3. Lack of depth. Back in the good old days of Byte, Micro, Dr Dobbs, and Computer language the articles where great and in depth. Byte has articles on making your own EEG, SBC, and even how to make your own PC. When I mean make your own PC I mean actually making the motherboard not getting the latest form ASUS. Most articles these days are on which Core2Duo motherboard will let you over clock the cpu.5% more then the others or which $600 graphics card will get you 3 more FPS out of Oblivion.
Steve Ciarcia bailed out of Byte when the new owners decided they wanted a PC Mag clone rather than the traditional Byte. Circuit Cellar is still publishing a lot of 'hands-on' articles and seems to be doing quite well. The Circuit Cellar website is set up as to not canibalize the magazine subscriptions (both print and electronic). One more thing - the ads complement the content.
I wrote an e-mail to the editor of Byte in late 1997 wondering if Byte was not long for the world - last print issue was July 1998. They did make an attempt to get back to the original idea of Byte in the last few issues. One constant was Jerry Pournelle's column, which is probably the first blog.
It has been interesting to see what's been happening on the professional side as well - EETimes was pretty fat ca. 2000, much thinner now, Electronic Design is holding its own, EDN has actually improved a lot over the last 10 years. Rags like Computer Design and Integrated Systems Design have folded.
Obviously, you aren't running a 64-bit-native version of Linux.
Not sure if that is more of an indictment of Linux or Flash. Flash runs fine on 64 bit Solaris - but 64 bit Solaris apparently does a better job of running 32 bit binaries than Linux.
What kind of sucks is that Flash 9 for Solaris is only available for Solaris 10, though there may be a way of getting the necessay libraries on Solaris 9. OTOH, Solaris 10 has enough advantages for desktop users (who would need Flash on a server?) so that's not a huge limitation.
There are some issues with Flash video on Mozilla 1.7 on Sparc, which do not occur with Firefox on Sparc.
His description of a nuclear power plant was one of the best predictions of a future technology that I've seen in any SF. The one crucial difference between his prediction and current reality was his being unaware of delayed neutron from fission (which were to be discovered by Enrico Fermi after the story was written). He did anticipate use of thermal cycles for power production, the use of control rods (dampers) and the need for safety).
The figure of 100 million tons of TNT for the equivalent explosive power of the 2.5 tons of U-235 in the core was off by a factor of two (would be 50MT if all of the U-235 was fissioned) - a really good estimate. What he got really wrong was assuming that all of the U-235 would be fissioned, where bomb designers are doing well to get 25% fissioning of the fissile material.
One other failure of prediction was not anticipating the advent of electronic computers used for numerical analysis (to be fair, Heinlein was far from alone with this), assuming that there would be advances in math that would eliminate the need for numerical integration.
The electric AC on the Honda Insight uses less than 5 amps when running. that is 60 watts,
I'd believe 5 amps from a 270-300V battery (~1500W), but not from a 12V battery. 60W wouldn't be much more than what it takes to run the fan.
This does hint at one advantage of a hybrid, running the A/C compressor off the electrical system rather than the fan belt - the compressor can operate at near ideal speed most of the time.
FWIW, railroad passenger cars of the 30' and 40's often had the A/C powered by an axle driven generator and typically drew 200A from the 32V lighting power supply.
Ok the solar cells may just be for cute factor but my car sits in my office parking lot all day in Florida. It might give me enough power to run the AC on the trip home.
If you put a roof on your parking space and then covered the roof with high-efficiency solar cells, you may get enough power to run your whole care all the way home. With 50% efficent solar cells and assuming the parking space was 9' by 20', the generated electricity would be enough to propel a Chevy Surburban sized vehicle some 20 miles or so. With 20% eff cells on a car roof top, you might get a couple of kWhr's which would be more than enough to run the A/C on the way home - especially if some care went into the A/C design.
Do you know how much the heat transfer from earth to space varies as a function of CO2 concentration?
Do you know the relative contribution of the various greenhouse gases, airplane contrails, changes in particulates affect that same heat transfer?
If not, then STFU yourself.
One of the reason's why Newton's theory of gravitation is so widely accepted is that it accurately predicted the motions of the planets as described by Kepler. The global warming models show a factor of two to three variation in predicted tempertaure changes as a consequence of doubling in CO2 concentrations - which is a complete joke as far as comparisons to Newton's theory of gravity.
A perfectly normal person with something slightly embarressing showing up online (and who hasn't done or said something that would be embarressing to have sprawled across the net?) is likely to draw far more attention if someone finds out they're paying to make that info disappear than if they just left it to get buried in the noise.
That's pretty much what tipped Stalin off to the US work on the A-bomb - seeing a sudden cessation of publishing of nuclear research. Similarly, Stalin's crew picked up on the problem of xenon poisoning in power reactors when mention of it was deleted from the Smythe Report.
Then there's the recent uproar about a certain number being deleted from Digg...
The latest combined cycle plants are capable of a 60% thermal efficiency - so I have a hard time imagining how this 'new' fuel cell will halve the carbon footprint of a natural gas fueled combined cycle plant.
Dr. Halton C. Arp used to be one of the premiere U.S. astrophysicists (assistant to Hubble, winner of many awards in his own right, including "best young American astronomer", plenty of publications, etc.), but after 28 years as a staff astronomer at Mount Palomar was kicked off the telescope for his heretical views about red-shift.
A bit of nit-picking - the 200 inch Hale telescope is on Palomar Mountain.
I hate Word with a passion, although I've never used Word 2007, because it thinks it's smarter than me. (As OpenOffice so slavishly tries to imitate Word I have some of the same problems with it.)
My biggest gripe about Star/OpenOffice is exactly that - it is too much like MS-Word (or more precisely, too much like MS-Word for Windows, the old Word for DOS had some rather nifty features). Both have a brain-dead approach to inserting graphics (though SO/OO seems to be a bit less so), where the graphics have to be resized after insertion (often leading to messing up the aspect ratio). A much better approach is to define a frame/container for the graphic and allow for the choice of proportional scaling to fit, non-proportional scaling to fit or cropping - that was a standard feature of Island Write back in the early 90's and apparently is in Apple's latest word processor.
Irrelevant. Assuming the person who took the drug is an adult and does not have a mnetal disorder, they had a perfectly well functioning brain at the time they made the decision to take the drug. The action of taking the drug harmed noone except the person who voluntarily took that drug and knew the risks. All of the other actions involved here which actually have victims were already illegal without anti-drug laws.
This would only be true where the person taking the drug was in a controlled environment, i.e. not permitted to do aything that would affect another non-consenting person, until after the effects of the drug wore off. Overuse of many illicit drugs can lead to long lasting personality changes (effectively a drug induced mental disorder) - and how do you propose that society handle that?
You're also completely ignoring the problems with addiction.
I remember Radio Shack selling their 5 meg drive for $2500 for the TRS-80.
And TFA claimed that the $400 price tag made it the most expensive desktop drive to date.... Says a lot about the quality of reporting on ExtremeTech (though Bill Machrone was usually pretty sharp). Heck, I paid $600 for a 80MB IDE drive in 1990 and thought it was a good price (to replace a CDC Wren IV on my Compaq).
Still weird to think that the Hitachi drives stores 12K times what the Conner Peripheral's drive held in the same form factor.
I walked into the local CompUSA last weekend, three days before it closed. About all that was left were optical media, cables, 500VA UPS's and Zunes - mind you they were even selling the shelving. Kinda reminds me of when Dell tried to get into the 'iPod' market.
Most of the existing schemes for tweaking valve timing still involve camshafts, but there's an additional mechanical linkage which allows adjustment of phase angle, valve travel, or both.
Why am I getting images of steam locomotive valve gears floating in my head???? While the typical valve gears (e.g. Walschaerts, Stephenson, Young, Baker, etc) didn't have that contorl over phasing, they did allow for variable cut-off. Probably closer to this application would have been the Caprotti oscillating cams used for poppet valves - especially since 99+% of the IC engines use poppet valves (major exception are two stroke engines).
Does it really cost more to provide energy at certain hours than others? Or is this just a case of the utility company fiddling with the rates in the only way they can to bilk more money out of everyone?
It isn't so much that the incremental cost of producing the power is higher at peak times as it is the cost of capital for an asset that's used less than 10% of the time. What makes life a bit worse is Calif's big FU attempt at deregulation where the utilities were forced to sell off their generation to companies that charge even higher rates during peak times than what the utilities would have done otherwise.
The first step that Calif should have taken in deregulation was to phase in time of day power for everyone over a ten year period. This would also make the economics of solar a lot better as the peak output of solar panels occurs during peak load times.
I'd believe they're creating fusion if they produce measurable amounts of 3He. At low energies, D(D,n)3He is about as likely as D(D,p)T - in other words, they should be producing shitloads of neutrons.
Tritium is found in most sources of water. Just about any process used for enriching deuterium will also likely be equally as good for enriching tritium.
Let's look at Bill through another lens...a scary twilight-zone question lens: Who'd you rather have babysit your 4-year-old for a weekend?
Bill Gates, Steven Jobs, Bill Joy or Richard Stallman?
From what I've heard about Bill Joy, he would e heads and shoulders above the other three as a babysitter - he's frequently described as being one of the most mature people involved in the computer industry.
Maybe that's why ZFS was developed at Sun instead of the Linux community - then again, I'd be really surprised to see something like ZFS developed at MS.
About ten years ago, I met a couple of guys at NRAD (Navy Research And Development) in San Diego who were doubtful of the work being done on cold fusion. One of the them was making comments about dadiation being detected with some ancient technology (e.g. electroscopes) but not with more modern radiation detectors.
The most amusing comment was that they were able to recreate Fleischman and Pons 'excess energy' - but pointed out that the palladium electrodes became more resistive when absorbing hydrogen and that they were using constant current power supplies (hint: Fleischman and Pons weren't monitoring the power supply voltage).
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Steve Ciarcia bailed out of Byte when the new owners decided they wanted a PC Mag clone rather than the traditional Byte. Circuit Cellar is still publishing a lot of 'hands-on' articles and seems to be doing quite well. The Circuit Cellar website is set up as to not canibalize the magazine subscriptions (both print and electronic). One more thing - the ads complement the content.I wrote an e-mail to the editor of Byte in late 1997 wondering if Byte was not long for the world - last print issue was July 1998. They did make an attempt to get back to the original idea of Byte in the last few issues. One constant was Jerry Pournelle's column, which is probably the first blog.
It has been interesting to see what's been happening on the professional side as well - EETimes was pretty fat ca. 2000, much thinner now, Electronic Design is holding its own, EDN has actually improved a lot over the last 10 years. Rags like Computer Design and Integrated Systems Design have folded.
Not sure if that is more of an indictment of Linux or Flash. Flash runs fine on 64 bit Solaris - but 64 bit Solaris apparently does a better job of running 32 bit binaries than Linux.There are some issues with Flash video on Mozilla 1.7 on Sparc, which do not occur with Firefox on Sparc.
The figure of 100 million tons of TNT for the equivalent explosive power of the 2.5 tons of U-235 in the core was off by a factor of two (would be 50MT if all of the U-235 was fissioned) - a really good estimate. What he got really wrong was assuming that all of the U-235 would be fissioned, where bomb designers are doing well to get 25% fissioning of the fissile material.
One other failure of prediction was not anticipating the advent of electronic computers used for numerical analysis (to be fair, Heinlein was far from alone with this), assuming that there would be advances in math that would eliminate the need for numerical integration.
I'd believe 5 amps from a 270-300V battery (~1500W), but not from a 12V battery. 60W wouldn't be much more than what it takes to run the fan.This does hint at one advantage of a hybrid, running the A/C compressor off the electrical system rather than the fan belt - the compressor can operate at near ideal speed most of the time.
FWIW, railroad passenger cars of the 30' and 40's often had the A/C powered by an axle driven generator and typically drew 200A from the 32V lighting power supply.
If you put a roof on your parking space and then covered the roof with high-efficiency solar cells, you may get enough power to run your whole care all the way home. With 50% efficent solar cells and assuming the parking space was 9' by 20', the generated electricity would be enough to propel a Chevy Surburban sized vehicle some 20 miles or so. With 20% eff cells on a car roof top, you might get a couple of kWhr's which would be more than enough to run the A/C on the way home - especially if some care went into the A/C design.This was brought up in Walton Bean's "History of California" class at UC Berkeley and I've seen other references to this as well.
What was not said in the article was that many of the worst IP pirates are corporations themselves (e.g. Microsoft).
You still haven't answered the question: what is f(carbon content)?
Do you know the relative contribution of the various greenhouse gases, airplane contrails, changes in particulates affect that same heat transfer?
If not, then STFU yourself.
One of the reason's why Newton's theory of gravitation is so widely accepted is that it accurately predicted the motions of the planets as described by Kepler. The global warming models show a factor of two to three variation in predicted tempertaure changes as a consequence of doubling in CO2 concentrations - which is a complete joke as far as comparisons to Newton's theory of gravity.
That's pretty much what tipped Stalin off to the US work on the A-bomb - seeing a sudden cessation of publishing of nuclear research. Similarly, Stalin's crew picked up on the problem of xenon poisoning in power reactors when mention of it was deleted from the Smythe Report.Then there's the recent uproar about a certain number being deleted from Digg...
Agree, TFA is more hype without facts.
A bit of nit-picking - the 200 inch Hale telescope is on Palomar Mountain.
My biggest gripe about Star/OpenOffice is exactly that - it is too much like MS-Word (or more precisely, too much like MS-Word for Windows, the old Word for DOS had some rather nifty features). Both have a brain-dead approach to inserting graphics (though SO/OO seems to be a bit less so), where the graphics have to be resized after insertion (often leading to messing up the aspect ratio). A much better approach is to define a frame/container for the graphic and allow for the choice of proportional scaling to fit, non-proportional scaling to fit or cropping - that was a standard feature of Island Write back in the early 90's and apparently is in Apple's latest word processor.
This would only be true where the person taking the drug was in a controlled environment, i.e. not permitted to do aything that would affect another non-consenting person, until after the effects of the drug wore off. Overuse of many illicit drugs can lead to long lasting personality changes (effectively a drug induced mental disorder) - and how do you propose that society handle that?You're also completely ignoring the problems with addiction.
And TFA claimed that the $400 price tag made it the most expensive desktop drive to date.... Says a lot about the quality of reporting on ExtremeTech (though Bill Machrone was usually pretty sharp). Heck, I paid $600 for a 80MB IDE drive in 1990 and thought it was a good price (to replace a CDC Wren IV on my Compaq).Still weird to think that the Hitachi drives stores 12K times what the Conner Peripheral's drive held in the same form factor.
My thoughts and sentiments, exactly.
I walked into the local CompUSA last weekend, three days before it closed. About all that was left were optical media, cables, 500VA UPS's and Zunes - mind you they were even selling the shelving. Kinda reminds me of when Dell tried to get into the 'iPod' market.
Which is unlikely as most of the heat transfer to Europe is due to atmospheric circulation, not the North Atlantic Gyre.
Why am I getting images of steam locomotive valve gears floating in my head???? While the typical valve gears (e.g. Walschaerts, Stephenson, Young, Baker, etc) didn't have that contorl over phasing, they did allow for variable cut-off. Probably closer to this application would have been the Caprotti oscillating cams used for poppet valves - especially since 99+% of the IC engines use poppet valves (major exception are two stroke engines).
It isn't so much that the incremental cost of producing the power is higher at peak times as it is the cost of capital for an asset that's used less than 10% of the time. What makes life a bit worse is Calif's big FU attempt at deregulation where the utilities were forced to sell off their generation to companies that charge even higher rates during peak times than what the utilities would have done otherwise.The first step that Calif should have taken in deregulation was to phase in time of day power for everyone over a ten year period. This would also make the economics of solar a lot better as the peak output of solar panels occurs during peak load times.
Tritium is found in most sources of water. Just about any process used for enriching deuterium will also likely be equally as good for enriching tritium.
Bill Gates, Steven Jobs, Bill Joy or Richard Stallman?
From what I've heard about Bill Joy, he would e heads and shoulders above the other three as a babysitter - he's frequently described as being one of the most mature people involved in the computer industry.Maybe that's why ZFS was developed at Sun instead of the Linux community - then again, I'd be really surprised to see something like ZFS developed at MS.
The most amusing comment was that they were able to recreate Fleischman and Pons 'excess energy' - but pointed out that the palladium electrodes became more resistive when absorbing hydrogen and that they were using constant current power supplies (hint: Fleischman and Pons weren't monitoring the power supply voltage).