I'm reading the book right now. He's not denying thermodynamics, in fact he has a whole chapter dealing with calories and the conservation of energy. The research suggests that exercise increases appetite in proportion to the number of calories burned. The body likes to stay at equilibrium. Someone who is 300lbs and holding steady is at equilibrium - just a non-optimal equilibrium. Taubes may be wrong, but if you read what he writes, he's certainly not a quack. Science writers tend not to be quacks. In general the book is incredibly well-written. It's a review of basically all the pertinent diet research over the last 100 years, and is very careful to state what is hypothesis, what has been confirmed by facts, and what is correlation vice causation.
But it's interesting that seemingly every cocoa app on my system has that behavior, including the new QuickTime player app. My point was mainly that this is not a uniform OS X behavior - that actually iTunes is more the anomaly on the Mac side as well.
Actually, in Tiger anyway, it looks like a Carbon/Cocoa thing. Every Cocoa app acts in the way that you describe as standard Windows behavior - a click on an out-of-focus widget will bring focus and activate the widget. iTunes is really the exception on OS X as well. (along with MS Office) It's probably because it is a Carbon app. My guess is the classic Mac OS worked this way, and something in the drawing model for Carbon apps is held over from that.
Panther runs just fine on 5 year old hardware. My in-laws have an over five year old PowerMac that I have Panther running on, and it works great. They have no complaints at all. Fancy features nicely degrade in a usable fashion (expose drops frames, but still works perfectly well, and that's on a 22" monitor). It's a fantastic upgrade from OS 9, even on old hardware.
The tone of this is wrong. The regulation in question is HR3752. This is a good thing. Read about it here. If you want space tourism to happen soon, you want this bill to go through. It's past the house - some idiot staffers in the Senate are screwing with it though. The jist of it is that it will require ONLY safety of people on the ground. Currently, for airplanes, there are regulatory requirements for the people in the craft as well. This bill makes sure that doesn't apply to these experimental space craft, even if they are used for paying customer flights.
According to the most recent information, staffers in the Senate are trying to amend the bill so that it requires the same safety for people in the vehicle as on the ground. If that goes through, it kills space tourism in America dead. See this. If people want to stop this they are going to need to call their Senators quickly and oppose it.
Research on this was done at Stanford a few years ago. The guy who did it was named Dave - don't remember his last name, but he was my TA in a class taught by Brad Parkinson - the guy who was the program manager for GPS when it went up (who was also Dave's advisor). The gist of the research was that they used GPS, and then augmented it with an inertial system, or they used an inertial system and corrected it with GPS every few seconds. It's related to the research they're still doing here on linking GPS with a bunch of other systems - one of the applications is increasing reliability of systems like that so they can be used to land planes.
Air pressure is just a force - albeit a well distributed force. There's nothing magical about air touching your skin. It just balances the forces on the inside. Basically, using a spandex wetsuit, you're replacing the force of air with the force of elastic (or some fraction - space suits are only at a fraction of an atm as it is...). The problem, as stated above somewhere, is that you need to make sure the force gets well-distributed, and that you have a way to breathe (fishbowl on the head). So heating (shedding heat) is probably the main problem - maybe could be solved with some sort of micro-channel embedded in the spandex connected to a radiator of some sort. Then you have to deal with radiation... as someone else said, there are definitely engineering problems, but the basic idea is not ridiculous. BTW, easier on Mars, because you don't have to deal with radiation and particle impacts - and you have a little bit of air pressure (.5psi?) to help.
I talked to a Safari manager at the conference today, and it's all Cocoa for sure. They widgets are all native Cocoa widgets - I'm using it now, and the text boxes are just so much better than Mozilla.
According to one of the managers of Safari I talked to today at the conference, the reason they chose khtml is speed, speed, and speed. They spent a long time looking at that and Gecko, but they decided they would have to re-write Gecko to make it fast enough. He told me to just look at the code base, 1.25million lines for Gecko, ~150,000 for khtml.
As stated elsewhere in this thread, theres's a great discussion of this over at ars, in this thread,
this thread, and this article.
In regards to your question, someone in one of the above threads posted a quote from John McCalpin at IBM that neatly answers your question:
"Please note that the old distinction between "POWER" and "PowerPC" is no longer operative. IBM's POWER3, RS64, POWER4,and subsequent processors all implement the 64-bit PowerPC architecture (of which the 32-bit PowerPC architecture is a subset). The RS64 and POWER4 (and following) processors also support the 64-bit PowerPC AS architecture, which includes some additional stuff to make the processor work in iSeries (formerly AS/400) systems."
There were 3 areas of liability found at the District Court level.
liability for monopoly maintenance, under section 2 of Sherman.
liability for attempted monopolization (of the browser market) also under section 2 of Sherman.
per se liability for illegal tying of Windows and IE under Section 1 of Sherman.
Basically, the ruling today upheld 1, reversed 2, and remanded 3. They said that the plaintiff (Justice) did not provide any of the proper evidence (definition of the browser market and barriers to entry) for 2, and thus reversed the ruling. They also said that per se liability cannot be applied to tying software products together, and that if that liability is to be pursued, it must be reviewed under the rule of reason. They also discussed how so far, basically, Justice has not showed liability under the rule of reason. The pretty much instruct the District Court as to the questions they should ask.
Finally, the reason the remedies were overturned was 3-fold.
The District Court failed to hold a remedies-specific evidentiary hearing when there were disputed facts.
The court failed to provide adequate reasons for its decreed remedies.
The Appellate Court revised the scope of Microsoft 's liability (see above) and it is impossible to determine to what extent that should
affect the remedies provisions.
Please, people, read the ruling before passing judgement and pontificating! This looks like more of a win for Microsoft than people are giving it credit for.
The basic premise of a jet engine is that it essentially burns air! In a typical fuel/air ratio, the air far out-weighs the fuel, so a lot of air is needed. In a turbojet or a turbofan, there is something called a compressor stage that compresses the air coming in (and in the process slowing it down) which also increases the temperature of the air (remember chem 101?).
As the free stream velocity (how fast the plane is going, becomes supersonic, this becomes more difficult, because the blades of the compressor aren't able to handle the flow. So, the solution is, get rid of the compressor - and use the shape of the nozzle to do the job for you. A normal shock wave is formed, which compresses the flow and reduces the air velocity to the subsonic range. In the process, the temperature in the flow goes way up, again. A normal shock wave always reduces the velocity of the flow to the subsonic range, so as the plane goes faster and faster, the temperature of the flow after the shock gets higher and higher (the energy in the velocity has to go somewhere). For example, if the free stream is at Mach 10, and the flow velocity at the combustor is Mach.2, the temperature increase in the flow is well over 4000 K. The pressure increase is 32 atm, which is not trivial. This is a big problem.
The only way to solve this, if you still want to burn air at hypersonic (>Mach 5) speeds, is to inject the fuel in the combustor into a supersonic stream, and burn it in flight. This is not simple. In fact, it's never been done in an actual airplane (It's what was supposed to have happened today). That's also where the name SCRAMjet comes from. Supersonic Combustion RAM jet.
The design of one of these things is so complex, that basically the whole vehicle becomes part of the engine - the exact shaping of the bottom of th plane is essential, and very difficult. That's why this has taken so long. Remeber, the X-15, and every other hypersonic vehicle to date has been rocket-powered, which does away with air all together.
I'm a grad student at Stanford and work in a different satellite lab. GPB is what is called a "drag-free" satellite. What this means is that it has a VERY good control system that monitors the position of the gyros with respect to the body of the satellite. The control system keeps the position of the satellite relative to the gyro constant, basically letting the gyro move in its own frame, with gravity being the only disturbance acting on it. This doesn't help with micrometeorite strikes, but that's a risk inherent to all satellites. The first us of drag-free control was the Navy's Triad transit navigation satellite, in 1972. The controller was was developed in Stanford's Aero/Astro Department as a spin-off of GPB. Drag-free control is now standard on all transit satellites. This is just one of many examples where a requirement for GPB drove development of a technology that is now widely used. For another good GPB site, check out the Navy's site http://www.onr.navy.mil/02/c0241e/GPB.htm .
Here's the official site for the project: einstein.stanford.edu. It has a complete description of the all the parts of the experiment, including the design and manufacture of the gyros.
Re:First we need a good launcher...
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 1
Maybe Beal can do it. He seems the closest of any of the commercial projects out there. He's using pressurised fuel tanks, though - no turbo pumps, but its never been done before because the tanks weren't strong enough (or so says my friend from Rocketdyne). Here's the link Beal Aerospace
If you read about it a little bit, you see that they're not manipulating the magnetic field, but rather are using it as a waveguide for a microwave signal that they inject into the field. This is new, and different.
This misses the point. In a good 3-D CAD package, like Pro-E, SolidWorks, CATIA, and others, you design in 3-D. The computer then does all your 2-D drawings for whatever purpose (machinists, reports, whatever) when you tell it to. It dimensions everything, all you do is choose the views. That's what they're teaching in ME nowadays - I know, I just graduated. The point is, you need 3-D parts to do the cool things ME's get to do, FEA, Rapid Prototyping, etc... It's a waste of time to draw in both 2-D and 3-D, if you know what you're doing.
MIT has a lab researching pretty much exactly what you are talking about, except in a new hardware-based architecture they call RAW, and it's part of the Oxygen project (you know, make computing as pervasive as oxygen...). There was an article in Scientific American a couple of months ago (August 1999). Here's the url to the issue.
The Oxygen project is part of the Labortatory of Computer Science at MIT, but it's kind of a pain to get direct info off of MIT's site. The best I could find is a list of articles of LCS in the news, that includes the Scientific American articles. www.lcs.mit.edu/news/inthenews/
It seems to be a new project (started in April) with a lot of money (38 million from DARPA), and, I'm sure this will piss some of you off, a new 20 million dollar facility donated by - you guessed it - Bill Gates.
From these articles, I get the impression that the technology goes a ways beyond FPGA's, because it is actually a whole bunch of processing units tiled together, and they plan to run multiple "programs" at once by varying the paths through the tiles. So, the chip could be a custom video chip and a radio and a cell phone at the same time. The last line in the article kind of sums it up:"...within a couple of decades there will be only three kinds of chips in the world: Raw chips, memory chips and, of course, potato chips." As long as we still have potato chips...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm reading the book right now. He's not denying thermodynamics, in fact he has a whole chapter dealing with calories and the conservation of energy. The research suggests that exercise increases appetite in proportion to the number of calories burned. The body likes to stay at equilibrium. Someone who is 300lbs and holding steady is at equilibrium - just a non-optimal equilibrium. Taubes may be wrong, but if you read what he writes, he's certainly not a quack. Science writers tend not to be quacks. In general the book is incredibly well-written. It's a review of basically all the pertinent diet research over the last 100 years, and is very careful to state what is hypothesis, what has been confirmed by facts, and what is correlation vice causation.
But it's interesting that seemingly every cocoa app on my system has that behavior, including the new QuickTime player app. My point was mainly that this is not a uniform OS X behavior - that actually iTunes is more the anomaly on the Mac side as well.
Actually, in Tiger anyway, it looks like a Carbon/Cocoa thing. Every Cocoa app acts in the way that you describe as standard Windows behavior - a click on an out-of-focus widget will bring focus and activate the widget. iTunes is really the exception on OS X as well. (along with MS Office) It's probably because it is a Carbon app. My guess is the classic Mac OS worked this way, and something in the drawing model for Carbon apps is held over from that.
Panther runs just fine on 5 year old hardware. My in-laws have an over five year old PowerMac that I have Panther running on, and it works great. They have no complaints at all. Fancy features nicely degrade in a usable fashion (expose drops frames, but still works perfectly well, and that's on a 22" monitor). It's a fantastic upgrade from OS 9, even on old hardware.
According to the most recent information, staffers in the Senate are trying to amend the bill so that it requires the same safety for people in the vehicle as on the ground. If that goes through, it kills space tourism in America dead. See this. If people want to stop this they are going to need to call their Senators quickly and oppose it.
apparently, the 'th' moves up on a printed copy, vs. the display on the screen. Saw this on a blog somewhere - not sure where anymore.
Research on this was done at Stanford a few years ago. The guy who did it was named Dave - don't remember his last name, but he was my TA in a class taught by Brad Parkinson - the guy who was the program manager for GPS when it went up (who was also Dave's advisor). The gist of the research was that they used GPS, and then augmented it with an inertial system, or they used an inertial system and corrected it with GPS every few seconds. It's related to the research they're still doing here on linking GPS with a bunch of other systems - one of the applications is increasing reliability of systems like that so they can be used to land planes.
Air pressure is just a force - albeit a well distributed force. There's nothing magical about air touching your skin. It just balances the forces on the inside. Basically, using a spandex wetsuit, you're replacing the force of air with the force of elastic (or some fraction - space suits are only at a fraction of an atm as it is...). The problem, as stated above somewhere, is that you need to make sure the force gets well-distributed, and that you have a way to breathe (fishbowl on the head). So heating (shedding heat) is probably the main problem - maybe could be solved with some sort of micro-channel embedded in the spandex connected to a radiator of some sort. Then you have to deal with radiation... as someone else said, there are definitely engineering problems, but the basic idea is not ridiculous. BTW, easier on Mars, because you don't have to deal with radiation and particle impacts - and you have a little bit of air pressure (.5psi?) to help.
I talked to a Safari manager at the conference today, and it's all Cocoa for sure. They widgets are all native Cocoa widgets - I'm using it now, and the text boxes are just so much better than Mozilla.
According to one of the managers of Safari I talked to today at the conference, the reason they chose khtml is speed, speed, and speed. They spent a long time looking at that and Gecko, but they decided they would have to re-write Gecko to make it fast enough. He told me to just look at the code base, 1.25million lines for Gecko, ~150,000 for khtml.
In regards to your question, someone in one of the above threads posted a quote from John McCalpin at IBM that neatly answers your question:
"Please note that the old distinction between "POWER" and "PowerPC" is no longer operative. IBM's POWER3, RS64, POWER4,and subsequent processors all implement the 64-bit PowerPC architecture (of which the 32-bit PowerPC architecture is a subset). The RS64 and POWER4 (and following) processors also support the 64-bit PowerPC AS architecture, which includes some additional stuff to make the processor work in iSeries (formerly AS/400) systems."
There were 3 areas of liability found at the District Court level.
Basically, the ruling today upheld 1, reversed 2, and remanded 3. They said that the plaintiff (Justice) did not provide any of the proper evidence (definition of the browser market and barriers to entry) for 2, and thus reversed the ruling. They also said that per se liability cannot be applied to tying software products together, and that if that liability is to be pursued, it must be reviewed under the rule of reason. They also discussed how so far, basically, Justice has not showed liability under the rule of reason. The pretty much instruct the District Court as to the questions they should ask.
Finally, the reason the remedies were overturned was 3-fold.
Please, people, read the ruling before passing judgement and pontificating! This looks like more of a win for Microsoft than people are giving it credit for.
The basic premise of a jet engine is that it essentially burns air! In a typical fuel/air ratio, the air far out-weighs the fuel, so a lot of air is needed. In a turbojet or a turbofan, there is something called a compressor stage that compresses the air coming in (and in the process slowing it down) which also increases the temperature of the air (remember chem 101?).
As the free stream velocity (how fast the plane is going, becomes supersonic, this becomes more difficult, because the blades of the compressor aren't able to handle the flow. So, the solution is, get rid of the compressor - and use the shape of the nozzle to do the job for you. A normal shock wave is formed, which compresses the flow and reduces the air velocity to the subsonic range. In the process, the temperature in the flow goes way up, again. A normal shock wave always reduces the velocity of the flow to the subsonic range, so as the plane goes faster and faster, the temperature of the flow after the shock gets higher and higher (the energy in the velocity has to go somewhere). For example, if the free stream is at Mach 10, and the flow velocity at the combustor is Mach .2, the temperature increase in the flow is well over 4000 K. The pressure increase is 32 atm, which is not trivial. This is a big problem.
The only way to solve this, if you still want to burn air at hypersonic (>Mach 5) speeds, is to inject the fuel in the combustor into a supersonic stream, and burn it in flight. This is not simple. In fact, it's never been done in an actual airplane (It's what was supposed to have happened today). That's also where the name SCRAMjet comes from. Supersonic Combustion RAM jet.
The design of one of these things is so complex, that basically the whole vehicle becomes part of the engine - the exact shaping of the bottom of th plane is essential, and very difficult. That's why this has taken so long. Remeber, the X-15, and every other hypersonic vehicle to date has been rocket-powered, which does away with air all together.
I'm a grad student at Stanford and work in a different satellite lab. GPB is what is called a "drag-free" satellite. What this means is that it has a VERY good control system that monitors the position of the gyros with respect to the body of the satellite. The control system keeps the position of the satellite relative to the gyro constant, basically letting the gyro move in its own frame, with gravity being the only disturbance acting on it. This doesn't help with micrometeorite strikes, but that's a risk inherent to all satellites. The first us of drag-free control was the Navy's Triad transit navigation satellite, in 1972. The controller was was developed in Stanford's Aero/Astro Department as a spin-off of GPB. Drag-free control is now standard on all transit satellites. This is just one of many examples where a requirement for GPB drove development of a technology that is now widely used. For another good GPB site, check out the Navy's site http://www.onr.navy.mil/02/c0241e/GPB.htm .
Here's the official site for the project: einstein.stanford.edu. It has a complete description of the all the parts of the experiment, including the design and manufacture of the gyros.
Maybe Beal can do it. He seems the closest of any of the commercial projects out there. He's using pressurised fuel tanks, though - no turbo pumps, but its never been done before because the tanks weren't strong enough (or so says my friend from Rocketdyne). Here's the link Beal Aerospace
Read the posts, read the article, read the website. This is totally, completely, fundamentally different technology from what Nortel tried in the UK.
If you read about it a little bit, you see that they're not manipulating the magnetic field, but rather are using it as a waveguide for a microwave signal that they inject into the field. This is new, and different.
This misses the point. In a good 3-D CAD package, like Pro-E, SolidWorks, CATIA, and others, you design in 3-D. The computer then does all your 2-D drawings for whatever purpose (machinists, reports, whatever) when you tell it to. It dimensions everything, all you do is choose the views. That's what they're teaching in ME nowadays - I know, I just graduated. The point is, you need 3-D parts to do the cool things ME's get to do, FEA, Rapid Prototyping, etc... It's a waste of time to draw in both 2-D and 3-D, if you know what you're doing.
This is the actual site at MIT: www.cag.lcs.mit.edu/raw/
The Oxygen project is part of the Labortatory of Computer Science at MIT, but it's kind of a pain to get direct info off of MIT's site. The best I could find is a list of articles of LCS in the news, that includes the Scientific American articles. www.lcs.mit.edu/news/inthenews/
It seems to be a new project (started in April) with a lot of money (38 million from DARPA), and, I'm sure this will piss some of you off, a new 20 million dollar facility donated by - you guessed it - Bill Gates.
From these articles, I get the impression that the technology goes a ways beyond FPGA's, because it is actually a whole bunch of processing units tiled together, and they plan to run multiple "programs" at once by varying the paths through the tiles. So, the chip could be a custom video chip and a radio and a cell phone at the same time. The last line in the article kind of sums it up:"...within a couple of decades there will be only three kinds of chips in the world: Raw chips, memory chips and, of course, potato chips." As long as we still have potato chips...