In fact, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter scheduled to be launched in 2005 will use the Atlas V as the launcher rocket, because the satellite is too heavy to be carried by pre-Delta IV rockets. It will be the biggest space vehicle to go to Mars since Viking was launched in 1975.
At least here in the San Francisco Bay Area we have something resembling decent public transportation, though of course some systems are in desperate need of upgrading (like MUNI in San Francisco).
I think one of the big mistakes the Santa Clara VTA did when they built the light rail system was not choosing their two initial lines of going up El Camino Real to Palo Alto and west on San Carlos Street/Stevens Creek Boulevard from San Jose; they could have captured a massive number of riders just on these two lines. Hopefully, when the economy improves we will eventually see LRT lines built along these corridors.
So many times I read about the evil **AA's, as if people don't realize these trade industry groups exist to do the bidding, and often the dirty work, of the creative entities like Lucas. Valenti and Rosen are paid to be targets for the heat-seekers so that the creative brands aren't tarnished by politics.
Yet there is something really right about the MPAA and really wrong about the RIAA.
The RIAA is shooting itself in the foot by essentially forcing the pricing of album-length audio CD's to around US$18. This is definitely NOT good value for the money, and now that CD recorder drives and CD recorder media are quite inexpensive and "ripping" CD's are quite easy to do, no wonder why there is great economic incentive to pirate music.
On the other hand, the MPAA is actually vastly less a villain in this whole mess. The reason: the enormous success of reasonable sell-through pricing of movies on home video. The movie studios have seen how the Walt Disney Company made loads of money doing this, and this model of video pricing was chosen for the DVD format. By keeping the cost of DVD's reasonable, sales of movies on DVD have literally gone through the roof; it is the success of the DVD format that has actually turned many money-losing movies into profitable movies. Because MPAA President Jack Valenti doesn't oppose sell-through pricing of movies on home video, the result is an all-around win for everyone: movie studios makes loads of money beyond theatrical release, and customers are more than willing to buy these movies on DVD at the price point of US$20 per movie for new releases and often under US$10 per movie for older releases. At this price point, the incentive to pirate a movie is very low indeed.
The price of going out to the movies is getting out of hand! Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, an evening admission for a family of four (two adults, two children under 13 or so) runs about US$32! (glyph of dollar bills sprouting wings and flying away)
With the price of home theater systems being really cheap nowadays, no wonder why DVD sales have gone through the roof. We've gone past the point that a five-speaker home theater system with DVD player and a good TV that accepts component video input will pay for itself in well under a year when that same family with the home theater system buys some DVD's and rents others. Yes, you'll miss out on the "big screen" experience but you'll also miss out on overpriced tickets, overpriced concessions, poor sightlines, uncomfortable seating, poor sound and projection quality, and annoying fellow moviegoers who talk too much, bring crying babies along and bring noisy and annoying pagers and cellphones along.
By keeping the price of DVD's reasonable (thanks to the fact they're following the sell-through model of video sales more or less pioneered by the Buena Vista Home Entertainment division of the Walt Disney Company), they've sent DVD sales literally through the roof.
DVD's could have been quite expensive initially due to the high cost of mastering the movie onto DVD disc, but now that you can master a professional-quality DVD movie on a dual-CPU Power Macintosh machine, it's small wonder why costs are relatively low.
I think the MPAA's Jack Valenti--unlike the RIAA folks--seems to a have clue about the economics of media piracy, and by pricing DVD movies at a low cost the economic incentive to do piracy is very low. If the RIAA understood the economics of media piracy they should price album-length audio CD's at US$11 per disc, which would cut down the incentive to pirate music quite dramatically.
Yet Hollywood makes millions on VHS tapes, and millions more on DVDs that are, I must admit despite my boycott, reasonably priced. Why? Because the hassle factor of burning a copied DVD outweights the pricetag... most people's time is more valuable to them than the money saved infringing on the copyright and burning a copy of the DVD... despite the existence of tools that make doing so easy, even trivial, on just about every platform.
The problem with attempting DVD "rips" is that 1) the original disk is so reasonably priced that there is very little incentive to pirate the movie, 2) DVD Recorder drives and the recording media are still quite expensive and 3) nobody has figured out how to do a home-made dual-layer DVD recordable disc.
When you can get the four-disc Extended Edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for under US$30 why bother with the hassle of getting a pirated copy off the Internet? Besides, DiVX "rips" of DVD's are so huge in size that it's a daunting task to download it even if you have a broadband connection.
I think Red Hat will succeed because it has essentially become pretty much the de facto standard for Linux.
I mean think about it: here in the USA when people know about Linux they definitely know about Red Hat Software. And Red Hat Linux is the commercial distro that is by far the most used in the corporate world. Even IBM's well-funded Linux research uses a variant of Red Hat Linux.
Slackware may be better for the highly-experienced user, and Mandrake may be great for newbies, but for the corporate crowd Red Hat Linux is pretty much it.
At 1/4 the price of a Segway HT, I can get a very nice regular bicycle AND a Dahon Boardwalk 6 for commuting (especially if you have to use public transport during commuting).
On the other hand, the weight could still be a problem for getting it into a car trunk or up to the first step of the commuter train I take each morning.
Given Segway's 65-pound weight, people are NOT going to be thrilled to carry that thing through public transit stations. Many transit stations have steep stairways that is beyond the capabilities of Segway, I'm sorry to say.:-( Also, it's inability to fold and/or collapse to a manageable size could result in the same restrictions that limit the loading of regular bicycles on buses, trains, trolleys and ferries.
By eventually building a transporter with Segway-like functions into something that weighs 25-27 pounds at most and fold and/or collapse into something smaller than most folding bicycles, you can easily carry it through transit stations and will not impede other public transit riders.
I think CES will become even more relevant nowadays because the home entertainment industry has really exploded in popularity in the last seven years, what with the rise of DVD's (high-quality video in an easy-to-store format), multi-channel home theater systems (finally a use for the idea pioneered by quadraphonics in the 1970's), and gaming consoles such as PlayStation/PlayStation2, XBox and GameCube.
Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center is a sign of things to come as the convergence of computers and the home entertainment system start to accelerate; I would not be surprised if Apple produces a Power Macintish model that aims for the same market within 24 months.
I think right now if you want to go to a large-scale show with emphasis on computers and related stuff, the best shows are CeBIT in Germany and COMPUTEX in Taiwan.
CeBIT is a huge show that makes COMDEX during its heyday look like a minor event in comparison; COMPUTEX is very relevant nowadays since a lot of computer technology now originates in Taiwan (look at the long list of well-known computer peripheral manufacturers based there).
Walking is great until you realize many people are hurting themselves because of the shoes they're wearing.:-(
In their zeal to make fashion statements too many shoe companies make shoes that look stylish but in fact are bad for humans walking or standing for long periods of time. You'll be amazed how many foot, leg and lower back problems could be avoided by wearing a proper pair of shoes.
That does explain why Birkenstocks and Rockport shoes are quite popular--both of these companies make excellent, very comfortable shoes that are great even for long walks.
While the Segway sounds like a great idea, I'll wait for the following improvements:
1. The weight of the unit has to come down. The current 65 pound weight is a bit much to carry up and down staircases.
2. The unit should be collapsible, so you it makes it much easier to carry on and off means of public transport (trains, trolleys, buses and ferries).
3. The cost has to be much lower than now.
I really hope a company like Dahon (famous for its folding bicycles) will work with Kamen and develop something akin to a Segway that weighs no more than 25-27 pounds, folds and/or collapses to a manageable size, and costs no more than US$2,000 to start and then lower the cost as technology improves.
...What ASUS, Gainward, LeadTek, PNY and other nVidia chipset graphics card manufacturers will do in terms of cooling the graphics card for the new GeForce FX 5800 cards.
Have you seen the cooling systems some of these manufacturers have attempted with their Ti4600 cards?! (eek.) I can just see the enormous monstrosities in terms of cooling systems for GeForce FX cards when the production models come out in late January 2003. It could make CPU coolers look downright conservative in comparison.
I've read that nVidia has stopped GeForce4 Ti4600 production and is only selling the GeForce4 Ti4200 GPU.
In short, better get that Ti4600 card very soon, because they could be gone in a matter of months.
By definition it was an intelligence submarine!
on
Book on NR-1
·
· Score: 2
It's obvious that given the sub had a nuclear powerplant it was going to be used on clandestine, secret operations in Soviet territorial waters to monitor Soviet Navy movements. NR-1 was probably the best submarine to quietly monitor the home bases of the Northern Fleet, the Soviet Navy's primary fleet for operations against NATO.
What's interesting is that the Soviets never built anything like NR-1. The Soviets had built a series of miniature submarines for Spetsnaz operations in Norwegian fjords but they never did build anything akin to NR-1, even though Soviet submarine designers could have easily designed and built such a craft. Maybe the poor state of Soviet nuclear reactor design prevented the NR-1'ski from being built?
I think you're kind of forgetting that the installation process isn't exactly a trivial process. It means many hours of planning the change, uninstalling the old Windows software on servers and desktops, reinstalling everything under Linux, and configuring/tweaking the whole setup to work correctly.
Given the state of the Japanese economy lately I don't think corporations are going to attempt this just yet given the high labor costs involved to do the conversion. They'll do it in a few years' time when the economy is better.
There may be thousands of kanji characters, but those beyond the 1,980 characters that the Ministry of Education requires for passing the final high school exams in Japan are rapidly falling into disuse.
Newspapers, periodicals and manga (the Japanese equivalent of comic books) published in Japan usually conform with the Ministry of Education standard for ease of printing reasons. In fact, there are articles in Japanese newspapers and periodicals on kanji that are falling into disuse.
In theory, if Linux sets up Unicode so it supports the 1,980 kanji characters and the entire hiregana and katakana character sets that every Japanese high school graduate should know (this is the Japanese Ministry of Education requirement) it can be done.
Given Japan's rather poor economy nowadays I really have my doubts if they're willing to tackle the conversion in the near future--mostly because of the large number of IT man-hours needed to do the conversion and support the systems after the conversion.
...First, they'll have to figure out the cost of changeover and supporting Linux, FreeBSD, etc. Software may be extremely cheap but supporting it could consume quite a lot of IT man-hours.
Besides, the Japanese are already heavily invested in commercial UNIX systems. I believe many Japanese government ministries are running minicomputers and mainframes built in Japan using UNIX.
Anyway, the Japanese should check with IBM Japan on this. After all, the biggest commercial supporter of Linux is IBM, and IBM definitely has the resources to do Linux installations from department servers all the way up to supercomputers.
However, don't try to be cute and put up any major unusual structure outside of town--it's bound to be seen from an imaging satellite.
The Russians hid their rocket engine test program by deliberately building their facilities in a suburb of Moscow and putting up apartment-like buildings with no-expenses-spared noise and engine exhaust surpression systems. That was exorbitantly expensive and only one such facility was ever built.
While Sony has one of the world's most recognizable brand names, they have to be wary of Microsoft because MS has far more than enough liquid assets on hand to wait out the competition. Sony doesn't does have that luxury and one wrong calculation by the Playstation group could result in Microsoft swooping in and take the console gaming marketshare before Sony knew what happened.
However, I don't think Microsoft will fail with XBox.
The reason is simple: Microsoft has US$40+ BILLION in liquid assets. That gives Microsoft more than enough time to wait and watch Sony and/or Nintendo make a marketing misstep and Microsoft will swoop in to take marketshare in a blink of an eye.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter scheduled to be launched in 2005 will use the Atlas V as the launcher rocket, because the satellite is too heavy to be carried by pre-Delta IV rockets. It will be the biggest space vehicle to go to Mars since Viking was launched in 1975.
At least here in the San Francisco Bay Area we have something resembling decent public transportation, though of course some systems are in desperate need of upgrading (like MUNI in San Francisco).
I think one of the big mistakes the Santa Clara VTA did when they built the light rail system was not choosing their two initial lines of going up El Camino Real to Palo Alto and west on San Carlos Street/Stevens Creek Boulevard from San Jose; they could have captured a massive number of riders just on these two lines. Hopefully, when the economy improves we will eventually see LRT lines built along these corridors.
So many times I read about the evil **AA's, as if people don't realize these trade industry groups exist to do the bidding, and often the dirty work, of the creative entities like Lucas. Valenti and Rosen are paid to be targets for the heat-seekers so that the creative brands aren't tarnished by politics.
Yet there is something really right about the MPAA and really wrong about the RIAA.
The RIAA is shooting itself in the foot by essentially forcing the pricing of album-length audio CD's to around US$18. This is definitely NOT good value for the money, and now that CD recorder drives and CD recorder media are quite inexpensive and "ripping" CD's are quite easy to do, no wonder why there is great economic incentive to pirate music.
On the other hand, the MPAA is actually vastly less a villain in this whole mess. The reason: the enormous success of reasonable sell-through pricing of movies on home video. The movie studios have seen how the Walt Disney Company made loads of money doing this, and this model of video pricing was chosen for the DVD format. By keeping the cost of DVD's reasonable, sales of movies on DVD have literally gone through the roof; it is the success of the DVD format that has actually turned many money-losing movies into profitable movies. Because MPAA President Jack Valenti doesn't oppose sell-through pricing of movies on home video, the result is an all-around win for everyone: movie studios makes loads of money beyond theatrical release, and customers are more than willing to buy these movies on DVD at the price point of US$20 per movie for new releases and often under US$10 per movie for older releases. At this price point, the incentive to pirate a movie is very low indeed.
Rick,
The price of going out to the movies is getting out of hand! Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, an evening admission for a family of four (two adults, two children under 13 or so) runs about US$32! (glyph of dollar bills sprouting wings and flying away)
With the price of home theater systems being really cheap nowadays, no wonder why DVD sales have gone through the roof. We've gone past the point that a five-speaker home theater system with DVD player and a good TV that accepts component video input will pay for itself in well under a year when that same family with the home theater system buys some DVD's and rents others. Yes, you'll miss out on the "big screen" experience but you'll also miss out on overpriced tickets, overpriced concessions, poor sightlines, uncomfortable seating, poor sound and projection quality, and annoying fellow moviegoers who talk too much, bring crying babies along and bring noisy and annoying pagers and cellphones along.
By keeping the price of DVD's reasonable (thanks to the fact they're following the sell-through model of video sales more or less pioneered by the Buena Vista Home Entertainment division of the Walt Disney Company), they've sent DVD sales literally through the roof.
DVD's could have been quite expensive initially due to the high cost of mastering the movie onto DVD disc, but now that you can master a professional-quality DVD movie on a dual-CPU Power Macintosh machine, it's small wonder why costs are relatively low.
I think the MPAA's Jack Valenti--unlike the RIAA folks--seems to a have clue about the economics of media piracy, and by pricing DVD movies at a low cost the economic incentive to do piracy is very low. If the RIAA understood the economics of media piracy they should price album-length audio CD's at US$11 per disc, which would cut down the incentive to pirate music quite dramatically.
Yet Hollywood makes millions on VHS tapes, and millions more on DVDs that are, I must admit despite my boycott, reasonably priced. Why? Because the hassle factor of burning a copied DVD outweights the pricetag ... most people's time is more valuable to them than the money saved infringing on the copyright and burning a copy of the DVD ... despite the existence of tools that make doing so easy, even trivial, on just about every platform.
The problem with attempting DVD "rips" is that 1) the original disk is so reasonably priced that there is very little incentive to pirate the movie, 2) DVD Recorder drives and the recording media are still quite expensive and 3) nobody has figured out how to do a home-made dual-layer DVD recordable disc.
When you can get the four-disc Extended Edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for under US$30 why bother with the hassle of getting a pirated copy off the Internet? Besides, DiVX "rips" of DVD's are so huge in size that it's a daunting task to download it even if you have a broadband connection.
I'm concerned it's not scalable to something larger, either.
First, we have to consider the weight of a larger Fan Wing. That could result in a quite heavy contraption.
Second, scaling up the Fan Wing to something bigger could result in a lot of mechanical complexity.
Finally, the Fan Wing could be quite noisy when scaled up.
I think Red Hat will succeed because it has essentially become pretty much the de facto standard for Linux.
I mean think about it: here in the USA when people know about Linux they definitely know about Red Hat Software. And Red Hat Linux is the commercial distro that is by far the most used in the corporate world. Even IBM's well-funded Linux research uses a variant of Red Hat Linux.
Slackware may be better for the highly-experienced user, and Mandrake may be great for newbies, but for the corporate crowd Red Hat Linux is pretty much it.
At 1/4 the price of a Segway HT, I can get a very nice regular bicycle AND a Dahon Boardwalk 6 for commuting (especially if you have to use public transport during commuting).
On the other hand, the weight could still be a problem for getting it into a car trunk or up to the first step of the commuter train I take each morning.
:-( Also, it's inability to fold and/or collapse to a manageable size could result in the same restrictions that limit the loading of regular bicycles on buses, trains, trolleys and ferries.
Given Segway's 65-pound weight, people are NOT going to be thrilled to carry that thing through public transit stations. Many transit stations have steep stairways that is beyond the capabilities of Segway, I'm sorry to say.
By eventually building a transporter with Segway-like functions into something that weighs 25-27 pounds at most and fold and/or collapse into something smaller than most folding bicycles, you can easily carry it through transit stations and will not impede other public transit riders.
I think CES will become even more relevant nowadays because the home entertainment industry has really exploded in popularity in the last seven years, what with the rise of DVD's (high-quality video in an easy-to-store format), multi-channel home theater systems (finally a use for the idea pioneered by quadraphonics in the 1970's), and gaming consoles such as PlayStation/PlayStation2, XBox and GameCube.
Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center is a sign of things to come as the convergence of computers and the home entertainment system start to accelerate; I would not be surprised if Apple produces a Power Macintish model that aims for the same market within 24 months.
I think right now if you want to go to a large-scale show with emphasis on computers and related stuff, the best shows are CeBIT in Germany and COMPUTEX in Taiwan.
CeBIT is a huge show that makes COMDEX during its heyday look like a minor event in comparison; COMPUTEX is very relevant nowadays since a lot of computer technology now originates in Taiwan (look at the long list of well-known computer peripheral manufacturers based there).
Walking is great until you realize many people are hurting themselves because of the shoes they're wearing. :-(
In their zeal to make fashion statements too many shoe companies make shoes that look stylish but in fact are bad for humans walking or standing for long periods of time. You'll be amazed how many foot, leg and lower back problems could be avoided by wearing a proper pair of shoes.
That does explain why Birkenstocks and Rockport shoes are quite popular--both of these companies make excellent, very comfortable shoes that are great even for long walks.
While the Segway sounds like a great idea, I'll wait for the following improvements:
1. The weight of the unit has to come down. The current 65 pound weight is a bit much to carry up and down staircases.
2. The unit should be collapsible, so you it makes it much easier to carry on and off means of public transport (trains, trolleys, buses and ferries).
3. The cost has to be much lower than now.
I really hope a company like Dahon (famous for its folding bicycles) will work with Kamen and develop something akin to a Segway that weighs no more than 25-27 pounds, folds and/or collapses to a manageable size, and costs no more than US$2,000 to start and then lower the cost as technology improves.
...What ASUS, Gainward, LeadTek, PNY and other nVidia chipset graphics card manufacturers will do in terms of cooling the graphics card for the new GeForce FX 5800 cards.
Have you seen the cooling systems some of these manufacturers have attempted with their Ti4600 cards?! (eek.) I can just see the enormous monstrosities in terms of cooling systems for GeForce FX cards when the production models come out in late January 2003. It could make CPU coolers look downright conservative in comparison.
I've read that nVidia has stopped GeForce4 Ti4600 production and is only selling the GeForce4 Ti4200 GPU.
In short, better get that Ti4600 card very soon, because they could be gone in a matter of months.
It's obvious that given the sub had a nuclear powerplant it was going to be used on clandestine, secret operations in Soviet territorial waters to monitor Soviet Navy movements. NR-1 was probably the best submarine to quietly monitor the home bases of the Northern Fleet, the Soviet Navy's primary fleet for operations against NATO.
What's interesting is that the Soviets never built anything like NR-1. The Soviets had built a series of miniature submarines for Spetsnaz operations in Norwegian fjords but they never did build anything akin to NR-1, even though Soviet submarine designers could have easily designed and built such a craft. Maybe the poor state of Soviet nuclear reactor design prevented the NR-1'ski from being built?
I think you're kind of forgetting that the installation process isn't exactly a trivial process. It means many hours of planning the change, uninstalling the old Windows software on servers and desktops, reinstalling everything under Linux, and configuring/tweaking the whole setup to work correctly.
Given the state of the Japanese economy lately I don't think corporations are going to attempt this just yet given the high labor costs involved to do the conversion. They'll do it in a few years' time when the economy is better.
There may be thousands of kanji characters, but those beyond the 1,980 characters that the Ministry of Education requires for passing the final high school exams in Japan are rapidly falling into disuse.
Newspapers, periodicals and manga (the Japanese equivalent of comic books) published in Japan usually conform with the Ministry of Education standard for ease of printing reasons. In fact, there are articles in Japanese newspapers and periodicals on kanji that are falling into disuse.
In theory, if Linux sets up Unicode so it supports the 1,980 kanji characters and the entire hiregana and katakana character sets that every Japanese high school graduate should know (this is the Japanese Ministry of Education requirement) it can be done.
Didn't TurboLinux work like this?
Given Japan's rather poor economy nowadays I really have my doubts if they're willing to tackle the conversion in the near future--mostly because of the large number of IT man-hours needed to do the conversion and support the systems after the conversion.
...First, they'll have to figure out the cost of changeover and supporting Linux, FreeBSD, etc. Software may be extremely cheap but supporting it could consume quite a lot of IT man-hours.
Besides, the Japanese are already heavily invested in commercial UNIX systems. I believe many Japanese government ministries are running minicomputers and mainframes built in Japan using UNIX.
Anyway, the Japanese should check with IBM Japan on this. After all, the biggest commercial supporter of Linux is IBM, and IBM definitely has the resources to do Linux installations from department servers all the way up to supercomputers.
However, don't try to be cute and put up any major unusual structure outside of town--it's bound to be seen from an imaging satellite.
The Russians hid their rocket engine test program by deliberately building their facilities in a suburb of Moscow and putting up apartment-like buildings with no-expenses-spared noise and engine exhaust surpression systems. That was exorbitantly expensive and only one such facility was ever built.
While Sony has one of the world's most recognizable brand names, they have to be wary of Microsoft because MS has far more than enough liquid assets on hand to wait out the competition. Sony doesn't does have that luxury and one wrong calculation by the Playstation group could result in Microsoft swooping in and take the console gaming marketshare before Sony knew what happened.
However, I don't think Microsoft will fail with XBox.
The reason is simple: Microsoft has US$40+ BILLION in liquid assets. That gives Microsoft more than enough time to wait and watch Sony and/or Nintendo make a marketing misstep and Microsoft will swoop in to take marketshare in a blink of an eye.