Circa 1975-76, this was just a design exercise at the tail-end of our logic design class--we just called it a minicomputer then, using SSI and MSI TTL modules--it would have been a bit tricky to come up with 64K of storage then, since 1Kbit to maybe 4Kbit chips was state of the art. If anything, you do have to commend the guy, not for design, but for getting such a large number of proto-boards and all those aggravating wires hooked up and get all of it working. A wire-wrapped version would be more compact/reliable, and just about as "homemade" in my book. No big deal.
Come on folks--surveillance satellites can, just like any other satellites, come in a couple of flavors: high-orbit geosynchronous or geostationary, and low-orbit. The high-flyers/geostat/geosync are great for getting a marginal picture of the same area--great for tracking hurricanes and himmicanes. The low-flyers are great for taking some sorda-detailed pictures every few hours or days, depending on how many birds you have flying.
On the other hand, survaillance aircraft have their varioius advantages/disadvantage:
The Global Hawk/UAVs have maybe 12 to 24 hour "dwell time" over a target area, but they, in reality, have serious operational difficulties--marginal payload capabilities/reliability/etc (unless you talk to someone trying to sell you some).
The now-retired SR-71 was fast, but had lousy dwell time--maybe 30 minutes over target before you had to go home.
The venerable U-2 (yes, they still fly them) still provides "reasonable" dwell time--about 12 hours total flight time, and still provides some of the best/most diverse recon capabilities around, but requires a lot of inconvenient life support for the pilot.
My concern--being such a noted authority on everything--is that a lightweight, stay in the air forever recon plane as proposed will not have anywhere near the mulit-spectral recon capability that a U-2 presently has, and will prove as worthless as the Global Hawk.
This "hold the phone this way" crap reminds me of the battle about 35 years ago when IBM was trying to compete against Brand X(erox) in the office copier market. IBM's first attempt looked like a lot of Selectric typewriter parts, but didn't work as well. The second attempt produced a copier which could do about two pages/minute, whereas Brand X was then doing about ten pages/minute. IBM salesmen were given a solution: Tell the customer "Our studies have shown that too many unnecessary copies are made on copiers that run faster that two pages/minute". IBM no longer makes copiers.
It seems like the initial human genome sequencing took several years, ending back in 2003 or thereabouts. Just how fast is the process nowadays? I trust, if they plan to sequence DNA from tens of thousands of individuals, it must be multiple orders of magnitude faster than what the original sequencing took????
I believe the imported fire ants have one-neuron brains that work as follows: Am I in contact with something? If yes, bite it.
In reality the fire ants have displaced native ant species, which are the primary diets of some much more delightful creatures, the horned lizards. Perhaps the only chance the horned lizards have are the phorid flies to keep the fire ants sufficiently controlled that native ants can make a sufficient comeback to save the horny toads.
You also forgot: A key part of photosynthesis is the "photo" part. What is this idiot planning to do, have a zillion megawatts/acre of grow lights on all the lower levels? Kill a forest or two to power this POS. This "architect" should get negative points on is certified moron exam for excess display of ignorance.
In my mixed=heritage family, whenever we serve kimchi, everyone in the house eats if for defensive/non-offensive reasons. If everyone has a mouth full, the odor is no problem.
The kids on MythBusters already tried this--using "plans" advertised for sale in the back of some magazine such as Popular Mechanics. Net was that the power-to-weight ratio of internal combustion engines w/ ducted fans just wouldn't cut it for this application.
A few of the military pilots may need a gel version of this drug: U2 pilots have to eat and drink during long-haul (>12 hours) flights through a tube into their space suit helmet. They currently have two options: a delicious caffeine-laced chocolate pudding, or a tube of the amphetamine gel. They would need a special device to enable snorting of this new stuff. For the U2 pilots, flying the most-difficult to land plane in the military arsenal, being in top form mentally is pretty essential to the landing, considering that, even during a normal/short operation, another pilot will typically help them to land by following the U2 down the run way in a muscle car, calling out altitude and position to the pilot.
Having experienced those damn vans, I would have agree. However, I suspect, as another poster suggested, following them around with your own sound car to contest what they say would be difficult: As with those damn American political adds, there is nothing said worth contesting--same ol' fluff, whether blown through a megaphone sound truck, or through your 70-inch Sony family spiritual center.
Consider, however, that rating girls in Idaho is much simpler--none of this 1 to 10 stuff--
just Grade 1, Grade 2, or culls--it is "famous for potatoes", after all.
Fellow engineers, nerds, and other three/four-dimensional entities,
Let us all be thankful for string theory:
1.) This keeps a large number of intelligent people studying fizziks, and out of the engineering and programming market.
2.) As e.e. cummings said:
listen:there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go
I've always found it most entertaining to check the effects reciting Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky has on any new/exciting speech reco program.
On a more serious note, however, my wife was involved in an ill-fated-due-to-ancient-technology project back in grad school in the early 70's which involved:
1. Speech recognition. 2. Machine translation into a universal grammar 3. Translation of the universal grammer into various target languages. 4. Speech synthesis in the various target languages, using the same vocal qualities as the original speaker.
Pretty lofty goals cosidering they were probably using computers with discrete components in them.
Curiously, my wife (a native Japanese speaker) was teamed with the Suomi (Finnish) team because of the similarities in the two language's structures.
You folks have it all wrong--kids could really get to enjoying classical music, along with all our old favorites from Lawrence Welk, Guy Lombardo, vintage Wayne Newton (his pre-puberty voice), etc., but the kids just haven't been able to get a player which will track from corner to corner of these CDs.
How is he doing the math here? He's implying a 32-way system running at 9.6 GHZ. What he really has is an 8-way (thinking of # of cores) or 32-way (# of cores times # of threads/core) running at 1.2 GHz. He is implying with his math the equivalent of a single processor running 32 x 89.6 = a 307 Ghz uni. All this is entertaining statisculation. What will be more entertaining are when he can post real performance numbers for a real system.
As an easily entertained kid,i found mixing dry ice with denatured alcohol provided a nice liquid at the same temperature as the dry ice--very useful for emersing various fruits/vegetables/squishy things, freezing them hard, and shattering them with a hammer. I would think filling the copper pipe with the denatured alcohol/dry ice mix could enhance heat transfer markedly. Once the dry ice is gone, one could then have lots of alcohol vapors available to burn down your house in short order.
All of this high-fallutin' physics speculation makes my very happy, in that in keeps some very intelligent individuals gainfully employed as fizzisists, and our of the engineering job market.
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This HAMAD thing looks to be old news compared with the Lueke ranch--check on googlemaps or googleearth for Smithville, Texas, and pan north a bit.
Circa 1975-76, this was just a design exercise at the tail-end of our logic design class--we just called it a minicomputer then, using SSI and MSI TTL modules--it would have been a bit tricky to come up with 64K of storage then, since 1Kbit to maybe 4Kbit chips was state of the art. If anything, you do have to commend the guy, not for design, but for getting such a large number of proto-boards and all those aggravating wires hooked up and get all of it working. A wire-wrapped version would be more compact/reliable, and just about as "homemade" in my book. No big deal.
Must have cost a lot in bribes for M$ to get on the most-ethical list.
Come on folks--surveillance satellites can, just like any other satellites, come in a couple of flavors: high-orbit geosynchronous or geostationary, and low-orbit. The high-flyers/geostat/geosync are great for getting a marginal picture of the same area--great for tracking hurricanes and himmicanes. The low-flyers are great for taking some sorda-detailed pictures every few hours or days, depending on how many birds you have flying. On the other hand, survaillance aircraft have their varioius advantages/disadvantage: The Global Hawk/UAVs have maybe 12 to 24 hour "dwell time" over a target area, but they, in reality, have serious operational difficulties--marginal payload capabilities/reliability/etc (unless you talk to someone trying to sell you some). The now-retired SR-71 was fast, but had lousy dwell time--maybe 30 minutes over target before you had to go home. The venerable U-2 (yes, they still fly them) still provides "reasonable" dwell time--about 12 hours total flight time, and still provides some of the best/most diverse recon capabilities around, but requires a lot of inconvenient life support for the pilot. My concern--being such a noted authority on everything--is that a lightweight, stay in the air forever recon plane as proposed will not have anywhere near the mulit-spectral recon capability that a U-2 presently has, and will prove as worthless as the Global Hawk.
This "hold the phone this way" crap reminds me of the battle about 35 years ago when IBM was trying to compete against Brand X(erox) in the office copier market. IBM's first attempt looked like a lot of Selectric typewriter parts, but didn't work as well. The second attempt produced a copier which could do about two pages/minute, whereas Brand X was then doing about ten pages/minute. IBM salesmen were given a solution: Tell the customer "Our studies have shown that too many unnecessary copies are made on copiers that run faster that two pages/minute". IBM no longer makes copiers.
Since Graphene-based computers are "organic", they should sell at a premium price, just like the worm-infested organic apples in the produce section.
It seems like the initial human genome sequencing took several years, ending back in 2003 or thereabouts. Just how fast is the process nowadays? I trust, if they plan to sequence DNA from tens of thousands of individuals, it must be multiple orders of magnitude faster than what the original sequencing took????
I believe the imported fire ants have one-neuron brains that work as follows: Am I in contact with something? If yes, bite it. In reality the fire ants have displaced native ant species, which are the primary diets of some much more delightful creatures, the horned lizards. Perhaps the only chance the horned lizards have are the phorid flies to keep the fire ants sufficiently controlled that native ants can make a sufficient comeback to save the horny toads.
You also forgot: A key part of photosynthesis is the "photo" part. What is this idiot planning to do, have a zillion megawatts/acre of grow lights on all the lower levels? Kill a forest or two to power this POS. This "architect" should get negative points on is certified moron exam for excess display of ignorance.
correction, this was for an Experimental RV-10 aircraft.
The motorbike option is available for Cirrus Aircraft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq2dLNiFaos
In my mixed=heritage family, whenever we serve kimchi, everyone in the house eats if for defensive/non-offensive reasons. If everyone has a mouth full, the odor is no problem.
The kids on MythBusters already tried this--using "plans" advertised for sale in the back of some magazine such as Popular Mechanics. Net was that the power-to-weight ratio of internal combustion engines w/ ducted fans just wouldn't cut it for this application.
A few of the military pilots may need a gel version of this drug: U2 pilots have to eat and drink during long-haul (>12 hours) flights through a tube into their space suit helmet. They currently have two options: a delicious caffeine-laced chocolate pudding, or a tube of the amphetamine gel. They would need a special device to enable snorting of this new stuff. For the U2 pilots, flying the most-difficult to land plane in the military arsenal, being in top form mentally is pretty essential to the landing, considering that, even during a normal/short operation, another pilot will typically help them to land by following the U2 down the run way in a muscle car, calling out altitude and position to the pilot.
Having experienced those damn vans, I would have agree. However, I suspect, as another poster suggested, following them around with your own sound car to contest what they say would be difficult: As with those damn American political adds, there is nothing said worth contesting--same ol' fluff, whether blown through a megaphone sound truck, or through your 70-inch Sony family spiritual center.
Consider, however, that rating girls in Idaho is much simpler--none of this 1 to 10 stuff-- just Grade 1, Grade 2, or culls--it is "famous for potatoes", after all.
Fellow engineers, nerds, and other three/four-dimensional entities, Let us all be thankful for string theory: 1.) This keeps a large number of intelligent people studying fizziks, and out of the engineering and programming market. 2.) As e.e. cummings said: listen:there's a hell of a good universe next door;let's go
I've always found it most entertaining to check the effects reciting Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky has on any new/exciting speech reco program.
On a more serious note, however, my wife was involved in an ill-fated-due-to-ancient-technology project back in grad school in the early 70's which involved:
1. Speech recognition.
2. Machine translation into a universal grammar
3. Translation of the universal grammer into various target languages.
4. Speech synthesis in the various target languages, using the same vocal qualities as the original speaker.
Pretty lofty goals cosidering they were probably using computers with discrete components in them.
Curiously, my wife (a native Japanese speaker) was teamed with the Suomi (Finnish) team because of the similarities in the two language's structures.
You folks have it all wrong--kids could really get to enjoying classical music, along with all our old favorites from Lawrence Welk, Guy Lombardo, vintage Wayne Newton (his pre-puberty voice), etc., but the kids just haven't been able to get a player which will track from corner to corner of these CDs.
How is he doing the math here? He's implying a 32-way system running at 9.6 GHZ. What he really has is an 8-way (thinking of # of cores) or 32-way (# of cores times # of threads/core) running at 1.2 GHz. He is implying with his math the equivalent of a single processor running 32 x 89.6 = a 307 Ghz uni. All this is entertaining statisculation. What will be more entertaining are when he can post real performance numbers for a real system.
As an easily entertained kid,i found mixing dry ice with denatured alcohol provided a nice liquid at the same temperature as the dry ice--very useful for emersing various fruits/vegetables/squishy things, freezing them hard, and shattering them with a hammer. I would think filling the copper pipe with the denatured alcohol/dry ice mix could enhance heat transfer markedly. Once the dry ice is gone, one could then have lots of alcohol vapors available to burn down your house in short order.
All of this high-fallutin' physics speculation makes my very happy, in that in keeps some very intelligent individuals gainfully employed as fizzisists, and our of the engineering job market.