Even so, the number of teams that choose Lisp each year and the relatively poor showing of those teams implies to me that the amount of advantage Lisp provides is not as great as some (e.g., Paul Graham) would have us believe.
Yeah, that puzzles me as well.
Dylan is in essence a version of Lisp that happens to be written in a C/Pascal-like syntax instead of S-expressions. My friends and I have been doing pretty well using it, winning ICFP prizes in two of the last four years (2nd place in 2001 and Judge's Prize in 2003).
That's a single team's record.
There were 12 teams using Common Lisp and 9 teams using Scheme this year. I don't think we're any smarter than the other Lisp teams. In fact 7 of those 21 beat us this year, which is pretty much the same as our overall position in the field. So if our Dylan team is picking up prizes from time to time I don't know why other Lisp dialects aren't. It's a mystery.
We (DylAntz) were there, we just seem to have had an "off" year, managing only 25th out of 87 in the lightning (24 hour) contest and 137th out of 361 in the main (72 hour) contest.
It would be nice to win every year, but actually I'm pretty happy with a record that goes:
I think this year's contest results had very little to do with how good your chosen programming language is. Instead it was all about how well you could get around the limitations of the ant instruction set and devise strategies for your ants to follow.
Sure, you could make a compiler that gave you a language with loops and subroutines and (very limited) variables and turned that into ant code -- and we did that -- but in the end you had to have something smart you wanted to get your ants to do. We spent a lot of time on making out ants explore the world and gather food efficiently (including raiding the opponent's nest), but our strategy for defening our own nest turned out to be inadequate.
For some reason the results say we used Perl, not Dylan. I don't know why. It's true that we had a quick&dirty ant assembler written in Perl that some of us used to play around with strategies while we waited for the proper compiler (written in Dylan) to be ready, but that wasn't used for the final submission.
We submitted the following programs all written in Dylan:
- world simulator library - very fast simulator (2 sec for 100,000 rounds) - slow simulator with OpenGL interface for visualization - high level compiler for ant brains
Congratulations to the winners and we're looking forward to next year's contest!
This article makes me wonder: just how fuel-efficient can an aircraft be?
The most efficient aircraft are sailplanes. Modern ones, such as the ASH-25 or Stemme S-10 have lift-to-drag ratios of around 60:1 at around 60 knots (110 km/h, 70 mph). That means at about 500 kg all up weight with two people on board they require about 8 kg (18 lbs) of thrust in order to fly.
Typical lift-to-drag ratios for other aircraft are:
18 - 20: large jetliner 12: small single engine plane (e.g. Cessna 172) 10: hang glider 5: parasal
Both these sailplanes have engines (optional in the case of the ASH-25) that allow them to take off and climb rapidly. These engines are much too powerful for really good fuel economy but on most days a skilled pilot can fly one of these aircraft hundreds of km without using the engine at all, just by making an intelligent choice of the route to fly and how fast to fly it. All they need is average air movement upward of about 100 feet (30m) per minute -- about 1 mph of upwards "wind" -- in order to fly indefinitely without using fuel at all.
Even without skill, you can use the engine to climb rapidly to, say, 10,000 ft, and then glide with the engine turned off for approximately 200 km before starting the engine again. In this way you can travel large distances using very little fuel, at speeds higher than you can acheive in a car.
XCode uses distcc for it's distributed compiling, distcc isn't rendezvous aware by default though, so you'll have to configure it yourself
The distcc that comes with XCode has been modified to use rendezvous.
It's not tied to XCode in any way. At work we're using XCode's distcc to distribute regular makefile (actually SCONS) builds around a bunch of dual proc G5's. Works really nice.
There's an old story from Analog (a science-fiction magazine) titled 'Amateurs' which reminds me quite a bit of the guys at Scaled Composites, except in 'Amateurs', they didn't have a government prize to spur them on
You appear to think that the X Prize has been put up by the government.
This is not correct.
The X Prize is completely private. Peter Diamantes has raised several million dollars from private donations. This has then been used to pay the premium on an insurance policy, with the insurance company essentially betting that the X Prize will not be won before the end of this year, and Diamantes (and the competitors) betting that it will be.
The government is not involved in any way other than in getting out of the way (which the FAA is doing a pretty good job of -- a year ago there was no legal way to make a flight such as yesterdays one).
While the X-Prize is a great thing -- and I'm personally crossing the Pacific this weekend to watch SS1's flight on Monday -- the current and upcoming generation of private spacecraft are still a very long way from being able to visit an orbiting hotel.
The good news though is that some companies do have a business plan for how to get from here to there in incremental, low risk, steps, and while making a profit along the way. XCOR, for example, has such a plan, financing later development with suborbital tourist flights and a few small satellite launches and sounding rocket replacement flights.
Scaled Composites may well have such a plan, though they haven't said yet what it is. But a story in today's Dominion Post (Wellington, NZ) originally from the Washington Post) (free registration required) quotes Burt Rutan as saying that suborbital flights are likely to start at US$30k - US$50k and drop to US$8k - US$12k in a second generation vehicle. That's a) a lot lower than the US$98k Space Adventures is planning to sell XCORs initial flights for, and b) indication that Scaled do in fact have an ongoing plan (d'oh).
is can NASA take a rocket up 100 km with 3 people, take it down, and put it back up again within 2 weeks?
No they can't. NASA can't do it today, and they never have done it (or been able to) in the past. And no one else has ever done it either.
The closest is the X15 flights in the 1960's, some of which went up 100 km, but with only one person instead of three. I don't know whether the X15 ever went 100 km up twice in two weeks, but they probably could have done that (with one person) if they wanted to.
You see a lot of panicy stuff about how dangerous all that electrical energy in the batteries is, but when it comes down to it if the car has the same range as a similar normal car then there is exactly the same amount of energy in the batteries as there would normally be in a car's fuel tank.
But these aren't pure electric cars. They only have a few km of range on the batteries and most of the energy is in the fuel tank just like any other car.
If it is good enough to inspire fanatical loyalty in some, why hasn't it been good enough to win over the rest of the world?
This really doesn't bother me. Just about everything I do or like seems to be a tiny minority thing.
Apple computers have always been far more hackable (in sofware -- I'm a software guy, not a hardware guy) than the alternatives, but most people don't care, or mistakenly think they're "closed" or something. They're simply better for how I want to hack computers than any alternative (especially once you could get A/UX, or now OSX), but clearly 97% of the popupation doens't agree with me. No prob.
I ride motorcycles. I never owned a car until I was about 35 and had family reasons to. By the time I was 24 I gravitated from the Japanese ones to BMW motorcycles and have stuck with them ever since. They're simply *better*, based on what makes a motorcycle useful to me, but clearly 99% of the population doesn't agree with me. No prob.
I fly sailplanes. I can't imagine why everyone doesn't, but it really seems that it doesn't interest most people -- I've taken more than forty of my friends, relatives and workmates for flights, and so far only *two* of them have been interested enough to go solo themselves -- and maybe half a dozen of the others ask for repeat flights. Oh well, no prob, each to their own, and the sport will survive even with only the current 1 person in 4000 (here in NZ, fewer in the USA, more in Germany) doing it.
My favourite programming language is Dylan. I can't imagine why everyone doesn't use it, but they don't, so I'm stuck with using Dylan for fun and programming contests, while using C and C++ at work. No prob, there are enough of us using Dylan to protect our compiler from bitrot, port it to new platforms, and gradually enhance it to be even better.
Every one of the above things is very much a minority thing that attracts fanatically loyalty in some. It would be great if the rest of the world agreed with me, but in fact the world is so big, and communication and trade so easy, that you don't *have* to have everyone using something to allow it to survive and even prosper.
Re:Applications for space flight
on
Son of Concorde
·
· Score: 1
That's called setting up a straw man, which you then bang up pretty good. Another VERY GOOD reason to reduce fuel usage is so that most of your cargo ISN'T fuel.
No, sorry.
Size doesn't matter unless it affects the cost per pound of people/cargo. Weight doesn't matter unless it affects the cost per pound of people/cargo. Fuel use doesn't matter unless it affects the cost per pound of people/cargo. Percentage of takeoff weight that is fuel doesn't matter unless it affects the cost per pound of people/cargo.
All those things will matter eventually -- perhaps in about twety years if XCOR or Scaled or similar are sucessful, maybe 50 - 100 years at the current rate of progress from NASA.
Worrying about them right now is the surest way to prevent a space industry. In fact, worrying about them for the last forty years has been the exact reason for the lack of progress to date. It is optimizing the wrong variable (performance) instead of the one that actually matters (cost).
If you had your way, the only way to fly as a passenger from New York to Paris would be on the SR71 at a cost of... megadollars.
Re:Applications for space flight
on
Son of Concorde
·
· Score: 1
Your only objection was to the cost. Why did you quote the whole paragraph? In fact the rest of his ideas were right, that's after all why scramjets are so attractive.
The cost is the WHOLE POINT. There is no other good reason to try to reduce fuel usage. If fuel cost was in fact the major cost of getting into space then scramjets might be attractive, but fuel is NOT a major cost and won't be for the forseeable future -- capital and development costs will be. Scramjets, on the other hand, are something that we don't know how to do, will cost billions and billions and probably many decades to develop, and will only at best get us to a small fraction of orbital speed.
What's the point when we already know how to build rockets, they will do the whole job, and the fuel cost isn't an issue anyway?
Answer: there is no point.
We already have all the technology we need, we should be taking that and bulding something that we can have going in a couple of years, fly it every day without requiring large amounts of maintainance, and watch the costs drop.
Fortunately, there are several companies working on doing exactly that. XCOR and Scaled Composites are the most credible, and both have rocket powered aircraft test flying *today*, leaning what they need to learn to eventually build planes that fly all the way to orbit. XCOR was first, flying several years ago (including at Oshkosh last July). Scaled have leapfrogged them in performance, but haven't actually lit the rocket in flight yet. XCOR's "Xerus" will again leapfrog Scaled, this time in reusability and cost.
Re:Applications for space flight
on
Son of Concorde
·
· Score: 1
The biggest cost to space flight is fuel. Most fuel is spend just getting the rest of the fuel off the ground. Of the fuel, 1/8th of the mass is oxygen. It stands to reason, that if we had an air-breathing plane handle the first leg of the journey, we could dramatically reduce the fuel requirements for space flight.
This is so misguded it's not funny.
The Space Shuttle uses maybe $20m - $30m of fuel for a flight (and the vast majority of that is the solids, not the hydrogen and oxygen for the main engines). A flight costs about $600m. Therefore fuel is *not* the biggest cost. In fact the biggest cost is having to rebuild the aircraft each flight, and pay thousnds of people to inspect it to death.
The Ananova article focuses solely on the implications for music storage. That will, no doubt, be a major application, but the important part of the story is: permanent, reliable storage with a data density of 1 GB/cm^3, for God's sake! This seems to me like a major breakthrough
A 40 GB iPod is 117.7 cm^3 (4.1 by 2.4 by 0.73 inches).
1 GB/cm^3 is only a bit over twice that density. Does anyone doubt that there will be a 100 GB iPod next year?
To bring this back on topic, it's worth noticing that the ICFP programming contest has never been won by a dynamically-typed language...
That's true and I think very interesting, as I pointed out in my 2001 writeup.
Of course what I didn't know when I wrote that was that our dynamically-typed language (Dylan) ended up in 2nd place that year (and with the Judges' Prize this year).
Also, a team using Erlang won the Lightning Prize in 2001, and a programmer using Python won the Lightning Prize in 2002.
Here in NZ we seem to be somewhere between the UK and the US (as in many other things).
The top and bottom 1 MHz of the FM band is reserved for unlicensed transmission with an effective radiated power of less than 300 mW. So as long as you tune your iTrip to 88 - 89 MHz or 107 - 108 MHz you're fine.
I've been wondering about getting an iTrip once the version for the new model iPod is available (Apple changed the connectors on the top...), but my car's radio.casette has a line-in (marked "CD") on the front panel anyway, and that's better quality.
Is anyone aware of any brokers who specialise in buying stuff from US web sites, shipping it to a US addess, then forwarding it to an international address?
I haven't done this for a while, but several years ago I had good luck a number of times by phoning up the NZ branch of MacZone/PCZone and asking them for things that were in neither their nor the US Zones catalogue. They'd source stuff in the US, put it in their next day's shipment to NZ, and send it on to me. It was as fast as buying direct from the US (faster if my stuff got held up in customs for GST...) and I got charged only for shipping within NZ.
Of course, issue is still price. $3000 at the top line is about 30% rich in my opinion, but Apple likes its margins fat, what can you say.
Uh, I just went to the Dell online store and configured a Precision 650 with dual 3.06 Xeons, a DVD burner, 512 MB RAM, 150 GB IDE drive, and no monitor.
$4354
Re:Apple + PPC970 = True!
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 1
I just went to the Dell site and put together a dual Xeon 3.06 system with DVD burner, 150 GB IDE drive, 512 MB RAM and no monitor.
Use the Hard drive to edit, pull out commercials, then burn to DVD.
Nice idea, but I actually *like* having a few 20 year old TV commercials in there. Talk about nostalgia!
Much of the stuff I've bothered to keep for 20 years is now starting to become availabel on pre-recorded DVDs, so I'm not sure it's worth copying myself. But I've got a 17" 1 GHz iMac with a DVD burner and I'm playing to see if it's worth-while (trying both iDVD and Toast Titanium).
I'm computer literate. I've worked on dozens of systems from the commodore PET to the IBM Sys/36 and AS400 to HP 3000 and lately some of the Stratus boxes that started rolling through our companies 'bullpen'.
I've never used a mac except a few times in passing.
I use MS Windows and Linux and HPUX and Solaris and even ftx (a Stratus OS) on a daily basis. I've also been using and programming the Mac since a few weeks after it came out.
If you're not familiar with the Mac after nearly two decades then I'm sorry but you are *NOT* computer literate.
It was designed explicitly for the non-computer literate.
It was designed to be accessable to the computer illiterate. But that's an inclusive thing, not exclusive. It is (and always has been) a superb machine for software hackers because it has a much more open and customizable operating system than MSDOS or Windows have ever had. YOu can replace or enhance *anything*.
You know what a Happy Mac is but don't know what 'hashing with buckets' means or what a b-tree does or what a two handed clock algorithm for freeing memory is all about
What a strange thing to say when the Mac "HFS" file system is nearly unique in being based totally around b-trees for the directory and file extents structures! There isn't a flat array or linked list in sight.
They say they get 80 mpg from this at up to 23 mph? Big deal. I consistently get 60 mpg from my 1100cc BMW motorcycle, with two people plus luggage, as long as I don't go over 70 mph or overtake aggressively.
Smaller engined conventional motorcycles (under 250cc) get 100+ mpg.
Slashdot Mirror
Even so, the number of teams that choose Lisp each year and the relatively poor showing of those teams implies to me that the amount of advantage Lisp provides is not as great as some (e.g., Paul Graham) would have us believe.
Yeah, that puzzles me as well.
Dylan is in essence a version of Lisp that happens to be written in a C/Pascal-like syntax instead of S-expressions. My friends and I have been doing pretty well using it, winning ICFP prizes in two of the last four years (2nd place in 2001 and Judge's Prize in 2003).
That's a single team's record.
There were 12 teams using Common Lisp and 9 teams using Scheme this year. I don't think we're any smarter than the other Lisp teams. In fact 7 of those 21 beat us this year, which is pretty much the same as our overall position in the field. So if our Dylan team is picking up prizes from time to time I don't know why other Lisp dialects aren't. It's a mystery.
We (DylAntz) were there, we just seem to have had an "off" year, managing only 25th out of 87 in the lightning (24 hour) contest and 137th out of 361 in the main (72 hour) contest.
It would be nice to win every year, but actually I'm pretty happy with a record that goes:
2001: 2nd
2002: 35th
2003: Judge's Prize
2004: 137th
I think this year's contest results had very little to do with how good your chosen programming language is. Instead it was all about how well you could get around the limitations of the ant instruction set and devise strategies for your ants to follow.
Sure, you could make a compiler that gave you a language with loops and subroutines and (very limited) variables and turned that into ant code -- and we did that -- but in the end you had to have something smart you wanted to get your ants to do. We spent a lot of time on making out ants explore the world and gather food efficiently (including raiding the opponent's nest), but our strategy for defening our own nest turned out to be inadequate.
For some reason the results say we used Perl, not Dylan. I don't know why. It's true that we had a quick&dirty ant assembler written in Perl that some of us used to play around with strategies while we waited for the proper compiler (written in Dylan) to be ready, but that wasn't used for the final submission.
We submitted the following programs all written in Dylan:
- world simulator library
- very fast simulator (2 sec for 100,000 rounds)
- slow simulator with OpenGL interface for visualization
- high level compiler for ant brains
Congratulations to the winners and we're looking forward to next year's contest!
When I was teaching calculus I made an exam where every answer was 2
It would be funnier if they were all 42.
This article makes me wonder: just how fuel-efficient can an aircraft be?
The most efficient aircraft are sailplanes. Modern ones, such as the ASH-25 or Stemme S-10 have lift-to-drag ratios of around 60:1 at around 60 knots (110 km/h, 70 mph). That means at about 500 kg all up weight with two people on board they require about 8 kg (18 lbs) of thrust in order to fly.
Typical lift-to-drag ratios for other aircraft are:
18 - 20: large jetliner
12: small single engine plane (e.g. Cessna 172)
10: hang glider
5: parasal
Both these sailplanes have engines (optional in the case of the ASH-25) that allow them to take off and climb rapidly. These engines are much too powerful for really good fuel economy but on most days a skilled pilot can fly one of these aircraft hundreds of km without using the engine at all, just by making an intelligent choice of the route to fly and how fast to fly it. All they need is average air movement upward of about 100 feet (30m) per minute -- about 1 mph of upwards "wind" -- in order to fly indefinitely without using fuel at all.
Even without skill, you can use the engine to climb rapidly to, say, 10,000 ft, and then glide with the engine turned off for approximately 200 km before starting the engine again. In this way you can travel large distances using very little fuel, at speeds higher than you can acheive in a car.
We use the distcc that Apple distributes with XCode even though we dont' use XCode itself. It really helps to get a few dual-CPU G5's working!
The cool thing about Apple's version is that by default it uses Rendezvous to determine which machines are available to distribute work to.
win2k hasnt crashed on me once unless I was being a fscktard and doing something stupid.
Doing something stupid
v. intr.
Taking some action that causes Windows to crash.
XCode uses distcc for it's distributed compiling, distcc isn't rendezvous aware by default though, so you'll have to configure it yourself
The distcc that comes with XCode has been modified to use rendezvous.
It's not tied to XCode in any way. At work we're using XCode's distcc to distribute regular makefile (actually SCONS) builds around a bunch of dual proc G5's. Works really nice.
There's an old story from Analog (a science-fiction magazine) titled 'Amateurs' which reminds me quite a bit of the guys at Scaled Composites, except in 'Amateurs', they didn't have a government prize to spur them on
You appear to think that the X Prize has been put up by the government.
This is not correct.
The X Prize is completely private. Peter Diamantes has raised several million dollars from private donations. This has then been used to pay the premium on an insurance policy, with the insurance company essentially betting that the X Prize will not be won before the end of this year, and Diamantes (and the competitors) betting that it will be.
The government is not involved in any way other than in getting out of the way (which the FAA is doing a pretty good job of -- a year ago there was no legal way to make a flight such as yesterdays one).
While the X-Prize is a great thing -- and I'm personally crossing the Pacific this weekend to watch SS1's flight on Monday -- the current and upcoming generation of private spacecraft are still a very long way from being able to visit an orbiting hotel.
The good news though is that some companies do have a business plan for how to get from here to there in incremental, low risk, steps, and while making a profit along the way. XCOR, for example, has such a plan, financing later development with suborbital tourist flights and a few small satellite launches and sounding rocket replacement flights.
Scaled Composites may well have such a plan, though they haven't said yet what it is. But a story in today's Dominion Post (Wellington, NZ) originally from the Washington Post) (free registration required) quotes Burt Rutan as saying that suborbital flights are likely to start at US$30k - US$50k and drop to US$8k - US$12k in a second generation vehicle. That's a) a lot lower than the US$98k Space Adventures is planning to sell XCORs initial flights for, and b) indication that Scaled do in fact have an ongoing plan (d'oh).
is can NASA take a rocket up 100 km with 3 people, take it down, and put it back up again within 2 weeks?
No they can't. NASA can't do it today, and they never have done it (or been able to) in the past. And no one else has ever done it either.
The closest is the X15 flights in the 1960's, some of which went up 100 km, but with only one person instead of three. I don't know whether the X15 ever went 100 km up twice in two weeks, but they probably could have done that (with one person) if they wanted to.
You see a lot of panicy stuff about how dangerous
all that electrical energy in the batteries is,
but when it comes down to it if the car has the
same range as a similar normal car then there is
exactly the same amount of energy in the batteries
as there would normally be in a car's fuel tank.
But these aren't pure electric cars. They only
have a few km of range on the batteries and most
of the energy is in the fuel tank just like any
other car.
This should boost Miguel's star ranking on Orkut -- at the moment he's only #5 with 193 fans, one place behind Wesley Clark with 194 fans.
Go Miguel!
(and hopefully past that whorkut Leonie with 208)
If it is good enough to inspire fanatical loyalty in some, why hasn't it been good enough to win over the rest of the world?
This really doesn't bother me. Just about everything I do or like seems to be a tiny minority thing.
Apple computers have always been far more hackable (in sofware -- I'm a software guy, not a hardware guy) than the alternatives, but most people don't care, or mistakenly think they're "closed" or something. They're simply better for how I want to hack computers than any alternative (especially once you could get A/UX, or now OSX), but clearly 97% of the popupation doens't agree with me. No prob.
I ride motorcycles. I never owned a car until I was about 35 and had family reasons to. By the time I was 24 I gravitated from the Japanese ones to BMW motorcycles and have stuck with them ever since. They're simply *better*, based on what makes a motorcycle useful to me, but clearly 99% of the population doesn't agree with me. No prob.
I fly sailplanes. I can't imagine why everyone doesn't, but it really seems that it doesn't interest most people -- I've taken more than forty of my friends, relatives and workmates for flights, and so far only *two* of them have been interested enough to go solo themselves -- and maybe half a dozen of the others ask for repeat flights. Oh well, no prob, each to their own, and the sport will survive even with only the current 1 person in 4000 (here in NZ, fewer in the USA, more in Germany) doing it.
My favourite programming language is Dylan. I can't imagine why everyone doesn't use it, but they don't, so I'm stuck with using Dylan for fun and programming contests, while using C and C++ at work. No prob, there are enough of us using Dylan to protect our compiler from bitrot, port it to new platforms, and gradually enhance it to be even better.
Every one of the above things is very much a minority thing that attracts fanatically loyalty in some. It would be great if the rest of the world agreed with me, but in fact the world is so big, and communication and trade so easy, that you don't *have* to have everyone using something to allow it to survive and even prosper.
That's called setting up a straw man, which you then bang up pretty good. Another VERY GOOD reason to reduce fuel usage is so that most of your cargo ISN'T fuel.
... megadollars.
No, sorry.
Size doesn't matter unless it affects the cost per pound of people/cargo. Weight doesn't matter unless it affects the cost per pound of people/cargo. Fuel use doesn't matter unless it affects the cost per pound of people/cargo. Percentage of takeoff weight that is fuel doesn't matter unless it affects the cost per pound of people/cargo.
All those things will matter eventually -- perhaps in about twety years if XCOR or Scaled or similar are sucessful, maybe 50 - 100 years at the current rate of progress from NASA.
Worrying about them right now is the surest way to prevent a space industry. In fact, worrying about them for the last forty years has been the exact reason for the lack of progress to date. It is optimizing the wrong variable (performance) instead of the one that actually matters (cost).
If you had your way, the only way to fly as a passenger from New York to Paris would be on the SR71 at a cost of
Your only objection was to the cost. Why did you quote the whole paragraph? In fact the rest of his ideas were right, that's after all why scramjets are so attractive.
The cost is the WHOLE POINT. There is no other good reason to try to reduce fuel usage. If fuel cost was in fact the major cost of getting into space then scramjets might be attractive, but fuel is NOT a major cost and won't be for the forseeable future -- capital and development costs will be. Scramjets, on the other hand, are something that we don't know how to do, will cost billions and billions and probably many decades to develop, and will only at best get us to a small fraction of orbital speed.
What's the point when we already know how to build rockets, they will do the whole job, and the fuel cost isn't an issue anyway?
Answer: there is no point.
We already have all the technology we need, we should be taking that and bulding something that we can have going in a couple of years, fly it every day without requiring large amounts of maintainance, and watch the costs drop.
Fortunately, there are several companies working on doing exactly that. XCOR and Scaled Composites are the most credible, and both have rocket powered aircraft test flying *today*, leaning what they need to learn to eventually build planes that fly all the way to orbit. XCOR was first, flying several years ago (including at Oshkosh last July). Scaled have leapfrogged them in performance, but haven't actually lit the rocket in flight yet. XCOR's "Xerus" will again leapfrog Scaled, this time in reusability and cost.
The biggest cost to space flight is fuel. Most fuel is spend just getting the rest of the fuel off the ground. Of the fuel, 1/8th of the mass is oxygen. It stands to reason, that if we had an air-breathing plane handle the first leg of the journey, we could dramatically reduce the fuel requirements for space flight.
This is so misguded it's not funny.
The Space Shuttle uses maybe $20m - $30m of fuel for a flight (and the vast majority of that is the solids, not the hydrogen and oxygen for the main engines). A flight costs about $600m. Therefore fuel is *not* the biggest cost. In fact the biggest cost is having to rebuild the aircraft each flight, and pay thousnds of people to inspect it to death.
The Ananova article focuses solely on the implications for music storage. That will, no doubt, be a major application, but the important part of the story is: permanent, reliable storage with a data density of 1 GB/cm^3, for God's sake! This seems to me like a major breakthrough
A 40 GB iPod is 117.7 cm^3 (4.1 by 2.4 by 0.73 inches).
1 GB/cm^3 is only a bit over twice that density. Does anyone doubt that there will be a 100 GB iPod next year?
To bring this back on topic, it's worth noticing that the ICFP programming contest has never been won by a dynamically-typed language...
That's true and I think very interesting, as I pointed out in my 2001 writeup.
Of course what I didn't know when I wrote that was that our dynamically-typed language (Dylan) ended up in 2nd place that year (and with the Judges' Prize this year).
Also, a team using Erlang won the Lightning Prize in 2001, and a programmer using Python won the Lightning Prize in 2002.
Here in NZ we seem to be somewhere between the UK and the US (as in many other things).
The top and bottom 1 MHz of the FM band is reserved for unlicensed transmission with an effective radiated power of less than 300 mW. So as long as you tune your iTrip to 88 - 89 MHz or 107 - 108 MHz you're fine.
I've been wondering about getting an iTrip once the version for the new model iPod is available (Apple changed the connectors on the top...), but my car's radio.casette has a line-in (marked "CD") on the front panel anyway, and that's better quality.
I also run into this problem from Australia.
Is anyone aware of any brokers who specialise in buying stuff from US web sites, shipping it to a US addess, then forwarding it to an international address?
I haven't done this for a while, but several years ago I had good luck a number of times by phoning up the NZ branch of MacZone/PCZone and asking them for things that were in neither their nor the US Zones catalogue. They'd source stuff in the US, put it in their next day's shipment to NZ, and send it on to me. It was as fast as buying direct from the US (faster if my stuff got held up in customs for GST...) and I got charged only for shipping within NZ.
Of course, issue is still price. $3000 at the top line is about 30% rich in my opinion, but Apple likes its margins fat, what can you say.
Uh, I just went to the Dell online store and configured a Precision 650 with dual 3.06 Xeons, a DVD burner, 512 MB RAM, 150 GB IDE drive, and no monitor.
$4354
I just went to the Dell site and put together a dual Xeon 3.06 system with DVD burner, 150 GB IDE drive, 512 MB RAM and no monitor.
$4354
Makes Apple look cheap.
Use the Hard drive to edit, pull out commercials, then burn to DVD.
Nice idea, but I actually *like* having a few 20 year old TV commercials in there. Talk about nostalgia!
Much of the stuff I've bothered to keep for 20 years is now starting to become availabel on pre-recorded DVDs, so I'm not sure it's worth copying myself. But I've got a 17" 1 GHz iMac with a DVD burner and I'm playing to see if it's worth-while (trying both iDVD and Toast Titanium).
I'm computer literate. I've worked on dozens of systems from the commodore PET to the IBM Sys/36 and AS400 to HP 3000 and lately some of the Stratus boxes that started rolling through our companies 'bullpen'.
I've never used a mac except a few times in passing.
I use MS Windows and Linux and HPUX and Solaris and even ftx (a Stratus OS) on a daily basis. I've also been using and programming the Mac since a few weeks after it came out.
If you're not familiar with the Mac after nearly two decades then I'm sorry but you are *NOT* computer literate.
It was designed explicitly for the non-computer literate.
It was designed to be accessable to the computer illiterate. But that's an inclusive thing, not exclusive. It is (and always has been) a superb machine for software hackers because it has a much more open and customizable operating system than MSDOS or Windows have ever had. YOu can replace or enhance *anything*.
You know what a Happy Mac is but don't know what 'hashing with buckets' means or what a b-tree does or what a two handed clock algorithm for freeing memory is all about
What a strange thing to say when the Mac "HFS" file system is nearly unique in being based totally around b-trees for the directory and file extents structures! There isn't a flat array or linked list in sight.
They say they get 80 mpg from this at up to 23 mph? Big deal. I consistently get 60 mpg from my 1100cc BMW motorcycle, with two people plus luggage, as long as I don't go over 70 mph or overtake aggressively.
Smaller engined conventional motorcycles (under 250cc) get 100+ mpg.