when my little Nokia digital cell phone rang under my 17 inch monitor, the screen shifted to the left just before the call
these wireless devices are not as potent as the mighty 600 milliwatt cell phone
600 mW average, approx 200 WATTS peak, ballpark-equal to 1/3 of a standard (600W) microwave oven. That's how they get to kick monitors around and generally engauss them. By the way, do you hang one of these babies near your gonads when you go out? Or let it ring while it's next to your head? Just a question, think nothing of it...
Makes the WaveLAN seem even less nocuous than you said, doesn't it? (-:
If a credit-card sized CD holds 40MB, then maybe an unfoldable one that comes out double the size (less a bit for the fold) should be able to do a couple of hundred megs. With "bzip2 -9" you could fit a useable distribution on that (especially if you replace monsters like Netscape with something lighter). Q: "What do you know about Linux?" A: Reaches into wallet... "Here, install this!" You might need some reversible brackety bits that slid across the fold, flick-knife style, to make it rigid enough, but I'm sure there are ways. (-:
A standard sized gold brick is worth about $250,000. A shuttle launch cost what $20,000,000? 100 bricks to break even.
A subsidised launch is $50M, so 250 gold bricks. Real cost, what? $100M (500 bricks)? $150 (750 bricks)? Which weigh enough to seriously challenge the flying ability of a Shuttle, plus if you didn't stack them evenly about the floor of the load bay and brace them, would seriously challenge the structure of a shuttle.
Then consider the effect of dumping tens of tons of gold on the market every few months.
That's what happens when you drop a rock straight down from space to ground on Earth. It would go through all the significant atmosphere in about two seconds, maybe three. Throw a car-sized rock (say 8m3 @ say 3t/m3 = 24t) at 11km/s, and even if you lost half, that's a staggering number of joules converted to heat at impact.
Go view some footage of Shoemaker/Levy hitting Jupiter if you think throwing rocks is trivial.
Firstly, where it might cost $X a tonne to mine iron ore, get it to the processing plant and rip the iron out here on Earth, you can park a big mirror behind an asteroid, net it, spin it, and get millions of tonnes of stratified minerals for maybe $X/10 tonne. This is possible because vacuum doesn't conduct or convect heat away, and energy in the form of sunlight is readily available
Second, nasty things like oxidation don't happen in a vacuum, so processing said minerals is also easier, and achieving higher purity is also easier.
Thirdly, and most interesting from my POV, an infrastructure is necessary to do this, and can also be used for other things; and the byproducts of refining, regarded as junk on earth, are still useable as building materials and reaction mass - and are already in orbit.
If you don't want metal or other products in orbit, the solution is simple: you make a big hat-shaped thingy out of your ore, park anything else you want to deorbit inside the hat, and drop it peak-first into an ocean. A little of it ablates away during the drop, but most of it survives to float "gently" down like a shuttlecock at a few hundred miles an hour an wind up as a big metal barge floating somewhere near its final point of use. I'm sure Japan would consistently land theirs on whale herds for research purposes, but never mind.
It would lend new meaning to the phrase "at the drop of a hat" and the choice of Linux distribution to run the instrumentation on would be moot. (-:
Polystrate fossils, huge homogenous volumes/areas of deposits, fossil animal trackways without sign of food, "inverted" rock layers, "inclusions", short-life radio-halos, environmentally grouped fossils, extensive turbidites, yadda-yadda-yadda are all expected phenomena in a global-flood scenario, and each of these features is a broad hint that there is no debate.
And the more reasearch that scientists do, the more information there is to hand, the less debate seems possible. 250,000 fossil species have been discovered - where are the intermediates?
Somehow or other, their DNA hasn't done anything sensible in any multiverse - and when you consider the difference in scale between a potentially multiversable DNA molecule, and even the tiniest cell, the reason should be obvious.
For those reading this over morning coffee with an as-yet unstarted brain, the DNA would have to be off exploring alternatives for quite a while before any "choice" it made (teleonomy - ooh, heresy!) had an impact on the whole cell, let alone whole lifeform.
microwalking - the act of taking tiny steps to move from one end of the living room to the other
macrowalking - the act of taking tiny steps to move from Los Angeles to New York
* OOPS! *
- The reality -
microwalking - the act of crossing a crack in the pavement in one small step.
macrowalking - the act of crossing something like the Standley Chasm or between the tops of the World Trade Centre towers in a series of small steps.
For a practical example, the odds of forming a single short genome in 30 billion years from a universe made entirely of the right proteins, (ignoring mismatches, decay, chirality, space/distance and a few other minor inconveniences) are about 1E80 against. Not a working organism, just a genome. Welcome to the wonderful world of macroevolution.
What happens when the dust clears? 'Bye 'bye coyote...
Since the 140G CD is apparently on the way, and capable of holding the audio from 2000 standard CDs (suitably MP3'ed) I would guess that the copying-old-data cycle will happen only once more before we start storing video rather than just text and occasionally sound.
At the moment, I could fit every hard disk in the house (many) and all of my audio CDs on a small part of one of those. Who knows how big the next shell will be for this hermit-crab data?
When we get down to storing data at the molecular level, in crystals or similar, the crystal can spend some of its idle time rewriting and refreshing the data, the integrity guaranteed by multiple copies and serious checksums.
Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series (all have SSR in the title) is great, and funny, and 12yog-safe.
The Xanth series (Golem in the Gears, Question Quest, Demons Don't Dream, The Color of Her Panties, Vale of the Voles etc) was actually aimed at/near the 12yog market.
If you like "Space Opera", most of EE "Doc" Smith is 12yog safe (Lensman series, SubSpace Explorers, SkyLark).
None of us know exactly how this is going to work out, but we are talking and we all realize it's important to work this out.
That seems to have been SGI's attitude all along, and I must say that it's far and away the best corporate attitude I've seen in any big player.
IBM is doing good, yes, but in a relatively cold-blooded way. In essence, SGI can't see the bottom of this chasm they've come to, but are willing to try jumping it anyway. That's real courage! IBM thinks that they can see the bottom, and are in for a surprise (-: IBM-shaped hole at bottom?:-). Sun are preparing to trek around it. So long, Sun, enjoy the trip, follow the footprints when you get back.
For SGI's multiple commitments to the public good (hey, that's me!), I'll be recommending SGI gear over comparable equipment from elsewhere for every high-end job that I spec from now on. It won't take a great percentage of the computing public doing likewise to double SGI's turnover.
Sun really don't get it. They think that they understand Open Source and are "cleverly" trying to leverage it in their favour and to the (compared with genuine Open Source) detriment of the computing public.
In reality Sun are shooting themselves in the foot, chaining their "open" source with conditions that will scare off the vast majority of potential contributors.
On a Celery 400, copying to or from an OLD SCSI drive used less than 1/4 of the CPU that copying to or from a modern 8.4G (Quantum Fireball) IDE drive did.
...and Linux actually has more credibility (in the eyes of mainstream press) as an embedded system than as a mainstream OS.
The competition in this market, we are told, is an embeddable version of Windows 2000. Hah! Imagine a washing machine requiring 64MB of RAM that "blueloads" and occasionally requires reformatting and reinstallation, and a toaster with no elements but four Itaniums each side of the bread, all sitting on NT's command line doing nothing.
If you wanted RAM for Quake or something, you could quadruple your PC's tally by borrowing from your appliances, or multiply your framerate tenfold by plugging your Voodoo card into your toaster and installing Linux on it!
Put a modem-and-or-network, ROM and 2x PS/2 plugs into a cartridge and you have a great TV-compatible X client with a robust TCP stack and a few other features not normally expected in a toy (e.g. run traceroutes, nmap scans, FreeCiv).
You might have to add some RAM and use an expansion connector instead of the cartridge. If you added a hard drive and some RAM, it would be about $Oz500 for an essentially complete PC system.
i had an ex who was late once and it scared [...] me.
I have a Mrs who was late once and now we have a happy little baby boy. It still scared me, though. I hear it gets better around the fifth or sixth child.
To the this-is-not-techo-news AC: haven't you ever been rebuked by MAILER-PAENGUIN for getting an address wrong? Keep on insulting them, and the Paenguins will get you! (-: So play n-i-c-e, Sid...:-)
I took my wife and children up to my parents' place north of Geraldton without telling any of my clients, and left my mobile off from Friday afternoon to Sunday (which I normally do anyway).
All of my Linux boxes (clients and mine, including the antique Linux Mobile) would be (were, in the event) perfectly happy, and the Windows boxes would get (did get, in a few cases) precisely what they deserve. (-:
It was very relaxing. I highly recommend a few days being pampered in the country during any potential crisis!
You need to read a few Niven and Forward books, amongst others... and find out about the Electric Universe. How would you like to escape the planet by the simple expedient of giving your craft a truly humungous electric charge? ``Don't touch me there... [ZAP!]... never mind...''
``Can these dedicated heros reach 1,000 trillion watts and reach high yield fusion?''
I think that a better question is if they can keep the plant from self-destructing every ~100 years or so
Actually, there may be a mucheasierway. There are many more pages on this out there. Did anyone else notice the solar wind stopping for two days last March? (-:
Slashdot Mirror
when my little Nokia digital cell phone rang under my 17 inch monitor, the screen shifted to the left just before the call
these wireless devices are not as potent as the mighty 600 milliwatt cell phone
600 mW average, approx 200 WATTS peak, ballpark-equal to 1/3 of a standard (600W) microwave oven. That's how they get to kick monitors around and generally engauss them. By the way, do you hang one of these babies near your gonads when you go out? Or let it ring while it's next to your head? Just a question, think nothing of it...
Makes the WaveLAN seem even less nocuous than you said, doesn't it? (-:
> FRANCE, who assigned the 2.4ghz range to the military
...another gem from the people who invented the ordinateur. I supposed it means their military people can buy such stuff cheaper than their civvies.
If a credit-card sized CD holds 40MB, then maybe an unfoldable one that comes out double the size (less a bit for the fold) should be able to do a couple of hundred megs. With "bzip2 -9" you could fit a useable distribution on that (especially if you replace monsters like Netscape with something lighter). Q: "What do you know about Linux?" A: Reaches into wallet... "Here, install this!" You might need some reversible brackety bits that slid across the fold, flick-knife style, to make it rigid enough, but I'm sure there are ways. (-:
A standard sized gold brick is worth about $250,000. A shuttle launch cost what $20,000,000? 100 bricks to break even.
A subsidised launch is $50M, so 250 gold bricks. Real cost, what? $100M (500 bricks)? $150 (750 bricks)? Which weigh enough to seriously challenge the flying ability of a Shuttle, plus if you didn't stack them evenly about the floor of the load bay and brace them, would seriously challenge the structure of a shuttle.
Then consider the effect of dumping tens of tons of gold on the market every few months.
That's what happens when you drop a rock straight down from space to ground on Earth. It would go through all the significant atmosphere in about two seconds, maybe three. Throw a car-sized rock (say 8m3 @ say 3t/m3 = 24t) at 11km/s, and even if you lost half, that's a staggering number of joules converted to heat at impact.
Go view some footage of Shoemaker/Levy hitting Jupiter if you think throwing rocks is trivial.
...by Robert Anson Heinlen. Read it!
What's the point of asteroid mining?
Firstly, where it might cost $X a tonne to mine iron ore, get it to the processing plant and rip the iron out here on Earth, you can park a big mirror behind an asteroid, net it, spin it, and get millions of tonnes of stratified minerals for maybe $X/10 tonne. This is possible because vacuum doesn't conduct or convect heat away, and energy in the form of sunlight is readily available
Second, nasty things like oxidation don't happen in a vacuum, so processing said minerals is also easier, and achieving higher purity is also easier.
Thirdly, and most interesting from my POV, an infrastructure is necessary to do this, and can also be used for other things; and the byproducts of refining, regarded as junk on earth, are still useable as building materials and reaction mass - and are already in orbit.
If you don't want metal or other products in orbit, the solution is simple: you make a big hat-shaped thingy out of your ore, park anything else you want to deorbit inside the hat, and drop it peak-first into an ocean. A little of it ablates away during the drop, but most of it survives to float "gently" down like a shuttlecock at a few hundred miles an hour an wind up as a big metal barge floating somewhere near its final point of use. I'm sure Japan would consistently land theirs on whale herds for research purposes, but never mind.
It would lend new meaning to the phrase "at the drop of a hat" and the choice of Linux distribution to run the instrumentation on would be moot. (-:
OPEN THE FLOODGATES
Odd it is that this term you should be choosing.
Polystrate fossils, huge homogenous volumes/areas of deposits, fossil animal trackways without sign of food, "inverted" rock layers, "inclusions", short-life radio-halos, environmentally grouped fossils, extensive turbidites, yadda-yadda-yadda are all expected phenomena in a global-flood scenario, and each of these features is a broad hint that there is no debate.
And the more reasearch that scientists do, the more information there is to hand, the less debate seems possible. 250,000 fossil species have been discovered - where are the intermediates?
Somehow or other, their DNA hasn't done anything sensible in any multiverse - and when you consider the difference in scale between a potentially multiversable DNA molecule, and even the tiniest cell, the reason should be obvious.
For those reading this over morning coffee with an as-yet unstarted brain, the DNA would have to be off exploring alternatives for quite a while before any "choice" it made (teleonomy - ooh, heresy!) had an impact on the whole cell, let alone whole lifeform.
microwalking - the act of taking tiny steps to move from one end of the living room to the other
macrowalking - the act of taking tiny steps to move from Los Angeles to New York
* OOPS! *
- The reality -
microwalking - the act of crossing a crack in the pavement in one small step.
macrowalking - the act of crossing something like the Standley Chasm or between the tops of the World Trade Centre towers in a series of small steps.
For a practical example, the odds of forming a single short genome in 30 billion years from a universe made entirely of the right proteins, (ignoring mismatches, decay, chirality, space/distance and a few other minor inconveniences) are about 1E80 against. Not a working organism, just a genome. Welcome to the wonderful world of macroevolution.
What happens when the dust clears? 'Bye 'bye coyote...
Since the 140G CD is apparently on the way, and capable of holding the audio from 2000 standard CDs (suitably MP3'ed) I would guess that the copying-old-data cycle will happen only once more before we start storing video rather than just text and occasionally sound.
At the moment, I could fit every hard disk in the house (many) and all of my audio CDs on a small part of one of those. Who knows how big the next shell will be for this hermit-crab data?
When we get down to storing data at the molecular level, in crystals or similar, the crystal can spend some of its idle time rewriting and refreshing the data, the integrity guaranteed by multiple copies and serious checksums.
No huhu.
Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series (all have SSR in the title) is great, and funny, and 12yog-safe.
The Xanth series (Golem in the Gears, Question Quest, Demons Don't Dream, The Color of Her Panties, Vale of the Voles etc) was actually aimed at/near the 12yog market.
If you like "Space Opera", most of EE "Doc" Smith is 12yog safe (Lensman series, SubSpace Explorers, SkyLark).
Recommend visiting a library and browsing.
None of us know exactly how this is going to work out, but we are talking and we all realize it's important to work this out.
:-). Sun are preparing to trek around it. So long, Sun, enjoy the trip, follow the footprints when you get back.
That seems to have been SGI's attitude all along, and I must say that it's far and away the best corporate attitude I've seen in any big player.
IBM is doing good, yes, but in a relatively cold-blooded way. In essence, SGI can't see the bottom of this chasm they've come to, but are willing to try jumping it anyway. That's real courage! IBM thinks that they can see the bottom, and are in for a surprise (-: IBM-shaped hole at bottom?
For SGI's multiple commitments to the public good (hey, that's me!), I'll be recommending SGI gear over comparable equipment from elsewhere for every high-end job that I spec from now on. It won't take a great percentage of the computing public doing likewise to double SGI's turnover.
Are you listening, Sun?
...and with an iron fist, at that.
Sun really don't get it. They think that they understand Open Source and are "cleverly" trying to leverage it in their favour and to the (compared with genuine Open Source) detriment of the computing public.
In reality Sun are shooting themselves in the foot, chaining their "open" source with conditions that will scare off the vast majority of potential contributors.
On a Celery 400, copying to or from an OLD SCSI drive used less than 1/4 of the CPU that copying to or from a modern 8.4G (Quantum Fireball) IDE drive did.
Now, if only they didn't cost nearly double!
...and Linux actually has more credibility (in the eyes of mainstream press) as an embedded system than as a mainstream OS.
The competition in this market, we are told, is an embeddable version of Windows 2000. Hah! Imagine a washing machine requiring 64MB of RAM that "blueloads" and occasionally requires reformatting and reinstallation, and a toaster with no elements but four Itaniums each side of the bread, all sitting on NT's command line doing nothing.
If you wanted RAM for Quake or something, you could quadruple your PC's tally by borrowing from your appliances, or multiply your framerate tenfold by plugging your Voodoo card into your toaster and installing Linux on it!
Put a modem-and-or-network, ROM and 2x PS/2 plugs into a cartridge and you have a great TV-compatible X client with a robust TCP stack and a few other features not normally expected in a toy (e.g. run traceroutes, nmap scans, FreeCiv).
You might have to add some RAM and use an expansion connector instead of the cartridge. If you added a hard drive and some RAM, it would be about $Oz500 for an essentially complete PC system.
it takes a year of testing before Service Pack 6 can be installed
...only to discover the near-silent release of SP6a over TechNet a little later to fix up some of the faux pas in SP6.
I tried a Google search for the above phrase, a quote from Mr Ballmer, and guess who headed the hit list? (-:
16 bits x 288Mb = 4608 megaBITs (Mb).
4608Mb / 8 bits-per-byte = 576 megaBYTEs (MB).
i had an ex who was late once and it scared [...] me.
I have a Mrs who was late once and now we have a happy little baby boy. It still scared me, though. I hear it gets better around the fifth or sixth child.
288M / 9 = 32M
Silly idea, should be using SECDED instead.
My mom smokes crack
:-)
Are you sure it was your mum?
To the this-is-not-techo-news AC: haven't you ever been rebuked by MAILER-PAENGUIN for getting an address wrong? Keep on insulting them, and the Paenguins will get you! (-: So play n-i-c-e, Sid...
I took my wife and children up to my parents' place north of Geraldton without telling any of my clients, and left my mobile off from Friday afternoon to Sunday (which I normally do anyway).
All of my Linux boxes (clients and mine, including the antique Linux Mobile) would be (were, in the event) perfectly happy, and the Windows boxes would get (did get, in a few cases) precisely what they deserve. (-:
It was very relaxing. I highly recommend a few days being pampered in the country during any potential crisis!
You need to read a few Niven and Forward books, amongst others... and find out about the Electric Universe. How would you like to escape the planet by the simple expedient of giving your craft a truly humungous electric charge? ``Don't touch me there... [ZAP!]... never mind...''
I think that a better question is if they can keep the plant from self-destructing every ~100 years or so
Actually, there may be a much easier way. There are many more pages on this out there. Did anyone else notice the solar wind stopping for two days last March? (-: