As noted, linear aerospikes work (at least in ground tests). The problem with X-33 (well, one of) is the general shape that invited the use of a linear (vs round) aerospike in the first place.
That deltoid shape (coupled with the central cargo bay, etc) pushed them to a V- or Y-shaped fuel tank, on which they were pushing material limits. Basically they couldn't make a pressurized, lightweight tank that shape that was also leakproof. (The original 70s StarClipper design that the X-33 was loosely based on used two external tanks joined in a V configuration around the lifting body.)
X-33 had other problems, of course. The whole vertical takeoff, horizontal landing profile is a mistake -- it means you need to engineer the vehicle for two orthogonal primary load paths, and it makes an intact launch abort virtually impossible (vs say VTVL). That latter in turn means you have more failure modes and have to engineer in more redundancy, do more intensive between-flight overhauls and inspections, and that generally you've just reinvented everything wrong with the current Shuttle system.
Exactly right. I was thinking the same thing when I saw the pictures.
Two other advantages of the aerospike over the plug: an aerdynamic spike is much lighter than a material one, and the blunter base of an aerospike can stand up to reentry heating on a tail-first reentry much better than a material spike. Oh, and you don't have to worry about asymmetric heating and erosion with an aerospike. Um, the three other advantages...;-)
Re:Regional encoding strikes again
on
The Borg MegaCube
·
· Score: 1
Three words: built-in region coding. (Or is that four?)
Computer DVD drives built after a certain date (a few years ago) have a region code built into the drive itself. You can change the region through software up to five times, after that further changes are locked out.
The GPL is the agreement by which all the Linux kernel contributors agree not to sue each other for redistributing each other's work.
That's one of the best summaries of the GPL I've seen.
Not perfect -- it omits "potential contributers" (ie anybody else who wants to take the code and redistribute without necessarily modifying it) -- but still a good summary.
I read and re-read it and I can't make heads or tails out of what they are saying.
Essentially, IBM is invoking section 4 of the GPL, which reads in part:
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.
SCO has done a number of things that certainly violate the spirit and probably the letter of the GPL (extra licensing, etc. -- and if the rumors are true, they've backported Linux code into their proprietary Unixes). Under section 4, this terminates SCO's rights to distribute Linux. IBM has copyright on its contributions to Linux, therefore SCO has been distributing IBM's (and ever other Linux contributer's) code without a license. That's copyright infringement.
If Spock's blood is really green, it's either a different copper-based molecule or perhaps chlorocruorin (iron-based, found in some worms), or possibly something vanadium-based. (Among others, sea squirts have vanadium-based blood. Colors are green, blue or orange, depending on the specific molecule.)
Speaking of Star Trek, since Klingons have violet blood (based on one of the movies), it's probably based on hemerythrin (also iron-based and found in some invertebrates here).
Now both may do something. By this law one may do something, but the other may not do the same thing only based on what they're going to do with the money,
So, you'd rather be bothered by both sets until such time as a perfect (in your view) law is passed. Fine, then don't sign up for the no-call list.
The rest of us figure that this is a good start. When the only people bothering us at dinnertime are the charitable donation folks, public ire will rise up against them, too.
The law as written opts you in to certain calls whether you want them or not.
No, it doesn't. You currently already get those calls, and commercial calls besides (unless you're in a state with a no-call law). No option.
What this law does is provide you with a way to opt out of getting commercial calls, while not changing the current status of you vis-a-vis political or charitable calls.
The ironic thing about this is that Colorado has had a do-not-call list -- with similar exceptions for charities and politicians -- for over a year.
Courts routinely exempt "commercial speech" from freedom of speech protection. Not that I'd complain about equal protection against begging calls from charities, mind, but that'd be a tougher one to get through. (And a bill outlawing telephone solitications from political organizations would be defeated by about the same margins as this one was passed -- and probably would violate 1st Amendment.)
I still use it now and then and can touch type the symbols
I just loaded up the Sharp APL I mentioned and the scary thing is, even though it's been close to 20 years since I did any APL, I can still touch type (some of) the symbols. No stickers either, although I think I still have a set around in the back of a drawer.
Seems APL was popular them, even though you needed a special keyboard.
Very much so. One of the few interpreted languages around at the time, and very powerful particularly for numerical stuff (think "Perl for numbers"). IBM and Burroughs both had mainframe based versions of it, one of the few timesharing (interactive) options. As for the special keyboard, the usual solution was a set of stickers to put on a normal keyboard, and swap out the typeball on the 2741 (or equivalent) terminal to print them. At college our Math Department had a room full of such APL terminals.
By the way, you can download Sharp APL for Linux, free (as in beer) for personal use.
Uh, no. At the time Apple's hot seller was still the Apple II, a very open architecture machine. The closed-architecture Mac didn't come out until the IBM PC had been around for several years.
Both Apple and IBM used proprietary ROMs in their machines -- Compaq reverse-engineered IBMs, and there was a brief market in Apple II clones (both name brands like Franklin and do-it-yourself clones starting from an empty circuit board and a bag of chips) until Apple clamped down on the bootleg (EP)ROM supply.
(I built an Apple II clone -- pretty easy given the 1 MHz clock (easy tolerances) and stock TTL parts. Mostly just soldering in dozens of chip sockets -- and using a scope to debug minor problems like putting a couple of transistors in backwards...oops.)
As for Gates and Microsoft -- yeah, they were supplying variations of their BASIC interpreter to all the hardware manufacturers (they got that lesson down early), and managed to cut a deal with IBM that let them independently market PC-DOS (as MS-DOS).
which personal computers were ever made based on the 8008? The Altair is obvious,
Well, there were a ton of clones of the Altair, to some degree of "cloneness" (eg S100 bus, etc). The IMSAI was an Altair lookalike but with cooler front panel switches that looked more like a PDP's than the cheap toggles on the Altair. There was the SOL-20, which put the mobo in the same box as a keyboard. Come to think of it, though, most of the boxes were based on the later 8080 (or its successor, the Z80) chip. The 8008 was basically two 4004s glued together. The 4004 was pretty primitive -- I once used a daisywheel terminal based on that processor, but I don't think it made it into anything general purpose.
BTW, IBM's first personal computer was also an APL (and/or BASIC, depending on options) machine. The IBM 5100, built in tape drive and tiny screen, your choice of hardwired APL and/or BASIC. The better-known 8088-based "first" IBM PC was model number 5150.
Why not just have paper and pencil and hand-count?
Federal elections in Australia with a population of 20 million are run this way with no problem.
I'm guessing that Australia, like Canada and other countries loosely based on the British Parliamentary system, have more flexibility built into the voting schedule -- in other words, they don't have all the elections happening on the same day. This means the ballots are smaller, there are fewer things to count, etc. The elections are spread out over the cycle.
In the US -- with a few local exceptions -- pretty much all elections from dog catcher (well, sheriff, school board, etc. anyway) up to president, at city, county, state and federal levels, happen on Election Day. Oh, plus any local initiatives and popular amendments. This means enormous multi-part ballots which are a nightmare to hand-count.
(Viz the "hanging chad" problem -- each card was a vote record for multiple different races, not just the presidency. Last Canadian election I voted in - 15+ years ago now - there were maybe three different races, each one got its own differently colored paper ballot with four or five names and places to make your X - each ballot goes into a separate box depending on the particular office being voted on -- so counts and recounts are greatly simplified by the thinning out of the data up front.)
Voting machines and computer make sense given the number of decisions a US voter has to make on election day -- but I agree they need an auditable paper trail. The task would be more manageable if the the various level elections were spread out rather than all happening on first Tuesday in November, but that's unlikely to happen.
this situation would pertain to any other OS if 90% of machines were using the same OS
Yes and no. For example, I'm running the same OS (SuSE Linux) on several of my machines, but they're not a monoculture: one's a Sparc, one's a PPC, the rest are x86s. Of the latter, no two are running the same set of services, nor necessarily the same executable for the same service on different machines.
The former (different architectures) isn't even possible with MS (not since NT4, anyway), and the latter (different apps for the same service) is discouraged by the OS vendor. (Sure, some folks are probably running Apache on Windows instead of IIS -- but why not just swap out the OS while you're at it.)
The fact is that no other OS is likely to be the sort of monoculture that Windows presents even with a 90% share, for the reasons outlined above (not to mention the differences introduced by the different distro vendors). It'll be close enough for applications that the user wants to install, but tough for viruses and worms that have to be tweaked to target different holes in each's armor.
Wesley Clark in 2004! Get out and vote, the best way for non-violent regieme change.
I dunno, from some of the reports I've heard, Wesley Clark is the sort who might initiate violent regime change on a large scale. You heard why he got transferred out of his last assignment a few months early? He issued orders (concerning beating the Russians to Kosovo airport) that would have unnecessarily escalated things. Fortunately both the British Lt. General and a US Admiral in theatre refused those orders.
This is the guy you want with his finger on the button?
Well, that's true enough. But it's the fault of incompetent developers (maybe they only know one language -- if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail) rather than the technology.
Until PHP gets exceptions, it will remain a toy scripting language great for rapidly developed websites and horrible for mission critical applications.
And what's wrong with that? Why does a language that's good for one thing have to evolve into some language that suits it (probably badly) to a whole 'nother level of application -- and in the process makes it worse for what it was originally good at. PHP is great for rapid prototyping, doing lightweight web apps and scripting. If you need something heavier duty -- like your banking example -- go with J2EE, not some UberPHP.
But that's almost a tautology: any C or Fortran program that doesn't contain "an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp" is clearly not "sufficiently-complicated";-)
Valid point. It depends what exactly the object is and what you're doing with it, of course, but if you're encapsulating properly then usually what you argue is correct.
Actually as often as not I'd take the 'back roads' through Breslau and past the Waterloo-Wellington Regional Airport, occasionally stopping in there to go flying if it was a nice day.
Glad to see someone from the U of W here.
Actually it was my (now ex-)wife that was the UW grad student, I was on the computer centre staff at U of Guelph at the time. Obviously I knew a number of other UW people. I'm sure, though, that there are other U of W folks here. I know I've recognized a few folks from my various past lives at GeoVision (hi Paul) and Concordia (hi Rene).
Slashdot Mirror
As noted, linear aerospikes work (at least in ground tests). The problem with X-33 (well, one of) is the general shape that invited the use of a linear (vs round) aerospike in the first place.
That deltoid shape (coupled with the central cargo bay, etc) pushed them to a V- or Y-shaped fuel tank, on which they were pushing material limits. Basically they couldn't make a pressurized, lightweight tank that shape that was also leakproof. (The original 70s StarClipper design that the X-33 was loosely based on used two external tanks joined in a V configuration around the lifting body.)
X-33 had other problems, of course. The whole vertical takeoff, horizontal landing profile is a mistake -- it means you need to engineer the vehicle for two orthogonal primary load paths, and it makes an intact launch abort virtually impossible (vs say VTVL). That latter in turn means you have more failure modes and have to engineer in more redundancy, do more intensive between-flight overhauls and inspections, and that generally you've just reinvented everything wrong with the current Shuttle system.
Exactly right. I was thinking the same thing when I saw the pictures.
;-)
Two other advantages of the aerospike over the plug: an aerdynamic spike is much lighter than a material one, and the blunter base of an aerospike can stand up to reentry heating on a tail-first reentry much better than a material spike. Oh, and you don't have to worry about asymmetric heating and erosion with an aerospike. Um, the three other advantages...
Three words: built-in region coding. (Or is that four?)
Computer DVD drives built after a certain date (a few years ago) have a region code built into the drive itself. You can change the region through software up to five times, after that further changes are locked out.
Heck, even one instance of copyright infringment against 2000 separate copyright holders at $150,000 each is way more than SCO's current market cap.
The GPL is the agreement by which all the Linux kernel contributors agree not to sue each other for redistributing each other's work.
That's one of the best summaries of the GPL I've seen.
Not perfect -- it omits "potential contributers" (ie anybody else who wants to take the code and redistribute without necessarily modifying it) -- but still a good summary.
Essentially, IBM is invoking section 4 of the GPL, which reads in part:
SCO has done a number of things that certainly violate the spirit and probably the letter of the GPL (extra licensing, etc. -- and if the rumors are true, they've backported Linux code into their proprietary Unixes). Under section 4, this terminates SCO's rights to distribute Linux. IBM has copyright on its contributions to Linux, therefore SCO has been distributing IBM's (and ever other Linux contributer's) code without a license. That's copyright infringement.
Yep, hemocyanin is blue.
If Spock's blood is really green, it's either a different copper-based molecule or perhaps chlorocruorin (iron-based, found in some worms), or possibly something vanadium-based. (Among others, sea squirts have vanadium-based blood. Colors are green, blue or orange, depending on the specific molecule.)
Speaking of Star Trek, since Klingons have violet blood (based on one of the movies), it's probably based on hemerythrin (also iron-based and found in some invertebrates here).
Now both may do something. By this law one may do something, but the other may not do the same thing only based on what they're going to do with the money,
So, you'd rather be bothered by both sets until such time as a perfect (in your view) law is passed. Fine, then don't sign up for the no-call list.
The rest of us figure that this is a good start. When the only people bothering us at dinnertime are the charitable donation folks, public ire will rise up against them, too.
Only the Supreme Court can rule a law unconstitutional.
You, clearly, are not a lawyer.
Any court can rule a law unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has the final decision if that ruling gets appealed all the way up to them.
However, your other points are valid.
The law as written opts you in to certain calls whether you want them or not.
No, it doesn't. You currently already get those calls, and commercial calls besides (unless you're in a state with a no-call law). No option.
What this law does is provide you with a way to opt out of getting commercial calls, while not changing the current status of you vis-a-vis political or charitable calls.
The ironic thing about this is that Colorado has had a do-not-call list -- with similar exceptions for charities and politicians -- for over a year.
Courts routinely exempt "commercial speech" from freedom of speech protection. Not that I'd complain about equal protection against begging calls from charities, mind, but that'd be a tougher one to get through. (And a bill outlawing telephone solitications from political organizations would be defeated by about the same margins as this one was passed -- and probably would violate 1st Amendment.)
Examples? Video editing.. nothing available for linux can touch adobe Premiere.. not even the old version 5.0 of it.
Taken a look at Cinelerra lately? Or MainActor?
I still use it now and then and can touch type the symbols
I just loaded up the Sharp APL I mentioned and the scary thing is, even though it's been close to 20 years since I did any APL, I can still touch type (some of) the symbols. No stickers either, although I think I still have a set around in the back of a drawer.
Seems APL was popular them, even though you needed a special keyboard.
Very much so. One of the few interpreted languages around at the time, and very powerful particularly for numerical stuff (think "Perl for numbers"). IBM and Burroughs both had mainframe based versions of it, one of the few timesharing (interactive) options. As for the special keyboard, the usual solution was a set of stickers to put on a normal keyboard, and swap out the typeball on the 2741 (or equivalent) terminal to print them. At college our Math Department had a room full of such APL terminals.
By the way, you can download Sharp APL for Linux, free (as in beer) for personal use.
Apple had the closed architecture,
Uh, no. At the time Apple's hot seller was still the Apple II, a very open architecture machine. The closed-architecture Mac didn't come out until the IBM PC had been around for several years.
Both Apple and IBM used proprietary ROMs in their machines -- Compaq reverse-engineered IBMs, and there was a brief market in Apple II clones (both name brands like Franklin and do-it-yourself clones starting from an empty circuit board and a bag of chips) until Apple clamped down on the bootleg (EP)ROM supply.
(I built an Apple II clone -- pretty easy given the 1 MHz clock (easy tolerances) and stock TTL parts. Mostly just soldering in dozens of chip sockets -- and using a scope to debug minor problems like putting a couple of transistors in backwards...oops.)
As for Gates and Microsoft -- yeah, they were supplying variations of their BASIC interpreter to all the hardware manufacturers (they got that lesson down early), and managed to cut a deal with IBM that let them independently market PC-DOS (as MS-DOS).
which personal computers were ever made based on the 8008? The Altair is obvious,
Well, there were a ton of clones of the Altair, to some degree of "cloneness" (eg S100 bus, etc). The IMSAI was an Altair lookalike but with cooler front panel switches that looked more like a PDP's than the cheap toggles on the Altair. There was the SOL-20, which put the mobo in the same box as a keyboard. Come to think of it, though, most of the boxes were based on the later 8080 (or its successor, the Z80) chip. The 8008 was basically two 4004s glued together. The 4004 was pretty primitive -- I once used a daisywheel terminal based on that processor, but I don't think it made it into anything general purpose.
BTW, IBM's first personal computer was also an APL (and/or BASIC, depending on options) machine. The IBM 5100, built in tape drive and tiny screen, your choice of hardwired APL and/or BASIC. The better-known 8088-based "first" IBM PC was model number 5150.
Why not just have paper and pencil and hand-count?
Federal elections in Australia with a population of 20 million are run this way with no problem.
I'm guessing that Australia, like Canada and other countries loosely based on the British Parliamentary system, have more flexibility built into the voting schedule -- in other words, they don't have all the elections happening on the same day. This means the ballots are smaller, there are fewer things to count, etc. The elections are spread out over the cycle.
In the US -- with a few local exceptions -- pretty much all elections from dog catcher (well, sheriff, school board, etc. anyway) up to president, at city, county, state and federal levels, happen on Election Day. Oh, plus any local initiatives and popular amendments. This means enormous multi-part ballots which are a nightmare to hand-count.
(Viz the "hanging chad" problem -- each card was a vote record for multiple different races, not just the presidency. Last Canadian election I voted in - 15+ years ago now - there were maybe three different races, each one got its own differently colored paper ballot with four or five names and places to make your X - each ballot goes into a separate box depending on the particular office being voted on -- so counts and recounts are greatly simplified by the thinning out of the data up front.)
Voting machines and computer make sense given the number of decisions a US voter has to make on election day -- but I agree they need an auditable paper trail. The task would be more manageable if the the various level elections were spread out rather than all happening on first Tuesday in November, but that's unlikely to happen.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a site full of nerds with T1 connections...
;-)
That's easy:
(num_of_nerds * T1s_per_nerd * 1.44) - overhead
Answer in megabits/sec.... (actually the overhead is probably a factor per T1, but heck, we're trying to not underestimate here
this situation would pertain to any other OS if 90% of machines were using the same OS
Yes and no. For example, I'm running the same OS (SuSE Linux) on several of my machines, but they're not a monoculture: one's a Sparc, one's a PPC, the rest are x86s. Of the latter, no two are running the same set of services, nor necessarily the same executable for the same service on different machines.
The former (different architectures) isn't even possible with MS (not since NT4, anyway), and the latter (different apps for the same service) is discouraged by the OS vendor. (Sure, some folks are probably running Apache on Windows instead of IIS -- but why not just swap out the OS while you're at it.)
The fact is that no other OS is likely to be the sort of monoculture that Windows presents even with a 90% share, for the reasons outlined above (not to mention the differences introduced by the different distro vendors). It'll be close enough for applications that the user wants to install, but tough for viruses and worms that have to be tweaked to target different holes in each's armor.
Wesley Clark in 2004! Get out and vote, the best way for non-violent regieme change.
I dunno, from some of the reports I've heard, Wesley Clark is the sort who might initiate violent regime change on a large scale. You heard why he got transferred out of his last assignment a few months early? He issued orders (concerning beating the Russians to Kosovo airport) that would have unnecessarily escalated things. Fortunately both the British Lt. General and a US Admiral in theatre refused those orders.
This is the guy you want with his finger on the button?
Well, that's true enough. But it's the fault of incompetent developers (maybe they only know one language -- if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail) rather than the technology.
Until PHP gets exceptions, it will remain a toy scripting language great for rapidly developed websites and horrible for mission critical applications.
And what's wrong with that? Why does a language that's good for one thing have to evolve into some language that suits it (probably badly) to a whole 'nother level of application -- and in the process makes it worse for what it was originally good at. PHP is great for rapid prototyping, doing lightweight web apps and scripting. If you need something heavier duty -- like your banking example -- go with J2EE, not some UberPHP.
Heh, thanks.
;-)
But that's almost a tautology: any C or Fortran program that doesn't contain "an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp" is clearly not "sufficiently-complicated"
Valid point. It depends what exactly the object is and what you're doing with it, of course, but if you're encapsulating properly then usually what you argue is correct.
Actually as often as not I'd take the 'back roads' through Breslau and past the Waterloo-Wellington Regional Airport, occasionally stopping in there to go flying if it was a nice day.
Glad to see someone from the U of W here.
Actually it was my (now ex-)wife that was the UW grad student, I was on the computer centre staff at U of Guelph at the time. Obviously I knew a number of other UW people. I'm sure, though, that there are other U of W folks here. I know I've recognized a few folks from my various past lives at GeoVision (hi Paul) and Concordia (hi Rene).