We used to have our application written this same way. VB GUI front end, C++ business logic back end. The problem we had was that some people on the team were stronger in VB than in C++, and we ended up with business logic creeping into the VB. A few years ago, we decided we had to walk away from that app for future development, and here we are reinventing the wheel today. After five years, we had ended up with more business logic in the VB than in the C++. It's an awful mix. It's tough to maintain, and tough to debug.
On the other hand, I don't think it was necessarily the language that caused the problem. What we had was people developing without understanding the underlying architecture of the application. The VB portion was originally created by a vendor in 1995, and she walked away from it as soon as it compiled. It was thrown over the fence to other coders at that vendor's site, as well as us at that time. Those of us who got in on her initial training were able to carry the design forward, but almost immediately the new hires (and the vendor developers who were not under our direct supervision) started "blending" business logic into the VB.
I think we were doomed to this fate from the get-go because we didn't have strong project control. Any ongoing programming task is going to have issues like this creep in eventually. Multiple languages aren't necessarily the problem, and in some cases can help, but discipline is required to pull it off successfully over the long run.
I, too, am working on a large programming project. It's primarily written in C++, but I use other languages to write quick-n-dirty tests for the objects.
A curious side benefit I've found is that when I cross language boundaries, I tend to expose more flaws than if I just had a small main() testing the objects. Crossing language boundaries forces me to code the interface to each object very properly and distinctly.
A new generation of homegrown-editors will spring up on the net. You'll get the web sites devoted to erasing annoying characters from otherwise watchable movies. But you'll get so much more.
You'll get "family-friendly" web sites devoted to removing only the sexual references, but leave in John Wayne killing natives with a dagger. Other editors will run web sites that remove the violence but leave the sex.
You'll also end up with violence-prone editors. They'll give you the "Good parts" edition of Dirty Harry, featuring just the gun battles and punk shakedowns. Playboy will probably run versions of popular movies just skipping to the sex scenes.
You'll get the Short Attention Span Theatre's version of Waterworld. It'll be three minutes long, and people will still complain that it's too long! The site'll probably be run by the Cliff's Notes people, and will probably give the Cliff's Notes edition of all sorts of old classics.
Certain editors will probably become wildly popular because they trim all sorts of bad and long popular movies down to their viewable components. Before long, the RIAA will get involved because someone will come up with a "Commercial Product Placement Skipping" version.
Because the primary cost of the shuttle launch is the fuel required to acheive orbit.
Sure, if you wanted to ship inflated balloons or empty cardboard boxes on the shuttle, the costs would probably figure differently. But the NASA engineers would also want to work with you to redesign your cargo to make it better fit within their volumetrics.
Remember that the payload cost on the shuttle isn't computed simply by "Set your satellite on that scale over there, and we'll just fill out an invoice for $5000/pound." That $5000/pound cost is a rate often quoted by the news media. It is simply an average cost, not a shipping rate.
I've also heard $6000/pound before, as well as $1000/pound, so I think these numbers are really made up from whole cloth anyway.
I've had the heat-sink-clamp-ear on the side of a socket break off. As far as I could tell, it had become brittle with age and/or heat (it was a 6 year old P90 that I was taking apart just for the heck of it.)
Yes, I was in the cabinet taking the heat sink off at that time. But it didn't take very much force to break that ear. I can imagine that much force might be generated by a tall, heavy fan receiving a sideways G shock, of the kind you might cause by transporting the cabinet improperly.
You have to figure that at some point in the future, these mobos will be expected to last more than three years before being replaced. Believe it or don't, but there are people out there who don't upgrade their systems annually.
When I first started playing the game, late at night, down in some new level I can no longer remember, I heard the distant clanking of some creature. My health was low, and I didn't feel like learning about a new monster at the wrong end of its weapon, so I started running around one of the bigger rooms.
Just when I thought I had outrun it, I remember turning 180 degrees and found myself standing in front of a pile of rocks. I was puzzled until it jumped up, growled and attacked me! I leapt in my chair and gave out a little AAUGH! which was enough time for it to kill me.
Not the most frightening graphics, but the sounds coupled with the lateness of the hour made me jump! That game still holds a place in my heart as "scary", even though the graphics are but one step better than ASCIImation. I even dug the Amiga out from the basement a few months ago and played a few more games just for old times sake.
We have a guy similar to that. He's been a tester for years. Anything he touches breaks within minutes. It's great to have a creative tester.
The capper is his nickname has always been "Spike". We should have known better than to let him near our gear in the first place... We even wanted him to change his nickname, but the best idea anyone came up with was "Surge", and that didn't make anyone feel better in the least.
You need admin rights to run a debugger that enters a secure part of the kernel. So, unless you're developing VB or Java or some other language that thinks disassemblers are dangerous, kiss productivity goodbye.
The good news is it takes about 10 minutes to root an NT box, and from there you can just grant yourself admin privileges!
Hey, mozilla already barges around my machine throwing 27MB of weight around just to display a stupid picture of a penguin with a cell phone, Bilgatus of Borg, etc. Another 5MB for a calendar is chump change.
Remember, they chose the mozilla icon as a representation of its memory footprint, not because it's an industry dominator.
John
no challenge points for spotting the troll here...:-)
I've been waiting more than 20 years for people to become more tech savvy. In the last five, people have climbed onto the internet and adopted it as their own. So now what do I see?
AOL.
It's like the (alleged) Ancient Chinese Proverb®: Be careful of what you wish for. You may get it.
I use this URL
http://www.deBarcode.com/deBarcode/cgi-bin/deBarco de.cgi?barcode=%s&type=U.P.C.%%20A
(where you replace the %s with the UPC-A) to translate my UPC-A barcodes to product info.
However, if you're trying to get "book" information, you don't want to use the UPC at all. You want to use the ISBN, which is encoded in the "Bookland EAN" found on most books. (It's the other barcode, not the UPC barcode.)
Amazon.com makes a very effective ISBN to book catalog database. This URL
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/%s/
does a great job for me.
(Note, that the Bookland EAN is not the ISBN number straight up: you need to decode it. Strip the leading "978" from the EAN, then the last digit of the EAN (the check digit.) You're left with nine digits. Compute the ISBN check digit, and append it to these nine digits, and you're good to go.)
There is some break-even point there, to be sure, but as you note, it's only at a very large company size (and this is just for bug fixing, not other TCO factors like support and usability). My observation is true for most companies, all but the very largest.
The large companies also have the ability to dominate the viewpoint of the software vendors. The number of marketroids we had in here once we mentioned the "L" word (Linux) was staggering. All of them spreading the very same FUD I'm reading in this column. They're relentless, too. We still get sh!t from the Microsofties. Sure, it's decorated in "Oh, hey, John, be sure to come to the.NET informational presentation. We'll have food."
They did, too. It was a religious revival, it would have been more appropriate to hold it in a tent. They spoke in tongues ("C#", "MSIL", ".NET") they raised their voices to the Gates of heaven, and I almost thought the presenters were going to break out in hymns.
I walked out of there with tracts (renamed "White papers"), a full belly, and a mind full of the benefits of.NET.
Absolutely. It's Microsoft's revenue stream, and while they don't like to admit it, they don't deny it.
The problem they've come up against is that they've feature bloated their software to the max. It's common knowledge that people don't know how to use 95% of the features of their word processors. Ten years ago, that number used to be 50% ignorance. They sell "new" software with more "features" because their revenue stream model forces them to market "new and improved," not out of any consumer demand.
Thus the birth of.NET. A subscription model. Same product, but now with "fewer hassles." Make it attractive to developers by pushing the hell out of it in the magazines and with evangelical meetings. Make it attractive to consumers by offering them magical promises that it "keeps up automatically with the latest features." They don't even have to think up those features today. It's like buying cleverness on credit!
Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Microsoft gets a monthly rent check from you, too.
That stops being true after a certain point. And it's no less true for $$$ware than OSS.
You think we roll out MS Office 2K without investing a couple man-years of effort, testing installations on supported platforms, building SMS packages, preparing training programs, advertising, providing conversion from Office '95 files, etc.? No difference between MS and GNU there.
And you may think that these are the big costs. Multiply that by 7,000+ desktops in this corporation, and Office 2K license fees run into the millions. If the installation cost runs to $150,000 for various peoples' time, it's still peanuts to the licenses.
Actually, the GPS satellites are NOT in geosynchronous orbit. They are in a low earth orbit of only a few hundred miles. They form a (sort of) shell around the earth, not unlike an electron "cloud" around the nucleus of an atom.
The test was to prove that you could use the signals from OUTSIDE the cloud, rather than just inside it, like we are used to down here on earth. The math to do it has always been there, but apparently nobody actually "walked the walk" before this test.
I suppose it's fortunate that there are many GPS birds in the constellation. One of the problems to solve WRT altitude is "am I inside or outside of the cloud"? It used to be true that you could assume you were inside...
I'm not sure, but I don't think the American government is going to want to offer such explosive compounds to all of us citizens who have now become "potential terrorists".
Gasoline vapor is explosive, but it's fairly tough to get enough vapor in one place to cause a big explosion. Liquid gasoline is merely very, very flammable. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to be exposed to large quantities of either in the presence of an ignition source, but it would be harder than it sounds to make a building-buster "bomb" out of gasoline.
I think it really depends on if the government wants to encourage or discourage this engine from succeeding. If they want it to fail, they'll say "the fuel's too dangerous for all you potential TERRORISTS," and conveniently ignore the fact that about ten dollars worth of readily available over-the-counter consumer products in use today could provide a building-levelling bomb with just the smallest amount of imagination (and an incredibly large amount of evil.) And no, I don't want to encourage a "how-to" in this thread, so I'm not describing these products or methods.
[ Darn, I hate it when I have to follow up with a correction to myself ]
The seal problem is actually easier than I thought.
After more carefully looking at a different animation of an operating engine on the McMaster web site, I see that the outer path described by the nutating disk defines a sphere, not a cylinder. (Duh!) The point of tangency where the disk edge contacts the spherical inside of the motor remains at a constant 90 degrees. Therefore, the seal travels an almost flat surface on the inside of the containing sphere, and can therefore be more like a conventional piston ring.
Now, if there is an oil-delivery system travelling through the axle and disk and out the edge (between two seals) then I agree with the original poster that oil that will be burned.
Unfortunately, I'm long since removed from my organic chemistry days, so I can't answer how the ammonia and/or nitrous oxide compounds might react to the tramp oil on the sphere's wall. It almost certainly will cause most of the pollution problems with this engine, either by causing undesirable reactions with the pre-ignition fuel components (preventing them from achieving 100% combustion) or by simply being burned and the waste being exhausted.
Whatever the results, it's much more likely to be eco-friendly than the good-old-fashioned hydrocarbons we burn today. Certainly the fuels he describes will combust more cleanly.
I disagree that the seal is an insolvable problem.
A coworker has a Mazda RX-7, and yes, he just blew a seal in it. However, he had over 200,000 miles on the engine, and much of that is high-speed driving on race tracks (well, as high speed as you can get in an RX-7, anyway...) The "problem" with the seals on the Wankel that you mention are note one of sealing, but rather stem from the fact that the surface area of the combustion area is so large that much oil is constantly being burned off, causing the pollution. The MRE is supposed to run without lubrication along these surfaces.
This engine might be even easier to seal than a normal Wankel. On the Wankel, you have nine separate seals in place on each rotor (one at each apex and one on each arc on each side of the rotor.) The seals meet at odd angles at the corners, and must be carefully manufactured and aligned to achieve a good seal.
The nutation plate in the McMasters engine has a single surface that requires sealing. The challenge with this seal is that the nutation plate changes its angle of contact throughout the cycle. Perhaps a round edge, or two rings, or other mechanism will be found.
McMasters is off-the-wall enought that he might try something completely different here. A ceramic cylinder, or seal, perhaps. He might even figure out a way to dynamically squeeze the cylinder walls to provide a seal from the outside, for all we know. He's proven himself a genius time and again, and if such a seal can be developed, I'm quite confident that he's the guy who can do it.
Yes, a "gasoline well" doesn't exist. But the raw crude from an oil well comes complete with enough internal potential energy to crack a usable amount of it into gasoline. The refiner simply burns part of his raw product to produce the heat required to crack the rest of it.
A bottle of water doesn't have enough energy present to split it into hydrogen. You can say "yes, if it's at 30,000 feet or 99 degrees C" or whatever, but that bottle of water required EXTERNAL energy to raise it to that potential. And that external energy is the entire point. It had to come from somewhere, it's not free.
Until someone invents a way to "crack" water (with some off-the-wall fusion theory or whatever) there will always be a need for an external energy source to split it. Whether it comes from solar panels on your garage roof or a coal-fired plant in Montana over electric lines doesn't change the fact that EXTERNAL energy was required to make it useful.
While triangulation is great on the ocean, it's not the best solution in the urban jungle.
Since many phones are used in cities, RF propagation is not the same when you have dozens of buildings to reflect RF from. And you can't really use signal strength as a distance indicator, either, because signal strength can be dependent on which cell tower the steel in your car is blocking the signal from reaching.
There's just too much noise (RF) to depend on this anywhere line of sight degrades. Not to mention the long stretches of freeway out in the country where one tower may be the ONLY antenna that can reach the cell phone, regardless of strength.
My Nokia 8260 (piece of crap phone, by the way, the only thing going for it is its very tiny size) has an "Emergency" category in the dealer setup menu. When I select that, I get another menu that offers me "Emergency number 1", "2", and "3".
Emergency 1 = "999"
Emergency 2 = "*999"
Emergency 3 = ""
This is different than the "9 = Emergency" setting under the user's menu.
I suspect most Nokia phones have similar settings.
Loose the softcore porn. I'm absolutely no prude but the jello-wrestling bit did nothing to move the story forward, the plot point could have happened anywhere else a lot more effectively. Play up the sexual tensions on the ship (close quarters, lots of stress, different cultures, different species, different cues & values etc.) if they want but make them part of something, not just there to get the boys all horny.
The jello-scene was clearly gratuitous. But it made me realize something else: this show wasn't filmed just for 40-year-old Trek fans. It was filmed to try to get 16-year-old boys interested, and frankly, this scene hit the one item that'll hold their interest the longest. My advice to you is to buy stock in Vaseline and get over it.
And another thing: did anyone else check the clock? 65 minutes of action crammed into two hours! I watched the entire show on Replay TV and thought I would go through a fresh set of AA batteries just by hitting the "skip 30 sec" button. Whoa.
Slashdot Mirror
We used to have our application written this same way. VB GUI front end, C++ business logic back end. The problem we had was that some people on the team were stronger in VB than in C++, and we ended up with business logic creeping into the VB. A few years ago, we decided we had to walk away from that app for future development, and here we are reinventing the wheel today. After five years, we had ended up with more business logic in the VB than in the C++. It's an awful mix. It's tough to maintain, and tough to debug.
On the other hand, I don't think it was necessarily the language that caused the problem. What we had was people developing without understanding the underlying architecture of the application. The VB portion was originally created by a vendor in 1995, and she walked away from it as soon as it compiled. It was thrown over the fence to other coders at that vendor's site, as well as us at that time. Those of us who got in on her initial training were able to carry the design forward, but almost immediately the new hires (and the vendor developers who were not under our direct supervision) started "blending" business logic into the VB.
I think we were doomed to this fate from the get-go because we didn't have strong project control. Any ongoing programming task is going to have issues like this creep in eventually. Multiple languages aren't necessarily the problem, and in some cases can help, but discipline is required to pull it off successfully over the long run.
John
A curious side benefit I've found is that when I cross language boundaries, I tend to expose more flaws than if I just had a small main() testing the objects. Crossing language boundaries forces me to code the interface to each object very properly and distinctly.
John
(But then, would he have been filtered out from the Saturday Night Live parody?)
John
A new generation of homegrown-editors will spring up on the net. You'll get the web sites devoted to erasing annoying characters from otherwise watchable movies. But you'll get so much more.
You'll get "family-friendly" web sites devoted to removing only the sexual references, but leave in John Wayne killing natives with a dagger. Other editors will run web sites that remove the violence but leave the sex.
You'll also end up with violence-prone editors. They'll give you the "Good parts" edition of Dirty Harry, featuring just the gun battles and punk shakedowns. Playboy will probably run versions of popular movies just skipping to the sex scenes.
You'll get the Short Attention Span Theatre's version of Waterworld. It'll be three minutes long, and people will still complain that it's too long! The site'll probably be run by the Cliff's Notes people, and will probably give the Cliff's Notes edition of all sorts of old classics.
Certain editors will probably become wildly popular because they trim all sorts of bad and long popular movies down to their viewable components. Before long, the RIAA will get involved because someone will come up with a "Commercial Product Placement Skipping" version.
This could be the Next Big Thing!
John
Sure, if you wanted to ship inflated balloons or empty cardboard boxes on the shuttle, the costs would probably figure differently. But the NASA engineers would also want to work with you to redesign your cargo to make it better fit within their volumetrics.
Remember that the payload cost on the shuttle isn't computed simply by "Set your satellite on that scale over there, and we'll just fill out an invoice for $5000/pound." That $5000/pound cost is a rate often quoted by the news media. It is simply an average cost, not a shipping rate.
I've also heard $6000/pound before, as well as $1000/pound, so I think these numbers are really made up from whole cloth anyway.
John
Yes, I was in the cabinet taking the heat sink off at that time. But it didn't take very much force to break that ear. I can imagine that much force might be generated by a tall, heavy fan receiving a sideways G shock, of the kind you might cause by transporting the cabinet improperly.
You have to figure that at some point in the future, these mobos will be expected to last more than three years before being replaced. Believe it or don't, but there are people out there who don't upgrade their systems annually.
John
When I first started playing the game, late at night, down in some new level I can no longer remember, I heard the distant clanking of some creature. My health was low, and I didn't feel like learning about a new monster at the wrong end of its weapon, so I started running around one of the bigger rooms.
Just when I thought I had outrun it, I remember turning 180 degrees and found myself standing in front of a pile of rocks. I was puzzled until it jumped up, growled and attacked me! I leapt in my chair and gave out a little AAUGH! which was enough time for it to kill me.
Not the most frightening graphics, but the sounds coupled with the lateness of the hour made me jump! That game still holds a place in my heart as "scary", even though the graphics are but one step better than ASCIImation. I even dug the Amiga out from the basement a few months ago and played a few more games just for old times sake.
John
The capper is his nickname has always been "Spike". We should have known better than to let him near our gear in the first place... We even wanted him to change his nickname, but the best idea anyone came up with was "Surge", and that didn't make anyone feel better in the least.
John
You need admin rights to run a debugger that enters a secure part of the kernel. So, unless you're developing VB or Java or some other language that thinks disassemblers are dangerous, kiss productivity goodbye.
The good news is it takes about 10 minutes to root an NT box, and from there you can just grant yourself admin privileges!
John
Remember, they chose the mozilla icon as a representation of its memory footprint, not because it's an industry dominator.
John
no challenge points for spotting the troll here... :-)
I've been waiting more than 20 years for people to become more tech savvy. In the last five, people have climbed onto the internet and adopted it as their own. So now what do I see?
AOL.
It's like the (alleged) Ancient Chinese Proverb®: Be careful of what you wish for. You may get it.
John
IBM.
The catalogs I get from their enterprise group all have :CueCat barcodes on them.
Just when you thought IBM was going to grow a clue...
John
http://www.deBarcode.com/deBarcode/cgi-bin/deBarc
(where you replace the %s with the UPC-A) to translate my UPC-A barcodes to product info.
However, if you're trying to get "book" information, you don't want to use the UPC at all. You want to use the ISBN, which is encoded in the "Bookland EAN" found on most books. (It's the other barcode, not the UPC barcode.)
Amazon.com makes a very effective ISBN to book catalog database. This URL
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/%s/
does a great job for me.
(Note, that the Bookland EAN is not the ISBN number straight up: you need to decode it. Strip the leading "978" from the EAN, then the last digit of the EAN (the check digit.) You're left with nine digits. Compute the ISBN check digit, and append it to these nine digits, and you're good to go.)
John
The large companies also have the ability to dominate the viewpoint of the software vendors. The number of marketroids we had in here once we mentioned the "L" word (Linux) was staggering. All of them spreading the very same FUD I'm reading in this column. They're relentless, too. We still get sh!t from the Microsofties. Sure, it's decorated in "Oh, hey, John, be sure to come to the .NET informational presentation. We'll have food."
They did, too. It was a religious revival, it would have been more appropriate to hold it in a tent. They spoke in tongues ("C#", "MSIL", ".NET") they raised their voices to the Gates of heaven, and I almost thought the presenters were going to break out in hymns.
I walked out of there with tracts (renamed "White papers"), a full belly, and a mind full of the benefits of .NET.
John
The problem they've come up against is that they've feature bloated their software to the max. It's common knowledge that people don't know how to use 95% of the features of their word processors. Ten years ago, that number used to be 50% ignorance. They sell "new" software with more "features" because their revenue stream model forces them to market "new and improved," not out of any consumer demand.
Thus the birth of .NET. A subscription model. Same product, but now with "fewer hassles." Make it attractive to developers by pushing the hell out of it in the magazines and with evangelical meetings. Make it attractive to consumers by offering them magical promises that it "keeps up automatically with the latest features." They don't even have to think up those features today. It's like buying cleverness on credit!
Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Microsoft gets a monthly rent check from you, too.
John
Not only that, but if those developers have a conscience, they could release their enhancements back to the OSS community.
John
You think we roll out MS Office 2K without investing a couple man-years of effort, testing installations on supported platforms, building SMS packages, preparing training programs, advertising, providing conversion from Office '95 files, etc.? No difference between MS and GNU there.
And you may think that these are the big costs. Multiply that by 7,000+ desktops in this corporation, and Office 2K license fees run into the millions. If the installation cost runs to $150,000 for various peoples' time, it's still peanuts to the licenses.
John
The test was to prove that you could use the signals from OUTSIDE the cloud, rather than just inside it, like we are used to down here on earth. The math to do it has always been there, but apparently nobody actually "walked the walk" before this test.
I suppose it's fortunate that there are many GPS birds in the constellation. One of the problems to solve WRT altitude is "am I inside or outside of the cloud"? It used to be true that you could assume you were inside...
John
Gasoline vapor is explosive, but it's fairly tough to get enough vapor in one place to cause a big explosion. Liquid gasoline is merely very, very flammable. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to be exposed to large quantities of either in the presence of an ignition source, but it would be harder than it sounds to make a building-buster "bomb" out of gasoline.
I think it really depends on if the government wants to encourage or discourage this engine from succeeding. If they want it to fail, they'll say "the fuel's too dangerous for all you potential TERRORISTS," and conveniently ignore the fact that about ten dollars worth of readily available over-the-counter consumer products in use today could provide a building-levelling bomb with just the smallest amount of imagination (and an incredibly large amount of evil.) And no, I don't want to encourage a "how-to" in this thread, so I'm not describing these products or methods.
John
The seal problem is actually easier than I thought.
After more carefully looking at a different animation of an operating engine on the McMaster web site, I see that the outer path described by the nutating disk defines a sphere, not a cylinder. (Duh!) The point of tangency where the disk edge contacts the spherical inside of the motor remains at a constant 90 degrees. Therefore, the seal travels an almost flat surface on the inside of the containing sphere, and can therefore be more like a conventional piston ring.
Now, if there is an oil-delivery system travelling through the axle and disk and out the edge (between two seals) then I agree with the original poster that oil that will be burned.
Unfortunately, I'm long since removed from my organic chemistry days, so I can't answer how the ammonia and/or nitrous oxide compounds might react to the tramp oil on the sphere's wall. It almost certainly will cause most of the pollution problems with this engine, either by causing undesirable reactions with the pre-ignition fuel components (preventing them from achieving 100% combustion) or by simply being burned and the waste being exhausted.
Whatever the results, it's much more likely to be eco-friendly than the good-old-fashioned hydrocarbons we burn today. Certainly the fuels he describes will combust more cleanly.
John
A coworker has a Mazda RX-7, and yes, he just blew a seal in it. However, he had over 200,000 miles on the engine, and much of that is high-speed driving on race tracks (well, as high speed as you can get in an RX-7, anyway...) The "problem" with the seals on the Wankel that you mention are note one of sealing, but rather stem from the fact that the surface area of the combustion area is so large that much oil is constantly being burned off, causing the pollution. The MRE is supposed to run without lubrication along these surfaces.
This engine might be even easier to seal than a normal Wankel. On the Wankel, you have nine separate seals in place on each rotor (one at each apex and one on each arc on each side of the rotor.) The seals meet at odd angles at the corners, and must be carefully manufactured and aligned to achieve a good seal.
The nutation plate in the McMasters engine has a single surface that requires sealing. The challenge with this seal is that the nutation plate changes its angle of contact throughout the cycle. Perhaps a round edge, or two rings, or other mechanism will be found.
McMasters is off-the-wall enought that he might try something completely different here. A ceramic cylinder, or seal, perhaps. He might even figure out a way to dynamically squeeze the cylinder walls to provide a seal from the outside, for all we know. He's proven himself a genius time and again, and if such a seal can be developed, I'm quite confident that he's the guy who can do it.
John
A bottle of water doesn't have enough energy present to split it into hydrogen. You can say "yes, if it's at 30,000 feet or 99 degrees C" or whatever, but that bottle of water required EXTERNAL energy to raise it to that potential. And that external energy is the entire point. It had to come from somewhere, it's not free.
Until someone invents a way to "crack" water (with some off-the-wall fusion theory or whatever) there will always be a need for an external energy source to split it. Whether it comes from solar panels on your garage roof or a coal-fired plant in Montana over electric lines doesn't change the fact that EXTERNAL energy was required to make it useful.
John
Since many phones are used in cities, RF propagation is not the same when you have dozens of buildings to reflect RF from. And you can't really use signal strength as a distance indicator, either, because signal strength can be dependent on which cell tower the steel in your car is blocking the signal from reaching.
There's just too much noise (RF) to depend on this anywhere line of sight degrades. Not to mention the long stretches of freeway out in the country where one tower may be the ONLY antenna that can reach the cell phone, regardless of strength.
John
My Nokia 8260 (piece of crap phone, by the way, the only thing going for it is its very tiny size) has an "Emergency" category in the dealer setup menu. When I select that, I get another menu that offers me "Emergency number 1", "2", and "3". Emergency 1 = "999" Emergency 2 = "*999" Emergency 3 = "" This is different than the "9 = Emergency" setting under the user's menu. I suspect most Nokia phones have similar settings.
The jello-scene was clearly gratuitous. But it made me realize something else: this show wasn't filmed just for 40-year-old Trek fans. It was filmed to try to get 16-year-old boys interested, and frankly, this scene hit the one item that'll hold their interest the longest. My advice to you is to buy stock in Vaseline and get over it.
And another thing: did anyone else check the clock? 65 minutes of action crammed into two hours! I watched the entire show on Replay TV and thought I would go through a fresh set of AA batteries just by hitting the "skip 30 sec" button. Whoa.