People could go to their local libraries, sign out copies of Kant and Hume, and read them. They could also read up on Europe 1618 - 1648 , and get an object lesson on why letting sectarian differences spill into the political realm is a bad idea.
This will no more kill wiMax than VOIP is killing cell phones. The municipality offers service for price N, where N is something that won't make the taxpayers scream too loudly. Presume that SF goes 802.11G. Someone will decide that they need more speed, more secure connection, smoother transitions from spot to spot, and will pay to upgrade to the better service. SF's municipal network has now set a lower limit for service, and allowed people to test wireless services that never would have otherwise.
Think of TV as a model. You can get TV off the airwaves in many areas, for basically free. On the other hand, if you want Discovery, or even more sports, or Home and Garden, etc, you pay someone (cable, satellite), for that improved service. The free (i.e. soaked in advertising) version has whetted your appetite, and made you ready to be a customer for a better pay system.
This is the problem with Telco executives. They still live in the, "we don't have to care, we're the Phone Company" world. A forward thinking executive would be offering better services in a competing network in SF. A phone-jock insted whinges how someone is competing and customers have expectations.
Seriously enough, if you're having to swap code with the company you're interning with, then either hold a rear-guard action, and advocate for Java, or subvert the Borg, and insist on the Mono/C#, rather than Microsoft/C#.
OTOH, if it's for your own research, then Python + GUI toolkit is good for rapid prototyping, or there's always Sqeak. (Smalltalk with good multimedia behaviour and performance) Both of these also have the advantage of being Open, which may matter to you later. I like the elegance and history of the pure OO Smalltalk, but realize that you're not going to find hordes of other programmers comfortable with it.
It has the advantage of scale. Moving macroscopic windows about on a desktop-sized screen, with many of them located in your peripheral vision, helps with your thought process. The movements, while not ideal for typing, are also normal, daily, real-world-sized motions, which don't requires as much of a mental shift. Since you're not trying to adapt to the unnatural one hand, 1-2 finger (depending on how many buttons your mouse has) interface, and can move freely, you're spending less energy adapting yourself to the environment, and have more mental power available for thinking.
We were just playing around years ago with a stereo wall, and I found that data was easier to visualize, and the gyromouse interface was more natural than a puck on a desk. On the other hand, this was still only one handed, and there are times that you wanted to be able to use the other hand for more operations.
The average office-drone isn't going to have this technology, but architects, doctors, scientists, etc, will take to it once the space/price issues for the screens get solved.
Semiseriously, if something has evolved that 'prefers' keyboards as an appropriate environment (lots of nooks and crannies in the plastic, frequent and multiple hosts stopping by, etc), how long before something decides that keyboards are a good ecological niche, and starts eating them?
This not entirely frivolous, as we have microbes that can metabolism halohydrocarbons, and fungus capable of etching glass is a disturbingly common problem for photographers. You could get a flesh-eating bacteria from the keyboard, and it would get a plastic-eating superbug from you.
You buy their good equipment, the workstation-class Dimensions or the midrange and up serveres or their ultra-light but pricey laptops, and they will be fine for years. You buy their loss-leader home-user systems, and you'll be better off whacking yourself in the shins with a hammer.
We had a couple of the old dual-proc, PIII 220/420 systems, which were fast when they came out over four years ago and they're still running fine. Last I knew one had entered an afterlife as a NIS master, after the addition of a RAID card and some more memory. OTOH, someone bought the cheap, home-based ones, and most of those ended up being cannibalized to keep others running.
Dell can make good stuff, but their good stuff costs as much as everyone else's good stuff, and at that point, you have to start evaluating them by other criteria, such as how quickly, with how little hassle, will they fix problems, or how easily can you upgrade them in the future (*cough* rdram *cough*)
According to current articles, South Korea has a hand in maintaining the stalemate, as otherwise they'll inherit a warped, and starving, North Korea. It's the Pottery-Barn Foreign Policy again; you break it, you bought it, and even at discount, nobody wants to buy North Korea.
Re:Space Elevators guaranteed within 30-35 years
on
Space Elevator Update
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· Score: 1
Since it's probably made from buckytubes, graphite rope. Much more flexible than rigid diamond lattice.
I know it's not what the poster wanted to do, but try building some critical math package such as LAPACK or FFTW, and then running the benchmarks in an infinite loop. With a modern CPU, you need to try to keep the floating-point unit active as well. Maybe mix that with the catting of/dev/random to gzip, and try for a fairly balanced mix of float and integer instructions.
When we first bought Athlon 800s (slot-A thunderbird), they ran at a reasonable temperature, until we started doing quantum chemistry with them. At that point, the power consumption and heat went through the roof. AMD told us it was because of how the FP unit accessed cache, so we didn't see a problem until we did floating-point 24-7.
Einstein once said (supposedly), that his belief in god was the god of Spinoza. This would place him firmly in the materialist camp, and worlds away from Christianity of any stripe, and the modern, american, form of fundamentalism especially.
What I want to know, is why your dusty book is considered to be the final authority on everything, while older, equally well documented dusty books, such as those of Marduk, are denied. You (collective) are beginning to sound like the old Soviets, in their claims that they had invented all of western technology first.
"It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes." - W. Reade
Actually, we have a whole number of 'seriously fatal', excessively natural, diseases left. AIDS, Flu, Ebola, Malaria, and TB come to mind, plus the various drug-resistant streps, West Nile.
Genetic manipulation might allow us to finally treat diseases by some method other than mining other organisms for specialized toxins, then hoping the disease (which reproduces on the seconds to minutes time scale) doesn't become resistant too quickly.
If you read Barbara McClintock's work and modern genetics, you'll see there are three events to worry about; mutations, exchanges with external organisms (virus, etc) and cross-overs. (genes exchanged during replication). Some people working with GA's have found that you don't need mutations at all, as cross-over events will give you all the variability you could want.
To answer your question, think of sickle-cell anemia. One copy of the gene, and you're resistant to malaria (but not immune, i.e. it simply kills you more slowly). Two copies, and you have sickle-cell anemia, and die early. The benefit of the gene outweighs the risk only as long as you don't have effective treatments for malaria. If you have good control of malaria, then it's better that you don't have that gene at all, as the net effect is deleterious.
We can't be sure of all of the ramifications, so we should make backups of anything we delete (CVS for your genes, so to speak), but in the end if we can short-circuit the process of better adapting ourselves to our environment, then we should do it.
A thousand years ago, genes that helped you resist smallpox and survive poorly fed winters were essential. Now, genes that coded for better DNA repair and reduced fat synthesis/uptake would be a better adaptation. We can wait for them to arise naturally (teenagers start keeling over from hardening of the arteries due to our first-world diet before they can reproduce), or we can engineer them, and introduce them into volunteers.
Note: this applies to research universities, which may be loosely defined as "having a PhD programme".
This may come as a surprise to you but:
(1) Professors, especially in sciences and engineering, are there to generate money and fame (grants and papers) for the University. I've seen professors who were excellent in the classroom get canned because of failing at this. This lesson tends to stick with new professors. I just lost a colleague that way, and am in danger of losing a second, because they believed the hype about "teaching is important to this University" when they were hired.
(2) While you may have slaved over that paper for Physics I, it is doubtful that you actually have made a novel contribution to the field. As such, the professor is justified in reading your paper to see if you got the key concepts, and then moving on.
(2a) Btw, the purpose of Physics I/ Chem 101, etc, is to separate the Sheep from the Goats. The Goats will go on to more difficult and interesting material in their field, and the Sheep will be sent home to Sociology. This is how we went from 120 students in my freshmen chem class to 9 by start of junior year.
(3) Those graduate student TAs that you revile, are students too. A research professor will spend many more hours per week supervising, meeting with, and otherwise assisting in their development. They are also the key to his/her/its success or failure, and as such will occupy a much greater mind-space than will undergrads, especially undergrads in 100 level survey courses.
(4) Your coursework is only of use insofar as it prepares you for Lab work. You'll learn most of your field from working hands-on, whether that's shepherding a mass spectrometer for Chemistry or crunching equations with pencil and paper in Theoretical Cosmology. If others can't read your work to repeat it, or you can't communicate your work, then it will be ignored. Those essay papers are for your benefit, not ours. However, if we didn't grade them, you wouldn't write them.
Get off your horse, and get over yourself. If you want professors who are dedicated full-time to undergrad instruction, then go to an Undergrad-focused institution. If you want resources and people that will help you run faster and harder in your field, then go to a PhD granting institution, sign up for undergrad research, and knuckle down in the lab. I went to a decent undergrad institution, learned a lot, but it was my time as a Coop in industrial research that prepared me for graduate school. A more self-contained experience at a research university would probably have been preferable, if for no other reason than the connections.
One of the biggest problems for professors these days is the attitude from Students that they are customers of a University, and that the customer is always right. No. You bought a ticket, which allowed you entrance to the zoo. What you make of your time their is up to you.
According to a couple of people I know who are pilots, the issue with any aircraft isn't physical age, but hours in the air. This is why you can still safely buy and fly a Piper Cub, or, if you're SAC, a somewhat updated B-52, first built back in the '50s.
Those shuttles are probably finally making it to broken in, from an airframe standpoint. (even if they are approaching the day for that one, last, flight to the Air and Space Museum)
I actually did that, so ask again in six months to see if it works.
I bought Mac servers, as for the cycles they put out relatively little heat (at least compared with an Itanium), and then I specified the room had to be able to handle 80K btu of heat, continuously. So, the U. renovated a room, controlled the volume (translation: assistant professors can't have too much space), and put in a recirculating water unit with the chiller out on the roof.
If I could have afforded it, I would have use VT's approach, and cooled the rack itself, as well as having the room turned down to the limits of comfortable for the humans. However, that's for some later point down the line.
I just hope it keeps working when the winter snows settle back in, and start to cover the chiller.
The only problem with wanting to be the $6M man, was that you had to _almost_ die in a fiery rocket crash first.
Wait until the Army starts treating that bionic eye as a mandatory upgrade for all grunts. First it's a medical treatment, then a lifestyle enhancement, then a mandatory professional upgrade.
Little glowing balls of light needing encounter suits to interact with lesser life-forms. (otherwise known as 'users')
More seriously, but keeping with the pop-culture references, we're probably headed for the 'Blade Runner' or 'Neuromancer' future; certain high-end medical technologies available only for a price, while cosmetic enhancements become inexpensive, common, and virtually mandatory. With this technology, presuming that you could implant it into a good eye, you'd get the visual end of the cell-phone craze; you'd leave cameras around, and never let certain places/people/things out of your sight.
One step further, and you could view virtual environments, so the line between your world and your job will blur even further. You'll always be able to read you email, even if you don't have a keyboard to respond, for instance. Your boss willl leave you notes, knowing that you'll see them as soon as you wake up, no matter where you are.
Doesn't the beginning of Neuromancer start out with Case fretting over some chick stealing three megs of RAM from him? Maybe old shows should have a 'unit update' function built into the reruns, where anything involving computing will tack on another three orders of magnitude every few years.
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People could go to their local libraries, sign out copies of Kant and Hume, and read them. They could also read up on Europe 1618 - 1648 , and get an object lesson on why letting sectarian differences spill into the political realm is a bad idea.
This will no more kill wiMax than VOIP is killing cell phones. The municipality offers service for price N, where N is something that won't make the taxpayers scream too loudly. Presume that SF goes 802.11G. Someone will decide that they need more speed, more secure connection, smoother transitions from spot to spot, and will pay to upgrade to the better service. SF's municipal network has now set a lower limit for service, and allowed people to test wireless services that never would have otherwise.
Think of TV as a model. You can get TV off the airwaves in many areas, for basically free. On the other hand, if you want Discovery, or even more sports, or Home and Garden, etc, you pay someone (cable, satellite), for that improved service. The free (i.e. soaked in advertising) version has whetted your appetite, and made you ready to be a customer for a better pay system.
This is the problem with Telco executives. They still live in the, "we don't have to care, we're the Phone Company" world. A forward thinking executive would be offering better services in a competing network in SF. A phone-jock insted whinges how someone is competing and customers have expectations.
Seriously enough, if you're having to swap code with the company you're interning with, then either hold a rear-guard action, and advocate for Java, or subvert the Borg, and insist on the Mono/C#, rather than Microsoft/C#.
OTOH, if it's for your own research, then Python + GUI toolkit is good for rapid prototyping, or there's always Sqeak. (Smalltalk with good multimedia behaviour and performance) Both of these also have the advantage of being Open, which may matter to you later. I like the elegance and history of the pure OO Smalltalk, but realize that you're not going to find hordes of other programmers comfortable with it.
Bah. If this was correct, you'd see lots more blue women.
OTOH, if it's only an attractant for male geeks, we may have an explanation.
It has the advantage of scale. Moving macroscopic windows about on a desktop-sized screen, with many of them located in your peripheral vision, helps with your thought process. The movements, while not ideal for typing, are also normal, daily, real-world-sized motions, which don't requires as much of a mental shift. Since you're not trying to adapt to the unnatural one hand, 1-2 finger (depending on how many buttons your mouse has) interface, and can move freely, you're spending less energy adapting yourself to the environment, and have more mental power available for thinking.
We were just playing around years ago with a stereo wall, and I found that data was easier to visualize, and the gyromouse interface was more natural than a puck on a desk. On the other hand, this was still only one handed, and there are times that you wanted to be able to use the other hand for more operations.
The average office-drone isn't going to have this technology, but architects, doctors, scientists, etc, will take to it once the space/price issues for the screens get solved.
No, No. Eve was a hominid, from after the split between monkeys and the rest of the apes.
The monkeys are over in aisle three, trying to reproduce Shakespeare.
If you have an app that writes term papers for you, how much effort would it be to extend it to write grant applications as well?
Semiseriously, if something has evolved that 'prefers' keyboards as an appropriate environment (lots of nooks and crannies in the plastic, frequent and multiple hosts stopping by, etc), how long before something decides that keyboards are a good ecological niche, and starts eating them?
This not entirely frivolous, as we have microbes that can metabolism halohydrocarbons, and fungus capable of etching glass is a disturbingly common problem for photographers. You could get a flesh-eating bacteria from the keyboard, and it would get a plastic-eating superbug from you.
Seems only fair.
Call me back when you make a Nanotuba to take to TubaChristmas.
(more seriously, congrats, guys)
The first replier has the answer:
You buy their good equipment, the workstation-class Dimensions or the midrange and up serveres or their ultra-light but pricey laptops, and they will be fine for years. You buy their loss-leader home-user systems, and you'll be better off whacking yourself in the shins with a hammer.
We had a couple of the old dual-proc, PIII 220/420 systems, which were fast when they came out over four years ago and they're still running fine. Last I knew one had entered an afterlife as a NIS master, after the addition of a RAID card and some more memory. OTOH, someone bought the cheap, home-based ones, and most of those ended up being cannibalized to keep others running.
Dell can make good stuff, but their good stuff costs as much as everyone else's good stuff, and at that point, you have to start evaluating them by other criteria, such as how quickly, with how little hassle, will they fix problems, or how easily can you upgrade them in the future (*cough* rdram *cough*)
According to current articles, South Korea has a hand in maintaining the stalemate, as otherwise they'll inherit a warped, and starving, North Korea. It's the Pottery-Barn Foreign Policy again; you break it, you bought it, and even at discount, nobody wants to buy North Korea.
Since it's probably made from buckytubes, graphite rope. Much more flexible than rigid diamond lattice.
I know it's not what the poster wanted to do, but try building some critical math package such as LAPACK or FFTW, and then running the benchmarks in an infinite loop. With a modern CPU, you need to try to keep the floating-point unit active as well. Maybe mix that with the catting of /dev/random to gzip, and try for a fairly balanced mix of float and integer instructions.
When we first bought Athlon 800s (slot-A thunderbird), they ran at a reasonable temperature, until we started doing quantum chemistry with them. At that point, the power consumption and heat went through the roof. AMD told us it was because of how the FP unit accessed cache, so we didn't see a problem until we did floating-point 24-7.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but...
Einstein once said (supposedly), that his belief in god was the god of Spinoza. This would place him firmly in the materialist camp, and worlds away from Christianity of any stripe, and the modern, american, form of fundamentalism especially.
What I want to know, is why your dusty book is considered to be the final authority on everything, while older, equally well documented dusty books, such as those of Marduk, are denied. You (collective) are beginning to sound like the old Soviets, in their claims that they had invented all of western technology first.
"It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes." - W. Reade
Actually, we have a whole number of 'seriously fatal', excessively natural, diseases left. AIDS, Flu, Ebola, Malaria, and TB come to mind, plus the various drug-resistant streps, West Nile.
Genetic manipulation might allow us to finally treat diseases by some method other than mining other organisms for specialized toxins, then hoping the disease (which reproduces on the seconds to minutes time scale) doesn't become resistant too quickly.
If you read Barbara McClintock's work and modern genetics, you'll see there are three events to worry about; mutations, exchanges with external organisms (virus, etc) and cross-overs. (genes exchanged during replication). Some people working with GA's have found that you don't need mutations at all, as cross-over events will give you all the variability you could want.
To answer your question, think of sickle-cell anemia. One copy of the gene, and you're resistant to malaria (but not immune, i.e. it simply kills you more slowly). Two copies, and you have sickle-cell anemia, and die early. The benefit of the gene outweighs the risk only as long as you don't have effective treatments for malaria. If you have good control of malaria, then it's better that you don't have that gene at all, as the net effect is deleterious.
We can't be sure of all of the ramifications, so we should make backups of anything we delete (CVS for your genes, so to speak), but in the end if we can short-circuit the process of better adapting ourselves to our environment, then we should do it.
A thousand years ago, genes that helped you resist smallpox and survive poorly fed winters were essential. Now, genes that coded for better DNA repair and reduced fat synthesis/uptake would be a better adaptation. We can wait for them to arise naturally (teenagers start keeling over from hardening of the arteries due to our first-world diet before they can reproduce), or we can engineer them, and introduce them into volunteers.
Given the codebase's history, they'll be VMS permissions.
Finally, files will be set [RWED], and you'll need SYSPRV or OPERATOR in order to be allowed to touch your machine.
I knew I saved the Grey Wall for a reason!
Heat and insulation.
If you're below the Mason-Dixon line, and between Mar 1 and Oct 31, then they have no use and should be sent back to storage.
Note: this applies to research universities, which may be loosely defined as "having a PhD programme". This may come as a surprise to you but: (1) Professors, especially in sciences and engineering, are there to generate money and fame (grants and papers) for the University. I've seen professors who were excellent in the classroom get canned because of failing at this. This lesson tends to stick with new professors. I just lost a colleague that way, and am in danger of losing a second, because they believed the hype about "teaching is important to this University" when they were hired. (2) While you may have slaved over that paper for Physics I, it is doubtful that you actually have made a novel contribution to the field. As such, the professor is justified in reading your paper to see if you got the key concepts, and then moving on. (2a) Btw, the purpose of Physics I/ Chem 101, etc, is to separate the Sheep from the Goats. The Goats will go on to more difficult and interesting material in their field, and the Sheep will be sent home to Sociology. This is how we went from 120 students in my freshmen chem class to 9 by start of junior year. (3) Those graduate student TAs that you revile, are students too. A research professor will spend many more hours per week supervising, meeting with, and otherwise assisting in their development. They are also the key to his/her/its success or failure, and as such will occupy a much greater mind-space than will undergrads, especially undergrads in 100 level survey courses. (4) Your coursework is only of use insofar as it prepares you for Lab work. You'll learn most of your field from working hands-on, whether that's shepherding a mass spectrometer for Chemistry or crunching equations with pencil and paper in Theoretical Cosmology. If others can't read your work to repeat it, or you can't communicate your work, then it will be ignored. Those essay papers are for your benefit, not ours. However, if we didn't grade them, you wouldn't write them. Get off your horse, and get over yourself. If you want professors who are dedicated full-time to undergrad instruction, then go to an Undergrad-focused institution. If you want resources and people that will help you run faster and harder in your field, then go to a PhD granting institution, sign up for undergrad research, and knuckle down in the lab. I went to a decent undergrad institution, learned a lot, but it was my time as a Coop in industrial research that prepared me for graduate school. A more self-contained experience at a research university would probably have been preferable, if for no other reason than the connections. One of the biggest problems for professors these days is the attitude from Students that they are customers of a University, and that the customer is always right. No. You bought a ticket, which allowed you entrance to the zoo. What you make of your time their is up to you.
Having just graded a chemistry midterm that was mostly essay questions, I'd like to say, "If I can't read it, I'm not grading it".
Come on people; buy a mechanical pencil or a pencil sharpener, or learn to type. Cuneiform tablets would have been a step up from most of those exams.
According to a couple of people I know who are pilots, the issue with any aircraft isn't physical age, but hours in the air. This is why you can still safely buy and fly a Piper Cub, or, if you're SAC, a somewhat updated B-52, first built back in the '50s.
Those shuttles are probably finally making it to broken in, from an airframe standpoint. (even if they are approaching the day for that one, last, flight to the Air and Space Museum)
I actually did that, so ask again in six months to see if it works.
I bought Mac servers, as for the cycles they put out relatively little heat (at least compared with an Itanium), and then I specified the room had to be able to handle 80K btu of heat, continuously. So, the U. renovated a room, controlled the volume (translation: assistant professors can't have too much space), and put in a recirculating water unit with the chiller out on the roof.
If I could have afforded it, I would have use VT's approach, and cooled the rack itself, as well as having the room turned down to the limits of comfortable for the humans. However, that's for some later point down the line.
I just hope it keeps working when the winter snows settle back in, and start to cover the chiller.
The only problem with wanting to be the $6M man, was that you had to _almost_ die in a fiery rocket crash first.
Wait until the Army starts treating that bionic eye as a mandatory upgrade for all grunts. First it's a medical treatment, then a lifestyle enhancement, then a mandatory professional upgrade.
Little glowing balls of light needing encounter suits to interact with lesser life-forms. (otherwise known as 'users')
More seriously, but keeping with the pop-culture references, we're probably headed for the 'Blade Runner' or 'Neuromancer' future; certain high-end medical technologies available only for a price, while cosmetic enhancements become inexpensive, common, and virtually mandatory. With this technology, presuming that you could implant it into a good eye, you'd get the visual end of the cell-phone craze; you'd leave cameras around, and never let certain places/people/things out of your sight.
One step further, and you could view virtual environments, so the line between your world and your job will blur even further. You'll always be able to read you email, even if you don't have a keyboard to respond, for instance. Your boss willl leave you notes, knowing that you'll see them as soon as you wake up, no matter where you are.
Doesn't the beginning of Neuromancer start out with Case fretting over some chick stealing three megs of RAM from him? Maybe old shows should have a 'unit update' function built into the reruns, where anything involving computing will tack on another three orders of magnitude every few years.