Why would a professor ask for a Facebook profile? I certainly wouldn't give them one.
Attractive member of the appropriate sex : obvious
Mostly its used after cheating is suspected. So, vlm and Anonymous Coward turned in rather similar "hello_world.c" programs last week... lets see if there is anything incriminating on their "walls"; perhaps vlm was dumb enough to write, "hey Anonymous, lets meet at the computer lab at 6pm tonight to work on the assignment together, OK?"
The other part is some profs actually have FB profiles and twitter profiles and they don't mind people asking them questions if they know who the heck they are. But they're not going to help their competitive coworker's students, or just some crazy random dude off the internet. Preemptively friending or whatevering all your students is a pretty easy way to work around this. On something more modern like google+ you just put them all in circles by class.
I would not begrudge our soldiers in Afghanistan small comforts. But still I was taken aback by the news that Pentagon spends more on airconditioning barracks in Afghanistan than the entire NASA budget. If Pentagon bought some more efficient air conditioners without compromising comfort, may be we could fund a few more of these missions.
Sounds like it would be a heck of a lot more cost effective for NASA under DOD contract to launch a "solar umbrella" arrangement to cool Afghanistan. As a bonus we'd be able to use the required heavy lifter / orbital construction gear for other purposes. Finally we could sell advertising space on the solar umbrella.
As a side note, there are not many US barracks in the sandbox. They're air conditioning tents and trailers. I spent some time in the 90s baby sitting some computers in a US Army air conditioned trailer; We were very thankful the "computers required air conditioning", it was just a side effect that we got comfortable.
Well, from Wikipedia... You could probably escape the gravitational field by jumping really hard, so tethers are probably a must for working outside.
From wikipedia the escape velocity is a big fraction of a kilometer per second... Jumping not a hazard.
Put that gravitational acceleration into the 1st semester physics kinematics equations and you will not be walking around down there. If I did my scaling factors and estimates correctly, each step bounding a couple times your height in the air, and each step taking a good part of a minute. Like lunar bunny hops, but worse.
Speaking of bunnies, to head off the inevitable pr0n questions, it would be a cross between orbital and lunar, nothing particularily qualitatively different. Probably pretty awkward.
When the ion drive isn't running, there is plenty of power. There's no reason to not gather as much data as possible. After all, if something went bung during insertion (when the probe was out of comms with Earth) it would be the only data they have. Given the detail in the last image (from ten days ago), what prevented them from at least getting a full surface sequence?
Other NASA probes take images from distant approach, trying to milk as much data as they can before the arrive, as well as PR for the mission. I can't find an explanation of why the Dawn team have been so reticent to image their target. It doesn't bode well for the rest of the mission.
I can think of a theoretical reason that may or may not have any application to reality.
We know the asteroid's orbit and our (the earths) orbit from a zillion years of position observation. We don't know the vehicle's relative velocity to the asteroid, and thats kind of important to put it in orbit. In ye olden days the stereotypical way to figure orbits was to put what amounts to a crossband linear repeater on the vehicle and spend inordinate amounts of effort on the earth measuring the doppler shift of signals transmitted thru the repeater. In ye olden days that was best done using an continuous information free carrier CW tone. Now a days the youngin's probably use some sort of spread spectrum solution to avoid ionospheric scintillation or just to plain ole be cool? At any rate the radios would probably be busy doing the navigation-thing as opposed to the science-thing.
Now a "news for nerds tech site" could make an interesting article about how this mission did navigation...
Here, off the shelf Cisco (expensive) plug in 1 gig 1000BASE-ZX SFP single mode fiber 70 km no repeater necessary. Thats over 40 miles of gigabit service.
Expensive, but not third of a million bucks expensive.
Yes, running cable would be expensive, especially with degradation of line signal over distance being very high, a repeater would need to be placed every half mile or mile to get any real speed
I think not.
I've been out of the telcom engineering dept for several years, but back then our OC-192 SONET rings needed a repeater or a ADM every 50 miles or so, and single mode 10Gig fiber ethernet ran 5 or 10 miles without a repeater. You can buy cheapie 10G fiber transmitters that only go 500 feet or whatever at low power, if you want, but that doesn't mean the 10 mile model isn't "off the shelf". I'm sure they can go faster and further now.
Maybe you're thinking of ancient AMI/B8ZS T1 physical 4-wire lines, that had repeater huts every 6kft, which is still longer than you claim? Some kind of weird DSL? I thought DSL was pretty much dead, like "ethernet over powerline" technology is dead.
The median household income in these areas is between $40,100 and $50,900. The median home prices are between $94,400 and $189,000.'
First of all they're dirt poor and not going to pay for broadband or own a computer. The critical part is the ratio of income to house price. Somewhere around 1:2 is OK but not ideal, 1:4 means extreme poverty, like 99% of your legally declared income must be going toward the house and you never eat anything but ramen, at least until the inevitable foreclosure and bankruptcy. Even commissioned cheerleaders for the home sales/building industry don't have the guts to ask for more than a ratio of 1:3. Personally I live around 1:1.5 and live a pleasant luxurious mostly carefree lifestyle, including broadband, although I am not rich enough that I can totally ignore budgeting and planning. So paying any amount of money at all to provide service is useless if economic conditions are such that they can't afford to own a PC or pay for the now-available service.
The next problem is, from being in the telco industry, most of the $349,234 is going to executive bonuses, scams, overhead, etc. They need a tower to put the wireless ISP gateway on, and the CEO's brother happens to own a company providing that at merely 5 times going market rate. To get a monopoly license from the city, the city would like a $1M tax/donation/fee, but don't worry the customers will pay for it... etc.
Finally the cost of providing telecom services is at least 100:1 from multi-zillion pair buried single mode 10 gig ethernet fiber, down to wireless using 802.11 gear and fancy antennas. Since they're pimping the high cost, assume they're talking about an absolutely gold plated fiber to the house 10 gig using all Cisco brand gear and as many subcontractors as politically possible. But realize a small hungry WISP could probably provide service for a capital cost of maybe $3492.34/customer not $349234/customer. That wouldn't fit with whatever political conclusion they're trying to draw, so...
We collected rock samples above and below the horn to determine the exact placement of the K/T boundary, and were surprised to see that the horn was no more than 13 cm below it.
A new fossil discovery has suggested that dinosaurs were alive right up until the asteroid impact
Speaking as a guy living in a county where the only non-service blue collar jobs left are at the local rock quarry, and having a geologist as a roommate two decades ago, I speak with profound scientific authority that those two quotes only go together if you define "right up until" as being about one zillion years. I suspect most readers define "right up until" on a somewhat shorter scale, like the time difference between the local news and american-idle, not zillions of years. (waves rolled up newspaper) Naughty journalist! Naughty!
"right up until" 13 cm of rock.
I am completely unaware of any political or cultural reason for the authors to be blind to this problem. I have no dog in the fight that I'm aware of. Just saying 13 cm of rock is not "right up until"
It MIGHT be that the real story is on a "bones per cm" basis this raises the curve implying the rate does not "tail off" (get it? dinosaur tail?) until the boundary, but that's not how the journalists are reporting it, as if the tip of the fossil was touching the boundary or chemical analysis of the fossil shows the dinosaur died during the boundary event.
Then the bears (etc) will eat them all and we'll have no wild population left. Probably not a good idea, long term.
For safetys sake, I advise experimenting by killing all the mosquitos first, then once you know what made mosquitos extinct, try not doing that to the bees.
But their adventures weren’t over for the night. Next, a pack of dogs approached and began barking loudly. Aghaei said they dispersed the dogs by inventing a new application for green laser pointers.
Bothersome dogs? Nothing a little permanent eye damage can't remedy.
I suspect its more like the "cat trick" where the chase the dot of light. Never tried it on dogs, probably works pretty well.
I think emotion would yield better results because bad emotions, such as losing tend to make people try harder and not lose rather than try sequentially try different strategies.
I would make them think further than just choosing different pathways in the game, as well as learn from their mistakes.
Page 3 algorithm 1, kind of neural network like learning feedback. Probably gets stuck in local maxima, should do simulated annealing.
in schools? Get kids reading decent manuals (text-books) and perhaps they may actually learn something and find they can do decent things with the new-found knowledge.
This probably dates myself quite accurately, but pretty much, Infocom taught me how to read and type.
It has its side effects, saying "inv" when I look in my wallet, saying "save" before I do something dangerous, but overall it worked pretty well.
Nice, now I have an AI to play against that isn't completely retarded.
Read the paper. The "reading AI" developed at MIT was still crushed by the game-provided AI about half the time. Gives you an idea just how badly the game-provided AI plays.
Computers have always been good for doing tedious jobs that people don't want to do.
Like playing Civ. Ow the burn. Just kidding, I really like Civ. The recent versions have too much touchy feely timefilling with animations and readers, but they're still tolerable. Still not sure what to think about the recent square to hex conversion.
I also find it junk that the web.mit.edu link posts a screenshot of Civ 5, when the AI they are discussing runs against Civ 2... My bullshit meter is starting to tickle.
Even worse if you read the paper, they ran it on freeciv. I'm sure the screenshots would show Civ5 on Vista, of course.
Before "gaming" became synonymous with exclusively FPS "if you can see it, shoot it", there used to be all kinds of games available, often with interesting manuals.
Needless to say, the downloaded copies were better than store bought, because they didn't have copy protection / DRM, but obviously they didn't have the manual that came in the box from the store.
Section 6 of the paper seems to imply that even the most illiterate fool would still win about 30% more games by having a copy of the manual, no matter how illiterate they are. Even if the manual was written by the programmers in Hindi, even non-Hindi readers, at least as smart as a computer, would win 30% more games...
If only the games industry made non-FPS games, then they could use this to motivate people to buy the game with the manual, instead of just downloading... You'd still have to download the game anyway to avoid the DRM, but at least you'd win a minimum of 30% more games by having the manual.
Pentium Pro CPU on my desk underneath my monitor because it reminds me of simpler times
Nostalgic for 10 year olds, maybe.
I like the hercules System/360 emulator running MVS although I admit to a fondness for MVT. Both are before my time. That and the PDP-8, and my SBC6120, and my MicroKIM...
Currently, external developers don't have any Google+ APIs or tools to tinker with
My sources say the actual quote was
Currently, external developers don't have any Google+ APIs or tools to steal private user information under the cover of "gaming" and "surveys" and sell the info to spammers, HR departments, and miscellaneous unregulated data warehousing companies do be used against the end users
I know we're all supposed to be in the "Privacy Stockholm Syndrome Groupthink" so I am very naughty for preferring they continue to not get access. Everyone please face their telescreen, and direct their "Two Minutes Hate" toward me and not poor emmanual goldstein who is too busy recording episodes of "off the hook" for 2600 anyway.
The equivalent would be for an entire PC to spin in for radiators attacked to it to be cooled. This would be highly inconvenient for any cat owners as well as make it even harder to plugin that USB cable.
Standard socket and packaging technology is going to have issues with the centrifugal force and vibrations. Spinning the whole gadget and doing all the connections with sliprings for power (or solar cells and searchlights?) and bluetooth for I/O MIGHT actually work... Need to research bluetooth doppler sensitivity first...
Look silly, proof is in the pudding. Off-the-shelf CPU coolers have about 0.8C/W thermal resistances, this thing has demonstrated 0.2C/W in version 1 prototype, and version 2 is estimated to lower it to 0.1C/W.
Almost, but not quite, as good as an off the shelf waterblock system now, maybe as good as an excellent waterblock system in the future, maybe, with some luck, in the lab.
Of if you want no moving parts, about as good as a poor heat pipe system, or ten to a hundred times worse than a truly excellent heat pipe system.
This is presumably connected to a large compressor, providing reasonable rates of high pressure air, as you need for air bearings. The average PC however doesn't actually have this.
Now you need to cool the big air compressor, which likely requires the whole air bearing arrangement. No problemo, you supply a little air compressor to cool the big air compressor. Now you need to cool the little air compressor, oh, its turtles all the way down, here.
The other problem is air bearings are real cool in a controlled system or for lab experiments, but in the real world fulla slugs of condensate water and compressor oil contamination, they're no walk in the park. As you've probably noticed the lack of air bearings around your house and work. Come up with a way to make air bearings "ready for prime time" and there's plenty of other exciting applications beyond just making smaller CPU heatsinks. Kind of like those spaceship designs that begin with "first, assume fusion reactors and warp drives. Then the rest is easy"
Check my math... 10e6 miles / 0.5e3 miles per hour = 20e3 hours, right? Did this in my head and its early in the morning... Standard work year is about 2e3 hours so he's spent 10 years equivalent of a full time job sitting in an airplane? With airport hassles he's probably up to 15 years of FTE work?
What has he done with his 15 years of "work"? Are there even 20k hours of audio books worth listening to?
Another back o ye envelope 10e6 miles / 6e3 flights = 1.2/3e3 miles per flight or rephrased 1667 miles per flight. What is he doing? Not flying from Chicago to Japan, I'm guessing. Nor Chicago to Detroit. Hmm.
*Man* you read and analysed those 44 pages of maths quickly.
I skimmed them.
It seemed to very carefully avoid the issue of the bearing's heat conduction ability while explaining how spinning a heatsink does reduce its thermal resistance vs merely blowing air upon it. So you decrease the resistance at one end while ignoring the increase at the other. Hmm.
The other mystery is the straw dog of cheap and easy to machine heatsink designs (you've all seen them) have moderately bad boundary layer problems, so rather than a more elaborately modeled and machined heatsink design, or even more simply, a larger heatsink, the solution is a very complicated, hard to model, and hard to machine rotating heatsink. So, why not just put the hydrodynamic engineering hours and CNC machining hours into a GOOD passive sink that might work just as well? Or invest in a couple more dollars of aluminum, or skip it all and go for broke with waterblocks. Who knows?
Is there a middle ground for this design to live in between cheap and easy and inefficient non-moving sinks and much higher performance (and cost) waterblocks? I'm guessing, no. Not in any electronic system I've worked on (not just computers, but high power RF amps, high power audio, high power VFDs, etc)
The other problem is it makes for a more brittle design. Now you can usually shut down a system automatically when the cooling system stops, due to thermal mass, limited natural convection cooling, etc. With this, it'll be smaller and lighter, can you shut down in time to avoid frying the CPU (physically) or crashing the filesystem? Its going to make OTHER parts of the system design more complex, not just the cooling system.
Cool engineering (pun intended) but I'm unimpressed from an economic standpoint. It will probably cost more than the alternatives. Unless you're just trying to avoid a patent or whatever.
Clearly you were not in the military. Military Grade means "GI proof" as in simple and indestructible. That also means its incredibly heavy. So these projectors probably weigh about 500 pounds each and have no controls other than a power switch and no indicators other than"call civilian contractor for service" and possibly a power light.
The only people harder on equipment than GIs, are the oil field roughnecks. Give those guys a screwdriver, they'll work all day to return a metal pretzel. Its a miracle any oil gets pumped at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would a professor ask for a Facebook profile? I certainly wouldn't give them one.
Attractive member of the appropriate sex : obvious
Mostly its used after cheating is suspected. So, vlm and Anonymous Coward turned in rather similar "hello_world.c" programs last week... lets see if there is anything incriminating on their "walls"; perhaps vlm was dumb enough to write, "hey Anonymous, lets meet at the computer lab at 6pm tonight to work on the assignment together, OK?"
The other part is some profs actually have FB profiles and twitter profiles and they don't mind people asking them questions if they know who the heck they are. But they're not going to help their competitive coworker's students, or just some crazy random dude off the internet. Preemptively friending or whatevering all your students is a pretty easy way to work around this. On something more modern like google+ you just put them all in circles by class.
I would not begrudge our soldiers in Afghanistan small comforts. But still I was taken aback by the news that Pentagon spends more on airconditioning barracks in Afghanistan than the entire NASA budget. If Pentagon bought some more efficient air conditioners without compromising comfort, may be we could fund a few more of these missions.
Sounds like it would be a heck of a lot more cost effective for NASA under DOD contract to launch a "solar umbrella" arrangement to cool Afghanistan. As a bonus we'd be able to use the required heavy lifter / orbital construction gear for other purposes. Finally we could sell advertising space on the solar umbrella.
As a side note, there are not many US barracks in the sandbox. They're air conditioning tents and trailers. I spent some time in the 90s baby sitting some computers in a US Army air conditioned trailer; We were very thankful the "computers required air conditioning", it was just a side effect that we got comfortable.
Well, from Wikipedia ... You could probably escape the gravitational field by jumping really hard, so tethers are probably a must for working outside.
From wikipedia the escape velocity is a big fraction of a kilometer per second... Jumping not a hazard.
Put that gravitational acceleration into the 1st semester physics kinematics equations and you will not be walking around down there. If I did my scaling factors and estimates correctly, each step bounding a couple times your height in the air, and each step taking a good part of a minute. Like lunar bunny hops, but worse.
Speaking of bunnies, to head off the inevitable pr0n questions, it would be a cross between orbital and lunar, nothing particularily qualitatively different. Probably pretty awkward.
When the ion drive isn't running, there is plenty of power. There's no reason to not gather as much data as possible. After all, if something went bung during insertion (when the probe was out of comms with Earth) it would be the only data they have. Given the detail in the last image (from ten days ago), what prevented them from at least getting a full surface sequence?
Other NASA probes take images from distant approach, trying to milk as much data as they can before the arrive, as well as PR for the mission. I can't find an explanation of why the Dawn team have been so reticent to image their target. It doesn't bode well for the rest of the mission.
I can think of a theoretical reason that may or may not have any application to reality.
We know the asteroid's orbit and our (the earths) orbit from a zillion years of position observation. We don't know the vehicle's relative velocity to the asteroid, and thats kind of important to put it in orbit. In ye olden days the stereotypical way to figure orbits was to put what amounts to a crossband linear repeater on the vehicle and spend inordinate amounts of effort on the earth measuring the doppler shift of signals transmitted thru the repeater. In ye olden days that was best done using an continuous information free carrier CW tone. Now a days the youngin's probably use some sort of spread spectrum solution to avoid ionospheric scintillation or just to plain ole be cool? At any rate the radios would probably be busy doing the navigation-thing as opposed to the science-thing.
Now a "news for nerds tech site" could make an interesting article about how this mission did navigation...
Here, off the shelf Cisco (expensive) plug in 1 gig 1000BASE-ZX SFP single mode fiber 70 km no repeater necessary. Thats over 40 miles of gigabit service.
Expensive, but not third of a million bucks expensive.
Yes, running cable would be expensive, especially with degradation of line signal over distance being very high, a repeater would need to be placed every half mile or mile to get any real speed
I think not.
I've been out of the telcom engineering dept for several years, but back then our OC-192 SONET rings needed a repeater or a ADM every 50 miles or so, and single mode 10Gig fiber ethernet ran 5 or 10 miles without a repeater. You can buy cheapie 10G fiber transmitters that only go 500 feet or whatever at low power, if you want, but that doesn't mean the 10 mile model isn't "off the shelf". I'm sure they can go faster and further now.
Maybe you're thinking of ancient AMI/B8ZS T1 physical 4-wire lines, that had repeater huts every 6kft, which is still longer than you claim? Some kind of weird DSL? I thought DSL was pretty much dead, like "ethernet over powerline" technology is dead.
The median household income in these areas is between $40,100 and $50,900. The median home prices are between $94,400 and $189,000.'
First of all they're dirt poor and not going to pay for broadband or own a computer. The critical part is the ratio of income to house price. Somewhere around 1:2 is OK but not ideal, 1:4 means extreme poverty, like 99% of your legally declared income must be going toward the house and you never eat anything but ramen, at least until the inevitable foreclosure and bankruptcy. Even commissioned cheerleaders for the home sales/building industry don't have the guts to ask for more than a ratio of 1:3. Personally I live around 1:1.5 and live a pleasant luxurious mostly carefree lifestyle, including broadband, although I am not rich enough that I can totally ignore budgeting and planning. So paying any amount of money at all to provide service is useless if economic conditions are such that they can't afford to own a PC or pay for the now-available service.
The next problem is, from being in the telco industry, most of the $349,234 is going to executive bonuses, scams, overhead, etc. They need a tower to put the wireless ISP gateway on, and the CEO's brother happens to own a company providing that at merely 5 times going market rate. To get a monopoly license from the city, the city would like a $1M tax/donation/fee, but don't worry the customers will pay for it... etc.
Finally the cost of providing telecom services is at least 100:1 from multi-zillion pair buried single mode 10 gig ethernet fiber, down to wireless using 802.11 gear and fancy antennas. Since they're pimping the high cost, assume they're talking about an absolutely gold plated fiber to the house 10 gig using all Cisco brand gear and as many subcontractors as politically possible. But realize a small hungry WISP could probably provide service for a capital cost of maybe $3492.34/customer not $349234/customer. That wouldn't fit with whatever political conclusion they're trying to draw, so...
We collected rock samples above and below the horn to determine the exact placement of the K/T boundary, and were surprised to see that the horn was no more than 13 cm below it.
A new fossil discovery has suggested that dinosaurs were alive right up until the asteroid impact
Speaking as a guy living in a county where the only non-service blue collar jobs left are at the local rock quarry, and having a geologist as a roommate two decades ago, I speak with profound scientific authority that those two quotes only go together if you define "right up until" as being about one zillion years. I suspect most readers define "right up until" on a somewhat shorter scale, like the time difference between the local news and american-idle, not zillions of years. (waves rolled up newspaper) Naughty journalist! Naughty!
"right up until" 13 cm of rock.
I am completely unaware of any political or cultural reason for the authors to be blind to this problem. I have no dog in the fight that I'm aware of. Just saying 13 cm of rock is not "right up until"
It MIGHT be that the real story is on a "bones per cm" basis this raises the curve implying the rate does not "tail off" (get it? dinosaur tail?) until the boundary, but that's not how the journalists are reporting it, as if the tip of the fossil was touching the boundary or chemical analysis of the fossil shows the dinosaur died during the boundary event.
No reason they can't get rid of the stinger
Then the bears (etc) will eat them all and we'll have no wild population left. Probably not a good idea, long term.
For safetys sake, I advise experimenting by killing all the mosquitos first, then once you know what made mosquitos extinct, try not doing that to the bees.
Yeah this is Afghanistan, the commander was power-tripping, and western police as a whole are 100x better behaved,
Sometimes.
Try again in the us as a non-white, or not an obvious "dad trying to educate his kids", let us know how it goes, assuming they don't shoot you.
FTA:
But their adventures weren’t over for the night. Next, a pack of dogs approached and began barking loudly. Aghaei said they dispersed the dogs by inventing a new application for green laser pointers.
Bothersome dogs? Nothing a little permanent eye damage can't remedy.
I suspect its more like the "cat trick" where the chase the dot of light. Never tried it on dogs, probably works pretty well.
How does it know it wins??
I think emotion would yield better results because bad emotions, such as losing tend to make people try harder and not lose rather than try sequentially try different strategies.
I would make them think further than just choosing different pathways in the game, as well as learn from their mistakes.
Page 3 algorithm 1, kind of neural network like learning feedback. Probably gets stuck in local maxima, should do simulated annealing.
in schools? Get kids reading decent manuals (text-books) and perhaps they may actually learn something and find they can do decent things with the new-found knowledge.
This probably dates myself quite accurately, but pretty much, Infocom taught me how to read and type.
It has its side effects, saying "inv" when I look in my wallet, saying "save" before I do something dangerous, but overall it worked pretty well.
Nice, now I have an AI to play against that isn't completely retarded.
Read the paper. The "reading AI" developed at MIT was still crushed by the game-provided AI about half the time. Gives you an idea just how badly the game-provided AI plays.
Computers have always been good for doing tedious jobs that people don't want to do.
Like playing Civ. Ow the burn. Just kidding, I really like Civ. The recent versions have too much touchy feely timefilling with animations and readers, but they're still tolerable. Still not sure what to think about the recent square to hex conversion.
I also find it junk that the web.mit.edu link posts a screenshot of Civ 5, when the AI they are discussing runs against Civ 2... My bullshit meter is starting to tickle.
Even worse if you read the paper, they ran it on freeciv. I'm sure the screenshots would show Civ5 on Vista, of course.
Before "gaming" became synonymous with exclusively FPS "if you can see it, shoot it", there used to be all kinds of games available, often with interesting manuals.
Needless to say, the downloaded copies were better than store bought, because they didn't have copy protection / DRM, but obviously they didn't have the manual that came in the box from the store.
Section 6 of the paper seems to imply that even the most illiterate fool would still win about 30% more games by having a copy of the manual, no matter how illiterate they are. Even if the manual was written by the programmers in Hindi, even non-Hindi readers, at least as smart as a computer, would win 30% more games...
If only the games industry made non-FPS games, then they could use this to motivate people to buy the game with the manual, instead of just downloading... You'd still have to download the game anyway to avoid the DRM, but at least you'd win a minimum of 30% more games by having the manual.
Pentium Pro CPU on my desk underneath my monitor because it reminds me of simpler times
Nostalgic for 10 year olds, maybe.
I like the hercules System/360 emulator running MVS although I admit to a fondness for MVT. Both are before my time. That and the PDP-8, and my SBC6120, and my MicroKIM...
Look at this terrible misquoting:
Currently, external developers don't have any Google+ APIs or tools to tinker with
My sources say the actual quote was
Currently, external developers don't have any Google+ APIs or tools to steal private user information under the cover of "gaming" and "surveys" and sell the info to spammers, HR departments, and miscellaneous unregulated data warehousing companies do be used against the end users
I know we're all supposed to be in the "Privacy Stockholm Syndrome Groupthink" so I am very naughty for preferring they continue to not get access. Everyone please face their telescreen, and direct their "Two Minutes Hate" toward me and not poor emmanual goldstein who is too busy recording episodes of "off the hook" for 2600 anyway.
The equivalent would be for an entire PC to spin in for radiators attacked to it to be cooled. This would be highly inconvenient for any cat owners as well as make it even harder to plugin that USB cable.
Standard socket and packaging technology is going to have issues with the centrifugal force and vibrations. Spinning the whole gadget and doing all the connections with sliprings for power (or solar cells and searchlights?) and bluetooth for I/O MIGHT actually work... Need to research bluetooth doppler sensitivity first...
Look silly, proof is in the pudding. Off-the-shelf CPU coolers have about 0.8C/W thermal resistances, this thing has demonstrated 0.2C/W in version 1 prototype, and version 2 is estimated to lower it to 0.1C/W.
Almost, but not quite, as good as an off the shelf waterblock system now, maybe as good as an excellent waterblock system in the future, maybe, with some luck, in the lab.
Of if you want no moving parts, about as good as a poor heat pipe system, or ten to a hundred times worse than a truly excellent heat pipe system.
This is presumably connected to a large compressor, providing reasonable rates of high pressure air, as you need for air bearings.
The average PC however doesn't actually have this.
Now you need to cool the big air compressor, which likely requires the whole air bearing arrangement. No problemo, you supply a little air compressor to cool the big air compressor. Now you need to cool the little air compressor, oh, its turtles all the way down, here.
The other problem is air bearings are real cool in a controlled system or for lab experiments, but in the real world fulla slugs of condensate water and compressor oil contamination, they're no walk in the park. As you've probably noticed the lack of air bearings around your house and work. Come up with a way to make air bearings "ready for prime time" and there's plenty of other exciting applications beyond just making smaller CPU heatsinks. Kind of like those spaceship designs that begin with "first, assume fusion reactors and warp drives. Then the rest is easy"
Check my math... 10e6 miles / 0.5e3 miles per hour = 20e3 hours, right? Did this in my head and its early in the morning... Standard work year is about 2e3 hours so he's spent 10 years equivalent of a full time job sitting in an airplane? With airport hassles he's probably up to 15 years of FTE work?
What has he done with his 15 years of "work"? Are there even 20k hours of audio books worth listening to?
Another back o ye envelope 10e6 miles / 6e3 flights = 1.2/3e3 miles per flight or rephrased 1667 miles per flight. What is he doing? Not flying from Chicago to Japan, I'm guessing. Nor Chicago to Detroit. Hmm.
*Man* you read and analysed those 44 pages of maths quickly.
I skimmed them.
It seemed to very carefully avoid the issue of the bearing's heat conduction ability while explaining how spinning a heatsink does reduce its thermal resistance vs merely blowing air upon it. So you decrease the resistance at one end while ignoring the increase at the other. Hmm.
The other mystery is the straw dog of cheap and easy to machine heatsink designs (you've all seen them) have moderately bad boundary layer problems, so rather than a more elaborately modeled and machined heatsink design, or even more simply, a larger heatsink, the solution is a very complicated, hard to model, and hard to machine rotating heatsink. So, why not just put the hydrodynamic engineering hours and CNC machining hours into a GOOD passive sink that might work just as well? Or invest in a couple more dollars of aluminum, or skip it all and go for broke with waterblocks. Who knows?
Is there a middle ground for this design to live in between cheap and easy and inefficient non-moving sinks and much higher performance (and cost) waterblocks? I'm guessing, no. Not in any electronic system I've worked on (not just computers, but high power RF amps, high power audio, high power VFDs, etc)
The other problem is it makes for a more brittle design. Now you can usually shut down a system automatically when the cooling system stops, due to thermal mass, limited natural convection cooling, etc. With this, it'll be smaller and lighter, can you shut down in time to avoid frying the CPU (physically) or crashing the filesystem? Its going to make OTHER parts of the system design more complex, not just the cooling system.
Cool engineering (pun intended) but I'm unimpressed from an economic standpoint. It will probably cost more than the alternatives. Unless you're just trying to avoid a patent or whatever.
requires special training to operate
Clearly you were not in the military. Military Grade means "GI proof" as in simple and indestructible. That also means its incredibly heavy. So these projectors probably weigh about 500 pounds each and have no controls other than a power switch and no indicators other than"call civilian contractor for service" and possibly a power light.
The only people harder on equipment than GIs, are the oil field roughnecks. Give those guys a screwdriver, they'll work all day to return a metal pretzel. Its a miracle any oil gets pumped at all.