Aviation R&D in the 1950s produced several interesting, but unstable, design concepts. The flying wing, the flying disk, and the flying platform were all tried. Many of the prototypes ended up at the Hiller Aviation Museum in Silicon Valley, which is worth a visit. But all those designs lacked stability, and electronics technology wasn't good enough to do active stabilization at the time.
The Flying Wing concept was pushed all the way to
bomber size, and several were built. Most of them crashed. (Edwards AFB is named after a Flying Wing pilot.) Not until the 1980s, and the Have Blue stealth prototype, was the stability problem resolved adequately. (A modified F-16 analog autopilot handled the stabilization.)
Some of those 1950s designs could now be revisited. The AvroCar could be made to work today, if anybody cared. If a competent aircraft designer, like Rutan, built one, it would work.
The problem, of course, is that all pure-thrust vehicles need huge engines and have lousy fuel economy, since they need enough power to go straight up on thrust alone. The only sucessful pure-thrust VTOL aircraft is the Harrier. Since modern fighters have enough thrust to go straight up anyway, a VTOL fighter is feasible. Marginally.
This new Russian thing sounds flakey, but not fake. They should be able to build a prototype and fly it. But the claims for efficiency are probably not real.
It sounds like they're fooling around with boundary layer control. This has been done before, all the way back to WWII. Aircraft with "blown" or "sucked" wings have been tried. It works, but the practical problems with a wing full of holes and plumbing have been too great. Ice, for example. A few aircraft, including the C-17, have blown control surfaces, but not the whole wing.
There's considerable interest in disk-shaped craft in small scales, from the micro air vehicle people. AeroVironment has built some.
This idea keeps coming around. "Smart buildings". "Smart dust".
A worthwhile project would be a "smart lecture hall". Just provide all the usual gear, but interconnect it so it works reasonably. Sense the approximate number of people in the room and crank airflow up and down accordingly. (That, all by itself, is a viable product concept.) Interconnect the lighting, screen, and projectors so that when the screen is lit, it's not illuminated by room lighting. (Use big, illuminated buttons on the controls, so you're not trying to read 10-point type in the dark.)
Provide a fully automated amplification system, with automatic feedback suppression, DSP-steered active microphone arrays, and sensors for the number of people present and room noise levels. If you go to the front of the room and talk, everyone can hear you, with no user action required.
All the gear for this exists. Yet what's installed is way too complex.
Then there's Ellison's new house in Woodside, which is supposedly going to end up costing around $140 million. He's trying to outspend Gates. Building has been going on since 1999, and it's supposed to be finished Real Soon Now.
Oracle HQ is a set of large cylindrical glass towers with "ORACLE" in giant illuminated letters on top. It's located in an open area, with no other large buildings nearby, clearly visible from a major freeway and facing a huge reflecting pool. It looks like the HQ of a Bond villain. By intent.
This isn't inevitable. We could elect a pro-labor president and Congress, put European-style controls on imports and outsourcing, and maintain a high standard of living in the US.
A few minor changes in labor law, and the US would be as unionized as it was in the 1950s, and as unionized as Canada is now.
Legged running on the flat has been done before, at MIT. But all their running machines were powered through external cables and hoses. Lots of hoses. Most of their machines required external electric, hydraulic, and pneumatic power.
Sony, correctly, points out that their robot is the first standalone running machine.
The MIT Leg Lab went through several generations. Raibert, back in the 1980s, had the big insight - legged locomotion is about balance, not gait. He worked on one-legged hoppers to force the issue, with considerable success. But the approach he used was something of a hack. He used undertuned PD control loops that, in a steady state, got to the right place at the right time. But this didn't generalize to hills, turns, slippery surfaces, etc.
Raibert went off to do a startup, which moved away from dynamics and towards kinematic graphical simulations for military training.
The Leg Lab was taken over by Pratt, who was more of an motor/actuator engineer. Not too much exciting happened in the Pratt era, although the drive mechanics got better. Pratt tried to build a legged walker from 1998 to 2001, but he left in 2001 and took the unfinished walker with him.
The Leg Lab was then taken over by someone interested in rehab and proesthetic devices.
The Leg Lab website hasn't been updated since 2001.
Some players can play both PAL and NTSC discs and output in the disk's format, and some can convert from PAL to NTSC and vice versa.
I have a $79 German DVD player that will convert PAL to NTSC. It also plays a number of other exotic formats, including several video-on-CD formats.
(It's the only player I've found that will play DVD-formatted video content from a CD. It has to wind the disk up to a very high RPM to get the data rate of a DVD, and you only get about 20 minutes of video on a CD blank, but it works. For a while, there was some interest in the animation world in using that format for short material, but DVD burners got cheap before that happened.)
Windows NT worked that way until the end of NT 3.x.
Then Microsoft demoted Dave Cutler, turned the code kiddies from the Windows 95 team loose on NT, and messed it up. It's prettier now, but less stable.
Microsoft has had a terrible time transitioning people from the DOS-Win3.1-Win95-Win98-WinME family to the NT-based systems. More than half of Windows-based desktops worldwide are still running DOS-family OSs.
Even though they've all been discontinued. Even though they have zero security and crash constantly. They're still out there.
California's tough spam law is mostly preempted by the new Federal law. But not entirely. The preemption clause reads
This Act supersedes any statute, regulation, or rule of a State or political subdivision of a State that expressly regulates the use of electronic mail to send commercial messages,
except to the extent that any such statute, regulation, or rule prohibits falsity or deception in any portion of a commercial electronic mail message or information attached thereto.
So for any spam that has a forged header or a misleading subject, California's new law, with the $1000 per spam penalty, will still apply. California allows private suits in small claims court by any party. So you can haul the bozos into court. Maybe even across state lines.
A year or two from now, we'll be rid of the chickenboners, but we'll be getting even more spam from "legitimate businesses".
We don't want to see SCO's source. We want to see SCO's specific claims of infringements within Linux source.
If and when SCO ever discloses that, any infringing code can be rewritten.
The IBM case is a contract dispute. The SCO vs. IBM issues are different from the copyright issues SCO raises in the press and which will eventually be litigated in Red Hat vs. SCO.
The head of FNARS, a FEMA employee, is Paul Reid, N4EKW.
FEMA has a point, though. They've put in a nationwide HF network for emergencies that can stay up even if other communication systems go down. So if somebody does bring down the phone system, they have backup. Someday we might really need that.
Parallel imports are legal in the US. See
Quality King Distributors, Inc. v. Lanza Research Int, a unanimous Supreme Court decision. Once the product has been sold by the copyright holder, the first sale doctrine permits further transfers, internationally or otherwise.
There are legislative attempts to change this, but Wal-Mart is opposed, so it's not likely to sneak through.
If you want either of those movies (in Mandarin), they're advertised on eBay
for $7.99.
How about a retro-looking NOC? Chart recorders, walls of blinking lights, big dials,
keyboards with buttons that light up, teletype printers, brass railings, and red battle lighting.
The SFFD fire dispatching center used to look like that. Now it's just a roomful of PCs.
Realize how lame a system this is even if it works. It's one car, on a single track, going back and forth over 0.8 mile, in a straight line, at a top speed of 40MPH, on a college campus. Why bother?
Japanese, Chinese, German, and British maglevs of greater length and higher speed have already been built.
The Birmingham airport maglev (1984-1995) was more ambitious. And it was so expensive to maintain that it was replaced with a cable-driven system.
The only maglev system being proposed that makes any economic sense is the link from Orlando Airport to Disney World. Disney wants to build that so that their customers bypass all other attractions and go directly to Disney property.
How close are we to developing a value system which would see war waged wherein the combatants maintain economic ties?
Members of OPEC have fought wars without dropping out of OPEC's price-fixing system.
WWI was like that. Some international arms makers, including Vickers and Krupp, received royalties from both sides. They were heavily criticized for this. Read the original "Merchants of Death".
This sort of thing worked better before air power. Wars used to start at frontiers and work towards the capitals. Europe had wars like that for centuries. Today, wars start with bombing the other side's cities.
Early in WWII, neither side bombed cities. The first bombing of London was due to a navigational error by some German pilots. After the British retaliated, everybody started bombing everything.
War for economic reasons ceased a long time ago. Almost every war started in the last century was an economic loss for the side that started it. Conquest just isn't what it used to be.
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It would be great to have an application that tracked the locations of politicians and lobbyists, for correlation with bank and voting records.
There is a lawsuit. The State of New York is after him.
The Flying Wing concept was pushed all the way to bomber size, and several were built. Most of them crashed. (Edwards AFB is named after a Flying Wing pilot.) Not until the 1980s, and the Have Blue stealth prototype, was the stability problem resolved adequately. (A modified F-16 analog autopilot handled the stabilization.)
Some of those 1950s designs could now be revisited. The AvroCar could be made to work today, if anybody cared. If a competent aircraft designer, like Rutan, built one, it would work.
The problem, of course, is that all pure-thrust vehicles need huge engines and have lousy fuel economy, since they need enough power to go straight up on thrust alone. The only sucessful pure-thrust VTOL aircraft is the Harrier. Since modern fighters have enough thrust to go straight up anyway, a VTOL fighter is feasible. Marginally.
This new Russian thing sounds flakey, but not fake. They should be able to build a prototype and fly it. But the claims for efficiency are probably not real.
It sounds like they're fooling around with boundary layer control. This has been done before, all the way back to WWII. Aircraft with "blown" or "sucked" wings have been tried. It works, but the practical problems with a wing full of holes and plumbing have been too great. Ice, for example. A few aircraft, including the C-17, have blown control surfaces, but not the whole wing.
There's considerable interest in disk-shaped craft in small scales, from the micro air vehicle people. AeroVironment has built some.
A worthwhile project would be a "smart lecture hall". Just provide all the usual gear, but interconnect it so it works reasonably. Sense the approximate number of people in the room and crank airflow up and down accordingly. (That, all by itself, is a viable product concept.) Interconnect the lighting, screen, and projectors so that when the screen is lit, it's not illuminated by room lighting. (Use big, illuminated buttons on the controls, so you're not trying to read 10-point type in the dark.)
Provide a fully automated amplification system, with automatic feedback suppression, DSP-steered active microphone arrays, and sensors for the number of people present and room noise levels. If you go to the front of the room and talk, everyone can hear you, with no user action required.
All the gear for this exists. Yet what's installed is way too complex.
Then there's Ellison's new house in Woodside, which is supposedly going to end up costing around $140 million. He's trying to outspend Gates. Building has been going on since 1999, and it's supposed to be finished Real Soon Now.
Go ahead, mod him up +1 (Funny).
Microsoft HQ is a rather bland industrial park.
Oracle HQ is a set of large cylindrical glass towers with "ORACLE" in giant illuminated letters on top. It's located in an open area, with no other large buildings nearby, clearly visible from a major freeway and facing a huge reflecting pool. It looks like the HQ of a Bond villain. By intent.
A few minor changes in labor law, and the US would be as unionized as it was in the 1950s, and as unionized as Canada is now.
The Vatican is not a member of the United Nations. It has a non-voting observer to the UN.
Wake me up when somebody makes "Bored of the Rings".
The MIT Leg Lab went through several generations. Raibert, back in the 1980s, had the big insight - legged locomotion is about balance, not gait. He worked on one-legged hoppers to force the issue, with considerable success. But the approach he used was something of a hack. He used undertuned PD control loops that, in a steady state, got to the right place at the right time. But this didn't generalize to hills, turns, slippery surfaces, etc.
Raibert went off to do a startup, which moved away from dynamics and towards kinematic graphical simulations for military training. The Leg Lab was taken over by Pratt, who was more of an motor/actuator engineer. Not too much exciting happened in the Pratt era, although the drive mechanics got better. Pratt tried to build a legged walker from 1998 to 2001, but he left in 2001 and took the unfinished walker with him.
The Leg Lab was then taken over by someone interested in rehab and proesthetic devices. The Leg Lab website hasn't been updated since 2001.
Imagine if your auto radio exchanged music files with other cars it passed.
Region 8 disks were made, at great expense, for airline movies not yet released to DVD. I don't think this is done much any more.
I have a $79 German DVD player that will convert PAL to NTSC. It also plays a number of other exotic formats, including several video-on-CD formats.
(It's the only player I've found that will play DVD-formatted video content from a CD. It has to wind the disk up to a very high RPM to get the data rate of a DVD, and you only get about 20 minutes of video on a CD blank, but it works. For a while, there was some interest in the animation world in using that format for short material, but DVD burners got cheap before that happened.)
Microsoft has had a terrible time transitioning people from the DOS-Win3.1-Win95-Win98-WinME family to the NT-based systems. More than half of Windows-based desktops worldwide are still running DOS-family OSs. Even though they've all been discontinued. Even though they have zero security and crash constantly. They're still out there.
So for any spam that has a forged header or a misleading subject, California's new law, with the $1000 per spam penalty, will still apply. California allows private suits in small claims court by any party. So you can haul the bozos into court. Maybe even across state lines.
A year or two from now, we'll be rid of the chickenboners, but we'll be getting even more spam from "legitimate businesses".
The IBM case is a contract dispute. The SCO vs. IBM issues are different from the copyright issues SCO raises in the press and which will eventually be litigated in Red Hat vs. SCO.
What are they using? pcc?
FEMA has a point, though. They've put in a nationwide HF network for emergencies that can stay up even if other communication systems go down. So if somebody does bring down the phone system, they have backup. Someday we might really need that.
There are legislative attempts to change this, but Wal-Mart is opposed, so it's not likely to sneak through.
If you want either of those movies (in Mandarin), they're advertised on eBay for $7.99.
The SFFD fire dispatching center used to look like that. Now it's just a roomful of PCs.
I thought that Netscape had an ISP around 2001 or so, but nobody signed up.
The Birmingham airport maglev (1984-1995) was more ambitious. And it was so expensive to maintain that it was replaced with a cable-driven system.
The only maglev system being proposed that makes any economic sense is the link from Orlando Airport to Disney World. Disney wants to build that so that their customers bypass all other attractions and go directly to Disney property.
Members of OPEC have fought wars without dropping out of OPEC's price-fixing system.
WWI was like that. Some international arms makers, including Vickers and Krupp, received royalties from both sides. They were heavily criticized for this. Read the original "Merchants of Death".
This sort of thing worked better before air power. Wars used to start at frontiers and work towards the capitals. Europe had wars like that for centuries. Today, wars start with bombing the other side's cities.
Early in WWII, neither side bombed cities. The first bombing of London was due to a navigational error by some German pilots. After the British retaliated, everybody started bombing everything.
War for economic reasons ceased a long time ago. Almost every war started in the last century was an economic loss for the side that started it. Conquest just isn't what it used to be.