>>Go get an Apple ][, you can learn just as much for $50;)
I disagree. This project completely rules. It's way more than just tinkering around with an Apple ][ -- it's the equivilent of building an Apple ][ from scratch, reverse engineering Applesoft, the monitor, the Sweet 16 emulator, the LISA assembler, building a floppy drive, etc. etc. etc.
Go read the articles and you'll appreciate what a tremendous amount of work this was -- a hell of an achievement of the variety that makes most PhD applications look like a 3rd grade book report.
>>that's one VERY expensive project that doesnt do anything useful.
Yeah? Let's see:
2500 hours of labor -- $125,000 3500 feet of wire -- $345 dog-eared copy of Dr. Dobbs - $5.95 parts -- $3500
Proving you are the ultimate bad-ass King of the Nerds by building a working Apollo 11 Guidance Computer -- priceless.
Exactly right! Backlight, touchscreen drivers, Windows Media Player (good grief!) and WinMain() idle loops chew a hell of a lot of power... power that should be spent sending signals to an aircraft, not playing stupid sound clips.
From the manuf. webpage:
>>The 7.4V 2200mAh Lithium-Ion battery... providing nearly 3 hours of flight time
Note they say *nearly* 3 Hours? What's that translate to in real life? Two and a half hours with a BRAND NEW fully charged lithium ion pack? That's not very impressive. And just wait 'till that battery begins to age... it's all downhill from there.
Now 2+ hours may sound like a long time (and for gas flights it is) but it's not uncommon for thermal sailplane flights to last more than an hour each! BTW: 1 hour per flight isn't excessive -- it may take 20 minutes of work just to get a plane out of an aggressive thermal riser and back on the ground without overstressing the airframe in a dive. With only two+ hours flight time, running out of battery during a flight is a real risk. Who is going to risk a thousand $ model with this radio system?
The so-called review (which was little more than a press release) sucks, too. It didn't even mention whether this radio can do advanced features such as flap/aeleron mixing, programmed sequences, v-tail mixing, etc. or whether the radio includes servos. Is it safe to assume it does all this? Who knows.
Finally, the price tag -- $2000!
No thanks. I'll stick with my old-fashioned radio that does all the above and lets me fly all day on one charge for 1/5 the price.
First of all, I agree with almost all your points. My advice is to do like I did, quit bitching and buy a color laser. The prices have fallen quite dramatically in the past year and so long people continue to buy their cheap-shit inkjet printers, they'll continue to make them.
The price per page on a laser is about 1/4 inkjets, toner cartridges last for thousands of pages (not hundreds, maybe, if you're lucky and the planets are aligned just right as with the typical 8ml inkjet), and it's waterproof.
Sure, you'll spend more upfront with the laser, but it's a far more dependable technology and
Oh, in case you're wondering, I bought a Dell 3100cn color laser on sale for $384, delivered. (Thanks, www.techbargains.com !) Supports my PC, Mac & Linux boxes just fine and according to my firewall, no spyware bullshit in the drivers.
It's worse than I imagined. If it weren't for the laughter, I'd be speechless! I love the shots of people posing next to the cars, laughing. Awesome!! (e.g. http://www.laughatrice.com/gallery20/g20p2.htm )
Can't wait to share this with the co-workers tomorrow! Thanks!
>>What about those VW bugs rollin' around with the Porsche stickers I too think it's silly, but there is a shared heritage between these car lines. In fact, a surprising number of Porsche parts are directly interchangable with VW, etc. For instance, you can swap a 944 rear suspension control arms directly into an old aircooled VW beetle to add rear disc brakes. Even the hydraulic lines line up perfectly. You almost can't believe how easy it is. While the cars are different, the design methodology is quite similar. But yes, a Porsche sticker on a Beetle is nonsense.
>>Does the book cover proper application of Type R decals?
Somehow this critical chapter was left out... editors these days! (sigh)
Addendum. Chapter 31: "Sticker-charging" your Rice Rocket Subtitled: If you can't go fast, make up for it by looking silly.
To increase the co-efficient of drag, add weight, reduce ETs and gain street cred with your peeps consider plastering your POS ragged-out pathetic bomb of an economy car with stickers. More is better, especially on four-door models. Our testing has found that stickers containing deliberate misspellings or pictographic words in an Asian lauguage you cannot speak are of particular, uh, "value." (End of chapter)
>> I'm still not buying any more RIAA CDs, Walmart or elsewhere.
Of course, you realize that's "stealing" (by the RIAA's) definition. They have a right to your money, and by denying them your hard-earned cash you're just plain evil.
Now if the RIAA were intellectually honest (stop laughing, I'm trying to make a point) they would revise their annual "loss due to piracy" (e.g. "we lost 3 billion dollars to internet pirates this year...) statements downwards due to the lower retail costs. Of course, that wouldn't suit their agenda so don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen.
>>...my mother already does this when I drive her anywhere...:) Sucks being you, but you've got to look on the bright side! If you're ever stopped by the police, and she "rats you out", you can always claim prior art. Hey, I think we've solved the problem of the Underwear Gnomes...
1. Nagging Mother-In-Law + 2. Traffic Ticket + 3. Prior Art Claim with patent bureau = 4. Profit!!
Actually, I have to disagree here. While similar conclusions are reached, the writing style is quite different. I found Iserbyt's book to be a bit dull, dry (although she's a fine speaker and a wonderful, gentle lady with whom I've spoken several times). John Taylor Gatto's book is warm and personal and full of ancedotes. You get a sense of what it's like to fight the system from within the system, with all it's absurd rules and subversive regulations and goals. As depressing as some of the content is, there are laugh-out-loud hilarious moments as well. Definitely not the same book, even if similar conclusions are reached.
:) No, you're simply one of those who saw through the nonsense of the public school system and your spirit (for all I can tell) wasn't broken by the endless surveillance, mindless rules, intimidations, favoritism, haphazard discipline. Somehow, you escaped the divide-and-conquer system at the heart of American education. For that, you should be thankful.
To dismiss the idea that there are others trapped by the system is insulting. Read about "Hector," beginning on page 82 of TUHOAE. Hector is a brilliant kid, but a terrible student and how the only way that Gatto knew to save Hector from a near-certain life of misery was to travel WAAAY outside the rules of modern schooling.
Cynthia Breazeal's name, before her marriage, was Cynthia Ferrell. As in Cynthia Ferrell, MIT graduate student (and mobile robot lab resident) whose phD project was Attila, the six-legged walking robot shown on dozens of television programs and gracing the cover of Scientific American magazine. She has spent several years working with Prof. Rodney Brooks, implementing systems using Subsumption Architecture. Cynthia Breazeal was also involved with the development of Cog, a humanoid robot that has demonstrated amazing capabilities, but she now focuses her research on emotive systems.
A simple search for publications under her current and former name should demonstrate that, unlike so many in the AI/Robotics field, she actually acheives what she sets out to do. She has advanced the field of AI and robotics by several steps, smartass, and while you're getting intoxicated with your stupid friends, she's changing the world, so show some respect or shut the hell up. I have no patience for ignorant naysayers who spout off just to hear their own voice. You're just one step above the jerk in every concert audience who shouts "freebird" and thinks he's being funny.
From foxnews.com: "Melvill said he heard a loud bang during the flight and did not know what it was. But he pointed to a place at the rear of the spacecraft where a part of the structure covering the nozzle had buckled, suggesting it may have been the source of the noise."
Ideas: Thermal shock after main engine shutdown? Structural failure of the engine shroud due to vaccuum or airflow pressure? Structural failue due to faulty ignition?
Both SpaceFlightNow and MSNBC have mentioned the pilot heard an unexpected noise: "He said he had one scary moment when he heard a loud bang during the flight. Pointing toward a buckled section at the rear of SpaceShipOne, he suggested it may have been the source of noise." (MSNBC)
'Sup widdat? Any more information? I don't know enough about these types of propulsion systems to speculate as to the cause, but I'm curious. Any ideas, folks?
At 200mph, drag due to wind resistance is substantial even on a low CoD F1 car, but enough to = braking performance of even a modest street car? No way. Even a comparitively enormous NASCAR racer doesn't lose speed that quickly at 220MPH, and it's three times the weight with double the frontal area of an F1 with probably.3 greater coefficient drag! Factor in NASCAR's greater rolling resistance and larger drivetrain frictional losses and that claim looks incredibly doubtful.
BTW, I've owned Corvettes and they have some of the best brakes on any moderately-priced sports car. While it's nowhere close to F1/Cart/Nascar level, those four big four-pot brakes and 14" rotors scrub off speed surprisingly well and shed heat effectively (they can do 100mph-> 0mph-> 100mph cycles repeatedly without fade). Vettes stop hard, the limiting factor often being available grip on the road, not grip on the rotor.
In summary, if that statement was in C&D, it surely came from the "letters to the editor" section or from an uninformed junior writer "sexing-up" his writing with sensational though inaccurate statements.
Now *that's* an interesting point! Here's a further idea, though. It's often said that the power of a lightning strike could power a small city for days... but the trouble is that no-one can predict just where a lightning strike will occur. Perhaps a laser "grounding rod" fired skyward would allow us to reliably harness atmospheric electricity?
>>a total stop from 200mph in 1.6 seconds. Imagine the g-forces....not to mention the heat! 1000C+ is typical after braking at the end of a straight, with normal operating temperature between 400-800 degrees Celsius!
More info from http://www.f1technical.net/article2.html : "A mere 4 seconds is the amount of time it takes for a Formula One car to go from 300km/h to a complete halt. At 200 km/h, a Formula One contender requires just 2.9 seconds to stop completely, a process that will have been accomplished over 65 meters. At 100km/h, these values are just as mind-blowing: 1.4 seconds and 17 meters! Under these heavy braking periods, a driver is subjected to a horizontal deceleration of close to 5,2G."
and...
"These brakes are extremely expensive as they are made from hi-tech carbon materials (long chain carbon, as in carbon fibre) and they can take up to 5 months to produce a single brake disk. The first stage in making a disc is to heat white polyacrylo nitrile (PAN) fibres until they turn black. This makes them pre-oxidised, and are arranged in layers similar to felt. They are then cut into shape and carbonised to obtain very pure carbon fibres. Next, they undergo two densification heat cycles at around 1000 degrees Celsius. These stages last hundreds of hours, during which a hydrocarbon-rich gas in injected into the oven or furnace. This helps the layers of felt-like material to fuse together and form a solid material. The finished disc is then machined to size ready for installing onto the car."
"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games." - Ernest Hemingway.
>>Surely it would be possible to deflect the beam by carrying a charged sphere (or similar device) next to you to attract the charged/ionized particles...
This is simple. How about a cardboard "shield" wrapped with aluminum foil? As far as clothing, since the laser is creating an ionized cathode/anode pair, it would seem to me that any sufficiently reflective, nonconductive surface deflecting either beam would prevent the circut from closing. Maybe SciFi writers of the 1950s were all correct -- we WILL be running around in shiny silver spandex in the future looking like Lost In Space or Flash Gordon cast extras!
Or what about this -- would a neoprene wetsuit be sufficient to insulate from the current? I've seen handheld stunguns (50K TO 100K volts) strike through very thick leather jackets, but the handheld models are probably more powerful than this air-conducted model. (For now, anyway.)
One last thought. Does that prototype need a "BFG" sticker, or what?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but how much fun is a blind cat?
>>Go get an Apple ][, you can learn just as much for $50 ;)
I disagree. This project completely rules. It's way more than just tinkering around with an Apple ][ -- it's the equivilent of building an Apple ][ from scratch, reverse engineering Applesoft, the monitor, the Sweet 16 emulator, the LISA assembler, building a floppy drive, etc. etc. etc.
Go read the articles and you'll appreciate what a tremendous amount of work this was -- a hell of an achievement of the variety that makes most PhD applications look like a 3rd grade book report.
>>that's one VERY expensive project that doesnt do anything useful.
Yeah? Let's see:
2500 hours of labor -- $125,000
3500 feet of wire -- $345
dog-eared copy of Dr. Dobbs - $5.95
parts -- $3500
Proving you are the ultimate bad-ass King of the Nerds by building a working Apollo 11 Guidance Computer -- priceless.
Awesome work.
Exactly right! Backlight, touchscreen drivers, Windows Media Player (good grief!) and WinMain() idle loops chew a hell of a lot of power... power that should be spent sending signals to an aircraft, not playing stupid sound clips.
From the manuf. webpage:
>>The 7.4V 2200mAh Lithium-Ion battery... providing nearly 3 hours of flight time
Note they say *nearly* 3 Hours? What's that translate to in real life? Two and a half hours with a BRAND NEW fully charged lithium ion pack? That's not very impressive. And just wait 'till that battery begins to age... it's all downhill from there.
Now 2+ hours may sound like a long time (and for gas flights it is) but it's not uncommon for thermal sailplane flights to last more than an hour each! BTW: 1 hour per flight isn't excessive -- it may take 20 minutes of work just to get a plane out of an aggressive thermal riser and back on the ground without overstressing the airframe in a dive. With only two+ hours flight time, running out of battery during a flight is a real risk. Who is going to risk a thousand $ model with this radio system?
The so-called review (which was little more than a press release) sucks, too. It didn't even mention whether this radio can do advanced features such as flap/aeleron mixing, programmed sequences, v-tail mixing, etc. or whether the radio includes servos. Is it safe to assume it does all this? Who knows.
Finally, the price tag -- $2000!
No thanks. I'll stick with my old-fashioned radio that does all the above and lets me fly all day on one charge for 1/5 the price.
First of all, I agree with almost all your points. My advice is to do like I did, quit bitching and buy a color laser. The prices have fallen quite dramatically in the past year and so long people continue to buy their cheap-shit inkjet printers, they'll continue to make them.
The price per page on a laser is about 1/4 inkjets, toner cartridges last for thousands of pages (not hundreds, maybe, if you're lucky and the planets are aligned just right as with the typical 8ml inkjet), and it's waterproof.
Sure, you'll spend more upfront with the laser, but it's a far more dependable technology and
Oh, in case you're wondering, I bought a Dell 3100cn color laser on sale for $384, delivered. (Thanks, www.techbargains.com !) Supports my PC, Mac & Linux boxes just fine and according to my firewall, no spyware bullshit in the drivers.
Oh.
My.
God.
It's worse than I imagined. If it weren't for the laughter, I'd be speechless! I love the shots of people posing next to the cars, laughing. Awesome!!
(e.g. http://www.laughatrice.com/gallery20/g20p2.htm )
Can't wait to share this with the co-workers tomorrow! Thanks!
>>What about those VW bugs rollin' around with the Porsche stickers
I too think it's silly, but there is a shared heritage between these car lines. In fact, a surprising number of Porsche parts are directly interchangable with VW, etc. For instance, you can swap a 944 rear suspension control arms directly into an old aircooled VW beetle to add rear disc brakes. Even the hydraulic lines line up perfectly. You almost can't believe how easy it is.
While the cars are different, the design methodology is quite similar. But yes, a Porsche sticker on a Beetle is nonsense.
>>Does the book cover proper application of Type R decals?
Somehow this critical chapter was left out... editors these days! (sigh)
Addendum.
Chapter 31: "Sticker-charging" your Rice Rocket
Subtitled: If you can't go fast, make up for it by looking silly.
To increase the co-efficient of drag, add weight, reduce ETs and gain street cred with your peeps consider plastering your POS ragged-out pathetic bomb of an economy car with stickers. More is better, especially on four-door models. Our testing has found that stickers containing deliberate misspellings or pictographic words in an Asian lauguage you cannot speak are of particular, uh, "value."
(End of chapter)
>> I'm still not buying any more RIAA CDs, Walmart or elsewhere.
Of course, you realize that's "stealing" (by the RIAA's) definition. They have a right to your money, and by denying them your hard-earned cash you're just plain evil.
Now if the RIAA were intellectually honest (stop laughing, I'm trying to make a point) they would revise their annual "loss due to piracy" (e.g. "we lost 3 billion dollars to internet pirates this year...) statements downwards due to the lower retail costs. Of course, that wouldn't suit their agenda so don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen.
You may resume laughing, now.
>>problem is, when they hit a Smart even slighly, they kill the occupant.
There's an upside, however. In the event of a collision, the Smart folds conveniently into the shape of a coffin.
>>What do you think he's got behind his back?
If he's smart, an updated copy of his resume!
>> ...my mother already does this when I drive her anywhere... :) Sucks being you, but you've got to look on the bright side! If you're ever stopped by the police, and she "rats you out", you can always claim prior art. Hey, I think we've solved the problem of the Underwear Gnomes...
1. Nagging Mother-In-Law +
2. Traffic Ticket +
3. Prior Art Claim with patent bureau =
4. Profit!!
>>Complete sentences people. This statement doesn't even parse lexically, let alone make sense.
Welcome to Slashdot.
>>it's very similar
Actually, I have to disagree here. While similar conclusions are reached, the writing style is quite different. I found Iserbyt's book to be a bit dull, dry (although she's a fine speaker and a wonderful, gentle lady with whom I've spoken several times). John Taylor Gatto's book is warm and personal and full of ancedotes. You get a sense of what it's like to fight the system from within the system, with all it's absurd rules and subversive regulations and goals. As depressing as some of the content is, there are laugh-out-loud hilarious moments as well. Definitely not the same book, even if similar conclusions are reached.
Read them both, but read Gatto first.
:) No, you're simply one of those who saw through the nonsense of the public school system and your spirit (for all I can tell) wasn't broken by the endless surveillance, mindless rules, intimidations, favoritism, haphazard discipline. Somehow, you escaped the divide-and-conquer system at the heart of American education. For that, you should be thankful.
To dismiss the idea that there are others trapped by the system is insulting. Read about "Hector," beginning on page 82 of TUHOAE. Hector is a brilliant kid, but a terrible student and how the only way that Gatto knew to save Hector from a near-certain life of misery was to travel WAAAY outside the rules of modern schooling.
>>I am hoping that we have as much guts as the Spanish who had the guts to throw out a government that kept lying to them...
and replace it with a Socialist government that cowers in fear (e.g. Spain)?
Why am I not surprised to read that on Slashdot?
Agreed. A directional Pain Field Generator is a more appropriate device.
Cynthia Breazeal's name, before her marriage, was Cynthia Ferrell. As in Cynthia Ferrell, MIT graduate student (and mobile robot lab resident) whose phD project was Attila, the six-legged walking robot shown on dozens of television programs and gracing the cover of Scientific American magazine. She has spent several years working with Prof. Rodney Brooks, implementing systems using Subsumption Architecture. Cynthia Breazeal was also involved with the development of Cog, a humanoid robot that has demonstrated amazing capabilities, but she now focuses her research on emotive systems.
A simple search for publications under her current and former name should demonstrate that, unlike so many in the AI/Robotics field, she actually acheives what she sets out to do. She has advanced the field of AI and robotics by several steps, smartass, and while you're getting intoxicated with your stupid friends, she's changing the world, so show some respect or shut the hell up. I have no patience for ignorant naysayers who spout off just to hear their own voice. You're just one step above the jerk in every concert audience who shouts "freebird" and thinks he's being funny.
From foxnews.com:
"Melvill said he heard a loud bang during the flight and did not know what it was. But he pointed to a place at the rear of the spacecraft where a part of the structure covering the nozzle had buckled, suggesting it may have been the source of the noise."
Ideas: Thermal shock after main engine shutdown? Structural failure of the engine shroud due to vaccuum or airflow pressure? Structural failue due to faulty ignition?
Both SpaceFlightNow and MSNBC have mentioned the pilot heard an unexpected noise: "He said he had one scary moment when he heard a loud bang during the flight. Pointing toward a buckled section at the rear of SpaceShipOne, he suggested it may have been the source of noise." (MSNBC)
'Sup widdat? Any more information? I don't know enough about these types of propulsion systems to speculate as to the cause, but I'm curious. Any ideas, folks?
Agreed. And to show my disgust, I'm going to NOT buy their album. Twice.
We'll see who's laughing then!
At 200mph, drag due to wind resistance is substantial even on a low CoD F1 car, but enough to = braking performance of even a modest street car? No way. Even a comparitively enormous NASCAR racer doesn't lose speed that quickly at 220MPH, and it's three times the weight with double the frontal area of an F1 with probably .3 greater coefficient drag! Factor in NASCAR's greater rolling resistance and larger drivetrain frictional losses and that claim looks incredibly doubtful.
BTW, I've owned Corvettes and they have some of the best brakes on any moderately-priced sports car. While it's nowhere close to F1/Cart/Nascar level, those four big four-pot brakes and 14" rotors scrub off speed surprisingly well and shed heat effectively (they can do 100mph-> 0mph-> 100mph cycles repeatedly without fade). Vettes stop hard, the limiting factor often being available grip on the road, not grip on the rotor.
In summary, if that statement was in C&D, it surely came from the "letters to the editor" section or from an uninformed junior writer "sexing-up" his writing with sensational though inaccurate statements.
Now *that's* an interesting point! Here's a further idea, though. It's often said that the power of a lightning strike could power a small city for days... but the trouble is that no-one can predict just where a lightning strike will occur. Perhaps a laser "grounding rod" fired skyward would allow us to reliably harness atmospheric electricity?
>>a total stop from 200mph in 1.6 seconds. Imagine the g-forces. ...not to mention the heat! 1000C+ is typical after braking at the end of a straight, with normal operating temperature between 400-800 degrees Celsius!
More info from http://www.f1technical.net/article2.html : "A mere 4 seconds is the amount of time it takes for a Formula One car to go from 300km/h to a complete halt. At 200 km/h, a Formula One contender requires just 2.9 seconds to stop completely, a process that will have been accomplished over 65 meters. At 100km/h, these values are just as mind-blowing: 1.4 seconds and 17 meters! Under these heavy braking periods, a driver is subjected to a horizontal deceleration of close to 5,2G."
and...
"These brakes are extremely expensive as they are made from hi-tech carbon materials (long chain carbon, as in carbon fibre) and they can take up to 5 months to produce a single brake disk. The first stage in making a disc is to heat white polyacrylo nitrile (PAN) fibres until they turn black. This makes them pre-oxidised, and are arranged in layers similar to felt. They are then cut into shape and carbonised to obtain very pure carbon fibres. Next, they undergo two densification heat cycles at around 1000 degrees Celsius. These stages last hundreds of hours, during which a hydrocarbon-rich gas in injected into the oven or furnace. This helps the layers of felt-like material to fuse together and form a solid material. The finished disc is then machined to size ready for installing onto the car."
"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games." - Ernest Hemingway.
>>Surely it would be possible to deflect the beam by carrying a charged sphere (or similar device) next to you to attract the charged/ionized particles...
This is simple. How about a cardboard "shield" wrapped with aluminum foil? As far as clothing, since the laser is creating an ionized cathode/anode pair, it would seem to me that any sufficiently reflective, nonconductive surface deflecting either beam would prevent the circut from closing. Maybe SciFi writers of the 1950s were all correct -- we WILL be running around in shiny silver spandex in the future looking like Lost In Space or Flash Gordon cast extras!
Or what about this -- would a neoprene wetsuit be sufficient to insulate from the current? I've seen handheld stunguns (50K TO 100K volts) strike through very thick leather jackets, but the handheld models are probably more powerful than this air-conducted model. (For now, anyway.)
One last thought. Does that prototype need a "BFG" sticker, or what?
800x600? 640x480? How about 200x1 resolution!
When I was in college, I had to use a teletype. My "screen" resolution was 200x1, you insensitive Clod!