Hey, when I started elementary school in 1981, computers in school were unheard of. You MAYBE saw a CPM machine. Then the Apple II came out. I remember playing with Apples clear into the 8th grade. I had a PC at home, and most of my friends had Commodore 64's. I programmed in BASIC, porting programs from Apple BASIC and Commodore BASIC to my IBM BASIC box.
When I started high school the district bought a roomful of PC's networked with Novel Netware. Anyone else remember the big leap (around 11th grade) from DOS based Word Processors to Windows based? Hell I still remember the vulcan-neckpinch commands needed to operate WordPerfect. At this point I was writing device drivers in C for DOS. (Gasp, I still have the reference manual for all of the interrupt handlers for DOS 5 and 6.)
In college I had to buy a Macintosh. Claris Works was my friend. My junior year they suddenly switched to PC's. I was on Coop an had to navigate MS Office. And just when people started to get good with NT, Linux came out. I moved on to scripting languages and SQL.
What have I learned from all this? Basically how to learn. Everything else is just details.
They are running T1 lines over copper these days. Call AT&T or sprint, and have them one to your house or a storefront. From there split it out with wireless. With the right antenna arrangements, you can boost the effective range to 2 or 3 miles.
I had wireless running between my office and my apartment, a quarter mile away, for a year and a half. It worked through trees and rain. The only time the signal sucked eggs was windy rainy weather. That tended to rustle the trees and scatter the signal.
You have it easy now, ethernet bridge devices are cheap, and they have an external antenna mount.
$400/month (for the T1) spread over 10 users is $40/month.
We just bought a house in South Philly. We figured, there is no way with 100,000 people per square mile that we could be more than 10,000 feet from the CO.
Wrong. we are 10,520 feet.
All we could get from Verizon was the SDSL service at an ungodly amount and a crappy speed. Same with Speakeasy.
My wife on a lark called Cavelier Telephone. They are advertising all the time on the local news radio. In any case we managed to get unlimited long distance, unlimited local calls, and a 784/784 DSL line for $80/month with a static IP.
Now you can argue that ablative is better, but that wasn't really the point of the shuttle. It was to have something that was cheap and reusable. Granted, NASA failed MISERABLY in this regard, but with that aim you can't really expect the skin to perform like a C-17's.
Well, unfortunately the shuttle DOES have to content with birds, foam, bolts, and other debris. The designers of the shuttle just stuck their head in the sand about it.
I'm reminded of working on the Solar Race car team back in college. They would spend a bundle on these reinforced bike tires to decrease the rolling friction of the car, and ignored the fact that we lost more time to tire blowouts (as well as the energy required to start the car moving again) than was saved by not using a properly rated motorcycle tire.
Of course these were the same folks who built a $100,000 composite chassis that weighed 10 pounds to save weight on a car that also had to hold 180 pounds of driver, 300 pounds of batteries, 100 pounds of solar cells...
So exactly where were they supposed to store the extra water? Water is heavy. At present most modern spacecraft don't even store it. They generate drinking water (in small amounts) as a byproduct of power generation.
Perhaps in the future, but I don't think the concept is ready for prime time.
Ask yourself: Why on earth (or in orbit therof) does NASA need an air-breathing engine capible of hypersonic speed?
Think about it. All of the savings in oxidizer are MORE than made up for in atmospheric drag. Why doesn't the concorde still fly? It burns WAY too much fuel to be profitable. If you want to get a rocket above the lower atmosphere use a sub-sonic jet. There are certainly enough off-the-shelf heavy lifters:
B-52
Boeing 747
C-5 Galaxy
And those are just the american designs. The Russians have a few of their own.
as funny as this is, I can't seem to remember the source of the original quote? Is it Monty Python?
The Simpons. The Episode where Homer flies on the space shuttle. During the struggle to land, an ant colony experiment busts open scattering ants all over the cabin. A few ants end up right in front of the camera (viewed by the audience on the ground), prompting that famous line from the Newscaster.
Other memorable lines that made the rounds (especially on the last Columbia mission:)
Now we will never know if ants can sort tiny screws.
Now they'll have to figure out how to prevent property loss associated with the repeated compaction of buildings from heavy misguided farming equipment...
Around my area the problem is the opposite: Farm loss from heavily misguided construction.
Just imagine how many hooligans are going to be leaving compacted soil samples in their drawers after stumbling onto a field and having an automated farm equipment nearly run them over.
I've been waiting 20 minutes for a meeting to start, and I managed to commandeer an unattended computer with a Net connection for a minute.
This article has made my day. Hell, it reminds me of the time my uncle gave me a few bucks to design a "switch simulator." I cleaned out the LED supplies at 4 Radio shacks, and assembled a psuedo-random blinking light pattern. He needed something to fill in an empty rack at the data center.
For kicks it included a voice recorder chip, and speed adjust. A miracle what can be accomplished with a few NAND chips, NOR chips, a BCD counter, and a whole lot of solder.
Hint for kids trying this at home, tie the LED's to the supply (+), and let the discreet components open the return (-) part of the circuit. 60 LEDs consume a surpisingly large amount of current. Forrest E. Mims is your friend...
You fail to realize this is a self limiting system. You can only take out so many routers between you and the internet before you yourself are cut off, and or bogged down in a deluge of diverted traffic.
You should try MyDNS. Instead of farting around maintaining those REALLY cryptic config files, store all your DNS records in a relational database.
Of course you REALLY want to lock down that database! (All of my servers clone a copy of a master database locked deep behind the firewall in my fortress of solitude. They also have iptables hooks to prevent ANYONE from accessing mysql except through the local socket.)
Between this announcement and the microsoft one I know at least one of the fine readers out there has cancelled all of their appointments for the next three days and has a case of mountain dew and a copy of worms for dummies under their arm whistling happily.
Mountain dew, nah. The sugar makes me sleepy after 20 minutes. I prefer my caffiene to be like my soul: Dark, Bitter, and (slurp) Empty.
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When I started high school the district bought a roomful of PC's networked with Novel Netware. Anyone else remember the big leap (around 11th grade) from DOS based Word Processors to Windows based? Hell I still remember the vulcan-neckpinch commands needed to operate WordPerfect. At this point I was writing device drivers in C for DOS. (Gasp, I still have the reference manual for all of the interrupt handlers for DOS 5 and 6.)
In college I had to buy a Macintosh. Claris Works was my friend. My junior year they suddenly switched to PC's. I was on Coop an had to navigate MS Office. And just when people started to get good with NT, Linux came out. I moved on to scripting languages and SQL.
What have I learned from all this? Basically how to learn. Everything else is just details.
Dude: that's with the phone service. A dialtone around here runs $30/month.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
The party names I've come up with so far:
The issue of course is NOT the agreement made in 1994. Its that fact that government rolled over and allowed the citizens to take it in the ass TODAY.
I had wireless running between my office and my apartment, a quarter mile away, for a year and a half. It worked through trees and rain. The only time the signal sucked eggs was windy rainy weather. That tended to rustle the trees and scatter the signal.
You have it easy now, ethernet bridge devices are cheap, and they have an external antenna mount.
$400/month (for the T1) spread over 10 users is $40/month.
We just bought a house in South Philly. We figured, there is no way with 100,000 people per square mile that we could be more than 10,000 feet from the CO.
Wrong. we are 10,520 feet.
All we could get from Verizon was the SDSL service at an ungodly amount and a crappy speed. Same with Speakeasy.
My wife on a lark called Cavelier Telephone. They are advertising all the time on the local news radio. In any case we managed to get unlimited long distance, unlimited local calls, and a 784/784 DSL line for $80/month with a static IP.
We are now up to Gandi's "They will fight you" stage of revolution.
Well, unfortunately the shuttle DOES have to content with birds, foam, bolts, and other debris. The designers of the shuttle just stuck their head in the sand about it.
I'm reminded of working on the Solar Race car team back in college. They would spend a bundle on these reinforced bike tires to decrease the rolling friction of the car, and ignored the fact that we lost more time to tire blowouts (as well as the energy required to start the car moving again) than was saved by not using a properly rated motorcycle tire.
Of course these were the same folks who built a $100,000 composite chassis that weighed 10 pounds to save weight on a car that also had to hold 180 pounds of driver, 300 pounds of batteries, 100 pounds of solar cells...
Perhaps in the future, but I don't think the concept is ready for prime time.
Think about it. All of the savings in oxidizer are MORE than made up for in atmospheric drag. Why doesn't the concorde still fly? It burns WAY too much fuel to be profitable. If you want to get a rocket above the lower atmosphere use a sub-sonic jet. There are certainly enough off-the-shelf heavy lifters:
And those are just the american designs. The Russians have a few of their own.
Try not to think of it as "Farm Loss." Think of it as overloading rural road, water, sewer, and education systems.
The Simpons. The Episode where Homer flies on the space shuttle. During the struggle to land, an ant colony experiment busts open scattering ants all over the cabin. A few ants end up right in front of the camera (viewed by the audience on the ground), prompting that famous line from the Newscaster.
Other memorable lines that made the rounds (especially on the last Columbia mission:)
Now we will never know if ants can sort tiny screws.
(Mulitple references to an inanimate carbon rod.)
I'm picturing a monochromic gray, accented with thin black lines.
Long story, military simulation humor.
Around my area the problem is the opposite: Farm loss from heavily misguided construction.
Or by having a robot eye follow a white line.
Just imagine how many hooligans are going to be leaving compacted soil samples in their drawers after stumbling onto a field and having an automated farm equipment nearly run them over.
As they say, as you reap so will you sow.
This article has made my day. Hell, it reminds me of the time my uncle gave me a few bucks to design a "switch simulator." I cleaned out the LED supplies at 4 Radio shacks, and assembled a psuedo-random blinking light pattern. He needed something to fill in an empty rack at the data center.
For kicks it included a voice recorder chip, and speed adjust. A miracle what can be accomplished with a few NAND chips, NOR chips, a BCD counter, and a whole lot of solder.
Hint for kids trying this at home, tie the LED's to the supply (+), and let the discreet components open the return (-) part of the circuit. 60 LEDs consume a surpisingly large amount of current. Forrest E. Mims is your friend...
You fail to realize this is a self limiting system. You can only take out so many routers between you and the internet before you yourself are cut off, and or bogged down in a deluge of diverted traffic.
Our facility tested it out, but concluded IPOA is for the birds.
Of course you REALLY want to lock down that database! (All of my servers clone a copy of a master database locked deep behind the firewall in my fortress of solitude. They also have iptables hooks to prevent ANYONE from accessing mysql except through the local socket.)
Mountain dew, nah. The sugar makes me sleepy after 20 minutes. I prefer my caffiene to be like my soul: Dark, Bitter, and (slurp) Empty.