The Concorde is cutting edge military technology misappropriated to a non-existent commercial market.
Cutting edge? Misappropriated, for peaceful purposes?;-);-);-)
They certainly didn't know it was going to be a non-existent market when they started designing Concorde. It was the noise, and 'environmental' issues that killed it; and many of those were issues that appear to have been deliberately raised and exagerated in the USA entirely to prevent it selling. There's a huge dollop of protectionism going on right there.
Actually, Concorde uses afterburners between mach 1 and 1.7.
It definitely was a cheap knock off, the Concorde had carefully designed wing shape to give good lift at low speeds, but Tu-144 wings were straight, and early ones had big problems because of this. But the one big innovation they added to overcome this was the retractable cannards (small wings just behind the nose), which gave it much better handling at low airspeeds and more lift. The TU-144 had a slightly higher top speed, but it was even less successful than Concorde commercially.
Actually, we now may be able to. One of the problems the concorde suffers from is that the only way, at the time, to go supersonic was to use jet engines that function basically like afterburners on military jets.
Yes, but Concorde is actually at it's most efficient when it gets to near its maximum speed; it doesn't use afterburners at mach 2.2, only at takeoff and to get from mach 1 to 1.7 (all aircraft have more drag between those speeds), which doesn't take that long.
The big inefficiency is at low speed. The only way the delta shape can fly at low airspeed is to take on a large angle of attack. That gives good lift, but also induces quite a bit of drag; which really screws the efficiency up until they go supersonic. They even have to use the afterburners at takeoff, and that's why it's so noisy, but they switch them off again soon after.
I feel that the next kewl feature in passenger aviation must be vertical takeoff and landing. Airports are much too big with those long runways. If passenger jets could do the Harrier thing, then airports could be almost like bus stops. (Although some clearance round the side of the aircraft would still be needed.)
This is a combination of gyrocopter and aeroplane- it has a very short takeoff and landing, but also has pretty good range. The small runways mean that they can be placed closer to the center of cities, or near to towns, and they would be much easier to get to, and from. I mean, total travel time to get to airports is very often more than flight time. What if the aeroplanes could pick you up from your home town?
How do you know your machine is faster than a Cray-1?
I compared the peak MFLOPs quoted for each. Frankly, if my laptop can't beat a ~20 year old machine (even a supercomputer), bearing in mind Moore's law; then my laptop would be pretty lousy.
Actually, my laptop is probably considerably faster than a Cray-1 for a lot of things- the Cray-1 gets its speed from vector processing, my laptop doesn't, so it is easier to program. And the MIPs rating for my laptop is much higher than Cray-1.
I figure that a Cray-2 has it beat though, at least on floating point stuff, although a newer laptop would beat Cray-2s easily.
Do you know of any routers for under $150 that could add VPN support for less than an additional $5 or so, or if these exist,
I have a Netgear MR-314 which is a 802.11b wireless router with 5 ethernet ports; you should be able to get that for much less than that; and it has VPN passthrough, which is what you need. I've also got a D-LINK DSL-504 adsl router which also has VPN passthrough, both built-in, no extra cost. The former is much less than $150 right no, the latter goes for about that much.
then can you link instead of flaming me?
You cheeky bastard; you're the one that started flaming me!
My laptop has more processing power than a Cray-1, I don't even know what to do with my 750 Mhz desktop half the time.
What do I need more processing power for exactly? Seriously?
Most applications that need more grunt probably already have ASICs designed for them (e.g. graphics cards), and ASICs are much more efficient anyway; and in quantity, cheaper.
So you're looking for an application that doesn't already have any hardware for it, and can't be attacked by a bunch of cheap Athlons or Intels or other supercomputers. What exactly?
Any WWAN router would be merely an 802.11(x) router with a WWAN card slapped in.
Most routers I'm familiar with don't have separate cards. In any case we're talking about 802.16 here, remember?
I know of no routers or firewalls that directly support VPN,
I'm using two at the moment. Contivity firewalls support VPN among others. You'd need a new router for 802.16 anyway,and the newer routers tend to support it out of the box.
A widely used standard (PPPoE) should be used for fast adoption of the service.
Could be. Stunningly bad idea though. As I understand it, PPPoE has absolutely no security, connections can be hijacked one way or another, and all kinds of evilness can be perpetrated; most of which represent a loss of bandwidth to the users, and a reduction in confidence, leading to a loss of customers for the ISP.
A special client/service rings much too close to AOL-like.
You can probably get on to the WWAN quite easily. Whether you would be able to get on to the internet from there is quite a different matter. The ISP may deploy a VPN over the WWAN that you have to log in to in order to allow access to the internet to people have paid the fees.
This seems like a wildly stupid CYA type of move. It seems that claiming ownership to whatever travels your lines could get you in big trouble. Who wants to lay claim to illegal content? It seems safer to claim no responsibility.
Yes. It looks to me like they are assuming ownership, and publishing, whatever their customers place on their website. That has to open them up to libel issues.
Sure, it's a violation of their Terms and Conditions; and they can terminate my contract, but I don't see anywhere that I indemnify them for damages for such a thing, and they already published the libellous material.
Yes, but the other clauses claim the right to edit the work and distribute it (over and above the copyright).
I don't know. It all looks very messy. My suspicion is that most of this doesn't have a hope of standing up in court.
And it could even backfire, for example if I were to post some libellous material up on their website. Suddenly they own it, and they're the ones publishing it. They could well be the subject of legal action against them. They could cancel my account, but they would still have been the ones that did the publishing, and the subject of the libellous material may be due damages, which presumably the ISP would have to meet.
Under international law you own the copyright of anything you write. I don't think that their terms and conditions are likely to stand up in court; unless they can show that you understood the agreement you were signing would remove all your rights.
If you didn't understand it, then it is likely that no contract exists, in which case they do not have a leg to stand on. Still, IANAL.
You expressly waive in favour of Xtra and any other party authorised by Xtra all moral rights and any similar rights in any jurisdiction which you may have or may later acquire in respect of any relevant Materials.
Which seems to say, that you don't own your own work anymore either.
I hoped that this is a late April fool; but it was updated 4th April.
Actually, I think that Microsoft should pick up a copy of Mozilla and hack on it and ship it.
Doing that would open source their web browser, but they're not making any money on it anyway, and they can do exactly the same evil things with a hacked Mozilla as they do with IE anyway, so what's the difference?
The irony of having effectively used their competitor to develop Microsoft's browser would be total;-)
I can't see them actually doing this though, but it would be very funny;-)
From past experience Microsoft's idea of better is more packed with features. I use Google because it is fast, efficient, and has unobtrusive advertising. Can you honestly see Microsoft competing on those terms?
Actually, I can. Microsoft are quite comfortable with simply buying a market. They just pour money onto it, embrace and extend it, FUD it; and ship it with their OS, and then finally they own it (usually). Check out IE. Other browsers are a tiny percentage of the market. Check out Microsoft Word for another example. Both are decent products. Microsoft can do decent if they really have to. Alas.
That's what they normally do. And it usually works. The only question in my mind is whether Microsoft really can capture this market. The incumbent is good, widespread and it's unclear whether Microsoft's strength on the desktop even, can allow them to capture it. Indeed, it's not even clear whether it's worth them trying- nobody knows how much money Google makes on it; or how much money Microsoft could make.
Anyway, back to the original question: can Microsoft do the right thing enough to get the market? Yes, and worse still, there's no guarantee that they would continue to do the right thing.
Incidentally, every rocket fuel of one kind or another has to have some oxidizer, or it won't work in space(think that one through.)
Not quite. Recall that rockets work by throwing fluid away. There is a class of rockets, such as solar or nuclear heated propellent or ion or plasma drives, that don't require oxidisers.
XCOR have a 'tea cart' engine that they ran indoors at the conference center of Space Access a couple of years ago; with full permission from the fire martials. There was talk of demoing it at schools, but I don't know what happened about that.
Your argument implies that listening to music without headphones is a copyright violation.
Taking the letter of the law, I think that that is correct. In practice, unless you are playing it for people who actually want to listen, and probably paying for it, you'd be vanishingly unlikely to run into problems.
Certainly corporations can own CDs; so that much is correct atleast.
However, if the corporation owns a copy of a CD, then only one person can listen at once, otherwise it becomes a 'performance', which you haven't bought the rights to when you buy a CD. However if you only allow one person to listen then that may be ok (but then you're talking about a library copy- IRC there may be different terms for those.)
Secondly, you can't deploy it across the organisation, say with P2P; because you don't have a license to do that- that would be a copy, and the copyright holder has a monopoly on allowing people to do that.
Yes, but not necessarily worse for that. WiFi uses it, as does ethernet for that matter.
Second, TDMA is not infinitely scalable.
True, and false;-)
True in the sense that sending more bits between two nodes increases the frequency band used, and eventually the band interferes with surrounding bands.
However, if power control, node routing and directional antennas are used the network throughput scales up proportional with the number of users; and TDMA supports this.
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Actually Concorde is the only plane that can do this. SR-71s can no longer do this, as they have been permanently grounded.
None of the Blackbirds fly anymore.
Cutting edge? Misappropriated, for peaceful purposes? ;-) ;-) ;-)
They certainly didn't know it was going to be a non-existent market when they started designing Concorde. It was the noise, and 'environmental' issues that killed it; and many of those were issues that appear to have been deliberately raised and exagerated in the USA entirely to prevent it selling. There's a huge dollop of protectionism going on right there.
It definitely was a cheap knock off, the Concorde had carefully designed wing shape to give good lift at low speeds, but Tu-144 wings were straight, and early ones had big problems because of this. But the one big innovation they added to overcome this was the retractable cannards (small wings just behind the nose), which gave it much better handling at low airspeeds and more lift. The TU-144 had a slightly higher top speed, but it was even less successful than Concorde commercially.
Yes, but Concorde is actually at it's most efficient when it gets to near its maximum speed; it doesn't use afterburners at mach 2.2, only at takeoff and to get from mach 1 to 1.7 (all aircraft have more drag between those speeds), which doesn't take that long.
The big inefficiency is at low speed. The only way the delta shape can fly at low airspeed is to take on a large angle of attack. That gives good lift, but also induces quite a bit of drag; which really screws the efficiency up until they go supersonic. They even have to use the afterburners at takeoff, and that's why it's so noisy, but they switch them off again soon after.
Actually, there's Cartercopter.
This is a combination of gyrocopter and aeroplane- it has a very short takeoff and landing, but also has pretty good range. The small runways mean that they can be placed closer to the center of cities, or near to towns, and they would be much easier to get to, and from. I mean, total travel time to get to airports is very often more than flight time. What if the aeroplanes could pick you up from your home town?
I compared the peak MFLOPs quoted for each. Frankly, if my laptop can't beat a ~20 year old machine (even a supercomputer), bearing in mind Moore's law; then my laptop would be pretty lousy.
Actually, my laptop is probably considerably faster than a Cray-1 for a lot of things- the Cray-1 gets its speed from vector processing, my laptop doesn't, so it is easier to program. And the MIPs rating for my laptop is much higher than Cray-1.
I figure that a Cray-2 has it beat though, at least on floating point stuff, although a newer laptop would beat Cray-2s easily.
I have a Netgear MR-314 which is a 802.11b wireless router with 5 ethernet ports; you should be able to get that for much less than that; and it has VPN passthrough, which is what you need. I've also got a D-LINK DSL-504 adsl router which also has VPN passthrough, both built-in, no extra cost. The former is much less than $150 right no, the latter goes for about that much.
then can you link instead of flaming me?
You cheeky bastard; you're the one that started flaming me!
What do I need more processing power for exactly? Seriously?
Most applications that need more grunt probably already have ASICs designed for them (e.g. graphics cards), and ASICs are much more efficient anyway; and in quantity, cheaper.
So you're looking for an application that doesn't already have any hardware for it, and can't be attacked by a bunch of cheap Athlons or Intels or other supercomputers. What exactly?
Yeah, but book and magazine publishers can get sued for damages. And they don't write the books.
Most routers I'm familiar with don't have separate cards. In any case we're talking about 802.16 here, remember?
I know of no routers or firewalls that directly support VPN,
I'm using two at the moment. Contivity firewalls support VPN among others. You'd need a new router for 802.16 anyway,and the newer routers tend to support it out of the box.
A widely used standard (PPPoE) should be used for fast adoption of the service.
Could be. Stunningly bad idea though. As I understand it, PPPoE has absolutely no security, connections can be hijacked one way or another, and all kinds of evilness can be perpetrated; most of which represent a loss of bandwidth to the users, and a reduction in confidence, leading to a loss of customers for the ISP.
A special client/service rings much too close to AOL-like.
Must be your provider huh?
I'm sure any WWAN router would handle VPN. I've not found that setting up a VPN is any more difficult than PPPOE.
You can probably get on to the WWAN quite easily. Whether you would be able to get on to the internet from there is quite a different matter. The ISP may deploy a VPN over the WWAN that you have to log in to in order to allow access to the internet to people have paid the fees.
Yes. It looks to me like they are assuming ownership, and publishing, whatever their customers place on their website. That has to open them up to libel issues.
Sure, it's a violation of their Terms and Conditions; and they can terminate my contract, but I don't see anywhere that I indemnify them for damages for such a thing, and they already published the libellous material.
I don't know. It all looks very messy. My suspicion is that most of this doesn't have a hope of standing up in court.
And it could even backfire, for example if I were to post some libellous material up on their website. Suddenly they own it, and they're the ones publishing it. They could well be the subject of legal action against them. They could cancel my account, but they would still have been the ones that did the publishing, and the subject of the libellous material may be due damages, which presumably the ISP would have to meet.
If you didn't understand it, then it is likely that no contract exists, in which case they do not have a leg to stand on. Still, IANAL.
You expressly waive in favour of Xtra and any other party authorised by Xtra all moral rights and any similar rights in any jurisdiction which you may have or may later acquire in respect of any relevant Materials.
Which seems to say, that you don't own your own work anymore either.
I hoped that this is a late April fool; but it was updated 4th April.
This is really quite remarkable.
Actually, I think that Microsoft should pick up a copy of Mozilla and hack on it and ship it.
Doing that would open source their web browser, but they're not making any money on it anyway, and they can do exactly the same evil things with a hacked Mozilla as they do with IE anyway, so what's the difference?
The irony of having effectively used their competitor to develop Microsoft's browser would be total ;-)
I can't see them actually doing this though, but it would be very funny ;-)
Actually, I can. Microsoft are quite comfortable with simply buying a market. They just pour money onto it, embrace and extend it, FUD it; and ship it with their OS, and then finally they own it (usually). Check out IE. Other browsers are a tiny percentage of the market. Check out Microsoft Word for another example. Both are decent products. Microsoft can do decent if they really have to. Alas.
That's what they normally do. And it usually works. The only question in my mind is whether Microsoft really can capture this market. The incumbent is good, widespread and it's unclear whether Microsoft's strength on the desktop even, can allow them to capture it. Indeed, it's not even clear whether it's worth them trying- nobody knows how much money Google makes on it; or how much money Microsoft could make.
Anyway, back to the original question: can Microsoft do the right thing enough to get the market? Yes, and worse still, there's no guarantee that they would continue to do the right thing.
I suspect they might consider it for the right price, if you could sort out the legalities so they don't get sued; rocketry is relatively expensive.
Not quite. Recall that rockets work by throwing fluid away. There is a class of rockets, such as solar or nuclear heated propellent or ion or plasma drives, that don't require oxidisers.
Taking the letter of the law, I think that that is correct. In practice, unless you are playing it for people who actually want to listen, and probably paying for it, you'd be vanishingly unlikely to run into problems.
However, if the corporation owns a copy of a CD, then only one person can listen at once, otherwise it becomes a 'performance', which you haven't bought the rights to when you buy a CD. However if you only allow one person to listen then that may be ok (but then you're talking about a library copy- IRC there may be different terms for those.)
Secondly, you can't deploy it across the organisation, say with P2P; because you don't have a license to do that- that would be a copy, and the copyright holder has a monopoly on allowing people to do that.
IANAL
Yes, but not necessarily worse for that. WiFi uses it, as does ethernet for that matter.
Second, TDMA is not infinitely scalable.
True, and false ;-)
True in the sense that sending more bits between two nodes increases the frequency band used, and eventually the band interferes with surrounding bands.
However, if power control, node routing and directional antennas are used the network throughput scales up proportional with the number of users; and TDMA supports this.