What about Apple's Mac OS X or Linux? Both are better. No one is forcing you to buy Vista. Buy it only if you like it and think it is worth the money. If you don't like it or can't aford it look at the other OSes.
"Most iPod owners aren't going to bother downloading from Amazon and importing into iTunes" Amazon figured as much. That's why the Amazon download program will put the tracks into the iTunes library for you.
"enough in oxygen to support life"
There was no oxygen in Earth's atmosphere when life formed. Oxygen was toxic to early life. Some of these early microbes are still around -- We called them "anaerobic". Oxygen still kills them. Only later as the oxygen level rose did life evolve a defence for oxygen then later a way to actually use oxygen
They are NOT listening for random signals like the type that are leaked out from Earth. The array is not sensitive enough for that. What they are hoping to find as a beacon. A huge transmitter beamed right at us. If they find such a thing then we might reasonably guess there is a signal on it. We would not have to wait for 2-way communication to learn a lot. Heck even if all we got was a "Hello Earth" greeting that in itself would be one of the greatest discoveries in all of history.
I doubt there are any huge microwave beacons. If we do discover anyone out there it will only be after our arrays become powerfull enough to hear the "leakage" signals that only escape by chance, like the signals we are currently sending. But we could get lucky. It's like buying a lottery ticket.
It's not "a bunch of little telescopes". It is one large phased array. The signals from all the antenna are added in phase. By controlling the delay from each antenna before adding the signals they can point the beam around in the sky. By building more "adders" they can have multiple simultainious beams.
Think of each dish antenna as an element of a single larger antennta
"Finally why would they use them over of all things an anti-war protest? I mean if you want to spy on them you send in agents with small cameras and MK1 eyeballs and ears. It would be cheaper and far more effective."
Why? A crowd in Washington DC, right in your own back yard. What I great test opportunity. andno travel costs for your engineers. You do both use the conventional method and your new flying bugs and then compare the results obtained with each method.
Not much in the wiki about the historical development of pressure regulation valve design. Then I tried to look up the differences between plumbing codes around the world to see how German and American waste water systems are different. Lot of people know about the, any German or American licensed plumber would. But guess what. Comp Sci students are more likey to write in the Wiki than Plumbers. To bad. I know much of the Comp Sci material but was curious about the "odd" plumbing I noticed in Europe
In fact MOST of what could be writen about is not there and never will be
Years ago a flight instructor told me "All airplanes are small compared to the size of the sky.". The other one is that the ocean is huge, but the sky is even bigger. I guess the implication is that big things can smash up little things. You should respect big things
Some people who have been to the moon say that the 1/6th G gravity their is more comfortable than either the Earth's 1 G or the zero G they experienced in free fall.
So in short, people might just like the moon. I wouldn't because I could do much except stay indoors under the few meters of rock and rubble used to shield from solar radiation. But if I were the type who liked sitting inside a small room 24x7 with a computer or TV screen then the moon would be the place, It only the price were not a million dollars an hour.
I think the way to build a moon settlement is to first send a few mining robots to dig out a huge space maybe a mile under ground. Then you pressurize the space and put in lighting, plant grass and trees. Maybe in 500 years some one will build a retirement home like that for rich old folks.
Long before there were manned spacecraft there were submarines and diving suits. Both of these were in use just after the turn of the last century (early 1900s) Answer is Either "open curcuit" new air pushes old air overboard or "closed" where air is recirculated through dehumidifiers and carbon filters and many times also through hydroxide "scrubbers" to remove carbon dioxide. So by 1960 these was half a century of technology for them to draw on.
I've been to japan a number of times. My wife was born and grew up there. My theory is simple. People in Tokyo do not own cars. OK a few do but most don't. If you are a kid (anyone who has not yet graduated from collage.) here in California nearly every last dime you make goes to paying for a car or gas, maintainance or insurance for same. What if there was no car? What elese to spend money on? Cloths and gadgets. Here when kids want to impress each other they buy stuff and bolt it onto their car like $1,000 wheel covers and big stereo speakers but if you don't have a car you gotta buy stuff you can carry around. Even if you are not out to impress - and many aren't there is still this large disposable income that comes with not having to pay for a car and it care and feeding.
One more Factor: While it sounds obvious, almost _everyone_ in Japan is Japanese. almost everyone is middle class and more than half have collage degrees. How does one make themselves stand out from the crowd?
Also if you go there or live there you will spend a lot of your time outside walking or on a train or just "out". Anything wired would never have much of a chance to be used
"Nuclear is something done by evil scientists wearing white outfits and radiation-monitor tags. It's obviously not to be trusted."
I think the above is close to hitting the nail on the head. Humans instintively fear things they don't understand. This instinct likely kept many cave men alive. (Best to not go into that dark cave, who knows what's in there?) What percent of people know anything at all about nuclear power or could even tell yu what "radiation" is. The way to promote use of this technology is through education, then people can make informed decisions.
Typically you use a hash in firmware so you can do a kind of self diagnostic check. It is a very, very common technique. The first thing many devices do is compute a checksum of themselves and stop with an error message if the checksum fails. Doing this means that yur suport people will not see so may random unrepeatable errors.
"no work without pay and a fair hourly rate for any kind of work"
Sounds good but what if your work is something creative? Or what if you are in a job that pays by value, say sales. Paying hourly only makes sense at the lowest levels where the employee is paid just to do a well defined job. As soon as your boss starts giving you directions like. "Make up a schedule and see where in the world we are going to find people to get this done..." You don't pay a guy doing work like that by the hour. You pay him based on the value he creates.
Many people are hired not by the hour but by the job. Actors are that way. Many busness ececutives and real estate people too.
Engineers are a middle ground. Some get to lead projects and think up the products the company will sell. Some are given great creative freedom some less senior ones are given more defined jobs. I think you have to look case by case here. Certainly most "IT" people are in a sopport role and hourly is the way to go. But the IT guy who is given the asignent "We need a new call center -- can you put together a few options for us" is doing an hourly job.
"I'm sure these programs would be very receptive to a reliable machine that costs less than $200 per kid."
No, they wouldn't. Have you ever tried to give a computer to a school? They have so many requirements and specifications and hoops they make you jump through I found it easier to "donate" them all to the to the local re-cycle center.
The APG-65 radar actually has several digital computers inside of it. The radar was capable of automatic target tracking and threat assesment. I remember that the track while scan feature was a big deal. I worked at Huges Aircraft back then and yes they had many software enginerrs emplyed back then. I was one of hundreds although I worked on radars both befor and after this timeframe.
You might remember the lack of power in a typical 8-bit micro in those days, but you are assuming they used a microprocessor. The mil-std-1750 was the "standard" airborne computer of the day. It was a 16-bit machine about the size of a shoe box.
I suspect this is not related at all to cryptography but "code" here reffers to the software inside the radar signal processor. What they likely had to do was reverse engineer it because they could not get the source code.
Let's say we have very strong white listing enabled and each executable program must be signed by three independent third parties or it can't run. Say I'm a virus writter. So what do I do to get around this? Easy. I place a timer in my code so that it acts nice for 6 months but when the time comes it trashes your system. A "time bomb" will pass white listing un-noticed
There is only one way to counter this: Open Source. The people
who sign off the code need to be able to inspect it line by line.
and they need to inspect any linked in libraries (DLLs) line by
line and the compiler too. Only after careful inspection can
they know there is no time bomb. Even then they can't be
100% sure because they might be hidden. In fact hiding it
even in open source would be easy.
So what to do? Go back to your Computer Science 101 class and
re-read the text book. Basically the OS should never grant more
privilege to a program than it needs. Do this at the finest level
of granularity you can and that's it. So, for example, a word processor should not be allowed to alter any file except a text document that is marked as "writable" by the user running the word processor. There are al kinds of way in do this but the basic
rule is to restrict what a program can do. The problem with
Windows is the granularity to to big, that and that most dumb user run with an admin account
I said that once too. But then we worked out the cost of maintainance and electrical power, in other words the montly cost to run and found a new system would pay it's own cost in under a year.
Even at home I've unplugged systems simply due to the $0.24 per kilowatt hour cost to power them. (Using an old Pentium III running UNIX as a wifi router and firewall works well but sucks electrical power big time.) I actually saved money by replacing a working system. GPS did the same thing but on t much larger scale.
practical applicationS: Airplans flying and not crashing into one another. Same for cars.
More practical. How about Earthmoving equipment or coal mining.
Some exotic ideas. Military robots that gather intelligence. You drop thousands of these on the enemy's side and they look out to see what is going on and report back via "the grape vine". There would be tens of tousands of communications paths, far to many to jam. They also watch out for each other and communicate warnings like "hide, someone is coming." Sensor could be very primitive, perhaps just a microphone or a cellphone-like camera, but by working together they can use triangulation to locate moving targets.
They don't have to be robots. What about a self configuring network? Each node only sees a few other nodes but they all talk about what they've seen and the word gets around that there is a printer on the second floor available for anyone who is a member of the graphic arts department to use.
I know what you mean. I use gcc on the Atmel AVR target. For those not in the know the AVR is an 8-bit micro controller that sells for less than $2. AVR would make a nice controllers for a microwave oven or a battery charger.
Typical 1980's space technology was that one radiator panel about 6 meters square could radiate about 1 kilowatt of waste heat. This is in low Earth orbit, This is about the performance of the panels now installed on the international space statin.
I guess that with some effort performance could be better. perhaps now in 2007 it is. also in deep space performance is likely better. The improve performace what you need to do is run them hotter, but then you need a more powerful compressor, so there is some optimum compromise
Yes, a big engine will make lots of waste heat. Most of the heat (we hope) is radiated in the beam and used for propulsion. Who knows how much will leak out of the machinery? but using 20 year old technology we know we can remove 1Kw with a 5 M^2 panel and liquid cooling. In 50 to 100 years maybe tey will find a way to make radiators that can run white hot, like the Sun. (That t to the forth term say you really want them to run hot)
Actually in theory a laser is about the best why possible to radiate heat into space but no one has ever used a laser that way and it may never be technically possible
Cooling? The normal method is to use radiators that are kept shaded from the sun. You them pump liquid from the heat sousre to the radiator. "Space" on the back side of a sun shade is very, very cold and a hot radiator ca loose lots of heat.
I think you could power the entire spacecraft from the waste heat generated by the laser. Bt I wonder what powers thelaser? I think most really big lasers are chemical powered.
This is really moot as we are talking micronewtons here. It needs to be millions (yes literally millions) of times bigger to get people to Mars
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"...Vista is now forced down my throat..."
What about Apple's Mac OS X or Linux? Both are better. No one is forcing you to buy Vista. Buy it only if you like it and think it is worth the money. If you don't like it or can't aford it look at the other OSes.
"Most iPod owners aren't going to bother downloading from Amazon and importing into iTunes" Amazon figured as much. That's why the Amazon download program will put the tracks into the iTunes library for you.
"enough in oxygen to support life" There was no oxygen in Earth's atmosphere when life formed. Oxygen was toxic to early life. Some of these early microbes are still around -- We called them "anaerobic". Oxygen still kills them. Only later as the oxygen level rose did life evolve a defence for oxygen then later a way to actually use oxygen
They are NOT listening for random signals like the type that are leaked out from Earth. The array is not sensitive enough for that. What they are hoping to find as a beacon. A huge transmitter beamed right at us. If they find such a thing then we might reasonably guess there is a signal on it. We would not have to wait for 2-way communication to learn a lot. Heck even if all we got was a "Hello Earth" greeting that in itself would be one of the greatest discoveries in all of history.
I doubt there are any huge microwave beacons. If we do discover anyone out there it will only be after our arrays become powerfull enough to hear the "leakage" signals that only escape by chance, like the signals we are currently sending. But we could get lucky. It's like buying a lottery ticket.
It's not "a bunch of little telescopes". It is one large phased array. The signals from all the antenna are added in phase. By controlling the delay from each antenna before adding the signals they can point the beam around in the sky. By building more "adders" they can have multiple simultainious beams.
Think of each dish antenna as an element of a single larger antennta
"Finally why would they use them over of all things an anti-war protest?
I mean if you want to spy on them you send in agents with small cameras and MK1 eyeballs and ears. It would be cheaper and far more effective."
Why? A crowd in Washington DC, right in your own back yard. What I great test opportunity. andno travel costs for your engineers. You do both use the conventional method and your new flying bugs and then compare the results obtained with each method.
Not much in the wiki about the historical development of pressure regulation valve design. Then I tried to look up the differences between plumbing codes around the world to see how German and American waste water systems are different. Lot of people know about the, any German or American licensed plumber would. But guess what. Comp Sci students are more likey to write in the Wiki than Plumbers. To bad. I know much of the Comp Sci material but was curious about the "odd" plumbing I noticed in Europe
In fact MOST of what could be writen about is not there and never will be
Years ago a flight instructor told me "All airplanes are small compared to the size of the sky.". The other one is that the ocean is huge, but the sky is even bigger. I guess the implication is that big things can smash up little things. You should respect big things
Some people who have been to the moon say that the 1/6th G gravity their is more comfortable than either the Earth's 1 G or the zero G they experienced in free fall.
So in short, people might just like the moon.
I wouldn't because I could do much except stay indoors under the few meters of rock and rubble used to shield from solar radiation. But if I were the type who liked sitting inside a small room 24x7 with a computer or TV screen then the moon would be the place, It only the price were not a million dollars an hour.
I think the way to build a moon settlement is to first send a few mining robots to dig out a huge space maybe a mile under ground. Then you pressurize the space and put in lighting, plant grass and trees. Maybe in 500 years some one will build a retirement home like that for rich old folks.
Long before there were manned spacecraft there were submarines and diving suits. Both of these were in use just after the turn of the last century (early 1900s) Answer is Either "open curcuit" new air pushes old air overboard or "closed" where air is recirculated through dehumidifiers and carbon filters and many times also through hydroxide "scrubbers" to remove carbon dioxide. So by 1960 these was half a century of technology for them to draw on.
I've been to japan a number of times. My wife was born and grew up there. My theory is simple. People in Tokyo do not own cars. OK a few do but most don't. If you are a kid (anyone who has not yet graduated from collage.) here in California nearly every last dime you make goes to paying for a car or gas, maintainance or insurance for same. What if there was no car? What elese to spend money on? Cloths and gadgets. Here when kids want to impress each other they buy stuff and bolt it onto their car like $1,000 wheel covers and big stereo speakers but if you don't have a car you gotta buy stuff you can carry around. Even if you are not out to impress - and many aren't there is still this large disposable income that comes with not having to pay for a car and it care and feeding.
One more Factor: While it sounds obvious, almost _everyone_ in Japan is Japanese. almost everyone is middle class and more than half have collage degrees. How does one make themselves stand out from the crowd?
Also if you go there or live there you will spend a lot of your time outside walking or on a train or just "out". Anything wired would never have much of a chance to be used
"Nuclear is something done by evil scientists wearing white outfits and radiation-monitor tags. It's obviously not to be trusted."
I think the above is close to hitting the nail on the head. Humans instintively fear things they don't understand. This instinct likely kept many cave men alive. (Best to not go into that dark cave, who knows what's in there?) What percent of people know anything at all about nuclear power or could even tell yu what "radiation" is. The way to promote use of this technology is through education, then people can make informed decisions.
Typically you use a hash in firmware so you can do a kind of self diagnostic check. It is a very, very common technique. The first thing many devices do is compute a checksum of themselves and stop with an error message if the checksum fails. Doing this means that yur suport people will not see so may random unrepeatable errors.
"no work without pay and a fair hourly rate for any kind of work"
Sounds good but what if your work is something creative? Or what if you are in a job that pays by value, say sales. Paying hourly only makes sense at the lowest levels where the employee is paid just to do a well defined job. As soon as your boss starts giving you directions like. "Make up a schedule and see where in the world we are going to find people to get this done..." You don't pay a guy doing work like that by the hour. You pay him based on the value he creates.
Many people are hired not by the hour but by the job. Actors are that way. Many busness ececutives and real estate people too.
Engineers are a middle ground. Some get to lead projects and think up the products the company will sell. Some are given great creative freedom some less senior ones are given more defined jobs. I think you have to look case by case here. Certainly most "IT" people are in a sopport role and hourly is the way to go. But the IT guy who is given the asignent "We need a new call center -- can you put together a few options for us" is doing an hourly job.
"I'm sure these programs would be very receptive to a reliable machine that costs less than $200 per kid."
No, they wouldn't. Have you ever tried to give a computer to a school? They have so many requirements and specifications and hoops they make you jump through I found it easier to "donate" them all to the to the local re-cycle center.
Why does it cost $400 to buy two $100 laptops?
I've seen "real" notebook computers selling at the $399 price point.
The APG-65 radar actually has several digital computers inside of it. The radar was capable of automatic target tracking and threat assesment. I remember that the track while scan feature was a big deal. I worked at Huges Aircraft back then and yes they had many software enginerrs emplyed back then. I was one of hundreds although I worked on radars both befor and after this timeframe. You might remember the lack of power in a typical 8-bit micro in those days, but you are assuming they used a microprocessor. The mil-std-1750 was the "standard" airborne computer of the day. It was a 16-bit machine about the size of a shoe box.
"That's the most likely meaning of the "codes". Not encryption methods at all."
No, I think the most likely meaning of "code" is "source code". The software that runs inside the radar.
I suspect this is not related at all to cryptography but "code" here reffers to the software inside the radar signal processor. What they likely had to do was reverse engineer it because they could not get the source code.
Let's say we have very strong white listing enabled and each executable program must be signed by three independent third parties or it can't run. Say I'm a virus writter. So what do I do to get around this? Easy. I place a timer in my code so that it acts nice for 6 months but when the time comes it trashes your system. A "time bomb" will pass white listing un-noticed There is only one way to counter this: Open Source. The people who sign off the code need to be able to inspect it line by line. and they need to inspect any linked in libraries (DLLs) line by line and the compiler too. Only after careful inspection can they know there is no time bomb. Even then they can't be 100% sure because they might be hidden. In fact hiding it even in open source would be easy. So what to do? Go back to your Computer Science 101 class and re-read the text book. Basically the OS should never grant more privilege to a program than it needs. Do this at the finest level of granularity you can and that's it. So, for example, a word processor should not be allowed to alter any file except a text document that is marked as "writable" by the user running the word processor. There are al kinds of way in do this but the basic rule is to restrict what a program can do. The problem with Windows is the granularity to to big, that and that most dumb user run with an admin account
"If the legacy crap works, it isn't crap"
I said that once too. But then we worked out the cost of maintainance and electrical power, in other words the montly cost to run and found a new system would pay it's own cost in under a year.
Even at home I've unplugged systems simply due to the $0.24 per kilowatt hour cost to power them. (Using an old Pentium III running UNIX as a wifi router and firewall works well but sucks electrical power big time.) I actually saved money by replacing a working system. GPS did the same thing but on t much larger scale.
practical applicationS: Airplans flying and not crashing into one another. Same for cars.
More practical. How about Earthmoving equipment or coal mining.
Some exotic ideas. Military robots that gather intelligence. You
drop thousands of these on the enemy's side and they look out to see what is going on and report back via "the grape vine". There would be tens of tousands of communications paths, far to many to jam. They also watch out for each other and communicate warnings like "hide, someone is coming." Sensor could be very primitive, perhaps just a microphone or a cellphone-like camera, but by working together they can use triangulation to locate moving targets.
They don't have to be robots. What about a self configuring network? Each node only sees a few other nodes but they all talk about what they've seen and the word gets around that there is a printer on the second floor available for anyone who is a member of the graphic arts department to use.
I know what you mean. I use gcc on the Atmel AVR target. For those not in the know the AVR is an 8-bit micro controller that sells for less than $2. AVR would make a nice controllers for a microwave oven or a battery charger.
First read up on Boltzmann's law. It's very much applicable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan-Boltzmann_law
Typical 1980's space technology was that one radiator panel about 6 meters square could radiate about 1 kilowatt of waste heat. This is in low Earth orbit, This is about the performance of the panels now installed on the international space statin.
I guess that with some effort performance could be better. perhaps now in 2007 it is. also in deep space performance is likely better. The improve performace what you need to do is run them hotter, but then you need a more powerful compressor, so there is some optimum compromise
Yes, a big engine will make lots of waste heat. Most of the heat (we hope) is radiated in the beam and used for propulsion. Who knows how much will leak out of the machinery? but using 20 year old technology we know we can remove 1Kw with a 5 M^2 panel and liquid cooling. In 50 to 100 years maybe tey will find a way to make radiators that can run white hot, like the Sun. (That t to the forth term say you really want them to run hot)
Actually in theory a laser is about the best why possible to radiate heat into space but no one has ever used a laser that way and it may never be technically possible
Cooling? The normal method is to use radiators that are kept shaded from the sun. You them pump liquid from the heat sousre to the radiator. "Space" on the back side of a sun shade is very, very cold and a hot radiator ca loose lots of heat.
I think you could power the entire spacecraft from the waste heat generated by the laser. Bt I wonder what powers thelaser? I think
most really big lasers are chemical powered.
This is really moot as we are talking micronewtons here. It needs to be millions (yes literally millions) of times bigger to get people to Mars