Let's see 3,000,000 blocks / (365*20)days = 420 blocks/day. Assuming an average of 12hrs of daylight we get 35 blocks an hour which is about 100 seconds / block. Just the cutting and shaping this many blocks with simple tools is amazing, not to mention transporting then raising them. A truly astounding feat.
I am not taking sides on this, but how could you find a submission on Youtube without key search terms. For example Jon Stewart, daily show, etc. If Youtube would not display items found by these search terms, wouldn't this stop most uploads?
One of the reasons for Apple's successes under Steve Jobs has been his knack for sensing what will sell and refusing to ok a prototype etc if it doesn't feel right to him. While I admire Bill Gates' commitment to charity, it seems he has been out of the loop on this and Microsoft has jumped the shark. If Jobs had been head of Microsoft and discovered that Vista was much slower than XP at copying/deleting files, I'd bet he would have not released it until this was done right rather than making it pretty. Other than Windows ME, all my other Windows' upgrades from 3.0 to XP made me say, "should have done this sooner." I can't recall any signicant problems running older software. If my current system dies and I need to get a new one, I will definitely let being able to buy it with XP not Vista be my first selection critereon, listen up Gateway, Dell, HP, etc. By the way, my copy speed with my 1.6 GHz XP system is about 25 Mbytes/sec for C drive to C drive copy of a 750 Mbype file and about 30 Mbytes/sec for C drive to a USB external. Not unreasonable considering 7200 rpm disk drive continuous read/write speeds.
When companies treat consumers as dumb blonds (Vista is like a dumb blond, pretty but slow), they are starting on the path to failure. I will always remember Ford's response to poor gas mileage due to their emission controls in the 1970's was to increase the gas tank size so consumers would not need to fill up more often. When gas prices jumped consumers did notice and switched to Japanese carmakers. So Vista requires more memory to do to the same things as XP. MS hopes that the consumer will not realize the speed up due increasing memory and faster computer will compensate enough for the slowness of Vista that the comsumer will not notice.
Bill it's time to apologize to us for Vista and ofter free XP to any Vista customer until you get Vista right.
People depend on the partial pressure of oxygen, fires the percentage. Thus on US submarines we let the sailors breathe down the oxygen to about 19% before turning on the oxygen generator to keep it at this level. Generating oxygen for people by water electroysis is energy intensive and requires about 500W per person. Now back to fires. As other smart readers of/. have pointed out fires burn at high altitude. In this case the percentage of oxygen is the same (20.9%) as at sea level but the partial pressure of oxygen is reduced which affects people to some degree depending on the person and work load. For the system described in the article one would need to use caution if it was used at high altitudes to make sure that people were not in an environment too low in oxygen.
In the "good old days" most sailors on submarines smoked and could tell when the oxygen level was down because they couldn't light or smoke their cigarettes.
Another aside: the Apollo moon capsule was maintained at about 3 psi of pure oxygen in space. They used lower pressure so the walls of the lunar lander could be very thin, I believe about 0.02 inches thick. The astronauts worried about accidently kicking a hole in the wall. This way the partial pressure of oxygen was the same as on the ground. The original design had the system on the ground at 100% oxygen for simplicity, with of course tragic results...it was modified to begin with normal air then change to 100% oxygen at lower pressure after launch. It was assumed that fires wouldn't burn in space because there is no convection due to zero g. This is flawed because fans are used to circulate the air. Fire in an environment where you are trapped is always a great concern.
This is done on ships carrying oil. They use the engine exhaust which is low in oxygen to purge the oil tanks. They can't do this with gasoline because crud in the exhaust contaminates the gasoline so they use reduced oxygen air to blanket the gasoline. The oxygen is reduced by passing pressurized air through a bundle of membranes tubes that oxygen diffuses through more readily than nitrogen.
Having the software makes it easy to check how close you are to Alternative Minimum Tax. I know I am getting closer every year. Also if just before filing suppose you remembered you gave $50 to a charity which is probably worth about $15 to you. With the computer easy to rerun. By hand doubt you would bother.
The most powerful members of Congress sneak things into bills. The best place to do it is in conference committee when House and Senate members are ironing out differences. With the internet it is harder to get away with. The Library of Congress web site publishes bills in their various forms but often the delay is enough that it can be too late to get caught. When Congress and the President are from different parties this type of thing can be kept under control. From 2001 to 2006 this wasn't the case so all kinds of things like the above item could be put into a bill.
If the justice department (oxymoron under Bush) decided for anti-trust reasons to break up Microsoft a straightforward thing to do would be to separate the operating system portion from the office portion and eventually allow them both to compete with each other. For this reason Microsoft should very careful about doing non competative actions. The government also could specify a standard word processing format and only purchase software that used it. Again Microsoft must be careful of how they tread. Just ask AT&T. IBM was facing a similar situation but was saved when the Intel/Microsoft based PCs took over so much of the computer business.
I have advised the folks who work on analyzing the air in the ISS. I talked to an astronaut about things that concerned them getting into the air. She said Tabasco sauce was one concern. With zero gravity a drop could float around and accidently be inhaled or get into your eye. Eventually the air filtration system will capture it. One of the effects of zero g on the human body is the redistribution of fluids which causes a loss of taste. This is why the astronauts like to add spicyness to their foods.
A lot easier than carrying around a computer for kids. Probably would be good to have a switch on the stick to write protect where the programs are stored from inadvertent erasure.
This is just one of many cases where the NY Attorney General is doing what the Federal Govt should be doing instead of taking away our rights. I would love to see a pro active US Attorney Gereral going after big business abusing consumers the way that has happened in NY. Oops I forgot he and his boss are from the party of the rich and selfish.
Prototype mine detectors based on NQR have been built and tested. The signals are very weak, even with tens of watts of excitation which makes this a difficult techique for practical use.
See http://maic.jmu.edu/JOURNAL/9.2/RD/williams/willia ms.htm for more info.
When I was in school and studied the Bill of Rights, we were taught that many of the Bill Rights were in response to the way British soldiers acted. Storming into someone's house, seizing property especially guns, throwing you in jail without you knowing why and leaving you there, etc. How do teachers now teach this in light of the behavior of the Bush administration? It just keeps getting worse.
This would be a great example for a software class to show why it is important to think what the result would be if someone inputs an unexpected value, etc. I also remember hearing about where people would deliberately overpay a utility bill by 1 cent so the company would end up spending a stamp to send them a check for the over payment. In the above example I would bet the charity fund (clean water, whatever) got a dollar less.
Probably already been patented, but here goes. Use flash for a large read/write cache for the hard drive. Somewhat like a RAID set-up except that cache write data would only be tranferred periodically. If you kept track of the read information so that frequently used data on the disk would stay in the cache and not be swapped out. Maybe disks could be designed to run at low speed for power saving as well when they are being infrequently accessed.
Don't forget the major source of mercury pollution in the US in coal burning power plants. Perhaps the energy saved with CFLs would mean less mercury in the environment even if they are improperly disposed of.
Yeah, glad I live in Virginia where our power is a combination of nuclear and coal. Pretty obvious from the data why google and yahoo are building server farms in Oregon along the Columbia River. I believe the counties where they are being built get first crack at the hydroelectric power plants on the Columbia River so the power there may be even cheaper still.
A major bottleneck in plant growth is nitrogen, hence fertilizer. Ponds grow lots of algae when there is runoff from farms. A famous chemist once told me that half the nitrogen in our bodies comes from man-made nitrogen sources. Currently we use hydrogen made from natural gas to react with nitrogen from the air to form ammonia which is converted to various forms of fertilizer. Yes there are nitrogen fixing bacteria that do this for us but I don't believe they can do this rapidly enough for the production rates the authors propose.
Just one more reason humanity is going to be SOL when oil and natural gas are in short supply.
If you plot carrying capacity of a road vs speed of traffic you will find a maximum around 40 miles/hour (65 kph). Lets start with an empty road and begin adding cars with everyone going 70 mph. Eventually traffic will begin to slow down. Remember that the carrying capacity is density of cars multiplied by their speed. As more cars are added the carrying capacity increases as more cars can be added to make up for the slower speeds. However once you reach a critical point about 40 mph then the carrying capacity goes down causing a traffic jam. Think about it this way once the speed goes below the critical speed (tipping point, if you like that term) then traffic will be feeding into a jam much faster than it can leave the jam.
This is why once the speed has dropped below the critical point all hell breaks loose on a crowded road. You can sense this when you are driving on a crowded interstate and feel that anything or idiot can cause everything to come to a halt.
So if one out of twenty drugs pays off, should the profit on that drug pay the R&D for the others? If I put my $ in a bank I get interest. You want to put $ in R&D and get no interest on it. I'll take the bank.
This is great. It is much faster than the US patent office site and you can see the text of old patents. I was easily able to find and read a 1919 patent by my wife's grandfather. For fun check out this patent:
Number 219628.
Out of curiousity I thought I might get an HDTV tuner and hook it up to my TV, I get good antenna reception. Anyway looked around Best Buy, (clerks of course knew little) and found a Samsung converter for $178. End of that thought. Seems far too expensive for what it does. Does anyone know of a reasonibly priced one? Obviously in 2008 will be upgrading my TV, likewise for vcr. With prices dropping on TVs figure I'll wait awhile before buying on, probably a 37" LCD.
Sounds great for simple tasks on the road, reading email, simple internet, readout for my gps. I assume it would have a USB interface to upload gps maps etc. Obviously a wi-fi as well. Cheap enough to leave in my car. Sometimes you don't want all the bells and whistles on a device.
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Let's see 3,000,000 blocks / (365*20)days = 420 blocks/day. Assuming an average of 12hrs of daylight we get 35 blocks an hour which is about 100 seconds / block. Just the cutting and shaping this many blocks with simple tools is amazing, not to mention transporting then raising them. A truly astounding feat.
I am not taking sides on this, but how could you find a submission on Youtube without key search terms. For example Jon Stewart, daily show, etc. If Youtube would not display items found by these search terms, wouldn't this stop most uploads?
One of the reasons for Apple's successes under Steve Jobs has been his knack for sensing what will sell and refusing to ok a prototype etc if it doesn't feel right to him. While I admire Bill Gates' commitment to charity, it seems he has been out of the loop on this and Microsoft has jumped the shark. If Jobs had been head of Microsoft and discovered that Vista was much slower than XP at copying/deleting files, I'd bet he would have not released it until this was done right rather than making it pretty. Other than Windows ME, all my other Windows' upgrades from 3.0 to XP made me say, "should have done this sooner." I can't recall any signicant problems running older software. If my current system dies and I need to get a new one, I will definitely let being able to buy it with XP not Vista be my first selection critereon, listen up Gateway, Dell, HP, etc. By the way, my copy speed with my 1.6 GHz XP system is about 25 Mbytes/sec for C drive to C drive copy of a 750 Mbype file and about 30 Mbytes/sec for C drive to a USB external. Not unreasonable considering 7200 rpm disk drive continuous read/write speeds.
When companies treat consumers as dumb blonds (Vista is like a dumb blond, pretty but slow), they are starting on the path to failure. I will always remember Ford's response to poor gas mileage due to their emission controls in the 1970's was to increase the gas tank size so consumers would not need to fill up more often. When gas prices jumped consumers did notice and switched to Japanese carmakers. So Vista requires more memory to do to the same things as XP. MS hopes that the consumer will not realize the speed up due increasing memory and faster computer will compensate enough for the slowness of Vista that the comsumer will not notice.
Bill it's time to apologize to us for Vista and ofter free XP to any Vista customer until you get Vista right.
People depend on the partial pressure of oxygen, fires the percentage. Thus on US submarines we let the sailors breathe down the oxygen to about 19% before turning on the oxygen generator to keep it at this level. Generating oxygen for people by water electroysis is energy intensive and requires about 500W per person. Now back to fires. As other smart readers of /. have pointed out fires burn at high altitude. In this case the percentage of oxygen is the same (20.9%) as at sea level but the partial pressure of oxygen is reduced which affects people to some degree depending on the person and work load. For the system described in the article one would need to use caution if it was used at high altitudes to make sure that people were not in an environment too low in oxygen.
In the "good old days" most sailors on submarines smoked and could tell when the oxygen level was down because they couldn't light or smoke their cigarettes.
Another aside: the Apollo moon capsule was maintained at about 3 psi of pure oxygen in space. They used lower pressure so the walls of the lunar lander could be very thin, I believe about 0.02 inches thick. The astronauts worried about accidently kicking a hole in the wall. This way the partial pressure of oxygen was the same as on the ground. The original design had the system on the ground at 100% oxygen for simplicity, with of course tragic results...it was modified to begin with normal air then change to 100% oxygen at lower pressure after launch. It was assumed that fires wouldn't burn in space because there is no convection due to zero g. This is flawed because fans are used to circulate the air. Fire in an environment where you are trapped is always a great concern.
This is done on ships carrying oil. They use the engine exhaust which is low in oxygen to purge the oil tanks. They can't do this with gasoline because crud in the exhaust contaminates the gasoline so they use reduced oxygen air to blanket the gasoline. The oxygen is reduced by passing pressurized air through a bundle of membranes tubes that oxygen diffuses through more readily than nitrogen.
Having the software makes it easy to check how close you are to Alternative Minimum Tax. I know I am getting closer every year. Also if just before filing suppose you remembered you gave $50 to a charity which is probably worth about $15 to you. With the computer easy to rerun. By hand doubt you would bother.
The most powerful members of Congress sneak things into bills. The best place to do it is in conference committee when House and Senate members are ironing out differences. With the internet it is harder to get away with. The Library of Congress web site publishes bills in their various forms but often the delay is enough that it can be too late to get caught. When Congress and the President are from different parties this type of thing can be kept under control. From 2001 to 2006 this wasn't the case so all kinds of things like the above item could be put into a bill.
If the justice department (oxymoron under Bush) decided for anti-trust reasons to break up Microsoft a straightforward thing to do would be to separate the operating system portion from the office portion and eventually allow them both to compete with each other. For this reason Microsoft should very careful about doing non competative actions. The government also could specify a standard word processing format and only purchase software that used it. Again Microsoft must be careful of how they tread. Just ask AT&T. IBM was facing a similar situation but was saved when the Intel/Microsoft based PCs took over so much of the computer business.
I have advised the folks who work on analyzing the air in the ISS. I talked to an astronaut about things that concerned them getting into the air. She said Tabasco sauce was one concern. With zero gravity a drop could float around and accidently be inhaled or get into your eye. Eventually the air filtration system will capture it. One of the effects of zero g on the human body is the redistribution of fluids which causes a loss of taste. This is why the astronauts like to add spicyness to their foods.
Looking at patents this is the only one that seemed like it might be the proposed technolgy.
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6967443
Essentially reflecting the IR portion of the light back onto the filament to reduce power requirements.
Anybody else have any ideas about the technology?
A lot easier than carrying around a computer for kids. Probably would be good to have a switch on the stick to write protect where the programs are stored from inadvertent erasure.
This is just one of many cases where the NY Attorney General is doing what the Federal Govt should be doing instead of taking away our rights. I would love to see a pro active US Attorney Gereral going after big business abusing consumers the way that has happened in NY. Oops I forgot he and his boss are from the party of the rich and selfish.
Prototype mine detectors based on NQR have been built and tested. The signals are very weak, even with tens of watts of excitation which makes this a difficult techique for practical use. See http://maic.jmu.edu/JOURNAL/9.2/RD/williams/willia ms.htm for more info.
When I was in school and studied the Bill of Rights, we were taught that many of the Bill Rights were in response to the way British soldiers acted. Storming into someone's house, seizing property especially guns, throwing you in jail without you knowing why and leaving you there, etc. How do teachers now teach this in light of the behavior of the Bush administration? It just keeps getting worse.
This would be a great example for a software class to show why it is important to think what the result would be if someone inputs an unexpected value, etc. I also remember hearing about where people would deliberately overpay a utility bill by 1 cent so the company would end up spending a stamp to send them a check for the over payment. In the above example I would bet the charity fund (clean water, whatever) got a dollar less.
Probably already been patented, but here goes. Use flash for a large read/write cache for the hard drive. Somewhat like a RAID set-up except that cache write data would only be tranferred periodically. If you kept track of the read information so that frequently used data on the disk would stay in the cache and not be swapped out. Maybe disks could be designed to run at low speed for power saving as well when they are being infrequently accessed.
Don't forget the major source of mercury pollution in the US in coal burning power plants. Perhaps the energy saved with CFLs would mean less mercury in the environment even if they are improperly disposed of.
Yeah, glad I live in Virginia where our power is a combination of nuclear and coal. Pretty obvious from the data why google and yahoo are building server farms in Oregon along the Columbia River. I believe the counties where they are being built get first crack at the hydroelectric power plants on the Columbia River so the power there may be even cheaper still.
A major bottleneck in plant growth is nitrogen, hence fertilizer. Ponds grow lots of algae when there is runoff from farms. A famous chemist once told me that half the nitrogen in our bodies comes from man-made nitrogen sources. Currently we use hydrogen made from natural gas to react with nitrogen from the air to form ammonia which is converted to various forms of fertilizer. Yes there are nitrogen fixing bacteria that do this for us but I don't believe they can do this rapidly enough for the production rates the authors propose. Just one more reason humanity is going to be SOL when oil and natural gas are in short supply.
If you plot carrying capacity of a road vs speed of traffic you will find a maximum around 40 miles/hour (65 kph). Lets start with an empty road and begin adding cars with everyone going 70 mph. Eventually traffic will begin to slow down. Remember that the carrying capacity is density of cars multiplied by their speed. As more cars are added the carrying capacity increases as more cars can be added to make up for the slower speeds. However once you reach a critical point about 40 mph then the carrying capacity goes down causing a traffic jam. Think about it this way once the speed goes below the critical speed (tipping point, if you like that term) then traffic will be feeding into a jam much faster than it can leave the jam.
This is why once the speed has dropped below the critical point all hell breaks loose on a crowded road. You can sense this when you are driving on a crowded interstate and feel that anything or idiot can cause everything to come to a halt.
So if one out of twenty drugs pays off, should the profit on that drug pay the R&D for the others? If I put my $ in a bank I get interest. You want to put $ in R&D and get no interest on it. I'll take the bank.
This is great. It is much faster than the US patent office site and you can see the text of old patents. I was easily able to find and read a 1919 patent by my wife's grandfather. For fun check out this patent: Number 219628.
Out of curiousity I thought I might get an HDTV tuner and hook it up to my TV, I get good antenna reception. Anyway looked around Best Buy, (clerks of course knew little) and found a Samsung converter for $178. End of that thought. Seems far too expensive for what it does. Does anyone know of a reasonibly priced one? Obviously in 2008 will be upgrading my TV, likewise for vcr. With prices dropping on TVs figure I'll wait awhile before buying on, probably a 37" LCD.
You beat me to it. Great counter example of why my bs detector went off when I read the story.
Sounds great for simple tasks on the road, reading email, simple internet, readout for my gps. I assume it would have a USB interface to upload gps maps etc. Obviously a wi-fi as well. Cheap enough to leave in my car. Sometimes you don't want all the bells and whistles on a device.