USB 2.0 peaks at 480 Mb/s -- unless you have a USB 1 device in the chain somewhere. And that's peak. Firewire sustains 400 MBs, and moreover, it's peer-to-peer, 1394 devices on the bus can exchange data without going through the computer (or even having a computer on the bus).
And 1394b will support speeds up to 3.2Gb/s.
USB has Intel going for it. 1394 has technical excellence going for it.
What it the buoyancy effect is just used as a freebie, and the large wing area also contributes to the lift significanty
Ah, you're talking about something like the deltoid pumpkin seed. Yeah, that's a valid possibility that I overlooked. (Posting in the middle of the night, what can I say.) Modern materials technology might make that design more feasible (although they did eventually get the prototype working).
For volume I assume a simple triangular prism, volume being 0.5 * width * height * length, or 0.5 * 300 * 40 * 600 = 3600000 cu ft.
Hmm, looks like my original message had a typo -- 3.6 million cu ft, not 36 million. At least that brings your numbers into the right ballpark. Still off by a factor of three -- and I was being generous, assuming the 100 ton mass given for the vehicle included the mass of the lifting gas.
Ah, I see your error. You're just taking the "lifting power" number from that web site -- and forgetting that the mass of the ship has to be subtracted from that for net payload. Yeah, a 124.1 ton lift minus the 100 ton airframe weight gives a payload of 24 tons -- about what I said. (Give or take 50%, close enough for back of the envelope calculations.)
If it isn't already, 1G ought to be standardized at 10.0 m/s2, to simplify calculations. Of course, that would mean Earth's gravity was.98 of a standard G, but I thought we dumped geocentrism a few centuries back.
(And you can look at it either as a unit of acceleration -- how it's usually used -- or as a field strength indicator -- 1 G exerts a force of 10 newtons on a 1 kg mass.)
Convenience in calculation. You have some problem with that? The dimensions were given in round numbers of feet. To figure the density of air I went by the molecular weight of N2 (approx 28), given that a mole occupies 22.4 litres, and a cubic foot is about 28.3 litres, or about 4/3 mole. Hence about 35 grams per cubic foot. The density of the ship is about 18 cubic feet per pound, or 1/18 pound per cubic foot -- a bit less than an ounce, an ounce being about 28 grams.
You have a problem with mixing SI and antique units in your head?
(And a barn megaparsec is about two-thirds of a teaspoon.)
Okay, some quick calculations, based on the estimated volume and mass, gives me a net payload of way less than 100 tons. (More like about 40 tons unless I messed up the math. - Figure a volume of about 36 million cu ft, the density is about 25 grams/cu ft, for a net lift of 10 gms/cu ft (air weighing about 35 gm/cu ft), or 36 metric tons.
A 747-400 has a payload of over 120 tons with a range of over 4400 nautical miles. Why not just use 747s? (Although, if this airship has the advantages of stealth and being able to "land" just about anywhere, there might be some point.)
"no ID required" is one of the big selling points banks are using to try and get people to switch to debit cards
And yet another reason I won't get a debit card. Banks love them because the money instantly disappears from your account. Tough luck if it wasn't you using it. But I'd rather take advantage of the float on checks or credit cards myself, thanks.
Re:I can't beleive no one's mentioning these...
on
Dystopic Novels?
·
· Score: 2
Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke.
Concur. I generally enjoy Clarke's stuff, but I remember the first time I read Childhood's End, as a young teenager, that I threw the book across the room in disgust at the ending. Might have been the heavy influence of John W. Campbell (Analog magazine) I was under at the time.
I don't see how Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself is a dystopia. A little weird, perhaps, but an entertaining read that amounts to a book-length version of Heinlein's "All You Zombies".
I don't know whether to agree with you or not with his War Against the Chtorr -- partly because he hasn't finished the damn series! It certainly does seem, though, that despite minor victories in each book, overall Earth is losing to the invaders. You could make the same observation about Harry Turtledove's Worldwar and Colonization series (the first recounts the arrival of the invasion fleet, the second of the colonization fleet, which left the home system long before the first arrived at Earth), although Gerrold's alien ecosystems are more horrific.
If you really want depressing endings, try the book "Level 7" by Mordecai Roshwald, if you can find a copy. Cold War era, written as the diary of one of the nuclear war button pushers. Very well written (at least as I remember it -- it has been literally decades since I read it.)
As one reviewer on Amazon.com puts it, "By the time you finish this one you'll be reaching for the extra-strength Prozac or a razor."
Re:And if they didn't?
on
More MS EULA Fun
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The only way will be for the client machine to initiate the connection.
Let's assume this is correct.
a.k.a. Automatic Windows Update (or some other memory resident application)
Some other memory resident "application" like the operating system itself, perhaps? Just tie the "call home and check for update" code to something that happens periodically but not too often -- booting, loading an app, opening a file, making a network connection, -- take your choice. Hardly a new concept, Microsoft apps already do this (IE, for example, on startup), but not very stealthily.
Way back when I had (still have, somewhere) an all-in-one box called a Canon Navigator. Based on a 286 DOS PC (gives you an idea of the age), it had a built-in fax (doubled as a scanner and printer), touch screen, and some pretty nice telephony software.
The phone software had features like:
- digital answering machine, messages recorded to disk (as separate files for each msg)
- automated dial-out using a pre-recorded message
- similar automated functions for receiving faxes to files and automated sending of faxes
- all of the above integrated with an address and phone number database
- more stuff I can't remember right now.
Some of the above had convenience interfaces -- for example, you could set it to give yourself (or somebody else) a wake-up call at a certain time.
The point being, if you're going to use a general purpose computer as a PBX, you might as well take advantage of the fact that it's a general purpose computer. Make all of the above functions available via any other computer on the household LAN.
I got the special two-video set of both the original and DS9 tribble episodes. It's great watching them back to back, and seeing how and where DS9 characters were cleverly inserted into original footage.
What Worf actually says when asked about it is "We don't talk about it", and obviously views the original series' more human-looking Klingons with some disgust.
The real reason is that they just did it because they could (higher budget) in the first movie, then were stuck with it for all the other movies, and never came up with a good backstory.
I suppose they could have come up with something like the Kdaptists of Larry Niven's Kzinti (who wear human masks -- of human skin -- when worshipping because, having had their butts kicked by humans in a couple of interstellar wars, they're convinced that God/Kdapt must favor humans -- see Ringworld), but that'd be derivative. Besides, there weren't really any Human/Klingon wars, the first one barely got started when it was ended by the Organians, and the Klingons already looked human then. (Original series episode).
More like late 80s. I bought my first VHS machine around 1984 --and it cost me over a thousand dollars. They didn't really become popular until a few years after that, when the price had dropped to just a few hundred.
DVD holds the record for being the fastest adopted consumer electronics technology. Sales of DVD players edged out VHS machines last year. (Mechanically, DVD players are much simpler than videocassette machines, and build on the experience of making CD players.)
However, VHS will be around for a long time to come, until recording to DVD (or whatever) becomes as easy as recording to tape is now.
Damn, it'll still take nearly 20 of the things to store a 2 hour, 720p movie in uncompressed form.
Heck, that (30 GB) is a little less than 2.5 hours of standard DV video. (DV doesn't use inter-frame compression, it's more like motion-JPEG rather than MPEG, to give clean frame boundaries for edits.)
The motivation behind using HTTP is a dubious one at best. The basic idea is to get around corporate firewalls.
While I don't disagree that using HTTP is often dubious, getting around firewalls isn't the only reason. (Heck, a lot of this stuff is on intranets behind the firewall anyway.)
Other reasons include:
HTTP is a "connectionless" protocol, ie the connection is not held open (well, HTTP 1.1 aside). This means if somebody walks away from his computer in the middle of a session he isn't still tying up a socket and process (and possibly a DB connection) on the server. Which means overall you can get away with a smaller server, resources are shared better.
HTTP is a pretty simple protocol, that means it's easier to implement and can be squeezed into smaller code or devices. It's also pretty ubiquitous, there are all kinds of libraries to support it. Not true if you're rolling your own protocol. (I know, I've rolled a few of my own when HTTP's statelessness is more trouble than it's worth.)
HTTP lets you use a browser as a standard and ubiquitous client if you need user interaction (as you point out, the client isn't necessarily a browser.) That makes UI development easy and cross-platform. The only other choices that come to mind for readily and widely available clients are things like NNTP, SMTP, FTP or telnet, none of whice really lend themselves to generalized interactive client/server use (except telnet, if you're into the command line interface). Or X, but then you spend a lot of work on the GUI.
And of course now that it has become a big deal, there are a ton of tools out there to make it simpler to develop and deploy such apps.
Management views the website, with its browser interface, as little more than a modern face on the old IBM mainframe application with its 3270-terminal interface.
The 3270 was a page-mode text terminal that let the app define fields the user filled in or checked off and then click a 'submit' key to send the form's contents back to the mainframe. Sound familiar?
That the back end now may consist of apps or components spread across several boxes, vs different apps and components in the same big box, isn't that huge a difference. (Just because the apps may have run on the same mainframe doesn't mean the whole thing was monolithic from an application sense.)
18 months is just about long enough to get the experience needed to shake out the first set of design bugs. I vaguely recall it was about that time frame to go from Java 1.0 to 1.1, which saw some significant improvements. But there were still a few more more signficant changes from 1.1 to 1.2 (aka Java2).
Granted, with.NET Microsoft has the advantage of learning some lessons that Java pioneered, but it's still a Microsoft 1.0 product. There'll be shakeouts yet.
You just drag a button onto a webpage, double click and write the event handling code in C#. The C# is compiled into a server side component along with some ASPX pages.
Okay, I'll grant you that seems like a pretty cool development environment (for that sort of thing). But it isn't.NET specific, there's no fundamental reason why a similar IDE couldn't be done for JSP. Indeed, it probably already has.
Slashdot Mirror
USB 2.0 peaks at 480 Mb/s -- unless you have a USB 1 device in the chain somewhere. And that's peak. Firewire sustains 400 MBs, and moreover, it's peer-to-peer, 1394 devices on the bus can exchange data without going through the computer (or even having a computer on the bus).
And 1394b will support speeds up to 3.2Gb/s.
USB has Intel going for it. 1394 has technical excellence going for it.
About 14.3, why?
What it the buoyancy effect is just used as a freebie, and the large wing area also contributes to the lift significanty
Ah, you're talking about something like the deltoid pumpkin seed. Yeah, that's a valid possibility that I overlooked. (Posting in the middle of the night, what can I say.) Modern materials technology might make that design more feasible (although they did eventually get the prototype working).
For volume I assume a simple triangular prism, volume being 0.5 * width * height * length, or 0.5 * 300 * 40 * 600 = 3600000 cu ft.
Hmm, looks like my original message had a typo -- 3.6 million cu ft, not 36 million. At least that brings your numbers into the right ballpark. Still off by a factor of three -- and I was being generous, assuming the 100 ton mass given for the vehicle included the mass of the lifting gas.
Ah, I see your error. You're just taking the "lifting power" number from that web site -- and forgetting that the mass of the ship has to be subtracted from that for net payload. Yeah, a 124.1 ton lift minus the 100 ton airframe weight gives a payload of 24 tons -- about what I said.
(Give or take 50%, close enough for back of the envelope calculations.)
If it isn't already, 1G ought to be standardized at 10.0 m/s2, to simplify calculations. Of course, that would mean Earth's gravity was .98 of a standard G, but I thought we dumped geocentrism a few centuries back.
(And you can look at it either as a unit of acceleration -- how it's usually used -- or as a field strength indicator -- 1 G exerts a force of 10 newtons on a 1 kg mass.)
In the "US" we use grams as the next lower "Imperial" measure below ounce
Well, mostly. People who load their own ammunition still talk in terms of "grains", as in bullet weight and powder weight.
I don't think anyone uses drams, though -- apothecaries (pharmacies) went metric a long time ago.
Imperial and SI units mixed up ? WHY?
Convenience in calculation. You have some problem with that? The dimensions were given in round numbers of feet. To figure the density of air I went by the molecular weight of N2 (approx 28), given that a mole occupies 22.4 litres, and a cubic foot is about 28.3 litres, or about 4/3 mole. Hence about 35 grams per cubic foot. The density of the ship is about 18 cubic feet per pound, or 1/18 pound per cubic foot -- a bit less than an ounce, an ounce being about 28 grams.
You have a problem with mixing SI and antique units in your head?
(And a barn megaparsec is about two-thirds of a teaspoon.)
Okay, some quick calculations, based on the estimated volume and mass, gives me a net payload of way less than 100 tons. (More like about 40 tons unless I messed up the math. - Figure a volume of about 36 million cu ft, the density is about 25 grams/cu ft, for a net lift of 10 gms/cu ft (air weighing about 35 gm/cu ft), or 36 metric tons.
A 747-400 has a payload of over 120 tons with a range of over 4400 nautical miles. Why not just use 747s? (Although, if this airship has the advantages of stealth and being able to "land" just about anywhere, there might be some point.)
Somehow I don't buy it.
"no ID required" is one of the big selling points banks are using to try and get people to switch to debit cards
And yet another reason I won't get a debit card. Banks love them because the money instantly disappears from your account. Tough luck if it wasn't you using it. But I'd rather take advantage of the float on checks or credit cards myself, thanks.
Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke.
Concur. I generally enjoy Clarke's stuff, but I remember the first time I read Childhood's End, as a young teenager, that I threw the book across the room in disgust at the ending. Might have been the heavy influence of John W. Campbell (Analog magazine) I was under at the time.
I don't see how Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself is a dystopia. A little weird, perhaps, but an entertaining read that amounts to a book-length version of Heinlein's "All You Zombies".
I don't know whether to agree with you or not with his War Against the Chtorr -- partly because he hasn't finished the damn series! It certainly does seem, though, that despite minor victories in each book, overall Earth is losing to the invaders. You could make the same observation about Harry Turtledove's Worldwar and Colonization series (the first recounts the arrival of the invasion fleet, the second of the colonization fleet, which left the home system long before the first arrived at Earth), although Gerrold's alien ecosystems are more horrific.
If you really want depressing endings, try the book "Level 7" by Mordecai Roshwald, if you can find a copy. Cold War era, written as the diary of one of the nuclear war button pushers. Very well written (at least as I remember it -- it has been literally decades since I read it.)
As one reviewer on Amazon.com puts it, "By the time you finish this one you'll be reaching for the extra-strength Prozac or a razor."
The only way will be for the client machine to initiate the connection.
Let's assume this is correct.
a.k.a. Automatic Windows Update (or some other memory resident application)
Some other memory resident "application" like the operating system itself, perhaps? Just tie the "call home and check for update" code to something that happens periodically but not too often -- booting, loading an app, opening a file, making a network connection, -- take your choice. Hardly a new concept, Microsoft apps already do this (IE, for example, on startup), but not very stealthily.
Way back when I had (still have, somewhere) an all-in-one box called a Canon Navigator. Based on a 286 DOS PC (gives you an idea of the age), it had a built-in fax (doubled as a scanner and printer), touch screen, and some pretty nice telephony software.
The phone software had features like:
- digital answering machine, messages recorded to disk (as separate files for each msg)
- automated dial-out using a pre-recorded message
- similar automated functions for receiving faxes to files and automated sending of faxes
- all of the above integrated with an address and phone number database
- more stuff I can't remember right now.
Some of the above had convenience interfaces -- for example, you could set it to give yourself (or somebody else) a wake-up call at a certain time.
The point being, if you're going to use a general purpose computer as a PBX, you might as well take advantage of the fact that it's a general purpose computer. Make all of the above functions available via any other computer on the household LAN.
From what I recall, the change in appearance was either due to some kind of virus, or a failed genetic experiment
...?"). That speculation is never verified.
No, that's just Dr. Bazir's speculation when he asks Worf about it ("Was it
I got the special two-video set of both the original and DS9 tribble episodes. It's great watching them back to back, and seeing how and where DS9 characters were cleverly inserted into original footage.
What Worf actually says when asked about it is "We don't talk about it", and obviously views the original series' more human-looking Klingons with some disgust.
The real reason is that they just did it because they could (higher budget) in the first movie, then were stuck with it for all the other movies, and never came up with a good backstory.
I suppose they could have come up with something like the Kdaptists of Larry Niven's Kzinti (who wear human masks -- of human skin -- when worshipping because, having had their butts kicked by humans in a couple of interstellar wars, they're convinced that God/Kdapt must favor humans -- see Ringworld), but that'd be derivative. Besides, there weren't really any Human/Klingon wars, the first one barely got started when it was ended by the Organians, and the Klingons already looked human then. (Original series episode).
Yeah, your typical microwave is a centimeter or so long. Let's see, you might get as many as 16 or 20 bits on a CD-sized disc...
VHS became popular in the mid 70's I think.
More like late 80s. I bought my first VHS machine around 1984 --and it cost me over a thousand dollars. They didn't really become popular until a few years after that, when the price had dropped to just a few hundred.
DVD holds the record for being the fastest adopted consumer electronics technology. Sales of DVD players edged out VHS machines last year. (Mechanically, DVD players are much simpler than videocassette machines, and build on the experience of making CD players.)
However, VHS will be around for a long time to come, until recording to DVD (or whatever) becomes as easy as recording to tape is now.
Only 30 GB?
Damn, it'll still take nearly 20 of the things to store a 2 hour, 720p movie in uncompressed form.
Heck, that (30 GB) is a little less than 2.5 hours of standard DV video. (DV doesn't use inter-frame compression, it's more like motion-JPEG rather than MPEG, to give clean frame boundaries for edits.)
While I don't disagree that using HTTP is often dubious, getting around firewalls isn't the only reason. (Heck, a lot of this stuff is on intranets behind the firewall anyway.)
Other reasons include:
- HTTP is a "connectionless" protocol, ie the connection is not held open (well, HTTP 1.1 aside). This means if somebody walks away from his computer in the middle of a session he isn't still tying up a socket and process (and possibly a DB connection) on the server. Which means overall you can get away with a smaller server, resources are shared better.
- HTTP is a pretty simple protocol, that means it's easier to implement and can be squeezed into smaller code or devices. It's also pretty ubiquitous, there are all kinds of libraries to support it. Not true if you're rolling your own protocol. (I know, I've rolled a few of my own when HTTP's statelessness is more trouble than it's worth.)
- HTTP lets you use a browser as a standard and ubiquitous client if you need user interaction (as you point out, the client isn't necessarily a browser.) That makes UI development easy and cross-platform. The only other choices that come to mind for readily and widely available clients are things like NNTP, SMTP, FTP or telnet, none of whice really lend themselves to generalized interactive client/server use (except telnet, if you're into the command line interface). Or X, but then you spend a lot of work on the GUI.
And of course now that it has become a big deal, there are a ton of tools out there to make it simpler to develop and deploy such apps.Don't kid yourself.
Management views the website, with its browser interface, as little more than a modern face on the old IBM mainframe application with its 3270-terminal interface.
The 3270 was a page-mode text terminal that let the app define fields the user filled in or checked off and then click a 'submit' key to send the form's contents back to the mainframe. Sound familiar?
That the back end now may consist of apps or components spread across several boxes, vs different apps and components in the same big box, isn't that huge a difference. (Just because the apps may have run on the same mainframe doesn't mean the whole thing was monolithic from an application sense.)
18 months is just about long enough to get the experience needed to shake out the first set of design bugs. I vaguely recall it was about that time frame to go from Java 1.0 to 1.1, which saw some significant improvements. But there were still a few more more signficant changes from 1.1 to 1.2 (aka Java2).
.NET Microsoft has the advantage of learning some lessons that Java pioneered, but it's still a Microsoft 1.0 product. There'll be shakeouts yet.
Granted, with
Oh, you can make J2EE sing and dance with Python, too, if you want.
:)
You have heard of Jython (nee JPython), haven't you?
(And you can add new features to Java applications at run time too (ClassLoader? JavaBeans? hello?). But of course you knew that.
you didn't ask "how well does a .NET Windows Forms UI run on a Solaris workstation," did you? :)
Well not specifically, no, but the context was comparing with Java and Swing. Swing is hardly the UI used by JSP or servlets, HTML/JavaScript is.
Kind of a moot question, otherwise, eh?
You just drag a button onto a webpage, double click and write the event handling code in C#. The C# is compiled into a server side component along with some ASPX pages.
.NET specific, there's no fundamental reason why a similar IDE couldn't be done for JSP. Indeed, it probably already has.
Okay, I'll grant you that seems like a pretty cool development environment (for that sort of thing). But it isn't