Well, technically it's more energy out than in. But there are reactants and products, and the energy you get out is the difference between the energy of the reactants and the energy of the products. Twice the bond energy holding the nucleus of an atom of hydrogen together is greater than the bond energy holding together the nucleus of the resultant He atom.
I saw either this or another story with the same arguments recently. It seems to me that lots of people expect change to occur in a relatively smooth, continuous fashion. The theory of punctuated equilibria, at least with respect to human civilization, says that things like social change stay relatively stagnant for long periods of time, and then rapidly change over a short period of time. Perhaps this also applies to technology.
Anyone who's ever worked on a decently sized project knows that you run into lots of dead ends and problems. Eventually, after you've run into enough of them, everything just works, and it's relatively clear sailing. Now, scale this up to the world on a large scale. There's more brains working on it, but the problems are more immense: renewable energy, space travel, nanotech, AI, making websites that don't suck.
It's quite possible that we're just in a lull period where change is rapid, but having little effect on our lives. That is to say, we're running into those dead ends faster than ever. For example, there are thousands of researchers all over the world poking and prodding at various carbon nanotubes, strands of DNA, silicon MEMS, etc. It'll probably be another 15-20 years, but eventually some unshaven grad student is going to yell 'Eureka!' and start pouring champagne down his pants. There are also dozens of companies working on the gravity well problem, or how to get things into low Earth orbit, where it's easy to launch stuff from. Eventually one of them will get the right cost/benefit ratio for the market to adopt it. Right now, though, it's just a bunch of engineers burning through capital.
The person who wrote this article does not have much appreciation for the behavior of complex systems (i.e. Humans and Technology). We may not be seeing the benefits for a while, but that's not to say all our current work is in vain. Just like Edison said..he discovered a thousand ways not to make a light bulb before he finally got it right. There will always be a huge mound of dead and dying poorly implemented technologies before a killer app emerges.
Re:J. Storrs-Hall's space ramp
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
Humans regularly do 10+ g's in centrifuges. Humans have done more than that on rocket sleds (given, all the capillaries in their face broke and they were as a result bruised all over).
10 g's accelerating you while you face forward is not so bad as 10 g's in a jet even. The latter forces blood into your feet, causing you to pass out. The former would just force blood to the back of your body. If sitting, this would simply result in blood flowing out of your legs and into your chest and head. Big deal.
On the other hand, at around 47g your eyes explode and you die.
Glucose is a solid. I think you're thinking of glycerol, which gives you the added benefit of a few seconds between mixing it with the KMnO4 and ignition.
Actually, the speed of light in a material is 1/sqrt(permittivity * permeability), with relative permittivity and permeability both equal to 1 (free space), the speed of light (and hence the electric field) is equal to approximately 3e8 m/s. But in semiconductors on a chip, a closer approximation is 1.5e8 m/s, or half the speed of light. So, given your math, 1.5cm, divided by 2.54 for inches, and that's ~0.591 inches. That's almost so small that by the time the electric field of the clock pulse ripples across the chip the next one's already started elsewhere.
I think IBM or somebody has started doing segments of chips in synchronous sections, linked somewhat asynchronously, or at least each using independent clock pulses, to better approximate synchronized switching.
Actually, we don't use the same thing that was invented in 1947 for ICs now. There are all kinds of transistors. BJTs, IGBTs, FETs, MOSFETs. The latter being the type used in modern semiconductor technology. Forgive any errors (I've not yet taken solid state), but whereas a conventional transistor emits a collector-emitter current proportional (the gain) to the base-emitter current, a MOSFET's gate is a capacitor (in fact the capacitors used for DRAM are just MOSFETs) where the current through them is proportional to the voltage across the gate. They are much more disposed to on-off operation than operation over a linear region, because it requires minimal (gate capacitor leakage current) energy to maintain a MOSFET gate state, whereas to represent a '1' on a BJT would take a constant supply of current, irregardless of whether it had changed recently or not.
BJT = Bipolar Junction Transistor
IGBT = Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor
FET = Field Effect Transistor
MOSFET = Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor
As you can see, there have been many advances more significant than having the boys in the back room develop a better/smaller/faster/more powerful widget.
I see a lot of people softly admitting that this is probably too much protection for any law abiding citizen, and only needed by criminals. Perhaps. I see that there are a few technical issues with the system, but there are political ones I would rather bear out now.
There are plenty of people throughout history who were criminals, some of whom were spied on by their government, such as MLK. With current trends, there undoubtedly will be uses for encryption by activists in the future.
Remember, a criminal is someone who breaks the law. Well, what is a good citizen to do when most of the laws are patently unconstitutional? Become a criminal, if they're really serious about democracy. Note that I'm not talking about Napster and other BS that Slashdot drones typically view as civil disobedience. There are much more important issues in the world, and it's important we take into account that there are people who fear for their lives because they act in accordance with beliefs which most of us share.
The only way to keep government even remotely just is to confound it at every turn with encryption, red tape, and other confusion. It certainly won't happen in McCongress or the Supreme Court w/ Cheese.
Actually, his title is a bit of misnomer. I don't know why he named it that. If you'd actually read the essay, you'd know that he says that in the beginning was *really* batch processing. In his high school CS class they called up a University mainframe and sent it batch commands and got results back. Only later did they maintain a live connection and enter commands one at a time, ala command line.
Well, technically it's mAh, if you want to get picky with case. And..what the hell are you talking about? Some existing lead acid batteries are as small as 80mAh, and some are thousands of Ah (like on submarines, only banks of batteries that size). Just increase the plate size and/or put smaller cells in parallel and series to achieve the desired voltage/internal resistance (and hence power density). Higher energy density => less weight per Joule => feasible electric/hybrid cars. Of course flywheels still have my favor, but hopefully these new batteries will be a little less bitchy than these newer, high tech, poorly designed battery technologies. Ooh, look. Lithium Ion. Charge me improperly and I'll blow flaming liquid electrolyte everywhere. Just the sort of thing I want in a computer on my lap. Something to be said for flywheels and lead acid batteries. Pretty much just dump energy into them and they'll sort it out.
Well, technically you don't have to buy DVDs, watch TV, listen to the radio, etc. I don't own a TV and I can't say I miss it.
The real question is..when do we decide that it's no longer possible to effect change in government from the inside? The very same Declaration of Independence tells us that we can take what firearms we still have and start ventilating jack booted thugs left and right if that's the case. Will it ever get that desperate, or can we still turn back?
Me, I'm voting for Harry Browne. But I've also got a rifle and lots of hollow point ammo. Whatever. For now I'm just a pissed off engineering student.
SMP Athlons will be out before the end of the year, utilizing the AMD 760MP chipset. The chipset has already been previewed in single proc configuration on Anandtech, I think. The main point of the preview being DDR SDRAM.
I'm seeing a lot of posts to the effect that this is a ripoff of Robot Wars UK. It's not. Robot Wars has been around in the US since 1995, but that effort was plagued by legal troubles and general bad blood, and the Robot Wars name got auctioned, I guess to Mentorn (who does Robot Wars UK). Battlebots has been around for a while now, and they've been having competitions for over a year. BotBash exists too, although it's somewhat different.
Battlebots exists primarily to fill the void left by Robot Wars's absence in the US, not to imitate Robot Wars UK.
They actually take the time to put together events that aren't necessarily always in the same place in the US every few months, which is a Good Thing. Meaning..shows that those of us on this side of the Atlantic can go to, possibly.
I've got a few gripes, though, really. The Robot Wars UK people live and breathe stupid jargon. They're basically sports announcers, but really horrible.
And also..it's more like Robot boxing, or wrestling, than Robot Wars. If you want to get a few dozen robots, put them out in the woods as separate teams, and let them fight it out, that might be more deserving of the moniker.
There's better equipment in the pipe. NASA (unless the budget for it's been cut..I haven't heard much about it lately) is planning on deploying, sometime this decade (okay, next decade. 2001-2010, whatever), I think perhaps 2008 or so, a big interferometer in a static position out near Jupiter. An interferometer in this case is several optical telescopes (4 of them) mounted colinearly on a track, and moved with micron precision along it for focus. The multiple detectors allow astronomers to block out the glare of a faraway star, say Epsilon Eridani, and look at things around it. So we could actually get pictures of this planet, and maybe (hopefully) other, smaller, rockier, wetter planets.
I have to admit I wouldn't go. Not now. Visit, maybe. Not that I'm one of those 'Let's solve our problems here first!/Won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-children ??' reactionaries. Just it'd be harder for me to build better technology if I was struggling for survival, and I'd rather be building better technology (yes, specifically space related stuff). Colonization of Mars will happen just like any other frontier. It'll attract people who don't have a whole lot to look forward to in the status quo ("The Other Shoe", anyone?), people looking for economic opportunity (land prospectors, gold rush crazies, etc..imagine if you got up there now and cornered the water market on Mars..you'd be pretty rich later on, although a Total Recall-esque Mars regime leaves a bad taste in my mouth). When people packed their bags to move to the western US, they'd often simply liquidate all their belongings, their life savings, etc. to pay for it. If a family had all their insurance policies bought out, sold their house and cars, all their possessions, cashed in retirement funds, they could probably afford a trip to Mars within a few decades. I just hope this time there aren't any Native Americans/Martians that have to get slaughtered in droves before the rest of the human race feels like joining the first settlers.
Are rockets really what commercial space ventures should be using? Chemical rockets,that is. They're big, heavy, expensive, and dirty (there's more to it than 2H2 + O2 => 2H20. Lots of hydrazine and who knows what else). If chemical rockets were hard to come by, but there were still a big market for getting stuff up into space, wouldn't it just accelerate the development of more efficient launch systems? This will only provide less of an incentive to improve.
Do you happen to know where GnoLM can be found? The original maintainer/author has moved his page, and it's not there (although some other Linux projects can be found there), so one can't get it from freshmeat. I've tried both an ftpsearch and google for the tarball and can't find it.
You can buy Townshend's music (pretty much directly from him, I believe, with no RIAA middleman) at www.eelpie.com, or just find out more about Pete Townshend at www.petetownshend.com, which used to be Linux-Netscape friendly, but I can't get to display properly anymore.
Eel Pie is mainly Pete Townshend's solo stuff. For classic Who stuff, you can get that pretty much anywhere.
I grabbed the Lifehouse Chronicles 6 CD box set when it came out back in February (and submitted it to Slashdot..rejected), so it's really the single CD version that's coming out now, which obviously doesn't have as much material. The box set's a little pricey (40 pounds), but they still sell it, and I don't regret for a second spending that money on it. It's great.
Everyone keeps bitching about how ATA/66 and ATA/100 are useless upgrades. First of all, they're backwards compatible, so I don't really see any issues there. Of course no one can buy an ATA drive that will do 100MB/s. However, it's quite easy to do IDE RAID (remember the Promise Fastrak66 conversion? They're coming out with a Fastrak100 soon -- this month, I think) and net more than 33MB/s, and within the next year, more than 66MB/s. Yeah, SCSI is a nicer technology once it's working. But how many of you have really gotten your hands bloody trying to properly terminate, sequence, hookup, and assign IDs for SCSI chain after SCSI chain? I know I have. So SCSI kicks ATA's ass for server applications and what not. ATA just *works*. SCSI's just not worth the cost unless you're 1) An irrational SCSI zealot (which I once was) or 2) Running a server, or broadcast quality video editing, or something else equally demanding. I've found being a zealot is a good way to pay more than you need to.
Mm, actually, BASIC Stamp II's run up to around $60. We've got one running six Sharp GP2D05 collision sensors on our robot, Fluffy. (UT Austin IEEE Robot Team) Of course, the main processor is a Technological Arts board with a Motorola 68HC12A4 on it.
I think he meant the 5500 model will have a hard drive power cable plugged into it (I believe that's so, don't remember for sure, I just know the 5500 I saw didn't have any external power), but only the quad processor board (the 6000) will have an external power supply.
Incidentally, 3dfx claims that this is because motherboard makers skimp on voltage regulator quality, so the motherboard apparently doesn't supply the right voltage. To this I say: Yeah, if you draw current over specifications, the voltage will drop, of course.:) We've all heard that sort of thing before from 3dfx. 'Oh, 32 bit is a waste of resources and completely useless. Look! Look! T-buffer!!! It's l33t!' Translation: Please wait until our engineers get around to catching up with the competition.
Actually, due to the move from.22u to.18u process, the GeForce2 uses half as much power as its predecessor. I've heard that NVidia will be shortly releasing the NV11 for laptops, which will use 30% less power than the GeForce2, as well. 3dfx is just going down the tubes. They did a technical seminar at my University (of Texas at Austin) two weeks ago, and had a Voodoo 5 5500 on hand. The FSAA made no noticeable difference, the speed wasn't very impressive, and they even went so far as to call the people working on Mesa 'a bunch of hippies', with no connection to OpenGL at all (i.e. they implied that it was as separate from OpenGL as Glide).
I personally have a TNT 1 card (I bought it because it was good enough, and cost $70) in my dual 500MHz system with 256MB of RAM. I get around 20fps, 8fps if anything interesting happens. Oh, yeah, that's at 512x384. I guess I need to get some time away from school to try those new drivers, but I'm seriously considering going non-NVidia if I buy another card.
I don't believe that anyone's going to even try to patent a gene. It simply can't be done. They can only patent processes. Therefore, all that companies are going to be patenting is certain types of processes involving the knowledge gained from sequencing the human genome. Even if companies like Celera Genomics sequence the genome well before the HGP, they're still going to have to develop novel and nonobvious processes which make use of their sequencing, which could take years. So if someone wants to prevent such patents, they should start trolling the HGP data and establishing some prior art.
For all the complaining about stupid kneejerk bullshit in other parts of America and the media, we sure do a lot of it here. Bleh.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, technically it's more energy out than in. But there are reactants and products, and the energy you get out is the difference between the energy of the reactants and the energy of the products. Twice the bond energy holding the nucleus of an atom of hydrogen together is greater than the bond energy holding together the nucleus of the resultant He atom.
I saw either this or another story with the same arguments recently. It seems to me that lots of people expect change to occur in a relatively smooth, continuous fashion. The theory of punctuated equilibria, at least with respect to human civilization, says that things like social change stay relatively stagnant for long periods of time, and then rapidly change over a short period of time. Perhaps this also applies to technology.
Anyone who's ever worked on a decently sized project knows that you run into lots of dead ends and problems. Eventually, after you've run into enough of them, everything just works, and it's relatively clear sailing. Now, scale this up to the world on a large scale. There's more brains working on it, but the problems are more immense: renewable energy, space travel, nanotech, AI, making websites that don't suck.
It's quite possible that we're just in a lull period where change is rapid, but having little effect on our lives. That is to say, we're running into those dead ends faster than ever. For example, there are thousands of researchers all over the world poking and prodding at various carbon nanotubes, strands of DNA, silicon MEMS, etc. It'll probably be another 15-20 years, but eventually some unshaven grad student is going to yell 'Eureka!' and start pouring champagne down his pants. There are also dozens of companies working on the gravity well problem, or how to get things into low Earth orbit, where it's easy to launch stuff from. Eventually one of them will get the right cost/benefit ratio for the market to adopt it. Right now, though, it's just a bunch of engineers burning through capital.
The person who wrote this article does not have much appreciation for the behavior of complex systems (i.e. Humans and Technology). We may not be seeing the benefits for a while, but that's not to say all our current work is in vain. Just like Edison said..he discovered a thousand ways not to make a light bulb before he finally got it right. There will always be a huge mound of dead and dying poorly implemented technologies before a killer app emerges.
Humans regularly do 10+ g's in centrifuges. Humans have done more than that on rocket sleds (given, all the capillaries in their face broke and they were as a result bruised all over).
10 g's accelerating you while you face forward is not so bad as 10 g's in a jet even. The latter forces blood into your feet, causing you to pass out. The former would just force blood to the back of your body. If sitting, this would simply result in blood flowing out of your legs and into your chest and head. Big deal.
On the other hand, at around 47g your eyes explode and you die.
That'd probably be Spielberg's new movie, which is a story by Kubrick, "AI".
Glucose is a solid. I think you're thinking of glycerol, which gives you the added benefit of a few seconds between mixing it with the KMnO4 and ignition.
Actually, the speed of light in a material is 1/sqrt(permittivity * permeability), with relative permittivity and permeability both equal to 1 (free space), the speed of light (and hence the electric field) is equal to approximately 3e8 m/s. But in semiconductors on a chip, a closer approximation is 1.5e8 m/s, or half the speed of light. So, given your math, 1.5cm, divided by 2.54 for inches, and that's ~0.591 inches. That's almost so small that by the time the electric field of the clock pulse ripples across the chip the next one's already started elsewhere.
I think IBM or somebody has started doing segments of chips in synchronous sections, linked somewhat asynchronously, or at least each using independent clock pulses, to better approximate synchronized switching.
Actually, we don't use the same thing that was invented in 1947 for ICs now. There are all kinds of transistors. BJTs, IGBTs, FETs, MOSFETs. The latter being the type used in modern semiconductor technology. Forgive any errors (I've not yet taken solid state), but whereas a conventional transistor emits a collector-emitter current proportional (the gain) to the base-emitter current, a MOSFET's gate is a capacitor (in fact the capacitors used for DRAM are just MOSFETs) where the current through them is proportional to the voltage across the gate. They are much more disposed to on-off operation than operation over a linear region, because it requires minimal (gate capacitor leakage current) energy to maintain a MOSFET gate state, whereas to represent a '1' on a BJT would take a constant supply of current, irregardless of whether it had changed recently or not.
BJT = Bipolar Junction Transistor
IGBT = Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor
FET = Field Effect Transistor
MOSFET = Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor
As you can see, there have been many advances more significant than having the boys in the back room develop a better/smaller/faster/more powerful widget.
I see a lot of people softly admitting that this is probably too much protection for any law abiding citizen, and only needed by criminals. Perhaps. I see that there are a few technical issues with the system, but there are political ones I would rather bear out now.
There are plenty of people throughout history who were criminals, some of whom were spied on by their government, such as MLK. With current trends, there undoubtedly will be uses for encryption by activists in the future.
Remember, a criminal is someone who breaks the law. Well, what is a good citizen to do when most of the laws are patently unconstitutional? Become a criminal, if they're really serious about democracy. Note that I'm not talking about Napster and other BS that Slashdot drones typically view as civil disobedience. There are much more important issues in the world, and it's important we take into account that there are people who fear for their lives because they act in accordance with beliefs which most of us share.
The only way to keep government even remotely just is to confound it at every turn with encryption, red tape, and other confusion. It certainly won't happen in McCongress or the Supreme Court w/ Cheese.
Actually, his title is a bit of misnomer. I don't know why he named it that. If you'd actually read the essay, you'd know that he says that in the beginning was *really* batch processing. In his high school CS class they called up a University mainframe and sent it batch commands and got results back. Only later did they maintain a live connection and enter commands one at a time, ala command line.
Well, technically it's mAh, if you want to get picky with case. And..what the hell are you talking about? Some existing lead acid batteries are as small as 80mAh, and some are thousands of Ah (like on submarines, only banks of batteries that size). Just increase the plate size and/or put smaller cells in parallel and series to achieve the desired voltage/internal resistance (and hence power density). Higher energy density => less weight per Joule => feasible electric/hybrid cars. Of course flywheels still have my favor, but hopefully these new batteries will be a little less bitchy than these newer, high tech, poorly designed battery technologies. Ooh, look. Lithium Ion. Charge me improperly and I'll blow flaming liquid electrolyte everywhere. Just the sort of thing I want in a computer on my lap. Something to be said for flywheels and lead acid batteries. Pretty much just dump energy into them and they'll sort it out.
Well, technically you don't have to buy DVDs, watch TV, listen to the radio, etc. I don't own a TV and I can't say I miss it.
The real question is..when do we decide that it's no longer possible to effect change in government from the inside? The very same Declaration of Independence tells us that we can take what firearms we still have and start ventilating jack booted thugs left and right if that's the case. Will it ever get that desperate, or can we still turn back?
Me, I'm voting for Harry Browne. But I've also got a rifle and lots of hollow point ammo. Whatever. For now I'm just a pissed off engineering student.
SMP Athlons will be out before the end of the year, utilizing the AMD 760MP chipset. The chipset has already been previewed in single proc configuration on Anandtech, I think. The main point of the preview being DDR SDRAM.
I'm seeing a lot of posts to the effect that this is a ripoff of Robot Wars UK. It's not. Robot Wars has been around in the US since 1995, but that effort was plagued by legal troubles and general bad blood, and the Robot Wars name got auctioned, I guess to Mentorn (who does Robot Wars UK). Battlebots has been around for a while now, and they've been having competitions for over a year. BotBash exists too, although it's somewhat different. Battlebots exists primarily to fill the void left by Robot Wars's absence in the US, not to imitate Robot Wars UK. They actually take the time to put together events that aren't necessarily always in the same place in the US every few months, which is a Good Thing. Meaning..shows that those of us on this side of the Atlantic can go to, possibly. I've got a few gripes, though, really. The Robot Wars UK people live and breathe stupid jargon. They're basically sports announcers, but really horrible. And also..it's more like Robot boxing, or wrestling, than Robot Wars. If you want to get a few dozen robots, put them out in the woods as separate teams, and let them fight it out, that might be more deserving of the moniker.
Actually, it's a 250MHz core. :)
There's better equipment in the pipe. NASA (unless the budget for it's been cut..I haven't heard much about it lately) is planning on deploying, sometime this decade (okay, next decade. 2001-2010, whatever), I think perhaps 2008 or so, a big interferometer in a static position out near Jupiter. An interferometer in this case is several optical telescopes (4 of them) mounted colinearly on a track, and moved with micron precision along it for focus. The multiple detectors allow astronomers to block out the glare of a faraway star, say Epsilon Eridani, and look at things around it. So we could actually get pictures of this planet, and maybe (hopefully) other, smaller, rockier, wetter planets.
I have to admit I wouldn't go. Not now. Visit, maybe. Not that I'm one of those 'Let's solve our problems here first!/Won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-children ??' reactionaries. Just it'd be harder for me to build better technology if I was struggling for survival, and I'd rather be building better technology (yes, specifically space related stuff).
Colonization of Mars will happen just like any other frontier. It'll attract people who don't have a whole lot to look forward to in the status quo ("The Other Shoe", anyone?), people looking for economic opportunity (land prospectors, gold rush crazies, etc..imagine if you got up there now and cornered the water market on Mars..you'd be pretty rich later on, although a Total Recall-esque Mars regime leaves a bad taste in my mouth).
When people packed their bags to move to the western US, they'd often simply liquidate all their belongings, their life savings, etc. to pay for it. If a family had all their insurance policies bought out, sold their house and cars, all their possessions, cashed in retirement funds, they could probably afford a trip to Mars within a few decades.
I just hope this time there aren't any Native Americans/Martians that have to get slaughtered in droves before the rest of the human race feels like joining the first settlers.
Are rockets really what commercial space ventures should be using? Chemical rockets ,that is. They're big, heavy, expensive, and dirty (there's more to it than 2H2 + O2 => 2H20. Lots of hydrazine and who knows what else).
If chemical rockets were hard to come by, but there were still a big market for getting stuff up into space, wouldn't it just accelerate the development of more efficient launch systems? This will only provide less of an incentive to improve.
Do you happen to know where GnoLM can be found? The original maintainer/author has moved his page, and it's not there (although some other Linux projects can be found there), so one can't get it from freshmeat. I've tried both an ftpsearch and google for the tarball and can't find it.
Eel Pie is mainly Pete Townshend's solo stuff. For classic Who stuff, you can get that pretty much anywhere.
I grabbed the Lifehouse Chronicles 6 CD box set when it came out back in February (and submitted it to Slashdot..rejected), so it's really the single CD version that's coming out now, which obviously doesn't have as much material. The box set's a little pricey (40 pounds), but they still sell it, and I don't regret for a second spending that money on it. It's great.
Everyone keeps bitching about how ATA/66 and ATA/100 are useless upgrades. First of all, they're backwards compatible, so I don't really see any issues there. Of course no one can buy an ATA drive that will do 100MB/s. However, it's quite easy to do IDE RAID (remember the Promise Fastrak66 conversion? They're coming out with a Fastrak100 soon -- this month, I think) and net more than 33MB/s, and within the next year, more than 66MB/s. Yeah, SCSI is a nicer technology once it's working. But how many of you have really gotten your hands bloody trying to properly terminate, sequence, hookup, and assign IDs for SCSI chain after SCSI chain? I know I have. So SCSI kicks ATA's ass for server applications and what not. ATA just *works*. SCSI's just not worth the cost unless you're 1) An irrational SCSI zealot (which I once was) or 2) Running a server, or broadcast quality video editing, or something else equally demanding.
I've found being a zealot is a good way to pay more than you need to.
-RevRigel
L0pht went there and testified once. Maybe they'd be willing to do it again.
Mm, actually, BASIC Stamp II's run up to around $60. We've got one running six Sharp GP2D05 collision sensors on our robot, Fluffy. (UT Austin IEEE Robot Team)
Of course, the main processor is a Technological Arts board with a Motorola 68HC12A4 on it.
I think he meant the 5500 model will have a hard drive power cable plugged into it (I believe that's so, don't remember for sure, I just know the 5500 I saw didn't have any external power), but only the quad processor board (the 6000) will have an external power supply.
:) We've all heard that sort of thing before from 3dfx. 'Oh, 32 bit is a waste of resources and completely useless. Look! Look! T-buffer!!! It's l33t!' Translation: Please wait until our engineers get around to catching up with the competition.
Incidentally, 3dfx claims that this is because motherboard makers skimp on voltage regulator quality, so the motherboard apparently doesn't supply the right voltage. To this I say: Yeah, if you draw current over specifications, the voltage will drop, of course.
Actually, due to the move from .22u to .18u process, the GeForce2 uses half as much power as its predecessor. I've heard that NVidia will be shortly releasing the NV11 for laptops, which will use 30% less power than the GeForce2, as well. 3dfx is just going down the tubes. They did a technical seminar at my University (of Texas at Austin) two weeks ago, and had a Voodoo 5 5500 on hand. The FSAA made no noticeable difference, the speed wasn't very impressive, and they even went so far as to call the people working on Mesa 'a bunch of hippies', with no connection to OpenGL at all (i.e. they implied that it was as separate from OpenGL as Glide).
I personally have a TNT 1 card (I bought it because it was good enough, and cost $70) in my dual 500MHz system with 256MB of RAM. I get around 20fps, 8fps if anything interesting happens. Oh, yeah, that's at 512x384. I guess I need to get some time away from school to try those new drivers, but I'm seriously considering going non-NVidia if I buy another card.
I don't believe that anyone's going to even try to patent a gene. It simply can't be done. They can only patent processes. Therefore, all that companies are going to be patenting is certain types of processes involving the knowledge gained from sequencing the human genome. Even if companies like Celera Genomics sequence the genome well before the HGP, they're still going to have to develop novel and nonobvious processes which make use of their sequencing, which could take years. So if someone wants to prevent such patents, they should start trolling the HGP data and establishing some prior art.
For all the complaining about stupid kneejerk bullshit in other parts of America and the media, we sure do a lot of it here. Bleh.