* FTP: needs two connections. Commands and responses and data are not synced in any way. No way to get a reliable list of files. No standard file listing format. No way to tell what files need ASCII and which need BIN mode. And probably more fubarskis.
* Telnet: The original handshake protocol is basically foobar-- the handshakes can go on forever. Several RFC patches did not help much. Basically the clients have to kinda cut off negotiations at some point and just guess what the other end can and will do.
* SMTP: You can't send a line with the word "From" as the first word? I'm not a typewriter? WTF?
Is it just me, or does this accident report seem to point out that NASA is a hugely bloated organization? Pages and pages just of signatures of guys in the chain of command. One Hundred Twenty Seven pages analyzing something about as complicated as a swing set. Seems about ten times as long as it should be.
The concept of autonomous autos is just plain silly. There is no way they would ever be approved for use on public roads. Several times a day you make some complex judgement while driving, a judgement that will always be beyond the ability of a computer. Just yesterday: (1) Oh crap, that old lady in the '78 Buick, better give her a wide berth, her eyesight is none too good. (2) A clapped-out minivan full of small kids unloading -- better slow down, they're likely to jump out without looking. (3) In heavy freeway traffic-- what's that ahead, a child crawling across the road?, Nope, looks like one, but it's just a wino's paper bag that slipped off his bottle of wine. No need to slam on the brakes. (4) Whoa, what's that? Oh, of course, nothing to worry about, it's just the shadows of planes landing at the airport a mile ahead.
I don't think your ambulatory computers will ever be clever enough to figure out those situations.
Ridiculous. Phones need about a watt. If you SHOUT into a microphone, you will maybe generate 50 millivolts across 600 ohms, or (E^2/R) about FIVE BLEEPIN MICROWATTS.
We're a good five powers of ten below what is needed.
This is a well-trodden area-- explored by many folks, starting with Tesla. Unfortunately there are several very basic phisical showbunglers if not showstoppers. Issues that are fundamental to electromagnetic radiation:
(1) If you send out EM waves, the efficiency of the antennas is like 1% at low frequencies, wasting 99.99% of the power. If you use microwave frequencies, the antennas are much more efficient, but so is your body's ability to absorb the stuff, which is not a good thing.
(2) If you try this near-field coupled resonator thing (first tried in 1886), you son find out it has very limited range, and you need coils as large as the distance to be spanned, and the power drops off as the square of the distance when near, as the cube of the distance a little bit farther away.
These are basic Maxwell's equation impediments that are unlikely to ever be overcome.
The whole premise seems kinda ridiculous. You might have some idea how the camera swung, but that only helps you if you're pointing at some 2D surface that's perpendicular to the camera.
If there is any depth to the scene, points closer will move more than points farther away. You might have an estimate of the distance from the auto-focus feature, but that's only going to help you fix up points near the focus sweet-spot. Points closer and farther away are going to be made worse, not better.
If you stop blathering for a minute, and actually "do the research", you'll find pictures of US Presidents, Secretaries of State and Defense, shaking hands, giving supporting speeches, and giving foreign aid to several dozen blooodthirsty dictators which enslaved, imprisoned, or killed about 80 million of their own people.
Here's a short list:
Bao Dai Ngo Dinh Diem Chiang Kai-shek Park Chung Hee Chun Doo Hwan Laurent Kabila Idi Amin General Sani Abacha Francisco Franco General Humberto Castelo Branco Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo Roberto Suazo Crdova Anastasio Somoza General Suharto Reza Muhammed Shah Pahlawi Augusto Ugarte Pinnochet Fulgencio Batista P.W. Botha Saddam Hussein Muammar al-Qaddafi Rafael Leonidas Molina Trujillo Porfirio Diaz Morena Manuel Antonio Noriega Anwar Al Saddat Husni Mubarak King Hussein Francois Duvalier Jean-Claude Duvalier
All either visibly supported by the USA, or secretly paid or trained by the CIA.
And you wonder why there is a bit of "anti-americanism" out there....
It's like asking: How can I learn to be a ( surgeon, lawyer ) in a few days? After all, I can carve a turkey already and I've watched every season of "LA Law".
Programming may seem easy-- after all, it's just typing, right?
Well, surprise, surprise, it's a lot harder than those "[Language X] For Dummies" books let on.
In fact some of us went to school for 4 years and just learned the basics. Maybe after another ten years you get good at it. No shortcuts.
Read TFA carefully, and you'll notice they never guarantee 6000 cycles AND 5-minute recharge at the same time.
Also a 5-minute recharge is NOT going to be very economical-- a significant fraction of the applied power is going to be lost as heat.
In a real car, you'll need a few dozen of these little bugers, and when you stack them, heat dissipation will be a huge issue. A real design will require a very fancy liquid cooling system to keep the thing from melting down during charge and discharge.... and they don't mention really important details, such as COST, or reliability or what kind of warranty they will provide.
And of course there is no way, not by a factor of FIVE, to get enough electrical power to recharge a nation of these.
I must have $500 tied up now in 40/80 pin IDE cables, SATA cables, 8-Bit Apple SCSI, four or five other flavors of SCSI interconnects-- mini- sub-mini, regular and LVDS, VGA cables, HDMI cables, USB type A, B, and Mini. Let's not forget the big bag of "RCA Phono" cables, to and from eighth-inch mono and stereo plugs. Then all those offbeat motherboard to PCI-slot Parallel port flat cables. ANd parallel-port printer cables, and who could forget serial cables, DB9, DB25, gender-changers, and breakout boxes. And the various internal flat- SCSI cables and connectors. And the various Vidio connectors on iMacs-- at least four varieties there. Somehow, no matter how many bulging cardboard boxes of cables and adaptors I have, each month I have to make a new trip to BEstBuy to purchase some overpriced new cable. I thought things would plateau for a while with the cheap SATA cables, but noooooo, we better start saving up for a whole new series of optical interconnects.
Not St. Augustine, Norman Augustine, ex-prez of many a big corporation. His book has dozens of interesting graphs, the most appropriiate one is a X-Y scatter graph of company president pay versus company stock. No visible correlation at all. When you get up to a certain level, you're mainly a figurehead.
Try estimating what the basic maintenance costs are for 3 miles of piping that can handle molten salt.
Molten salt is rely, really *corrosive*. Either they're spending tons of money up front on miles of stainless steel, or even more every year replacing the pipes as they corrode away.
Either way it's hard to even break even-- 5MW of electricity is only about $2 million a year wholesale, far less than the interest cost on a $60M plant, and likely less than the cost to maintain 3 mmiles of molten salt piping and collectors.
Here's a radical idea: How's about they don't release code tons of fresh code every cycle, and instead maybe check the code over first for buffer overflows, NULL pointer abuse, heap munging, and all the other obvious ways of executing code?
Ah, I think what the writer was trying to say was that the disks were the old Apple ][ / Lisa dual-sided 5 1/4 inch drives, which were the original drives intended for the Mac. They actually did a small production run of those, for internal use, so there were Lisas and Macs with 5 1/4 inch drives, and a lot of development software was on those style of floppies.
Oh wow, I still remember the first time I saw MacPaint-- there was nothing like it. Bill Atkinson did a superb job, shoehorning all those features so they could run in 128K of RAM.
He just barely made it-- I remember trying to find how much memory my desk accessory could use while MacPaint was running, and when you did a "print preview", the available RAM went down to like 1800 bytes! Yikes!
If you make this machine ten times bigger in each of the three linear dimensions, you get:
(1) A machine that weighs 1,000 times as much.
(2) Heavy equipment cost is very close to proportional to weight, so it also costs 1,000 times as much.
(3) The 2-D components, the pipe cross-sections, the centrifuge inner and outer radii, are going to be 10 times too small, at only 100 times larger. So it's only going to pump and filter at 1/10th the rate you'd expect.
(4) The tank that is holding 1,000 times as much water has sides that are only 10 times thicker, so the tank is going to rupture.
So you have a machine that's only 1/10th as efficient, by dollar or volume.
There's a reason nobody's invested in this technology-- the numbers are just impossible.
Cosner's machine can process 200 gallons per minute. If you take the extent of the damage, about 17,000 square miles, and want to run the top ten feet of it through his device, and you could afford to buy 100,000 of them, it would take.....
1,830 years
to process that amount of water.
And scientists have found the stuff distributed a whole lot deeper than that.
The "Protocol on Laser Weapons" has nothing to do with this issue.
The weapon under discussion is not a laser. The wavelength it emits is at least a thousand times longer. It comes out of a waveguide, not out of a optical lens.
It's been known for over fifty years that microwaves, at just a few milliwatts per square centimeter, cause cataracts. That's why there are rather tight limits on microwave exposure around radar and telecom equipment.
Spraying microwaves around and possibly inducing mass blindness is not going to look good in the history books.
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Why go hatin' on this particular protocol?
Most of them are just nuckin futs:
* FTP: needs two connections. Commands and responses and data are not synced in any way. No way to get a reliable list of files. No standard file listing format. No way to tell what files need ASCII and which need BIN mode. And probably more fubarskis.
* Telnet: The original handshake protocol is basically foobar-- the handshakes can go on forever. Several RFC patches did not help much. Basically the clients have to kinda cut off negotiations at some point and just guess what the other end can and will do.
* SMTP: You can't send a line with the word "From" as the first word? I'm not a typewriter? WTF?
Is it just me, or does this accident report seem to point out that NASA is a hugely bloated organization? Pages and pages just of signatures of guys in the chain of command. One Hundred Twenty Seven pages analyzing something about as complicated as a swing set. Seems about ten times as long as it should be.
Seymour Cray's 6600 was cooling with liquid-filled cold plates... in 1962. That's, er, 48 years?
Gas turbines are very poorly suited for automobile use.
They're extremely expensive, have mediocre MPG, don't respond quickly to the gas pedal, and the gyroscopic effects are problematic.
That's why they didn't catch on-- no need to look for conspiracies.
The concept of autonomous autos is just plain silly. There is no way they would ever be approved for use on public roads. Several times a day you make some complex judgement while driving, a judgement that will always be beyond the ability of a computer. Just yesterday: (1) Oh crap, that old lady in the '78 Buick, better give her a wide berth, her eyesight is none too good. (2) A clapped-out minivan full of small kids unloading -- better slow down, they're likely to jump out without looking. (3) In heavy freeway traffic-- what's that ahead, a child crawling across the road?, Nope, looks like one, but it's just a wino's paper bag that slipped off his bottle of wine. No need to slam on the brakes. (4) Whoa, what's that? Oh, of course, nothing to worry about, it's just the shadows of planes landing at the airport a mile ahead.
I don't think your ambulatory computers will ever be clever enough to figure out those situations.
Ridiculous. Phones need about a watt. If you SHOUT into a microphone, you will maybe generate 50 millivolts across 600 ohms, or (E^2/R) about FIVE BLEEPIN MICROWATTS.
We're a good five powers of ten below what is needed.
Doesn't anybody do math anymore?
This is a well-trodden area-- explored by many folks, starting with Tesla. Unfortunately there are several very basic phisical showbunglers if not showstoppers.
Issues that are fundamental to electromagnetic radiation:
(1) If you send out EM waves, the efficiency of the antennas is like 1% at low frequencies, wasting 99.99% of the power. If you use microwave frequencies, the antennas are much more efficient, but so is your body's ability to absorb the stuff, which is not a good thing.
(2) If you try this near-field coupled resonator thing (first tried in 1886), you son find out it has very limited range, and you need coils as large as the distance to be spanned, and the power drops off as the square of the distance when near, as the cube of the distance a little bit farther away.
These are basic Maxwell's equation impediments that are unlikely to ever be overcome.
The whole premise seems kinda ridiculous. You might have some idea how the camera swung, but that only helps you if you're pointing at some 2D surface that's perpendicular to the camera.
If there is any depth to the scene, points closer will move more than points farther away. You might have an estimate of the distance from the auto-focus feature, but that's only going to help you fix up points near the focus sweet-spot. Points closer and farther away are going to be made worse, not better.
If you stop blathering for a minute, and actually "do the research", you'll find pictures of US Presidents, Secretaries of State and Defense, shaking hands, giving supporting speeches, and giving foreign aid to several dozen blooodthirsty dictators which enslaved, imprisoned, or killed about 80 million of their own people.
Here's a short list:
Bao Dai
Ngo Dinh Diem
Chiang Kai-shek
Park Chung Hee
Chun Doo Hwan
Laurent Kabila
Idi Amin
General Sani Abacha
Francisco Franco
General Humberto Castelo Branco
Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo
Roberto Suazo Crdova
Anastasio Somoza
General Suharto
Reza Muhammed Shah Pahlawi
Augusto Ugarte Pinnochet
Fulgencio Batista
P.W. Botha
Saddam Hussein
Muammar al-Qaddafi
Rafael Leonidas Molina Trujillo
Porfirio Diaz
Morena Manuel Antonio Noriega
Anwar Al Saddat
Husni Mubarak
King Hussein
Francois Duvalier
Jean-Claude Duvalier
All either visibly supported by the USA, or secretly paid or trained by the CIA.
And you wonder why there is a bit of "anti-americanism" out there....
It's like asking: How can I learn to be a ( surgeon, lawyer ) in a few days? After all, I can carve a turkey already and I've watched every season of "LA Law".
Programming may seem easy-- after all, it's just typing, right?
Well, surprise, surprise, it's a lot harder than those "[Language X] For Dummies" books let on.
In fact some of us went to school for 4 years and just learned the basics. Maybe after another ten years you get good at it. No shortcuts.
Can they bundle it with a copy of ( insert your favorite vaporware here )..???
Read TFA carefully, and you'll notice they never guarantee 6000 cycles AND 5-minute recharge at the same time.
Also a 5-minute recharge is NOT going to be very economical-- a significant fraction of the applied power is going to be lost as heat.
In a real car, you'll need a few dozen of these little bugers, and when you stack them, heat dissipation will be a huge issue. A real design ... and they don't mention really important details, such as COST, or reliability or what kind of warranty they will provide.
will require a very fancy liquid cooling system to keep the thing from melting down during charge and discharge.
And of course there is no way, not by a factor of FIVE, to get enough electrical power to recharge a nation of these.
It's all part of the Connector Conspiracy.
I must have $500 tied up now in 40/80 pin IDE cables, SATA cables, 8-Bit Apple SCSI, four or five other flavors of SCSI interconnects-- mini- sub-mini, regular and LVDS, VGA cables, HDMI cables, USB type A, B, and Mini. Let's not forget the big bag of "RCA Phono" cables, to and from eighth-inch mono and stereo plugs. Then all those offbeat motherboard to PCI-slot Parallel port flat cables. ANd parallel-port printer cables, and who could forget serial cables, DB9, DB25, gender-changers, and breakout boxes. And the various internal flat- SCSI cables and connectors. And the various Vidio connectors on iMacs-- at least four varieties there. Somehow, no matter how many bulging cardboard boxes of cables and adaptors I have, each month I have to make a new trip to BEstBuy to purchase some overpriced new cable. I thought things would plateau for a while with the cheap SATA cables, but noooooo, we better start saving up for a whole new series of optical interconnects.
Not St. Augustine, Norman Augustine, ex-prez of many a big corporation. His book has dozens of interesting graphs, the most appropriiate one is a X-Y scatter graph of company president pay versus company stock. No visible correlation at all. When you get up to a certain level, you're mainly a figurehead.
Calling these things "invisibility cloaks" is being very, very generous.
They are fundamentally flawed in the specs: percent transmission, angle, bandwidth, and refraction.
They're more of a laboratory curiosity than anything that would fool anybody.
Try estimating what the basic maintenance costs are for 3 miles of piping that can handle molten salt.
Molten salt is rely, really *corrosive*. Either they're spending tons of money up front on miles of stainless steel, or even more every year replacing the pipes as they corrode away.
Either way it's hard to even break even-- 5MW of electricity is only about $2 million a year wholesale, far less than the interest cost on a $60M plant, and likely less than the cost to maintain 3 mmiles of molten salt piping and collectors.
Here's a radical idea: How's about they don't release code tons of fresh code every cycle, and instead maybe check the code over first for buffer overflows, NULL pointer abuse, heap munging, and all the other obvious ways of executing code?
Just sayin'
Yeah. Too bad, though, since dropping gravity bombs from planes had its heyday during 1935 to 1955.
Nobody's tried doing that for a long long time.
What you do is stand off 20 miles and shoot a missile at the ship.
So an anti-plane laser is not all that useful. And what if it's a cloudy day?
> The Lisa was never sold!
Ah, I think what the writer was trying to say was that the disks were the old Apple ][ / Lisa dual-sided 5 1/4 inch drives, which were the original drives intended for the Mac.
They actually did a small production run of those, for internal use, so there were Lisas and Macs with 5 1/4 inch drives, and a lot of development software was on those style of floppies.
>I remember thinking how expensive and lacking in features 'MacPaint' was.
Er, um, MacPaint was "free". It was bundled with every Mac, for at least three years.
And wasn't the color on the ZX limited to like seven colors, in 24x80 character-sized blocks?
Oh wow, I still remember the first time I saw MacPaint-- there was nothing like it. Bill Atkinson did a superb job, shoehorning all those features so they could run in 128K of RAM.
He just barely made it-- I remember trying to find how much memory my desk accessory could use while MacPaint was running, and when you did a "print preview", the available RAM went down to like 1800 bytes! Yikes!
You are very confused about scaling.
If you make this machine ten times bigger in each of the three linear dimensions, you get:
(1) A machine that weighs 1,000 times as much.
(2) Heavy equipment cost is very close to proportional to weight, so it also costs 1,000 times as much.
(3) The 2-D components, the pipe cross-sections, the centrifuge inner and outer radii, are going to be 10 times too small, at only 100 times larger. So it's only going to pump and filter at 1/10th the rate you'd expect.
(4) The tank that is holding 1,000 times as much water has sides that are only 10 times thicker, so the tank is going to rupture.
So you have a machine that's only 1/10th as efficient, by dollar or volume.
There's a reason nobody's invested in this technology-- the numbers are just impossible.
Cosner's machine can process 200 gallons per minute. If you take the extent of the damage, about 17,000 square miles, and want to run the top ten feet of it through his device, and you could afford to buy 100,000 of them, it would take.....
1,830 years
to process that amount of water.
And scientists have found the stuff distributed a whole lot deeper than that.
The "Protocol on Laser Weapons" has nothing to do with this issue.
The weapon under discussion is not a laser. The wavelength it emits is at least a thousand times longer. It comes out of a waveguide, not out of a optical lens.
It's been known for over fifty years that microwaves, at just a few milliwatts per square centimeter, cause cataracts. That's why there are rather tight limits on microwave exposure around radar and telecom equipment.
Spraying microwaves around and possibly inducing mass blindness is not going to look good in the history books.