Considering the locations of XBox production facilities it isn't suprising Microsoft is waiting for after Christmas to toss their hat into the Japanese market. Sony and Nintendo can spank their asses in console deliveries in the Christmas buying season which would make for a pretty shallow market penetration (sorta like the PS2 not meeting the initial demand when it was released here). By starting off in the US and Europe (where they have production facilities) they can keep overhead low since they don't need to ship units overseas. That means much better margins on the units they sell. The less money they lose the quicker they make a profit which is their goal in the first place.
You are a fucking moron. Do you even believe the crap you spouted off? Free networks will not destroy telcos and do not have the ability to. Unless you as a volunteer want to pay the thousands of dollars in property fees to run you own copper wire and set up your own switches which you own, the telco is the only way you're going to get a wire to your house. You also need to have a fairly large cash reserve to operate a wireless network of any sort because you need to pay for frequency licenses and station operating license. You can't output more than a watt of PEP on ISM (2.4 and 5.2GHz) bands because that would cause interference with other equipment. I don't think granpa will appriciate your wireless network interfering with his pacemaker. Running off at the mouth about wireless freenets creating routing problem is ludicrous. Geographical routing and IPv6 will solve problems? What the fuck is geographical routing? Next time research for twenty minutes and think for ten minutes.
It's sad seeing every other post whining about how you don't need a 2GHz processor. It's even worse seeing people being proud that they run a slow (600MHz processor) and recommend their friends and family do the same. You don't really NEED a computer on any clock speed in the first place and second, 600MHz is not slow. The first computer I ever touched with an Apple IIc. That was slow. The Powerbook I'm writing this on is more powerful than all of the computers that existed in the 1960s. I'd recommend the faster computer someone could afford if they asked me. You can get a 1.4GHz P4 from Dell or Gateway for under a thousand dollars, same with an Athlon system if you can find an OEM that makes them. I'm amazed now at how cheap computers are for how much computing horse power they have. Systems 15 year old Linux zealots see as slow (600 MHz with a hard drive almost six thousand times bigger than the first drive I ever used) I'm impressed by because those didn't exist just a couple years while said zealot was still playing with Power Rangers. Getting hot and bothered because Intel has a faster processor that AMD is pretty sad and gay. AMD is no better a corporation than any other corporation and getting upset and flaming people because they don't like your processor or your OS is also sad and gay.
Why the fuck are you using a SETI benchmark? For fuck sake man find a d.net RC5 score or something. SETI's packets vary in computational complexity and redundancy. If you get a packet that has a bunch of almost-but-not-quite alien messages the SETI client reprocesses that packet at higher and higher resolutions. If a packet has none or few of these it breezes through the packet. Ergo using SETI to benchmark a system is pretty ridiculous since every packet is not necessarily comparable to every other packet. This throws off averages by a a good deal and doesn't return very favorable results for anyone.
Re:How about improving design rather than speed?
on
Pentium IV Hits 2 Ghz
·
· Score: 1
I think I fried the RAM in my PC so I've been cruising on my laptop for the past week. My Powerbook uses about 45 watts max where my PC would suck a whopping 250 watts max. I've reduced my power consumption by 80% and I can still do all the things I was doing on my PC. Way to go G3 processor.
Hello McFly! RIMMs have to be paired like EDO SIMMs used to have to be paired. Thus in order to get 128 megs of RAM you need to get a pair of 64 meg RIMMs. I don't exactly see how this is "not terribly useful" since most people are sticking to around 128 megs of RAM. How much is a good quality 512 meg DDR DIMM? If you compare that price to two 256 meg RIMMs you'll have an accurate price comparison. Don't go comparing apples to grapefruit.
Someone ought to be ashamed they modded you up to informative. You've just about doubled the cost per kilo for a shuttle luanch (probably the most expensive means of getting into orbit you can find). My Powerbook only weighs 5.9 pounds with a Lithium ion battery, CD-ROM, and hard disk drive in it no to mention a 14.1 inch LCD screen. Ergo about a pound of electronics can do a whole bunch. Antennas can be very lightweight (a dipole with a mesh reflector works very well) and a 1.375"x4.5" flexible solar panel that outputs 50mA at 3VDC (think an array of these) will set you back 8$ a pop from RS. Nine pounds of satellite can do a suprising amount. Besides the fact your launch figures are pretty high, on a Delta II you can put stuff into orbit for about 6300$ per pound, a Soyuz can put you into an LEO for a third of that even.
Here's the problem with being a jackass and feeling some sort of deep need to install Linux on a free computer: you start down a path of broken compatibility. Suddenly you can't follow an assignment because you're using some GNOME based text editor rather than Word. You also are stranded if the computer came with some sort of encyclopedia program that you can't use under Linux and which there aren't any open source analogs. Thats like the guy in the English class who thinks he ought to be able to e-mail assignments in to the teacher when the syllabus clearly states all assignments must be printed.
By your logic forcing kids to join competitive sports could let them find the inner jock that's lain repressed for too long or focing them to study the bible in public schools could release the saint they secretly keep in side. Don't be a complete jackass. Giving someone a computer doesn't make them computer literate. Giving every 7th grader a laptop is just another means of tossing money at a problem in hopes it will go away. Using a computer is a monkey's job, programs will only get more user friendly and intuitive, by the time today's seventh graders are looking for their monkey jobs their interaction with a computer will involve little more than pushing a couple buttons. No one needs an intimate knowlege of computers in order to use them. Cynacism here isn't from a lack of intelligence but experience. Alot of people here realize that throwing money at something doesn't fix it and just because someone has a computer it doesn't suddenly make them smarter or more productive. In fact in the expereince of many people, introductions of computers into the workplace has made people less productive because its alot easier for them to screw around but look busy. I'd rather my kid be given a graphing calculator and instructions on how to use and program it rather than a laptop. They'll learn that computers are just tools are are pretty much expensive toys if you don't know what you're doing.
If you're going to stick computers in the hands of every student in a school you better be teaching them to program the goddamned thing. I think it's pretty ridiculous that math classes now pretty much require a graphing calculator yet don't teach you to do anything useful with it. It is a tool, learn to use it. I'd like to see math teachers having kids write programs on their TI-85s to solve math problems for them. In order to write said programs the kids have to become well aqainted with the problem they're trying to solve and use basic logic to figure out HOW to write their programs. Same with chemistry and physics, if you want to teach motion of falling bodies or percent yield it is as easy as teaching someone to program a computer to figure out the actual values for them.
I think providing students with some sort of electronic medium to store and access information is a good idea in some cases but I can only imagine how something like this would go over at my old high school. Half the students would probably sell something like this for weed or booze money. The main hurdle of any sort of electronic device being provided by schools also requires a sometimes extensive infrastructure to back it up. Paper books don't require this sort of infrastructure whereas a CD-ROM requires a fairly expensive computer in order to be of any use.
What the fuck are you talking about and how the fuck did it get moderated up? Do you realize at all where and when Albert Einstein went to fucking school? You're speaking as if the last century was some sort of golden age of enlightened thought and government which has fallen into dark times of late.
The problem I see with all these MSS systems is people are being too fucking demanding on them. Everyone seems to want realtime voice communication as well as a high bandwidth link for playing Quake3 and watching streaming video from the middle of the desert. Instead these services ought to offer by default a SMS-like setup. Text messages don't require low latency or high bandwidth. They're also a bit more effective in an emergency; instead of making a panicked phone call to someone you could press a panic button on your satphone and it will start transmitting your coordinates (after finding them by using GPS signals) and an SOS message. Text services also work well for web based data transmission. Data from web services can be packed into fairly small packets in an AvantGo manner. I see something like a Blackberry RIM with an L or S band antenna and a Li ion high output battery. Oh well.
The ITU set aside L and S bands for MSS phones to use, 1.5 and 2.5GHz respectively. Extra point bonus because these bands aren't used for anything else thus can be used all over the world with no problems.
I knew a guy in my English class that loved to take down notes on his Palm Pilot using a keyboard. It was the most annoying fucking sound you can imagine having to hear in an english class. It was a smaller lit class so we weren't in some big auditorium. Having to listen to that guy for weeks straight finally made me reach over and press the power button. He finally got the point and wrote his notes on paper. One time he went into a diatribe about how cool his Palm was because of all of its academic functions. In the middle of his little demonstration the batteries died and it turned itself off. I didn't hear him go on about technology much after that.
A couple years ago there was some sort of manufacturing break through in blue LEDs. Apparently U2's bigass TV screen they used on their POP tour used big LED elements in the pixels and the blue elements were manufactured using the new process though I imagine they still cost a few bucks. Look up some LED enthusiast websitesand you can find a good source of blue LEDs. You can pick up blue LEDs from the Radio Shack catalog for 2.99 a pop.
Battery technology doesn't move in leaps and bounds because they store electricity chemically and thus there's only so much "energy density" certain technologies can reach. You also want consistant discharge rates as the battery is drained. As amperage is drained out of battery the voltage begins to drop. When the voltage drops below a circuit's tolerances the battery is dead. In making batteries you need to figure out which chemicals you can produce industrially that will make worth while batteries. Thus development is slow as there's only so many ways to store energy chemically and then retrieve it. When you're building battery powered devices all you can do is increase their efficiency because you generally need to assume you're not going to get more efficient batteries. It's alot easier to make your electronics more efficient than it is to make your batteries store more power.
Do you wear a sign on your chest that reveals you're mentally retarded or do you make people have to fucking listen to you speak first? Jesus I feel sorry for anybody who has to be within a hundred feet of you.
The highest throughput I know of for an FTP server is Walnut Creek's record of 1.39TB over the course of a day, that's about 115 movies per hour or so. Let's say you can provide this sort of throughput to several servers all the time. How much bandwidth is required for this system to make any money at all? It's pretty fantastic, especially when you figure in the cost of maintaining the hardware which has to store all these movies. To figure if this will make any money at all, decide how many potential viewers you're going to have. How many people have the bandwidth necessary to download these movies that don't have DirecTV/Dish Network (who can pay a couple bucks for an all day movie pass on a PPV movie channel) and aren't so fucking lazy that can't drive their secretary asses down to the video store. This isn't really anything I couldn't do with DirecTV and a TiVo.
You mention developing web applications that are just like normal applications but with a web interface...how exactly does this differ at all from Apache + mod_CGI? I mean if you're using the web you're sort of stuck with using HTTP which has specific interface routes. How does writing an app in C# become easier than writing it in C/C++? A problem with C# like Java is that your code is only going to be as fast as the sandbox it is running in. I'm just curious, using NT is fine and dandy since you're a small business and don't need or want to fuddle with Unix systems all day. I'm just wondering how you came about your choice in language and whatnot.
Publishing houses actually used to be just that, a place that merely published a copyrighted work. However as time progressed and the market grew it became uncompetitive to merely publish the work so they said "Hey not only will we print the work, we'll distribute it and you'll get your money and we'll get ours". The problem arose from that when the contract was up the publisher was out of a cash cow and had to fight to retain publishing rights. Then someone somewhere had a brilliant idea, write up a contract that gave the publishing company sole juristiction over a work and in turn gave the creator a percentage of any money derived from their work. This let the publisher publish, distribute, and market the works someone else created. Eventually the whole business picked up this model and we've got the industries we've got. Anyone competing against the established industry has a LONG way to go since the big record labels/publishing houses can undercut just about anybody.
Like the other dude said, this isn't about Windows vs Linux it's about the cost of maintaining 400 fat clients vs the cost of maintaining 400 thin clients. Using 400 Windows clients costs you not only hardware and infrastructure (network, admins, repairs) but also costs you licenses for Windows and Office. Circumventing Microsoft saves you thousands in terms of software cost. Of course then you have to take into account the limitations using a publicly developed piece of software has. Does it fulfill the needs of your organization in its current state and if not will the cost of adding that function cost more than a prepackaged solution?
Scientific American had this article back in January. I think the SciAm article suggests an interesting point though. How many art forms have disappeared in the last three centuries due to the ever moving juggernaut that is progress? It's theorized that changes in trade led to a diminished amount of the carbide infused steel to reach blacksmiths which eventually led to no one being able to produce Damascus blades. We run into the same problem today, how many of you have a drive that can read 9" floppy disks?
As so many have pointed out the Buran looks a lot like NASA's SST. The Russians used a lot of design features of the SST because they were proven with hundreds of flights of the SST. Why waste a bunch of money of a off the wall shuttle concept when there's already a viable and proven design already in use by somebody else. Look at how much hassle and cash NASA's got to spend working on new shuttle designs.
What I want to know is what happened to the HOPE and Hermes developed by Japan and Europe respectively. Did they ever build scale models of either of those? I think I'd like a one person version of the Hermes to stick a deathray on and wreak destruction upon the Earth with it.
The blunted shapes on the nose and leading edges of the wings of the Buran (and space shuttle) create a pressure wave in front of them which acts as a heat transfer mechanism. The temperatures of the plasma on the forefront of this pressure wave can reach thousands of degrees but the air wall in front of the aerodynamic surfaces prevents a good portion of the heat from ever reaching the skin of the ship. Also the skin structure is a ceramic tile filled with glass spirals which results in an enormous heat conducting surface area. The aluminum skin under these tiles would vaporize without said tiles.
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Considering the locations of XBox production facilities it isn't suprising Microsoft is waiting for after Christmas to toss their hat into the Japanese market. Sony and Nintendo can spank their asses in console deliveries in the Christmas buying season which would make for a pretty shallow market penetration (sorta like the PS2 not meeting the initial demand when it was released here). By starting off in the US and Europe (where they have production facilities) they can keep overhead low since they don't need to ship units overseas. That means much better margins on the units they sell. The less money they lose the quicker they make a profit which is their goal in the first place.
You are a fucking moron. Do you even believe the crap you spouted off? Free networks will not destroy telcos and do not have the ability to. Unless you as a volunteer want to pay the thousands of dollars in property fees to run you own copper wire and set up your own switches which you own, the telco is the only way you're going to get a wire to your house. You also need to have a fairly large cash reserve to operate a wireless network of any sort because you need to pay for frequency licenses and station operating license. You can't output more than a watt of PEP on ISM (2.4 and 5.2GHz) bands because that would cause interference with other equipment. I don't think granpa will appriciate your wireless network interfering with his pacemaker. Running off at the mouth about wireless freenets creating routing problem is ludicrous. Geographical routing and IPv6 will solve problems? What the fuck is geographical routing? Next time research for twenty minutes and think for ten minutes.
It's sad seeing every other post whining about how you don't need a 2GHz processor. It's even worse seeing people being proud that they run a slow (600MHz processor) and recommend their friends and family do the same. You don't really NEED a computer on any clock speed in the first place and second, 600MHz is not slow. The first computer I ever touched with an Apple IIc. That was slow. The Powerbook I'm writing this on is more powerful than all of the computers that existed in the 1960s. I'd recommend the faster computer someone could afford if they asked me. You can get a 1.4GHz P4 from Dell or Gateway for under a thousand dollars, same with an Athlon system if you can find an OEM that makes them. I'm amazed now at how cheap computers are for how much computing horse power they have. Systems 15 year old Linux zealots see as slow (600 MHz with a hard drive almost six thousand times bigger than the first drive I ever used) I'm impressed by because those didn't exist just a couple years while said zealot was still playing with Power Rangers. Getting hot and bothered because Intel has a faster processor that AMD is pretty sad and gay. AMD is no better a corporation than any other corporation and getting upset and flaming people because they don't like your processor or your OS is also sad and gay.
So you don't use Western Digital hard drives or ext2? You're so fucking smart.
Why the fuck are you using a SETI benchmark? For fuck sake man find a d.net RC5 score or something. SETI's packets vary in computational complexity and redundancy. If you get a packet that has a bunch of almost-but-not-quite alien messages the SETI client reprocesses that packet at higher and higher resolutions. If a packet has none or few of these it breezes through the packet. Ergo using SETI to benchmark a system is pretty ridiculous since every packet is not necessarily comparable to every other packet. This throws off averages by a a good deal and doesn't return very favorable results for anyone.
I think I fried the RAM in my PC so I've been cruising on my laptop for the past week. My Powerbook uses about 45 watts max where my PC would suck a whopping 250 watts max. I've reduced my power consumption by 80% and I can still do all the things I was doing on my PC. Way to go G3 processor.
Hello McFly! RIMMs have to be paired like EDO SIMMs used to have to be paired. Thus in order to get 128 megs of RAM you need to get a pair of 64 meg RIMMs. I don't exactly see how this is "not terribly useful" since most people are sticking to around 128 megs of RAM. How much is a good quality 512 meg DDR DIMM? If you compare that price to two 256 meg RIMMs you'll have an accurate price comparison. Don't go comparing apples to grapefruit.
Someone ought to be ashamed they modded you up to informative. You've just about doubled the cost per kilo for a shuttle luanch (probably the most expensive means of getting into orbit you can find). My Powerbook only weighs 5.9 pounds with a Lithium ion battery, CD-ROM, and hard disk drive in it no to mention a 14.1 inch LCD screen. Ergo about a pound of electronics can do a whole bunch. Antennas can be very lightweight (a dipole with a mesh reflector works very well) and a 1.375"x4.5" flexible solar panel that outputs 50mA at 3VDC (think an array of these) will set you back 8$ a pop from RS. Nine pounds of satellite can do a suprising amount. Besides the fact your launch figures are pretty high, on a Delta II you can put stuff into orbit for about 6300$ per pound, a Soyuz can put you into an LEO for a third of that even.
Here's the problem with being a jackass and feeling some sort of deep need to install Linux on a free computer: you start down a path of broken compatibility. Suddenly you can't follow an assignment because you're using some GNOME based text editor rather than Word. You also are stranded if the computer came with some sort of encyclopedia program that you can't use under Linux and which there aren't any open source analogs. Thats like the guy in the English class who thinks he ought to be able to e-mail assignments in to the teacher when the syllabus clearly states all assignments must be printed.
By your logic forcing kids to join competitive sports could let them find the inner jock that's lain repressed for too long or focing them to study the bible in public schools could release the saint they secretly keep in side. Don't be a complete jackass. Giving someone a computer doesn't make them computer literate. Giving every 7th grader a laptop is just another means of tossing money at a problem in hopes it will go away. Using a computer is a monkey's job, programs will only get more user friendly and intuitive, by the time today's seventh graders are looking for their monkey jobs their interaction with a computer will involve little more than pushing a couple buttons. No one needs an intimate knowlege of computers in order to use them. Cynacism here isn't from a lack of intelligence but experience. Alot of people here realize that throwing money at something doesn't fix it and just because someone has a computer it doesn't suddenly make them smarter or more productive. In fact in the expereince of many people, introductions of computers into the workplace has made people less productive because its alot easier for them to screw around but look busy. I'd rather my kid be given a graphing calculator and instructions on how to use and program it rather than a laptop. They'll learn that computers are just tools are are pretty much expensive toys if you don't know what you're doing.
If you're going to stick computers in the hands of every student in a school you better be teaching them to program the goddamned thing. I think it's pretty ridiculous that math classes now pretty much require a graphing calculator yet don't teach you to do anything useful with it. It is a tool, learn to use it. I'd like to see math teachers having kids write programs on their TI-85s to solve math problems for them. In order to write said programs the kids have to become well aqainted with the problem they're trying to solve and use basic logic to figure out HOW to write their programs. Same with chemistry and physics, if you want to teach motion of falling bodies or percent yield it is as easy as teaching someone to program a computer to figure out the actual values for them.
I think providing students with some sort of electronic medium to store and access information is a good idea in some cases but I can only imagine how something like this would go over at my old high school. Half the students would probably sell something like this for weed or booze money. The main hurdle of any sort of electronic device being provided by schools also requires a sometimes extensive infrastructure to back it up. Paper books don't require this sort of infrastructure whereas a CD-ROM requires a fairly expensive computer in order to be of any use.
What the fuck are you talking about and how the fuck did it get moderated up? Do you realize at all where and when Albert Einstein went to fucking school? You're speaking as if the last century was some sort of golden age of enlightened thought and government which has fallen into dark times of late.
The problem I see with all these MSS systems is people are being too fucking demanding on them. Everyone seems to want realtime voice communication as well as a high bandwidth link for playing Quake3 and watching streaming video from the middle of the desert. Instead these services ought to offer by default a SMS-like setup. Text messages don't require low latency or high bandwidth. They're also a bit more effective in an emergency; instead of making a panicked phone call to someone you could press a panic button on your satphone and it will start transmitting your coordinates (after finding them by using GPS signals) and an SOS message. Text services also work well for web based data transmission. Data from web services can be packed into fairly small packets in an AvantGo manner. I see something like a Blackberry RIM with an L or S band antenna and a Li ion high output battery. Oh well.
The ITU set aside L and S bands for MSS phones to use, 1.5 and 2.5GHz respectively. Extra point bonus because these bands aren't used for anything else thus can be used all over the world with no problems.
I knew a guy in my English class that loved to take down notes on his Palm Pilot using a keyboard. It was the most annoying fucking sound you can imagine having to hear in an english class. It was a smaller lit class so we weren't in some big auditorium. Having to listen to that guy for weeks straight finally made me reach over and press the power button. He finally got the point and wrote his notes on paper. One time he went into a diatribe about how cool his Palm was because of all of its academic functions. In the middle of his little demonstration the batteries died and it turned itself off. I didn't hear him go on about technology much after that.
A couple years ago there was some sort of manufacturing break through in blue LEDs. Apparently U2's bigass TV screen they used on their POP tour used big LED elements in the pixels and the blue elements were manufactured using the new process though I imagine they still cost a few bucks. Look up some LED enthusiast websitesand you can find a good source of blue LEDs. You can pick up blue LEDs from the Radio Shack catalog for 2.99 a pop.
Battery technology doesn't move in leaps and bounds because they store electricity chemically and thus there's only so much "energy density" certain technologies can reach. You also want consistant discharge rates as the battery is drained. As amperage is drained out of battery the voltage begins to drop. When the voltage drops below a circuit's tolerances the battery is dead. In making batteries you need to figure out which chemicals you can produce industrially that will make worth while batteries. Thus development is slow as there's only so many ways to store energy chemically and then retrieve it. When you're building battery powered devices all you can do is increase their efficiency because you generally need to assume you're not going to get more efficient batteries. It's alot easier to make your electronics more efficient than it is to make your batteries store more power.
Do you wear a sign on your chest that reveals you're mentally retarded or do you make people have to fucking listen to you speak first? Jesus I feel sorry for anybody who has to be within a hundred feet of you.
The highest throughput I know of for an FTP server is Walnut Creek's record of 1.39TB over the course of a day, that's about 115 movies per hour or so. Let's say you can provide this sort of throughput to several servers all the time. How much bandwidth is required for this system to make any money at all? It's pretty fantastic, especially when you figure in the cost of maintaining the hardware which has to store all these movies. To figure if this will make any money at all, decide how many potential viewers you're going to have. How many people have the bandwidth necessary to download these movies that don't have DirecTV/Dish Network (who can pay a couple bucks for an all day movie pass on a PPV movie channel) and aren't so fucking lazy that can't drive their secretary asses down to the video store. This isn't really anything I couldn't do with DirecTV and a TiVo.
You mention developing web applications that are just like normal applications but with a web interface...how exactly does this differ at all from Apache + mod_CGI? I mean if you're using the web you're sort of stuck with using HTTP which has specific interface routes. How does writing an app in C# become easier than writing it in C/C++? A problem with C# like Java is that your code is only going to be as fast as the sandbox it is running in. I'm just curious, using NT is fine and dandy since you're a small business and don't need or want to fuddle with Unix systems all day. I'm just wondering how you came about your choice in language and whatnot.
Publishing houses actually used to be just that, a place that merely published a copyrighted work. However as time progressed and the market grew it became uncompetitive to merely publish the work so they said "Hey not only will we print the work, we'll distribute it and you'll get your money and we'll get ours". The problem arose from that when the contract was up the publisher was out of a cash cow and had to fight to retain publishing rights. Then someone somewhere had a brilliant idea, write up a contract that gave the publishing company sole juristiction over a work and in turn gave the creator a percentage of any money derived from their work. This let the publisher publish, distribute, and market the works someone else created. Eventually the whole business picked up this model and we've got the industries we've got. Anyone competing against the established industry has a LONG way to go since the big record labels/publishing houses can undercut just about anybody.
Like the other dude said, this isn't about Windows vs Linux it's about the cost of maintaining 400 fat clients vs the cost of maintaining 400 thin clients. Using 400 Windows clients costs you not only hardware and infrastructure (network, admins, repairs) but also costs you licenses for Windows and Office. Circumventing Microsoft saves you thousands in terms of software cost. Of course then you have to take into account the limitations using a publicly developed piece of software has. Does it fulfill the needs of your organization in its current state and if not will the cost of adding that function cost more than a prepackaged solution?
Scientific American had this article back in January. I think the SciAm article suggests an interesting point though. How many art forms have disappeared in the last three centuries due to the ever moving juggernaut that is progress? It's theorized that changes in trade led to a diminished amount of the carbide infused steel to reach blacksmiths which eventually led to no one being able to produce Damascus blades. We run into the same problem today, how many of you have a drive that can read 9" floppy disks?
As so many have pointed out the Buran looks a lot like NASA's SST. The Russians used a lot of design features of the SST because they were proven with hundreds of flights of the SST. Why waste a bunch of money of a off the wall shuttle concept when there's already a viable and proven design already in use by somebody else. Look at how much hassle and cash NASA's got to spend working on new shuttle designs.
What I want to know is what happened to the HOPE and Hermes developed by Japan and Europe respectively. Did they ever build scale models of either of those? I think I'd like a one person version of the Hermes to stick a deathray on and wreak destruction upon the Earth with it.
The blunted shapes on the nose and leading edges of the wings of the Buran (and space shuttle) create a pressure wave in front of them which acts as a heat transfer mechanism. The temperatures of the plasma on the forefront of this pressure wave can reach thousands of degrees but the air wall in front of the aerodynamic surfaces prevents a good portion of the heat from ever reaching the skin of the ship. Also the skin structure is a ceramic tile filled with glass spirals which results in an enormous heat conducting surface area. The aluminum skin under these tiles would vaporize without said tiles.