It's basically about being greedy. Screw the human race, just concentrate on being the person who scientists will say the human species originated from in 5000 years time.
All you need to do is be as greedy as possible and do everything for yourself while nothing for everyone else.
While avoiding being killed by those who resent you for doing it, or by people who see you as a threat to their own greed.
The sad thing is that it isn't a game and people play for keeps.
Most of them are politicians, but some are lawyers or even managers.
So the US goes and allows (or perhaps worse, is complicit in allowing) it's corporations to keep up profits by dumping toxic products in other countries, where it kills and maims children (which is well proven) who struggle to live by supplying their lives to people who use them as slave labour to recover valuable materials from the dumped items through lethal practices, such as burning plastic from wire.
Then some people argue that if the countries allow it, why is that the US's problem?
And then twenty years later they whine like little babies that they can't understand why the survivors of this situation in those countries hate them so much and want to kill them and everyone else they see as a part of the "Western" world...
And they can't even blame the CIA this time. US corporations are doing a far more sinister job that the CIA ever did.
No, Just the one that supposedly crashed into the Pentagon... The one that didn't have wings, which no video exists for, which only had one small jet engine... Must have been an early model 767...
GrpA
No one in Australia is afraid...
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 0
Of course, everyone in Europe will probably be sterilised by the radiation as the black holes decay...
But not us!
We've got the entire planet between us and your folly!
You guys in the US should be afraid though... You've only got the Atlantic Ocean.
I find it very hard to imagine Sony doing anything altruistic at all. They are to Hardware what Microsoft is to Software.
So I'm wondering what's in it for them. Do they have some kind of new technology that when measured by the second method only, looks much better for them? Or perhaps their min-power usage number is the same as the movie-play version...
I'm only guessing, but I can't imagine Sony would be doing this just for the benefit of consumers, if they didn't get something out of it, since other manufacturers will still be using the old method of measuring this.
Time to call the Space Debris Section of Technora Corporation....
I wonder how far something like Planetes is off from reality at times. Excellent series.
GrpA
Is the stupid restrictions arbitrarily imposed on getting a block imposed by self-important registrars (eg, APNIC, ARIN, etc). They are so desparate to control this resource that nobody want's to use it. Especially when they already have IPv4.
Charging for IPv6 and rigidly controlling it's distribution is like building a five-hundred-lane toll-only-freeway with perfect roads right next to a two-lane freeway with acceptable roads, that is essentially free to use (because it was always there) and that isn't all that badly congested.
If they gave huge chunks of IPv6 away for a few years to early adopters, as they did with IPv4, then it would be more likely to lead to an environment in which corporate use would have to follow after the enthusiasts who picked up early on the idea because it was free and subsequently developed applications that require it.
Don't forget why we use WWW instead of the competing hypertext systems of the era... It was free and unrestricted. And once it's popular, there's a reason for everyone to use it.
And all they need to do to maintain their future stranglehold on an essentially limitless resource is impose appropriate technical criteria for anyone applying (eg, only provide to people who can demonstrate they know what they are doing... Like they used to a long time ago) .
Don't waste your time arguing that commercial realities will drive IPv6 implementation. I'm a consultant to government and the government has a real need for IPv6. They need it for VoIP and Toll Bypass between agencies and don't have enough IPv4 to meet this need - they all tend to use the 10.x.x.x block internally and then wonder why they can't connect up two agencies that have just merged... *sigh*.
Yet despite this, they don't see any value in going to IPv6 if no one else is going to... Why? Because it's going to cost them a few thousand in fees to the APNIC each year, so they keep putting it off.
If I could get a free permanent legacy block of IPv6 easily, I'd grab one... But there's no way I'd pay for one.
The only reason IPv6 is dead is that it's somebody's cash cow... And no one wants to buy it.
I'm always suprised when I hear comments like this... Especially as I didn't suggest anything extreme such as "PC games were going to overtake consoles", but take a look at what the game designers are saying about Console Vs PC on google (takes a little searching).
What I was saying is that the PC architecture is still so far ahead of console that next-gen games will only play on PC. (And by Next-Gen, I mean games designed for the technology designed over the past two years).
The PC is already and likely permanently dominant in the area of MMORPGs and FPS games. There is little point even questioning it, and conversely, games intended for console frequently don't make it to the PC. It's not that you can't play them - they just weren't designed for keyboard and mouse (and few people actually keep an X-box or PS2 like pad for their PC ).
You can build a PC that outperforms a X360 now for well under $400 - even in Australia! (Core-2 Duo, X1950, 2G Ram, etc). I'm not including the monitor in that price, because you don't need a monitor now - Just plug it into your high res LCD, and then you can build in a DVR and whatever else too.
And a high end machine barely touches the thousand dollar mark.
Trying to argue that price alone is going to make the difference would make the PS2 the best proposition ( Still a strong seller, I beleive).
As a retail seller, you would know that the market is fickle...
All it takes is a few killer games that run on PC only that the consoles simply can't be made to run, then the new gen of game players is going to start wanting PCs, diluting the X360 *and* PS3 marketplace...
And that's going to start happening in 2009.
So if you want to see where this is going, compare PCs that can run anything you can do on a console (assuming it's not an exclusive title) to older PS2 and Xbox's and you will see why the console's need to keep up also -
Joe Majority may never understand it - I still don't understand why my kids want a PS3, when the X360 seems more their style (and they all have reasonably high end PCs) - But I'm pretty sure it has something to do with which games they want to play that are only available on that console.
It's a long cycle based on technology growth, and this time, the cheaper PC high-end stuff is slewing the market for an early return to PC being in front.
Maybe I am wrong and you are correct about the guess, but the next twelve months will be interesting to watch...:)
I'd guess that the recent games like Asassin's Creed and other console-first, PC later games are starting to show up the consoles and while it's not having a lot of effect yet, it's starting to, and people are waiting for the PC release before buying, because they know that unless the conversion is a dud, the PC version is always going to be better and higher resolution...
But as I said, it's only a small number of people looking that way at present, because the difference is slight at the moment.
I'd guess they're looking ahead to late 2009 where the next gen of PC video cards will make things possible in games that simply can't be repeated on consoles, and at higher resolutions too.
Then the X360 and PS3 and both going to start looking like an oversized DS..
I'd be suprised if some in Microsoft aren't wondering what they're going to do as that starts to happen... Create a new higher level X360 maybe or maybe even some are suggesting they build a whole new console that's X360 compatible.
But that's just conjecture based on them saying they're not making a new one... Because if they did, everyone would be waiting to buy it instead and the existing stocks would go the way of the Osborne PC.
I tend to watch the ads while my wife skips them...
The difference? I don't watch much TV so many of the ads are new to me... So I don't mind watching them. I find it more frustrating hunting for the start of the show that watching them, unless they are really long or really bad and annoying.
And if the ad's interesting enough, I rewind and watch it twice:)
If there was any likelyhood of civilisations wiping themselves from existance with the creation of microscopic black holes, then you would expect the universe to be full of black holes where each subsequent civilisation had extinguished itself.
Now take a look into the night sky... How many black holes do you see?
According to the article, it only targets Peer to Peer technology, not FTP, HTTP or other protocols...
Which if IIRC is where it all started.
Of course, when Peer to Peer programs start using modified versions of well known protocols such as FTP and HTTP then identifying the difference between illegal and legal traffic is going to be impossible... Either that or Youtube is completely screwed.
What happened to the embedded developers? The industry got rid of them...
So if it doesn't have any now, then it really can't look elsewhere to blame anyone.
I started out as a R&D engineer working with video game technology, but essentially, it was all embedded work... I lived and breathed machine code and logic - to me software and hardware were one in the same, a symphony of technology with blurred distinction between the two. I remember sitting down with six spare GAL16v8s and a couple of low-power walkie talkies and a spare afternoon and built myself a radio modem for fun. That was the sort of work I used to do.
But there weren't many people like me - Assembly programmers were hard to find, even back in the 80s and most engineers fresh out of university just didn't know how to write real-time code in assembly language properly - didn't know how to write fault-tolerant code or build a spinlock as the starting point for your application. Didn't understand the necessity of understanding how many cycles an instruction took or how to watch for errors by measuring the duty cycle of the interrupt pin with a logic probe.
So the people who employed hardware designers (back then, if you knew machine code, you usually had a hand in the design of the system as well) found that it was difficult to get replacement engineers. As a result, they couldn't employ similar salary replacements and as old engineers got tired of being mistreated and poorly paid, they simply left and went off to do something different.
Industry responded to the lack of engineering by eliminating the need for the machine code engineers - they moved away from the embedded design with assembly to embedded design with C or even to outsourcing the product they needed, and the hardware got designed by dedicated hardware engineers.
Once again, any real skill in the area was lost as employers wouldn't pay for experience and the best engineers realised they would never be paid what they were worth, so left to do something else.
Then the industry got around this constraint by using really powerful embedded devices - basically a complete PC ready to run whatever PC programmers could write for it.
That's where we're at now. The skills left the industry because the industry wouldn't pay what they were worth... If you can make more money at another job (in my case at the time, selling PCs and Journalism) then why would you keep on developing hardware for a company that doesn't want to pay what you're worth?
I'm seeing the same thing now in Network Analysis... The world is full of network technicians (and I include many people who consider themselves engineers in that description, but don't really know how to actually measure things or understand the technology they work on) but has very few network engineers.
The solution for me? I got smart and moved to management.
I'm a lousy manager ( really, I suck at it ) but I try hard and for once, my contribution is recognised by the company I work for financially... And I have a family to look after.
Would I even go back to engineering or even embedded engineering?
I would love to go back, I really would. I can sit in front of circuits all day and build something and I enjoy every second of it, but I can't afford to do company critical work that won't feed my family or pay my bills.
So unless the industry is prepared to pay for skilled people, and by pay I mean pay them more than they would get being a manager or an accountant or even a journalist, then they will leave.
The other embedded engineers I know all did the same thing... One works on an offshore oilrig, another as a miner, one went to a call centre. One even opened a grocery business. These are all smart people and although they all miss working with electronics and embedded designs, they have families to feed too.
As much as it riles me, these new graduates are actually right asking for more.
I don't know how many times I hear directors telling people that if companies want to keep them, then those 7 figure salaries are what they have to pay...
Well, most IT people are realists, and I can't think of many who wouldn't stay put for the right salary package.
But if companies aren't willing to pay, why should the employee show any loyalty? The market forces affect IT staff too. You can stay with your current job and ask for a 3 percent pay rise, or move companies and take 20%.
People like to blame the attitudes of IT staff, but really, it's the company attitudes to blame.
As for me? I'm a long time IT specialist (20yrs+) recently moved to management. Even from the other side of the table I can still see that the company's attitude is wrong.
Companies who have IT staff churn deserve the problems that go with it. That's all there is to it.
Actually, lately I've been noticing the console fans referring to the PC as "Next-Gen".
During the reign of the previous kings, PS2 and Xbox, the PC didn't really accelerate that far ahead.
The PS2 came out in March 2000 and was truly groundbreaking then. This was during the era of the GEFORCE and GEFORCE 2 cards... That's still TNT stuff. Sure, they were fast back then but certainly not the next generation.
IMHO, the first cards to really push the envelope were the R300 series ( Radeon through to 9800 ) although that was late 2003 by release and 2004 by the time people started to really buy them - just three years ago.
Although these cards had the power to bring next-gen titles to the PC, look how far behind the consoles the PCs were, and the games market was still designing games for the mid-level to low-level market - ie, still catering to people with GeForce 1 cards - still where the top-of-the-line PCs were in 2000 when the PS2 was so powerful.
The problem was that the difference in performance between low and high end cards was several orders of magnitude.
This trend continued right up until 2006, when two critical factors came together all at the same time.
Vista and Better manufacturing process for GPUs
Vista needs more resources that a high-end FPS! and that gives you just enough power to run! More so it has an exclusivity on DX10, which needs a high end card (there are no low-end card supporting DX-10). And game manufacturers are taking advantage - unfortunately in more ways that one - of this situation.
And since then, the manufacturing processes have allowed for mid-to-low end cards that perform within 30% of the speed of the present next-gen cards - and they are flooding the market. Just take a look at the specs of the new 8800GT or HD3850/3870
This results in new game engines designed to use both Vista and Next-gen cards, while not playing on older cards at all, due to constraints of memory and speed.
Think about what that means for a moment - PC gaming has taken it's first step towards a whole new paradigm - one we haven't seen since the original processor-rendered games started to support open-GL way back in the early nineties.
This means that not only have the consoles come out with next-gen consoles that are now here, the PC skipped right past them to set it's current benchmark way past the very best capabilities of the latest consoles.
Just take a look at Bioshock at HD resolution or Crysis with everything turned on. Call of duty 4 shows how realistic game AI can be made to appear.
The result is that the consoles are no longer next-gen from an industry-wide perspective.
The PC is.
And the PC is only at the current level of iteration... Newer engines designed to combine multiple CPUs and GPUs and new GPU tecnologies that should arrive in 6 to 12 months will accelerate the PC far beyond what consoles could ever be capable of.
As a result, lately I hear console owners ( PS3 and 360 ) talking about next-gen games, referring to PC games they hope they might be able to port to the consoles.
I'm sure the technology will get there as console programming techniques improve but since they don't have the raw power of a PC, they need the finesse.
At a guess, the response to Bioshock on the PC and the consoles has set a trend. If game distributers release a game multi-platform, people just buy the PC version and rubbish the consoles version now. How would you feel if you only had a 360 and your mates with PCs kept telling you how much better it was on the PC. Even if you didn't have a PC, I bet you wouldn't want to buy it.
That can't be good for console sales.
And I'm wondering if that has anything to do with the significant lateness of Assassin's Creed release for the PC.
Of course, we'll see three things happen, I beleive.
1. The PC will be locked out of some console games releases - even if it was originally due for multiplatform release.
It depends on the timescale actually... If you assume God has a galactic presence, then the days are each about 210 million years (one trip around the Milky Way), so assuming those sort of timescales, we're about into the 22nd day (21.7 days).
Of course, I'm assuming God uses non-union labour, or we'd still have a solar system that was full of rubble and dust...
If the diode driver circuit is hit by lighting, the output will be in the order of watts before the diode disappears... Way more than a CD burner. Anyone who's worked with LEDs knows how easily you can overdrive them if you have the duty cycle low enough. Basically, the power limitation in LEDs is based on how quickly they can dissipate the heat. This is the same for many electronic circuits.
But having thought it through, I'm thinking that even with wires inside the tank, I've heard of cars being struck by lightning before and not exploding.
And if there is enough of a potential difference between the tank and the wiring anyway for lightning to cause arcing, then the arc even to the outside of the tank will generate enough heat inside to ignite fuel/air... Just like an arc welder...
Well, the biggest problem with Intrisically Safe designs is that they don't tend to be nearly as safe when they get struck by missiles...:)
I thought it was interesting though. I don't actually know enough about that aircraft to know if it was an intrinsically safe design that went wrong or just bad design.
Of course, Avtur - or Kerosene, doesn't ignite with a spark or even a flame - try it. It takes a LOT more, so I'm not really sure how the middle tank went up. You need heat and pressure too. I would have to read the accident report to fully understand it, which is something I haven't done.
Or of course, it might really have been that the wires became frayed after being struck by a missile:)
Actually, there's a lot of air in the tank anyway, especially when it's nearly empty, so a spark would be bad news.
Intrinsic Safety is better explained on the Wikipedia that I did in the post.
And the insulation doesn't exist in the rheostat - just wires rubbing together in the presence of fuel and air, but as I mentioned, it's extremely rare for car fuel tanks to spontaneously explode, which is probably a good example of why intrinsic safety designs work so well:) (Yes, the wires in a fuel tank have no insulation, and they sit in the air/vapour part of the tank)....
I designed some intrinsically safe stuff for a company I worked for once... Sensors that were designed to sit inside the petrol tank and relay information through RFID to an external reader... Which is even lower power than lasers, and actually worked quite well (Credit card information located in the fuel tank or near the filler to be read by the pump handle).. In the end I think they just went with straight commercial stuff, which would have been IS also..
There is nothing wrong with running wires into petrol tanks for sensors... Take a good look at how badly made the rheostats in everyone's pertol tanks are made. Most engineers freak out when they see them for the first time.
However the design is what is known as "Intrinsically Safe"... ie, it can't cause an explosion.
Currents, voltages are limited. Components are overrated by a set amount.
I've never heard of any intrinsically safe circuit igniting gasoline.
So what if you use fiber optics to provide the power. It's still electronic circuits in the tank, except now they are a whole lot more complicated and have power generation and regulation circuits, which make it a whole lot more dangerous...
And please don't just say encapsulate the dangerous stuff, because I'm sure that won't explode with a pressure build up if a component dies (as they tend to do in regulated power circuits).
It really scares me how such "great" ideas like this seem sane, when the original technology was probably safer.
I remember thinking about how unscientific people's objections to nuclear power were even when I was a kid, but somehow all of the sentiment got caught up in the anti-nuclear movements of the time.
But people who suddenly reverse their opinion based on something as simple as an energy crisis don't deserve a lot of respect for their position... Which basically all along was to get what they wanted which pretty much boils down to the lesser of their fears.
Nuclear power always was a good alternative, except for one problem.
Karen Silkwood would have been a good person to point that problem out.
Otherwise, trading coal for heavy metals is just out of the fire, into the frying pan.
Science just isn't as great as it likes to make out... There is a scientific solution of course, but accountants and managers get their way and so we have completely brainless ideas like leap seconds...
And of course, global warming slows down the earth's rotation by moving water from the poles to the equator.
A true engineer would shift mass back to the poles from the equator to fix the issue...
A truly great engineer would calculate just how much mass to leave off a bridge construction somewhere in China to fine-tune the seconds each year to compensate for people moving house and shifting location all around the world.
A really truly great engineer would shift massive amounts of earth from the equator to the poles to make the earth shaped like an Australian football so the earth's rotation speeds up and we can all leave work early each day.
But the second is sacred... And leap seconds are just toooo easy.
Slashdot Mirror
It's basically about being greedy. Screw the human race, just concentrate on being the person who scientists will say the human species originated from in 5000 years time.
All you need to do is be as greedy as possible and do everything for yourself while nothing for everyone else.
While avoiding being killed by those who resent you for doing it, or by people who see you as a threat to their own greed.
The sad thing is that it isn't a game and people play for keeps.
Most of them are politicians, but some are lawyers or even managers.
Oh, and cheating is encouraged. :)
GrpA
So the US goes and allows (or perhaps worse, is complicit in allowing) it's corporations to keep up profits by dumping toxic products in other countries, where it kills and maims children (which is well proven) who struggle to live by supplying their lives to people who use them as slave labour to recover valuable materials from the dumped items through lethal practices, such as burning plastic from wire.
Then some people argue that if the countries allow it, why is that the US's problem?
And then twenty years later they whine like little babies that they can't understand why the survivors of this situation in those countries hate them so much and want to kill them and everyone else they see as a part of the "Western" world...
And they can't even blame the CIA this time. US corporations are doing a far more sinister job that the CIA ever did.
GrpA.
No, Just the one that supposedly crashed into the Pentagon... The one that didn't have wings, which no video exists for, which only had one small jet engine... Must have been an early model 767...
GrpA
Of course, everyone in Europe will probably be sterilised by the radiation as the black holes decay...
But not us!
We've got the entire planet between us and your folly!
You guys in the US should be afraid though... You've only got the Atlantic Ocean.
Perhaps you could invest in lead underwear?
GrpA
I find it very hard to imagine Sony doing anything altruistic at all. They are to Hardware what Microsoft is to Software.
So I'm wondering what's in it for them. Do they have some kind of new technology that when measured by the second method only, looks much better for them? Or perhaps their min-power usage number is the same as the movie-play version...
I'm only guessing, but I can't imagine Sony would be doing this just for the benefit of consumers, if they didn't get something out of it, since other manufacturers will still be using the old method of measuring this.
GrpA
Time to call the Space Debris Section of Technora Corporation.... I wonder how far something like Planetes is off from reality at times. Excellent series. GrpA
Is the stupid restrictions arbitrarily imposed on getting a block imposed by self-important registrars (eg, APNIC, ARIN, etc). They are so desparate to control this resource that nobody want's to use it. Especially when they already have IPv4.
Charging for IPv6 and rigidly controlling it's distribution is like building a five-hundred-lane toll-only-freeway with perfect roads right next to a two-lane freeway with acceptable roads, that is essentially free to use (because it was always there) and that isn't all that badly congested.
If they gave huge chunks of IPv6 away for a few years to early adopters, as they did with IPv4, then it would be more likely to lead to an environment in which corporate use would have to follow after the enthusiasts who picked up early on the idea because it was free and subsequently developed applications that require it.
Don't forget why we use WWW instead of the competing hypertext systems of the era... It was free and unrestricted. And once it's popular, there's a reason for everyone to use it.
And all they need to do to maintain their future stranglehold on an essentially limitless resource is impose appropriate technical criteria for anyone applying (eg, only provide to people who can demonstrate they know what they are doing... Like they used to a long time ago) .
Don't waste your time arguing that commercial realities will drive IPv6 implementation. I'm a consultant to government and the government has a real need for IPv6. They need it for VoIP and Toll Bypass between agencies and don't have enough IPv4 to meet this need - they all tend to use the 10.x.x.x block internally and then wonder why they can't connect up two agencies that have just merged... *sigh*.
Yet despite this, they don't see any value in going to IPv6 if no one else is going to... Why? Because it's going to cost them a few thousand in fees to the APNIC each year, so they keep putting it off.
If I could get a free permanent legacy block of IPv6 easily, I'd grab one... But there's no way I'd pay for one.
The only reason IPv6 is dead is that it's somebody's cash cow... And no one wants to buy it.
GrpA
I'm always suprised when I hear comments like this... Especially as I didn't suggest anything extreme such as "PC games were going to overtake consoles", but take a look at what the game designers are saying about Console Vs PC on google (takes a little searching).
:)
What I was saying is that the PC architecture is still so far ahead of console that next-gen games will only play on PC. (And by Next-Gen, I mean games designed for the technology designed over the past two years).
The PC is already and likely permanently dominant in the area of MMORPGs and FPS games. There is little point even questioning it, and conversely, games intended for console frequently don't make it to the PC. It's not that you can't play them - they just weren't designed for keyboard and mouse (and few people actually keep an X-box or PS2 like pad for their PC ).
You can build a PC that outperforms a X360 now for well under $400 - even in Australia! (Core-2 Duo, X1950, 2G Ram, etc). I'm not including the monitor in that price, because you don't need a monitor now - Just plug it into your high res LCD, and then you can build in a DVR and whatever else too.
And a high end machine barely touches the thousand dollar mark.
Trying to argue that price alone is going to make the difference would make the PS2 the best proposition ( Still a strong seller, I beleive).
As a retail seller, you would know that the market is fickle...
All it takes is a few killer games that run on PC only that the consoles simply can't be made to run, then the new gen of game players is going to start wanting PCs, diluting the X360 *and* PS3 marketplace...
And that's going to start happening in 2009.
So if you want to see where this is going, compare PCs that can run anything you can do on a console (assuming it's not an exclusive title) to older PS2 and Xbox's and you will see why the console's need to keep up also -
Joe Majority may never understand it - I still don't understand why my kids want a PS3, when the X360 seems more their style (and they all have reasonably high end PCs) - But I'm pretty sure it has something to do with which games they want to play that are only available on that console.
It's a long cycle based on technology growth, and this time, the cheaper PC high-end stuff is slewing the market for an early return to PC being in front.
Maybe I am wrong and you are correct about the guess, but the next twelve months will be interesting to watch...
GrpA
I'd guess that the recent games like Asassin's Creed and other console-first, PC later games are starting to show up the consoles and while it's not having a lot of effect yet, it's starting to, and people are waiting for the PC release before buying, because they know that unless the conversion is a dud, the PC version is always going to be better and higher resolution...
But as I said, it's only a small number of people looking that way at present, because the difference is slight at the moment.
I'd guess they're looking ahead to late 2009 where the next gen of PC video cards will make things possible in games that simply can't be repeated on consoles, and at higher resolutions too.
Then the X360 and PS3 and both going to start looking like an oversized DS..
I'd be suprised if some in Microsoft aren't wondering what they're going to do as that starts to happen... Create a new higher level X360 maybe or maybe even some are suggesting they build a whole new console that's X360 compatible.
But that's just conjecture based on them saying they're not making a new one... Because if they did, everyone would be waiting to buy it instead and the existing stocks would go the way of the Osborne PC.
GrpA.
I tend to watch the ads while my wife skips them...
The difference? I don't watch much TV so many of the ads are new to me... So I don't mind watching them. I find it more frustrating hunting for the start of the show that watching them, unless they are really long or really bad and annoying.
And if the ad's interesting enough, I rewind and watch it twice
GrpA
No, they are one light hour apart, relative to each other...
Otherwise they would have had to have travelled at 2C for the past hour...
Which if course, is impossible...
GrpA
If there was any likelyhood of civilisations wiping themselves from existance with the creation of microscopic black holes, then you would expect the universe to be full of black holes where each subsequent civilisation had extinguished itself.
Now take a look into the night sky... How many black holes do you see?
None!
So obviously, this is completely safe...
GrpA
According to the article, it only targets Peer to Peer technology, not FTP, HTTP or other protocols...
Which if IIRC is where it all started.
Of course, when Peer to Peer programs start using modified versions of well known protocols such as FTP and HTTP then identifying the difference between illegal and legal traffic is going to be impossible... Either that or Youtube is completely screwed.
GrpA.
What happened to the embedded developers? The industry got rid of them...
So if it doesn't have any now, then it really can't look elsewhere to blame anyone.
I started out as a R&D engineer working with video game technology, but essentially, it was all embedded work... I lived and breathed machine code and logic - to me software and hardware were one in the same, a symphony of technology with blurred distinction between the two. I remember sitting down with six spare GAL16v8s and a couple of low-power walkie talkies and a spare afternoon and built myself a radio modem for fun. That was the sort of work I used to do.
But there weren't many people like me - Assembly programmers were hard to find, even back in the 80s and most engineers fresh out of university just didn't know how to write real-time code in assembly language properly - didn't know how to write fault-tolerant code or build a spinlock as the starting point for your application. Didn't understand the necessity of understanding how many cycles an instruction took or how to watch for errors by measuring the duty cycle of the interrupt pin with a logic probe.
So the people who employed hardware designers (back then, if you knew machine code, you usually had a hand in the design of the system as well) found that it was difficult to get replacement engineers. As a result, they couldn't employ similar salary replacements and as old engineers got tired of being mistreated and poorly paid, they simply left and went off to do something different.
Industry responded to the lack of engineering by eliminating the need for the machine code engineers - they moved away from the embedded design with assembly to embedded design with C or even to outsourcing the product they needed, and the hardware got designed by dedicated hardware engineers.
Once again, any real skill in the area was lost as employers wouldn't pay for experience and the best engineers realised they would never be paid what they were worth, so left to do something else.
Then the industry got around this constraint by using really powerful embedded devices - basically a complete PC ready to run whatever PC programmers could write for it.
That's where we're at now. The skills left the industry because the industry wouldn't pay what they were worth... If you can make more money at another job (in my case at the time, selling PCs and Journalism) then why would you keep on developing hardware for a company that doesn't want to pay what you're worth?
I'm seeing the same thing now in Network Analysis... The world is full of network technicians (and I include many people who consider themselves engineers in that description, but don't really know how to actually measure things or understand the technology they work on) but has very few network engineers.
The solution for me? I got smart and moved to management.
I'm a lousy manager ( really, I suck at it ) but I try hard and for once, my contribution is recognised by the company I work for financially... And I have a family to look after.
Would I even go back to engineering or even embedded engineering?
I would love to go back, I really would. I can sit in front of circuits all day and build something and I enjoy every second of it, but I can't afford to do company critical work that won't feed my family or pay my bills.
So unless the industry is prepared to pay for skilled people, and by pay I mean pay them more than they would get being a manager or an accountant or even a journalist, then they will leave.
The other embedded engineers I know all did the same thing... One works on an offshore oilrig, another as a miner, one went to a call centre. One even opened a grocery business. These are all smart people and although they all miss working with electronics and embedded designs, they have families to feed too.
GrpA.
As much as it riles me, these new graduates are actually right asking for more.
I don't know how many times I hear directors telling people that if companies want to keep them, then those 7 figure salaries are what they have to pay...
Well, most IT people are realists, and I can't think of many who wouldn't stay put for the right salary package.
But if companies aren't willing to pay, why should the employee show any loyalty? The market forces affect IT staff too. You can stay with your current job and ask for a 3 percent pay rise, or move companies and take 20%.
People like to blame the attitudes of IT staff, but really, it's the company attitudes to blame.
As for me? I'm a long time IT specialist (20yrs+) recently moved to management. Even from the other side of the table I can still see that the company's attitude is wrong.
Companies who have IT staff churn deserve the problems that go with it. That's all there is to it.
GrpA
Actually, lately I've been noticing the console fans referring to the PC as "Next-Gen".
During the reign of the previous kings, PS2 and Xbox, the PC didn't really accelerate that far ahead.
The PS2 came out in March 2000 and was truly groundbreaking then. This was during the era of the GEFORCE and GEFORCE 2 cards... That's still TNT stuff.
Sure, they were fast back then but certainly not the next generation.
IMHO, the first cards to really push the envelope were the R300 series ( Radeon through to 9800 ) although that was late 2003 by release and 2004 by the time people started to really buy them - just three years ago.
Although these cards had the power to bring next-gen titles to the PC, look how far behind the consoles the PCs were, and the games market was still designing games for the mid-level to low-level market - ie, still catering to people with GeForce 1 cards - still where the top-of-the-line PCs were in 2000 when the PS2 was so powerful.
The problem was that the difference in performance between low and high end cards was several orders of magnitude.
This trend continued right up until 2006, when two critical factors came together all at the same time.
Vista and Better manufacturing process for GPUs
Vista needs more resources that a high-end FPS! and that gives you just enough power to run! More so it has an exclusivity on DX10, which needs a high end card (there are no low-end card supporting DX-10). And game manufacturers are taking advantage - unfortunately in more ways that one - of this situation.
And since then, the manufacturing processes have allowed for mid-to-low end cards that perform within 30% of the speed of the present next-gen cards - and they are flooding the market. Just take a look at the specs of the new 8800GT or HD3850/3870
This results in new game engines designed to use both Vista and Next-gen cards, while not playing on older cards at all, due to constraints of memory and speed.
Think about what that means for a moment - PC gaming has taken it's first step towards a whole new paradigm - one we haven't seen since the original processor-rendered games started to support open-GL way back in the early nineties.
This means that not only have the consoles come out with next-gen consoles that are now here, the PC skipped right past them to set it's current benchmark way past the very best capabilities of the latest consoles.
Just take a look at Bioshock at HD resolution or Crysis with everything turned on. Call of duty 4 shows how realistic game AI can be made to appear.
The result is that the consoles are no longer next-gen from an industry-wide perspective.
The PC is.
And the PC is only at the current level of iteration... Newer engines designed to combine multiple CPUs and GPUs and new GPU tecnologies that should arrive in 6 to 12 months will accelerate the PC far beyond what consoles could ever be capable of.
As a result, lately I hear console owners ( PS3 and 360 ) talking about next-gen games, referring to PC games they hope they might be able to port to the consoles.
I'm sure the technology will get there as console programming techniques improve but since they don't have the raw power of a PC, they need the finesse.
At a guess, the response to Bioshock on the PC and the consoles has set a trend. If game distributers release a game multi-platform, people just buy the PC version and rubbish the consoles version now. How would you feel if you only had a 360 and your mates with PCs kept telling you how much better it was on the PC. Even if you didn't have a PC, I bet you wouldn't want to buy it.
That can't be good for console sales.
And I'm wondering if that has anything to do with the significant lateness of Assassin's Creed release for the PC.
Of course, we'll see three things happen, I beleive.
1. The PC will be locked out of some console games releases - even if it was originally due for multiplatform release.
2. Th
Weapons of Music Discounting ?
GrpA
It depends on the timescale actually... If you assume God has a galactic presence, then the days are each about 210 million years (one trip around the Milky Way), so assuming those sort of timescales, we're about into the 22nd day (21.7 days).
Of course, I'm assuming God uses non-union labour, or we'd still have a solar system that was full of rubble and dust...
Ummm, then again...
GrpA
See my comment above.
If the diode driver circuit is hit by lighting, the output will be in the order of watts before the diode disappears... Way more than a CD burner. Anyone who's worked with LEDs knows how easily you can overdrive them if you have the duty cycle low enough. Basically, the power limitation in LEDs is based on how quickly they can dissipate the heat. This is the same for many electronic circuits.
But having thought it through, I'm thinking that even with wires inside the tank, I've heard of cars being struck by lightning before and not exploding.
And if there is enough of a potential difference between the tank and the wiring anyway for lightning to cause arcing, then the arc even to the outside of the tank will generate enough heat inside to ignite fuel/air... Just like an arc welder...
GrpA
Just out of interest, I wonder how many watts will a laser pointer diode put out for microseconds or less if it gets hit by lightning.
The pulse would be short but I wonder if it might be enough to cause damage/ignition at the other end.
Diodes seem really easy to overdrive in my experience.
GrpA
Yes, TWA 800.
Well, the biggest problem with Intrisically Safe designs is that they don't tend to be nearly as safe when they get struck by missiles...
I thought it was interesting though. I don't actually know enough about that aircraft to know if it was an intrinsically safe design that went wrong or just bad design.
Of course, Avtur - or Kerosene, doesn't ignite with a spark or even a flame - try it. It takes a LOT more, so I'm not really sure how the middle tank went up. You need heat and pressure too. I would have to read the accident report to fully understand it, which is something I haven't done.
Or of course, it might really have been that the wires became frayed after being struck by a missile
GrpA
Actually, there's a lot of air in the tank anyway, especially when it's nearly empty, so a spark would be bad news.
:) (Yes, the wires in a fuel tank have no insulation, and they sit in the air/vapour part of the tank)....
Intrinsic Safety is better explained on the Wikipedia that I did in the post.
And the insulation doesn't exist in the rheostat - just wires rubbing together in the presence of fuel and air, but as I mentioned, it's extremely rare for car fuel tanks to spontaneously explode, which is probably a good example of why intrinsic safety designs work so well
I designed some intrinsically safe stuff for a company I worked for once... Sensors that were designed to sit inside the petrol tank and relay information through RFID to an external reader... Which is even lower power than lasers, and actually worked quite well (Credit card information located in the fuel tank or near the filler to be read by the pump handle).. In the end I think they just went with straight commercial stuff, which would have been IS also..
GrpA
There is nothing wrong with running wires into petrol tanks for sensors... Take a good look at how badly made the rheostats in everyone's pertol tanks are made. Most engineers freak out when they see them for the first time.
However the design is what is known as "Intrinsically Safe"... ie, it can't cause an explosion.
Currents, voltages are limited. Components are overrated by a set amount.
I've never heard of any intrinsically safe circuit igniting gasoline.
So what if you use fiber optics to provide the power. It's still electronic circuits in the tank, except now they are a whole lot more complicated and have power generation and regulation circuits, which make it a whole lot more dangerous...
And please don't just say encapsulate the dangerous stuff, because I'm sure that won't explode with a pressure build up if a component dies (as they tend to do in regulated power circuits).
It really scares me how such "great" ideas like this seem sane, when the original technology was probably safer.
GrpA
I remember thinking about how unscientific people's objections to nuclear power were even when I was a kid, but somehow all of the sentiment got caught up in the anti-nuclear movements of the time.
But people who suddenly reverse their opinion based on something as simple as an energy crisis don't deserve a lot of respect for their position... Which basically all along was to get what they wanted which pretty much boils down to the lesser of their fears.
Nuclear power always was a good alternative, except for one problem.
Karen Silkwood would have been a good person to point that problem out.
Otherwise, trading coal for heavy metals is just out of the fire, into the frying pan.
GrpA
Science just isn't as great as it likes to make out... There is a scientific solution of course, but accountants and managers get their way and so we have completely brainless ideas like leap seconds...
And of course, global warming slows down the earth's rotation by moving water from the poles to the equator.
A true engineer would shift mass back to the poles from the equator to fix the issue...
A truly great engineer would calculate just how much mass to leave off a bridge construction somewhere in China to fine-tune the seconds each year to compensate for people moving house and shifting location all around the world.
A really truly great engineer would shift massive amounts of earth from the equator to the poles to make the earth shaped like an Australian football so the earth's rotation speeds up and we can all leave work early each day.
But the second is sacred... And leap seconds are just toooo easy.
Only good for accountants and managers.
GrpA.