Suppose you were a Columbia astronaut and you were told (which apparently was not the case) that there could be a problem with foam ice impact on the leading edge of the left wing. Having digital cameras on-board which could be preset to take numerous photos, could you figure out a way to get one of the cameras below the wing (via the cargo bay) to a position to get a photo given you had days to try and try again? Think boom, string, elastic & a cargo bay full of items you have at your command to figure out how to get that camera out there and back (again and again if necessary) until you get just one revealing photo. Can a digital camera operate in space if you could somehow get it out there to take a photo?
Found it here. Clever, inexpensive out-of-the-box thinking. Answers to most questions above (location, steering) can probably be solved with undue complication. Compliment this with ARES Mars Airplane, conceived at Langley which could easily follow tumbleweed travels.
Based on ideas they gleaned from Atanasoff on a one-week visit to Iowa State (and actually staying at the home of Atanasoff and leaving with a notebook full ABC computer details). Did Eckert/Mauchly deserve a patent for ideas gleaned from Atanasoff? The courts ruled NO, as Atanasoff had clearly developed the first digital computer.
All 3 articles are FREE! Try thousands, not 200Gs. An interesting quote regarding a FPGA web server application (in case you didn't get your free login ID just like/.): "The result is that a WinCom server with a few $2,000 FPGAs can blow the doors off a Sun or an Intel-based machine. "We're 50 to 300 times faster."
"My job for the past several months has been to obtain and evaluate these tools. I can tell you that these tools are not there yet." Did you try Viva, a 3D Graphical icon alternative to 1D linear ASCII coding in Verilog, VHDL, Forge, DK1, JHDL etc? You can test/run Viva on your PC in addition to targeting it to FPGAs. Perhaps Star Bridge will let you try a courtesy copy, as they did for graduate students in the Parallel Computing Class I teach.
"A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."
Sounds like you have little faith in NASA, it's engineers and astronauts. Much COULD HAVE been done if a proper debris analysis, ground and space photos etc. confirmed the likelihood of a disaster. Atlantis was on the pad ready to launch within 1 week for a rescue mission. I believe NASA is a CAN DO agency, and when I hear NOTHING COULD BE DONE and we can't do this and we can't do that, I think we sell NASA short. If you don't believe me, check here which states:
"Could another shuttle have been sent up? Shuttle Atlantis might have been rushed into service, and if normal testing were skipped, it might have been in space in a week or so. The Columbia crew had enough supplies to last through Wednesday, Feb. 5 and might have been able to stretch those supplies a few more days."
More testing indicates Cisco 3.6.1 VPN incompatibility with Mac OSX 2.4. 10.2.4. works fine on Titanium until VPN is installed when (whether VPN is active or not), the Titanium with OSX10.2.4 drops the internet every time the cover is closed or "sleep" is selected. When VPN is uninstalled, 10.2.4 works normally again. Is this an Apple or Cisco (or other) problem? 10.2.4 problem I suspect.
Installed 10.2.4 on our G4, iBook and Titanium. All worked fine except the Titanium laptop which now drops the internet connection under sleep or closing the cover (requiring a reboot to bring back the intgernet: mail or browser connections). The iBook and G4 are fine, holding their internet (cable via wireless or direct connect) just as the Titanium did til upgrading to 10.2.4. We've reinstalled 10.2.4 and the problem persists. Is there a known BUG? Solution? Go back to 10,2.3? Appreciate any insight HERE!
How about 4 IBM PowerPCs onboard a large Xilinx FPGA chip. That allows significant flexibility. The tradeoff is just how parallel is your application. Some prefer more silicon for reconfigurable gates to the fixed CPUs on-board that may not maximize silicon use/cycle during an application.
Better than that, a key NASA researcher attempting to convert Cray weather codes is Dave. However, we're targeting the new Starbridge HC system with Xilinx FPGA chips with 6 million gates rather than the 62K gates of HAL.
Although FPGAs may be used to emulate CPUs etc., that does not maximize their potential speed and flexibility. Traditional CPUs are severely restricted to only one (or several) operations/cycle. Thus, most silicon (gates) on general-purpose CPUs is wasted during each cycle with less than 1% active/cycle. FPGAs are inherently parallel, allowing orders of magnitude more operations/cycle. You can pack applications to maximize the operations/cycle and if you exceed the 6 million gates/FPGA chip, even extend to additional FPGAs & FPGA boards. This allows tailoring FPGAs to applications in a reconfigurable way to optimize silicon use. Viva simplifies coding of large-scale applications in a 3-dimensional way (x & y screen axes plus drilling in for the 3rd dimension) which is more intuitive than traditional 1-dimensional sequential line-by-line ASCII coding. The next generation seem to adapt well to graphic (iconic) coding perhaps better than many of us who may have our tradition in 1-D ASCII coding.
More technical information is found in MAPLD Paper D1 and other reports. NASA Huntsville, NSA, USAF (Eglin), University of South Carolina, George Washington University, George Mason University, San Diego Supercomputer Center, North Carolina A&T and others have StarBridge Hypercomputers they are exploring for diverse applications. The latest StarBridge HC contains Xilinx FPFAs with 6 million gates compared to the earlier HAL-Jr with only 82,000 gates. Costs are nowhere near $26 Million. NASA spent approx 50K for two StarBridge Systems.
Werner von Braun had a series of articles and drawings that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post indicating the steps mankind should take in space. We have been following the steps which eventually lead to Mars. The only question is WHEN (during which generation) and who (U.S., China,...).
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose you were a Columbia astronaut and you were told (which apparently was not the case) that there could be a problem with foam ice impact on the leading edge of the left wing. Having digital cameras on-board which could be preset to take numerous photos, could you figure out a way to get one of the cameras below the wing (via the cargo bay) to a position to get a photo given you had days to try and try again? Think boom, string, elastic & a cargo bay full of items you have at your command to figure out how to get that camera out there and back (again and again if necessary) until you get just one revealing photo. Can a digital camera operate in space if you could somehow get it out there to take a photo?
Found it here. Clever, inexpensive out-of-the-box thinking. Answers to most questions above (location, steering) can probably be solved with undue complication. Compliment this with ARES Mars Airplane, conceived at Langley which could easily follow tumbleweed travels.
Go State, Langley & JPL!
Based on ideas they gleaned from Atanasoff on a one-week visit to Iowa State (and actually staying at the home of Atanasoff and leaving with a notebook full ABC computer details). Did Eckert/Mauchly deserve a patent for ideas gleaned from Atanasoff? The courts ruled NO, as Atanasoff had clearly developed the first digital computer.
Here it is
All 3 articles are FREE! Try thousands, not 200Gs. /.): "The result is that a WinCom server with a few $2,000 FPGAs can blow the doors off a Sun or an Intel-based machine. "We're 50 to 300 times faster."
An interesting quote regarding a FPGA web server application (in case you didn't get your free login ID just like
"My job for the past several months has been to obtain and evaluate these tools. I can tell you that these tools are not there yet."
Did you try Viva, a 3D Graphical icon alternative to 1D linear ASCII coding in Verilog, VHDL, Forge, DK1, JHDL etc? You can test/run Viva on your PC in addition to targeting it to FPGAs. Perhaps Star Bridge will let you try a courtesy copy, as they did for graduate students in the Parallel Computing Class I teach.
The following UPI excerpt documents Iraqi views:
"A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."
full story
Sounds like you have little faith in NASA, it's engineers and astronauts. Much COULD HAVE been done if a proper debris analysis, ground and space photos etc. confirmed the likelihood of a disaster. Atlantis was on the pad ready to launch within 1 week for a rescue mission. I believe NASA is a CAN DO agency, and when I hear NOTHING COULD BE DONE and we can't do this and we can't do that, I think we sell NASA short. If you don't believe me, check here which states:
"Could another shuttle have been sent up? Shuttle Atlantis might have been rushed into service, and if normal testing were skipped, it might have been in space in a week or so. The Columbia crew had enough supplies to last through Wednesday, Feb. 5 and might have been able to stretch those supplies a few more days."
More testing indicates Cisco 3.6.1 VPN incompatibility with Mac OSX 2.4. 10.2.4. works fine on Titanium until VPN is installed when (whether VPN is active or not), the Titanium with OSX10.2.4 drops the internet every time the cover is closed or "sleep" is selected. When VPN is uninstalled, 10.2.4 works normally again. Is this an Apple or Cisco (or other) problem? 10.2.4 problem I suspect.
Installed 10.2.4 on our G4, iBook and Titanium. All worked fine except the Titanium laptop which now drops the internet connection under sleep or closing the cover (requiring a reboot to bring back the intgernet: mail or browser connections). The iBook and G4 are fine, holding their internet (cable via wireless or direct connect) just as the Titanium did til upgrading to 10.2.4. We've reinstalled 10.2.4 and the problem persists. Is there a known BUG? Solution? Go back to 10,2.3?
Appreciate any insight HERE!
How about 4 IBM PowerPCs onboard a large Xilinx FPGA chip. That allows significant flexibility. The tradeoff is just how parallel is your application. Some prefer more silicon for reconfigurable gates to the fixed CPUs on-board that may not maximize silicon use/cycle during an application.
Better than that, a key NASA researcher attempting to convert Cray weather codes is Dave. However, we're targeting the new Starbridge HC system with Xilinx FPGA chips with 6 million gates rather than the 62K gates of HAL.
Although FPGAs may be used to emulate CPUs etc., that does not maximize their potential speed and flexibility. Traditional CPUs are severely restricted to only one (or several) operations/cycle. Thus, most silicon (gates) on general-purpose CPUs is wasted during each cycle with less than 1% active/cycle. FPGAs are inherently parallel, allowing orders of magnitude more operations/cycle. You can pack applications to maximize the operations/cycle and if you exceed the 6 million gates/FPGA chip, even extend to additional FPGAs & FPGA boards. This allows tailoring FPGAs to applications in a reconfigurable way to optimize silicon use. Viva simplifies coding of large-scale applications in a 3-dimensional way (x & y screen axes plus drilling in for the 3rd dimension) which is more intuitive than traditional 1-dimensional sequential line-by-line ASCII coding. The next generation seem to adapt well to graphic (iconic) coding perhaps better than many of us who may have our tradition in 1-D ASCII coding.
More technical information is found in MAPLD Paper D1 and other reports. NASA Huntsville, NSA, USAF (Eglin), University of South Carolina, George Washington University, George Mason University, San Diego Supercomputer Center, North Carolina A&T and others have StarBridge Hypercomputers they are exploring for diverse applications. The latest StarBridge HC contains Xilinx FPFAs with 6 million gates compared to the earlier HAL-Jr with only 82,000 gates. Costs are nowhere near $26 Million. NASA spent approx 50K for two StarBridge Systems.
Werner von Braun had a series of articles and drawings that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post indicating the steps mankind should take in space. We have been following the steps which eventually lead to Mars. The only question is WHEN (during which generation) and who (U.S., China,...).