With how much full brightness screen usage and 2+ GB/mo of data usage? Sure, if I leave my phone in my pocket all day, don't look at it, and set it to only check my email twice an hour, I get 10 hrs easy.
But when I'm away from home, I use it like a portable computer. I get on average 5 emails an hour, an unknown quantity of facebook updates, facebook messenger, google talk, steam, steam chat, 2-10 google queries an hour, plus standard stuff like voice and text messages. My 2600mAh battery (Nexus S) runs flat in about 2.5 hrs unless I'm tethered to the wall.
I consider the battery simply a backup in case I'm away from a wall outlet for more than 15 minutes.
Maybe it's intermittent where you live; if I could run my AC for free during the day here in Dallas, the house would probably be cold enough by the time the sun sets that I could coast through till dawn and still have it below 78F in here. The electronics I run during the night would still keep my bill hovering around $35/mo, but that's $200/mo I'd be saving.
It's also $1.5 billion net income for the winner. That's nothing to sneeze at. 100 scientist salaries @ $100,000/yr is an extra $10 million a year in to the local economy. They will have kids, drive new cars, pay local school taxes and send their kids to private schools, buy new clothes, buy the best food, etc etc. The people who sell them luxuries will be able to buy medium quality goods, who in turn will be able to buy walmart/low quality goods. I'm not sure what the total improvement is, but adding a bunch of high end jobs have a huge effect on the entire community and generally raises the quality of life for all involved. I'd fight like hell for that too; if I lost, I know I'd have let my community down, and tens, if not hundreds of kids would lose the chance to go to college.
Sure, it's just money. Money buys a lot of things though.
Sure, but we've already been to the moon. It's rather bland. There's a reason why 2001: a space Odyssey in 1968 was the last film or tv show to prominently feature the moon - it's gray, bland, and boring. Sadly, Mars is just slightly less monochromatic.
Presumably, large portions of the lunar base would be underground. They've identified several areas on the moon that look like collapsed lava tunnels, which provide excellent radiation shielding. Also, a rather large amount of time is spent shielded by either the moon or the earth, roughly 50%. There are worse places to be irradiated.
Russia has something like 3x more manned spaceflight missions, and at least 3x more space stations than any other country. Hell, the ISS's primary module during it's infancy was quite literally MIR 2. They just had a spare space station lying around and decided to repurpose it.
It's also worth noting, that when China ramped up their manned spaceflight program, they modeled their space capsule after the diving-bell style Soyuz capsule, not the conical Mercury/Gemini/Apollo style that the US uses. There's something to be said for that.
Russia might have one of the worst income gaps in the world, but their space program is world class.
I wonder if the computer was waiting to see if the pressure subsided before the launch window closed.
In the Apollo era, I'm sure there were some automatic shutoffs, but I imagine a lot of data had to be monitored by humans, making these sorts of last half second aborts a lot less common.
It's also worth pointing out that SpaceX is developing a human rated rocket based on the same basic technology. It would be really hard to sell NASA, congress, and perhaps most importantly, the astronauts riding on top of the thing, if it blew up on the pad. An abort costs millions of dollars, but three days worth of delays is nothing compared to flushing six years worth of hard work down the drain just because they weren't overly cautious. Expect to see more delays more often in the future to avoid catastrophic failures during launch.
That's debatable, they didn't have an orbital rendezvous element, although there was a separation and docking stage after they had entered orbit together as a single unit. Docking in orbit with something that shares your exact orbit isn't terribly difficult; they sighted that with human eyes via a periscope and used manual thrusters. It's probably one of the last real example of pilots doing piloting in space. Everything since has been largely automated.
Right, but those dozen or two lines of code spit out your launch date/time. Sure, it's not hard for a computer, but your launch time is a fairly specific point that you can't stray from, which was my original point.
Once you have your launch time, you just give it a specific series of headings and specific impulse times and you'll be in the correct orbit; with final approach done separately once you've arrived in your parking orbit. If you launch 2-3 hours off from your computer-calculated launch time, you're going to burn up most/all of your reserve fuel trying to correct your orbit.
Go buy Kerbal Space Program, get a ship in orbit, then launch a second one to go chase after the first ship in orbit. Even if your launches are only a few hours apart, it's difficult to match orbit (speeding up to "catch up" with the ISS causes your orbit to go all egg shaped).
I've been playing that damn game for about 3 weeks now and I have yet to successfully complete an orbital rendezvous. Matching orbits is hard. Space is hard. If this shit were free and easy, North Korea would have a manned space station already.
NASA makes it look easy, but the fact of the matter is you've got objects zipping through low earth orbit at tens of thousands (17,500 mph generally), and if you're off by "only" 500mph, well, hope you're not on a collision course with the station. Imagine roughly the same result of your car hitting a brick wall at 500mph.
TL;DR you've got to launch that shit when you have to, no ifs, ands, or buts. Apollo moon missions don't have a rendezvous element so they had the option of launching during prime time.
I would really like to see smaller (32gb) ssd drives hard wired to the motherboard in laptops, with the option to add a second spinning drive in the open hd bay. Unfortunately two hard drives is only reserved for the upper most echelons of business laptops.
Marketer 1: "hey, we don't have enough budget to advertise on Facebook"
Marketer 2: "how do we reach the facebook crowd without spending money?"
"Marketer 1: I know! Let's do a press release that says we can't afford advertising on Facebook, but spin it as us not wanting to advertise on facebook"
Marketer 3: "that's a great idea! let's announce it just days before facebook's public IPO for maximum impact!"
I'm sure there's a term for this, but corporations generally go in to slow decline after the original, or most successful CEO leaves the company for whatever reason. Very rarely does their successor have the grasp of the market and internal workings from the ground up that the original guy did. While Ballmer wasn't able to expand Microsoft beyond it's current state, he's done an excellent job of keeping it comfortably where it is in the market. I don't think a new CEO could step in and make changes that Ballmer had considered, but then turned down, and be successful doing it.
Perhaps there's a growing star inside of microsoft, but if there is, I haven't heard of him/her yet; I think Google and Facebook siphoned off a lot of their top talent back in 2005-2006 during the boom years; there were a lot of news articles to that effect as well. Ballmer's not good for growth, but he's a safe bet until he retires.
I had this conversation with my friend the other day. I noticed most of my friends falling off gtalk, and asked my buddy about it; his response was "well, I still leave gtalk running, but mostly only talk to you and (other good friend) on it. everyone else is on fb messenger these days, in particular girls" which sort of sold me on the idea. Gtalk had critical mass for a few years, but the male:female ratio is about 1:1 on facebook, and most everyone you know on facebook already has the chat app installed either through their web browser, or through the facebook app. Most of my sailing contacts are on gtalk, who are also guys, but as a single male I find myself using fb messenger talking to females a lot more often. gtalk gets use perhaps once a week or so, and keeps getting used less and less.
Twitter is impossibly hard to follow on their website, especially long drawn out conversations, and its not terribly private, which is important in high school drama. SMS is just a poor replacement of instant messenger, but it's already preinstalled on all phones so the barrier to entry is low. FB messenger is also already preinstalled on most phones, as well as any computer with a web browser, and doesn't cost money. It's important to look at SMS as an instant messaging service, not a broadcast web service. All twitter is good for is networking among journalists and celeberty marketing.
Clearly you aren't a teenage girl. I worked with a girl in 2006 who had just graduated high school and was in community college, she would send something like 1200 texts a week. 20 friends x ~15 simultaneous conversations, with all the "lol"s and "wut r u doing?"s and "im bored"s each using their own message, plus response, general drama etc... adds up. I probably sent 1200 "text messages" a week over AIM when I was in high school. It's just that mobile phones didn't exist yet for my age group, nor did their SMS functionality work across networks yet.
Yes, but I think a lot of people are still stuck on legacy family plans from 2004 or so, so they're paying per message still. Unlimited text messaging has been $5/mo for about 6 years now, and in the last 4 years most single user/phone plans that have data also have unlimited SMS. To buy a new phone on a new plan these days, you'd almost have to go out of your way to pay-per-SMS unless you're a cheap bastard trying to avoid paying carrier's SMS tax.
My roommate (who can well afford it) is trying to avoid the SMS tax on his pay as you go phone, so I have to email him if I want a timely response, and hope he's near a computer. It's really annoying if I want to see if we're low on dishwashing detergent or whatever.
Wouldn't it be easier to just simulate the entire city on a supercomputer? And when it's not calculating wattage of incandescent vs led lightbulbs, it could do something, oh, I don't know, useful, like curing cancer?
Which is why they fall back to something like Gnome 3 if the system can't handle it. If you don't like the idea of all the eye candy turned on, you can just default to Gnome 3 and call it a day. I don't know what they call it, but it's probably something along the lines of "opt-out rich computing experience".
TL;DR they addressed your issues, I don't understand what you're complaining about
My 2009 era netbook is still running 10.04, which is the last version of Ubuntu to have the "best" Netbook Remix (pre-Unity), and will probably continue to run 10.04 until either the battery completely wears out, or the screen breaks. I have a much older 2003 era laptop that runs hardy heron (2008 release) just great.
Generally I don't recommend upgrading beyond the first LTS release of Ubuntu for your system, especially mobile systems. They just can't handle it. Too much damn feature creep. Really, unless you do a major hardware upgrade (wireless networking or video card come to mind), there's no substantial reason to upgrade the OS as well.
Which is a great reason why they shouldn't support older graphics chipsets. I'm reasonably sure the intel HD3000, and soon HD4000 that's in 50% of all laptops can more than handle the basic 3d gui tasks ubuntu throws at them. You don't need to break a bunch of functionality to support chipsets older than the crappy GMA950.
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With how much full brightness screen usage and 2+ GB/mo of data usage? Sure, if I leave my phone in my pocket all day, don't look at it, and set it to only check my email twice an hour, I get 10 hrs easy.
But when I'm away from home, I use it like a portable computer. I get on average 5 emails an hour, an unknown quantity of facebook updates, facebook messenger, google talk, steam, steam chat, 2-10 google queries an hour, plus standard stuff like voice and text messages. My 2600mAh battery (Nexus S) runs flat in about 2.5 hrs unless I'm tethered to the wall.
I consider the battery simply a backup in case I'm away from a wall outlet for more than 15 minutes.
Maybe it's intermittent where you live; if I could run my AC for free during the day here in Dallas, the house would probably be cold enough by the time the sun sets that I could coast through till dawn and still have it below 78F in here. The electronics I run during the night would still keep my bill hovering around $35/mo, but that's $200/mo I'd be saving.
It's also $1.5 billion net income for the winner. That's nothing to sneeze at. 100 scientist salaries @ $100,000/yr is an extra $10 million a year in to the local economy. They will have kids, drive new cars, pay local school taxes and send their kids to private schools, buy new clothes, buy the best food, etc etc. The people who sell them luxuries will be able to buy medium quality goods, who in turn will be able to buy walmart/low quality goods. I'm not sure what the total improvement is, but adding a bunch of high end jobs have a huge effect on the entire community and generally raises the quality of life for all involved. I'd fight like hell for that too; if I lost, I know I'd have let my community down, and tens, if not hundreds of kids would lose the chance to go to college.
Sure, it's just money. Money buys a lot of things though.
Sure, but we've already been to the moon. It's rather bland. There's a reason why 2001: a space Odyssey in 1968 was the last film or tv show to prominently feature the moon - it's gray, bland, and boring. Sadly, Mars is just slightly less monochromatic.
So in terms of harmful radiation, how is that split? 60/40 for solar/cosmic radiation? I would have guessed 80/20 or more.
Presumably, large portions of the lunar base would be underground. They've identified several areas on the moon that look like collapsed lava tunnels, which provide excellent radiation shielding. Also, a rather large amount of time is spent shielded by either the moon or the earth, roughly 50%. There are worse places to be irradiated.
Russia has something like 3x more manned spaceflight missions, and at least 3x more space stations than any other country. Hell, the ISS's primary module during it's infancy was quite literally MIR 2. They just had a spare space station lying around and decided to repurpose it.
It's also worth noting, that when China ramped up their manned spaceflight program, they modeled their space capsule after the diving-bell style Soyuz capsule, not the conical Mercury/Gemini/Apollo style that the US uses. There's something to be said for that.
Russia might have one of the worst income gaps in the world, but their space program is world class.
Sputnik was a hollowed out ICBM warhead. I can only guess the political reasoning behind doing what they did, besides national pride/one-upsmanship.
I wonder if the computer was waiting to see if the pressure subsided before the launch window closed.
In the Apollo era, I'm sure there were some automatic shutoffs, but I imagine a lot of data had to be monitored by humans, making these sorts of last half second aborts a lot less common.
It's also worth pointing out that SpaceX is developing a human rated rocket based on the same basic technology. It would be really hard to sell NASA, congress, and perhaps most importantly, the astronauts riding on top of the thing, if it blew up on the pad. An abort costs millions of dollars, but three days worth of delays is nothing compared to flushing six years worth of hard work down the drain just because they weren't overly cautious. Expect to see more delays more often in the future to avoid catastrophic failures during launch.
That's debatable, they didn't have an orbital rendezvous element, although there was a separation and docking stage after they had entered orbit together as a single unit. Docking in orbit with something that shares your exact orbit isn't terribly difficult; they sighted that with human eyes via a periscope and used manual thrusters. It's probably one of the last real example of pilots doing piloting in space. Everything since has been largely automated.
Right, but those dozen or two lines of code spit out your launch date/time. Sure, it's not hard for a computer, but your launch time is a fairly specific point that you can't stray from, which was my original point.
Once you have your launch time, you just give it a specific series of headings and specific impulse times and you'll be in the correct orbit; with final approach done separately once you've arrived in your parking orbit. If you launch 2-3 hours off from your computer-calculated launch time, you're going to burn up most/all of your reserve fuel trying to correct your orbit.
Go buy Kerbal Space Program, get a ship in orbit, then launch a second one to go chase after the first ship in orbit. Even if your launches are only a few hours apart, it's difficult to match orbit (speeding up to "catch up" with the ISS causes your orbit to go all egg shaped).
I've been playing that damn game for about 3 weeks now and I have yet to successfully complete an orbital rendezvous. Matching orbits is hard. Space is hard. If this shit were free and easy, North Korea would have a manned space station already.
NASA makes it look easy, but the fact of the matter is you've got objects zipping through low earth orbit at tens of thousands (17,500 mph generally), and if you're off by "only" 500mph, well, hope you're not on a collision course with the station. Imagine roughly the same result of your car hitting a brick wall at 500mph.
TL;DR you've got to launch that shit when you have to, no ifs, ands, or buts. Apollo moon missions don't have a rendezvous element so they had the option of launching during prime time.
I'm relatively sure that feature is only found in business class laptops, as well.
There's a reason why Texas' legislature only meets every other year (excepting emergency sessions)
I would really like to see smaller (32gb) ssd drives hard wired to the motherboard in laptops, with the option to add a second spinning drive in the open hd bay. Unfortunately two hard drives is only reserved for the upper most echelons of business laptops.
Marketer 1: "hey, we don't have enough budget to advertise on Facebook"
Marketer 2: "how do we reach the facebook crowd without spending money?"
"Marketer 1: I know! Let's do a press release that says we can't afford advertising on Facebook, but spin it as us not wanting to advertise on facebook"
Marketer 3: "that's a great idea! let's announce it just days before facebook's public IPO for maximum impact!"
I'm sure there's a term for this, but corporations generally go in to slow decline after the original, or most successful CEO leaves the company for whatever reason. Very rarely does their successor have the grasp of the market and internal workings from the ground up that the original guy did. While Ballmer wasn't able to expand Microsoft beyond it's current state, he's done an excellent job of keeping it comfortably where it is in the market. I don't think a new CEO could step in and make changes that Ballmer had considered, but then turned down, and be successful doing it.
Perhaps there's a growing star inside of microsoft, but if there is, I haven't heard of him/her yet; I think Google and Facebook siphoned off a lot of their top talent back in 2005-2006 during the boom years; there were a lot of news articles to that effect as well. Ballmer's not good for growth, but he's a safe bet until he retires.
WHAT
chromatic abberation in MY 1.21 gigapixel space photo?
this was NOT the future I was promised
send it back
I had this conversation with my friend the other day. I noticed most of my friends falling off gtalk, and asked my buddy about it; his response was "well, I still leave gtalk running, but mostly only talk to you and (other good friend) on it. everyone else is on fb messenger these days, in particular girls" which sort of sold me on the idea. Gtalk had critical mass for a few years, but the male:female ratio is about 1:1 on facebook, and most everyone you know on facebook already has the chat app installed either through their web browser, or through the facebook app. Most of my sailing contacts are on gtalk, who are also guys, but as a single male I find myself using fb messenger talking to females a lot more often. gtalk gets use perhaps once a week or so, and keeps getting used less and less.
Twitter is impossibly hard to follow on their website, especially long drawn out conversations, and its not terribly private, which is important in high school drama. SMS is just a poor replacement of instant messenger, but it's already preinstalled on all phones so the barrier to entry is low. FB messenger is also already preinstalled on most phones, as well as any computer with a web browser, and doesn't cost money. It's important to look at SMS as an instant messaging service, not a broadcast web service. All twitter is good for is networking among journalists and celeberty marketing.
Clearly you aren't a teenage girl. I worked with a girl in 2006 who had just graduated high school and was in community college, she would send something like 1200 texts a week. 20 friends x ~15 simultaneous conversations, with all the "lol"s and "wut r u doing?"s and "im bored"s each using their own message, plus response, general drama etc... adds up. I probably sent 1200 "text messages" a week over AIM when I was in high school. It's just that mobile phones didn't exist yet for my age group, nor did their SMS functionality work across networks yet.
Yes, but I think a lot of people are still stuck on legacy family plans from 2004 or so, so they're paying per message still. Unlimited text messaging has been $5/mo for about 6 years now, and in the last 4 years most single user/phone plans that have data also have unlimited SMS. To buy a new phone on a new plan these days, you'd almost have to go out of your way to pay-per-SMS unless you're a cheap bastard trying to avoid paying carrier's SMS tax.
My roommate (who can well afford it) is trying to avoid the SMS tax on his pay as you go phone, so I have to email him if I want a timely response, and hope he's near a computer. It's really annoying if I want to see if we're low on dishwashing detergent or whatever.
Wouldn't it be easier to just simulate the entire city on a supercomputer? And when it's not calculating wattage of incandescent vs led lightbulbs, it could do something, oh, I don't know, useful, like curing cancer?
Which is why they fall back to something like Gnome 3 if the system can't handle it. If you don't like the idea of all the eye candy turned on, you can just default to Gnome 3 and call it a day. I don't know what they call it, but it's probably something along the lines of "opt-out rich computing experience".
TL;DR they addressed your issues, I don't understand what you're complaining about
My 2009 era netbook is still running 10.04, which is the last version of Ubuntu to have the "best" Netbook Remix (pre-Unity), and will probably continue to run 10.04 until either the battery completely wears out, or the screen breaks. I have a much older 2003 era laptop that runs hardy heron (2008 release) just great.
Generally I don't recommend upgrading beyond the first LTS release of Ubuntu for your system, especially mobile systems. They just can't handle it. Too much damn feature creep. Really, unless you do a major hardware upgrade (wireless networking or video card come to mind), there's no substantial reason to upgrade the OS as well.
Which is a great reason why they shouldn't support older graphics chipsets. I'm reasonably sure the intel HD3000, and soon HD4000 that's in 50% of all laptops can more than handle the basic 3d gui tasks ubuntu throws at them. You don't need to break a bunch of functionality to support chipsets older than the crappy GMA950.