I wonder, over the many millions of years that the earth has been around, how many other meteorites of this size or larger have struck ground and subsequently been covered with layers of dirt
The entire Earth was formed by small impacts like this, each impact, on average, making the Earth a little larger.
Seriously, I could see this being useful for the military
You are about 25 year to late. This is the way it's beed done for many years Have you ever seen a real life "TOC" (tactical Command center) basically it is a bunch of shipping containers filled with radios, computers and workstations. They can mount these containers on trucks and in some cases use them while moving on a raodway but typically they set up and deply big satilite dishes and antana masts with camo netting over the top. Many times these containers (they call them "shelters") are protected against biological and chemical agents and harded for EMP (eletromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion)
You are right the MS Windose style "Maximise" button is not so usfull on a 30" screen. That is why Apple makes it work differently. When using Mac OSX the window does not expand to fill all of the screen. It only gets as big as it needs to be to show all of the content. Apple's green button should really be called "Get bigger", not "maximize".
I'm sure over time as big screen become more common the other's will all follows Apple's lead on this
It means the whole problem of polution and global warming will simply go away in about 50 years. Also the world will then be able to ignore the Middle East.
It is pretty easy to guess that in 50 years EVERYTHING will be electric powered with the power comming from mostly nuclear power and some hydro plus other minor sources. No new technology needs to be invented. This will very good for the economies of the industrail world, all the money that is now flowing to oil producers will remain in-contry.
No on forced you to buy Vista and if you did buy it you had to agree to the terms. So by definition Vista will only be used by people who agree with Microsoft's terms.
Let's say I leased you a car and I said you had to pay only one cent the first week, 2 cents to next and so on. Every week the price doubles until the 60 month lease period is over. You can cancel at any time by paying off 1% of the remaining payments. So you sign it. Am I being unfair or are yu being stupd? I'd claim you were stupid. the terms were clear and you agreed to them. Same with Vista. You read the EULA and "signed" it. Stupid or unfair? Microsoft is betting (correctly) that most uers are stuupid.
Widgets have a big memory footprint. Each one seems to have its own instance of the Javascript runtime
Yes each might have a copy of Javascript mapped into it's address space but only one physical copy of Javascript is in RAM. The system uses "copy on write" so all instances of a running program can use the same copy of the code while each has it's own data. Even better, if the system needs more memory it can simply over write parts of executable coe that are not being activly used by any of the instances and not have to save to a swapfile because the data is in the executable file already. The magic of a modern demand paged virtual memory system. All modern OSes work this way.
You can't add up the memory used by each applicatioon to find the total used. Then same gose for commly used dynamic loadable libraies. There should be only one copy in physical RAM
Yes you are right. It WILL drive up the cost gas and oil. But it will drive up the price world wide. All consummers even those in China will pay very slightly more. VERY slightly more because of the reduced production in California. But the tax monay will flow to California ONLY This is a very smart move. California can effectivly tax consummers in the other 49 states, in Europe and China. Californians will pay (maybe) a few bucks more a month but collect many more backs per month in taxes. But remembeer. Tax money does not disapper. ALL of it is spent by the government right here in the state. All that tax money goes into some californian's paycheck.
For all the people who point out the problems of having people live longer. There is one advantage. Increased overall productivity. If people did not age as fast (as opposed to simply living longer) then the ratio of years of productive output to years of education would be dreater. Today if takes 20 to 25 years for a person to become able to contribute economically and then he works only 40 years. If 40 could become 50 or 60 we would all be better of economically but if longer life only means you spend an extra 20 years in a nursing home then on average we are worse off.
One way to think of this is WHICH part of life is extended. Do we extend middle age or do we extend old age. The best plan would be to make you feel as if you were in your 40's for 30 years. the 40's is when people are most productive. the effect on society depends on which part of life is exteneded
we have the rotary power, how do we convert that into electrical energy
Let's see.... maybe put a magnet on the rotor and little coils of wire around the outside? The changing magnetic field will induce current in any nearby conductors. This part was figured out more then 100 years ago. After all the only new thing here is the size.
Yes he abandoned his work. But he had little choise in the matter. It seems he died before he finished. He did ask his son organize and publish the work and this is what we see him doing. I think he asked Christopher to do this because he know that Christopher had great interrest in doing this
When I was in school I had and English professor who knew Tolkein. He was one of Tolkein's students. I got to hear some stories 2nd hand. Tolkein had a "day job" doing research, teaching and spending time with students but I think "middle Earth consummer mot of the reast of his time. One of the sories was of being a Tolkein's house for dinner at the time after his first boooks' publication and before the book reviews were published in the newspapers. His was very worried that rviewers would dismiss his work as light weight "fairy tale". He was greatly releived, it turned out because the reviewers seemed to have "gotten it". He did care a lot about what people would think of his work. But he did not write fr a living.
First off it s surprizing how many people, even trainned software engineers don't understand SQL databases. I'd bet that most people writting software today don't know what "normal form" means
As I see it a dfesigner has three options not two. Yes you can go faster if you use a stripped down database that lacks important features be coding those features into your aplication. But you can go even faster by not using a data base at all and writing directly to the file system. For simple applications where you only have a few thousand items to track and ONLY your one applacation needs to access that data a file works fine. But when you have many, many tables and each is large and the tables are mostly related to each other and (this is the key) you have many applacations written by diferent organizations that all need to access the data at the same time then yu have no bussines to be using MySQL. Most people however write small, simple software. certainly if you are using PHP you are just backing up a web site.
I wonder what his vews on Oracle are?
One core dedicated to enemy AI.
One core for physics calculations
That is NOT the way you design multi threaded aplications. No, what you do is to identify varius proceses that you need to do. Perhaps one of them is to read user inputs, read inputs comming in from the network (Internet). another to move the "camera" and then one process for each object to be simulated. So you might have 40 or 100 threads running. Then you would depend on the operating system to allocate physical "cores" to software threads. With this type if design performance can scale as you add cores. ASo in 5 to 10 years when we all are using 32 or 64 core machines it really will run 8 times faster
How many threads is an enginerring decision. For example if you have four cars running on a raod do you use a thread for each car or one thread for all cars, another for all people. Thread per object is a radical design but thread per type of object is less radical
The best option for me is the local public library. They offer DVDs for free. Hard to beat free. I can reserve them on-line then walk in and the DVD is tagged with my name on it and setting on a self up by the checkout counter.
No matter how badly polluted and climate changed the Earth becomes life will be easier here on Earth then on Mars. Even if the air become toxic so we need a gas mask to breath and most life dies, still it will be easier then on Mars. At least on earth we would have air pressure and a magnetic field. Mars without a strong magnetic field means that people will need to live underground in shelters and will need to limit their exposure to rediation on the surface.
Go to Mars for other reasons like "because you can" or "it might be fun" or "it provides good jobs for engineers" but not so that you can find a better place to live. The radiation from the Sun would kill a person living on the surface of Mars if he stayed there for any period of years.
WAAS is better. All you need is one GPS reciever and it costs noting and is available everywhere GPS is. Differential was a great idea but they used a second back channel radio to broadcast the data. WAAS is almost the same thing but uses the GPS system itself to broadcast the data. Smarter really.
I doubt anyone would used DOS as a home desk top machine. However these are far more uses for computers than web surfing and reading e-mail. Applications that come to mind for Free DOS include. Controlling lab instruments. Embeded devices. Basically are the things that don't require megabytes of RAM and a graphical user interface.
.... then you keep running it, loading the mass at the counterweight. Then build a bigger cable, wash/rinse/repeat. Soon you are sending tons up at a time. Yes, it is expensive, but compared to blasting the stuff up into orbit, greatly cheaper.
Do you know where all the money goes for a space launch today? In has little to do with the cost of fuel. The fuel is cheap. Almost ALL of the money goes to labor It takes and army f preople to build the very complex machines. but even most of them to check and re-check. With a rocket you never are able to really test it until you launch, you get one chance to get it right. The test, retests and the paperwork to track everything is where all that money goes.
In theory a re-usable launcher like the shuttleculd save moneybut for the need to recertify it fr each launch. Certification means checks and paperwork
Why, Lets say you have a building full of computers they run Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Now you want to add a user to the system. Ideally he should have an account on all or some subset of the machines and his data should live on some server, so his folders and data are available no matter which machine he logs into. I think this is what users expect no days. OK so where do YOU keep his username and password. Do you go to each machine in the building and make an account for him? Likely not. So yu need some kind of database the Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris and so on know how to querry. Gosh wouldn't it be need if the e-mail user directory and the company phone book could use the same data? LDAP will do all this.
If you only had one machine at home, yes this would be pointless unless then goal was to learn about LDAP.
You are right the 2 in 17 figure the news media picked up on is not important. But the real news here is that 17 in 17 did not die of the treatment which very well could have happened. Also I'm not sure of your method. In the cases studied it is very well known that all of them would have died. I'm not sure if 17 is the correct sample size. There are _many_ more known cases of cancer and these might be conciderd part of a control group.
What hapens when work of layoffs gets out is EVERYONE start looking for a new job and gues what -- The bbest people are the first ones to find new jobs. You tend to loose the best and keep only those who can't find another job.
There is an even simplier method to break a lock. This works on most every front door locks and most every house. Get a large flat blade screw driver and a hammer. Pound the screwdriver blade into the key slot. Next place a vicegrip plier on the screw driver and rotate the screw driver as if it were a key. You will share off all the tumblers. The whole process takes about 15 seconds.
Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?
How long would it take you to round up a few PC and build a cluster and get it connected to a high badwidth Internet connection? How much do you want to be paid per hour? What are the payrol taxes on your hourly rate. Add this all up. Assume the old PCs are free. OK now you have the buy-in price. How many hours a month will yo need to keep this system running? At what hourly rate?
Now you have to figure the cost of power is about $0.15 per KWH and each PC will burn about 0.2 KW and every KW the PC burns required at least 1 KW of airconditionaling power. The power osts alone are $0.06 per hour for only four cents more I get a PC and don't have to pay you to build it for me.
Have you ever been to Japan? I was there recently visting my in-laws. They bought a new condo and as you might guess after some time I had need to check out the bathroom. So I'm siting there and notice this control console with an LCD display and a bunch of buttons and it's all in Japaneese and I can't read a word of it. I'm afraid to push anyhting. Fortunatly there was still the standerd chrome lever handle. Later I had my wife translate. You can adjust the seat temperture, water sprays and air blowers and 4 other parameters. It seems the condo builders put these in every unit along with the microwave, dishwasher, laundry machine, stove and so on. Even teh airconditioner has a large complex programmagle control. But it is all well designed, you can ignore the part you don't understand so even I can use everything in a miniman way They've come a long way from the traditional house with rice paper divider walls that my wive grew up in. They did not even own a cloths washer in those days, they were not affordable, "gramma" used a washboard and tub in the early 60's but now the computer controlled comode just comes with the house, like it or not.
I can tell you why sellers have to list the items multiple times to sell it. All the smart buyers have gone gone gone.
eBay knows that it is the sellers who pay the bills so they set things up to favor them. This has the effect of chasing away buyers. Almost everyonr I know agrees that ebay is a good place to sell because you can take advantage of dumb buyers who will over pay just so they can "win" But no one I knwo would buy anything there. So what you have is an army of sellers all chasing a limimited number buyers
Me and I'm sure most people concider eBay a "high risk" market place. You have a good chance of fraud or otherwise getting ripped off. If you do find something being sold by a "real person" not some shoe string reseller then some other buyer will over bid. Good for the buyer but a pointless waste of time for me. The other total waste of time is "reserve price" Why don't they say what the minum price is? Total waste of my time
The bottom line is that thee are few good deals on eBay I figure half the sellers are people unloading crap out of their pawn shops while posing ast private party sellers
If the sellers want to sell on eBay they will have to figure out how to attact a more buyers. Here is how:
(1) Make it easy for buyers to REALLY find out who they are buying from. Require EVERY seller to have a VERIFIED Name, street address and phone number. That is the only way to get rid of fraud.
(2) Eliminate secret reserve prices. A minimum bid is OK.
(3) spot check a higher percentage of the item descriptions
(4) Base fees on the total transaction amount
You don't really need a VM to get what you want. Set ypuir desktop machines to boot over the Ethernet interface. After booting they they use a network "share" as their C: drive. I've seen this done at a company I used to work for. All the sales people had identical diskless computers. When a computer broke the IT staff would pull a random machine out of a box and put it on the guy's desk and power it up. That was it. With now local hard drive there was no possable way to configure the machine. They'd put the broken machine in the box and have UPS pick it up and send it to the repait place. With not hard drive there was no way they could send out sensitive data with the broken machine.
This could be done with a VM too. but why bother? You would need to install an OS and at least a "VM Player" on the machine. It is simpler to install nothing.
I like VMs but their porpose is to allow yu to run more than one OS instance on one machine. When you only want to run one OS instance on one machine you don't need a VM.
Slashdot Mirror
The entire Earth was formed by small impacts like this, each impact, on average, making the Earth a little larger.
You are about 25 year to late. This is the way it's beed done for many years Have you ever seen a real life "TOC" (tactical Command center) basically it is a bunch of shipping containers filled with radios, computers and workstations. They can mount these containers on trucks and in some cases use them while moving on a raodway but typically they set up and deply big satilite dishes and antana masts with camo netting over the top. Many times these containers (they call them "shelters") are protected against biological and chemical agents and harded for EMP (eletromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion)
You are right the MS Windose style "Maximise" button is not so usfull on a 30" screen. That is why Apple makes it work differently. When using Mac OSX the window does not expand to fill all of the screen. It only gets as big as it needs to be to show all of the content. Apple's green button should really be called "Get bigger", not "maximize". I'm sure over time as big screen become more common the other's will all follows Apple's lead on this
It is pretty easy to guess that in 50 years EVERYTHING will be electric powered with the power comming from mostly nuclear power and some hydro plus other minor sources. No new technology needs to be invented. This will very good for the economies of the industrail world, all the money that is now flowing to oil producers will remain in-contry.
I only wish we'd run out of oil sooner
Let's say I leased you a car and I said you had to pay only one cent the first week, 2 cents to next and so on. Every week the price doubles until the 60 month lease period is over. You can cancel at any time by paying off 1% of the remaining payments. So you sign it. Am I being unfair or are yu being stupd? I'd claim you were stupid. the terms were clear and you agreed to them. Same with Vista. You read the EULA and "signed" it. Stupid or unfair? Microsoft is betting (correctly) that most uers are stuupid.
Yes each might have a copy of Javascript mapped into it's address space but only one physical copy of Javascript is in RAM. The system uses "copy on write" so all instances of a running program can use the same copy of the code while each has it's own data. Even better, if the system needs more memory it can simply over write parts of executable coe that are not being activly used by any of the instances and not have to save to a swapfile because the data is in the executable file already. The magic of a modern demand paged virtual memory system. All modern OSes work this way.
You can't add up the memory used by each applicatioon to find the total used. Then same gose for commly used dynamic loadable libraies. There should be only one copy in physical RAM
Yes you are right. It WILL drive up the cost gas and oil. But it will drive up the price world wide. All consummers even those in China will pay very slightly more. VERY slightly more because of the reduced production in California. But the tax monay will flow to California ONLY This is a very smart move. California can effectivly tax consummers in the other 49 states, in Europe and China. Californians will pay (maybe) a few bucks more a month but collect many more backs per month in taxes. But remembeer. Tax money does not disapper. ALL of it is spent by the government right here in the state. All that tax money goes into some californian's paycheck.
One way to think of this is WHICH part of life is extended. Do we extend middle age or do we extend old age. The best plan would be to make you feel as if you were in your 40's for 30 years. the 40's is when people are most productive. the effect on society depends on which part of life is exteneded
Let's see.... maybe put a magnet on the rotor and little coils of wire around the outside? The changing magnetic field will induce current in any nearby conductors. This part was figured out more then 100 years ago. After all the only new thing here is the size.
When I was in school I had and English professor who knew Tolkein. He was one of Tolkein's students. I got to hear some stories 2nd hand. Tolkein had a "day job" doing research, teaching and spending time with students but I think "middle Earth consummer mot of the reast of his time. One of the sories was of being a Tolkein's house for dinner at the time after his first boooks' publication and before the book reviews were published in the newspapers. His was very worried that rviewers would dismiss his work as light weight "fairy tale". He was greatly releived, it turned out because the reviewers seemed to have "gotten it". He did care a lot about what people would think of his work. But he did not write fr a living.
First off it s surprizing how many people, even trainned software engineers don't understand SQL databases. I'd bet that most people writting software today don't know what "normal form" means As I see it a dfesigner has three options not two. Yes you can go faster if you use a stripped down database that lacks important features be coding those features into your aplication. But you can go even faster by not using a data base at all and writing directly to the file system. For simple applications where you only have a few thousand items to track and ONLY your one applacation needs to access that data a file works fine. But when you have many, many tables and each is large and the tables are mostly related to each other and (this is the key) you have many applacations written by diferent organizations that all need to access the data at the same time then yu have no bussines to be using MySQL. Most people however write small, simple software. certainly if you are using PHP you are just backing up a web site. I wonder what his vews on Oracle are?
One core dedicated to enemy AI.
One core for physics calculations
That is NOT the way you design multi threaded aplications. No, what you do is to identify varius proceses that you need to do. Perhaps one of them is to read user inputs, read inputs comming in from the network (Internet). another to move the "camera" and then one process for each object to be simulated. So you might have 40 or 100 threads running. Then you would depend on the operating system to allocate physical "cores" to software threads. With this type if design performance can scale as you add cores. ASo in 5 to 10 years when we all are using 32 or 64 core machines it really will run 8 times faster How many threads is an enginerring decision. For example if you have four cars running on a raod do you use a thread for each car or one thread for all cars, another for all people. Thread per object is a radical design but thread per type of object is less radical
The best option for me is the local public library. They offer DVDs for free. Hard to beat free. I can reserve them on-line then walk in and the DVD is tagged with my name on it and setting on a self up by the checkout counter.
No matter how badly polluted and climate changed the Earth becomes life will be easier here on Earth then on Mars. Even if the air become toxic so we need a gas mask to breath and most life dies, still it will be easier then on Mars. At least on earth we would have air pressure and a magnetic field. Mars without a strong magnetic field means that people will need to live underground in shelters and will need to limit their exposure to rediation on the surface. Go to Mars for other reasons like "because you can" or "it might be fun" or "it provides good jobs for engineers" but not so that you can find a better place to live. The radiation from the Sun would kill a person living on the surface of Mars if he stayed there for any period of years.
WAAS is better. All you need is one GPS reciever and it costs noting and is available everywhere GPS is. Differential was a great idea but they used a second back channel radio to broadcast the data. WAAS is almost the same thing but uses the GPS system itself to broadcast the data. Smarter really.
I doubt anyone would used DOS as a home desk top machine. However these are far more uses for computers than web surfing and reading e-mail. Applications that come to mind for Free DOS include. Controlling lab instruments. Embeded devices. Basically are the things that don't require megabytes of RAM and a graphical user interface.
Do you know where all the money goes for a space launch today? In has little to do with the cost of fuel. The fuel is cheap. Almost ALL of the money goes to labor It takes and army f preople to build the very complex machines. but even most of them to check and re-check. With a rocket you never are able to really test it until you launch, you get one chance to get it right. The test, retests and the paperwork to track everything is where all that money goes.
In theory a re-usable launcher like the shuttleculd save moneybut for the need to recertify it fr each launch. Certification means checks and paperwork
If you only had one machine at home, yes this would be pointless unless then goal was to learn about LDAP.
You are right the 2 in 17 figure the news media picked up on is not important. But the real news here is that 17 in 17 did not die of the treatment which very well could have happened. Also I'm not sure of your method. In the cases studied it is very well known that all of them would have died. I'm not sure if 17 is the correct sample size. There are _many_ more known cases of cancer and these might be conciderd part of a control group.
What hapens when work of layoffs gets out is EVERYONE start looking for a new job and gues what -- The bbest people are the first ones to find new jobs. You tend to loose the best and keep only those who can't find another job.
There is an even simplier method to break a lock. This works on most every front door locks and most every house. Get a large flat blade screw driver and a hammer. Pound the screwdriver blade into the key slot. Next place a vicegrip plier on the screw driver and rotate the screw driver as if it were a key. You will share off all the tumblers. The whole process takes about 15 seconds.
How long would it take you to round up a few PC and build a cluster and get it connected to a high badwidth Internet connection? How much do you want to be paid per hour? What are the payrol taxes on your hourly rate. Add this all up. Assume the old PCs are free. OK now you have the buy-in price. How many hours a month will yo need to keep this system running? At what hourly rate?
Now you have to figure the cost of power is about $0.15 per KWH and each PC will burn about 0.2 KW and every KW the PC burns required at least 1 KW of airconditionaling power. The power osts alone are $0.06 per hour for only four cents more I get a PC and don't have to pay you to build it for me.
Have you ever been to Japan? I was there recently visting my in-laws. They bought a new condo and as you might guess after some time I had need to check out the bathroom. So I'm siting there and notice this control console with an LCD display and a bunch of buttons and it's all in Japaneese and I can't read a word of it. I'm afraid to push anyhting. Fortunatly there was still the standerd chrome lever handle. Later I had my wife translate. You can adjust the seat temperture, water sprays and air blowers and 4 other parameters. It seems the condo builders put these in every unit along with the microwave, dishwasher, laundry machine, stove and so on. Even teh airconditioner has a large complex programmagle control. But it is all well designed, you can ignore the part you don't understand so even I can use everything in a miniman way They've come a long way from the traditional house with rice paper divider walls that my wive grew up in. They did not even own a cloths washer in those days, they were not affordable, "gramma" used a washboard and tub in the early 60's but now the computer controlled comode just comes with the house, like it or not.
eBay knows that it is the sellers who pay the bills so they set things up to favor them. This has the effect of chasing away buyers. Almost everyonr I know agrees that ebay is a good place to sell because you can take advantage of dumb buyers who will over pay just so they can "win" But no one I knwo would buy anything there. So what you have is an army of sellers all chasing a limimited number buyers
Me and I'm sure most people concider eBay a "high risk" market place. You have a good chance of fraud or otherwise getting ripped off. If you do find something being sold by a "real person" not some shoe string reseller then some other buyer will over bid. Good for the buyer but a pointless waste of time for me. The other total waste of time is "reserve price" Why don't they say what the minum price is? Total waste of my time
The bottom line is that thee are few good deals on eBay I figure half the sellers are people unloading crap out of their pawn shops while posing ast private party sellers
If the sellers want to sell on eBay they will have to figure out how to attact a more buyers. Here is how: (1) Make it easy for buyers to REALLY find out who they are buying from. Require EVERY seller to have a VERIFIED Name, street address and phone number. That is the only way to get rid of fraud. (2) Eliminate secret reserve prices. A minimum bid is OK. (3) spot check a higher percentage of the item descriptions (4) Base fees on the total transaction amount
This could be done with a VM too. but why bother? You would need to install an OS and at least a "VM Player" on the machine. It is simpler to install nothing.
I like VMs but their porpose is to allow yu to run more than one OS instance on one machine. When you only want to run one OS instance on one machine you don't need a VM.