Well, the aereon 26 wasn't helium-assisted, partly because it was small enough that helium wasn't needed, and partly because it would have cost too much money..
I think the aerobody concept is a good one, it's just a matter of finding the right formula.. and who knows, maybe the military has.
i think they're much more likely to be semi-rigid, helium-filled... like a cross between a blimp and an airplane. they probably have an inner skeleton covered in some fabric.. at least that's how most of the aerobodies i've heard of work.
I've read the book. The entire point of the product was to BE a barge.. it was always intended as a massive, low-cost, transport vehicle, never as a jet or airmail service or whatever.
yup, mcphee is an utterly fantastic writer.. he can make the most mundane subjects exciting. The curve of binding energy is also one of my favorites... doesn't he even talk about the possibility of a dirty bomb in that book? Something like that.. it's been a while since I've read it. I do know he mentions how even a very small nuclear bomb detonated a few blocks away from the white house could render it completely inhabitable, and kill everyone inside. All without warning. Gotta love it.
It's possible, but I doubt it... there's too much obscure and weird history to Aereon corp for it to really be a front..
examples:
1) Founded by a presbyterian pastor (I think), who provided most of the original funding for the project.
Quote: In Mr. McPhee's words, Mr. Drew, asked himself: "Why not bring the world's underdeveloped nations into the transportation forefront of the 20th century in a single leap by eliminating the need for roads, railroads, tunnels, bridges, airports, storage facilities and prepared harbors? Enormous warehouses in the sky would move from place to place, landing lightly on grass fields."
It's possible Lockheed got a lot of strange religious people to start up this company, but I kinda doubt it...
2) The now leader of the company, William Miller Jr., is also a religious man: he's a graduate of the Princeton Theological Seminary. It just strikes me as unlikely that an organization with such a...holy...background would be a front for lockheed-martin.
Basically, a huge number of those involved with the project are a pastor, reverend, priest, minister, or graduate of a seminary...
3) Lockheed's interest in lighter-than-air vehicles is fairly well documented..
4) Another quote:
He didn't give up. When the aircraft industry showed no interest, the theologian/flyer/inventor turned to the trucking industry. An aging trucking industry magazine in his files shows a football-field sized Aereon pulled up to a loading dock. Trucking companies showed some interest, but, Mr. Miller said, unions representing truckers felt threatened by the airship that could put many of them out of business, and so funding never materialized.
It's possible the whole thing is a coverup, but I think it's more likely that Aereon is just a group of people who believe in the idea of an aerobody.
Back in the 1970's, author John McPhee wrote a great book called "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed," detailing the efforts of the Aereon company to create a lighter-than-air transport vessel.
The company has, over the years, been issued five US patents for their work, numbers (feel free to look them up) 4149688, 4896160, 5034751, 5931411, and 6179248.
McPhee is by no means a crackpot or a ufo "journalist", but rather a widely respected non-fiction author who has covered subjects from nuclear energy ("The Curve of Binding Energy") to oranges ("Oranges") and underground russian art ("The Ransom of Russian Art"). Although he is certainly not an expert in aerodynamics, he is not a biased party.
The Aereon ships, shaped something like a bright orange pumpkin seed (hence the title), were never any longer than 26 feet, and the 26-footer (a test, basically) required no helium to take off--but the notion was always that the larger, transport versions, would need some assistance from helium to lift off and travel. The goal of the shape is to combine the lift capabilities of a normal plane with the features of a blimp. It was always meant for transport.
A few urls:
http://www.johnmcphee.com/deltoid.htm
http://www.nidsci.org/news/illinois/aereon.html (from NIDS itself, commenting on the possibility of the vessel being an Aereon or an Aereon knockoff)
http://www.users.on.net/justin/docs/transport/ae re on.jpg (the original design for the Aereon)
http://www.aereoncorp.com/ Official Website of the Aereon corp, including a picture of the Aereon 26 in flight
http://www.pacpubserver.com/new/business/6-22-99 /a ereon.html (article from 1999 about the possible return of the Aereon corp, including the following quote:
Mr. Smith [an Aereon employee] described Aereon's two most promising current projects. One is a rotor vector -- part helicopter, part helium balloon -- that is being designed to replace helicopters in aerial logging operations. The second is a version of Aereon 26 that the company is designing to carry radar. Called WASP -- wide aperture surveillance plane -- and capable of a making continuous 360 degrees sweeps of the sky, the deltoid-shaped craft would far exceed the effectiveness of current anti-missile detection aircraft, Mr. Smith said.
end quote. You'll note that the only current patent Aereon corp holds is for the WASP-style system)
I'm not saying I have any idea what these things people are seeing are, I'm just mentioning a possibility. Anyone still interested in this *kind* of vessel should definitely go read "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" by McPhee.
My favorite aalib hack is the aalib output plugin for mplayer. Any format mplayer can open, it can convert to ascii... it even plays in the console, so you can watch your 80x24 porn remotely.
You don't often intentionally hurl your car at 45 miles an hour into a steel box, either, but insurance companies do it all the time to see how well a particular car stands up to the abuse.
Even if you don't knowingly take the insurance institute's results (or federal crash-test ratings) into account, the company selling you insurance does, and your premiums will be higher.
To say "just because i'll never do something this way it has no merit" is silly. Performance in a 45-mile-per-hour offset crash will tell a car company how well it would stand to you accidentally bumping into the corner of your garage, or into the bumper of another car.
Tests like this are important because they're indicative of performance at all bitrates. If you want to know WHICH codec will sound the best at 128kbit, you should look at which codec sounds the best at 64kbit--the two are likely to be the same.
There are two intended audiences for this test: 1) people trying to decide which audio format to use for a stream (which are very often in the 32-64kbit range)
and
2) people who realize these tests can tell us much more than simply which codec performs best at 64kbit, and want to know how to maximize the quality-to-diskspace ratio on their own encodings.
where I am, univision was also 10 seconds ahead of ABC, so you could watch it on univision, and when something exciting happened, switch to ABC and hear about it in english the a second time.
Yeah, there's an entire class on routing protocols... (I know some people were just studying eigrp and ospf for their midterm)... the textbook is actually from cisco press.
We're also required to take a technical writing class, and I've had classes where one assignment was, in fact, to diagram a network.
There are lots of schools that focus completely on theory, depaul isn't one of them..part of the reason I'm enjoying my stay here.
In fact, just today I was in our telephony lab, learning how to configure a lucent pbx. Right next door is the networks lab, which has a fairly nice little network with atm, token ring, a netware lan, and a plain vanilla switched ethernet lan.
http://facweb.cs.depaul.edu/brewster/tdc-web/lab s. html
There's lots of theory, and there's lots of practice.
Also, interestingly enough, all students getting a computer-related degree have to take either public speaking or "interpersonal communications".
Not all schools only have programming/engineering courses.
I spent a year at www.macalester.edu, which only had engineering and programming (since it was mostly a liberal arts school). The programming classes were good, and if that's what I had wanted, I would have been fine there.
But I really don't enjoy writing code.
Now I go to Depaul University's CTI school, which has a boatload of majors, not just pure CS. My major is "Network Technologies," but there are also majors in "Management of Information Systems," "Human-Computer Interaction," "Computer Graphics and Animation," and a few others I can't remember right now.
We're learning the same basic things as CS majors, but we're approaching it from a network engineering perspective rather than a code perspective.
Depaul is very friendly to older students, and students who are working full time. There are lots of night classes and no one looks at a 30 or 40 year old in their intro class as weird.
Some of the profs have recently worked in industry, some are lifetime profs. In one class of mine ("Digital Access Services," where we cover PPP, SONET, 802.11, and lots of other stuff) the professor worked for a startup before the recent bust, and was at motorola and bell labs (before it became lucent) before that.
Another professor has been teaching for his 20+ year career. Both are equally good, and both come with very different perspectives.
In short, choose your college carefully. Make sure their CS program will have classes you'll enjoy, and not too many you'll have to sleep through.
it's not like it's a new practice, I remember seeing posts mentioning 2.1.127 or 2.1.83 back in the day...
Slashdot is whatever they want to make it. It's not your site, you don't select the stories, if you don't like it, go to kuro5hin where you do select the stories.
Of course, everyone is wrong, and it's all the slashdot editor's fault.
If he had bothered to read the first paragraph (i think) of the story being linked, he'd see that Comcast is buying solely the cable television and other broadband services, NOT ATT Broadband Internet. ATTBI is being spun off into its own company.
i think a chunk of the thickness of the archos is the neoprene bumpers, which add about a half-inch, I think.. they're those blue things on the corners that act as shock absorbers should you drop it..
the archos doesn't quite compare to the ipod in terms of size, but it is by no means bulky... it also costs about $200-220, only slightly more than the nomad.
size specs on the archos:
Dimensions: 115 x 82 x 34mm (4.5" x 3.2" x 1.3")
Weight: 290g (12 oz.)
weighs half as much, which is impressive, but otherwise is very similar in terms of actual volume.
and at twice the price for a gig less storage, and given how i use my portable mp3 players (i don't jog with them), the extra 6oz doesn't bother me.
again, i love the way the ipod looks, it looks like a perfectly great mp3 player, but I don't think the notion regarding transfer rate is really valid for the vast majority of its users.
but yes, i agree there are exceptions:)
you might be interested to know that it's fairly easy to upgrade the archos jukebox.. just plop in a new 2.5" hard drive and away you go. people have upgraded theirs to 40gb, so that'd be a nice 450 albums, or so...
You really have more than 10 gigs of music that you listen to regularly? I mean, at 74 minutes per album and 192kbit, that's 96 albums, and a mind-numbing 118 hours of music.
I have an archos jukebox 6000, which has a 6 gig hard drive and connects via USB, and can also function as a USB hard drive. So yes, it took about 80-90 minutes to fill up the hard drive initially. But, uh, I haven't transferred any files to or from it since then.
Why would I?
That's about 57 albums worth of music, and I guarantee you I don't listen to more than that regularly.
The only point at which the transfer rate really becomes an issue is if you're actually using it as a portable hard drive, and I think a relatively small number of customers use it for that purpose.
And do you want to know *why* the people who buy these rarely use it as a hard drive? Because people who buy $200-400 hard-drive based mp3 players usually have fairly new cd burners.
I have a 16x cd burner, which will burn an entire 700mb cd in maybe 4.5 minutes. Which doesn't require me to make space on my mp3 player, and doesn't require me to bring it to someone who has a usb or firewire enabled system, etc etc.
Seriously.
If you have one of these things, you know you don't use it as a portable hard drive. It's an mp3 player, first and foremost.
of course, if you have one of these kinds of things and you find you regularly *do* do file transfers, feel free to flame away.
Try Urban Terror (Beta 2.3) for Q3, www.urbanterror.net
A fantastic mod, in the vein of AQ2. I came from AQ2 and am more addicted to UT2 than I ever was to AQ2.
A better damage system than AQ2, and trust me, UT2 plays very well as CTF. There may be a more "objective" style gamemode in beta 3, but I gather that's still in the planning process.
Check it out, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the aereon 26 wasn't helium-assisted, partly because it was small enough that helium wasn't needed, and partly because it would have cost too much money..
I think the aerobody concept is a good one, it's just a matter of finding the right formula.. and who knows, maybe the military has.
-gleam
actually it's unlikely that they're inflatable..
i think they're much more likely to be semi-rigid, helium-filled... like a cross between a blimp and an airplane. they probably have an inner skeleton covered in some fabric.. at least that's how most of the aerobodies i've heard of work.
-gleam
I've read the book. The entire point of the product was to BE a barge.. it was always intended as a massive, low-cost, transport vehicle, never as a jet or airmail service or whatever.
-gleam
oops, i forgot the un.
so yeah, make it uninhabitable, and I won't look so stupid. oh well.
-gleam
yup, mcphee is an utterly fantastic writer.. he can make the most mundane subjects exciting. The curve of binding energy is also one of my favorites... doesn't he even talk about the possibility of a dirty bomb in that book? Something like that.. it's been a while since I've read it. I do know he mentions how even a very small nuclear bomb detonated a few blocks away from the white house could render it completely inhabitable, and kill everyone inside. All without warning. Gotta love it.
-gleam
It's possible, but I doubt it... there's too much obscure and weird history to Aereon corp for it to really be a front..
examples:
1) Founded by a presbyterian pastor (I think), who provided most of the original funding for the project.
Quote: In Mr. McPhee's words, Mr. Drew, asked himself: "Why not bring the world's underdeveloped nations into the transportation forefront of the 20th century in a single leap by eliminating the need for roads, railroads, tunnels, bridges, airports, storage facilities and prepared harbors? Enormous warehouses in the sky would move from place to place, landing lightly on grass fields."
It's possible Lockheed got a lot of strange religious people to start up this company, but I kinda doubt it...
2) The now leader of the company, William Miller Jr., is also a religious man: he's a graduate of the Princeton Theological Seminary. It just strikes me as unlikely that an organization with such a...holy...background would be a front for lockheed-martin.
Basically, a huge number of those involved with the project are a pastor, reverend, priest, minister, or graduate of a seminary...
3) Lockheed's interest in lighter-than-air vehicles is fairly well documented..
4) Another quote:
He didn't give up. When the aircraft industry showed no interest, the theologian/flyer/inventor turned to the trucking industry. An aging trucking industry magazine in his files shows a football-field sized Aereon pulled up to a loading dock. Trucking companies showed some interest, but, Mr. Miller said, unions representing truckers felt threatened by the airship that could put many of them out of business, and so funding never materialized.
It's possible the whole thing is a coverup, but I think it's more likely that Aereon is just a group of people who believe in the idea of an aerobody.
-gleam
Of course! Asciimation!
http://www.asciimation.co.nz/
you can also view it via telnet:
telnet://towel.blinkenlights.nl
-gleam
Back in the 1970's, author John McPhee wrote a great book called "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed," detailing the efforts of the Aereon company to create a lighter-than-air transport vessel.
e re on.jpg (the original design for the Aereon)
9 /a ereon.html (article from 1999 about the possible return of the Aereon corp, including the following quote:
The company has, over the years, been issued five US patents for their work, numbers (feel free to look them up) 4149688, 4896160, 5034751, 5931411, and 6179248.
McPhee is by no means a crackpot or a ufo "journalist", but rather a widely respected non-fiction author who has covered subjects from nuclear energy ("The Curve of Binding Energy") to oranges ("Oranges") and underground russian art ("The Ransom of Russian Art"). Although he is certainly not an expert in aerodynamics, he is not a biased party.
The Aereon ships, shaped something like a bright orange pumpkin seed (hence the title), were never any longer than 26 feet, and the 26-footer (a test, basically) required no helium to take off--but the notion was always that the larger, transport versions, would need some assistance from helium to lift off and travel. The goal of the shape is to combine the lift capabilities of a normal plane with the features of a blimp. It was always meant for transport.
A few urls:
http://www.johnmcphee.com/deltoid.htm
http://www.nidsci.org/news/illinois/aereon.html (from NIDS itself, commenting on the possibility of the vessel being an Aereon or an Aereon knockoff)
http://www.users.on.net/justin/docs/transport/a
http://www.aereoncorp.com/ Official Website of the Aereon corp, including a picture of the Aereon 26 in flight
http://www.pacpubserver.com/new/business/6-22-9
Mr. Smith [an Aereon employee] described Aereon's two most promising current projects. One is a rotor vector -- part helicopter, part helium balloon -- that is being designed to replace helicopters in aerial logging operations. The second is a version of Aereon 26 that the company is designing to carry radar. Called WASP -- wide aperture surveillance plane -- and capable of a making continuous 360 degrees sweeps of the sky, the deltoid-shaped craft would far exceed the effectiveness of current anti-missile detection aircraft, Mr. Smith said.
end quote. You'll note that the only current patent Aereon corp holds is for the WASP-style system)
I'm not saying I have any idea what these things people are seeing are, I'm just mentioning a possibility. Anyone still interested in this *kind* of vessel should definitely go read "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" by McPhee.
-gleam
My favorite aalib hack is the aalib output plugin for mplayer. Any format mplayer can open, it can convert to ascii... it even plays in the console, so you can watch your 80x24 porn remotely.
-gleam
You don't often intentionally hurl your car at 45 miles an hour into a steel box, either, but insurance companies do it all the time to see how well a particular car stands up to the abuse.
Even if you don't knowingly take the insurance institute's results (or federal crash-test ratings) into account, the company selling you insurance does, and your premiums will be higher.
To say "just because i'll never do something this way it has no merit" is silly. Performance in a 45-mile-per-hour offset crash will tell a car company how well it would stand to you accidentally bumping into the corner of your garage, or into the bumper of another car.
Tests like this are important because they're indicative of performance at all bitrates. If you want to know WHICH codec will sound the best at 128kbit, you should look at which codec sounds the best at 64kbit--the two are likely to be the same.
There are two intended audiences for this test: 1) people trying to decide which audio format to use for a stream (which are very often in the 32-64kbit range)
and
2) people who realize these tests can tell us much more than simply which codec performs best at 64kbit, and want to know how to maximize the quality-to-diskspace ratio on their own encodings.
Hope this clears something up for you.
-gleam
http://web.archive.org/web/19980119143350/stardivi sion.com/staroffice/java.html
And one about corel's java port from network computing magazine...
http://www.networkcomputing.com/816/816sp3.html
-gleam
StarOffice itself was never written completely in java, but there WAS a wholly java version of staroffice. Check archive.org's archive of stardivision.com -gleam
where I am, univision was also 10 seconds ahead of ABC, so you could watch it on univision, and when something exciting happened, switch to ABC and hear about it in english the a second time.
-gleam
Yeah, there's an entire class on routing protocols... (I know some people were just studying eigrp and ospf for their midterm)... the textbook is actually from cisco press.
b s. html
We're also required to take a technical writing class, and I've had classes where one assignment was, in fact, to diagram a network.
There are lots of schools that focus completely on theory, depaul isn't one of them..part of the reason I'm enjoying my stay here.
In fact, just today I was in our telephony lab, learning how to configure a lucent pbx. Right next door is the networks lab, which has a fairly nice little network with atm, token ring, a netware lan, and a plain vanilla switched ethernet lan.
http://facweb.cs.depaul.edu/brewster/tdc-web/la
There's lots of theory, and there's lots of practice.
Also, interestingly enough, all students getting a computer-related degree have to take either public speaking or "interpersonal communications".
Anyways.
-gleam
Not all schools only have programming/engineering courses.
I spent a year at www.macalester.edu, which only had engineering and programming (since it was mostly a liberal arts school). The programming classes were good, and if that's what I had wanted, I would have been fine there.
But I really don't enjoy writing code.
Now I go to Depaul University's CTI school, which has a boatload of majors, not just pure CS. My major is "Network Technologies," but there are also majors in "Management of Information Systems," "Human-Computer Interaction," "Computer Graphics and Animation," and a few others I can't remember right now.
We're learning the same basic things as CS majors, but we're approaching it from a network engineering perspective rather than a code perspective.
Depaul is very friendly to older students, and students who are working full time. There are lots of night classes and no one looks at a 30 or 40 year old in their intro class as weird.
Some of the profs have recently worked in industry, some are lifetime profs. In one class of mine ("Digital Access Services," where we cover PPP, SONET, 802.11, and lots of other stuff) the professor worked for a startup before the recent bust, and was at motorola and bell labs (before it became lucent) before that.
Another professor has been teaching for his 20+ year career. Both are equally good, and both come with very different perspectives.
In short, choose your college carefully. Make sure their CS program will have classes you'll enjoy, and not too many you'll have to sleep through.
-gleam
yeah, and the ultimate learning experience for a chef is to work at a three star restaurant...
there's one god-like guy in france who happens to own and run TWO michelin three star restaurants... basically unheard of.
-gleam
it's not like it's a new practice, I remember seeing posts mentioning 2.1.127 or 2.1.83 back in the day...
Slashdot is whatever they want to make it. It's not your site, you don't select the stories, if you don't like it, go to kuro5hin where you do select the stories.
Or something.
Bah.
-gleam
Of course, everyone is wrong, and it's all the slashdot editor's fault.
If he had bothered to read the first paragraph (i think) of the story being linked, he'd see that Comcast is buying solely the cable television and other broadband services, NOT ATT Broadband Internet. ATTBI is being spun off into its own company.
sheesh.
-gleam
yeah, but it won't look twice as big ;)
point taken, though.
i think a chunk of the thickness of the archos is the neoprene bumpers, which add about a half-inch, I think.. they're those blue things on the corners that act as shock absorbers should you drop it..
-gleam
if i wanna transfer a movie i burn it to a cd :P takes 4 minutes, permanent, doesn't require deletion from my jukebox
:)
besides, most of my movies are already burned to cd
-gleam, who is ogling the UPS truck outside his house..
the archos doesn't quite compare to the ipod in terms of size, but it is by no means bulky... it also costs about $200-220, only slightly more than the nomad.
:)
size specs on the archos:
Dimensions: 115 x 82 x 34mm (4.5" x 3.2" x 1.3")
Weight: 290g (12 oz.)
size specs on the ipod:
Height: 4.02 inches (102 mm)
Width: 2.43 inches (61.8 mm)
Depth: 0.78 inches (19.9 mm)
Weight: 6.5 ounces (185 g)
weighs half as much, which is impressive, but otherwise is very similar in terms of actual volume.
and at twice the price for a gig less storage, and given how i use my portable mp3 players (i don't jog with them), the extra 6oz doesn't bother me.
again, i love the way the ipod looks, it looks like a perfectly great mp3 player, but I don't think the notion regarding transfer rate is really valid for the vast majority of its users.
but yes, i agree there are exceptions
you might be interested to know that it's fairly easy to upgrade the archos jukebox.. just plop in a new 2.5" hard drive and away you go. people have upgraded theirs to 40gb, so that'd be a nice 450 albums, or so...
-gleam
people keep talking about the transfer rate.
who cares?
You really have more than 10 gigs of music that you listen to regularly? I mean, at 74 minutes per album and 192kbit, that's 96 albums, and a mind-numbing 118 hours of music.
I have an archos jukebox 6000, which has a 6 gig hard drive and connects via USB, and can also function as a USB hard drive. So yes, it took about 80-90 minutes to fill up the hard drive initially. But, uh, I haven't transferred any files to or from it since then.
Why would I?
That's about 57 albums worth of music, and I guarantee you I don't listen to more than that regularly.
The only point at which the transfer rate really becomes an issue is if you're actually using it as a portable hard drive, and I think a relatively small number of customers use it for that purpose.
And do you want to know *why* the people who buy these rarely use it as a hard drive? Because people who buy $200-400 hard-drive based mp3 players usually have fairly new cd burners.
I have a 16x cd burner, which will burn an entire 700mb cd in maybe 4.5 minutes. Which doesn't require me to make space on my mp3 player, and doesn't require me to bring it to someone who has a usb or firewire enabled system, etc etc.
Seriously.
If you have one of these things, you know you don't use it as a portable hard drive. It's an mp3 player, first and foremost.
of course, if you have one of these kinds of things and you find you regularly *do* do file transfers, feel free to flame away.
-gleam
god i love that show.
it's so much fun watching torbjorn samuelssen and magnus samuelssen (brothers) competing against the protege of a former winner.
well, no
it's a lot of fun watching really big guys lift really huge weights and do pointless things with them.
yeah.
-gleam
part of the problem is also that kazaa et al run supernodes and provide dynamic server lists, which is part of the "facilitation" aspect of the claim.
The RIAA knows they don't have as strong a case as they did against napster, but they still have a case.
My favorite part is that kazaa is partially encrypted, so any attempts by the RIAA to reverse engineer it are illegal under the DMCA
-gleam
Try Urban Terror (Beta 2.3) for Q3, www.urbanterror.net
A fantastic mod, in the vein of AQ2. I came from AQ2 and am more addicted to UT2 than I ever was to AQ2.
A better damage system than AQ2, and trust me, UT2 plays very well as CTF. There may be a more "objective" style gamemode in beta 3, but I gather that's still in the planning process.
Check it out, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
-gleam