What I am now wondering is how anyone found out about this, and discovered the finer details. It seems that Russia have done alot of things in secret, in the space race of the 60s for instance. The US has also had it's fair share of foul-ups (Hubble, anyone?). How often could this sort of thing be happening, and more importantly, how much is it costing?
International regulations insist that anything that achieves orbit is given some form of designation. So we have a pretty good idea how how much stuff is up there.
The Soviets used a catch-all Kosmos designation for most of their failures. There are well over 2000 satellites in the Kosmos series, but this was complicated in that some Kosmos missions were genuine science, military or test vehicles, whilst others were probes and satellites that didn't get where they were meant to go.
To make things more complicated, the Soviets would often say that a Kosmos probe had completed its mission - even if had been DOA. Which made working out exactly what was working and what wasn't a complete nightmare for the West. No doubt the Kremlin loved these sorts of games.
To take just one example a 1964 Venus probe should have become a member of the Venera series; but it instead became the relatively anonymous Kosmos 27 after it failed to escape Earth orbit.
Once a probe was on its way out of orbit the Soviets usually then assigned it a proper mission name, although they complicated things by often using more than one name - so Zond (probe) was sometimes substituted for Mars or Venera!
Anything that failed to climb into orbit was usually not assigned a name and in Soviet days was rarely mentioned - just look at how successfully they covered up the N1 Moon rocket until after the collapse of Communism.
Nowadays the Russians are much more open, even to the extent of confirming military launches.
As for the cost? Who knows, so much of space expenditure is military I doubt we will ever find out. The Soviet programme was a crippling expense for their government and foolish attempts to match the Shuttle using the (admittedly far superior) Buran were one of the reasons for the final collapse of Communism.
Not to mention that all commercial satellite launches were removed from the Shuttle following the Challenger disaster.
Which had the side-effect of making the Shuttle an even bigger financial liability than before. At least chucking out satellites to beam repeats of M*A*S*H earned some money.
Interesting. But they picked the wrong name for the design. It should be "Squirrel Cage Fan Wing".
Hmmm perhaps you've stumbled on the ideal low-weight, high-energy power source! Fill the inside of the fan with ten-thousand hamsters and get them running.
1. Why not just buy a Dell? It'd be more powerful and cost only a little more.
By making a miniature computer of very low cost, the users can keep personal data on smart-cards and share one Simputer amongst many users. Thus the cost can be spread around. This could also be done with a laptop, but the power consumption and cost of a laptop much higher than this Simputer would be.
Additionally, India would be importing technology. The Simputer may require imported components (notably the CPU) but much of it can be fabricated inside India. That employs people, boosts the economy and offers export opportunities for other developing markets.
There is no reason to suspect that this is the end of their ambitions. They have a viable solid state device for the mass-market. Why shouldn't they be thinking of a more fully-featured product for the upper end of the market?
I seem to remember people laughing at a little company from a group of islands off the coast of China; they used to produce cheap and nasty copies of Western radios. Strange name - something like Somy... I wonder what became of them?
India has traditionally tried to concentrate on indigenous technology even when there are established alternatives. This is an attempt to jump start the economy and is not too dissimilar to the way the US industrialised during the 19th Century.
And India has had many successes in advanced technology - nuclear power and its space programme immediately spring to mind.
And how many WalMarts are there out at their target market - the jungle?
Probably none, but then precious little of India is a jungle anyway. You seem to be showing a great deal of ignorance about India and Indians. People might be poor, but they are not stupid.
India has a good network of roads and railways - most people are in (admittedly) infrequent contact with the outside world. Goods and services make it even to the most rural areas and the people there have some acquaintance with the technologies you or I take for granted. Until now they haven't had ready access to them; that is Simputer's target market.
Besides, $5 is a weeks' income, according to the article.
Batteries don't cost the same as they do in the US. They are manufactured and priced for the local market. A pack of batteries will cost a fraction of the price in the US. Many people will already have battery-powered radios and access to batteries.
Rechargeables would be nice, but we have to assume the Simputer people have done research and believe that the disposable battery is sufficiently available and familiar to the target audience.
I dunno, I'm pretty disappointed by Starfox, to be honest with you. And I think Halo kicks 7 kinds of ass.
Starfox is bad? That's a shame (it hasn't arrived in the UK yet).
Quite agree about Halo - it is fabulous and a worthy game for any system, but the fact it is still riding so high in the charts after all of these months seems to show the lack of XBox must-have games. So far all the hyped titles - 'Buffy', that platform game with the really ugly cat - have all been disappointments.
What's also worrying me about the XBox is that Microsoft have hyped its on-line abilities but made the system closed and broadband only. Here in the UK, broadband is reaching about 6% of online homes and vast swathes of the country (including me:( ) just can't get any broadband. Conversely, Nintendo and Sony are accommodating modem users which will make their systems much more palatable to users.
The XBox is now competitively priced, but it really needs some exclusive, top-notch games to pull ahead. And where are those games?
Best wishes,
Mike.
PS. Dreamcast - yep mine still gets regular outings for the post-pub madness that is 'Chu Chu Rocket'.
I can't figure out *why* there's such a massive aversion among Europeans to genetically enhanced food, food from animals that were given antibiotics, food that pesticide was applied to, even (to some degree) non-free-range meat.
Part of the resistance is that the US is refusing to label such food and allow people to make a choice about whether they eat hormone-treated or GM foods. The European consumer has shown that they want to know these things - that the US is refusing to do so is both arrogant and misguided. Indeed inside the US, there has been pressure for BST-treated milk to be labelled, the companies have refused. Why shouldn't we be given a choice what we eat and drink?
If the food is better, it will succeed in the market.
What's the big deal? Health organizations were all over this, have scrutinized it, and I can guarantee you (I know people that work in the medical industry) that the FDA is unbelivably uptight about letting *anything* past them if there's even the remotest unfounded possibility that something might have some risk to it. The only reason *not* to eat improved food is because of some irrational gut emotional response.
The problem is that people who work in industry have then taken up positions on the regulatory bodies that are meant to produce independent advice on the safety of these products.
For instance Margaret Miller wrote most of the FDA's regulations on why BST-treated milk would not be labelled, but she was a member of the team at Monsanto which had developed BST. Additionally, Dr Nick Weber of the FDA who had been negotiating with international regulators had passed confidential committee information to Monsanto.
This cannot be considered as satisfactory regulation. All the science in the World will not save you from corruption - and this is nothing more than corruption.
Finally, you have to remember that Europe has many small farms many of which rely on organic production methods. Any GM planting in Europe would result in cross-pollenation between GM and non-GM produce. People would end up eating GM food whether they liked it or not.
Nintendo sold Rare because Rare has outlived it's worth. What most people don't know about Rare is that they've been around for a very long time. They were making games back in the NES days and even since those days have remained a relatively small company.
Even before then, they were originally Ultimate - Play the Game and used to write exclusively for the ZX Spectrum. As a Commodore 64 owner I had to go round to a friend's to play Atic Atac and the like.
Sigh, nostalgia.
Another story doing to rounds about Rare is that they have lost a lot of staff recently and the Stamper brothers who founded the company are no longer so interested in writing games.
Still, we'll see. And let's face it a bad Rare game is going to be better than almost anything the XBox has to offer at the moment.
I can't get digital TV, digital radio or digital cable.
Oh and while I'm moaning about great British institutions, BT can't offer me ADSL either.
Naturally, what passes for a government in this country says that digital provision isn't a matter for them and pass you on to the regulators, who say that since x% of people CAN get these services there is nothing to complain about.
If the government is determined to switch off the analogue signal they are going to be in for one hell of a shock. There aren't just millions of people unable to get a digital signal, but millions of others who will resent being asked to fork out more money for a service they've already paid for once.
As yet, the date of the switch off hasn't been finalised and I get the impression that it will continue to be pushed back time and time again.
Just to rub salt into my wounds, my parents, who live at the very tip of Cornwall can get digital TV, digital radio and ADSL.
Although the press release was not specific on exactly what sort of home security functions it would perform, I would think that it's speed would limit it's use. A 15 m per minute (.9 km/h) could easily be out walked by even the most unfit of people. This would seem to make it fairly useless in any sort of roving intruder detection system.
Hmmm not entirely; it would deter AIBOs from breaking and entering.
To an extent you're right, but the Soviets did good science with their Lunokhod missions which were remotely controlled from Earth. With a 2 second delay, there is plenty of opportunity for Earth controllers to get thr robot to stop and roll back to the site of interest.
And of course, if we had robots up there, we could go into the geologically interesting sites that would be too dangerous for a manned mission - AND stay there for an extended period of time.
But the manned programme looks even more ridiculous when you take the ISS into account. What are they doing up there that couldn't be done by an unmanned mission? Even the much vaunted protein crystallisation experiments or novel alloy manufacture could be done in recoverable capsules.
As for the medical experiments, they're being done to see how the human body reacts to zero G. Errr - why? Don't put people up there and you don't get the problems associated with zero G.
At the end of the day, the manned programme is nothing more than a flag-waving exercise that can only be afforded by the big players. It's the 21st Century equivalent of the liner races or the battleship races of the 20th Century - ultimately pointless, but it makes for great headlines.
I'm just glad I'm not an American taxpayer who is being expected to cough up for it.
The Russians have a whole stack of the much more modern Energia boosters sitting at Baikonur. That's 100 tonnes straight into orbit - and they'd love the hard cash.
If NASA needs a big rocket, why not go to the people who have most experience? They're already willing to use Soviet engines on the Atlas V, so it can't be pride.
The BBC are doing a poll at the moment on the Greatest ever Britain [bbc.co.uk]. Last time I looked the front runner was Diana (former Princess), while Sir Isaac Newton languished at number 9 or 10. Says it all really.
Cheer up! Currently its Isambard Kingdom Brunel - an engineer! He'd be the perfect person for NASA - if he wasn't unfortunately dead. We'd have vast gothic, cast iron starships by now if IKB were in charge.
I wonder if it was because the nuclear program was efficiently generating clean energy at an economical price?
Not in the UK. The government admitted right at the end of the 1980s that the books had been comprehensively cooked and that nuclear power was by far the most expensive way of generating power in the UK. This revelation killed off a major PWR programme that would have erected six new reactors to wean Britain off of coal-fired generation.
There were a number of problems - the country was still obsessed with reprocessing fuel to recover plutonium, when it would have been cheaper and safer to bury spent fuel, the Advanced Gas Reactors had come in late, underpowered and unreliable - putting their cost up by an order of magnitude and finally the government had decided to privatise the industry.
Since no one would touch it with a bargepole, the British programme was split into three. British Nuclear Fuels would remain state-owned and be in charge of manufacturing, reprocessing and storing fuel. Magnox would run the older Magnox stations which were coming near the end of their lives (ironically they were actually profitable). Magnox was eventually folded into BNFL and remains state-owned.
The debugged AGRs and the single PWR at Sizewell B were eventually sold off as British Energy. The whole thing stank as the state took on the entire burden of decommissioning the reactors when their lives expire. People made a short term killing on BE, but recently the company has foundered and is essentially bankrupt. No one knows what will happen next, the EU is refusing a bailout by the government, so its possible that part of the industry will have to come back into state ownership.
I've no problem with nuclear power per say, but the British programme has been a nightmare and should never have been allowed to get into the state it is nowadays. Had the Thatcher government confronted some of the well-known problems earlier, it wouldn't be in the mess it is. We urgently need to diversify our power generation supply - which is dangerously reliant on the rapidly depleting North Sea and it is quite clear that the privatised market can't deliver a long term solution.
But since power generation isn't 'sexy', the government appears to be doing nothing.
I imagine any Europa probe is going to need an RTG to produce electricity. These use the decay of Pu238 to produce heat which then generates electricity.
Has anyone any idea how much heat one of these things produces - and would that be enough to heat the probe sufficiently so that it sinks through the ice?
I know it's done in Iceland but how would it be in a not so hot place?
The technology is known as Hot Dry Rock geothermal power and has been attempted in a number of places around the World. To the best of my knowledge, there are no commercial plants using the power system.
The first problem is that it doesn't get that hot that quickly under most parts of the World - say about 15 Celsius per kilometre on average. The geothermal gradient in Iceland is upwards of 50 Celsius per kilometre. So if you drilled elseswhere, you'd need a nice deep borehole. Difficult, expensive, but not impractical.
Then you'd need two wells (minimum) of sufficient diameter to accommodate plenty of water. One pipe sends cold water down to the reservoir, the second brings hot water up to the turbines.
Then you'd need to create a sizeable volume of fractured rock to provide a large area for the water to pick up heat.
This can be done using hydrofracturing - essentially high pressure water, of course this gets more difficult the further down you go.
This was attempted in the 1980s at Rosemanowes in Cornwall where there were plans to build a geothermal power station using the hot granite as a heat source. A prototype plant had wells sunk to about 2km and the granite fractured. Water was extracted from the system at more than 90 Celsius - too cool for commercial power generation, but a good proof of concept.
The project ran into many problems - including the difficulty of controlling the fracturing process - ideally the fractures should run from one borehole to the other - but quite frequently nature decided not to co operate. The second problem was that the Cornish project lost huge amounts of water through other cracks and fissures - reducing the efficiency of the whole project.
Although the project succeeded in getting very hot water out of the borehole, it was closed down when the government refused to advance any more money for a full commercial plant. A crying shame really as not only would have it produced almost green power, it would have helped employment in a very run-down area. But at the time, the Thatcher government was firmly wedded to the disaster that was the British nuclear programme and was busy killing off any research into alternative power.
I think the main problem would be the economics of such a venture. Even if boring the holes could be made much cheaper, the costs of pumping water and maintaining the plant could make such a scheme impractical for all but the shallowest, hot rocks.
Wouldn't that polar ice that melts have to go somewhere? Like maybe a few feet inland along the coasts of the world. That probably isn't good is it?
No, the Northern polar cap is made of floating ice which has already displaced sea water. When it melts it won't affect sea levels.
And if anyone doubts me...
Kids! Here's a quick experiment. Put some ice cubes into a glass. Now carefully add water until the glass is completely full. What happens when the ice melts?
Melting of Antarctic ice would be a different matter as the vast majority of that ice sheet is sitting on the continental landmass itself.
In the UK we have a consumer protection laws that prevent shops from selling products that are 'not fit for purpose'. Checkout your local consumer protections laws, it is always good to know your local rights anyway.
Being polite is the important bit here. The manager of the store in the end has precious little choice in what to stock, he has to make his quotas. The most important thing to do is to explain politely why this is a bad thing and ask him to pass your comments on to his boss. (And you do the same by writing (like on paper) to the head of the chain).
In the UK you have a very good chance of getting your money back on the grounds of the product not being 'fit for purpose'. The consumer protection laws in this country are excellent compared to those in most parts of the US, and people should use them.
If the store decides to play hardball, mention that you are prepared to take the issue to the local trading standards office and they should cave-in. If they don't, contact trading standards (they're in the local phone book) and get them involved. If you have a good case they will take it on on your behalf - quite often one call from trading standards produces a favourable reaction from a company. Companies don't like run-ins with trading standards as judgements are made public.
The other thing to remember is that if enough of these disks are returned, the stores still have to issue refunds, but they may not be able to get a refund from the distributor - so the chain has to eat the loss.
Oh and it may be a terrible piece of tabloid tat, but BBC's Watchdog has the ability to cause serious embarrassment for big companies.
Agree completely on UP - it's awesome and well worth buying - although shop around in the UK to get the cheapest deal you can.
I must have missed those two TV adverts, since I've seen no advertising. Yet UP still cost as much as CDs which receive constant advertising.
Are we now meant to believe that the mark-up on UP went to subsidise the promotion costs of other groups?
Or perhaps it went to organisations that plead poverty yet somehow manage to scrape together £30 million for Robbie Williams and £19 million to pay off Mariah Carey? No doubt the labels count both as 'developing new talents'.
From memory, there is a robust digital watermark that will survive digital -> analogue conversion and can be detected by SDMI hardware which can then refuse to record the music.
Of course this assumes that SDMI will ever become widespread (and they've gone very quiet of late) in hardware and software. Anyone know what's going on out there in SDMI-world?
I will use iBook for personal stuff, but it would be nice to be able to work on it if and when necessary. Most files I create are.doc and.xls, but I do quite a bit of reading on.pdf and some on.ppt. Can I work with them all on iBook?
Yes you can. Adobe have a full OSX version of their Reader software, and OSX can generate PDF versions of almost anything.
Since you do a lot of work with Office applications you will need a copy of OfficeX for the Mac. Check out the price when you buy your Mac as Apple and Microsoft have some well-priced bundles for Office. If you get Office you'll get the quite lovely Entourage mail program which is really excellent and highly recommended.
One last question: I kind of remember that compatibility issues were solved a way back, but is there any problem at all between documents saved in PC and Mac? Save in one, open in the other, etc?
I haven't found anything important when moving stuff from Mac to PC and vice versa. In a few cases I've found Word documents will loose some font formatting when imported from the PC to the Mac, but that is a matter of moments to fix. Our office is a mixed Mac/PC environment and we get along just fine.
The most common problem I know of is when PC users have Outlook set up to send HTML mail messages. Attachments in that format always come in winmail.dat files that the Mac can't read. Get them to change their mail settings to something normal and everyone is happy.
Best of luck if you do decide to change to the Mac. I'm just wondering if my office PC needs to have an 'accident' so that I can replace it with a G4 desktop:)
I would appreciate it if you guys could comment on how difficult a defection to Apple could be for me.
I made my iBook my main home machine about 3 months ago and it was relatively painless. Getting used to not pressing Ctrl was the hardest task.
Without knowing exactly what you do, the best answer is 'it depends'. Your main expense may well be replacing software that you have used on the PC - which could work out VERY expensive. If you have a lot of PC software you might want to think about getting a Windows emulator to help you continue working as you replace software with Mac applications.
Microsoft are offering good deals on Office X right now which eases the pain of buying what for many of us is an essential product.
Remember, OSX has a very nice little mail program thrown in for standard, AppleWorks is a perfectly competent office application if you don't need all the features of Office and naturally you have a browser included. There is a DVD player, the very lovely iTunes, iPhoto, iCal and iChat and a CD burner. For many people this will be all the productivity software they ever need. (Assuming that you consider that DVD player to constitute 'productivity':) )
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International regulations insist that anything that achieves orbit is given some form of designation. So we have a pretty good idea how how much stuff is up there.
The Soviets used a catch-all Kosmos designation for most of their failures. There are well over 2000 satellites in the Kosmos series, but this was complicated in that some Kosmos missions were genuine science, military or test vehicles, whilst others were probes and satellites that didn't get where they were meant to go.
To make things more complicated, the Soviets would often say that a Kosmos probe had completed its mission - even if had been DOA. Which made working out exactly what was working and what wasn't a complete nightmare for the West. No doubt the Kremlin loved these sorts of games.
To take just one example a 1964 Venus probe should have become a member of the Venera series; but it instead became the relatively anonymous Kosmos 27 after it failed to escape Earth orbit.
Once a probe was on its way out of orbit the Soviets usually then assigned it a proper mission name, although they complicated things by often using more than one name - so Zond (probe) was sometimes substituted for Mars or Venera!
Anything that failed to climb into orbit was usually not assigned a name and in Soviet days was rarely mentioned - just look at how successfully they covered up the N1 Moon rocket until after the collapse of Communism.
Nowadays the Russians are much more open, even to the extent of confirming military launches.
As for the cost? Who knows, so much of space expenditure is military I doubt we will ever find out. The Soviet programme was a crippling expense for their government and foolish attempts to match the Shuttle using the (admittedly far superior) Buran were one of the reasons for the final collapse of Communism.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Which had the side-effect of making the Shuttle an even bigger financial liability than before. At least chucking out satellites to beam repeats of M*A*S*H earned some money.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Hmmm perhaps you've stumbled on the ideal low-weight, high-energy power source! Fill the inside of the fan with ten-thousand hamsters and get them running.
It... might... just... work!
Best wishes,
Mike.
Additionally, India would be importing technology. The Simputer may require imported components (notably the CPU) but much of it can be fabricated inside India. That employs people, boosts the economy and offers export opportunities for other developing markets.
There is no reason to suspect that this is the end of their ambitions. They have a viable solid state device for the mass-market. Why shouldn't they be thinking of a more fully-featured product for the upper end of the market?
I seem to remember people laughing at a little company from a group of islands off the coast of China; they used to produce cheap and nasty copies of Western radios. Strange name - something like Somy... I wonder what became of them?
India has traditionally tried to concentrate on indigenous technology even when there are established alternatives. This is an attempt to jump start the economy and is not too dissimilar to the way the US industrialised during the 19th Century.
And India has had many successes in advanced technology - nuclear power and its space programme immediately spring to mind.
Good luck to them with this.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Probably none, but then precious little of India is a jungle anyway. You seem to be showing a great deal of ignorance about India and Indians. People might be poor, but they are not stupid.
India has a good network of roads and railways - most people are in (admittedly) infrequent contact with the outside world. Goods and services make it even to the most rural areas and the people there have some acquaintance with the technologies you or I take for granted. Until now they haven't had ready access to them; that is Simputer's target market.
Besides, $5 is a weeks' income, according to the article.Batteries don't cost the same as they do in the US. They are manufactured and priced for the local market. A pack of batteries will cost a fraction of the price in the US. Many people will already have battery-powered radios and access to batteries.
Rechargeables would be nice, but we have to assume the Simputer people have done research and believe that the disposable battery is sufficiently available and familiar to the target audience.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Starfox is bad? That's a shame (it hasn't arrived in the UK yet).
Quite agree about Halo - it is fabulous and a worthy game for any system, but the fact it is still riding so high in the charts after all of these months seems to show the lack of XBox must-have games. So far all the hyped titles - 'Buffy', that platform game with the really ugly cat - have all been disappointments.
What's also worrying me about the XBox is that Microsoft have hyped its on-line abilities but made the system closed and broadband only. Here in the UK, broadband is reaching about 6% of online homes and vast swathes of the country (including me :( ) just can't get any broadband. Conversely, Nintendo and Sony are accommodating modem users which will make their systems much more palatable to users.
The XBox is now competitively priced, but it really needs some exclusive, top-notch games to pull ahead. And where are those games?
Best wishes,
Mike.
PS. Dreamcast - yep mine still gets regular outings for the post-pub madness that is 'Chu Chu Rocket'.
Part of the resistance is that the US is refusing to label such food and allow people to make a choice about whether they eat hormone-treated or GM foods. The European consumer has shown that they want to know these things - that the US is refusing to do so is both arrogant and misguided. Indeed inside the US, there has been pressure for BST-treated milk to be labelled, the companies have refused. Why shouldn't we be given a choice what we eat and drink?
If the food is better, it will succeed in the market.
What's the big deal? Health organizations were all over this, have scrutinized it, and I can guarantee you (I know people that work in the medical industry) that the FDA is unbelivably uptight about letting *anything* past them if there's even the remotest unfounded possibility that something might have some risk to it. The only reason *not* to eat improved food is because of some irrational gut emotional response.
The problem is that people who work in industry have then taken up positions on the regulatory bodies that are meant to produce independent advice on the safety of these products.
For instance Margaret Miller wrote most of the FDA's regulations on why BST-treated milk would not be labelled, but she was a member of the team at Monsanto which had developed BST. Additionally, Dr Nick Weber of the FDA who had been negotiating with international regulators had passed confidential committee information to Monsanto.
This cannot be considered as satisfactory regulation. All the science in the World will not save you from corruption - and this is nothing more than corruption.
Finally, you have to remember that Europe has many small farms many of which rely on organic production methods. Any GM planting in Europe would result in cross-pollenation between GM and non-GM produce. People would end up eating GM food whether they liked it or not.
I thought the market was all about choice?
Best wishes,
Mike.
Even before then, they were originally Ultimate - Play the Game and used to write exclusively for the ZX Spectrum. As a Commodore 64 owner I had to go round to a friend's to play Atic Atac and the like.
Sigh, nostalgia.
Another story doing to rounds about Rare is that they have lost a lot of staff recently and the Stamper brothers who founded the company are no longer so interested in writing games.
Still, we'll see. And let's face it a bad Rare game is going to be better than almost anything the XBox has to offer at the moment.
Best wishes,
Mike.
That's right, the City of the Future!
I can't get digital TV, digital radio or digital cable.
Oh and while I'm moaning about great British institutions, BT can't offer me ADSL either.
Naturally, what passes for a government in this country says that digital provision isn't a matter for them and pass you on to the regulators, who say that since x% of people CAN get these services there is nothing to complain about.
If the government is determined to switch off the analogue signal they are going to be in for one hell of a shock. There aren't just millions of people unable to get a digital signal, but millions of others who will resent being asked to fork out more money for a service they've already paid for once.
As yet, the date of the switch off hasn't been finalised and I get the impression that it will continue to be pushed back time and time again.
Just to rub salt into my wounds, my parents, who live at the very tip of Cornwall can get digital TV, digital radio and ADSL.
There is no justice in the World.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
These ones give you 8 hours of useful content, the AOL disk on the other hand...
Best wishes,
Mike.
Hmmm not entirely; it would deter AIBOs from breaking and entering.
Best wishes,
Mike.
And of course, if we had robots up there, we could go into the geologically interesting sites that would be too dangerous for a manned mission - AND stay there for an extended period of time.
But the manned programme looks even more ridiculous when you take the ISS into account. What are they doing up there that couldn't be done by an unmanned mission? Even the much vaunted protein crystallisation experiments or novel alloy manufacture could be done in recoverable capsules.
As for the medical experiments, they're being done to see how the human body reacts to zero G. Errr - why? Don't put people up there and you don't get the problems associated with zero G.
At the end of the day, the manned programme is nothing more than a flag-waving exercise that can only be afforded by the big players. It's the 21st Century equivalent of the liner races or the battleship races of the 20th Century - ultimately pointless, but it makes for great headlines.
I'm just glad I'm not an American taxpayer who is being expected to cough up for it.
Best wishes,
Mike.
If NASA needs a big rocket, why not go to the people who have most experience? They're already willing to use Soviet engines on the Atlas V, so it can't be pride.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Cheer up! Currently its Isambard Kingdom Brunel - an engineer! He'd be the perfect person for NASA - if he wasn't unfortunately dead. We'd have vast gothic, cast iron starships by now if IKB were in charge.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Not in the UK. The government admitted right at the end of the 1980s that the books had been comprehensively cooked and that nuclear power was by far the most expensive way of generating power in the UK. This revelation killed off a major PWR programme that would have erected six new reactors to wean Britain off of coal-fired generation.
There were a number of problems - the country was still obsessed with reprocessing fuel to recover plutonium, when it would have been cheaper and safer to bury spent fuel, the Advanced Gas Reactors had come in late, underpowered and unreliable - putting their cost up by an order of magnitude and finally the government had decided to privatise the industry.
Since no one would touch it with a bargepole, the British programme was split into three. British Nuclear Fuels would remain state-owned and be in charge of manufacturing, reprocessing and storing fuel. Magnox would run the older Magnox stations which were coming near the end of their lives (ironically they were actually profitable). Magnox was eventually folded into BNFL and remains state-owned.
The debugged AGRs and the single PWR at Sizewell B were eventually sold off as British Energy. The whole thing stank as the state took on the entire burden of decommissioning the reactors when their lives expire. People made a short term killing on BE, but recently the company has foundered and is essentially bankrupt. No one knows what will happen next, the EU is refusing a bailout by the government, so its possible that part of the industry will have to come back into state ownership.
I've no problem with nuclear power per say, but the British programme has been a nightmare and should never have been allowed to get into the state it is nowadays. Had the Thatcher government confronted some of the well-known problems earlier, it wouldn't be in the mess it is. We urgently need to diversify our power generation supply - which is dangerously reliant on the rapidly depleting North Sea and it is quite clear that the privatised market can't deliver a long term solution.
But since power generation isn't 'sexy', the government appears to be doing nothing.
Best wishes,
Mike.
One thought.
I imagine any Europa probe is going to need an RTG to produce electricity. These use the decay of Pu238 to produce heat which then generates electricity.
Has anyone any idea how much heat one of these things produces - and would that be enough to heat the probe sufficiently so that it sinks through the ice?
Thanks,
Mike.
The technology is known as Hot Dry Rock geothermal power and has been attempted in a number of places around the World. To the best of my knowledge, there are no commercial plants using the power system.
The first problem is that it doesn't get that hot that quickly under most parts of the World - say about 15 Celsius per kilometre on average. The geothermal gradient in Iceland is upwards of 50 Celsius per kilometre. So if you drilled elseswhere, you'd need a nice deep borehole. Difficult, expensive, but not impractical.
Then you'd need two wells (minimum) of sufficient diameter to accommodate plenty of water. One pipe sends cold water down to the reservoir, the second brings hot water up to the turbines.
Then you'd need to create a sizeable volume of fractured rock to provide a large area for the water to pick up heat. This can be done using hydrofracturing - essentially high pressure water, of course this gets more difficult the further down you go.
This was attempted in the 1980s at Rosemanowes in Cornwall where there were plans to build a geothermal power station using the hot granite as a heat source. A prototype plant had wells sunk to about 2km and the granite fractured. Water was extracted from the system at more than 90 Celsius - too cool for commercial power generation, but a good proof of concept.
The project ran into many problems - including the difficulty of controlling the fracturing process - ideally the fractures should run from one borehole to the other - but quite frequently nature decided not to co operate. The second problem was that the Cornish project lost huge amounts of water through other cracks and fissures - reducing the efficiency of the whole project.
Although the project succeeded in getting very hot water out of the borehole, it was closed down when the government refused to advance any more money for a full commercial plant. A crying shame really as not only would have it produced almost green power, it would have helped employment in a very run-down area. But at the time, the Thatcher government was firmly wedded to the disaster that was the British nuclear programme and was busy killing off any research into alternative power.
I think the main problem would be the economics of such a venture. Even if boring the holes could be made much cheaper, the costs of pumping water and maintaining the plant could make such a scheme impractical for all but the shallowest, hot rocks.
Best wishes,
Mike.
No, the Northern polar cap is made of floating ice which has already displaced sea water. When it melts it won't affect sea levels.
And if anyone doubts me...
Kids! Here's a quick experiment. Put some ice cubes into a glass. Now carefully add water until the glass is completely full. What happens when the ice melts?
Melting of Antarctic ice would be a different matter as the vast majority of that ice sheet is sitting on the continental landmass itself.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Being polite is the important bit here. The manager of the store in the end has precious little choice in what to stock, he has to make his quotas. The most important thing to do is to explain politely why this is a bad thing and ask him to pass your comments on to his boss. (And you do the same by writing (like on paper) to the head of the chain).
In the UK you have a very good chance of getting your money back on the grounds of the product not being 'fit for purpose'. The consumer protection laws in this country are excellent compared to those in most parts of the US, and people should use them.
If the store decides to play hardball, mention that you are prepared to take the issue to the local trading standards office and they should cave-in. If they don't, contact trading standards (they're in the local phone book) and get them involved. If you have a good case they will take it on on your behalf - quite often one call from trading standards produces a favourable reaction from a company. Companies don't like run-ins with trading standards as judgements are made public.
The other thing to remember is that if enough of these disks are returned, the stores still have to issue refunds, but they may not be able to get a refund from the distributor - so the chain has to eat the loss.
Oh and it may be a terrible piece of tabloid tat, but BBC's Watchdog has the ability to cause serious embarrassment for big companies.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I must have missed those two TV adverts, since I've seen no advertising. Yet UP still cost as much as CDs which receive constant advertising.
Are we now meant to believe that the mark-up on UP went to subsidise the promotion costs of other groups?
Or perhaps it went to organisations that plead poverty yet somehow manage to scrape together £30 million for Robbie Williams and £19 million to pay off Mariah Carey? No doubt the labels count both as 'developing new talents'.
Best wishes,
Mike.
But isn't this one of the aims of SDMI?
From memory, there is a robust digital watermark that will survive digital -> analogue conversion and can be detected by SDMI hardware which can then refuse to record the music.
Of course this assumes that SDMI will ever become widespread (and they've gone very quiet of late) in hardware and software. Anyone know what's going on out there in SDMI-world?
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Yes you can. Adobe have a full OSX version of their Reader software, and OSX can generate PDF versions of almost anything.
Since you do a lot of work with Office applications you will need a copy of OfficeX for the Mac. Check out the price when you buy your Mac as Apple and Microsoft have some well-priced bundles for Office. If you get Office you'll get the quite lovely Entourage mail program which is really excellent and highly recommended.
One last question: I kind of remember that compatibility issues were solved a way back, but is there any problem at all between documents saved in PC and Mac? Save in one, open in the other, etc?
I haven't found anything important when moving stuff from Mac to PC and vice versa. In a few cases I've found Word documents will loose some font formatting when imported from the PC to the Mac, but that is a matter of moments to fix. Our office is a mixed Mac/PC environment and we get along just fine.
The most common problem I know of is when PC users have Outlook set up to send HTML mail messages. Attachments in that format always come in winmail.dat files that the Mac can't read. Get them to change their mail settings to something normal and everyone is happy.
Best of luck if you do decide to change to the Mac. I'm just wondering if my office PC needs to have an 'accident' so that I can replace it with a G4 desktop :)
Best wishes,
Mike.
I made my iBook my main home machine about 3 months ago and it was relatively painless. Getting used to not pressing Ctrl was the hardest task.
Without knowing exactly what you do, the best answer is 'it depends'. Your main expense may well be replacing software that you have used on the PC - which could work out VERY expensive. If you have a lot of PC software you might want to think about getting a Windows emulator to help you continue working as you replace software with Mac applications.
Microsoft are offering good deals on Office X right now which eases the pain of buying what for many of us is an essential product.
Remember, OSX has a very nice little mail program thrown in for standard, AppleWorks is a perfectly competent office application if you don't need all the features of Office and naturally you have a browser included. There is a DVD player, the very lovely iTunes, iPhoto, iCal and iChat and a CD burner. For many people this will be all the productivity software they ever need. (Assuming that you consider that DVD player to constitute 'productivity' :) )
Best wishes,
Mike.