OTOH, seriously, win calculator on 32 bit Win2000 under VMWare on the same machine takes exactly 120 seconds, on par with my home Athlon XP 2000+. Impressive, for an emulated machine!
Ha! My super-optimized Gentoo x86-64 system, running on a 2 GHz Turion64 CPU, all unnecessary services and processes killed, under optimal condition (downslope, wind from behind, air temp below 10C) uses exactly zero seconds to tell me "Error" in kcalc...
I tried to get some information about this asteroid, bu as soon as i read the word "Au" small $ signs appeared in my eyes and I was unable to read further.
Putting aside for a moment the artistic effects, this project could be turned in a distortion-free ultra-cheap ultra-hi-res digital camera. You only need to "fix" the image so that it stands still while the scanner works. For example, you could expose to light a plate covered with some photo-sensitive chemical (like, for example, a silver halide) and then putting that in front of the scanner. I wonder why nobody thought of this before...
Speaking as the last living Flores Man, I can well see what isolation has done to you poor Sapiens. Indeed, being segregated away from our beautiful Flores land somehow made your bodies huge, probably to the detriment of your brains. I can't imagine what life conditions you must endure living cramped on that small rock you call "World", but overcrowding alone must make it terrible! At least, based on what I read daily here on Slashdot.
Best regards.
It's a fundamental speed that turns up in lots of places
Not here. Not nearly.
Moreover, who cares about relativistic effects on interstellar probes? The travel may seem to be short by the probe's point of view, but it will still take years for us on Earth. And it's not difficult to build a robot with infinite patience.
I fail to understand what is the point in comparing natural radiation speed in a vacuum (don't declinate, if you are not speaking Latin) with artificial physical object speed in the atmosphere.
Well, in one sense he is stealing to the rich (us first worlders) in order to give to the poor (third worlders)... He just gets to keep a percentage for himself.
I agree. With all the sarcasm about Hayabusa probe failures, it has been underreported how innovative the mission is in the field of autonomous navigation. Both NASA and ESA are doing a lot of research in the same field, as it's what is badly needed in order to make robotic exploration more and more effective, especially when your probe is 2 UA away and the Sun gets in the way of control signals. But the Japanese can build on decades of AI research that most of us laughed at one time or another. What is an Asimo robot good for, after all? Put something similar on Mars with the ability to think by itself "What's that unusual shiny patch? I'll take a closer look at it while I wait for Mission Control's next assignment...". Then you (them, the Japanese) get maybe 75% of what a human explorer can discover (or build) while spending less than 10% as much.
Far from being an expert in orbital dynamics, I suspect that solar radiation would accelerate this structure while it's on one half of its orbit, and slow it down it when it's on the other half. Shouldn't the forces compensate? Or maybe it would result in an orbit more and more elliptical, until it intersecates Earth's athmosphere?
The video is very interesting, well produced and informative, indeed. I'd like to recommend it to the many complaining about NASA's role and the usefulness of Low Earth Orbit science.
I agree strongly. As soon as they (finally! It's been delayed a lot!) turn on this remarkable instrument, we immediately get to see the depths of Martian ground. Huge buried craters with no sign on the surface, a section of northern polar icecap, maybe a buried lake! There's no need to argue endlessly about solid/liquid water, whether it was previously detected or not, or even about implications for life on Mars. The fact is, we now have a new window to look at Mars in a different way. I wish to congratulate Prof. Giovanni Picardi from Rome University 'La Sapienza' (Roma, Italia) and all the people who designed, built and operated MARSIS.
As for a depth indication, the press release says:
The planar reflection is consistent with a flat interface that separates the floor of the basin, situated at a depth of about 1.5 to 2.5 km, from a layer of overlying different material.
They put a vertical marker indicating a 50mus interval. The reason for the use of a time scale instead of a space one (and for the big error margin in the depth estimate) is due to the fact that all they are measuring is the radar pulse travel time. Since EM radiation travels at different speeds in different unknown materials, at first you only get a broad estimate of vertical distances. When you have a good estimate of the ground composition (mainly from the reflections' strength) you can be more precise.
The article probably misses the point by looking at files of omogeneous type, but the problem with current... erm... paradigm (sorry for the swearword, couldn't think of a better one) for managing files is real. The problem lies not in the manager, but in the storage mechanism itself: the hierarchical filesystem. We all hit the point, sooner or later, where the organization of data in our mind can't be matched with a rigid directory hierarchy. What is really needed is a graph organization. Links and metadata help up to a point, but in order to make things work smoothly it will probably be necessary to abandon current ideas about directories as "containers", slash-separated file paths, filenames as unique identifiers (and attributes as mere extensions of the filenames), probably even the graphical interface used to access and manipulate the filesystem. The listed applications do their best, but they still work at a level too high to replace a file manager. I don't have a solution. Maybe Reiser4 can be of some help.
Oh, I guess this will be modded down because I said "paradigm", anyway...
Patents aside, I wonder how much of current global economy is fueled by this kind of nonsense. $A_COMPANY gettin money from $ANOTHER_COMPANY, as long as $A_COMPANY's lawyers don't do $LEGAL_ACTION to $ANOTHER_COMPANY's lawyers while they are litigating $YET_ANOTHER_COMPANY about what they shouldn't have done to $A_COMPANY according to an agreement which wasn't to be disclosed except in front of $REGULATOR_BODY's lawyers... and so on ad nauseam.
Maybe a lawyer could find a sense (wrong, of course) in the previous sentence, but it was intended as an example of the insanity of an out-of-control system where wealth is exchanged on the basis of what one doesn't do.
have "Warning: Only A Theory" stickers slapped on Stephen Hawking, as well as Einstein and Newton's tombs
Nice. Applying one of those d-e-a-n-a-m-o things, we may well get some free electricity out of all the spinning that is about to occur. At least, in theory.
Slashdot Mirror
OTOH, seriously, win calculator on 32 bit Win2000 under VMWare on the same machine takes exactly 120 seconds, on par with my home Athlon XP 2000+. Impressive, for an emulated machine!
Ha! My super-optimized Gentoo x86-64 system, running on a 2 GHz Turion64 CPU, all unnecessary services and processes killed, under optimal condition (downslope, wind from behind, air temp below 10C) uses exactly zero seconds to tell me "Error" in kcalc...
No doubt, the heat is on their processors!
I tried to get some information about this asteroid, bu as soon as i read the word "Au" small $ signs appeared in my eyes and I was unable to read further.
Is it just me, or it's getting more and more difficult to tell sarcasm from assertion?
Putting aside for a moment the artistic effects, this project could be turned in a distortion-free ultra-cheap ultra-hi-res digital camera. You only need to "fix" the image so that it stands still while the scanner works. For example, you could expose to light a plate covered with some photo-sensitive chemical (like, for example, a silver halide) and then putting that in front of the scanner. I wonder why nobody thought of this before...
Speaking as the last living Flores Man, I can well see what isolation has done to you poor Sapiens. Indeed, being segregated away from our beautiful Flores land somehow made your bodies huge, probably to the detriment of your brains. I can't imagine what life conditions you must endure living cramped on that small rock you call "World", but overcrowding alone must make it terrible! At least, based on what I read daily here on Slashdot.
Best regards.
P.S.: Anybody here with a short sister?
I'd love to be able to read The Fine Article, if only my vision hadn't been severely impaired by too many hours watching crap TV on a Video Ipod!
Wow! Can't imagine what the rest of the people are, then!
Not here. Not nearly. Moreover, who cares about relativistic effects on interstellar probes? The travel may seem to be short by the probe's point of view, but it will still take years for us on Earth. And it's not difficult to build a robot with infinite patience.
Let's hope for a smoother reentry than that of the Genesis probe
I fail to understand what is the point in comparing natural radiation speed in a vacuum (don't declinate, if you are not speaking Latin) with artificial physical object speed in the atmosphere.
...i meant "orthography", of course! The same about spellcheeking... No, wait!
Well, in one sense he is stealing to the rich (us first worlders) in order to give to the poor (third worlders)... He just gets to keep a percentage for himself.
...while ortography is obviously dead!
What does Uranus have to do with genitalia? Oh... I see. Sorry, didn't want to sound insensitive.
I agree. With all the sarcasm about Hayabusa probe failures, it has been underreported how innovative the mission is in the field of autonomous navigation. Both NASA and ESA are doing a lot of research in the same field, as it's what is badly needed in order to make robotic exploration more and more effective, especially when your probe is 2 UA away and the Sun gets in the way of control signals. But the Japanese can build on decades of AI research that most of us laughed at one time or another. What is an Asimo robot good for, after all? Put something similar on Mars with the ability to think by itself "What's that unusual shiny patch? I'll take a closer look at it while I wait for Mission Control's next assignment...". Then you (them, the Japanese) get maybe 75% of what a human explorer can discover (or build) while spending less than 10% as much.
Far from being an expert in orbital dynamics, I suspect that solar radiation would accelerate this structure while it's on one half of its orbit, and slow it down it when it's on the other half. Shouldn't the forces compensate? Or maybe it would result in an orbit more and more elliptical, until it intersecates Earth's athmosphere?
The video is very interesting, well produced and informative, indeed. I'd like to recommend it to the many complaining about NASA's role and the usefulness of Low Earth Orbit science.
This sounds good, but you can't say that Sun's behaviour recently has been spotless...
The article probably misses the point by looking at files of omogeneous type, but the problem with current... erm... paradigm (sorry for the swearword, couldn't think of a better one) for managing files is real. The problem lies not in the manager, but in the storage mechanism itself: the hierarchical filesystem. We all hit the point, sooner or later, where the organization of data in our mind can't be matched with a rigid directory hierarchy. What is really needed is a graph organization. Links and metadata help up to a point, but in order to make things work smoothly it will probably be necessary to abandon current ideas about directories as "containers", slash-separated file paths, filenames as unique identifiers (and attributes as mere extensions of the filenames), probably even the graphical interface used to access and manipulate the filesystem. The listed applications do their best, but they still work at a level too high to replace a file manager. I don't have a solution. Maybe Reiser4 can be of some help.
Oh, I guess this will be modded down because I said "paradigm", anyway...
Patents aside, I wonder how much of current global economy is fueled by this kind of nonsense. $A_COMPANY gettin money from $ANOTHER_COMPANY, as long as $A_COMPANY's lawyers don't do $LEGAL_ACTION to $ANOTHER_COMPANY's lawyers while they are litigating $YET_ANOTHER_COMPANY about what they shouldn't have done to $A_COMPANY according to an agreement which wasn't to be disclosed except in front of $REGULATOR_BODY's lawyers... and so on ad nauseam. Maybe a lawyer could find a sense (wrong, of course) in the previous sentence, but it was intended as an example of the insanity of an out-of-control system where wealth is exchanged on the basis of what one doesn't do.
The so-called "Dark Side" of the Moon is actually dark! At least, stripes of it...