It is those people who will download with no intention of buying, not tech savy economically conscious slashdotters. (In most cases at least)
oh PLEASE.
it IS ($0 + effort to download) vs ($19 + effort to go to store), and we have no way to tell what's really going on. P2P are a form of unfair competition against the record company monopoly (or cartel, i guess).
To what end? We've essentially arrived at a multipurpose protocol layered atop a single purposed sub-section of a multipurposed protocol, the firewall vendors make the bank, the network admins get a bit more automated every day, and all that's old is new again.
Theres a difference- the port 80 stuff has client programs running with user priviledges- limited damage there. you can firewall other stuff off.
>My advice is to take your money and hire a starving college student or two. >Hell, set up an internship and have them work for free (or give them ~$10/hr. They'll still love you).
I think it depends on the nature of the task. Most projects could benefit from coders having exposure to other similar tasks... In my somewhat limited experience, there's relatively little "general purpose" programming. So pay for interns depends on how much you would have to teach someone who knew how to program well but knew nothing about issues specific to the application...
the other problem is turnover... interns typically do short projects, so it might or might not take them some time to get rolling with their project
actually It just occured to me that slowing down isn't so bad -- here's why. The outer planets all have a good number of sattelites, which means one could use these bodies to do funky orbits that would slow you down (think three body problem- not just ellipses).
first off we should stop thinking about it in terms of US vs Russia -- western-funded spacecraft are launched from russia because they have cheaper launch vehicles and fewer legal hassles
the issue with ion rocket is the amount of electrical power required... Not sure how long / large a mission you need for it to pay off. Also, ion rocket usually powered by nuclear, which the well-meaning but misinformed public freaks out about (cassini):-(
The issue with solar sail is diminishing power away from sun, but thats about it! would be pretty sweet for lightweight science probes to the outer planets...
well.... the way things are now, the biggest hardware cost for space flight is the launch vehicle. you need like 7.5 kilometers/second to get into Low Earth Orbit, this generally sets you back $5K to $10K per kg into LEO (or like a factor of 3 or 4 higher for Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit, which is used for comm sats).
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/space/launchers/
then you need like another 3 or 4 kilometers/second to get to the rest of the solar system (and you can do tricks like gravity assist etc once away from earth)
so the problem isnt using a chem. rocket to go to mars, jupiter, etc but hauling that rocket's fuel up into LEO...
solar sails require zero fuel. other futuristic space propulsion types all consume LOTS of power, which means bigger launch vehicle, bigger costs
Dont knock octave, its a great tool. Unfortunately it hasnt been developed in a while i dont think.
I'm a Mech. Eng. student at Cornell, we use a lot of Matlab, and I use it around here all the time. octave does like 80% of the stuff Matlab is used for, and is less frustrating to work with (loads faster, and matlab behaves weird from time to time)
the thing is matlab has more functionality. As for performance, both Octave and Matlab are just fine for small/medium calculations, and neither can handle really big ones so it isnt much of an issue to me. Personally i think octave is nicer to script for (#!/usr/bin/octave -q). working in unix is much nicer and more flexible than windows (but at the cost of a steep learning curve, i guess)
anyhow, what makes me use matlab is simulink and the gui/zoomer that comes up when you make plots, and its ability to interface with DAQ boards...
perhaps if a more friendly plotter was added to octave it'd be pretty awesome. thats my two cents...
Slashdot Mirror
kinda sounds like works wasnt getting done because people were spending hours downloading music : )
doesnt really prove that *playing* music is bad- just make employees bring CDs or MP3s from home and d/l it on their time
It is those people who will download with no intention of buying, not tech savy economically conscious slashdotters. (In most cases at least)
oh PLEASE.
it IS ($0 + effort to download) vs ($19 + effort
to go to store), and we have no way to tell what's really going on. P2P are a form of unfair competition against the record company monopoly (or cartel, i guess).
noone is innocent.
To what end? We've essentially arrived at a multipurpose protocol layered atop a single purposed sub-section of a multipurposed protocol, the firewall vendors make the bank, the network admins get a bit more automated every day, and all that's old is new again.
Theres a difference- the port 80 stuff has client programs running with user priviledges- limited damage there. you can firewall other stuff off.
>My advice is to take your money and hire a starving college student or two.
>Hell, set up an internship and have them work for free (or give them ~$10/hr. They'll still love you).
I think it depends on the nature of the task. Most projects could benefit from coders having exposure to other similar tasks... In my somewhat limited experience, there's relatively little "general purpose" programming. So pay for interns depends on how much you would have to teach someone who knew how to program well but knew nothing about issues specific to the application...
the other problem is turnover... interns typically do short projects, so it might or might not take them some time to get rolling with their project
wow tacking- sweet!
actually It just occured to me that slowing down isn't so bad -- here's why. The outer planets all have a good number of sattelites, which means one could use these bodies to do funky orbits that would slow you down (think three body problem- not just ellipses).
first off we should stop thinking about it in terms of US vs Russia -- western-funded spacecraft are launched from russia because they have cheaper launch vehicles and fewer legal hassles
:-(
:-)
the issue with ion rocket is the amount of electrical power required... Not sure how long / large a mission you need for it to pay off. Also, ion rocket usually powered by nuclear, which the well-meaning but misinformed public freaks out about (cassini)
The issue with solar sail is diminishing power away from sun, but thats about it! would be pretty sweet for lightweight science probes to the outer planets...
I wonder how they slow down
well.... the way things are now, the biggest hardware cost for space flight is the launch vehicle. you need like 7.5 kilometers/second to get into Low Earth Orbit, this generally sets you back $5K to $10K per kg into LEO (or like a factor of 3 or 4 higher for Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit, which is used for comm sats).
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/space/launchers/
then you need like another 3 or 4 kilometers/second to get to the rest of the solar system (and you can do tricks like gravity assist etc once away from earth)
so the problem isnt using a chem. rocket to go to mars, jupiter, etc but hauling that rocket's fuel up into LEO...
solar sails require zero fuel. other futuristic space propulsion types all consume LOTS of power, which means bigger launch vehicle, bigger costs
it hasnt been developed in a while i dont think.
I'm a Mech. Eng. student at Cornell, we use a lot of Matlab, and I use it around here all the time. octave does like 80% of the stuff Matlab is used for, and is less frustrating to work with (loads faster, and matlab behaves weird from time to time)
the thing is matlab has more functionality. As for performance, both Octave and Matlab are just fine for small/medium calculations, and neither can handle really big ones so it isnt much of an issue to me. Personally i think octave is nicer to script for (#!/usr/bin/octave -q). working in unix is much nicer and more flexible than windows (but at the cost of a steep learning curve, i guess)
anyhow, what makes me use matlab is simulink and the gui/zoomer that comes up when you make plots, and its ability to interface with DAQ boards...
perhaps if a more friendly plotter was added to octave it'd be pretty awesome. thats my two cents...
-pete