I've felt for a while that download sites are the new [redacted], except they're accessible over a different protocol. A "premium account" is a subscription, more or less.
Are companies actually integrating these products? -24 dBi performance isn't so hot, though it would probably be good enough for an urban area. I expect that a headphone cable would do better.
I was at Berkeley a few years ago, and I don't think we had any logic design courses that used logic family chips. The class I took in the EE department was FPGA based. While it's possible to do really amazing things with a chip that's basically a sea of logic, I fear that today's EEs are losing familiarity with the physical layer.
It's interesting that the class you took is offered by the Physics department, and not the EE department.
I dunno about MMOs, but my friend was telling me about this "crappy Chinese RPG" he was playing. Apparently he got to the final boss and was expecting this big, huge, epic battle. So when he hit the boss a few times and the boss proceeded to roll over and die, he was pretty disappointed.
The connections are between copper bus bars. Superconducting material is typically clad in copper and it's the copper that gets soldered together. The joints need to have a resistance of less than 25 nano-Ohms, which seems to be the difficult part.
But it's not that hard to build a small machine that has an unstable plasma. The original Stellerator, in 1951, did that.
Uh, the advantage of a Stellarator is that it's a stable configuration... relatively speaking.
And indeed it is not difficult to build a machine with an unstable plasma. The history of magnetic confinement fusion research is "oh I've got this great idea for a stable plasma configuration" followed by "we built it and found out that it's not stable enough."
Interesting report, though the spin is strong with this one. I was a bit surprised at that $79 billion number. Looking at the source material, though, it's not that shocking. The figure includes all expenditure related to climate change, which casts a pretty wide net: DOE, NASA, NSF, USAID, Commerce, EPA, Agriculture, HHS, Treasury, DoD, Interior, Transportation, State, Smithsonian, HUD, Trade.
I find it more interesting that despite all the obvious signs that the Bush administration was anti-science, the climate-change research budget increased while he was in office.
But man, this paper... "Lots of one-sided honest research does not make for fair debate". "Thousands of scientists have been funded to find a connection between human carbon emissions and the climate. Hardly any have been funded to find the opposite." This is just wrong on so many levels, and betrays a faulty understanding of both the scientific method and statistical analysis.
There's a lot more awful stuff, but eh, enough already.
I think people might be coming to actually *expect* good looking graphics too, so when they see a game that is not aestetically pleasing as games of a similar type this would make getting immersed in the game more difficult.
It hinders people from playing older games too. A friend of mine (who didn't get into PC gaming until ~2004) is unwilling to play games like Deus Ex due to the dated graphics, no matter how much I rave about the gameplay.
Fusion is not 100 years away. It's already been achieved in JET, for example. What's 50-100 years away is a practical commercial fusion power plant with a lifetime measured in years.
In order to be practical, a fusion plant has to produce net power. ITER is expected to do that.
However, the materials issue remains. The interior of a tokamak, the "first wall", has to be able to withstand an intense neutron flux without degrading. ITER is going to be made out of stainless steel, which is fine for research; it wouldn't hold up very long in a 24x365 environment. For a commercial reactor, we don't have an ideal first wall material yet.
These cost overruns and delays over the history of the ITER program have been ridiculous. I'm not sure whether canning ITER is a good idea. Scaling it back might be, but the problem is, a new reactor needs to be significantly larger than existing ones, in order to explore a different part of the parameter space. Large = still expensive.
At this point, the most important part of the ITER program, IMO, is the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility. We need better materials.
My understanding is that we have QCD equations all figured out, but doing stuff like perturbative QCD is computationally or analytically intractable. There's a lot of work in Lattice QCD, which is QCD done on a grid, but of course this is an approximation approach.
From the headline I expected this to be about some persistence of vision application. Now that would be cool. Just imagine people waving their cellphones at each other.
And please, for the love of God, when I type in the part number which I know in advance is correct for the datasheet I'm seeking, return at least *one* authoritative hit in the top ten from the actual company that makes the part in question (by the billions, in some cases). Argh!!!! Argh!!!!!! Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Some vendors manage to place themselves in the top ten for their own parts, most don't. What's the problem? Is serving up your own data sheet too much like support and not enough like sales? Are these companies deliberately detuning their search results? The situation baffles me.
Yeah, I hate when that happens. The biggest offender in my book is Phillips/NXP. I think it's because semiconductor companies like to "refresh" their websites a lot, so pages move around and the pagerank has to be reestablished. Dunno.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, two bad analogies in one post?
This Tilera product doesn't look like an FPGA. Standard cell ASIC, maybe, but definitely not an FPGA.
I've felt for a while that download sites are the new [redacted], except they're accessible over a different protocol. A "premium account" is a subscription, more or less.
Are companies actually integrating these products? -24 dBi performance isn't so hot, though it would probably be good enough for an urban area. I expect that a headphone cable would do better.
http://www.fractus.com/sales_documents/FR01-B3-W-0-055/DS_FR01-B3-W-0-055.pdf
NAND Flash is not RAM. It is a kind of EEPROM.
Yeah, CHDK is awesome. I haven't tried all the features, but biggest thing for me is RAW support on a point-n-shoot (I have a Canon SD1000).
That's a neat trick, but why bother when phonetic methods are so much faster?
I was at Berkeley a few years ago, and I don't think we had any logic design courses that used logic family chips. The class I took in the EE department was FPGA based. While it's possible to do really amazing things with a chip that's basically a sea of logic, I fear that today's EEs are losing familiarity with the physical layer.
It's interesting that the class you took is offered by the Physics department, and not the EE department.
When did you go to college? These days I'm afraid they might not have courses like the one you described.
I dunno about MMOs, but my friend was telling me about this "crappy Chinese RPG" he was playing. Apparently he got to the final boss and was expecting this big, huge, epic battle. So when he hit the boss a few times and the boss proceeded to roll over and die, he was pretty disappointed.
So yeah, how about balance issues?
I like how your comment was moderated "Informative".
The connections are between copper bus bars. Superconducting material is typically clad in copper and it's the copper that gets soldered together. The joints need to have a resistance of less than 25 nano-Ohms, which seems to be the difficult part.
http://gordonwatts.wordpress.com/2009/07/05/energy-vs-power-vs-heat-vs-oh-no/
Perfectly reasonable circuits just refuse to simulate, even when good initial conditions are set. Now it's possible I've been doing something wrong.
What's a "reasonable circuit" for you? Most likely you are doing something wrong. ;_;
But it's not that hard to build a small machine that has an unstable plasma.
The original Stellerator, in 1951, did that.
Uh, the advantage of a Stellarator is that it's a stable configuration... relatively speaking.
And indeed it is not difficult to build a machine with an unstable plasma. The history of magnetic confinement fusion research is "oh I've got this great idea for a stable plasma configuration" followed by "we built it and found out that it's not stable enough."
I just installed using the automatic updates thing (prompt before install) and I was not asked to reboot.
Interesting report, though the spin is strong with this one. I was a bit surprised at that $79 billion number. Looking at the source material, though, it's not that shocking. The figure includes all expenditure related to climate change, which casts a pretty wide net: DOE, NASA, NSF, USAID, Commerce, EPA, Agriculture, HHS, Treasury, DoD, Interior, Transportation, State, Smithsonian, HUD, Trade.
I find it more interesting that despite all the obvious signs that the Bush administration was anti-science, the climate-change research budget increased while he was in office.
But man, this paper... "Lots of one-sided honest research does not make for fair debate". "Thousands of scientists have been funded to find a connection between human carbon emissions and the climate. Hardly any have been funded to find the opposite." This is just wrong on so many levels, and betrays a faulty understanding of both the scientific method and statistical analysis.
There's a lot more awful stuff, but eh, enough already.
I think people might be coming to actually *expect* good looking graphics too, so when they see a game that is not aestetically pleasing as games of a similar type this would make getting immersed in the game more difficult.
It hinders people from playing older games too. A friend of mine (who didn't get into PC gaming until ~2004) is unwilling to play games like Deus Ex due to the dated graphics, no matter how much I rave about the gameplay.
I have a Lenovo L220x, which is a 1920x1200 22" PVA. They seem to have discontinued it, though, unfortunately.
Item two parallels some of the arguments made in The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Yes, there would be neutron activation in the stainless steel, creating cobalt-60 which is pretty nasty.
Fusion is not 100 years away. It's already been achieved in JET, for example. What's 50-100 years away is a practical commercial fusion power plant with a lifetime measured in years.
In order to be practical, a fusion plant has to produce net power. ITER is expected to do that.
However, the materials issue remains. The interior of a tokamak, the "first wall", has to be able to withstand an intense neutron flux without degrading. ITER is going to be made out of stainless steel, which is fine for research; it wouldn't hold up very long in a 24x365 environment. For a commercial reactor, we don't have an ideal first wall material yet.
These cost overruns and delays over the history of the ITER program have been ridiculous. I'm not sure whether canning ITER is a good idea. Scaling it back might be, but the problem is, a new reactor needs to be significantly larger than existing ones, in order to explore a different part of the parameter space. Large = still expensive.
At this point, the most important part of the ITER program, IMO, is the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility. We need better materials.
When I had to work with Fortran 77, I just went to the first google hit for "fortran tutorial".
http://folk.uio.no/steikr/doc/f77/tutorial/
It's pretty straightforward, once you understand the archaic numbering and spacing requirements. Fun in a strange way.
My understanding is that we have QCD equations all figured out, but doing stuff like perturbative QCD is computationally or analytically intractable. There's a lot of work in Lattice QCD, which is QCD done on a grid, but of course this is an approximation approach.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD
I know my group's experimental work has something to do with deriving more useful QCD equations, but my understanding stops there.
From the headline I expected this to be about some persistence of vision application. Now that would be cool. Just imagine people waving their cellphones at each other.
With the S2 engine, the Eva's operation time is extended to infinity. Kinda hard to beat.
And please, for the love of God, when I type in the part number which I know in advance is correct for the datasheet I'm seeking, return at least *one* authoritative hit in the top ten from the actual company that makes the part in question (by the billions, in some cases). Argh!!!! Argh!!!!!! Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Some vendors manage to place themselves in the top ten for their own parts, most don't. What's the problem? Is serving up your own data sheet too much like support and not enough like sales? Are these companies deliberately detuning their search results? The situation baffles me.
Yeah, I hate when that happens. The biggest offender in my book is Phillips/NXP. I think it's because semiconductor companies like to "refresh" their websites a lot, so pages move around and the pagerank has to be reestablished. Dunno.