For a show with such a strong military orientation, it sure was unrealistic as hell.
Were they fighter pilots? Or groud troops?
If you're going to do a "touchy-feely" sci fi series like Farscape or Star Trek, you can afford to bend reality a bit.
IMO - if you can't add a little "realism" to your sci-fi show, then don't bother producing or airing it. I don't want to waste my time watching another "touchy-feely" drama with a futuristic setting, that's going to be cancelled in less than 20 episodes.
Damn, that could also apply to most Christian Rock songs too. . . .
Re:Here's a way better solution.
on
Son of Concorde
·
· Score: 1
The A-12/YF-12a/SR-71 was designed in the 1950's, with engineering ingenuity and slide rules. No computers.
However, this plane was incredibly expensive to fly, on a per-mission basis. So much so, that it was scrapped, because designing, launching, and operating space surveillance was MUCH cheaper.
But the great thing about the Blackbird was it's extraordinarily low fuel consumption, on a per-mile basis. You'd think THAT is the technology these airlines would want to grab ahold of. It basically requires mach 2+ speeds to attain that level of efficiency. Then you get a plane that's capable of flying 3000-5000 miles without refuelling. Unfortunately, all the other technologies required to deal with those high altitudes and temperatures were what drove the costs up so high. (on long flights, the pilots would heat their meals by putting it against the cockpit window).
Re:Applications for space flight
on
Son of Concorde
·
· Score: 1
Wrong. Trust me. The BIGGEST cost to space flight is the safety testing. Each individual vehicle. Over and over and over again, whether they get it right or not. Hundreds of tests for one flight. Ain't cheap. But it's cheaper than having a bird come down in a populated area.
Yeah, but afterwards, Ownership of Mars will be transferred to Halliburton, and the Social Security Trust fund will be diverted to pay for the exploration and infrastructure development.
In other words: Worst case scenario: Apple ditches BSD subsystem - (or asks users to pay extra license fee for the privilege) - and ships Mach/Cocoa/Carbon. The question is - since a lot of important system-level processes rely on BSD, how much can they keep and not infringe? And how much would they need to re-impliment? (In a worst-case scenario).
On the other hand.. . Apple probably does have more lawyers than SCO has employees. . .
My dual G5's CPU and cooling takes up approximately half the interior volume of the case. While it's a very slick-looking case, and very easy to get into, and very easy to do simple things like add RAM or a hard drive - there's a lot of other tasks (like adding more than one hard drive) that are nigh-impossible. Tasks that Apple has deemed, you really oughtn't to be messing with. But I digress. The point is; the dual G5's are frickin huge. iMac? Non-trivial - but those Apple guys are pretty sharp. Laptop? I don't think so. They'll need some help from IBM (ie. a *different* chip! most likely binary compatability, with a different capability) PDA/Cellphone? ya right.
My ancient and massively (and expensively upgraded) beige G3 (G4), has finally given up the ghost - in a nasty and very slow way; turns out that there's something wrong with the logic board that causes it to drain the PRAM battery in the space of a couple of weeks - it won't recharge it. Hence, I'll lose settings, and occasionally not be able to boot. Which is okay, because booting takes a good solid 3 minutes.
So I bought a Dual 2ghz G5. With the last of my dotcom-bust stock. (401k notwithstanding).
What can I say that they haven't already said on a zillion review sites, and Ars?
I was not disappointed. I was presented with the dilemma of where to put some of my old components (no room in this HUGE case for any regular IDE drives? no room in my tapped-out budget to buy some external FW800 cases.)
(and it's gonna cost me an arm and a leg to have a contracter come out here and put the wall back on my house.)
PDA/Cellphone and Camera/Cellphone combos are a great idea. They solve the portable storage problem. Instead of storing your photos or PDA info on the device (ie. constant power drain to keep them in RAM - or expensive and slow NVRAM), you dial in through the phone network and store your data on a "server".
Having worked on a couple of backup/replication products, I can say that there are many, many different ways to do this. Probably one of the neatest ways I saw (probably NT only) was to implement a "filter driver" (NTFS is implemented as a filter driver - it's a Microsoft term). The filter driver our backup product used would intercept write calls, and then for file blocks that were changed, copy only those to the backup copy. Only a bit more intelligence would be required at this level to work that into a versioning system, instead of duplicating a change to a backup copy, instead, it'd would create a delta file. The disk would only store deltas - albeit fairly inefficient deltas. But for a multi-gigabyte file with just a few byte-changes, it would save on space enormously, and save the time it takes to scan through the entire file for just the few bytes that changed. The extra storage space over the latter scenario is worth the overhead, especially since IO is already broken down into blocks by the filter driver.
There's also different logic you want to use to handle other types of edits. Like a deletion - that effectively shifts the bits from that point in your file onward, which would create a huge list of changed blocks, that really aren't changed - so you do pattern-matching, and instead, only duplicate the block that contains the deletion, and represent the shifted blocks thereafter.
Then if there's an insertion, same deal.
The real question is, what's better, a forward delta or reverse delta? With a forward delta, you keep your entire original file version on line, and store changes as deltas - and if someone wants the latest version, or an earlier version, you've got to reconstruct the file. With reverse delta, you put the overhead up front, and construct the latest version of the file intact (second, latest, because the latest is the actual file). Then for progressively earlier versions, you just apply successive deltas. The oldest file takes the most overhead to reconstruct, since it's the least likely version a person would want to get to. Basically, these two methods determine where the overhead is. I favor the reverse-delta method, because, even though it's slower up-front, it saves time when you need to roll back by one version - the most likely scenario. Ideally, the user could configure the system to maybe keep a few complete copies of the latest three versions or so, and just deltas of older versions. This would take up more space, but save time when rolling back.
As implemented as a backup product, of course, you need a database to track all the changes. But as implemented as a file system extension - the deltas can be stored natively, using filesystem metadata. All those years working on products like this - I thought this would be the coolest way to do it. But nobody wanted to pursue that, because, well, unless you're an OS vendor - there's no profit in writing a filesystem that's just going to be pushed out by the defacto standard filesystem anyway.
I'm not as well-versed into how Linux/UFS works, so I don't know how this would be implemented on Linux.
"According to some theatre techs that I know, this technique is extensively used in theatre and television where a light failure could ruin a show."
. . . also used in photocopiers. It's the dreaded "preheat" you have to wait for when the copier hasn't been used in some time.
Of course, for a show, they'll preheat the stagelights (I think this is really only used for those spotlights, not the regular stage lights) prior to ths start of the show, and then keep em on standby.
I, for one, would really like to know if there ARE, in fact, any patents standing in the way of such chemistry research.
If some group of Plutocratic Lawyers is sitting on an overly broad submarine patent, similar to the ones commonly discussed here on slashdot, which is acting as a barrier to finding a decent energy storage technology - then that's just another reason, and a crucially important one to every man, woman, and child on the planet, that our bassackwards system of patent law needs real reform, and like, YESTERDAY.
So the obvious solution is to account for the increasing entropy (fundamental laws of thermodynamics are pretty important, I guess) - and make the gate so it can function on a wide range of charge levels, and when the stored charge reaches a certain low level (less than the threshold required for a reliable 0->1 switch), then dump that charge and ask for a new one.
The single most dangerous thing about flying isn't pilot error. It's accountant error.
When an accountant decides; "hey, if we just cut costs in maintenance.. .." or "we need to hire cheaper pilots so our labor costs aren't so high. . . " or "lets work hard on union busting among the security guys. . . "
Lots of bad things could happen.
(what the pilot in Iowa did was called "porpoising" - he used the wing engines to steer - because the rudder was gone, because the tail engine's main rotor exploded and severed ALL THREE redundant hydraulic lines, because some damned accountant made the decision to reduce inspection frequency!).
There's too much of a gravity well to make strip-mining profitable.
The barriers to human survival in that environment make it just as costly to live there as on the moon.
Travel times are a bitch.
And terraforming just AIN'T GONNA WORK. Mars has no magnetic field. Any atmosphere you create will be scrubbed right back off by the same solar wind that's been scrubbing it off for millions of years.
Actually, probably a FAR FAR better way of transporting the energy is to convert the electricity on the moon into antimatter (via a giant particle acclerator), then physically transport the antimatter to earth, in containment, via the old L5-society mass-driver/mass-catcher solution.
Then on earth, the antimatter can be conveniently reacted with matter back into energy. It's an extremely compact method of physical energy storage.
It's just a different way of looking at the world.
The "hippies" see the world, all of human civilization, as a system. Like a machine. We'll use a car as an analogy. They see that without somebody doing something about the exhaust, and the need for gasoline, the passenger compartment will fill up with smoke and everyone will die. Unless everyone pitches in and puts an exhaust pipe on the engine.
The "straights" see the world, as a system, and they see that they can use this system to their advantage. They happen to be lucky enough to be sitting in the seat next to the window that rolls down. So they won't die, but everyone else will. Why should they pay to put in an exhaust pipe. Those lazy bastards sitting in the other seats can damn well build their own roll-down windows. On the other hand, when everyone else dies from the car exhaust in the passenger compartment, he can just dump their bodies, and the car will belong to him alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately, we haven't reached the "Soylent Green" methods of crowd control yet.
"Bring in the Scoops!"
Bleh!
What a boring show.
For a show with such a strong military orientation, it sure was unrealistic as hell.
Were they fighter pilots?
Or groud troops?
If you're going to do a "touchy-feely" sci fi series like Farscape or Star Trek, you can afford to bend reality a bit.
IMO - if you can't add a little "realism" to your sci-fi show, then don't bother producing or airing it. I don't want to waste my time watching another "touchy-feely" drama with a futuristic setting, that's going to be cancelled in less than 20 episodes.
Well, I bet when one of the main characters decided to "correct" the bible, that pissed off one of the conservative upper management types at FOX.
Damn, that could also apply to most Christian Rock songs too. . . .
The A-12/YF-12a/SR-71 was designed in the 1950's, with engineering ingenuity and slide rules. No computers.
However, this plane was incredibly expensive to fly, on a per-mission basis. So much so, that it was scrapped, because designing, launching, and operating space surveillance was MUCH cheaper.
But the great thing about the Blackbird was it's extraordinarily low fuel consumption, on a per-mile basis. You'd think THAT is the technology these airlines would want to grab ahold of.
It basically requires mach 2+ speeds to attain that level of efficiency. Then you get a plane that's capable of flying 3000-5000 miles without refuelling.
Unfortunately, all the other technologies required to deal with those high altitudes and temperatures were what drove the costs up so high.
(on long flights, the pilots would heat their meals by putting it against the cockpit window).
Wrong. Trust me. The BIGGEST cost to space flight is the safety testing. Each individual vehicle. Over and over and over again, whether they get it right or not. Hundreds of tests for one flight. Ain't cheap. But it's cheaper than having a bird come down in a populated area.
Yeah, but afterwards, Ownership of Mars will be transferred to Halliburton, and the Social Security Trust fund will be diverted to pay for the exploration and infrastructure development.
In other words:
Worst case scenario:
Apple ditches BSD subsystem - (or asks users to pay extra license fee for the privilege) - and ships Mach/Cocoa/Carbon. The question is - since a lot of important system-level processes rely on BSD, how much can they keep and not infringe? And how much would they need to re-impliment? (In a worst-case scenario).
On the other hand.. . Apple probably does have more lawyers than SCO has employees. . .
My dual G5's CPU and cooling takes up approximately half the interior volume of the case.
While it's a very slick-looking case, and very easy to get into, and very easy to do simple things like add RAM or a hard drive - there's a lot of other tasks (like adding more than one hard drive) that are nigh-impossible. Tasks that Apple has deemed, you really oughtn't to be messing with. But I digress. The point is; the dual G5's are frickin huge.
iMac? Non-trivial - but those Apple guys are pretty sharp.
Laptop? I don't think so. They'll need some help from IBM (ie. a *different* chip! most likely binary compatability, with a different capability)
PDA/Cellphone? ya right.
My ancient and massively (and expensively upgraded) beige G3 (G4), has finally given up the ghost - in a nasty and very slow way; turns out that there's something wrong with the logic board that causes it to drain the PRAM battery in the space of a couple of weeks - it won't recharge it. Hence, I'll lose settings, and occasionally not be able to boot. Which is okay, because booting takes a good solid 3 minutes.
So I bought a Dual 2ghz G5. With the last of my dotcom-bust stock. (401k notwithstanding).
What can I say that they haven't already said on a zillion review sites, and Ars?
I was not disappointed.
I was presented with the dilemma of where to put some of my old components (no room in this HUGE case for any regular IDE drives? no room in my tapped-out budget to buy some external FW800 cases.)
(and it's gonna cost me an arm and a leg to have a contracter come out here and put the wall back on my house.)
I can think of one thing we GOTTA do with Hubble before we de-orbit it:
Point the big end at the sun, and see if we can burn some ants!
The platinum ain't worth that. He's got to calculate the cost to actually extract and transport that material, and subtract it.
PDA/Cellphone and Camera/Cellphone combos are a great idea. They solve the portable storage problem. Instead of storing your photos or PDA info on the device (ie. constant power drain to keep them in RAM - or expensive and slow NVRAM), you dial in through the phone network and store your data on a "server".
Having worked on a couple of backup/replication products, I can say that there are many, many different ways to do this. Probably one of the neatest ways I saw (probably NT only) was to implement a "filter driver" (NTFS is implemented as a filter driver - it's a Microsoft term). The filter driver our backup product used would intercept write calls, and then for file blocks that were changed, copy only those to the backup copy. Only a bit more intelligence would be required at this level to work that into a versioning system, instead of duplicating a change to a backup copy, instead, it'd would create a delta file. The disk would only store deltas - albeit fairly inefficient deltas. But for a multi-gigabyte file with just a few byte-changes, it would save on space enormously, and save the time it takes to scan through the entire file for just the few bytes that changed. The extra storage space over the latter scenario is worth the overhead, especially since IO is already broken down into blocks by the filter driver.
There's also different logic you want to use to handle other types of edits. Like a deletion - that effectively shifts the bits from that point in your file onward, which would create a huge list of changed blocks, that really aren't changed - so you do pattern-matching, and instead, only duplicate the block that contains the deletion, and represent the shifted blocks thereafter.
Then if there's an insertion, same deal.
The real question is, what's better, a forward delta or reverse delta? With a forward delta, you keep your entire original file version on line, and store changes as deltas - and if someone wants the latest version, or an earlier version, you've got to reconstruct the file. With reverse delta, you put the overhead up front, and construct the latest version of the file intact (second, latest, because the latest is the actual file). Then for progressively earlier versions, you just apply successive deltas. The oldest file takes the most overhead to reconstruct, since it's the least likely version a person would want to get to. Basically, these two methods determine where the overhead is. I favor the reverse-delta method, because, even though it's slower up-front, it saves time when you need to roll back by one version - the most likely scenario. Ideally, the user could configure the system to maybe keep a few complete copies of the latest three versions or so, and just deltas of older versions. This would take up more space, but save time when rolling back.
As implemented as a backup product, of course, you need a database to track all the changes. But as implemented as a file system extension - the deltas can be stored natively, using filesystem metadata. All those years working on products like this - I thought this would be the coolest way to do it. But nobody wanted to pursue that, because, well, unless you're an OS vendor - there's no profit in writing a filesystem that's just going to be pushed out by the defacto standard filesystem anyway.
I'm not as well-versed into how Linux/UFS works, so I don't know how this would be implemented on Linux.
THe other disadvantage is the manual maintenance of the wet cells (same deal for off-grid home-solar power).
"According to some theatre techs that I know, this technique is extensively used in theatre and television where a light failure could ruin a show."
. . . also used in photocopiers. It's the dreaded "preheat" you have to wait for when the copier hasn't been used in some time.
Of course, for a show, they'll preheat the stagelights (I think this is really only used for those spotlights, not the regular stage lights) prior to ths start of the show, and then keep em on standby.
I, for one, would really like to know if there ARE, in fact, any patents standing in the way of such chemistry research.
If some group of Plutocratic Lawyers is sitting on an overly broad submarine patent, similar to the ones commonly discussed here on slashdot, which is acting as a barrier to finding a decent energy storage technology - then that's just another reason, and a crucially important one to every man, woman, and child on the planet, that our bassackwards system of patent law needs real reform, and like, YESTERDAY.
So the obvious solution is to account for the increasing entropy (fundamental laws of thermodynamics are pretty important, I guess) - and make the gate so it can function on a wide range of charge levels, and when the stored charge reaches a certain low level (less than the threshold required for a reliable 0->1 switch), then dump that charge and ask for a new one.
I suppose THAT'S the real trick.
I recently saw a local job advertisement.
It was for an assembly language programmer, who "must have good working knowledge of automotive technology".
The guy was apparently going to be programming FI computers for custom car applications.
The pay?
$20/hr. 20 hrs/week.
No - I do not think programmers are overpaid in this day and age.
No.
." or
The single most dangerous thing about flying isn't pilot error. It's accountant error.
When an accountant decides;
"hey, if we just cut costs in maintenance.. .
"we need to hire cheaper pilots so our labor costs aren't so high. . . " or
"lets work hard on union busting among the security guys. . . "
Lots of bad things could happen.
(what the pilot in Iowa did was called "porpoising" - he used the wing engines to steer - because the rudder was gone, because the tail engine's main rotor exploded and severed ALL THREE redundant hydraulic lines, because some damned accountant made the decision to reduce inspection frequency!).
Damn, we need another man like him. Instead, we got another Bush.
No.
Mars is a complete waste of time.
There's too much of a gravity well to make strip-mining profitable.
The barriers to human survival in that environment make it just as costly to live there as on the moon.
Travel times are a bitch.
And terraforming just AIN'T GONNA WORK.
Mars has no magnetic field. Any atmosphere you create will be scrubbed right back off by the same solar wind that's been scrubbing it off for millions of years.
Actually, probably a FAR FAR better way of transporting the energy is to convert the electricity on the moon into antimatter (via a giant particle acclerator), then physically transport the antimatter to earth, in containment, via the old L5-society mass-driver/mass-catcher solution.
Then on earth, the antimatter can be conveniently reacted with matter back into energy. It's an extremely compact method of physical energy storage.
Hell, the KID covered this in the FIRST movie:
"Don't listen to these hypocrites. To deny our impulses, is to deny that which makes us human."
But I thought it was FREE WILL that made us human! Which is it?
It's just a different way of looking at the world.
The "hippies" see the world, all of human civilization, as a system. Like a machine. We'll use a car as an analogy. They see that without somebody doing something about the exhaust, and the need for gasoline, the passenger compartment will fill up with smoke and everyone will die. Unless everyone pitches in and puts an exhaust pipe on the engine.
The "straights" see the world, as a system, and they see that they can use this system to their advantage. They happen to be lucky enough to be sitting in the seat next to the window that rolls down. So they won't die, but everyone else will. Why should they pay to put in an exhaust pipe. Those lazy bastards sitting in the other seats can damn well build their own roll-down windows. On the other hand, when everyone else dies from the car exhaust in the passenger compartment, he can just dump their bodies, and the car will belong to him alone.