I don't think "matured" into Thunderbolt is the right way to put it, at all.
Thunderbolt itself is just an interim solution on the way to Light Peak.
In addition, I don't think it will be fully "mature", Light Peak or no, unless and until they can start making cheaper cables. In general, I would say an active cable is not a good idea. It really raises the price.
A way should be found to put the "active" components inside the devices at either end, with the (now much cheaper) cable running between them.
BTW, contrary to much of contemporary thinking, getting off the earth is VERY interesting and is in fact probably the single most central issue.
The gravity well is the single largest obstacle to complete conquest of local space. As long as missions continue to be launched from Earth, they will continue to be unnecessarily expensive. By a factor of 10 to 100 at least.
Put industrial plants on the moon (a completely feasible, if expensive, concept today) and you divide those costs by many times.
Generally agreed. Though "specific impulse" is kind of a hard measure to try to use for continuous drives. It rather presumes a fixed energy exerted over a fixed amount of time.
Which of course is one of the reasons we should be re-thinking these things from scratch. The old chemical-explosion model is probably, mostly, outmoded.
"The Via APC might be right for some; however, be aware that the power draw on the Via APC (uses some Chinese ARM close) will be significantly higher than on the PI."
Well, yeah. It has a faster, more capable CPU, twice as much RAM, and more built-in peripherals. The idea that it will use more power is hardly a stroke of genius.
"History will mark "Citizens United" as the tipping point."
Hah. I'd mod you up for humor if I were not so enraged by the obvious, even blatant, corruption behind that bizarre decision.
When the Supreme Court starts producing decisions that corporations have actual "rights", in the same way that citizens do, despite the historical record (ALL of which says otherwise), they have gone beyond the pale.
"Where there is education, there is social change, contraception, medicine, increased health and lifespan and decreased reproduction rate."
Where education does not work, financial incentives do. What the hey: it's worked in China.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not claiming that China is the poster child for contraception, or even civilized behavior. But there is no doubt that the financial incentive has worked: the birthrate is way down since.
I've been caught on that one before... and it was my fault.
Those things need to be spelled out ahead of time, for a project of any size. If the customer's needs change, that won't be in your written scope of work, and you can point to it as proof.
For small projects, I've been able to point to emails and say, "You didn't specify that anywhere in your instructions." For anything larger, put it in writing more formally.
It can be something as simple as a "Project Description", written by you and sent to the client. If they want something that isn't in the description as you wrote it, then it's their job to change it and send it back... before you agree on payment.
"You have to be careful, because I've had companies that start making changes to their infrastructure, and then told us our software didn't work when in fact their environment changed. So be very specific."
You should have a specified "scope of work", describing the deliverable. If the situation changes to the extent that anything lies outside the original scope of work, it costs extra.
I used to work for an engineering company, and that worked for them. Just be sure to specify your scope of work. Then actual bugs that lie inside the scope of work are your responsibility. Anything else is not.
In contrast, Orion (the old-school Orion concept) gives you the output of a couple of billion of them, in a few microseconds. Nobody said it was efficient, but if nobody's using the key you can always use the sledgehammer.
"They could have at least saved the name until building a high-thrust ion drive vehicle with similar potential."
It's a different concept. An ion drive of any size could probably not power such a beast off the Earth, for the simple reason that ion drives rely on low mass at extremely high velocity to power their acceleration. But that velocity is necessarily limited by the currently known laws of physics. It probably would not be sufficient for escape velocity by itself.
But agreed. Ion thrusters are, today, designed for extremely efficient thrust / mass ratio, but only over time. If that same efficiency could be brought to bear in huge quantities all at once, you could have liftoff. Cheap.
But we're not quite there yet. It's kind of like saying, "We need the output of a standard 100W light bulb for 10 straight years, all in 0.0001 seconds."
Yes, there are certainly very strict limitations on its normal use. But on the other hand, if a big sacrifice (of a rather large area) were really necessary, technically there is nothing preventing it from being single-stage-to-orbit... and far beyond.
Read "Lucifer's Hammer" by Niven and Pournelle. (And maybe you already have.) But the Orion concept has been around far longer than their book. They borrowed it, they didn't invent it.
Agreed. See my reply below. Unless they can make it definable by points, rather than fixed keys, its utility will be severely limited.
And as someone else pointed out: it also places a soft layer over the nice hard capacitive touch screens that took so long to develop. I mean: you don't scratch Gorilla Glass with your plastic-pointed stylus. But you could probably break one of these keys (or maybe all of them, due to pressure loss) with a single pin prick.
The devices with hard screens have been doing a good job of improving tactile feedback. (It's called "haptic" these days for some strange reason, although nobody -- ever -- has been able to explain to me a real difference.) Haptic, admittedly, is different from "tactile" itself, but nobody has ever explained how "haptic" is different from "tactile feedback". They are the same thing. Just a marketing word.
... unless they can come up with a way to raise them based on a fine grid array rather than fixed cell sizes. Then it would be a truly useful technology.
Until then, I am sure a company or two will see this useful for raising a telephone keypad above the rest of the display, for example. I don't see it as more finely-controlled than that, because the screens of different devices differ so much.
Unless it were made into a grid array, it could never be a standard. For long.
"NASA already is almost pathologically paranoid about what gets near the ISS."
As much as I agree with much of what you say, it is perfectly understandable that NASA is extremely cautious about the ISS. It's their ONLY manned program right now, and it's not even really "theirs"!
Of course, as we well know, bureaucratic stagnation and bungling are behind that very situation, and NASA has been ordered by 2 different Presidents to clean up that act... which they still haven't done.
What the private space program does NOT need is more regulation or interference from NASA. We KNOW this. Look what SpaceX and Virgin and others have accomplished without it.
There should be at least a couple, perhaps similar, but with different specialties. Maybe Dragon is better to LEO with heavy cargo or to HEO, and someone else's solution works better for smaller satellites, etc.
The original Orion concept -- and it get serious attention, even today -- was for an enormous, massive parabolic dome with a spacecraft on top of it. The spacecraft injects small nuclear bombs into the dome, and they explode at the focus. It's pretty much guaranteed that thing will MOVE! And yes, it is quite feasible and technically possible.
I don't think anybody is seriously considering building one of those right now, but the name stuck, and Orion has now been known to generations as "the nuclear bomb powered spacecraft".
Kind of a negative name to pick for your newfangled, modern, but chemical-powered machine.
What he said. "Textbooks" is really a misnomer these days. "Schoolbooks" should be used instead. Today's schoolbooks are typically full of color graphics. Have you looked at a math or physics book lately?
Well, Debian squeeze is not exactly what I'd call "vanilla".
But if Debian will compile for the Pi, I doubt there would be very much trouble compiling it for the Via as well, as long as there is a graphics driver. And since it's apparently an ARM GPU I doubt that would be an issue.
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I don't think "matured" into Thunderbolt is the right way to put it, at all.
Thunderbolt itself is just an interim solution on the way to Light Peak.
In addition, I don't think it will be fully "mature", Light Peak or no, unless and until they can start making cheaper cables. In general, I would say an active cable is not a good idea. It really raises the price.
A way should be found to put the "active" components inside the devices at either end, with the (now much cheaper) cable running between them.
BTW, contrary to much of contemporary thinking, getting off the earth is VERY interesting and is in fact probably the single most central issue.
The gravity well is the single largest obstacle to complete conquest of local space. As long as missions continue to be launched from Earth, they will continue to be unnecessarily expensive. By a factor of 10 to 100 at least.
Put industrial plants on the moon (a completely feasible, if expensive, concept today) and you divide those costs by many times.
We must have a lunar colony. Must... not maybe.
Generally agreed. Though "specific impulse" is kind of a hard measure to try to use for continuous drives. It rather presumes a fixed energy exerted over a fixed amount of time.
Which of course is one of the reasons we should be re-thinking these things from scratch. The old chemical-explosion model is probably, mostly, outmoded.
"The Via APC might be right for some; however, be aware that the power draw on the Via APC (uses some Chinese ARM close) will be significantly higher than on the PI."
Well, yeah. It has a faster, more capable CPU, twice as much RAM, and more built-in peripherals. The idea that it will use more power is hardly a stroke of genius.
The best way to turn salespeople into credible programmers is to turn programmers into salespeople.
The other way around is next to impossible.
"History will mark "Citizens United" as the tipping point."
Hah. I'd mod you up for humor if I were not so enraged by the obvious, even blatant, corruption behind that bizarre decision.
When the Supreme Court starts producing decisions that corporations have actual "rights", in the same way that citizens do, despite the historical record (ALL of which says otherwise), they have gone beyond the pale.
I grieve for the America that once was.
"Where there is education, there is social change, contraception, medicine, increased health and lifespan and decreased reproduction rate."
Where education does not work, financial incentives do. What the hey: it's worked in China.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not claiming that China is the poster child for contraception, or even civilized behavior. But there is no doubt that the financial incentive has worked: the birthrate is way down since.
It reflects Larry Ellison's "comprehension" of the online future.
Sadly, Larry Ellison is no Harlan Ellison. Bye-bye, Oracle.
Congratulations. You are the first person to actually explain that to me.
Others (and I have asked) were unable to describe to me any difference that was really a difference.
I've been caught on that one before... and it was my fault.
Those things need to be spelled out ahead of time, for a project of any size. If the customer's needs change, that won't be in your written scope of work, and you can point to it as proof.
For small projects, I've been able to point to emails and say, "You didn't specify that anywhere in your instructions." For anything larger, put it in writing more formally.
It can be something as simple as a "Project Description", written by you and sent to the client. If they want something that isn't in the description as you wrote it, then it's their job to change it and send it back... before you agree on payment.
"You have to be careful, because I've had companies that start making changes to their infrastructure, and then told us our software didn't work when in fact their environment changed. So be very specific."
You should have a specified "scope of work", describing the deliverable. If the situation changes to the extent that anything lies outside the original scope of work, it costs extra.
I used to work for an engineering company, and that worked for them. Just be sure to specify your scope of work. Then actual bugs that lie inside the scope of work are your responsibility. Anything else is not.
That's not the same thing at all. Stuff is specifically written to be compatible with Windows, not the other way around.
His situation is reversed. He puts a web app out there, and browsers / technology / other software will constantly be changing around it.
In contrast, Orion (the old-school Orion concept) gives you the output of a couple of billion of them, in a few microseconds. Nobody said it was efficient, but if nobody's using the key you can always use the sledgehammer.
"They could have at least saved the name until building a high-thrust ion drive vehicle with similar potential."
It's a different concept. An ion drive of any size could probably not power such a beast off the Earth, for the simple reason that ion drives rely on low mass at extremely high velocity to power their acceleration. But that velocity is necessarily limited by the currently known laws of physics. It probably would not be sufficient for escape velocity by itself.
But agreed. Ion thrusters are, today, designed for extremely efficient thrust / mass ratio, but only over time. If that same efficiency could be brought to bear in huge quantities all at once, you could have liftoff. Cheap.
But we're not quite there yet. It's kind of like saying, "We need the output of a standard 100W light bulb for 10 straight years, all in 0.0001 seconds."
We'll get there. Not just yet.
Yes, there are certainly very strict limitations on its normal use. But on the other hand, if a big sacrifice (of a rather large area) were really necessary, technically there is nothing preventing it from being single-stage-to-orbit... and far beyond.
Read "Lucifer's Hammer" by Niven and Pournelle. (And maybe you already have.) But the Orion concept has been around far longer than their book. They borrowed it, they didn't invent it.
Perhaps I did not explain myself well. As far as the surface, see the reply I made earlier, below. I expressed the same doubts.
The only point I was trying to make above was: unless you can define the raised areas on the fly, they will always be of limited utility.
Agreed. See my reply below. Unless they can make it definable by points, rather than fixed keys, its utility will be severely limited.
And as someone else pointed out: it also places a soft layer over the nice hard capacitive touch screens that took so long to develop. I mean: you don't scratch Gorilla Glass with your plastic-pointed stylus. But you could probably break one of these keys (or maybe all of them, due to pressure loss) with a single pin prick.
The devices with hard screens have been doing a good job of improving tactile feedback. (It's called "haptic" these days for some strange reason, although nobody -- ever -- has been able to explain to me a real difference.) Haptic, admittedly, is different from "tactile" itself, but nobody has ever explained how "haptic" is different from "tactile feedback". They are the same thing. Just a marketing word.
... unless they can come up with a way to raise them based on a fine grid array rather than fixed cell sizes. Then it would be a truly useful technology.
Until then, I am sure a company or two will see this useful for raising a telephone keypad above the rest of the display, for example. I don't see it as more finely-controlled than that, because the screens of different devices differ so much.
Unless it were made into a grid array, it could never be a standard. For long.
"NASA already is almost pathologically paranoid about what gets near the ISS."
As much as I agree with much of what you say, it is perfectly understandable that NASA is extremely cautious about the ISS. It's their ONLY manned program right now, and it's not even really "theirs"!
Of course, as we well know, bureaucratic stagnation and bungling are behind that very situation, and NASA has been ordered by 2 different Presidents to clean up that act... which they still haven't done.
What the private space program does NOT need is more regulation or interference from NASA. We KNOW this. Look what SpaceX and Virgin and others have accomplished without it.
There should be at least a couple, perhaps similar, but with different specialties. Maybe Dragon is better to LEO with heavy cargo or to HEO, and someone else's solution works better for smaller satellites, etc.
There need not be only one.
The original Orion concept -- and it get serious attention, even today -- was for an enormous, massive parabolic dome with a spacecraft on top of it. The spacecraft injects small nuclear bombs into the dome, and they explode at the focus. It's pretty much guaranteed that thing will MOVE! And yes, it is quite feasible and technically possible.
I don't think anybody is seriously considering building one of those right now, but the name stuck, and Orion has now been known to generations as "the nuclear bomb powered spacecraft".
Kind of a negative name to pick for your newfangled, modern, but chemical-powered machine.
What he said. "Textbooks" is really a misnomer these days. "Schoolbooks" should be used instead. Today's schoolbooks are typically full of color graphics. Have you looked at a math or physics book lately?
Well, Debian squeeze is not exactly what I'd call "vanilla".
But if Debian will compile for the Pi, I doubt there would be very much trouble compiling it for the Via as well, as long as there is a graphics driver. And since it's apparently an ARM GPU I doubt that would be an issue.
Well, someone else showed me that there is already a Debian distro available for it, so that's all news to me.
If they were doing that, I have to wonder why they bothered with the Arch Linux at all.
"Android? Better than Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu/etc?"
If you can get a more-or-less vanilla version of any of those to run on a Pi, then money and fame are probably yours.
Apparently Pi can't do it.