Also, you leave out an interesting tangent, which is that rockets' maximum achievable speed is related to exhaust velocity. At this point, the rocket is accelerating the fuel away such that the fuel is at a standstill relative to an observer. To go faster with the same exhaust velocity, the fuel would end up chasing the rocket, which is a physical impossibility according to currently accepted laws of physics.
I don't see why. All the rocket's remaining fuel has already been accelerated to the rocket's velocity. If the rocket pushes some of that fuel out the back, the fuel will be moving more slowly than the rocket and fuel were moving before, and the rocket will be moving more quickly than the rocket and fuel were moving before.
Saying that a rocket's velocity can't exceed its exhaust velocity sounds a lot like saying that a rocket can't work in space because there's nothing for it to push against.
"Your" software? You're speaking as though the machine had software on it that you own, as opposed to a bunch of rental agreements. Or maybe you think you've produced content that should remain under your control, instead of being wafted into the cloud. Clearly you're living in the past, and irrelevant to Apple's interests.
I've been using Macs since 1985. Lately, though, every year's "progress" makes me feel less like a happy repeat customer and more like a stubborn fool.
NHTSA estimates the odds of a hybrid vehicle being involved in a pedestrian crash are 19 percent higher compared with a traditional gas-powered vehicle
"Estimates"???? Wtf, are they trying to suggest this would be a good idea without even having any actual hard statistics backed by actual research to support the notion that it would actually result in fewer pedestrian injuries?
Yes, "estimates". You know, that thing you use statistics to do.
Ah, QA, I didn't recognize you without the space/3D-printing hat. Tell me, do you maintain a list of everyone who's ever criticized one of your posts? Because, while I get tired of your shtick pretty frequently, I don't think I've posted in response to you (or anyone else) that frequently.
In any event, the presentation you linked does show considerably better technology than I was aware of. (For anyone who couldn't already tell, no, this isn't my field.) And yet -- look at the performance graphs scattered throughout the deck. They seem to show a pretty messy 5-15db lobe being steered. Compare that to 50+db gain of a 1-meter parabolic antenna at 50GHz. Facebook is pushing 100W through that transmitter (although admittedly there's no indication how much of that makes it to the radiator). How do you suppose the steerable array system would fare if you fed it a megawatt?
(BTW, snark aside, if you are an antenna engineer, I'd love to see some actual analysis around this.)
Still not as fast as an IR free-space link, and I'm struggling to see what other advantage it has. It's still blocked by atmospheric water or precipitation. It might be harder for a bird to block it by flying through the beam, but if you expand a laser beam's diameter to 1 m, no one bird's going to block that, either. And I can't imagine you'd need anywhere near 100 watts to get IR across that distance.
As I said up-thread, the part of the article that talked about a large parabolic reflector aimed within 0.07 degrees implies a very precise line-of-sight alignment. If it were possible to bounce this signal off an atmospheric layer or rely on backscatter, they wouldn't need that kind of accuracy. From looking at the terrain on Google, I don't think towers would do the trick -- I'll bet that they had the transmitter and receiver set up on peaks near Malibu and Woodland Hills, high enough to see each other.
That's an impressive distance for that part of the spectrum. I still think of mm-wave as a local or very-short-haul medium. If you're doing line-of-sight with that kind of precision required, why not go straight to IR laser?
If they were using a one-meter-plus parabolic antenna that had to be aimed to an accuracy of 0.07 degrees, and since they pointed out that this part of the spectrum is blocked by rain and fog, I'm going to say "totally". Millimeter-wave gets attenuated by just about anything. If the AC below is correct that there was a ridge in the way, then they must have been using really tall towers -- or, as hinted in the article, an airborne target.
See, if AT&T already owned Time Warner, there'd be no issue here -- instead of "illegal collusion", this would just be a responsible and well-run company maximizing value for its shareholders.
This machine, and any other machine you can buy today, presumably supports low-power Bluetooth. Someone needs to make and market a single key with a Bluetooth connection, and a sticky silicone back for staying put on your desktop or laptop. Pair it and map it to whatever you like; get a bunch if you're so inclined.
Sort of like the giant Staples "Easy" button, only functional and practical. I'd be inclined to call it the "dammit" button, because that's what I always seem to call for when I want a key that isn't there...
Sure. What a pleasure it would be to use vi, if only I had a touch-panel across the top of my keyboard for heavily-used commands like "escape", "colon", "slash", "single-quote", "h", "j", "k", "l"...
I've been an Apple user since 06 when they went Intel (strictly *nix for 22 years before that other than a brief, self abusive period using Windows in the late 90s) and I don't understand why the retina, multi-touch tech of the TouchBar isn't implement in the screen as well.
I've been an Apple user since 1985, using Unix most of that time -- UniPlus+ on a Lisa, then A/UX on a Mac II, then a bit of a hiatus running terminal programs to get into remote Unix systems until OS X came along. (And, let me tell you, it wasn't always fun.)
I was a happy Fingerworks TouchStream user during the last decade. I'm still sore at Apple for shutting them down when they bought out their multi-touch technology. I want all that cool gestural technology back.
I do not want it on my desktop displays, though. I don't want to look through grimy fingerprints to see my main display. I don't want to try to point and gesture precisely while I'm holding my arm in the air. I don't want to move my arm through large distances as I move between selection and typing.
I'd like to think that Apple's stayed away from desktop and laptop touchscreens because they understand the ergonomic issues. I actually think it's more likely because they don't want unsightly fingerprints befouling their sleek designs.
Wanted to give this one mod points, but figured I'll have too much to say in this thread.
In any situation where the display can change out from under an in-progress action -- for example, an Outlook reminder popping up in the middle of a standard Windows keyboard-and-mouse workflow -- the very first thing that a well-integrated system should do is to check the interpretation of the next user action (click, keystroke, etc) against the pre-existing interaction state, explicitly accounting for human reaction times. If I've just hit Return, and that event is going to a confirmation dialog that was displayed 0.05 seconds ago, there is no way that I've seen and read the dialog.
But I have yet to use any system that does this consistently. If anybody's going to lead the way on it, I'd expect it to be Apple, or Microsoft with the Surface stuff -- but I'm betting that they haven't, at least not yet.
Not, I think, in constant-dollar terms. Factor out inflation, and labor and equipment costs remain relatively constant, but technology costs plummet even more quickly.
That's what they did in our neighborhood, but they still needed a jackhammer to make that hole in the middle of the street, and of course the city needed to hire in a backhoe crew to fix the water line that they STILL managed to nick, presumably with the horizontal ram.
It took a crew contracted to AT&T about a week to lay fiber alongside the road to our house. That's a distance of maybe 300 meters. I imagine they were working other areas at the same time, but I was amazed that it took so long from start to finish.
They had to cross one residential street and a lot of driveways. For the driveways, they dug a pit at either side, and used a driver to tunnel underneath. For the street, I think they had to cut a hole in the middle, because it was too far for the driver to bridge in one pass.
A week or two after they finished, we lost water pressure. They'd damaged a pipe near the other end of the road. A city crew had to roll a backhoe, a dump truck, and a fair number of people to find the leak, excavate it, repair it, and refill it. As I understand it, the contractor who laid the fiber will be billed for that. Either they'll bill it back to AT&T, or they'll roll it into their future rates, or they'll go out of business and the remaining contractors will raise their rates to compensate for the market shift.
I wish Google had gotten here first. I really don't want to deal with AT&T's data caps and MIM attacks on my traffic, nor do I want to pay many hundreds of dollars a year extra for the privilege of having them behave like a common carrier. So right now, even after AT&T went to the expense of laying fiber practically to our doorstep, I'm not a customer, and they're getting zero return on their investment from me.
Laying fiber through a developed area is hard and expensive, and the rewards are uncertain.
Brilliant! If those lazy, shiftless poors would just put off having children until they can afford it, then... well, given the increasing stratification of American culture, they'd probably never manage to have children. So we breed poorness out of the population! Win-win!
Exactly. You're being fired from two of your three part-time, low-wage jobs because you needed to stay home to care for a sick child? You just need to start your own business! If you're too lazy to do that, why should we care about your problems?
Can you use your own "intelligence" on the caustic, searing surface of Venus without billions of dollars of infrastructure? I'm guessing not. You're not as "independent of your environment" as your analogies imply.
And something that uses fewer resources over time, instead of needing to be fed more and more every day -- that may be "life", Jim, but not as we know it.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, you leave out an interesting tangent, which is that rockets' maximum achievable speed is related to exhaust velocity. At this point, the rocket is accelerating the fuel away such that the fuel is at a standstill relative to an observer. To go faster with the same exhaust velocity, the fuel would end up chasing the rocket, which is a physical impossibility according to currently accepted laws of physics.
I don't see why. All the rocket's remaining fuel has already been accelerated to the rocket's velocity. If the rocket pushes some of that fuel out the back, the fuel will be moving more slowly than the rocket and fuel were moving before, and the rocket will be moving more quickly than the rocket and fuel were moving before.
Saying that a rocket's velocity can't exceed its exhaust velocity sounds a lot like saying that a rocket can't work in space because there's nothing for it to push against.
"Your" software? You're speaking as though the machine had software on it that you own, as opposed to a bunch of rental agreements. Or maybe you think you've produced content that should remain under your control, instead of being wafted into the cloud. Clearly you're living in the past, and irrelevant to Apple's interests.
I've been using Macs since 1985. Lately, though, every year's "progress" makes me feel less like a happy repeat customer and more like a stubborn fool.
"Estimates"???? Wtf, are they trying to suggest this would be a good idea without even having any actual hard statistics backed by actual research to support the notion that it would actually result in fewer pedestrian injuries?
Yes, "estimates". You know, that thing you use statistics to do.
Drill a hole or to in the muffler if you must.
Or hang some bells from the reins, or just crack your whip more loudly.
Ah, QA, I didn't recognize you without the space/3D-printing hat. Tell me, do you maintain a list of everyone who's ever criticized one of your posts? Because, while I get tired of your shtick pretty frequently, I don't think I've posted in response to you (or anyone else) that frequently.
In any event, the presentation you linked does show considerably better technology than I was aware of. (For anyone who couldn't already tell, no, this isn't my field.) And yet -- look at the performance graphs scattered throughout the deck. They seem to show a pretty messy 5-15db lobe being steered. Compare that to 50+db gain of a 1-meter parabolic antenna at 50GHz. Facebook is pushing 100W through that transmitter (although admittedly there's no indication how much of that makes it to the radiator). How do you suppose the steerable array system would fare if you fed it a megawatt?
(BTW, snark aside, if you are an antenna engineer, I'd love to see some actual analysis around this.)
Still not as fast as an IR free-space link, and I'm struggling to see what other advantage it has. It's still blocked by atmospheric water or precipitation. It might be harder for a bird to block it by flying through the beam, but if you expand a laser beam's diameter to 1 m, no one bird's going to block that, either. And I can't imagine you'd need anywhere near 100 watts to get IR across that distance.
As I said up-thread, the part of the article that talked about a large parabolic reflector aimed within 0.07 degrees implies a very precise line-of-sight alignment. If it were possible to bounce this signal off an atmospheric layer or rely on backscatter, they wouldn't need that kind of accuracy. From looking at the terrain on Google, I don't think towers would do the trick -- I'll bet that they had the transmitter and receiver set up on peaks near Malibu and Woodland Hills, high enough to see each other.
That's an impressive distance for that part of the spectrum. I still think of mm-wave as a local or very-short-haul medium. If you're doing line-of-sight with that kind of precision required, why not go straight to IR laser?
Please tell us more, O Expert AC, about the circuitry you use to generate an array of phase-controlled mm-wave signals.
If they were using a one-meter-plus parabolic antenna that had to be aimed to an accuracy of 0.07 degrees, and since they pointed out that this part of the spectrum is blocked by rain and fog, I'm going to say "totally". Millimeter-wave gets attenuated by just about anything. If the AC below is correct that there was a ridge in the way, then they must have been using really tall towers -- or, as hinted in the article, an airborne target.
Because it's so terribly difficult to tamper with perception and memory.
See, if AT&T already owned Time Warner, there'd be no issue here -- instead of "illegal collusion", this would just be a responsible and well-run company maximizing value for its shareholders.
Now, where did I leave that sarcasm tag...
I could launch into a long history of the Computer Science department at Virginia Tech, but let's just say "it was the 80's" and leave it at that.
This machine, and any other machine you can buy today, presumably supports low-power Bluetooth. Someone needs to make and market a single key with a Bluetooth connection, and a sticky silicone back for staying put on your desktop or laptop. Pair it and map it to whatever you like; get a bunch if you're so inclined.
Sort of like the giant Staples "Easy" button, only functional and practical. I'd be inclined to call it the "dammit" button, because that's what I always seem to call for when I want a key that isn't there...
Sure. What a pleasure it would be to use vi, if only I had a touch-panel across the top of my keyboard for heavily-used commands like "escape", "colon", "slash", "single-quote", "h", "j", "k", "l"...
Sort of like this, by some strange coincidence?
I've been an Apple user since 06 when they went Intel (strictly *nix for 22 years before that other than a brief, self abusive period using Windows in the late 90s) and I don't understand why the retina, multi-touch tech of the TouchBar isn't implement in the screen as well.
I've been an Apple user since 1985, using Unix most of that time -- UniPlus+ on a Lisa, then A/UX on a Mac II, then a bit of a hiatus running terminal programs to get into remote Unix systems until OS X came along. (And, let me tell you, it wasn't always fun.)
I was a happy Fingerworks TouchStream user during the last decade. I'm still sore at Apple for shutting them down when they bought out their multi-touch technology. I want all that cool gestural technology back.
I do not want it on my desktop displays, though. I don't want to look through grimy fingerprints to see my main display. I don't want to try to point and gesture precisely while I'm holding my arm in the air. I don't want to move my arm through large distances as I move between selection and typing.
I'd like to think that Apple's stayed away from desktop and laptop touchscreens because they understand the ergonomic issues. I actually think it's more likely because they don't want unsightly fingerprints befouling their sleek designs.
Wanted to give this one mod points, but figured I'll have too much to say in this thread.
In any situation where the display can change out from under an in-progress action -- for example, an Outlook reminder popping up in the middle of a standard Windows keyboard-and-mouse workflow -- the very first thing that a well-integrated system should do is to check the interpretation of the next user action (click, keystroke, etc) against the pre-existing interaction state, explicitly accounting for human reaction times. If I've just hit Return, and that event is going to a confirmation dialog that was displayed 0.05 seconds ago, there is no way that I've seen and read the dialog.
But I have yet to use any system that does this consistently. If anybody's going to lead the way on it, I'd expect it to be Apple, or Microsoft with the Surface stuff -- but I'm betting that they haven't, at least not yet.
Except, of course, when subsequent projects cut your fiber and it needs to be repaired. Repeatedly.
Not, I think, in constant-dollar terms. Factor out inflation, and labor and equipment costs remain relatively constant, but technology costs plummet even more quickly.
That's what they did in our neighborhood, but they still needed a jackhammer to make that hole in the middle of the street, and of course the city needed to hire in a backhoe crew to fix the water line that they STILL managed to nick, presumably with the horizontal ram.
It took a crew contracted to AT&T about a week to lay fiber alongside the road to our house. That's a distance of maybe 300 meters. I imagine they were working other areas at the same time, but I was amazed that it took so long from start to finish.
They had to cross one residential street and a lot of driveways. For the driveways, they dug a pit at either side, and used a driver to tunnel underneath. For the street, I think they had to cut a hole in the middle, because it was too far for the driver to bridge in one pass.
A week or two after they finished, we lost water pressure. They'd damaged a pipe near the other end of the road. A city crew had to roll a backhoe, a dump truck, and a fair number of people to find the leak, excavate it, repair it, and refill it. As I understand it, the contractor who laid the fiber will be billed for that. Either they'll bill it back to AT&T, or they'll roll it into their future rates, or they'll go out of business and the remaining contractors will raise their rates to compensate for the market shift.
I wish Google had gotten here first. I really don't want to deal with AT&T's data caps and MIM attacks on my traffic, nor do I want to pay many hundreds of dollars a year extra for the privilege of having them behave like a common carrier. So right now, even after AT&T went to the expense of laying fiber practically to our doorstep, I'm not a customer, and they're getting zero return on their investment from me.
Laying fiber through a developed area is hard and expensive, and the rewards are uncertain.
Although if its orbit is eccentric enough, it could occlude the Sun on its way to perihelion. That would get the researchers really excited.
Brilliant! If those lazy, shiftless poors would just put off having children until they can afford it, then... well, given the increasing stratification of American culture, they'd probably never manage to have children. So we breed poorness out of the population! Win-win!
Exactly. You're being fired from two of your three part-time, low-wage jobs because you needed to stay home to care for a sick child? You just need to start your own business! If you're too lazy to do that, why should we care about your problems?
That seemed poetic, but kind of pointless.
Can you use your own "intelligence" on the caustic, searing surface of Venus without billions of dollars of infrastructure? I'm guessing not. You're not as "independent of your environment" as your analogies imply.
And something that uses fewer resources over time, instead of needing to be fed more and more every day -- that may be "life", Jim, but not as we know it.