This is a perfect opportunity to plug Neal Stephenson's excellent essay on fibre-optic cables: Mother Earth, Mother Board. It's well worth reading, being gripping, easy to get into, endlessly fascinating, and funny --- all the qualities that essays on cable laying usually aren't. He answers all your questions and more. (It also turned into research for Cryptonomicon.)
The short answers to your questions, though, are yes, yes, and by being very clever, respectively.
At the time Acorn simply used ARM to compete with Intel chips, in 1995 when the StrongARM Risc PC came out it was 233MHz, where as the latest Intel Pentium was 200Mhz or so.
Actually...
The ARM largely predates the Intel hegemony. Acorn designed it in about 1984 as a successor to the 6502 for the simple reason that they couldn't find any other processor that was fast enough to compete with the 6502! State of the art for 16 or 32 bit processors then were chips like the 68000, which had lousy interrupt performance.
The first actual ARM computer was the Archimedes, which shipped in 1987. (Prior to that it had existed only as a second processor addon for the 6502-based BBC Micro.) It used a 16MHz ARM2. At the time the only Intel 32-bit processor was the iAPX; the 286 ruled the desktop market. The 386 would come out in 1988.
As you say, the RISC PC came out in the mid-90s with a StrongARM, but by then Intel was working on the early Pentiums, and had pretty much won the desktop market.
The fastest ARM processors today are only 806mhz...
I have a SheevaPlug running at 1.2GHz; actual speed for integer stuff appears to roughly equivalent to a 500MHz Pentium. (Benchmarks here.)
I'm just here hoping somebody ports Risc OS Open to x86, Apple managed it after all.
Impossible, alas. RISC OS is a huge pile of undocumented hand-written ARM machine code. You'd need to rewrite it from scratch, from the ground up, to change architecture. Even just cleaning up the worst bugs (friends don't let friends allocate memory inside interrupt handlers) looks to be infeasible.
Yes, I've got one of these. They're awesome. My home server runs off one. When I switched away from a Shuttle PC to a SheevaPlug the power consumption went down from 100W to 35W --- and that's including ADSL box, wireless router, home made SSD, external hard drives, UPS, USB hubs, etc.
My setup hosts my email, serves my website, acts as my firewall and router, manages all my backups, is my main ssh-able headless server for doing command-line stuff, proxies stuff for me from when I'm working away from home, etc. I basically treat it as a Real Server, and it copes just fine. I'm using Postfix, Spey and DProbe for SMTP email, Dovecot for IMAP serving, and thttpd for web serving; bits of my website use servlets, and I'm using the Winstone servlet container for that. Alas, it's not brilliant at Java, since nobody's done a decent JIT for ARM yet, but it'll still respond to requests in a couple of hundred milliseconds.
However, all is not totally rosy with the SheevaPlug: it's connectivity sucks, as you get one (1) USB 2.0 port. I have six hard drives plugged into this and frequently hit USB bandwidth limitations. (Four of the hard drives are a home-made SSD made up of USB keys. RAID-5 basically does not work because of bandwidth limits --- 500kB/s write!)
You may want to look at the OpenRD instead, which is the same chip in a bigger box with more ports --- two Ethernet ports, multiple USB, video, etc. But it's a lot more expensive. I can forgive a lot for $100.
A friend of mine did a system like this about ten years ago --- hi, Iain! --- called Flit. It had a number of the same features, although using a custom language; it had some rather interesting concepts, such as asynchronous function calls that would return immediately, spawning a new thread, but return a future: a value whose value was not known yet. Accessing the value would cause the thread to be waited upon.
Unfortunately the killer problem that sunk Flit was that of distributed garbage collection. Collecting data over multiple machines is really, really hard, and he never found a usable approach to make it work. I was very disappointed to see that Swarm's garbage collection is still on the to-do list --- he doesn't appear to have started to think about it yet.
I hope he can make Swarm work --- it's something that we could all definitely use. But there are fundamental theoretical problems that have to be solved first...
So how, exactly, does one know whether a Linux box has been compromised?
Windows machines have an entire industry of antivirus software. We... don't. Dislike Windows as much as you like, but the mere fact that Windows is so insecure means that people are aware of it being insecure, and so the tools are available to deal with the problem.
What does a Linux user do? I know of tools like chkrootkit and rkhunter, and run them, but I have no idea if they're any good. What's the recommended way of finding out whether you've been compromised? Waiting for SORBS to blacklist you probably isn't the best way...
It's so bad that its suckiness has to be deliberate...
I find myself wondering just how much work the rectangular selection system was, which makes it impossible to select filenames and URLs if they get split across more than one line.
yeah, I know there are alternatives.
Where? WHERE? FOR GODS' SAKE, TELL ME WHERE!
I have never found any alternative to the Windows command box. There are plenty of alternatives to cmd.exe, some of which only suck marginally (Interix for example, which is basically Microsoft Unix, is actually pretty good, for a Unix), but I've never found an alternative command box. As I tend to get stuck with the sodding thing at work a lot, have you found anything I haven't?
I once used gparted to move a 500MB partition on an external hard drive by a small amount. I'd forgotten that the drive was plugged in via the USB1 connection rather than the Firewire connection.
Absolutely false. USB 2.0 real world speeds are around 30-40mb/sec because of all the overhead. A low end hard drive can easily do 60+ mb/sec and bursts well over 100 mb/sec. USB 2.0 is terrible for hard drives, which is why we have eSata today and need USB 3.0 soon.
My home server is running on a SheevaPlug, an excellent low-wattage ARM based solid state device. I built my own SSD out of 4x16GB USB keys. For a single key I get about 31MB/s read and 10 MB/s write; not brilliant, but I can work with it.
What's interesting is what happens to the figures when I build a RAID array. For read, the fastest is RAID-0 with two drives, at 33MB/s. Adding more drives makes the speed go down. It's even weirder for write: fastest is RAID-4 with three drives, at 13MB/s. With four drives? 3MB/s!
All I can assume is that the complex RAID arrangements involve so many concurrent read and writes that it's hitting some fundamental limit as to the number of transactions you can do over USB. (A single RAID-5 block write involves reading every block on the stripe and then writing every block on the stripe, IIRC.) So a simpler arrangement beats what would you'd expect to be the most efficient arrangment.
I'm just sorry the SheevaPlug doesn't have an eSATA port --- that would have solved all my problems.
The USB CPU overhead on the SheevaPlug, by the way, appears to be negligable.
Direct insertion of DNA sequences from other species is different to breeding and selection.
End of story.
Beginning of story, actually.
Viruses are not precisely reliable. They'll frequently inject genetic material into a cell but then the reproductive phase will fail. This can cause cancer, various metabolic faults in the cell including immediate cell death, or frequently nothing at all because the genetic material will usually remain inert. Usually it's nothing to worry about because it's just one cell.
But what if the cell is a reproductive cell that turns into a zygote, forming an embryo? What'll happen is that the viral DNA will get replicated into every cell in the embryo --- including the embryo's own germ cells. This means the change will breed true. Viral DNA has now part of the animal's bloodline. It's rare, but it happens --- and the viral genetic material may not stay inert; it's frequently coopted and used. Apparently it's fairly well proven that the genetic sequence that protects babies from the immune systems of their mothers was stolen in this way from a retrovirus like HIV.
But this also works in reverse. A virus can attack a cell, reproduce, and accidentally scoop up host DNA. Now the animal's genetic material has entered the viral bloodline (as it were).
Add the two together, and what do you get? A mechanism for directly inserting DNA sequences from one species to a totally unrelated species. And it's all completely natural.
That's just animals. Plants are even worse --- they're extremely lax about cellular security, and will happily swap genetic material with organisms nearby. If you look on the verges of fields planted with a pesticide-resistant crop, you can frequently find unrelated weeds that have become pesticide resistant themselves; they've snapped up the useful genetic sequences from the crops nearby. I don't know if they've found the mechanism for this yet --- anyone know?
The thing that scares me the most from the Cold War is we were raised to fear the specter of a Soviet attack but our own leaders were every bit as batshit crazy as they were accusing the Soviets of.
I went to school in the 80s in St.Andrews in Scotland, which is about five miles from the Leuchars RAF base that hosted the North Sea interception squadron.
Knowing that any incoming Soviet warhead would be followed a few minutes later by an American one (you know, just to make sure the evil communists didn't capture the smoking remnants of the UK) really made for a stable childhood experience. We all pretty much shat ourselves every time they tested the sirens.
No, really, go and look --- it was written by Aiden Bell (Ian Bell's brother) and Brian Phillips. Okay, you are going to have to stage it yourself, but the full book's there.
There's lots of other good stuff on Ian Bell's Elite website, including versions for most microcomputers, actual source code for the original BBC Micro version (which is damn scary, by the way), concept art, lots of reviews and interviews, a version of the trading engine written in C that's compatible with the original, unreleased versions (Game Boy Elite!), the novella The Dark Wheel that came with the game... and, sadly, lots of info about the ongoing feud between Bell and Braben after they fell out.
A low carbon stainless steel such as the 316 series should be more than sufficient for any piping.
Stainless steel is prone to pitting corrosion when exposed to water containing chlorides. 316 series stainless steel is significantly corroded by concentrations of chlorides above 1000ppm (ref). Standard sea water at 3.5% salinity has a chloride concentration of about 20000ppm (ref).
Stainless steel works rather like aluminium when it comes to preventing corrosion; the surface oxidises very rapidly to form a passive coating, protecting the bulk of the metal from oxygen. In water, this only works if (a) the water contains enough oxygen to passivate the metal, and (b) the water won't then dissolve the coating as soon as it forms. In particular, this means that stainless steel is not suitable for things like marine bolts, because under the bolt head the water will quickly lose all its oxygen and you'll get corrosion. It also means you have to be very careful in sea water as the salts can strip off the chromium oxy passive layer.
316 stainless is considered 'marine grade', but only just. In particular, it's unsuitable for warm sea water, as this makes the water vastly more corrosive. So you probably don't want to use it for coolant pipes.
And I haven't even mentioned electrolytic corrosion yet. Sea water is one of the most corrosive environments on the planet, and dealing with corrosion is one of the biggest problems when working with it.
One of the most absurd sounds I have ever experienced was driving at 60mph past someone playing the bagpipes in a roadside layby off Loch Linnhe in Scotland.
Oddly enough, my copy arrived today, so I've just played through the tutorial. It was slightly less smooth for me.
The first problem was due to billing; after feeding the serial number into the registration form it asked me what subscription type I wanted: credit card or gamecard. There was no option for 'my copy came with a month's worth of time and I want to see whether I like it before giving you my credit card number'. I eventually had to make a transatlantic phone call to tech support in the USA to get that sorted out. Poor, Cryptic. Very poor.
The second problem was the 10-minute load time. No, not kidding, it sat there at the loading screen for ten minutes. I've only played it once so far, so I don't know if it's going to do that every time or whether it's just the first time. Either way it's not a good first impression.
The third problem was getting the graphics set up. I have a 2GB Celeron D 3.2GHz with a 1GB GeForce 9500GT graphics card. Not the latest hardware, sure, but still perfectly reasonable, and it'll run WoW at 1440x900 with all the settings on max. Even with the resolution cranked down and all the settings on minimum, Champions would still chug periodically, and the graphics quality is comparable to World of Warcraft. In particular, loading geometry would cause it to slide-show for a few seconds. Getting out of the starting zone improved things a lot, but it still feels very sluggish. What's more, there wasn't any attempt to autodetect a sane set of, er, settings --- out of the box I was getting a 1fps slideshow.
Once into the actual tutorial --- yes, the tutorial is indeed very cool. There are some sections where you're obviously being led around by the hand. Fighting through the Champions HQ was more like following Defender around through the pitch black corridors (level design tip: always provide enough light to see the walls by) until he led me to the next plot coupon. But there's a lot of very nice touches; such as the instanced victory parade for you, just you, where all the people you rescued are in the audience making apropos comments (and the guy who's supposed to be going on holiday is dashing off in the distance, late for his plane). That's cool.
In general I like the idea of the action-packed tutorial. It was certainly fun. OTOH it was also overwhelmingly busy. The WoW tutorial starts you out with an almost completely blank screen which gradually fills with elements one by one as you learn about them. In Champions, on exiting the tutorial at level 5 there's still lots of stuff on the screen which I don't recognise (and the tooltips don't help). I think on the whole I prefer the WoW approach where you at least get a quiet area where you can practice walking before having to take on the alien horde.
After a couple of hours the gameplay is still unfamiliar, but my first impression is that it's much less smooth than WoW. Little things like when you rotate the viewpoint with the camera and then press 'walk', your character takes a couple of paces in the wrong direction before turning --- I fell off a couple of things because of that. The autotargeting is a good idea; if you press the 'punch' button and nothing's targeted, it will autotarget the closest item. OTOH if you've been using a ranged power on one target and another one jumps you in melee and you start hammering the 'punch' button, nothing happens other than 'target out of range' appearing in tiny letters until you reach for the mouse. All this stuff needs polish.
The actual UI is clunky and unintuitive and can be largely summed up with the phrase 'Comic Sans'. Everything has a tooltip, but they're uninformative and take far too long to appear. At one point one of the NPCs tells me to press 'i' to bring up my inventory. Well, 'i' doesn't work because I picked the Fantasy keybinding set rather than the Champions keybinding set. Having different keybindings available is a very nice feature --- but it would be nicer if the docs got updated to match. I still hav
Say... what would the 3D equivalent of a star-wipe be?
You could do a z-axis wipe from far to near (probably after cross-fading the background plane). That would avoid most of the issues with shifting focal planes. It wouldn't be too dissimilar from the 2D effect where you cross-fade the background and then a bit later cross-fade the foreground. OTOH, in real 3D it might look really freaky --- only way to know is to try it...
I heard an interview with a writer on the radio the other day... BBC Radio 4, incidentally... saying: "The Jews call me anti-semitic and the Arabs call me Zionist. So I suppose I must be doing something right."
...and it gets slightly under 100 miles to the (US) gallon, in real-life driving.
Er, oops. I appear to have applied the UK-to-US unit conversion backwards. Which means than in US terms it actually gets a bit under 70 mpg, not 100. (The actual figure in UK units is 80 mpg.)
That makes the Volt better than I thought --- the Note now gets 1/3 its mileage, rather than 1/2, but the rest of my point still stands.
Yes, because comparing a Volt to a motorcycle makes a ton of sense and isn't at all a strawman. Why not compare it with riding the bus, or getting on a bike? The guy has a car, he's in the market for a new car, and he's getting the Volt. Please compare within those parameters.
I agree; comparing the Volt to a motorbike is rubbish.
OTOH my father recently bought a second-hand Nissan Note for about 8000 pounds (call it 14000 dollars). It's in excellent condition, it's extremely pleasant to drive with air con and power everything, it will seat four in comfort and hold an impressive amount of luggage, and it gets slightly under 100 miles to the (US) gallon, in real-life driving.
So you can compare the Volt to that, as it's about the same size. For half the price of the Volt you can get an excellent car that does half the mileage that local garages know where to find parts for. Given that you now have about 20000 dollars in hand on money you didn't spend on the Volt to buy fuel with, you're going to have to keep the Volt for a very long time before it becomes cheaper in the long run to choose it over the Nissan.
I would love to have a hybrid, or preferably a pure electric, but I'm afraid that right now it's simply not economic.
How about we get like almost every other country in the world, and ban prescription drug advertising, that would cut down on their costs dramatically, and make drugs cheaper for everyone.
Amen to that. I spent a couple of months in Dallas at the beginning of year, and I remember being utterly shocked by seeing a TV advert for a prescription antidepressant, aimed at depressed people. 'Ask your doctor about !' Yeah, let's condition mentally ill people to ignore medical advice and instead opt for the medication that'll increase your profit margin.
Here in the UK our advertising watchdog would have the people responsible for that taken out and shot, simply as a public hygiene measure --- people who think that sort of thing is acceptable practice do not belong in a civilized country.
6. Coal power stations, worldwide, release approximately the same amount of radioactive material into the atmosphere every year than Chernobyl did, ever.
Which means we that if we could replace those coal power stations with nuclear ones then we could have a Chernobyl-style event every couple of years and still come out ahead.
I use a greylisting SMTP proxy (that I wrote myself). It eliminates about 90% of all spam before I even have to download it. Spamprobe takes care of the rest. It's only on very rare occasions that spam ever makes it to my inbox, and there are practically no fals positives; and I've been using my email address for close to a decade now, on Usenet, on mailing lists, on crappy forums (like this one), and have never bothered to shield it or cloak it. Spam just isn't a problem for me any more.
Of course, that doesn't mean that it's not still annoying, and I think that public stocks should be reintroduced for this sort of abuse-of-the-commons crime...
The short answer is yes --- water takes a staggering amount of energy to change temperature (it's one of the many properties the stuff's got that's really weird). A big lake makes an ideal dumping ground for waste heat. What's more, the environmental impact is going to be minimal: even the biggest data centre isn't going to produce enough waste energy to have much effect.
(A big data center consumes about 5MW of power. The specific heat capacity of water is about 4kJ/kg.K, which means that it takes 4kJ to raise the temperature on one kilogram of water by one kelvin. Assuming all that gets dumped into the lake as heat, that means you're raising the temperature of about 1000 litres per second by one kelvin. A small lake, say 1km x 1km x 10m, contains 10000000000 litres! So you're going to need to run your data centre for ten million seconds, or about 110 days, to raise the temperature by one measly degree. And that's ignoring the cooling off the surface, which would vastly overpower any amount of heat you could put into it.)
(The same applies in reverse. You can extract practically unlimited amounts of heat from water. Got running water in your property? Go look into heat pumps.)
In fact, if you were dumping waste heat into a lake, it would make sense to try and concentrate the heat to produce hotspots. You would then use this for things like fish farming. Warm water's always useful.
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This is a perfect opportunity to plug Neal Stephenson's excellent essay on fibre-optic cables: Mother Earth, Mother Board. It's well worth reading, being gripping, easy to get into, endlessly fascinating, and funny --- all the qualities that essays on cable laying usually aren't. He answers all your questions and more. (It also turned into research for Cryptonomicon.)
The short answers to your questions, though, are yes, yes, and by being very clever, respectively.
At the time Acorn simply used ARM to compete with Intel chips, in 1995 when the StrongARM Risc PC came out it was 233MHz, where as the latest Intel Pentium was 200Mhz or so.
Actually...
The ARM largely predates the Intel hegemony. Acorn designed it in about 1984 as a successor to the 6502 for the simple reason that they couldn't find any other processor that was fast enough to compete with the 6502! State of the art for 16 or 32 bit processors then were chips like the 68000, which had lousy interrupt performance.
The first actual ARM computer was the Archimedes, which shipped in 1987. (Prior to that it had existed only as a second processor addon for the 6502-based BBC Micro.) It used a 16MHz ARM2. At the time the only Intel 32-bit processor was the iAPX; the 286 ruled the desktop market. The 386 would come out in 1988.
As you say, the RISC PC came out in the mid-90s with a StrongARM, but by then Intel was working on the early Pentiums, and had pretty much won the desktop market.
The fastest ARM processors today are only 806mhz...
I have a SheevaPlug running at 1.2GHz; actual speed for integer stuff appears to roughly equivalent to a 500MHz Pentium. (Benchmarks here.)
I'm just here hoping somebody ports Risc OS Open to x86, Apple managed it after all.
Impossible, alas. RISC OS is a huge pile of undocumented hand-written ARM machine code. You'd need to rewrite it from scratch, from the ground up, to change architecture. Even just cleaning up the worst bugs (friends don't let friends allocate memory inside interrupt handlers) looks to be infeasible.
OTOH if you want bug-for-bug compatibility, someone has it working on the BeagleBoard...
it's connectivity sucks
Its. Its. Aaargh!
And before you ask, no, I won't turn in my International Pedantry Society Card. It's actually made out of plastic.
My setup hosts my email, serves my website, acts as my firewall and router, manages all my backups, is my main ssh-able headless server for doing command-line stuff, proxies stuff for me from when I'm working away from home, etc. I basically treat it as a Real Server, and it copes just fine. I'm using Postfix, Spey and DProbe for SMTP email, Dovecot for IMAP serving, and thttpd for web serving; bits of my website use servlets, and I'm using the Winstone servlet container for that. Alas, it's not brilliant at Java, since nobody's done a decent JIT for ARM yet, but it'll still respond to requests in a couple of hundred milliseconds.
However, all is not totally rosy with the SheevaPlug: it's connectivity sucks, as you get one (1) USB 2.0 port. I have six hard drives plugged into this and frequently hit USB bandwidth limitations. (Four of the hard drives are a home-made SSD made up of USB keys. RAID-5 basically does not work because of bandwidth limits --- 500kB/s write!)
You may want to look at the OpenRD instead, which is the same chip in a bigger box with more ports --- two Ethernet ports, multiple USB, video, etc. But it's a lot more expensive. I can forgive a lot for $100.
A friend of mine did a system like this about ten years ago --- hi, Iain! --- called Flit. It had a number of the same features, although using a custom language; it had some rather interesting concepts, such as asynchronous function calls that would return immediately, spawning a new thread, but return a future: a value whose value was not known yet. Accessing the value would cause the thread to be waited upon.
Unfortunately the killer problem that sunk Flit was that of distributed garbage collection. Collecting data over multiple machines is really, really hard, and he never found a usable approach to make it work. I was very disappointed to see that Swarm's garbage collection is still on the to-do list --- he doesn't appear to have started to think about it yet.
I hope he can make Swarm work --- it's something that we could all definitely use. But there are fundamental theoretical problems that have to be solved first...
So how, exactly, does one know whether a Linux box has been compromised?
Windows machines have an entire industry of antivirus software. We... don't. Dislike Windows as much as you like, but the mere fact that Windows is so insecure means that people are aware of it being insecure, and so the tools are available to deal with the problem.
What does a Linux user do? I know of tools like chkrootkit and rkhunter, and run them, but I have no idea if they're any good. What's the recommended way of finding out whether you've been compromised? Waiting for SORBS to blacklist you probably isn't the best way...
It's so bad that its suckiness has to be deliberate...
I find myself wondering just how much work the rectangular selection system was, which makes it impossible to select filenames and URLs if they get split across more than one line.
yeah, I know there are alternatives.
Where? WHERE? FOR GODS' SAKE, TELL ME WHERE!
I have never found any alternative to the Windows command box. There are plenty of alternatives to cmd.exe, some of which only suck marginally (Interix for example, which is basically Microsoft Unix, is actually pretty good, for a Unix), but I've never found an alternative command box. As I tend to get stuck with the sodding thing at work a lot, have you found anything I haven't?
I once used gparted to move a 500MB partition on an external hard drive by a small amount. I'd forgotten that the drive was plugged in via the USB1 connection rather than the Firewire connection.
It took all frigging day.
Absolutely false. USB 2.0 real world speeds are around 30-40mb/sec because of all the overhead. A low end hard drive can easily do 60+ mb/sec and bursts well over 100 mb/sec. USB 2.0 is terrible for hard drives, which is why we have eSata today and need USB 3.0 soon.
My home server is running on a SheevaPlug, an excellent low-wattage ARM based solid state device. I built my own SSD out of 4x16GB USB keys. For a single key I get about 31MB/s read and 10 MB/s write; not brilliant, but I can work with it.
What's interesting is what happens to the figures when I build a RAID array. For read, the fastest is RAID-0 with two drives, at 33MB/s. Adding more drives makes the speed go down. It's even weirder for write: fastest is RAID-4 with three drives, at 13MB/s. With four drives? 3MB/s!
All I can assume is that the complex RAID arrangements involve so many concurrent read and writes that it's hitting some fundamental limit as to the number of transactions you can do over USB. (A single RAID-5 block write involves reading every block on the stripe and then writing every block on the stripe, IIRC.) So a simpler arrangement beats what would you'd expect to be the most efficient arrangment.
I'm just sorry the SheevaPlug doesn't have an eSATA port --- that would have solved all my problems.
The USB CPU overhead on the SheevaPlug, by the way, appears to be negligable.
Direct insertion of DNA sequences from other species is different to breeding and selection.
End of story.
Beginning of story, actually.
Viruses are not precisely reliable. They'll frequently inject genetic material into a cell but then the reproductive phase will fail. This can cause cancer, various metabolic faults in the cell including immediate cell death, or frequently nothing at all because the genetic material will usually remain inert. Usually it's nothing to worry about because it's just one cell.
But what if the cell is a reproductive cell that turns into a zygote, forming an embryo? What'll happen is that the viral DNA will get replicated into every cell in the embryo --- including the embryo's own germ cells. This means the change will breed true. Viral DNA has now part of the animal's bloodline. It's rare, but it happens --- and the viral genetic material may not stay inert; it's frequently coopted and used. Apparently it's fairly well proven that the genetic sequence that protects babies from the immune systems of their mothers was stolen in this way from a retrovirus like HIV.
But this also works in reverse. A virus can attack a cell, reproduce, and accidentally scoop up host DNA. Now the animal's genetic material has entered the viral bloodline (as it were).
Add the two together, and what do you get? A mechanism for directly inserting DNA sequences from one species to a totally unrelated species. And it's all completely natural.
It's called horizontal gene transfer.
That's just animals. Plants are even worse --- they're extremely lax about cellular security, and will happily swap genetic material with organisms nearby. If you look on the verges of fields planted with a pesticide-resistant crop, you can frequently find unrelated weeds that have become pesticide resistant themselves; they've snapped up the useful genetic sequences from the crops nearby. I don't know if they've found the mechanism for this yet --- anyone know?
The thing that scares me the most from the Cold War is we were raised to fear the specter of a Soviet attack but our own leaders were every bit as batshit crazy as they were accusing the Soviets of.
I went to school in the 80s in St.Andrews in Scotland, which is about five miles from the Leuchars RAF base that hosted the North Sea interception squadron.
Knowing that any incoming Soviet warhead would be followed a few minutes later by an American one (you know, just to make sure the evil communists didn't capture the smoking remnants of the UK) really made for a stable childhood experience. We all pretty much shat ourselves every time they tested the sirens.
...then watch the musical!
No, really, go and look --- it was written by Aiden Bell (Ian Bell's brother) and Brian Phillips. Okay, you are going to have to stage it yourself, but the full book's there.
There's lots of other good stuff on Ian Bell's Elite website, including versions for most microcomputers, actual source code for the original BBC Micro version (which is damn scary, by the way), concept art, lots of reviews and interviews, a version of the trading engine written in C that's compatible with the original, unreleased versions (Game Boy Elite!), the novella The Dark Wheel that came with the game... and, sadly, lots of info about the ongoing feud between Bell and Braben after they fell out.
A low carbon stainless steel such as the 316 series should be more than sufficient for any piping.
Stainless steel is prone to pitting corrosion when exposed to water containing chlorides. 316 series stainless steel is significantly corroded by concentrations of chlorides above 1000ppm (ref). Standard sea water at 3.5% salinity has a chloride concentration of about 20000ppm (ref).
Stainless steel works rather like aluminium when it comes to preventing corrosion; the surface oxidises very rapidly to form a passive coating, protecting the bulk of the metal from oxygen. In water, this only works if (a) the water contains enough oxygen to passivate the metal, and (b) the water won't then dissolve the coating as soon as it forms. In particular, this means that stainless steel is not suitable for things like marine bolts, because under the bolt head the water will quickly lose all its oxygen and you'll get corrosion. It also means you have to be very careful in sea water as the salts can strip off the chromium oxy passive layer.
316 stainless is considered 'marine grade', but only just. In particular, it's unsuitable for warm sea water, as this makes the water vastly more corrosive. So you probably don't want to use it for coolant pipes.
And I haven't even mentioned electrolytic corrosion yet. Sea water is one of the most corrosive environments on the planet, and dealing with corrosion is one of the biggest problems when working with it.
One of the most absurd sounds I have ever experienced was driving at 60mph past someone playing the bagpipes in a roadside layby off Loch Linnhe in Scotland.
Oddly enough, my copy arrived today, so I've just played through the tutorial. It was slightly less smooth for me.
The first problem was due to billing; after feeding the serial number into the registration form it asked me what subscription type I wanted: credit card or gamecard. There was no option for 'my copy came with a month's worth of time and I want to see whether I like it before giving you my credit card number'. I eventually had to make a transatlantic phone call to tech support in the USA to get that sorted out. Poor, Cryptic. Very poor.
The second problem was the 10-minute load time. No, not kidding, it sat there at the loading screen for ten minutes. I've only played it once so far, so I don't know if it's going to do that every time or whether it's just the first time. Either way it's not a good first impression.
The third problem was getting the graphics set up. I have a 2GB Celeron D 3.2GHz with a 1GB GeForce 9500GT graphics card. Not the latest hardware, sure, but still perfectly reasonable, and it'll run WoW at 1440x900 with all the settings on max. Even with the resolution cranked down and all the settings on minimum, Champions would still chug periodically, and the graphics quality is comparable to World of Warcraft. In particular, loading geometry would cause it to slide-show for a few seconds. Getting out of the starting zone improved things a lot, but it still feels very sluggish. What's more, there wasn't any attempt to autodetect a sane set of, er, settings --- out of the box I was getting a 1fps slideshow.
Once into the actual tutorial --- yes, the tutorial is indeed very cool. There are some sections where you're obviously being led around by the hand. Fighting through the Champions HQ was more like following Defender around through the pitch black corridors (level design tip: always provide enough light to see the walls by) until he led me to the next plot coupon. But there's a lot of very nice touches; such as the instanced victory parade for you, just you, where all the people you rescued are in the audience making apropos comments (and the guy who's supposed to be going on holiday is dashing off in the distance, late for his plane). That's cool.
In general I like the idea of the action-packed tutorial. It was certainly fun. OTOH it was also overwhelmingly busy. The WoW tutorial starts you out with an almost completely blank screen which gradually fills with elements one by one as you learn about them. In Champions, on exiting the tutorial at level 5 there's still lots of stuff on the screen which I don't recognise (and the tooltips don't help). I think on the whole I prefer the WoW approach where you at least get a quiet area where you can practice walking before having to take on the alien horde.
After a couple of hours the gameplay is still unfamiliar, but my first impression is that it's much less smooth than WoW. Little things like when you rotate the viewpoint with the camera and then press 'walk', your character takes a couple of paces in the wrong direction before turning --- I fell off a couple of things because of that. The autotargeting is a good idea; if you press the 'punch' button and nothing's targeted, it will autotarget the closest item. OTOH if you've been using a ranged power on one target and another one jumps you in melee and you start hammering the 'punch' button, nothing happens other than 'target out of range' appearing in tiny letters until you reach for the mouse. All this stuff needs polish.
The actual UI is clunky and unintuitive and can be largely summed up with the phrase 'Comic Sans'. Everything has a tooltip, but they're uninformative and take far too long to appear. At one point one of the NPCs tells me to press 'i' to bring up my inventory. Well, 'i' doesn't work because I picked the Fantasy keybinding set rather than the Champions keybinding set. Having different keybindings available is a very nice feature --- but it would be nicer if the docs got updated to match. I still hav
Say... what would the 3D equivalent of a star-wipe be?
You could do a z-axis wipe from far to near (probably after cross-fading the background plane). That would avoid most of the issues with shifting focal planes. It wouldn't be too dissimilar from the 2D effect where you cross-fade the background and then a bit later cross-fade the foreground. OTOH, in real 3D it might look really freaky --- only way to know is to try it...
I heard an interview with a writer on the radio the other day... BBC Radio 4, incidentally... saying: "The Jews call me anti-semitic and the Arabs call me Zionist. So I suppose I must be doing something right."
Also, are you aware that UK gallons and US gallons are different sizes? 100 mpg (US) corresponds to about 80 mpg (UK).
In fact it doesn't --- I cocked up my maths. *70* mpg (US) corresponds to 80 mpg (UK). Sorry about that.
...and it gets slightly under 100 miles to the (US) gallon, in real-life driving.
Er, oops. I appear to have applied the UK-to-US unit conversion backwards. Which means than in US terms it actually gets a bit under 70 mpg, not 100. (The actual figure in UK units is 80 mpg.)
That makes the Volt better than I thought --- the Note now gets 1/3 its mileage, rather than 1/2, but the rest of my point still stands.
There isn't a car on the road today that seats four comfortably, swallows volumes of luggage and gets 100MPG while running the air conditioning.
Would you like to quote the bit where I said that it would do all these things at the same time?
Also, are you aware that UK gallons and US gallons are different sizes? 100 mpg (US) corresponds to about 80 mpg (UK).
Yes, because comparing a Volt to a motorcycle makes a ton of sense and isn't at all a strawman. Why not compare it with riding the bus, or getting on a bike? The guy has a car, he's in the market for a new car, and he's getting the Volt. Please compare within those parameters.
I agree; comparing the Volt to a motorbike is rubbish.
OTOH my father recently bought a second-hand Nissan Note for about 8000 pounds (call it 14000 dollars). It's in excellent condition, it's extremely pleasant to drive with air con and power everything, it will seat four in comfort and hold an impressive amount of luggage, and it gets slightly under 100 miles to the (US) gallon, in real-life driving.
So you can compare the Volt to that, as it's about the same size. For half the price of the Volt you can get an excellent car that does half the mileage that local garages know where to find parts for. Given that you now have about 20000 dollars in hand on money you didn't spend on the Volt to buy fuel with, you're going to have to keep the Volt for a very long time before it becomes cheaper in the long run to choose it over the Nissan.
I would love to have a hybrid, or preferably a pure electric, but I'm afraid that right now it's simply not economic.
How about we get like almost every other country in the world, and ban prescription drug advertising, that would cut down on their costs dramatically, and make drugs cheaper for everyone.
Amen to that. I spent a couple of months in Dallas at the beginning of year, and I remember being utterly shocked by seeing a TV advert for a prescription antidepressant, aimed at depressed people. 'Ask your doctor about !' Yeah, let's condition mentally ill people to ignore medical advice and instead opt for the medication that'll increase your profit margin.
Here in the UK our advertising watchdog would have the people responsible for that taken out and shot, simply as a public hygiene measure --- people who think that sort of thing is acceptable practice do not belong in a civilized country.
Don't forget:
6. Coal power stations, worldwide, release approximately the same amount of radioactive material into the atmosphere every year than Chernobyl did, ever.
Which means we that if we could replace those coal power stations with nuclear ones then we could have a Chernobyl-style event every couple of years and still come out ahead.
I use a greylisting SMTP proxy (that I wrote myself). It eliminates about 90% of all spam before I even have to download it. Spamprobe takes care of the rest. It's only on very rare occasions that spam ever makes it to my inbox, and there are practically no fals positives; and I've been using my email address for close to a decade now, on Usenet, on mailing lists, on crappy forums (like this one), and have never bothered to shield it or cloak it. Spam just isn't a problem for me any more.
Of course, that doesn't mean that it's not still annoying, and I think that public stocks should be reintroduced for this sort of abuse-of-the-commons crime...
The short answer is yes --- water takes a staggering amount of energy to change temperature (it's one of the many properties the stuff's got that's really weird). A big lake makes an ideal dumping ground for waste heat. What's more, the environmental impact is going to be minimal: even the biggest data centre isn't going to produce enough waste energy to have much effect.
(A big data center consumes about 5MW of power. The specific heat capacity of water is about 4kJ/kg.K, which means that it takes 4kJ to raise the temperature on one kilogram of water by one kelvin. Assuming all that gets dumped into the lake as heat, that means you're raising the temperature of about 1000 litres per second by one kelvin. A small lake, say 1km x 1km x 10m, contains 10000000000 litres! So you're going to need to run your data centre for ten million seconds, or about 110 days, to raise the temperature by one measly degree. And that's ignoring the cooling off the surface, which would vastly overpower any amount of heat you could put into it.)
(The same applies in reverse. You can extract practically unlimited amounts of heat from water. Got running water in your property? Go look into heat pumps.)
In fact, if you were dumping waste heat into a lake, it would make sense to try and concentrate the heat to produce hotspots. You would then use this for things like fish farming. Warm water's always useful.