I always thought there was only one fission nuke in most thermonuclear bombs - in the center.
I also thought, and I'm pretty positive about this one, that the neutron bomb is just a small fission bomb. Fission devices with low TNT equivalent still have a large neutron radiation output. In the 50s and the 60s thy made bombs with as little as 10 ton TNT eq., where all the effect of the explosion would be from the penetrating radiation. Just take a look at this beauty: Davy Crockett.
Better yet, have the laptop call the police if it's stolen. The asshole stealing your laptop is probably stupid, so they will most certainly:
1. Not reinstall the software; 2. Try to get on the internet.
I just keep a no-ip.com client active in mine. If it ever gets stolen, DNS record will give me the IP as soon as it's on the internet, and the police should be able to take it from there.
Try getting the sound or the built-in modem to work on a two-year-old thinkpad:-) MWave wasn't just a winmodem, it was a win-modem/sound combo, so neither one worked.
...most participants (like myself) had no formal algorithms and data structures training.
Did you, like, do this before you went to colledge? It's kinda hard to find a colledge that wouldn't have an ADS class in the second year the latest....formal programming training has really cramped my creativity:)
Now that you know standard solutions to well-known problems, your creativity is free to be applied to new problems, isn't it? Without formal traning you can't help but keep being creative reinventing the wheel, and getting excited every time you invent some stupid shit like bubble sort. So, much excitement, not much useful stuff getting done. Blondes have more fun.
You are right about one thing, they seem to have chosen the lowest-possible performance design on all counts:
1. Solid fuel = makes the whole fuel tank a propulsion chamber = large thick heavy wall -- compared to liquid fuel, where the pressure wall is just the little combustion chamber in the engine.
2. Pressure fed oxidizer = thick walled heavy tank - compared to pump-fed design.
3. There are fuels with much higher energy contents than HTPB/NOX.
But then, you don't know what they did to the HTPB, but they did do something, otherwise the thing wouldn't burn fast enough to push a shopping cart, lest a space rocket. Whatever they did, maybe it had an effect on Isp as well.
Secondly, you don't know what that N2O tank is made of. It could be some super-strong composite, rather than fiberglass/metal.
And of course, they use high-altitude air-launch, which improves the mass ratio required for orbit.
Overall, it looks like the engine takes up only a small portion of RubberRocketOne, compared to any old booster. So there is room to improve the mass ratio right there by putting in a biger engine.
I'd kinda like to see some calculations, but without knowing the weight of the ship and the material of the nitrous tank it would be difficult to calculate anything interesting.
I think you mean, solar wind particles which impacted the collectors at several km/s versus Utah dust particles which impacted the collectors at several km/s. Oh, hm, I guess there's a problem after all.
I think he means solar wind particles which impacted the collectors at several km/s versus Utah dust particles which the collectors impacted at several km/s.
I fear that alot of the consumer "switches" on the market do not do proper routing
All home routers I've seen (dlink, linksys, smc, belkin) do route, but only between the outside and the inside. On the inside, the 4 ports are on a regular hub, so no routing. This is appropriate for the normal usage pattern, 4 computers connected through the router to the evel internet. The sniffer would work fine. If the thing can sniff bank-account passwords from victims' home computers, it should give the author more than enough money to steal.
The strange thing, neither one of Intel/AMD/Transmeta would make the internal instruction set accessible. The only reason for this that I can think of is that they change the architecture between the releases of the chip enough that the code would break, and they want to keep being able to change it.
Then, Intel might be afraid of coming up with another Itanium.
2. Misplace the legit serial #; that do what anyone would in that situation: get online and find a serial.
3. Get your home directory wiped. Loose a $100M in irreplaceable source code to your company's yet-unreleased valuable application. Or what not.
4. Sue the heck out of Mr. Prankster.
See, for once - a slashdot business plan with ??? under number 3. So perfectly hideous, it's scary.
P.S. If you think the course of events under number 2 is unrealistic, read the MS knowledge base article that explains how to change the key in a WinXP installation and ponder why MS had to explain this to their customers.
For example, a programmer might place the video address in a variable, then reference that for screen paints.
I don't see how that could be a problem. There is a serious problem with self-modifying code and code generated on-the-fly. Basically, every time anything crosses the data/code boundary, it would have to be translated. A simple translator would only handle the data/code boundary that the program crosses when it's first loaded into memory from an executible file.
Then, there are thunks (in Win16/Win32 programming; small pieces of code generated dynamically to help call Win16 libraries from Win32 code and vice-versa). Then there are compressed executables. Encrypted executables for copy-protected games. Dynamically generated code for inner loops for high-performance computations, maybe. Code generated by applications that compile on-the-fly, like your average LISP system., or JVM. A binary translator would not be able to handle any of those, unless you try to detect a jump to data somehow, which may be prohibitively expensive on a PowerPC. Is it?
Has anyone tried translating binary code between Mac and IA32? Should be much faster than emulation, and the output could be cached to disk, maybe. Generate a binary for the target architecture the first time the IA32 binary is loaded, linked with the API converter library, and cache it to disk. Given that the PowerPC has more registers than an IA32 machine, and a more flexible architecture, the translated code could be made as efficient as the original, as no registers would have to be emulated in memory.
Than, all you need to do is to write the API converter library. That could very consuming of man-hours, and difficult to get the bugs out of, but it has been done before many times over, with variable success.
Maybe that's what they do. If not, this post will be prior art for anyone trying to patent this shit:-)
Well... they could sell their bombs to terrorists. The bombs would also make NK much harder for the US to invade, allowing them to wage a war against, say, SK or Japan. And they do have missiles...
That's my take on the situation. As far as I'm concerned, software patents are a complete nonsense, have always been, and (unfortunately) will always be. Let them nasty large companies are suing each other over this nonsense. It's all for the better for me.
And hashing has only been described in scientific papers for what, a century or two? Just open any crypto textbook, and look up the bibliography at the end. And I'm not even touching CRC and checksums, which are essentially the same thing, except not useful against malicious attacks.
The "technology" that Transmeta developed is essentially a VLIW processor that can be micro-programmed to interpret the IA32 instruction set...
Not INTERPRET, but rather TRANSLATE IA32 to native VLIW. The word "translate" means "compile binary to binary" here. The translated result is cached, which makes the whole thing run at a more acceptable speed.
Intel and AMD do the same thing - IA32 is translated to an internal RISC-like code. They also cache the translated code. Only they do the translation in hardware, while Transmeta does it in software.
The extra translation hardware drains extra power. The extra translation software uses up extra CPU clocks, effectively slowing down a Crusoe (or any transmeta CPU) compared to a Pentium (any recent Intel/AMD CPU) at the same clock rate. If you slow down the clock on the Pentium so that the performance equals to that of the Crusoe, you reduce the power consumption to the same level as the Crusoe as well. Or better.
So, all in all, it's a wash. All mobile CPUs throttle down the clock when possible. The maximum speed for the Pentium is higher than for a Crusoe with the same clock. The die of the Transmeta chip is smaller. That's all the difference.
Surprisingly, where Intel (not AMD) gets its edge with Pentium M has nothing to do with CPU core. It's the way they handle the L2 cache. They have a large L2 cache, but they only clock the block of it where there is an access. This saves a lot of power, while allowing for a larger L2 cache. Which has more effect on the CPU speed and power consumption than all the tricks with the core architecture.
The original idea that made Transmeta chips so attractive had nothing to do with the core architecture either. The idea was that they would not only slow down the clock, but also reduce the supply voltage accordingly, which squared the power savings compared to Intel SpeedStep. Of course, by now both Intel and AMD do the same thing, so Transmeta doesn't have an edge there any more.
AMD and Intel are in a fierce battle that will destroy lesser players like Transmeta Not necessarily. Transmeta is in a niche market, ultra-mobile IA32 devices. As long as they stay in a niche market, they have a chance. But I doubt they could make it into the mainstream CPU market in near future.
Is there a white knight for Transmeta? Is there an SS1 for Transmeta? Wait, wrong topic...
I heard of a guy who rigged a hand grenade to his third car radio, after the first two got stolen. It worked. The thief is buried and decomposed by now, the inventive car owner is still in jail.
Slashdot Mirror
I always thought there was only one fission nuke in most thermonuclear bombs - in the center.
I also thought, and I'm pretty positive about this one, that the neutron bomb is just a small fission bomb. Fission devices with low TNT equivalent still have a large neutron radiation output. In the 50s and the 60s thy made bombs with as little as 10 ton TNT eq., where all the effect of the explosion would be from the penetrating radiation. Just take a look at this beauty: Davy Crockett.
Better yet, have the laptop call the police if it's stolen. The asshole stealing your laptop is probably stupid, so they will most certainly:
1. Not reinstall the software;
2. Try to get on the internet.
I just keep a no-ip.com client active in mine. If it ever gets stolen, DNS record will give me the IP as soon as it's on the internet, and the police should be able to take it from there.
Try getting the sound or the built-in modem to work on a two-year-old thinkpad:-) MWave wasn't just a winmodem, it was a win-modem/sound combo, so neither one worked.
...is wrong. it spells "nukelar"
It must have been, like, a few years since I've seen a BSOD. And it was Win98, too. Where have you been all this time?
...most participants (like myself) had no formal algorithms and data structures training.
...formal programming training has really cramped my creativity :)
Did you, like, do this before you went to colledge? It's kinda hard to find a colledge that wouldn't have an ADS class in the second year the latest.
Now that you know standard solutions to well-known problems, your creativity is free to be applied to new problems, isn't it? Without formal traning you can't help but keep being creative reinventing the wheel, and getting excited every time you invent some stupid shit like bubble sort. So, much excitement, not much useful stuff getting done. Blondes have more fun.
You are right about one thing, they seem to have chosen the lowest-possible performance design on all counts:
1. Solid fuel = makes the whole fuel tank a propulsion chamber = large thick heavy wall -- compared to liquid fuel, where the pressure wall is just the little combustion chamber in the engine.
2. Pressure fed oxidizer = thick walled heavy tank - compared to pump-fed design.
3. There are fuels with much higher energy contents than HTPB/NOX.
But then, you don't know what they did to the HTPB, but they did do something, otherwise the thing wouldn't burn fast enough to push a shopping cart, lest a space rocket. Whatever they did, maybe it had an effect on Isp as well.
Secondly, you don't know what that N2O tank is made of. It could be some super-strong composite, rather than fiberglass/metal.
And of course, they use high-altitude air-launch, which improves the mass ratio required for orbit.
Overall, it looks like the engine takes up only a small portion of RubberRocketOne, compared to any old booster. So there is room to improve the mass ratio right there by putting in a biger engine.
I'd kinda like to see some calculations, but without knowing the weight of the ship and the material of the nitrous tank it would be difficult to calculate anything interesting.
I think the word spam has been invented much less than 100 years ago...
go look at your router, does it have individual traffic lights for each port? guess what, it's switching...
Go look at your hub. I bet it also has individual traffic lights, and it's not switching either:-)
I think you mean, solar wind particles which impacted the collectors at several km/s versus Utah dust particles which impacted the collectors at several km/s. Oh, hm, I guess there's a problem after all.
I think he means solar wind particles which impacted the collectors at several km/s versus Utah dust particles which the collectors impacted at several km/s.
I suppose, the results of the Genesis are essentially a pinch of salt even in the best case. Even, maybe, several pinches of different salts.
I fear that alot of the consumer "switches" on the market do not do proper routing
All home routers I've seen (dlink, linksys, smc, belkin) do route, but only between the outside and the inside. On the inside, the 4 ports are on a regular hub, so no routing. This is appropriate for the normal usage pattern, 4 computers connected through the router to the evel internet. The sniffer would work fine. If the thing can sniff bank-account passwords from victims' home computers, it should give the author more than enough money to steal.
The strange thing, neither one of Intel/AMD/Transmeta would make the internal instruction set accessible. The only reason for this that I can think of is that they change the architecture between the releases of the chip enough that the code would break, and they want to keep being able to change it.
Then, Intel might be afraid of coming up with another Itanium.
1. Buy a copy of the software.
2. Misplace the legit serial #; that do what anyone would in that situation: get online and find a serial.
3. Get your home directory wiped. Loose a $100M in irreplaceable source code to your company's yet-unreleased valuable application. Or what not.
4. Sue the heck out of Mr. Prankster.
See, for once - a slashdot business plan with ??? under number 3. So perfectly hideous, it's scary.
P.S. If you think the course of events under number 2 is unrealistic, read the MS knowledge base article that explains how to change the key in a WinXP installation and ponder why MS had to explain this to their customers.
For example, a programmer might place the video address in a variable, then reference that for screen paints.
I don't see how that could be a problem. There is a serious problem with self-modifying code and code generated on-the-fly. Basically, every time anything crosses the data/code boundary, it would have to be translated. A simple translator would only handle the data/code boundary that the program crosses when it's first loaded into memory from an executible file.
Then, there are thunks (in Win16/Win32 programming; small pieces of code generated dynamically to help call Win16 libraries from Win32 code and vice-versa). Then there are compressed executables. Encrypted executables for copy-protected games. Dynamically generated code for inner loops for high-performance computations, maybe. Code generated by applications that compile on-the-fly, like your average LISP system., or JVM. A binary translator would not be able to handle any of those, unless you try to detect a jump to data somehow, which may be prohibitively expensive on a PowerPC. Is it?
Has anyone tried translating binary code between Mac and IA32? Should be much faster than emulation, and the output could be cached to disk, maybe. Generate a binary for the target architecture the first time the IA32 binary is loaded, linked with the API converter library, and cache it to disk. Given that the PowerPC has more registers than an IA32 machine, and a more flexible architecture, the translated code could be made as efficient as the original, as no registers would have to be emulated in memory.
Than, all you need to do is to write the API converter library. That could very consuming of man-hours, and difficult to get the bugs out of, but it has been done before many times over, with variable success.
Maybe that's what they do. If not, this post will be prior art for anyone trying to patent this shit:-)
Well... they could sell their bombs to terrorists. The bombs would also make NK much harder for the US to invade, allowing them to wage a war against, say, SK or Japan. And they do have missiles...
Russia is not a US ally. Or, was not. China was not a US ally. It's not about being allied with anyone. It's about limiting proliferation.
That's my take on the situation. As far as I'm concerned, software patents are a complete nonsense, have always been, and (unfortunately) will always be. Let them nasty large companies are suing each other over this nonsense. It's all for the better for me.
And hashing has only been described in scientific papers for what, a century or two? Just open any crypto textbook, and look up the bibliography at the end. And I'm not even touching CRC and checksums, which are essentially the same thing, except not useful against malicious attacks.
The "technology" that Transmeta developed is essentially a VLIW processor that can be micro-programmed to interpret the IA32 instruction set...
Not INTERPRET, but rather TRANSLATE IA32 to native VLIW. The word "translate" means "compile binary to binary" here. The translated result is cached, which makes the whole thing run at a more acceptable speed.
Intel and AMD do the same thing - IA32 is translated to an internal RISC-like code. They also cache the translated code. Only they do the translation in hardware, while Transmeta does it in software.
The extra translation hardware drains extra power. The extra translation software uses up extra CPU clocks, effectively slowing down a Crusoe (or any transmeta CPU) compared to a Pentium (any recent Intel/AMD CPU) at the same clock rate. If you slow down the clock on the Pentium so that the performance equals to that of the Crusoe, you reduce the power consumption to the same level as the Crusoe as well. Or better.
So, all in all, it's a wash. All mobile CPUs throttle down the clock when possible. The maximum speed for the Pentium is higher than for a Crusoe with the same clock. The die of the Transmeta chip is smaller. That's all the difference.
Surprisingly, where Intel (not AMD) gets its edge with Pentium M has nothing to do with CPU core. It's the way they handle the L2 cache. They have a large L2 cache, but they only clock the block of it where there is an access. This saves a lot of power, while allowing for a larger L2 cache. Which has more effect on the CPU speed and power consumption than all the tricks with the core architecture.
The original idea that made Transmeta chips so attractive had nothing to do with the core architecture either. The idea was that they would not only slow down the clock, but also reduce the supply voltage accordingly, which squared the power savings compared to Intel SpeedStep. Of course, by now both Intel and AMD do the same thing, so Transmeta doesn't have an edge there any more.
AMD and Intel are in a fierce battle that will destroy lesser players like Transmeta
Not necessarily. Transmeta is in a niche market, ultra-mobile IA32 devices. As long as they stay in a niche market, they have a chance. But I doubt they could make it into the mainstream CPU market in near future.
Is there a white knight for Transmeta?
Is there an SS1 for Transmeta? Wait, wrong topic...
As if PnP on Windows was not trouble enough, now the following dialog box has been reported seen on select linux systems around the world:
"Driver Compilation Wizard"
"Drivers for USB device 43CD/1132 loaded, but can not be compiled. Please install glibc-2.2.3 before proceding"
*throws 'puter out window*
*buys a used iMac off ebay*
I heard of a guy who rigged a hand grenade to his third car radio, after the first two got stolen. It worked. The thief is buried and decomposed by now, the inventive car owner is still in jail.
Think about it - who'd steal a car without a radio?
heck, as long as there is enough covers... Eh, whatever.
I think this is old news. Some people have been backing up the source code for viruses that they wrote on Kazaa for months now.