It's not just different orbits, the ISS is in an orbit that is almost perpendicular to that of Mir. Both orbits have the same inclination and roughly the same altitude, but the ascending nodes of the orbits differ by roughly 145 degrees. That maximizes the amount of fuel required to change between orbits.
And don't think that this was by accident. NASA was pushing for that orbit from the beginning. As Russia was preparing to launch the first piece of the ISS in November of 1998, they realized that by waiting ten hours, they could park it right next to Mir, allowing the possibility of linking the two stations. When NASA was told of the idea, they threw a major hissy fit.
CNN covered the story here. Here's a quote from the story:
NASA officials were stunned when Russia's prime contractor proposed just 2 1/2 weeks before Zarya was to be launched that the orbital position be changed. The change would have allowed the Russians, who are critically short of funds, to move scientific equipment from Mir to the new station.
What caps? There weren't any alphabetics in my original message at all! I guess that the lameness filter is really checking the ratio of lower-case letters to message length.
Here is Google search that turns up lots of useful info. Every article on the first page of results is worth looking at. Here are the first three matches.
The first link is slide from a Brookhaven talk. Not much useful info here, and the picture doesn't match what the other links describe. The entire slide show is fairly interesting, though.
The second link is PDF whitepaper discussing the commercial production of such cable. A great read, if you have the time to wade through it.
The third link is an article from the Nov. 18, 2000, issue of "Science News" on the same subject as the Knight-Ridder article. Much more technical details.
I followed the link, and found out some more about the claimed compression algorithm. First, there was apparently some confusion introduced somewhere, in that the algoritm's description discusses 16-bit computer words, not arbitrary English words. These are somehow differenced, and then stored in a trinary form on magnetic media (each bit is recorded as a region that is magnetized either "up", "down", or left unmagnetized).
Doing the math,
2**16=3**x
log(2**16)=log(3**x)
16*log(2)=x*log(3)
x=16*log(2)/log(3)
x=10.094876 "trits" to store a 16-bit word
Illuminati: New World Order (aka INWO) is also a non-zero sum game. Yes, like M:TG, it's (mostly) collectable (see below), but like the original, it is more fun the more people are playing it. The rules for both the original Illuminati and INWO allow for both individual and cooperative wins, and there is nothing to prevent every player from sharing the win.
Unlike M:TG, which comes out with a new collectable expansion every month or two, INWO has only had a few expansions in its life, and one of them isn't even collectable! INWO SubGenius is a stand-alone version of INWO produced in cooperation with the Church of the SubGenius. (Yes, the "Bob" guys.) Ah, heck, let me quote:
This is a hundred-card non-collectible set. The cards feature art provided by the Church itself. [...] You
will like it.
The set of 100 cards is usable by itself, and includes rules for a 4-player common-deck game, using four Church of the SubGenius cards (with different art, of course). Each represents a different faction of the Church, fighting for control, Slack, and that unending flow of dollars from the mindless Pinks. You can also drop other INWO cards into a SubGenius game, or vice versa!
This sounds a lot like a game that I used to play in college. I don't recall its name; hell, I don't know if it even had a name. But the rules were simple: Try to "kill" the other players before they "killed" you.
For example, lets say that you're with an opponent, and they foolishly ask you to get them a drink. You bring back a can that has a PostIt® note on the bottom that says "Cyanide". If they drink the can without noticing the note, you get a point and they lose one. Or you can plant an alarm clock somewhere, with a PostIt® note reading "Bomb". Anyone in the room when it goes off loses a point apiece, and you get them all.
P.S. This was back in 1976, before the term "LARP" was invented. Ah, the good old days, before all those new-fangled computers showed up.
As the article points out, this will back-fill a "bullet point" in comparisons to Windows Update. My one regret is that it spreads the use of RPM. Is there anyone who really thinks that RPM is better than Debian?
There are lots of exploitable resources in space. Solar power, for instance. The old L-5 project from the '70s is still as feasible as it ever was, and probably more so now that we've used another 25 years worth of petroleum.
The biggest thing standing in the way of cheap space exploitation is NASA. NASA needs to get out of near-Earth space. Instead they should guarantee that all future unmanned launches will be done using commercial boosters, with manned launches to follow as soon as someone builds a man-rated launch vehicle. There are at least 19 outfits that would love to be in that business, but they have a hard time competing with NASA's tax-supported monopoly.
Let's see here, the IIS has a projected lifespan to 10 to 25 years. Mir was continuously occupied for about 12 years. So, IIS could be decommissioned and deorbited two years short of setting a record for continuous habitation.
About 25 years ago, I had the privilege of sitting next to Capt. Grace Hopper at dinner. (Capt. Hopper is, for you youngsters, one of the inventors of COBOL, which was the second or third high-level language ever invented.) The topic turned to why COBOL was designed the way that it was. She said that her team had looked at several options, and decided that (at least in every language that they were familar with) commands were the most portable.
E.g., in COBOL the programmer tells the computer to do things: "add sales-tax to total." Translate the words "add" and "to" to any European language, and you'd get something that native speakers would understand. In fact, the COBOL implementors did just that, but the DOD didn't persue the possibilities.
That said, it is interesting to wonder how things would be different if something other than "command" form had been used. Commands (in English anyway) are "verb object" (i.e. "Drop that gun"), which emphasises the verb over the noun. I don't know if such a language exists, but what if there were one where the object preceeded the verb (i.e. "That gun, drop!")? If so, Object Oriented programming may have been invented in the sixties!
Re:TRGpro gives the best of Palm and Handspring
on
The new Palm VIIx
·
· Score: 1
Ditto. I've had one since before they came out (yes, I was a beta tester) and I think that they are the greatest thing since the original Pilot.
EBCDIC was a method of translating punched-cards into binary. Here is a picture of a punched card. (The image comes from here.) EBCDIC means "Extended BCD Interchange Code", and BCD means "Binary Coded Decimal". In BCD, the digit "0" is encoded with a low-order nybble of "0000" and "9" is "1001". On a punched card, 0-9 were encoded as single punches, and A-Z were encoded as 1-9 with additional "zone" punches. As a result, the EBCDIC encoding for the letters followed the encoding for digits, so when expressed in binary, there are gaps between "I" ("yyyy1001") and "J" ("xxxx0001"), and again between "R" ("xxxx0001") and "S" ("zzzz0010").
BTW, my pseudo-values for the high-order nybbles follows from the zone punches that were overpunched. The top row was the "Y" zone, then came the "X" zone, and then the "zero" zone.
Legacy code assumes that bytes are equivalant to chars. Bytes are the smallest addressable units on modern computers, but they weren't always. In the 1950's, CPUs addressed words, and you had to jump through hooks to access individual bytes. So, the solution is obvious.
Build computers that address memory in 16-bit chunks!
char == 16 bits short == 2 chars == 32 bits long == 2 shorts == 64 bits int == pointer == 32/64 bits, depending on model of CPU
This is exactly the way C worked on PDP-11s, etc. All existing code would recompile just fine, but would "magically" start using Unicode instead of ASCII. Yeah, the table that's used by isascii and its friends would suddenly grow to 64KB (remember, those are 16-bit bytes, not 8-bit!), but memory's cheap and getting cheaper. The memory that would be used by such a table is cheaper today than the 256 byte version was in 1970.
So surely the system you actually want is not to check whether they have patents but how they license their patents.
How about this: "The license fee is variable by requestor, and is equal to the maximum amount that the requestor changes for any of her/his/its patents?" This way, there is no charge to anyone who doesn't charge to use patents, and a big charge for those who charge a lot.
If you want to see the original page, circa November, google still has it cached here. And, it looks like the links on that page still work, so you can go to the credits page and see both the number of successful cracks: 1 in the info box and the additional credit to And Daniel Jacobowitz, because good security isn't always good enough. near the end of the listing.
Will a day come when both voice synthesis and GPS are commonplace? Would it remove your need for a color map if your device were capable of saying "This is your stop. Exit here"?
Unfortunately, GPS really wants a clear view of the sky, so don't expect any GPS receiver, whether stand-alone or integrated into something, to tell you when you arrive at your subway stop.
But maybe subways can add IR beamers to their cars and transmit the stops to everyone's Palms that way!
Don't worry, Bill, the media is totally swappable. The TRGpro recognizes and uses a FAT-32 filesystem on the CF cards. Playing MP3 files isn't practical due to CPU through-put considerations (not that you won't see it done), but playing WAV files is easy. Hopefully, you'll also be able to move a CF card from your camera to your TRGpro and view the pictures on it (suitably reduced, of course).
Larry Niven provided the best argument against the existance of time machines several years ago. IIRC, it went like this: Assume you build a time machine. When you go into the past, your actions will have various effects on the future. Eventually, one of those effects will be to prevent the building of your time machine.
David Brin wrote a similar story as well, wherein the hero could only sucessfully build a time machine that had the "back-in-time" button disabled.
Slashdot Mirror
Xunker, could you please re-read the headline? The story isn't about the Lake, it's about the discovery of a magnetic anomaly.
And don't think that this was by accident. NASA was pushing for that orbit from the beginning. As Russia was preparing to launch the first piece of the ISS in November of 1998, they realized that by waiting ten hours, they could park it right next to Mir, allowing the possibility of linking the two stations. When NASA was told of the idea, they threw a major hissy fit.
CNN covered the story here. Here's a quote from the story:
So, I wanted to just post the above one-liner, and I got this:
What caps? There weren't any alphabetics in my original message at all! I guess that the lameness filter is really checking the ratio of lower-case letters to message length.The first link is slide from a Brookhaven talk. Not much useful info here, and the picture doesn't match what the other links describe. The entire slide show is fairly interesting, though.
The second link is PDF whitepaper discussing the commercial production of such cable. A great read, if you have the time to wade through it.
The third link is an article from the Nov. 18, 2000, issue of "Science News" on the same subject as the Knight-Ridder article. Much more technical details.
Doing the math,
2**16=3**x
log(2**16)=log(3**x)
16*log(2)=x*log(3)
x=16*log(2)/log(3)
x=10.094876 "trits" to store a 16-bit word
Still a bit short of 8:1!
Unlike M:TG, which comes out with a new collectable expansion every month or two, INWO has only had a few expansions in its life, and one of them isn't even collectable! INWO SubGenius is a stand-alone version of INWO produced in cooperation with the Church of the SubGenius. (Yes, the "Bob" guys.) Ah, heck, let me quote:
BTW, INWO encourages players to create their own cards. Steve Jackson Games sells blank cards expressly for the purpose.
In case you haven't guessed, this is one of my favorite games of all time. Buy it, you won't regret it!
For example, lets say that you're with an opponent, and they foolishly ask you to get them a drink. You bring back a can that has a PostIt® note on the bottom that says "Cyanide". If they drink the can without noticing the note, you get a point and they lose one. Or you can plant an alarm clock somewhere, with a PostIt® note reading "Bomb". Anyone in the room when it goes off loses a point apiece, and you get them all.
P.S. This was back in 1976, before the term "LARP" was invented. Ah, the good old days, before all those new-fangled computers showed up.
As the article points out, this will back-fill a "bullet point" in comparisons to Windows Update. My one regret is that it spreads the use of RPM. Is there anyone who really thinks that RPM is better than Debian?
The biggest thing standing in the way of cheap space exploitation is NASA. NASA needs to get out of near-Earth space. Instead they should guarantee that all future unmanned launches will be done using commercial boosters, with manned launches to follow as soon as someone builds a man-rated launch vehicle. There are at least 19 outfits that would love to be in that business, but they have a hard time competing with NASA's tax-supported monopoly.
Let's see here, the IIS has a projected lifespan to 10 to 25 years. Mir was continuously occupied for about 12 years. So, IIS could be decommissioned and deorbited two years short of setting a record for continuous habitation.
About 25 years ago, I had the privilege of sitting next to Capt. Grace Hopper at dinner. (Capt. Hopper is, for you youngsters, one of the inventors of COBOL, which was the second or third high-level language ever invented.) The topic turned to why COBOL was designed the way that it was. She said that her team had looked at several options, and decided that (at least in every language that they were familar with) commands were the most portable. E.g., in COBOL the programmer tells the computer to do things: "add sales-tax to total." Translate the words "add" and "to" to any European language, and you'd get something that native speakers would understand. In fact, the COBOL implementors did just that, but the DOD didn't persue the possibilities. That said, it is interesting to wonder how things would be different if something other than "command" form had been used. Commands (in English anyway) are "verb object" (i.e. "Drop that gun"), which emphasises the verb over the noun. I don't know if such a language exists, but what if there were one where the object preceeded the verb (i.e. "That gun, drop!")? If so, Object Oriented programming may have been invented in the sixties!
Ditto. I've had one since before they came out (yes, I was a beta tester) and I think that they are the greatest thing since the original Pilot.
BTW, my pseudo-values for the high-order nybbles follows from the zone punches that were overpunched. The top row was the "Y" zone, then came the "X" zone, and then the "zero" zone.
Build computers that address memory in 16-bit chunks!
char == 16 bits
short == 2 chars == 32 bits
long == 2 shorts == 64 bits
int == pointer == 32/64 bits, depending on model of CPU
This is exactly the way C worked on PDP-11s, etc. All existing code would recompile just fine, but would "magically" start using Unicode instead of ASCII. Yeah, the table that's used by isascii and its friends would suddenly grow to 64KB (remember, those are 16-bit bytes, not 8-bit!), but memory's cheap and getting cheaper. The memory that would be used by such a table is cheaper today than the 256 byte version was in 1970.
How about this: "The license fee is variable by requestor, and is equal to the maximum amount that the requestor changes for any of her/his/its patents?" This way, there is no charge to anyone who doesn't charge to use patents, and a big charge for those who charge a lot.
If you want to see the original page, circa November, google still has it cached here. And, it looks like the links on that page still work, so you can go to the credits page and see both the number of successful cracks: 1 in the info box and the additional credit to And Daniel Jacobowitz, because good security isn't always good enough. near the end of the listing.
Unfortunately, GPS really wants a clear view of the sky, so don't expect any GPS receiver, whether stand-alone or integrated into something, to tell you when you arrive at your subway stop.
But maybe subways can add IR beamers to their cars and transmit the stops to everyone's Palms that way!
Don't worry, Bill, the media is totally swappable. The TRGpro recognizes and uses a FAT-32 filesystem on the CF cards. Playing MP3 files isn't practical due to CPU through-put considerations (not that you won't see it done), but playing WAV files is easy. Hopefully, you'll also be able to move a CF card from your camera to your TRGpro and view the pictures on it (suitably reduced, of course).
David Brin wrote a similar story as well, wherein the hero could only sucessfully build a time machine that had the "back-in-time" button disabled.