Hmm... I don't know too much about the CO2 lasers, all I recall is that they're much more efficient/powerful than most others.
If ionization of some sort is not how CO2 lasers work, what is the mechanism? They're not light-pumped, the gas is definately excited by the electrical current...
Of course, if only a portion of the gas is ionized, it could be less efficient, since I recall the amount of amplification is proportional to the difference in the amounts of excited and ground-state ions... So there could be more ionized molecules, but even more non-ionized molecules sapping the efficiency.
I don't know about other states, but 100% of every recent increase in New Jersey cigarette taxes goes right to the healthcare system to pay for all the damage tobacco has done, and/or to anti-smoking advertising campaigns. Why would the government do the latter if the tax were for the sole purpose of making money? Why the heck would they use the tax revenue to try and reduce future tax revenue?
Those taxes aren't intended to make money - They're intended to discourage use of tobacco and to recoup the healthcare expenditures that the tobacco industry has forced the government to make.
CSS-capable DVD players will play one of two types of discs:
CSS-encrypted discs for the player's region
Non-encrypted discs which will play in any region.
It's perfectly feasible to create an unencrypted region-free disc, and playing it will be no problem as long as you use the correct file formats/bitrates/etc. (Which ARE documented AFAIK - In fact, there are guides on how to make your own DVD. Although in most cases they cover using the DVD filesystem/file format on CD-R media, which DVD players will recognize and play just like a normal DVD.)
I don't see how this could be used to cloak/shield a satellite - Space is a vacuum, and hence all of the precious gas would leak. Plus this needs two large (read: radar-reflecting) plates on the sides.
BUT - From what I recall, among other things the maximum power for a given laser is proportional to the number of excited atoms capable of radiating, i.e. the density of the gas in the case of a gas laser. With this kind of plasma-generating scheme, you would need a far smaller laser to get the same amount of power (Or conversely, you could get far more power out of currently-sized lasers).
The patent applications don't mention the use of carbon dioxide as a gas to generate plasma from - But I'm willing to bet that unless there is some strange property of CO2 that prevents this from working (probably not, given the variety of other gases listed), CO2 has been tried.
Carbon dioxide is one of the best gases for making high-power lasers. CO2 lasers are much more efficient than most other gas lasers, and are the easiest way for an amateur (or relative amateur, you still need glass-blowing skills...) to make a high-powered laser capable of cutting through numerous materials. (CO2 lasers are well within the range of a serious hobbyist, as opposed to some of the more exotic lasers in existence.)
HPA isn't THAT new, they were in production when I was selling computers for the campus store earlier this year and last year. HPA is better than dual-scan, but not by much. Get TFT, anything else is going to be difficult to read in many lighting conditions.
As someone earlier said, most users probably won't go for the full 512 processors.
I see the 8-processor boxes being a hot seller in a lot of research labs, or where people just want a centralized server.
These machines are very similar to an SMP machine from a programmer's perspective. (From a hardware perspective, they're vastly different, each CPU has its own local memory, although the entire system memory is treated as one big block. It just happens that local memory is much faster to access.)
We have an older 8-processor SGI machine at work that people use to do scientific simulations. Rarely are the simulations themselves paralellized, but instead, people log in and the system gives em' a processor all to themselves if one is free. I think my boss is looking to replace it eventually... Any time someone gets a new system, he wants people to run some benchmarks he wrote. My 500 MHz Coppermine gets twice the performance of a processor on the old machine for small problems, but as soon as the dataset gets larger than the CPU cache, the SGI's excellent memory system kicks in.
The UT engine and netcode are inferior. I get better performance with 300 ms ping over a modem with Q3 than I do with 150 ms ping over a cable modem with UT.
And graphically - UT has all sorts of nagging visual artifacts that are an eyesore. Play LavaGiant CTF and look at all the places you can see pixels of red lava where there should be no lava.
I'll admit, Q3's DM ain't that hot. But I don't play DM, I play CTF and Q3F. Q3F is far more fun than anything even UT has to offer. But in the end:
UT's engine is flawed, which the community cannot fix.
Q3A's engine is far ahead of any other game out there. Yes, the gameplay might not be so hot out of the box, but that can be fixed by the community. All of the innovative gameplay forms (Class-based teamplay such as TF/Q3F, QPong, etc.) start with Quake and often never leave Quake.
Look at Q3Rally - Nothing like that exists for UT, and nothing like that is even in development. And probably never will be.
If you want to pass data over the lines (modem), I don't know of a solution, other than the aforementioned "Just use wire" comment.
If you just need to do voice, you can probably go to your local K-Mart or Radio Shack and buy a phone-line extender system. Basically one end plugs into the phone line and a power supply, and you plug a phone and another power supply into the other half of the system. They're manufactured by RCA among other people. Probably made by every major consumer electronics manufacturer. I don't have product names, unfortunately... I know my family has one lying somewhere around the house.
Same basic thing as a cordless phone, except you plug any 'ole phone into it.
That's definately reasonable... You could probably go well below $1000... Hell, someone with decent amounts of electronics experience could build it themselves.
Considering that 50-100 watt 150 MHz business-band radios go for under $50 on the surplus market nowadays (Well, that market has dried up over the years...), a low-power transmitter in the 100-watt range could probably be bought for well under $500. (Brand new 144 MHx (aka 2 meter) ham mobiles can be had in the $200-400 range, and these are FAR more complex than a basic FM transmitter would be.)
PAL/NTSC dictates the timing/resolution. S-Video vs. composite video dictates how much the signals are multiplexed together. I think (I'm not sure) that standard video has the chrominance and luminance signals mixed, but S-Video splits these two signals on two different wires. (I know that something is split on S-Video that isn't on standard composite video, I can't recall exactly what is split.)
Where in the article does it say that the screen is printed on paper?
"Seiko Epson can deposit individual pixels of red, green and blue LEPs directly onto a silicon substrate."
Um, silicon != paper... It sounds like they're working on other substrate possibilities, but right now, they can't print on paper. It just happenes that in order to deposit the LEPs on silicon they're using the same techniques people use to put ink on paper.
Trust me, while it's not as nice as being able to print on paper, it's a LOT nicer than current LCD/silicon tech - It looks as if this particular manufacturing tech won't need the stuff to be in a vacuum at all, while most silicon processing techniques require all air to be removed from the chamber. (Either a vaccum or an inert gas of your choice depending on the process... Or a reactive gas for CVD.)
Both NT and the original MacOS followed the "Usability, then reliability" devlopment model. They both had horrendous reliability, and nothing short of a complete rewrite can fix either.
OSX IS a complete rewrite, and despite what you say, the development model is "Reliability then usability." The reliability comes from using an existing (BSD/Mach) core.
When you take a close look, OSX is exactly what you knock GNOME for being - An add-on layered above a UNIX OS. It just happens that the layers Apple has added to BSD are a lot more polished than GNOME, but Apple did NOT say, "How can we make our OS reliable.", but they said, "How can we make this reliable OS easy to use?"
A number of people (including Ryan himself) have mentioned the importance of Felixstowe. Britain isn't going to let ANY armed ship from an even slightly untrusted country near that port. The only non-British armed ship that MIGHT be able to get near Felixstowe would be one belonging to the US Navy. (Since the US and UK trust each other a grat deal.) But the US would most likely not conduct military action against Sealand, it would be a PR nightmare.
They're more like "Computing peripherals" - They're PCI cards that fit in any PCI slot. (Well, one conforming to the right specs - One of their 66 MHz/64-bit PCI cards won't work in your average box.)
They cards will not run standalone or as a primary processor, they're slave processors. You still need a host processor, which can be whatever you want. (Intel, SPARC, Alpha, PPC, even StrongARM probably.)
The latter. This is for very CPU-intensive processor-hog applications. The same basic stuff that Beowulf clusters are built for. (If anything, it's Beowulf but with higher bandwidth and lower latency - Direct PCI is probably even better than SCI for smaller systems.)
Just because the code size may be small doesn't mean that the contribution is meaningless. If that line of contributed code was a bugfix, it's a bug that may never have been found if the main developer(s) had been concentrating on doing real work on improving the software. (Or if it had been found, it would have held up the main developer significantly.)
And if you'd ever listened to any of ESR's speeches, you'd realize that he doesn't believe that Open Source is the solution to everything. In fact, he specifically brought up games as one of the few cases where the software might really be as valuable as what it's selling for. And in another case, he was called in to advise a company on whether or not they should open-source, and his reply after looking into it was, "Absolutely not." - It was some sort of software to automatically determing how a logging mill should cut logs into lumber to minimize waste.
When he spoke at Cornell, it was just the opposite. He was very well received by not only the Linux users group, but by the many people from the Engineering department who had never really heard about open-source before.
Meaning that his speeches have a LOT of Q&A most of the time. In many cases, his reply is, "I'm getting to that next.", but in other cases, he'll sidetrack a bit.
He spoke at Cornell 2-3 months ago. It lasted for 2 hours, and would've lasted longer if the room hadn't been needed by other occupants.
Every posting I've read regarding SCO is that it's one of the most brain-dead of all Unices.
They might have a few good features (clustering, etc.), but I have a feeling they'll try their hardest to keep them closed-source. Linux will gain nothing, and if the PHBs like this bastardized distro, Linux has a lot to lose.
A lot of the systems where I work (Lucent) have ksh only, or if they have other shells, default to ksh and I can't figure out how to change it. (chsh doesn't work, and ypchsh hasn't allowed me to change to anything other than ksh, which I'm already using.)
Using the company-run systems is hell - I keep on trying to tab-complete and use my bash history, but neither are there...:)
I'm referring to the "large" desktop iPaq. I think the guy asking the questions was asking about some portable version I've never heard of or seen before now. I was wondering where he was getting those weird specs...
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Hmm... I don't know too much about the CO2 lasers, all I recall is that they're much more efficient/powerful than most others.
If ionization of some sort is not how CO2 lasers work, what is the mechanism? They're not light-pumped, the gas is definately excited by the electrical current...
Of course, if only a portion of the gas is ionized, it could be less efficient, since I recall the amount of amplification is proportional to the difference in the amounts of excited and ground-state ions... So there could be more ionized molecules, but even more non-ionized molecules sapping the efficiency.
Wish I had my EE 306 notebook with me...
I don't know about other states, but 100% of every recent increase in New Jersey cigarette taxes goes right to the healthcare system to pay for all the damage tobacco has done, and/or to anti-smoking advertising campaigns. Why would the government do the latter if the tax were for the sole purpose of making money? Why the heck would they use the tax revenue to try and reduce future tax revenue?
Those taxes aren't intended to make money - They're intended to discourage use of tobacco and to recoup the healthcare expenditures that the tobacco industry has forced the government to make.
CSS-capable DVD players will play one of two types of discs:
CSS-encrypted discs for the player's region
Non-encrypted discs which will play in any region.
It's perfectly feasible to create an unencrypted region-free disc, and playing it will be no problem as long as you use the correct file formats/bitrates/etc. (Which ARE documented AFAIK - In fact, there are guides on how to make your own DVD. Although in most cases they cover using the DVD filesystem/file format on CD-R media, which DVD players will recognize and play just like a normal DVD.)
I don't see how this could be used to cloak/shield a satellite - Space is a vacuum, and hence all of the precious gas would leak. Plus this needs two large (read: radar-reflecting) plates on the sides.
BUT - From what I recall, among other things the maximum power for a given laser is proportional to the number of excited atoms capable of radiating, i.e. the density of the gas in the case of a gas laser. With this kind of plasma-generating scheme, you would need a far smaller laser to get the same amount of power (Or conversely, you could get far more power out of currently-sized lasers).
The patent applications don't mention the use of carbon dioxide as a gas to generate plasma from - But I'm willing to bet that unless there is some strange property of CO2 that prevents this from working (probably not, given the variety of other gases listed), CO2 has been tried.
Carbon dioxide is one of the best gases for making high-power lasers. CO2 lasers are much more efficient than most other gas lasers, and are the easiest way for an amateur (or relative amateur, you still need glass-blowing skills...) to make a high-powered laser capable of cutting through numerous materials. (CO2 lasers are well within the range of a serious hobbyist, as opposed to some of the more exotic lasers in existence.)
HPA isn't THAT new, they were in production when I was selling computers for the campus store earlier this year and last year. HPA is better than dual-scan, but not by much. Get TFT, anything else is going to be difficult to read in many lighting conditions.
As someone earlier said, most users probably won't go for the full 512 processors.
I see the 8-processor boxes being a hot seller in a lot of research labs, or where people just want a centralized server.
These machines are very similar to an SMP machine from a programmer's perspective. (From a hardware perspective, they're vastly different, each CPU has its own local memory, although the entire system memory is treated as one big block. It just happens that local memory is much faster to access.)
We have an older 8-processor SGI machine at work that people use to do scientific simulations. Rarely are the simulations themselves paralellized, but instead, people log in and the system gives em' a processor all to themselves if one is free. I think my boss is looking to replace it eventually... Any time someone gets a new system, he wants people to run some benchmarks he wrote. My 500 MHz Coppermine gets twice the performance of a processor on the old machine for small problems, but as soon as the dataset gets larger than the CPU cache, the SGI's excellent memory system kicks in.
Who made it and where can it be bought???
:(
I'm looking for one of these to combine with an MPTrip, the only one I can find is $40 from Rat Shack.
I'd email, except you didn't log in. I'll probably never get a reply...
The UT engine and netcode are inferior. I get better performance with 300 ms ping over a modem with Q3 than I do with 150 ms ping over a cable modem with UT.
And graphically - UT has all sorts of nagging visual artifacts that are an eyesore. Play LavaGiant CTF and look at all the places you can see pixels of red lava where there should be no lava.
I'll admit, Q3's DM ain't that hot. But I don't play DM, I play CTF and Q3F. Q3F is far more fun than anything even UT has to offer. But in the end:
UT's engine is flawed, which the community cannot fix.
Q3A's engine is far ahead of any other game out there. Yes, the gameplay might not be so hot out of the box, but that can be fixed by the community. All of the innovative gameplay forms (Class-based teamplay such as TF/Q3F, QPong, etc.) start with Quake and often never leave Quake.
Look at Q3Rally - Nothing like that exists for UT, and nothing like that is even in development. And probably never will be.
If you want to pass data over the lines (modem), I don't know of a solution, other than the aforementioned "Just use wire" comment.
If you just need to do voice, you can probably go to your local K-Mart or Radio Shack and buy a phone-line extender system. Basically one end plugs into the phone line and a power supply, and you plug a phone and another power supply into the other half of the system. They're manufactured by RCA among other people. Probably made by every major consumer electronics manufacturer. I don't have product names, unfortunately... I know my family has one lying somewhere around the house.
Same basic thing as a cordless phone, except you plug any 'ole phone into it.
Life support systems are far higher on the "FCC food chain" than computers...
That's definately reasonable... You could probably go well below $1000... Hell, someone with decent amounts of electronics experience could build it themselves.
Considering that 50-100 watt 150 MHz business-band radios go for under $50 on the surplus market nowadays (Well, that market has dried up over the years...), a low-power transmitter in the 100-watt range could probably be bought for well under $500. (Brand new 144 MHx (aka 2 meter) ham mobiles can be had in the $200-400 range, and these are FAR more complex than a basic FM transmitter would be.)
PAL/NTSC dictates the timing/resolution. S-Video vs. composite video dictates how much the signals are multiplexed together. I think (I'm not sure) that standard video has the chrominance and luminance signals mixed, but S-Video splits these two signals on two different wires. (I know that something is split on S-Video that isn't on standard composite video, I can't recall exactly what is split.)
I don't recall whether they mentioned it...
But the MPTrip does support VBR. Although the track display will freak out...
Um, $449 is not "Cheap" - He's talking about the sub-$200 range. (Hell, sub-$150...)
If the Epson 640 and 740 are still available, they're cheap and work great.
Where in the article does it say that the screen is printed on paper?
"Seiko Epson can deposit individual pixels of red, green and blue LEPs directly onto a silicon substrate."
Um, silicon != paper... It sounds like they're working on other substrate possibilities, but right now, they can't print on paper. It just happenes that in order to deposit the LEPs on silicon they're using the same techniques people use to put ink on paper.
Trust me, while it's not as nice as being able to print on paper, it's a LOT nicer than current LCD/silicon tech - It looks as if this particular manufacturing tech won't need the stuff to be in a vacuum at all, while most silicon processing techniques require all air to be removed from the chamber. (Either a vaccum or an inert gas of your choice depending on the process... Or a reactive gas for CVD.)
Reliability before usability, ALWAYS.
Both NT and the original MacOS followed the "Usability, then reliability" devlopment model. They both had horrendous reliability, and nothing short of a complete rewrite can fix either.
OSX IS a complete rewrite, and despite what you say, the development model is "Reliability then usability." The reliability comes from using an existing (BSD/Mach) core.
When you take a close look, OSX is exactly what you knock GNOME for being - An add-on layered above a UNIX OS. It just happens that the layers Apple has added to BSD are a lot more polished than GNOME, but Apple did NOT say, "How can we make our OS reliable.", but they said, "How can we make this reliable OS easy to use?"
A number of people (including Ryan himself) have mentioned the importance of Felixstowe. Britain isn't going to let ANY armed ship from an even slightly untrusted country near that port. The only non-British armed ship that MIGHT be able to get near Felixstowe would be one belonging to the US Navy. (Since the US and UK trust each other a grat deal.) But the US would most likely not conduct military action against Sealand, it would be a PR nightmare.
They're more like "Computing peripherals" - They're PCI cards that fit in any PCI slot. (Well, one conforming to the right specs - One of their 66 MHz/64-bit PCI cards won't work in your average box.)
They cards will not run standalone or as a primary processor, they're slave processors. You still need a host processor, which can be whatever you want. (Intel, SPARC, Alpha, PPC, even StrongARM probably.)
The latter. This is for very CPU-intensive processor-hog applications. The same basic stuff that Beowulf clusters are built for. (If anything, it's Beowulf but with higher bandwidth and lower latency - Direct PCI is probably even better than SCI for smaller systems.)
Just because the code size may be small doesn't mean that the contribution is meaningless. If that line of contributed code was a bugfix, it's a bug that may never have been found if the main developer(s) had been concentrating on doing real work on improving the software. (Or if it had been found, it would have held up the main developer significantly.)
And if you'd ever listened to any of ESR's speeches, you'd realize that he doesn't believe that Open Source is the solution to everything. In fact, he specifically brought up games as one of the few cases where the software might really be as valuable as what it's selling for. And in another case, he was called in to advise a company on whether or not they should open-source, and his reply after looking into it was, "Absolutely not." - It was some sort of software to automatically determing how a logging mill should cut logs into lumber to minimize waste.
When he spoke at Cornell, it was just the opposite. He was very well received by not only the Linux users group, but by the many people from the Engineering department who had never really heard about open-source before.
Meaning that his speeches have a LOT of Q&A most of the time. In many cases, his reply is, "I'm getting to that next.", but in other cases, he'll sidetrack a bit.
He spoke at Cornell 2-3 months ago. It lasted for 2 hours, and would've lasted longer if the room hadn't been needed by other occupants.
Every posting I've read regarding SCO is that it's one of the most brain-dead of all Unices.
They might have a few good features (clustering, etc.), but I have a feeling they'll try their hardest to keep them closed-source. Linux will gain nothing, and if the PHBs like this bastardized distro, Linux has a lot to lose.
A lot of the systems where I work (Lucent) have ksh only, or if they have other shells, default to ksh and I can't figure out how to change it. (chsh doesn't work, and ypchsh hasn't allowed me to change to anything other than ksh, which I'm already using.)
:)
Using the company-run systems is hell - I keep on trying to tab-complete and use my bash history, but neither are there...
I'm referring to the "large" desktop iPaq. I think the guy asking the questions was asking about some portable version I've never heard of or seen before now. I was wondering where he was getting those weird specs...