Thise Europeans know how to do big engineering projects.
look up "Spruce Goose," buddy. It is and remains to be the largest aircraft ever built (american, btw), and it was built in the 40s! wingspan is just shy of 100 metres, and most of the entire thing is built with _WOOD_. It's a true wonder that if actually FLEW. Hughes is a maniac and a genius.
p.s. the said aircraft takes off / lands on water, so there was the tiny detail of transporting it (in parts) from the hanger to the bay where it was final assembled. If you want to marvel at engineering miracles, at least marvel at ones worht marveling at.
the proper term is probably "signal," but anyway, depending on your dielectric and how you set up your lines, your speed varied but almost all of them is a fraction of c. IIRC coax is ~25cm / 1nS, FR4 (PCB material) is ~18cm / 1nS, and internal wiring in chips are actually slower, which means clock distribution is a very big deal within that 1.x sq.cm of silicon.
Chronologically speaking, out of order execution was introduced in Pentium Pro and not Pentium II. Unless you count the inclusion of MMX instruction set a revolution, the evolution from P-Pro to PII was not very big.
stop making excuses for the lazy behemoth that the phone companies had become in the US. densly packed or not, that's not the point at all; It's not that NY or Chicago or Bay area or Los angeles is any less packed than japan, and just by exploring these highly contentrated areas you can still cover the majority of the population.
did you know that I get FOMA (3G) coverage way off in the boondocks in japan, in the middle of a ricefield? Heck, Gunma is like the redneck country in Japan - there are not even enough railroads in a country famous for public transportation so that the prefecture has the highest car-ownership in the country - but don't worry, you will get fantastic coverage pretty much everywhere you'd want to go.
heck, I go hiking in the middle of a mountain and i still get mova (mobile internet) coverage so i can check train schedules while i am still on the top of a mountain.
don't be silly, "densly packed" is just an excuse; do you work for the phone company or something?
Mostly chips that fail are crushed and tossed. they are crushed because the chips contain your IP and you don't want, say, a compeitor finding a shiny (but bad) wafer in your trash and take a microscope to it - and face it, test is not 100% so that "defective" wafer you tossed out might actually be fully functional, more reason to fear the competitor getting your secrets*.
i don't even think the crushed silicon is recycled - after dozens of litho runs, the chips have too much junk on it and it's cheaper to get the high purity stuff directly. So, unfortunately, just tossed.
Now, if you befriend somebody in semiconductor industry, you might swing some bad wafers (or even better, blank wafers). let me tell you, ultrapure silicon polished to within atoms precision makes excellent mirrors - they have this erie purple / metallic colour. And you KNOW that your mug reflected in it is going to be the most precise image you will see of yourself. ever.
too bad that these days wafers are cut so thin that they would curl if not packaged right away after the baking, though - ruins the mirror thing.
*in packaging, the chips are embedded in resin, and it's a pain to get the resin off without ruining the circuit underneath, so it's a lot harder for someone to see your chip "naked." That does not prevent them from trying, though - it's time consuming but with enough patience and acid (to burn away the resin), you can eventually reveal the chip underneath.
I am getting fiber to the premisis installed this week, and it's 100Mbps up/down for ~25 bux / month.
I was complaining because VSL limits that to ~55Mbps.
Being in Japan just put things into a dirrerent perspective, I guess. So here is to consumers of America (of whom I will become one again all too soon) - DEMAND MORE!! it's kind of weird when the post get so excited even though it... erm... relly slow.
As flamebait and as troll the parent is, considering that this is the N.Korean OFFICAL page and their central news agency is hosted in japan... I really do wonder about the amount of computers in the country.
you have to realize that most companies are forbidden to export anything to N.K. And to think the latency of the last explosion getting out - it's no wonder as there are 1.1million phone lines in a country of 22.7m people. cellular phone availability data is nonexistant, and all the phone are routed through beijing and russia.
sort of to answer the origial story, though - N.K. probably is using china's networks to get online not necessarily because china have anything to do it other than just selling them bandwidth (just like MCI could be selling bandwidth to western malicious internet personalities without knowledge). I do wonder if the said hackers have to contend with the firewall of china, though...
hah hah. you are right; for such a "polite" culture, i am absolutely in shock how infrequently do people give up their seats on trains.
as for MD: as far as i know it's not a perfect digital copy, and people would individually rent and record instead of record off eachother. Besides sony licenses the MD and makes money off that plus the rental fees so the economy sort of works out.
Actually before everybody goes off hailing SONY for being so great and good: From everything I have seen here in japan I honestly don't think Japanese people *DO* any piracy. Sure there are the niche "maniacs" that does that, but in general the population shuns pirated software and music and movies like it's a bad disease.
Some examples:
* I bring back stacks of new movies unreleased in japan (back when LOTR:ROK was not in theatres yet), DVDs bought in china. Everyone is interested until the moment they realize it's pirated. "Oh it must be bad quality," or "ahh it's ok i'll just wait for the theatres." etc
* Japanese in piracy capitals doesn't browse the bootleg shops. At ALL.
(side note to above, they also pay full price for Luis Vuitton crap even when there are immitations for 1/100th of the price and absolutely no discernable difference). There are also no market for said immitation products in Japan.
* us foreigners are downloading movies off bittorrent that we can't get here, and we always get these looks of amazement like "oh you guys are pirating again!"
This is compared to pretty much all of my acquaintences in the US (including everyone who is not even considered "tech savvy") who downloads from kazaa or torrent or whatever. Why do you think the announcement is that they will simply end the copy-protect from Sony Japan, but not globally?
I saw this when walking through tokyo the other day.
the screen *cannot* be any bigger because of the rounded shape of the top cover. the cover portion is not like a slate, but rather the edges start from a blade edge and only reaches full thickness about 2cm in, where the actual LCD is embedded. check out the side-view - that's why the screen is so "small".
Now, why whould they want to design their system wich such rounded edges, that's another mystery that you can only ask their design department.
2.4 mil is pocket change to a school of 40k students. when tuition clocks in at $20k per student per year (not figuring in room / board / activity fee / whatever), what's 60 bux per year? probably less than that even, as the summer / winter breaks are likely not covered.
On the other hand, if you have a huge P2P fest happening on campus, the fee the univ end up paying for simple outbound bandwidth will exceed that amount.
Anyway. On the other hand, I have never had downloaded anything from P2P *ever* (hard to believe in this day and age, probably, but iTunes radio serves me good enough), so would feel that charging absolutely everyone is quite unfair. Though, that said, for 5 dollars a month and unlimited downloads, I'd probably start getting hooked.
Anyway this seems like kind of old news, as they had coverage on this quite a while back in Japan (which I actually saw part of). In any case most of the robots are balanced by "AI" - I put quotes because it's not intelligence that balances (you don't use your logical thought for balance either, but rather it's more like a background function), but robots had balance algorithms that were automated: i.e. the remote controls would command the robots to, say, stand on one leg, and the robot would calculate its arms position and shift center of weight and whatnot in order to accomplish this.
They are far more advanced than they appear to the eye. I have no idea where this obsession with robots come from in Japan, but I have to admit they are world leaders in this area.
Erm, granted probably not (btw Casshern is a movie released recently in Japan. See here (bottom of page) for a PA rant on it.)
That's almost exactly what the movie suggests: that we are a message and we can pass the same message onward. Won't say too much lest I ruin the movie for yall though, as much as I realize it has but a small chance of ever making it to the states. (wonders about the prospects of Cutie Honey in the same vein.)
My Sharp phone (DoCoMo SH251i) died within 3 monthes of me recieving it. Exchange for new one. died again within 1 week. Exchanged new one - still kicking but the battery life has become quite questionable.
My Sharp Electronic Dictionary: keys become non-responsive after about 6 monthes; the hinges are almost gone, and the letters SHARP has been falling off one by one, first to read SHAP, and then SHP - I think if it gets to SH in a few weeks I will write "IT" beside it.
As a comparison my NEC phone had never had *any* problems including my stupid action of plugging it (100V device) into a 220V socket. My Seiko dictionary is holding up quite well with about double the usage recieved on the Sharp, etc.
US need a MUCH MORE rigorous drivers training program - most other country with a large road network has one: Japan, Germany (I think most of europe), heck even China. Black boxes may convict the dangerous drivers, but it won't stop people from being killed.
At least support something that will solve the *root* of your problems: doing away with generations of bad drivers teaching their kids who turn out to be even worse drivers.
Lycos owns Wired and Webmonkey and a slew of other actually really cool stuff right... I even vaguely remember monster.com being part of their network.
I can't imagine what sane mind would try to market something like this! Let's see...
1) remote should be take anywhere, put anywhere device, as this thing is a huge power-hog, it needs no rest on the charging stand when not in use.
2) remote controls basically sends a relatively short sequence of bits to an infrared LED when a certain button is pressed. It does not need a 200MHz processor or a 65k colour screen to do this. In fact, this gets back to the battery / power thing - you can make a remote control that functions perfectly that can last a year on two alkaline cells.
3) if you really want customizability, the remote itself doesn't have to do all of this! it would be much wiser and cheaper and easier (more later) to simply have the remote be programmable via, say, a computer - it'd be like writing to a cheap FPGA, if you want the remote to be that powerful. as for easier - programming a remote on a well designed application on a computer monitor would be much easier than doing the same on the tiny remote display, no?
4) and it's like... twice the price of my TV! geez... fuck, i might as well write an app for my palm to control the TV via the infrared port. Heck it might be cheaper too...
Erm, Venus has no magneto sphere either, you know.
That said, since it does sport a huge iron core maybe if we spun the planet the magnetic field would come along too. Though it would be interesting to see what effect would it have on the earth's magneto sphere (magnetic tidal forces?). It would suck if earth's magneto sphere disappeared because of it.
Though maybe we can send a team of crackpots to detonate some nukes in the core. Oh gosh that was a terrible movie. but hey! maybe we can do that for venus!
Giving this some thought, I wonder if it will provide any good return of information we do not already know.
1) the the last few decades material sciences has advanced a lot, for example I believe that the amount of titatium and composite materials being used today is a lot more than the lunar lander.
2) if we are worried about the effect of radiation, vacuum, etc on space structures - we really don't need to look at the lander: an astronaunt can just walk outside of the space station (provided a functional suit or two) - or even have the spaceshuttle pick up and old satellite or two. Those are being subjected to much harsher environments than the lander moon
3) we can fairly accurately duplicate the environment on the moon, and carry out the same experiment (even, accelerated) on earth.
4) construction of a moonbase would probably take place underground to take advantage of some cheap radiation / meteorite shielding from the moon's dirt. the above ground structure does not provide readily corrolateable information in this regard.
Indeed, with unlimited resources it would be interesting to see if microfractures develop due to small meteorite impact / radiation / day/night temperature cycle and such, but it would seem that these can be learned via separate means without the need of a dedicated rover mission.
Slashdot Mirror
look up "Spruce Goose," buddy. It is and remains to be the largest aircraft ever built (american, btw), and it was built in the 40s! wingspan is just shy of 100 metres, and most of the entire thing is built with _WOOD_. It's a true wonder that if actually FLEW. Hughes is a maniac and a genius.
p.s. the said aircraft takes off / lands on water, so there was the tiny detail of transporting it (in parts) from the hanger to the bay where it was final assembled. If you want to marvel at engineering miracles, at least marvel at ones worht marveling at.
the proper term is probably "signal," but anyway, depending on your dielectric and how you set up your lines, your speed varied but almost all of them is a fraction of c. IIRC coax is ~25cm / 1nS, FR4 (PCB material) is ~18cm / 1nS, and internal wiring in chips are actually slower, which means clock distribution is a very big deal within that 1.x sq.cm of silicon.
Chronologically speaking, out of order execution was introduced in Pentium Pro and not Pentium II. Unless you count the inclusion of MMX instruction set a revolution, the evolution from P-Pro to PII was not very big.
stop making excuses for the lazy behemoth that the phone companies had become in the US. densly packed or not, that's not the point at all; It's not that NY or Chicago or Bay area or Los angeles is any less packed than japan, and just by exploring these highly contentrated areas you can still cover the majority of the population.
did you know that I get FOMA (3G) coverage way off in the boondocks in japan, in the middle of a ricefield? Heck, Gunma is like the redneck country in Japan - there are not even enough railroads in a country famous for public transportation so that the prefecture has the highest car-ownership in the country - but don't worry, you will get fantastic coverage pretty much everywhere you'd want to go.
heck, I go hiking in the middle of a mountain and i still get mova (mobile internet) coverage so i can check train schedules while i am still on the top of a mountain.
don't be silly, "densly packed" is just an excuse; do you work for the phone company or something?
This sentence is a lie.
???
Mostly chips that fail are crushed and tossed. they are crushed because the chips contain your IP and you don't want, say, a compeitor finding a shiny (but bad) wafer in your trash and take a microscope to it - and face it, test is not 100% so that "defective" wafer you tossed out might actually be fully functional, more reason to fear the competitor getting your secrets*.
i don't even think the crushed silicon is recycled - after dozens of litho runs, the chips have too much junk on it and it's cheaper to get the high purity stuff directly. So, unfortunately, just tossed.
Now, if you befriend somebody in semiconductor industry, you might swing some bad wafers (or even better, blank wafers). let me tell you, ultrapure silicon polished to within atoms precision makes excellent mirrors - they have this erie purple / metallic colour. And you KNOW that your mug reflected in it is going to be the most precise image you will see of yourself. ever.
too bad that these days wafers are cut so thin that they would curl if not packaged right away after the baking, though - ruins the mirror thing.
*in packaging, the chips are embedded in resin, and it's a pain to get the resin off without ruining the circuit underneath, so it's a lot harder for someone to see your chip "naked." That does not prevent them from trying, though - it's time consuming but with enough patience and acid (to burn away the resin), you can eventually reveal the chip underneath.
I am getting fiber to the premisis installed this week, and it's 100Mbps up/down for ~25 bux / month.
I was complaining because VSL limits that to ~55Mbps.
Being in Japan just put things into a dirrerent perspective, I guess. So here is to consumers of America (of whom I will become one again all too soon) - DEMAND MORE!! it's kind of weird when the post get so excited even though it... erm... relly slow.
you have to realize that most companies are forbidden to export anything to N.K. And to think the latency of the last explosion getting out - it's no wonder as there are 1.1million phone lines in a country of 22.7m people. cellular phone availability data is nonexistant, and all the phone are routed through beijing and russia.
sort of to answer the origial story, though - N.K. probably is using china's networks to get online not necessarily because china have anything to do it other than just selling them bandwidth (just like MCI could be selling bandwidth to western malicious internet personalities without knowledge). I do wonder if the said hackers have to contend with the firewall of china, though...
hah hah. you are right; for such a "polite" culture, i am absolutely in shock how infrequently do people give up their seats on trains.
as for MD: as far as i know it's not a perfect digital copy, and people would individually rent and record instead of record off eachother. Besides sony licenses the MD and makes money off that plus the rental fees so the economy sort of works out.
Actually before everybody goes off hailing SONY for being so great and good: From everything I have seen here in japan I honestly don't think Japanese people *DO* any piracy. Sure there are the niche "maniacs" that does that, but in general the population shuns pirated software and music and movies like it's a bad disease.
Some examples:
* I bring back stacks of new movies unreleased in japan (back when LOTR:ROK was not in theatres yet), DVDs bought in china. Everyone is interested until the moment they realize it's pirated. "Oh it must be bad quality," or "ahh it's ok i'll just wait for the theatres." etc
* Japanese in piracy capitals doesn't browse the bootleg shops. At ALL.
(side note to above, they also pay full price for Luis Vuitton crap even when there are immitations for 1/100th of the price and absolutely no discernable difference). There are also no market for said immitation products in Japan.
* us foreigners are downloading movies off bittorrent that we can't get here, and we always get these looks of amazement like "oh you guys are pirating again!"
This is compared to pretty much all of my acquaintences in the US (including everyone who is not even considered "tech savvy") who downloads from kazaa or torrent or whatever. Why do you think the announcement is that they will simply end the copy-protect from Sony Japan, but not globally?
It's a moral problem, boys and girls.
Since nissan is Mr. Nissan and nissancars is the car company...
I saw this when walking through tokyo the other day.
the screen *cannot* be any bigger because of the rounded shape of the top cover. the cover portion is not like a slate, but rather the edges start from a blade edge and only reaches full thickness about 2cm in, where the actual LCD is embedded. check out the side-view - that's why the screen is so "small".
Now, why whould they want to design their system wich such rounded edges, that's another mystery that you can only ask their design department.
I showed this page to my friend (girl) who was looking at buying an iPod mini.
She said "this looks like an egg. I like the iPod better."
never underestiname the power of good industrial design.
2.4 mil is pocket change to a school of 40k students. when tuition clocks in at $20k per student per year (not figuring in room / board / activity fee / whatever), what's 60 bux per year? probably less than that even, as the summer / winter breaks are likely not covered.
On the other hand, if you have a huge P2P fest happening on campus, the fee the univ end up paying for simple outbound bandwidth will exceed that amount.
Anyway. On the other hand, I have never had downloaded anything from P2P *ever* (hard to believe in this day and age, probably, but iTunes radio serves me good enough), so would feel that charging absolutely everyone is quite unfair. Though, that said, for 5 dollars a month and unlimited downloads, I'd probably start getting hooked.
Anyway this seems like kind of old news, as they had coverage on this quite a while back in Japan (which I actually saw part of). In any case most of the robots are balanced by "AI" - I put quotes because it's not intelligence that balances (you don't use your logical thought for balance either, but rather it's more like a background function), but robots had balance algorithms that were automated: i.e. the remote controls would command the robots to, say, stand on one leg, and the robot would calculate its arms position and shift center of weight and whatnot in order to accomplish this.
They are far more advanced than they appear to the eye. I have no idea where this obsession with robots come from in Japan, but I have to admit they are world leaders in this area.
You mean the 19th century telegramed, right?
That's almost exactly what the movie suggests: that we are a message and we can pass the same message onward. Won't say too much lest I ruin the movie for yall though, as much as I realize it has but a small chance of ever making it to the states. (wonders about the prospects of Cutie Honey in the same vein.)
Let's see:
My Sharp phone (DoCoMo SH251i) died within 3 monthes of me recieving it. Exchange for new one. died again within 1 week. Exchanged new one - still kicking but the battery life has become quite questionable.
My Sharp Electronic Dictionary: keys become non-responsive after about 6 monthes; the hinges are almost gone, and the letters SHARP has been falling off one by one, first to read SHAP, and then SHP - I think if it gets to SH in a few weeks I will write "IT" beside it.
As a comparison my NEC phone had never had *any* problems including my stupid action of plugging it (100V device) into a 220V socket. My Seiko dictionary is holding up quite well with about double the usage recieved on the Sharp, etc.
Just some ancidotal evidence...
US need a MUCH MORE rigorous drivers training program - most other country with a large road network has one: Japan, Germany (I think most of europe), heck even China. Black boxes may convict the dangerous drivers, but it won't stop people from being killed.
At least support something that will solve the *root* of your problems: doing away with generations of bad drivers teaching their kids who turn out to be even worse drivers.
The girl in question is Ceren Ercen
Lycos owns Wired and Webmonkey and a slew of other actually really cool stuff right...
I even vaguely remember monster.com being part of their network.
Lycos portal I don't care, what happens to these?
I can't imagine what sane mind would try to market something like this! Let's see...
1) remote should be take anywhere, put anywhere device, as this thing is a huge power-hog, it needs no rest on the charging stand when not in use.
2) remote controls basically sends a relatively short sequence of bits to an infrared LED when a certain button is pressed. It does not need a 200MHz processor or a 65k colour screen to do this. In fact, this gets back to the battery / power thing - you can make a remote control that functions perfectly that can last a year on two alkaline cells.
3) if you really want customizability, the remote itself doesn't have to do all of this! it would be much wiser and cheaper and easier (more later) to simply have the remote be programmable via, say, a computer - it'd be like writing to a cheap FPGA, if you want the remote to be that powerful. as for easier - programming a remote on a well designed application on a computer monitor would be much easier than doing the same on the tiny remote display, no?
4) and it's like... twice the price of my TV! geez... fuck, i might as well write an app for my palm to control the TV via the infrared port. Heck it might be cheaper too...
Erm, Venus has no magneto sphere either, you know.
That said, since it does sport a huge iron core maybe if we spun the planet the magnetic field would come along too. Though it would be interesting to see what effect would it have on the earth's magneto sphere (magnetic tidal forces?). It would suck if earth's magneto sphere disappeared because of it.
Though maybe we can send a team of crackpots to detonate some nukes in the core. Oh gosh that was a terrible movie. but hey! maybe we can do that for venus!
go here for cool animations.
Giving this some thought, I wonder if it will provide any good return of information we do not already know.
1) the the last few decades material sciences has advanced a lot, for example I believe that the amount of titatium and composite materials being used today is a lot more than the lunar lander.
2) if we are worried about the effect of radiation, vacuum, etc on space structures - we really don't need to look at the lander: an astronaunt can just walk outside of the space station (provided a functional suit or two) - or even have the spaceshuttle pick up and old satellite or two. Those are being subjected to much harsher environments than the lander moon
3) we can fairly accurately duplicate the environment on the moon, and carry out the same experiment (even, accelerated) on earth.
4) construction of a moonbase would probably take place underground to take advantage of some cheap radiation / meteorite shielding from the moon's dirt. the above ground structure does not provide readily corrolateable information in this regard.
Indeed, with unlimited resources it would be interesting to see if microfractures develop due to small meteorite impact / radiation / day/night temperature cycle and such, but it would seem that these can be learned via separate means without the need of a dedicated rover mission.