When you talk about space, everything changes. If the ferrofluid has a volatile base liquid, it will all evaporate/boil away in the vacuum (and make a heck of a mess of the rest of the telescope). I couldn't tell from the ferrofluid manufacturer web site, but the material doesn't make any claims about vacuum compatibility (the stuff is used to make seals but those look to be hermetic and not vacuum seals).
The other problem with space applications and these thin deformable mirrors is whether there is any savings in making a mirror out of them over glass. If the weight of all the actuators, actuator support structures, electronics to run the actuators and the control system, etc. weigh more than a proper piece of glass of comparable diameter, then you're better off going with a nice stable piece of glass.
As an aside, I'm not so sure it makes it easier to build larger interferometric arrays. Everything behind the primary telescope mirrors stays the same and you are only talking about how much gain you get building these mirrors over glass. For interferometric arrays what is important is the "filled" area vs the area of the effective diameter, and unless you're talking about these mirrors being an order of magnitude larger (and much cheaper than the glass ones), I'm not so sure it impacts your "filled" vs "unfilled" area ratio.
"Sufficiently power," of course, depends on your mission goals as well. An RTG will give you consistent power for a long time, whereas the solar cells will have issues managing eclipses and long-term degradation from radiation exposure. A Voyager-like flyby would be better suited for an all-solar approach rather than a Galileo-type orbit (and eclipse) all the time in strong radiation belts. History has also shown that it is far from trivial to deploy large solar arrays, even when you have humans present, and the size of these arrays are huge.
A very nice summary of solar cell technology and future plans can be found over at the USRA site.
There are whole classes of problems that Excel is well suited to solve. Linear propagation models, optical ray tracing for instance, is one. I remember back in the early 80's spreadsheets in general were touted as a good way to solve complicated 2-D boundary value problems via iteration because you are given a nice cell grid to start (I have foggy memories of doing this myself on whatever preceded Excel). I have seen some very impressive models built out of spreadsheets; it wouldn't have been my tool of choice, but the people putting them together could really do some impressive things.
At the undergraduate level I don't know what to say. I don't know how much programming I would force on the physics major. I am a very strong advocate of teaching mathematical methods for the major, as I had been. My professor spent some time having us learn FORTRAN, but I wouldn't say it was very productive because we were learning it for the sake of knowing it, not because we had a task to use it for (and so it really didn't set in). I didn't do any serious programming until graduate school, where I ended up becoming a FORTRAN expert after all.
I do agree that Excel can't handle real data sets, especially with the limitations of plotting 32k data points and only holding 64k in a column. On the other hand, not too much data handling you do at the undergraduate level deals with that much data.
I wouldn't say the students would be at a major handicap having only used Excel at the undergraduate level. If they are handed that particle data set in C++ objects, they'd do what I would have to do: learn C++. Between undergraduate and graduate school I made a conscience decision to learn either C or FORTRAN, since those were the languages of physics. I settled on C, picked up some books and started teaching myself. When I got to graduate school, the research I inherited was all FORTRAN, so I ended up betting on the wrong horse (at first, at least). When I got out of graduate school, I ended up learning C for the job I was doing at the time (I've since drifted into the IDL/Matlab world and now I find I'm rusty in all of them!).
You also have to be careful what you consider a grown-up language. By the time I got out of graduate school, C++ was all the rage and I kept hearing how they couldn't believe that any serious programmer would program in a non-object-oriented language unless they were either old or a Luddite.
The other problem is the airship launch conditions. I was involved with a project where we were testing some equipment on an airship. We had a lot of launch scrubs because of ground winds that were pretty modest.
I think the airship as freight mover idea would only be practical for the types of cargo that can sit at a facility for quite a while until it can finally be moved when conditions suffice.
The gravity probes, as far as I am aware, do not have precisely synchronized flight, but very good knowledge of where each of them are. The science is extracted by measuring the changes in the spacecraft separation (I think the relative distance is known at the tens or hundreds of microns). Flying a separated telescope requires measuring and controlling separations and rotations to a level much more demanding than the GRACE satellites. In principle it can be done now (such as in the lab), but in practice it is very challenging (at least to do on a reasonable budget) which is why many of the NASA and ESA separated telescope projects have been drastically scaled back or delayed (SIM, TPF, Darwin, etc.).
In general, long focal lengths aren't that much of a problem because of the many telescope designs that fold up the optical path.
I don't understand your comment about zero interaction cross sections because it doesn't agree with the physics I know. If you look at the elastic and total cross sections for hadronic interactions, they are at worst flat at very high energies, and most in fact have a logarithmic rise with energy at very high energies (see, for instance, Table 40.2 for Figure 40.10 in this reference). And things are much different if you consider all the other particle interaction effects. For instance, photons travel at the speed of light and they have a very high interaction cross section; that is how my sunglasses work.
Very high speed charged particles get killed by radiative losses that kick out bremsstrahlung and pair produce like crazy (you don't want to be around all the x-rays and gamma rays that get produced, which is one reason these things are built underground). The neutral particles are unstable and end up decaying into charged particles, so you don't have long-lived very high speed neutrals hanging around either.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with escape velocity. How can the "near light-speed" particles you talk about not have escape velocity (assuming we pretend there is no matter for them to interact so that we can ignore all the dominant energy loss processes) and end up hanging about and not interacting? The particles that don't have escape velocity don't even make it out of the walls of the vacuum chamber.
I would disagree with you that "serious" physicists are worrying too much about this. The ones who work in the field know the physics. It is similar to the speculations about the fusion bomb igniting the atmosphere, where speculation carried on long after the physics was worked out by those who knew how to do the calculations.
The solar corona problem isn't tied to fusion per se, just to a very hot core cooling radially outward. Also, there aren't any problems with thermodynamics in this situation provided there is some mechanism that is adding energy to the plasma at the solar surface. Given the violent nature of the solar surface, particularly with respect to solar flares and coronal mass ejections, there are certainly energy generating processes going on, so it isn't too terribly surprising that the corona gets heated up. The big question is what process(es) are causing it. For what it's worth, magnetic reconnection is the main suspect.
I'm not saying anything about how people should do things, the old way or not, and I could care less whether they use the command line, change their own oil, or have all their shopping done with a personal assistant. You do things your way, and leave me be todo things my way. I'm simply talking about the self-proclaimed anthropologists telling everyone that the common folk are too stupid to do things that were ordinary things not too long ago.
If you don't want to use the command line because you don't need to, fine; you're unwilling because you don't have a need or desire. Just don't start telling me that it is too complicated or hard for our favorite "Joe Sixpack." I used to change the oil in my car myself; it was cheaper, I knew it was going to be done correct, and it gave me a connection with my vehicle. I don't anymore because basically I'm too lazy. But I don't go around talking about how we simple country folk are best to just take it to Jiffy Lube because these modern cars are just much too complicated to understand. Frankly, I find people who tell you what the limitations are on people in general are either elitist and condescending, or looking for a cop-out answer to cover for their own limitations ("Linux is just too complicated for Joe Sixpack" instead of "Linux is too complicated for me (because I am either too lazy, unwilling, or unable to learn)").
Isn't it amazing how stupid everyone has apparently become? I remember when the lowly secretary would type up professor's correspondences and papers using MSDOS and LaTeX. Now suddenly everyone is too mentally challenged to even consider such a thing.
Too many people act like my children: just because you are too lazy, unwilling, or incapable of learning or doing something doesn't necessarily mean the task is too hard or complicated.
The funny thing (to me, at least) is that I needed to purchase some Vista licenses at work for some new computers we were putting together, and I had a hell of a time trying to figure out the five different Vista versions they offer. Did we really need Ultimate, or would the Business version work? What is this Enterprise version and how is it different than Business? Ultimately the decision was made for me because the difference in price (for the OEM versions, at least) wasn't worth wasting my time researching the differences.
If you link through to the paper, it is right there. Essentially to reconstruct the hologram you need to know the form of the electric field from the source. To do this they have a model for it that has thousands of parameters. To determine these parameters they use the Newton method of optimization, which is an iterative method. You guess a form for the input and crunch through the numbers to get an output. You then compare your output to what you measure. A difference function is constructed to determine how close the modeled and measured outputs are. You then tweak your parameters and try again until the difference function is minimized.
To do the optimization you need to know how to tweak the parameters and you end up taking first and second order partial derivatives of your difference function. One thing you end up with is the Hessian matrix, which is a square matrix of second-order partial derivatives. With thousands of parameters in the model, the Hessian can be huge and very computationally expensive to calculate. In these cases, and this is what the authors did, one employs a quasi-Newton method that compromises by updating the Hessian instead of calculating all those partial derivatives. There are several ways to do the update and the authors went with an algorithm known as the BFGS method (this method is very popular and the code for it is freely available (and optimized for speed).
Critics of the space station, and a significant manned program in general, point out that the space station serves no scientific or engineering purpose. Unfortunately things like this, rich tourists, and hitting golf balls don't provide the best endorsement, at least from the scientific community. Then again, the scientific and engineering community has basically no input for the station, because if they did the station would either be scrapped, or filled with actual scientific experiments.
I understand your general point about the hardware, but in my experience it isn't as cut and dried as you point out.
When Win2k was out for a year or more, I moved the Win side of my dual-boot up from Win95. Not being an overly-experienced Windows person at the time (I was mainly using a VAX at work and Linux at home) I celebrated my hardware and software upgrade by going out and getting some games. I found out the hard way that my games from EA (Madden NFL and SimCity) wouldn't run on Win2k. It ended up being something, I believe, they never rectified.
At work I've become the default PC guy who will build/upgrade computers. In the past I have had a lot of problems (on non-Vista systems) with graphics cards and DVD drives, especially installing two DVD drives into the same machine. A lot of the time Windows would only recognize one of the drives, or if it saw the other one, it would always say that the drive didn't have a recognizable disk in it (for what it's worth, Linux never had a problem with it). I've spent a lot of time monkeying around with configurations and registry settings as I would do trying to get something working on Linux. A colleague of mine installed a SCSI card into his system (Windows only) using the supplied drivers and it took out his computer; he had to do a bare metal rebuild. So far I've only done one Vista system, and interestingly enough it went very smoothly (though I did spend enough time checking out the hardware specs before I ordered them).
I've got wireless problems in XP that I don't have in Linux. For whatever reason, if the computer goes into sleep mode and wakes back up, it can't reconnect to the wireless network. It has trouble renewing the IP address, or if it does, it can't re-register the DNS. I know several other people who have this problem (on different hardware), and though it is based on a small data set, I think it has something to do with the combination of XP and WPA (or WPA2). The only way to fix this is to reboot the PC and sometimes the access point. The longer-term fix for me is to either only connect wirelessly under Linux, set my computer up so that it never goes into sleep mode, or go back to WEP encryption (none of these "fixes" are popular with me). If I follow your reasoning I would have to claim that wireless networking sucks in Windows (and by my experience under WPA, it does).
I don't think that it is fair to knock Ubuntu (or any other Linux disto) when you say that they don't support the specific hardware you want until much later, when you started out your post saying that is also the case for Vista.
I'm not sure if you are specifically talking about purchasing stuff from Best Buy, or if you are using them to represent a consumer electronics chain in general, but I will agree that you'll be disappointed picking up specific hardware from them and expecting it to work out of the box in Linux. Obviously you can go in and buy all the EIDE and SATA drives or NIC cards you want with no problem. However, Best Buy, as well as most of any of the "Big Box" stores, has an inventory that is a mile wide and an inch deep. If that one particular vendor they carry for that one particular device doesn't have something, then you are out of luck. Incidentally, this has never been a problem for me because apart from impulse or short-need purchases (for the computer, at least), I find the prices are much much better on-line than they are in the store, and not only can I get exactly what I want, I can get stuff that I know will work where I need it to work.
If your criteria for being hardware friendly is that it needs to support everything Best Buy sells, then I'll concede your point. On the other hand, I find Linux to be very hardware friendly. You can get top-end hardware (graphics cards, RAID controllers, pretty much anything you want) to work on Linux. When we all had to use modems, pretty much all that Best Buy sold were WinModems, which are modems that only worked on Windows systems because they were v
Maybe at 1AU, but out beyond the magnetosphere that isn't true.
For what it's worth, the many flavors of galactic cosmic rays you mention is pretty much the periodic table. While true there are a variety of ways to accelerate a charged particle, there are not that many known ways to get them to those energies that don't stick out like sore thumbs (which is why supernovae were always the best candidates). For the galactic cosmic rays, at least one of the methods must be able to accelerate very large nuclei such as silicon or iron, without blowing apart the nuclei while accelerating them.
The problem with the really really high energy cosmic rays is that when they travel at those speeds everything is blue-shifted up. The cosmic background radiation shifts up to x-rays and gamma rays and so these particles would interact like crazy with the background and thus should not be able to travel very far (like across the universe). So where the hell do they come from? If I knew, I'd have a nice tenured position somewhere.
To be fair, Einstein didn't receive his Nobel for anything about quantum mechanics. His 1905 "photoelectric paper" (On a heuristic viewpoint concerning the production and transformation of light) shows how the entropy of high frequency radiation has the same form as the entropy of a bunch of oscillators with independent energies. He then goes on and shows how this explains the photoelectric effect:
According to the concept that the light consists of energy quanta of magnitude Rbn/N (i.e. hn) however one can conceive of the ejection of electrons by light in the following way. Energy quanta penetrate into the surface layer of the body, and their energy is transformed, at least in part, into kinetic energy of electrons. The simplest way to imagine this is that a light quantum delivers its entire energy to a single electron; we shall assume that this is what happens. The possibility should not be excluded, however, that electrons might receive their energy only in part from the light quanta.
It is one of the great ironies of history that Einstein, who laid the foundation for quantum mechanics so well with this paper (as well as working out the Bose-Einstein statistics), never accepted quantum mechanics, and he always believed that quantum mechanics appeared so weird only because of our lack of understanding of nature (i.e., there must be some other variables hidden from us that, when worked into a proper equation, will describe nature)
This doesn't look like a site targeted at the layman. It seems to be a site targeted at the scientific community to help disseminate research results to other scientists. I think this is a great idea. Basically the majority of scientific papers that are written only have their abstracts, intros, conclusions, and figures read until it is determined that the paper is of great interest, then the nitty-gritty details are read. This allows researchers to quickly get the gist of papers to determine which ones they want to read in detail. It would also help the scientific journalist to quickly understand the big picture of a particular recent topic.
Since the videos are targeted at other scientists and engineers, I wouldn't expect too much polish. It would not surprise me if it gets used by company PR departments or researchers on the fringe to promote their ideas (and in which case I would expect pretty slick presentations) because I suspect posting a video on this site would carry more weight than just posting it on YouTube.
I would have said your definition for Windows was more applicable to Macs. For Windows I would put it at something like: For users who don't want to spend time looking at other options (which in its own way is similar to your definition).
It was probably the same trackball as in Missile Command, but do you remember that football game where the players were x's and o's? We played that one all the time and those trackballs took some major abuse but I don't recall ever going to an arcade where one was out of service.
Maybe it is just because I'm an old fart, or it was my age when I played those games, but I haven't played a game in a long time that had such great gameplay as those 70's and 80's arcade games. Of course, if I had to do it all over again, I would take all those quarters I dumped in the arcades and invest them instead, and I'd be sitting rather pretty right now.
Slashdot Mirror
When you talk about space, everything changes. If the ferrofluid has a volatile base liquid, it will all evaporate/boil away in the vacuum (and make a heck of a mess of the rest of the telescope). I couldn't tell from the ferrofluid manufacturer web site, but the material doesn't make any claims about vacuum compatibility (the stuff is used to make seals but those look to be hermetic and not vacuum seals).
The other problem with space applications and these thin deformable mirrors is whether there is any savings in making a mirror out of them over glass. If the weight of all the actuators, actuator support structures, electronics to run the actuators and the control system, etc. weigh more than a proper piece of glass of comparable diameter, then you're better off going with a nice stable piece of glass.
As an aside, I'm not so sure it makes it easier to build larger interferometric arrays. Everything behind the primary telescope mirrors stays the same and you are only talking about how much gain you get building these mirrors over glass. For interferometric arrays what is important is the "filled" area vs the area of the effective diameter, and unless you're talking about these mirrors being an order of magnitude larger (and much cheaper than the glass ones), I'm not so sure it impacts your "filled" vs "unfilled" area ratio.
Your joke started out pretty funny at first, but then it dragged on too long and got too maudlin and preachy in the end.
Hey, don't dis it man! That was invented by a schoolteacher!
"Sufficiently power," of course, depends on your mission goals as well. An RTG will give you consistent power for a long time, whereas the solar cells will have issues managing eclipses and long-term degradation from radiation exposure. A Voyager-like flyby would be better suited for an all-solar approach rather than a Galileo-type orbit (and eclipse) all the time in strong radiation belts. History has also shown that it is far from trivial to deploy large solar arrays, even when you have humans present, and the size of these arrays are huge.
A very nice summary of solar cell technology and future plans can be found over at the USRA site.
There are whole classes of problems that Excel is well suited to solve. Linear propagation models, optical ray tracing for instance, is one. I remember back in the early 80's spreadsheets in general were touted as a good way to solve complicated 2-D boundary value problems via iteration because you are given a nice cell grid to start (I have foggy memories of doing this myself on whatever preceded Excel). I have seen some very impressive models built out of spreadsheets; it wouldn't have been my tool of choice, but the people putting them together could really do some impressive things.
At the undergraduate level I don't know what to say. I don't know how much programming I would force on the physics major. I am a very strong advocate of teaching mathematical methods for the major, as I had been. My professor spent some time having us learn FORTRAN, but I wouldn't say it was very productive because we were learning it for the sake of knowing it, not because we had a task to use it for (and so it really didn't set in). I didn't do any serious programming until graduate school, where I ended up becoming a FORTRAN expert after all.
I do agree that Excel can't handle real data sets, especially with the limitations of plotting 32k data points and only holding 64k in a column. On the other hand, not too much data handling you do at the undergraduate level deals with that much data.
I wouldn't say the students would be at a major handicap having only used Excel at the undergraduate level. If they are handed that particle data set in C++ objects, they'd do what I would have to do: learn C++. Between undergraduate and graduate school I made a conscience decision to learn either C or FORTRAN, since those were the languages of physics. I settled on C, picked up some books and started teaching myself. When I got to graduate school, the research I inherited was all FORTRAN, so I ended up betting on the wrong horse (at first, at least). When I got out of graduate school, I ended up learning C for the job I was doing at the time (I've since drifted into the IDL/Matlab world and now I find I'm rusty in all of them!).
You also have to be careful what you consider a grown-up language. By the time I got out of graduate school, C++ was all the rage and I kept hearing how they couldn't believe that any serious programmer would program in a non-object-oriented language unless they were either old or a Luddite.
The other problem is the airship launch conditions. I was involved with a project where we were testing some equipment on an airship. We had a lot of launch scrubs because of ground winds that were pretty modest.
I think the airship as freight mover idea would only be practical for the types of cargo that can sit at a facility for quite a while until it can finally be moved when conditions suffice.
The gravity probes, as far as I am aware, do not have precisely synchronized flight, but very good knowledge of where each of them are. The science is extracted by measuring the changes in the spacecraft separation (I think the relative distance is known at the tens or hundreds of microns). Flying a separated telescope requires measuring and controlling separations and rotations to a level much more demanding than the GRACE satellites. In principle it can be done now (such as in the lab), but in practice it is very challenging (at least to do on a reasonable budget) which is why many of the NASA and ESA separated telescope projects have been drastically scaled back or delayed (SIM, TPF, Darwin, etc.).
In general, long focal lengths aren't that much of a problem because of the many telescope designs that fold up the optical path.
That's just during the playoffs.
I don't understand your comment about zero interaction cross sections because it doesn't agree with the physics I know. If you look at the elastic and total cross sections for hadronic interactions, they are at worst flat at very high energies, and most in fact have a logarithmic rise with energy at very high energies (see, for instance, Table 40.2 for Figure 40.10 in this reference). And things are much different if you consider all the other particle interaction effects. For instance, photons travel at the speed of light and they have a very high interaction cross section; that is how my sunglasses work.
Very high speed charged particles get killed by radiative losses that kick out bremsstrahlung and pair produce like crazy (you don't want to be around all the x-rays and gamma rays that get produced, which is one reason these things are built underground). The neutral particles are unstable and end up decaying into charged particles, so you don't have long-lived very high speed neutrals hanging around either.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with escape velocity. How can the "near light-speed" particles you talk about not have escape velocity (assuming we pretend there is no matter for them to interact so that we can ignore all the dominant energy loss processes) and end up hanging about and not interacting? The particles that don't have escape velocity don't even make it out of the walls of the vacuum chamber.
I would disagree with you that "serious" physicists are worrying too much about this. The ones who work in the field know the physics. It is similar to the speculations about the fusion bomb igniting the atmosphere, where speculation carried on long after the physics was worked out by those who knew how to do the calculations.
The last time I was there I had to try to squeeze through the door blocked by a bunch of elementary school kids.
The solar corona problem isn't tied to fusion per se, just to a very hot core cooling radially outward. Also, there aren't any problems with thermodynamics in this situation provided there is some mechanism that is adding energy to the plasma at the solar surface. Given the violent nature of the solar surface, particularly with respect to solar flares and coronal mass ejections, there are certainly energy generating processes going on, so it isn't too terribly surprising that the corona gets heated up. The big question is what process(es) are causing it. For what it's worth, magnetic reconnection is the main suspect.
I'm not saying anything about how people should do things, the old way or not, and I could care less whether they use the command line, change their own oil, or have all their shopping done with a personal assistant. You do things your way, and leave me be todo things my way. I'm simply talking about the self-proclaimed anthropologists telling everyone that the common folk are too stupid to do things that were ordinary things not too long ago.
If you don't want to use the command line because you don't need to, fine; you're unwilling because you don't have a need or desire. Just don't start telling me that it is too complicated or hard for our favorite "Joe Sixpack." I used to change the oil in my car myself; it was cheaper, I knew it was going to be done correct, and it gave me a connection with my vehicle. I don't anymore because basically I'm too lazy. But I don't go around talking about how we simple country folk are best to just take it to Jiffy Lube because these modern cars are just much too complicated to understand. Frankly, I find people who tell you what the limitations are on people in general are either elitist and condescending, or looking for a cop-out answer to cover for their own limitations ("Linux is just too complicated for Joe Sixpack" instead of "Linux is too complicated for me (because I am either too lazy, unwilling, or unable to learn)").
MU: Best greatest hits album ever. :P
Isn't it amazing how stupid everyone has apparently become? I remember when the lowly secretary would type up professor's correspondences and papers using MSDOS and LaTeX. Now suddenly everyone is too mentally challenged to even consider such a thing.
Too many people act like my children: just because you are too lazy, unwilling, or incapable of learning or doing something doesn't necessarily mean the task is too hard or complicated.
The funny thing (to me, at least) is that I needed to purchase some Vista licenses at work for some new computers we were putting together, and I had a hell of a time trying to figure out the five different Vista versions they offer. Did we really need Ultimate, or would the Business version work? What is this Enterprise version and how is it different than Business? Ultimately the decision was made for me because the difference in price (for the OEM versions, at least) wasn't worth wasting my time researching the differences.
If you link through to the paper, it is right there. Essentially to reconstruct the hologram you need to know the form of the electric field from the source. To do this they have a model for it that has thousands of parameters. To determine these parameters they use the Newton method of optimization, which is an iterative method. You guess a form for the input and crunch through the numbers to get an output. You then compare your output to what you measure. A difference function is constructed to determine how close the modeled and measured outputs are. You then tweak your parameters and try again until the difference function is minimized.
To do the optimization you need to know how to tweak the parameters and you end up taking first and second order partial derivatives of your difference function. One thing you end up with is the Hessian matrix, which is a square matrix of second-order partial derivatives. With thousands of parameters in the model, the Hessian can be huge and very computationally expensive to calculate. In these cases, and this is what the authors did, one employs a quasi-Newton method that compromises by updating the Hessian instead of calculating all those partial derivatives. There are several ways to do the update and the authors went with an algorithm known as the BFGS method (this method is very popular and the code for it is freely available (and optimized for speed).
The only problem is you have to be careful with the units conversion if your plans are in letter and you want to use A4.
Critics of the space station, and a significant manned program in general, point out that the space station serves no scientific or engineering purpose. Unfortunately things like this, rich tourists, and hitting golf balls don't provide the best endorsement, at least from the scientific community. Then again, the scientific and engineering community has basically no input for the station, because if they did the station would either be scrapped, or filled with actual scientific experiments.
It is too bad you got modded down. Maybe it is because I am married as well, but your comment made me laugh out loud.
I understand your general point about the hardware, but in my experience it isn't as cut and dried as you point out.
When Win2k was out for a year or more, I moved the Win side of my dual-boot up from Win95. Not being an overly-experienced Windows person at the time (I was mainly using a VAX at work and Linux at home) I celebrated my hardware and software upgrade by going out and getting some games. I found out the hard way that my games from EA (Madden NFL and SimCity) wouldn't run on Win2k. It ended up being something, I believe, they never rectified.
At work I've become the default PC guy who will build/upgrade computers. In the past I have had a lot of problems (on non-Vista systems) with graphics cards and DVD drives, especially installing two DVD drives into the same machine. A lot of the time Windows would only recognize one of the drives, or if it saw the other one, it would always say that the drive didn't have a recognizable disk in it (for what it's worth, Linux never had a problem with it). I've spent a lot of time monkeying around with configurations and registry settings as I would do trying to get something working on Linux. A colleague of mine installed a SCSI card into his system (Windows only) using the supplied drivers and it took out his computer; he had to do a bare metal rebuild. So far I've only done one Vista system, and interestingly enough it went very smoothly (though I did spend enough time checking out the hardware specs before I ordered them).
I've got wireless problems in XP that I don't have in Linux. For whatever reason, if the computer goes into sleep mode and wakes back up, it can't reconnect to the wireless network. It has trouble renewing the IP address, or if it does, it can't re-register the DNS. I know several other people who have this problem (on different hardware), and though it is based on a small data set, I think it has something to do with the combination of XP and WPA (or WPA2). The only way to fix this is to reboot the PC and sometimes the access point. The longer-term fix for me is to either only connect wirelessly under Linux, set my computer up so that it never goes into sleep mode, or go back to WEP encryption (none of these "fixes" are popular with me). If I follow your reasoning I would have to claim that wireless networking sucks in Windows (and by my experience under WPA, it does).
I don't think that it is fair to knock Ubuntu (or any other Linux disto) when you say that they don't support the specific hardware you want until much later, when you started out your post saying that is also the case for Vista.
I'm not sure if you are specifically talking about purchasing stuff from Best Buy, or if you are using them to represent a consumer electronics chain in general, but I will agree that you'll be disappointed picking up specific hardware from them and expecting it to work out of the box in Linux. Obviously you can go in and buy all the EIDE and SATA drives or NIC cards you want with no problem. However, Best Buy, as well as most of any of the "Big Box" stores, has an inventory that is a mile wide and an inch deep. If that one particular vendor they carry for that one particular device doesn't have something, then you are out of luck. Incidentally, this has never been a problem for me because apart from impulse or short-need purchases (for the computer, at least), I find the prices are much much better on-line than they are in the store, and not only can I get exactly what I want, I can get stuff that I know will work where I need it to work.
If your criteria for being hardware friendly is that it needs to support everything Best Buy sells, then I'll concede your point. On the other hand, I find Linux to be very hardware friendly. You can get top-end hardware (graphics cards, RAID controllers, pretty much anything you want) to work on Linux. When we all had to use modems, pretty much all that Best Buy sold were WinModems, which are modems that only worked on Windows systems because they were v
Maybe at 1AU, but out beyond the magnetosphere that isn't true.
For what it's worth, the many flavors of galactic cosmic rays you mention is pretty much the periodic table. While true there are a variety of ways to accelerate a charged particle, there are not that many known ways to get them to those energies that don't stick out like sore thumbs (which is why supernovae were always the best candidates). For the galactic cosmic rays, at least one of the methods must be able to accelerate very large nuclei such as silicon or iron, without blowing apart the nuclei while accelerating them.
The problem with the really really high energy cosmic rays is that when they travel at those speeds everything is blue-shifted up. The cosmic background radiation shifts up to x-rays and gamma rays and so these particles would interact like crazy with the background and thus should not be able to travel very far (like across the universe). So where the hell do they come from? If I knew, I'd have a nice tenured position somewhere.
It is one of the great ironies of history that Einstein, who laid the foundation for quantum mechanics so well with this paper (as well as working out the Bose-Einstein statistics), never accepted quantum mechanics, and he always believed that quantum mechanics appeared so weird only because of our lack of understanding of nature (i.e., there must be some other variables hidden from us that, when worked into a proper equation, will describe nature)
This doesn't look like a site targeted at the layman. It seems to be a site targeted at the scientific community to help disseminate research results to other scientists. I think this is a great idea. Basically the majority of scientific papers that are written only have their abstracts, intros, conclusions, and figures read until it is determined that the paper is of great interest, then the nitty-gritty details are read. This allows researchers to quickly get the gist of papers to determine which ones they want to read in detail. It would also help the scientific journalist to quickly understand the big picture of a particular recent topic.
Since the videos are targeted at other scientists and engineers, I wouldn't expect too much polish. It would not surprise me if it gets used by company PR departments or researchers on the fringe to promote their ideas (and in which case I would expect pretty slick presentations) because I suspect posting a video on this site would carry more weight than just posting it on YouTube.
I would have said your definition for Windows was more applicable to Macs. For Windows I would put it at something like: For users who don't want to spend time looking at other options (which in its own way is similar to your definition).
It was probably the same trackball as in Missile Command, but do you remember that football game where the players were x's and o's? We played that one all the time and those trackballs took some major abuse but I don't recall ever going to an arcade where one was out of service.
It was an Atari game and I found a link for it.
Maybe it is just because I'm an old fart, or it was my age when I played those games, but I haven't played a game in a long time that had such great gameplay as those 70's and 80's arcade games. Of course, if I had to do it all over again, I would take all those quarters I dumped in the arcades and invest them instead, and I'd be sitting rather pretty right now.