It's a bit like outsourcing manufacturing to China except there is no learning curve. The Russians already have the expertise and infrastructure built in the Soviet era.
Sure, the Americans and Europeans have better technology but it isn't being used. The rockets that are flying are still 60's tech, mostly military derivations at at that. Maybe when SpaceShipThree and it's counterparts start getting into the game, it will be different. For now, no one does 60's space tech better than the Russians.
If merging at the end was the right solution then there would be no need for a merge lane at all. There would be only one place to merge.
We have merge lanes so that drivers can merge wherever they do so most smoothly. This may be near the start, near the end, or somewhere in between. If you ignore early opportunities and wait until then end, you will often have to brake and/or force yourself into the through lane. Neither is any good for traffic flow. You also really hack off those of us were ahead of you, smoothly executed our merge and are now stuck behind the traffic jam you created.
It's not just a few cents of flash. Firmware, like any other sort of software, invariably needs to be updated. (If it didn't, it would run straight out ROM, which is cheaper than RAM or flash)
So the total really comes to.
1) A few cents of flash 2) Hardware support for programming flash. 3) Driver support for programming flash 4) Careful documentation and usability testing so that users don't botch the process, call support and complain that their hardware is dead.
I'd stick with the RAM based solution. Simpler, cheaper, and more reliable.
E-mail is plenty reliable if you engineer it to be so.
Relying on a single third party DNS service is pretty stupid if reliability important. Redundant links, geographically and geopolitically dispersed DNS, careful administration. Engineer reliability between all important endpoints.
Do that and you can send rather important things via e-mail and be confident that they will get there on time.
Be sloppy and it's no better than relying on a cell phone with poor coverage, a weak battery, and a pre-paid plan.
"For RC aircraft flight, the A/C must stay lower than 400 feet AGL (FAA Advisory circular 91-57), and according to the Associationof Model Aricraft's safety code, must stay in the control of, and stay within the sight of,an operator at all times. Autonomous flight is forbidden."
It wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't a size limitation as well.
If anything, the existence of vestigial structures make intelligence design/creationists look stupid. Why would an intelligence designer create a structure that serves no purpose, (though the same structure exists in other "lower" animals that the organism and the animal both likely evolved from a common ancestor)?
Creating Heaven and Earth in 6 days demands a fair bit of reuse of common functions. General code cleanup, include DCE failures like the appendix were scheduled for day 7. But after 6 days, He was tired and decided to stay home instead.
Every time I see an article about AMD's "Fusion", I think "Everyone knows that the power consumption of modern cpu's has gotten out of hand. Still, you gotta give AMD credit for having the guts to propose the obvious solution: An on chip fusion reactor"
Yep. That's the one. If you dig in, you will find that that the Squeezebox itself does not do anything at all with Pandora. It depends on the Slimserver to communicate with Pandora and transcode the stream into something the Squeezebox can handle.
I'd like to stream Paradox or LastFM to a Squeezebox. Unfortunately, the Squeezebox needs a Windows or Linux box to run the software, AFAICT. Having the Slimserver be open source Perl doesn't help much of the data source is only available as a binary.
Why do I care? Because my 24x7 server is a Sparc. I don't want my tunes to go out just because I am fiddling with or haven't yet booted my desktop machine.
I'm thinking of using a trailing edge notebook instead. Less elegent but it can run everything locally. No server required. I'm a little concerned about continuous power usage. Notebooks generally conserve power but turning things off.
It's only an issue if water is permanently removed from the environment, which it generally won't be. Water was in the air and in a few hours, it is back again.
This is actually much better than trucking in water from afar or pulling it out of deep wells. In that case, you are altering the environment. Water not previously in the environment is being added.
Hmmmm. Isn't this comparison forgetting about the elevator mechanism itself. A bit like comparing airplanes to trains but leaving out the train tracks. I'm not saying that the (presumably) one time cost of shunting the ribbon and the counter weight (and whatever else) into orbit won't ultimately be better than rockets, but the setup costs need to be amortised over all the subsequent trips on the elevator.
Setup costs and energy efficiency are different things. The setup costs of a space eleveator are enormous. That's the chief economic problem I aluded to. At present there isn't enough demand for lifting goods into orbit to remotely pay for a space elevator, even if we had the technology. Further, the space elevator is monolithic. It is an enormous investment that does nothing until the structure is complete. Rockets can purchased one at a time, if necessary.
As a few other posters have said, could we use a space elevator for getting to and from the Moon's surface? Is that even possible? I dimly recall someone stating that the moon isn't suitable because it's difficult to get a geostationary orbit around it (gravity pull of the Moon is interfered with by that of the Earth and the Sun because it's simply not a large enough object).
My memory is that it is actually worse than that. There are no stable lunar orbits. I'm not sure exactly what this would do with an elevator since it does not have to be precisely in orbit. Adds some stress probably but maybe still much less than an Earth to orbit elevator.
The bigger problem is what do with a lunar elevator. Mass drivers are suitable for getting stuff off the surface with the same energy cost and lower infrastructure costs than a space elevator. Landing still needs rockets but rockets aren't so bad at 1/6g.
You have to do the same amount of work to get on object into orbit whether it goes up the elevator or it goes up in a free-flying machine.
Not true. With a rocket, you must lift the fuel, reaction mass*, and the tankage required to contain the same. Typically, that is 100x the mass of the payload, although only a small part is lifted all the way to orbit.
By contrast, with space elevator, only the payload carrier, payload, and electric motors need to be lifted. This is vastly more energy efficient than a rocket.
Space elevators face enormous structural and economic barriers if they are to become reality. But don't discount their efficiency. That's very real.
*Even if it's a laser launch system, you still need reaction mass.
That's becuase the science supports a pre-existing popular viewpoint. Rest assured. If the scientific evidence ran contrary, it would be ignored and so would the scientists who discovered it.
Where's that tunderous outcry in support of nuclear power?
No kidding. Naming in Orion is travsity. The real Orion would open up the entire solar system. This return to Apollo style capsules is an embarassment, a belated acknowledgement that we went down the wrong path and now must back up and start again. Nothing at all like the great leap forward that a nuclear pulse rocket would be.
That a few simple organisms once existed on mars, and that Mars once had water? But don't we know this now?
Finding even simple organisims that evolved on Mars would be of fantastic value. Right now all we know about life is derived from one sample point. A lot of what we assume to fundamental about life could be proven completely wrong if we find out the Martian life does it differently. It could be that Earth life has unnecessary complexities and finding Mars life is the key to creating life from scratch in the lab. All sorts of amazing bio-technology could result.
The low-tech solution for the one waiting to use the dryer is to open it up and move the other person's clothes out of the way. Ironically, the solution to lack of consideration by one person is... lack of consideration by the other. Which can escalate into a cycle of anger, and neighbor feuds, and next thing you know there'll be a neutral zone and Jimmy Carter will be coming in to make sure that your complex doesn't break into open warfare. *ahem* Sorry about that...
The even lower tech solution is for all concerned to chill out and accept that rabid pursuit of exclusivity does not work when resources are shared.
The one waiting should check his watch and come back in 5 minutes. If, after 5 minutes, the dryer is still full, the person waiting should remove said clothes from dryer. The person who shows up to find their clothes removed from the dryer should know that they failed to keep on top of their laundary and perhaps even apologize to the person who had to move their clothing asside.
In 20 years of sharing laundary facilities with friends and strangers I have encountered exactly one person who got upset about this policy. I still consider him an anti-social dweeb.
I work to live not live to work. I will do my job to the fullest, but I want a life. I don't want to wake up when I'm old and find that I'm alone and regretting that I didn't live my life instead of wasting it in the office.
If your mission in life is best accomplished at the office, then how can spending your time there be a waste? If you are genuinely afraid that, when you are old, you will regret the time you spent at work, then maybe you chose your career poorly.
Many or even most people choose their career poorly. Sometimes this is avoidable. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes the best occupation is one that pays poorly or not at all. Too many don't even try. They just chase the money instead. But those who do manage to unify their passion with their career are more effective employees.
* as small (i.e. as hight density) as DRAM; single MRAM memory cell is two magnets instead of two conductors of capacitor in DRAM, but the (theoretical) size is of the same order of magnitude
Not at present. MRAM's have a problem with cells influencing and flipping the values of their neighbors. To combat this effect, designers have resorted to using some rather complex shapes that are difficult to scale down.
* much less energy-hungry than SRAM, DRAM and Flash while working; when not working it can keep information at least as well as Flash
No way. Current MRAM devices read by sensing current. They are much more power hungry than DRAM, SRAM, or flash.
To summerise, MRAM's
- High Power - Poor density + Non volitile + Radiation resistant
The last one is what is driving current consumption. They are used in space appliations. The first two are deal breakers for most non-space applications. Major breakthroughs are required before you see MRAM in your desktop or notebook.
A tungsten sphere 10cm in diameter would have such a tiny gravitational field that I suspect even a hydrogen atom at the ambient temperature of local space would possess escape velocity.
No doubt. The only reason there is any hydrogen on *Earth* is because it binds readily with more massive elements. Helium does not and, as a consequence, any helium released into the atmosphere will ultimately escape. My understanding is that the only reason we have any helium at all is due to radioactive decay from heavier elements
They are much stiffer than cycling clothing. They have no padding. They do have heavy seems that chafe. They are hot and don't dry well.
If you are riding 8-20 miles, these things matter. If you are only doing 2-3 miles at a liesurely pace, it doesn't. In my college days, I always wore jeans except when I wore non-cycling shorts. It was fine and saved the hassle and expense of dedicated clothing.
Working professionals, though, have the money to pay for dedicated clothing and have long commutes to need it.
Semi-arbitrary. Each whole generation is half the feature size of the generation before, starting from 0.650 micron (650nm). In between are "half" generations counting down from 1000micron.
The precise digits are chosen for convenience and actual processes vary a bit up and down for a given technology node. Each node requires new equipment. By moving from node to node together, manufacturers share some of the cost of development. Still, odd ball nodes do exist. DRAM's are often manufactured at intermediate dimentions and 150nm is used by some foundaries.
Many fabless chip makers will skip half generations. I know a lot of manufacturers went straight from 350 to 180. Still, the choice to skip or not is mostly economic. If a node lands durring a recession, fabless chip makers are likely to hold off until the node that follows. The fabs don't really have a choice. They have to produce each generation in sequence, at least at small scale, or they will not have the technological base to start work on the nodes that follow.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a bit like outsourcing manufacturing to China except there is no learning curve. The Russians already have the expertise and infrastructure built in the Soviet era.
Sure, the Americans and Europeans have better technology but it isn't being used. The rockets that are flying are still 60's tech, mostly military derivations at at that. Maybe when SpaceShipThree and it's counterparts start getting into the game, it will be different. For now, no one does 60's space tech better than the Russians.
If merging at the end was the right solution then there would be no need for a merge lane at all. There would be only one place to merge.
We have merge lanes so that drivers can merge wherever they do so most smoothly. This may be near the start, near the end, or somewhere in between. If you ignore early opportunities and wait until then end, you will often have to brake and/or force yourself into the through lane. Neither is any good for traffic flow. You also really hack off those of us were ahead of you, smoothly executed our merge and are now stuck behind the traffic jam you created.
It's not just a few cents of flash. Firmware, like any other sort of software, invariably needs to be updated. (If it didn't, it would run straight out ROM, which is cheaper than RAM or flash)
So the total really comes to.
1) A few cents of flash
2) Hardware support for programming flash.
3) Driver support for programming flash
4) Careful documentation and usability testing so that users don't botch the process, call support and complain that their hardware is dead.
I'd stick with the RAM based solution. Simpler, cheaper, and more reliable.
E-mail is plenty reliable if you engineer it to be so.
Relying on a single third party DNS service is pretty stupid if reliability important.
Redundant links, geographically and geopolitically dispersed DNS, careful administration.
Engineer reliability between all important endpoints.
Do that and you can send rather important things via e-mail and be confident that they will get there on time.
Be sloppy and it's no better than relying on a cell phone with poor coverage, a weak battery, and a pre-paid plan.
Not the greatest link but, excerpted from http://iagblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/faa-vs-la-sher iff.html
"For RC aircraft flight, the A/C must stay lower than 400 feet AGL (FAA Advisory circular 91-57), and according to the Associationof Model Aricraft's safety code, must stay in the control of, and stay within the sight of,an operator at all times. Autonomous flight is forbidden."
It wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't a size limitation as well.
If anything, the existence of vestigial structures make intelligence design/creationists look stupid. Why would an intelligence designer create a structure that serves no purpose, (though the same structure exists in other "lower" animals that the organism and the animal both likely evolved from a common ancestor)?
Creating Heaven and Earth in 6 days demands a fair bit of reuse of common functions. General code cleanup, include DCE failures like the appendix were scheduled for day 7. But after 6 days, He was tired and decided to stay home instead.
I'm sorry. I can't help it.
Every time I see an article about AMD's "Fusion", I think
"Everyone knows that the power consumption of modern cpu's has gotten out of hand. Still, you gotta give AMD credit for having the guts to propose the obvious solution: An on chip fusion reactor"
>> simple - the slashdot mod system is broken, funny posts get no positive karma.
> That's not a bug, it's a feature.
The way it is implimented, it is a bug.
It has only happend to me once, and only by 1 point, but it is annoying to lose Karma for a post that has a flat or net positive moderation.
+Funny should only be zeroed to the degree that the final score is the same as the starting score.
Yep. That's the one. If you dig in, you will find that that the Squeezebox itself does not do anything at all with Pandora. It depends on the Slimserver to communicate with Pandora and transcode the stream into something the Squeezebox can handle.
I'd like to stream Paradox or LastFM to a Squeezebox. Unfortunately, the Squeezebox needs a Windows or Linux box to run the software, AFAICT. Having the Slimserver be open source Perl doesn't help much of the data source is only available as a binary.
Why do I care? Because my 24x7 server is a Sparc. I don't want my tunes to go out just because I am fiddling with or haven't yet booted my desktop machine.
I'm thinking of using a trailing edge notebook instead. Less elegent but it can run everything locally. No server required. I'm a little concerned about continuous power usage. Notebooks generally conserve power but turning things off.
It's only an issue if water is permanently removed from the environment, which it generally won't be. Water was in the air and in a few hours, it is back again.
This is actually much better than trucking in water from afar or pulling it out of deep wells. In that case, you are altering the environment. Water not previously in the environment is being added.
Hmmmm. Isn't this comparison forgetting about the elevator mechanism itself. A bit like comparing airplanes to trains but leaving out the train tracks. I'm not saying that the (presumably) one time cost of shunting the ribbon and the counter weight (and whatever else) into orbit won't ultimately be better than rockets, but the setup costs need to be amortised over all the subsequent trips on the elevator.
Setup costs and energy efficiency are different things. The setup costs of a space eleveator are enormous. That's the chief economic problem I aluded to. At present there isn't enough demand for lifting goods into orbit to remotely pay for a space elevator, even if we had the technology. Further, the space elevator is monolithic. It is an enormous investment that does nothing until the structure is complete. Rockets can purchased one at a time, if necessary.
As a few other posters have said, could we use a space elevator for getting to and from the Moon's surface? Is that even possible? I dimly recall someone stating that the moon isn't suitable because it's difficult to get a geostationary orbit around it (gravity pull of the Moon is interfered with by that of the Earth and the Sun because it's simply not a large enough object).
My memory is that it is actually worse than that. There are no stable lunar orbits. I'm not sure exactly what this would do with an elevator since it does not have to be precisely in orbit. Adds some stress probably but maybe still much less than an Earth to orbit elevator.
The bigger problem is what do with a lunar elevator. Mass drivers are suitable for getting stuff off the surface with the same energy cost and lower infrastructure costs than a space elevator. Landing still needs rockets but rockets aren't so bad at 1/6g.
Even if the actual space elevator is not.
You have to do the same amount of work to get on object into orbit whether it goes up the elevator or it goes up in a free-flying machine.
Not true. With a rocket, you must lift the fuel, reaction mass*, and the tankage required to contain the same. Typically, that is 100x the mass of the payload, although only a small part is lifted all the way to orbit.
By contrast, with space elevator, only the payload carrier, payload, and electric motors need to be lifted. This is vastly more energy efficient than a rocket.
Space elevators face enormous structural and economic barriers if they are to become reality. But don't discount their efficiency. That's very real.
*Even if it's a laser launch system, you still need reaction mass.
That's becuase the science supports a pre-existing popular viewpoint.
Rest assured. If the scientific evidence ran contrary, it would be
ignored and so would the scientists who discovered it.
Where's that tunderous outcry in support of nuclear power?
Just not from our sun.h esis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_nucleosynt
I vote for a name change
No kidding. Naming in Orion is travsity. The real Orion would open up the entire solar system. This return to Apollo style capsules is an embarassment, a belated acknowledgement that we went down the wrong path and now must back up and start again. Nothing at all like the great leap forward that a nuclear pulse rocket would be.
That a few simple organisms once existed on mars, and that Mars once had water? But don't we know this now?
Finding even simple organisims that evolved on Mars would be of fantastic value. Right now all we know about life is derived from one sample point. A lot of what we assume to fundamental about life could be proven completely wrong if we find out the Martian life does it differently. It could be that Earth life has unnecessary complexities and finding Mars life is the key to creating life from scratch in the lab. All sorts of amazing bio-technology could result.
The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) 1.0 Beta is out. It's big, really big.
But that's peanuts to space.
The low-tech solution for the one waiting to use the dryer is to open it up and move the other person's clothes out of the way. Ironically, the solution to lack of consideration by one person is... lack of consideration by the other. Which can escalate into a cycle of anger, and neighbor feuds, and next thing you know there'll be a neutral zone and Jimmy Carter will be coming in to make sure that your complex doesn't break into open warfare. *ahem* Sorry about that...
The even lower tech solution is for all concerned to chill out and accept that rabid pursuit of exclusivity does not work when resources are shared.
The one waiting should check his watch and come back in 5 minutes.
If, after 5 minutes, the dryer is still full, the person waiting should remove said clothes from dryer. The person who shows up to find their clothes removed from the dryer should know that they failed to keep on top of their laundary and perhaps even apologize to the person who had to move their clothing asside.
In 20 years of sharing laundary facilities with friends and strangers I have encountered exactly one person who got upset about this policy. I still consider him an anti-social dweeb.
I work to live not live to work. I will do my job to the fullest, but I want a life. I don't want to wake up when I'm old and find that I'm alone and regretting that I didn't live my life instead of wasting it in the office.
If your mission in life is best accomplished at the office, then how can spending your time there be a waste? If you are genuinely afraid that, when you are old, you will regret the time you spent at work, then maybe you chose your career poorly.
Many or even most people choose their career poorly. Sometimes this is avoidable. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes the best occupation is one that pays poorly or not at all. Too many don't even try. They just chase the money instead. But those who do manage to unify their passion with their career are more effective employees.
* as small (i.e. as hight density) as DRAM; single MRAM memory cell is two magnets instead of two conductors of capacitor in DRAM, but the (theoretical) size is of the same order of magnitude
Not at present. MRAM's have a problem with cells influencing and flipping the values of their neighbors. To combat this effect, designers have resorted to using some rather complex shapes that are difficult to scale down.
* much less energy-hungry than SRAM, DRAM and Flash while working; when not working it can keep information at least as well as Flash
No way. Current MRAM devices read by sensing current. They are much more power hungry than DRAM, SRAM, or flash.
To summerise, MRAM's
- High Power
- Poor density
+ Non volitile
+ Radiation resistant
The last one is what is driving current consumption. They are used in space appliations. The first two are deal breakers for most non-space applications. Major breakthroughs are required before you see MRAM in your desktop or notebook.
A tungsten sphere 10cm in diameter would have such a tiny gravitational field that I suspect even a hydrogen atom at the ambient temperature of local space would possess escape velocity.
No doubt. The only reason there is any hydrogen on *Earth* is because it binds readily with more massive elements. Helium does not and, as a consequence, any helium released into the atmosphere will ultimately escape. My understanding is that the only reason we have any helium at all is due to radioactive decay from heavier elements
Jeans are simply less comfortable.
They are much stiffer than cycling clothing. They have no padding. They do have heavy seems that chafe. They are hot and don't dry well.
If you are riding 8-20 miles, these things matter. If you are only doing 2-3 miles at a liesurely pace, it doesn't. In my college days, I always wore jeans except when I wore non-cycling shorts. It was fine and saved the hassle and expense of dedicated clothing.
Working professionals, though, have the money to pay for dedicated clothing and have long commutes to need it.
From the "I-can-see-you-now" department, about a camera on the hubble being fixed. Click on story and get "Nothing to see here. Please move along"
Are we sure it's fixed?
Semi-arbitrary. Each whole generation is half the feature size of the generation before, starting from 0.650 micron (650nm). In between are "half" generations counting down from 1000micron.
Half generations: 1000, 500, 250, 130, 65, 32, 16
Whole generations: 650, 350, 180, 90, 45, 22
The precise digits are chosen for convenience and actual processes vary a bit up and down for a given technology node. Each node requires new equipment. By moving from node to node together, manufacturers share some of the cost of development. Still, odd ball nodes do exist. DRAM's are often manufactured at intermediate dimentions and 150nm is used by some foundaries.
Many fabless chip makers will skip half generations. I know a lot of manufacturers went straight from 350 to 180. Still, the choice to skip or not is mostly economic. If a node lands durring a recession, fabless chip makers are likely to hold off until the node that follows. The fabs don't really have a choice. They have to produce each generation in sequence, at least at small scale, or they will not have the technological base to start work on the nodes that follow.