Dude, the website claims that they could scale the unit down to project a HAND-HELD screen with only four watts of power: That'd be 3.2 inches, NOT 32.
The point about burgers and doctors is that (in my doomsday scenario) those would be the ONLY jobs left in the US (for practical reasons, nothing to do with racism).
You left out infrastructure jobs: electricians, plumbers, ditch-diggers, etc....
It's AWFULLY hard to unclog a pipe over the phone! (or to import a road.)
From what I remember about the making of the SR-71, all of the titanium parts of the plane (a very large portion of the structure) had to machined from billet titanium which had been cast in an inert gas atmosphere, as Titanium will form an alloy with Nitrogen gas, making it quite brittle.
So, apparently, all that you have to do to keep titanium from being brittle is immerse it in a pool/atmosphere of argon gas before you melt it.
But, that's all off of the top of my head, and I'm anything BUT a metallurgist.
Do you mean like MacOS (pre OSX) did? All file identification was done by unique-file-id/disk-id, not name-and-path.
You could make an alias to a file, then take that file and move it, duplicate it, rename it: whatever: the alias would still sucessfully point to the original file (even if you moved the alias to a different disk.)
The only time that I've ever heard of this going wrong was when a guy was trying to manually clone a batch of hard-drives: the aliases to the applications all pointed to the apps installed on the original hard-drive, not the new local one. (This being non-profit work, he didn't want to pay for drive-cloning software.)
I think that you'll find that that is what most people find to be Google's best feature. It doesn't contaminate everything that it touches with a clinging, contaminating residue of itself.
Unlike most products from a certain Redmond based corporation. (especially the "free" ones.)
Tell that to the organizations that stored their punchcard archives on site, in the basement, and had them EATEN by termites!
Any storage media that we use that can be considered "food" (any hydrocarbon-based substance, including the plastic that CD's are made from is vulnerable to attack by fungus) has to be considered temporary storage. (and salt mines have a nasty tendancy to be geologically unstable: we know much of what we do about the Celts by finding trapped Celt salt miners sealed underground)
drat it, I was so worked up about correcting a piece of misinformation that I introduced a piece of my own:
Full virtual-mode addressing (enabled by the existance of a hardware Memory Management Unit (MMU) ) allows PROTECTED MEMORY, not Preemptive Multitasking (although the two are related.)
Linux was originally written to take advantage of the first full virtual-mode memory addressing available to purchasers of commodity hardware.
In short, Linux was written for the Intel 386. (386sx or 386dx, it didn't matter.)
And without the memory management that virtual-mode addressing makes possible, you can't have proper preemptive multitasking. And if you haven't got that, it's not really UNIX-like, and that means it's not really Linux, is it?
Yes, there were OS's written to run on pre-386 processors that had UNIX-like shells and API's (MINIX comes to mind), but those weren't Linux!
Before you go lamenting the good-old-days-gone-by, make sure that you are remembering them, and not inventing them!
Are you sure that you don't mean geosynchronous orbit?
Of course, that would require that the angle of inclination of the moon's orbit around the earth matched the angle of inclination of the earth's spin, which I'm pretty sure it doesn't.
In which case, we'd wind up with tides that moved North-South, instead of East-West, on an exact half-day period.
Not that I care: my great-grandchildren will be dead and gone LONG before that day comes. (but will the earth's tectonic plates be fused yet?)
If all MATERIAL goods may be replicated by the machine, then the only thing with value will be the inputs to the machine.
Namely: ENERGY. (matter is all around us: even gold may be harvested from sea water in non-trivial (but non-profitable) quantities.)
So, in a society with universal molecular manufacturing, the most valuable "posessions" in the future will be the sites of harvestable energy gradients(e.g. locations with abundant geothermal energy, or coastal locations adjacent to sharp thermal inclines.)
In the future, the fundamental unit of currency may be the killowatt!
I was just at a local library book sale and saw a copy of this.
It was a paperback, so it would've been $0.10.
And I didn't pick it up, because my arms were already kind of full, and it wouln't have fit into the stack very well. (that, and I thought that it looked kind of useless.)
If only i had known that this was HISTORY that I was looking at (and not 10-year-old cruft),I would have surely bought it.
We used to have three grocery stores in my town: one newer/larger, one older/smaller, and one in the mall.
They got into a price war.
We now only have two grocery stores: and one of them was built after the smaller/older store went out of business.
The benefits of price wars are temporary.
Except that Jean-Louis Gasee' et. al. refused to be bought out (you can do that when you're a privately held company): they insisted that Apple pay a per-unit liscence fee, regardless of any modifications to the code that Apple produced.
Instead, Apple took one step FURTHER back into its own history, and brought back Jobs by buying NeXT.
In The Hunt For Red October they were using Magneto Hydrodynamic drive, where the magnetic asymetry of the water molecule is exploited by using an intense magnetic field to align the water within the drive tube (much like what is done in a MRI), and then moving/pulsing the magnetic fields along the drive tube to push the water through it.
There is no screw. (except as a backup.)
If you've ever seen pictures of the levitating frog (being held up by magnetic fields), it is the same principle.
Remember: MHz doesn't measure speed.
You can only use it as a measure of relative speed between chips which are otherwise virtually identical (e.g. two P IV's)
This idea ignores two very important concepts in the cost/benefit analysis: administrative overhead and the economies of scale.
Just because the publisher already has the text "in the computer" doesn't mean that it won't cost them anything to publish it as an e-book: there are skills and tools necessary for that that are not present in the average paper-publisher's repertoire: they will have to hire or contract for such work to be done: an additional cost.
The printed word is a mature medium. The idea that presenting it as a collection of pixels on a screen is suddenly going to increase the receptive audience of the exact same content over presenting it as ink patterns on paper is improbable at best. A more likely interperetation is that the e-book will simply be a more convenient format for a certain segment of the audience who would have bought and paid for it in any case. That doesn't increase the publisher's profits, rather it erodes them by the additional costs of e-publishing, combined with a loss of the economies of scale in their print distribution: where before, book retailers might average, say, 10 copies of a typical book, now they might average only 8 copies. That shippment of books will still have to be packed, shipped, tracked, unpacked and inventoried. Only now there will be fewer actual sales to spread the costs of those operations out over.
E-publishing, therefore, leaves the publisher with the choice of either a deminished profit-margin (try selling THAT to the board of directors!), or higher prices (with the attendant loss of sales that that entails) in order to maintain the financial outlook which NOT e-publishing corrently affords them. So why e-publish? Why indeed!
And just what do you think that you're going to do with it once you've dug it up?
Bury it safely?
The whole point of this excercise is to keep the radioactive material from interacting with living creatures: if it is immobile, insoluble and buried, then there are PRECIOUS FEW living things that are in any way affected by it.
After all, the REAL danger in toxic and radioactive heavy metals is not momentary exposure, but the concentration over time into the tissues of long-lived creatures (e.g. humans); just look at all of the trouble with soluble mercury concentrations in large ocean fish (tuna, swordfish, etc.)
This technique renders the uranium insoluble, which makes it impossible to absorb, which makes it impossible to CONCENTRATE, so nobody winds up with a toxic dose (there are NO toxic materials: only toxic DOSAGES. Prolonged breathing of pure oxygen is fatal, after all.)
What you are missing is that YOU are choosing the file size when you select "128 kbps CBR"
That "kbps" in there means "KiloBits Per Second"
So, for a song that is a given number of seconds long, ANY encoder/compressor set to produce output at 128 kbps will make the SAME size file when fed that song.
Additionally, taking a lossy compression (MP3), and decompressing it, then feedintg the output into a DIFFERENT lossy compression (AAC), will give you a WORSE sounding result than if you hadn't bothered at all! (the errors & losses in compression compound.)
So, you're going to have to choose: If you want smaller files, then you're going to have to encode at a different bitrate (96kbps, perhaps?) If you want higer quality at the SAME bitrate, then you're going to have to go back to the original source-disks (CDs.Assuming that you actually have them.)
In less informed times (back when people believed that mice would spontaniously form if you left cotton and grain in a box together for long enough), it was also belived that bear cubs were actually born as undifferentiated blobs of flesh and fur. In order for them to achieve proper "bear" status, they had to be "licked into shape" by their mother.
Don't believe me? Go watch "Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins" some time. (an entertaining book series, but a mildly cheezy movie, and a WORSE TV series.) http://us.imdb.com/Title?0089901
Wi l ford Brimley's character states, in the beginning "I could find out the temperature of your butt on that chair, if I wanted to badly enough." (or something like that)
Progress is the act of making yesterday's innovations obsolete.e
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, the website claims that they could scale the unit down to project a HAND-HELD screen with only four watts of power: That'd be 3.2 inches, NOT 32.
The point about burgers and doctors is that (in my doomsday scenario) those would be the ONLY jobs left in the US (for practical reasons, nothing to do with racism).
You left out infrastructure jobs: electricians, plumbers, ditch-diggers, etc....
It's AWFULLY hard to unclog a pipe over the phone! (or to import a road.)
From what I remember about the making of the SR-71, all of the titanium parts of the plane (a very large portion of the structure) had to machined from billet titanium which had been cast in an inert gas atmosphere, as Titanium will form an alloy with Nitrogen gas, making it quite brittle.
So, apparently, all that you have to do to keep titanium from being brittle is immerse it in a pool/atmosphere of argon gas before you melt it.
But, that's all off of the top of my head, and I'm anything BUT a metallurgist.
Do you mean like MacOS (pre OSX) did? All file identification was done by unique-file-id/disk-id, not name-and-path.
You could make an alias to a file, then take that file and move it, duplicate it, rename it: whatever: the alias would still sucessfully point to the original file (even if you moved the alias to a different disk.)
The only time that I've ever heard of this going wrong was when a guy was trying to manually clone a batch of hard-drives: the aliases to the applications all pointed to the apps installed on the original hard-drive, not the new local one. (This being non-profit work, he didn't want to pay for drive-cloning software.)
Google has got no stickiness
I think that you'll find that that is what most people find to be Google's best feature. It doesn't contaminate everything that it touches with a clinging, contaminating residue of itself.
Unlike most products from a certain Redmond based corporation. (especially the "free" ones.)
Punch cards don't corrupt!?!
Tell that to the organizations that stored their punchcard archives on site, in the basement, and had them EATEN by termites!
Any storage media that we use that can be considered "food" (any hydrocarbon-based substance, including the plastic that CD's are made from is vulnerable to attack by fungus) has to be considered temporary storage. (and salt mines have a nasty tendancy to be geologically unstable: we know much of what we do about the Celts by finding trapped Celt salt miners sealed underground)
"yeth there ith a thix, and yeth, it ith thilent."
So... What science-fiction short-story am I quoting?
It's about a man who uses analysis of extremely large number strings (he starts with pi) in a search for messages from God.
drat it, I was so worked up about correcting a piece of misinformation that I introduced a piece of my own:
Full virtual-mode addressing (enabled by the existance of a hardware Memory Management Unit (MMU) ) allows PROTECTED MEMORY, not Preemptive Multitasking (although the two are related.)
I call Bu11$h17.
Linux was originally written to take advantage of the first full virtual-mode memory addressing available to purchasers of commodity hardware.
In short, Linux was written for the Intel 386. (386sx or 386dx, it didn't matter.)
And without the memory management that virtual-mode addressing makes possible, you can't have proper preemptive multitasking. And if you haven't got that, it's not really UNIX-like, and that means it's not really Linux, is it?
Yes, there were OS's written to run on pre-386 processors that had UNIX-like shells and API's (MINIX comes to mind), but those weren't Linux!
Before you go lamenting the good-old-days-gone-by, make sure that you are remembering them, and not inventing them!
Are you sure that you don't mean geosynchronous orbit?
Of course, that would require that the angle of inclination of the moon's orbit around the earth matched the angle of inclination of the earth's spin, which I'm pretty sure it doesn't.
In which case, we'd wind up with tides that moved North-South, instead of East-West, on an exact half-day period.
Not that I care: my great-grandchildren will be dead and gone LONG before that day comes. (but will the earth's tectonic plates be fused yet?)
If all MATERIAL goods may be replicated by the machine, then the only thing with value will be the inputs to the machine.
Namely: ENERGY. (matter is all around us: even gold may be harvested from sea water in non-trivial (but non-profitable) quantities.)
So, in a society with universal molecular manufacturing, the most valuable "posessions" in the future will be the sites of harvestable energy gradients(e.g. locations with abundant geothermal energy, or coastal locations adjacent to sharp thermal inclines.)
In the future, the fundamental unit of currency may be the killowatt!
I was just at a local library book sale and saw a copy of this.
It was a paperback, so it would've been $0.10.
And I didn't pick it up, because my arms were already kind of full, and it wouln't have fit into the stack very well. (that, and I thought that it looked kind of useless.)
If only i had known that this was HISTORY that I was looking at (and not 10-year-old cruft),I would have surely bought it.
*ARRGH*!!
We used to have three grocery stores in my town: one newer/larger, one older/smaller, and one in the mall.
They got into a price war.
We now only have two grocery stores: and one of them was built after the smaller/older store went out of business.
The benefits of price wars are temporary.
BeOS dang near WAS MacOS X...
Except that Jean-Louis Gasee' et. al. refused to be bought out (you can do that when you're a privately held company): they insisted that Apple pay a per-unit liscence fee, regardless of any modifications to the code that Apple produced.
Instead, Apple took one step FURTHER back into its own history, and brought back Jobs by buying NeXT.
Except, of course, that the G3 has no symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) capabilities.
So, unless just ONE G3+SIMD is enough to make a "sweet laptop", it's not going to happen.
I'd nominate it for the next generation of iBooks, though.
In The Hunt For Red October they were using Magneto Hydrodynamic drive, where the magnetic asymetry of the water molecule is exploited by using an intense magnetic field to align the water within the drive tube (much like what is done in a MRI), and then moving/pulsing the magnetic fields along the drive tube to push the water through it.
There is no screw. (except as a backup.)
If you've ever seen pictures of the levitating frog (being held up by magnetic fields), it is the same principle.
Except that, as you so observantly noted, DAVIS ISN'T ONE OF THE CHOICES ON THE BALLOT.
The choice is:
Keep Davis.
XOR
Replace Davis with X.
Where X is the candidate selected by the voter.
There's no reason that IRV couldn't be used to make the replacement-candidate selection.
By definition, anyone attempting this job without proper training will be extremely temporary.
Remember: MHz doesn't measure speed. You can only use it as a measure of relative speed between chips which are otherwise virtually identical (e.g. two P IV's)
This idea ignores two very important concepts in the cost/benefit analysis: administrative overhead and the economies of scale.
Just because the publisher already has the text "in the computer" doesn't mean that it won't cost them anything to publish it as an e-book: there are skills and tools necessary for that that are not present in the average paper-publisher's repertoire: they will have to hire or contract for such work to be done: an additional cost.
The printed word is a mature medium. The idea that presenting it as a collection of pixels on a screen is suddenly going to increase the receptive audience of the exact same content over presenting it as ink patterns on paper is improbable at best. A more likely interperetation is that the e-book will simply be a more convenient format for a certain segment of the audience who would have bought and paid for it in any case. That doesn't increase the publisher's profits, rather it erodes them by the additional costs of e-publishing, combined with a loss of the economies of scale in their print distribution: where before, book retailers might average, say, 10 copies of a typical book, now they might average only 8 copies. That shippment of books will still have to be packed, shipped, tracked, unpacked and inventoried. Only now there will be fewer actual sales to spread the costs of those operations out over.
E-publishing, therefore, leaves the publisher with the choice of either a deminished profit-margin (try selling THAT to the board of directors!), or higher prices (with the attendant loss of sales that that entails) in order to maintain the financial outlook which NOT e-publishing corrently affords them. So why e-publish? Why indeed!
And just what do you think that you're going to do with it once you've dug it up?
Bury it safely?
The whole point of this excercise is to keep the radioactive material from interacting with living creatures: if it is immobile, insoluble and buried, then there are PRECIOUS FEW living things that are in any way affected by it.
After all, the REAL danger in toxic and radioactive heavy metals is not momentary exposure, but the concentration over time into the tissues of long-lived creatures (e.g. humans); just look at all of the trouble with soluble mercury concentrations in large ocean fish (tuna, swordfish, etc.)
This technique renders the uranium insoluble, which makes it impossible to absorb, which makes it impossible to CONCENTRATE, so nobody winds up with a toxic dose (there are NO toxic materials: only toxic DOSAGES. Prolonged breathing of pure oxygen is fatal, after all.)
What you are missing is that YOU are choosing the file size when you select "128 kbps CBR"
That "kbps" in there means "KiloBits Per Second"
So, for a song that is a given number of seconds long, ANY encoder/compressor set to produce output at 128 kbps will make the SAME size file when fed that song.
Additionally, taking a lossy compression (MP3), and decompressing it, then feedintg the output into a DIFFERENT lossy compression (AAC), will give you a WORSE sounding result than if you hadn't bothered at all! (the errors & losses in compression compound.)
So, you're going to have to choose: If you want smaller files, then you're going to have to encode at a different bitrate (96kbps, perhaps?) If you want higer quality at the SAME bitrate, then you're going to have to go back to the original source-disks (CDs.Assuming that you actually have them.)
In less informed times (back when people believed that mice would spontaniously form if you left cotton and grain in a box together for long enough), it was also belived that bear cubs were actually born as undifferentiated blobs of flesh and fur. In order for them to achieve proper "bear" status, they had to be "licked into shape" by their mother.
Now, what was the problem?
- Airfraime
, to be specific. It's how the protagonist discovers the auxiliary data-recorder that lets her solve the mystery. And this is copyright 1996.Don't believe me? Go watch "Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins" some time. (an entertaining book series, but a mildly cheezy movie, and a WORSE TV series.)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0089901
Wi l ford Brimley's character states, in the beginning "I could find out the temperature of your butt on that chair, if I wanted to badly enough." (or something like that)
Progress is the act of making yesterday's innovations obsolete.e