"Yes, why not? In theory you just need to go a short distance past Geosynchronous orbit, which is about half that, but only if you have a very heavy counterweight."
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
"Last, but not least: Within a year, KOffice will likely run on Windows as well."
I hope MS already knew that, but if they didn't, I'd expect that will be the sphintcer moment.
They should be imagining this reaction from managers: We can have (Open) Office running for free (ok - worst case - $30 CD including TFM) on all our existing platforms? Vista who?
Bill tips his hand years in advance, then takes twice as long to implement. While the first one may seem necessary given the corporate customer base, the second is still inexcusable and leads to smaller faster organizations (Allchin's breathless tell-alls nonwithstanding) can do something like this. Make something work, ship sooner, and make the choice pretty simple for managers of comanies mostly much more agile than MS. They can alternately wait for Vista and the MS Office that will ride on its coattails, pay full price for both of them *OR* get a much cheaper version for a platform MS will be supporting for at least a few more years (they carried 98 for 7 years...)
They haven't needed it since the solar max and hubble servicing missions, until recently with Hubble's diminished capacity - and what happens? People start talking about some imagined robotic mission to service the hubble again as if it were a near-term possibility. That's the daydream/
Only no such robotic capabilities exist, while the human/shuttle servicing missions are proven solutions.
The last statment is simply derision masking as glibness - ask a pilot or astronaut if they think the reality is that the "most capable machine" is "often not a good choice".
And it's really a question of decision making and nerve - apparently we're planning to go to the moon in a gilded Apollo replica, when a week earlier almost none of us thought we needed to go to the moon. But it makes headlines and "Returning to the moon is an important component of the President's Vision for Space Exploration." Who knew.
Yes, I understand when and the respective rates. Much of this discussion has begun to sound like "NASA kills astronauts, Russia doesn't." That impression is not true.
Soyuz/Progress are lifeboat and tugboat respectively. They are not attempting anywhere near what the Shuttle is capable of.
Plus, it may work but it's hardly the path to what we eventually want to do in space. Ever seen any photos from inside a Soyuz? There's barely room to get a camera far enough away from you to take a picture. Three people, as much room as a subcompact front seat. It's a three day have-to trip, not a want-to. The pressure suits are secured with a giant rubber band. I'm not making this up - watch SpaceStation IMAX and Sue Helms suiting up for a ride in the Soyuz.
Soyuz as it stands won't go to Mars, it won't go back to the moon. It can't even approach doing things like satellite capture and repair.
Renault made the model 4 and the model 5 side by side as late as 1992, the 4 being a 60s throwback but it worked, sliding windows and all and it cost very little money. This is parallel to the use of the Soyuz.
The Soyuz record is "Near 100%", true. But that's not 100%. Neither record is 100%.
We had Apollo 1 on the pad (3 dead) - they had R-16 on the pad (over 90 dead). We had Challenger and Columbia, both fatal flights (14 dead), they had Souyz 1 and 11 - both fatal flights (4 dead). We had a near miss on Apollo 13, they had one on Soyuz 5. We each tossed a space station into the drink, arguably prematurely on both accounts. Both have a full compliment of Charlie Foxtrot flight moments, and ground crew / training fatalities.
The usual rhetoric includes references here on/. such as "nasa's core competencies whish seem to be killing astroanuts in groups of seven" is glib and gratuitously derisive.
C'mon. Three out of every four people in an office spend an hour a week wandering the halls like Diogenes with a lantern to find out what (insert term here) means. I call BS. Horrifically crap research at the very least. Just because Chloe says they might as well speak Arabic doesn't mean that users are as tested as if they were actually speaking Arabic. It's a FIGURE OF SPEECH. You don't report research results based on one comment. And let's see - they rounded up a mess of office workers, who excuse me, but most cubicle dwellers would probably hold up their hands if they could anonymously vote on anything even mildly annoying in displacement of (insert gripe here), as bludgeoning your boss often offends.
And Christ, from what I've seen of Welsh, they could be thinking every consonant laden acronym is some obscure Welsh word and they spend the hour looking for a dictionary. (I suspect I'll hear about that one but hey - google "BWRDD".)
Thanks for the insight that "worms" work until they completely fill your hard drive. Either they couldn't even be bothered to ask the expert firm for definitions, or the expert firm is crap for having given those.
I never referred to airsoft as paintball - I said call me when they SWAP IN the paintball rig - cuz it's a much better effect on those black Jehovah's Witnesses' suits.
Lazy susan bearing - $3 at Big Lots. Raggedy PIII to run the controllers - $50 on eBay. Video of your little brother running like a frightened baby bunny while being peppered with BBs for all the world to see on the internet - Priceless.
Call me when they swap in the paintball rig and it can feature recognize Jehovah's Witnesses.
... when every school programming exercise began with the single letter variable names you'd use in algebra. First variable was X, second one you needed was Y, the third was Z, the fourth... was... *narf* OMG we've run out of variable names we're doomed!
Jeez. Just go around to A again. It's not like there's not enough other data about these things so we'd never distinguish them, the name is not tied to a date, so you always give a hurricane's name and then mention the month and year anyway...
... they created a word processor with over 1,100 commands, where type controls are two layers deep in the GUI, and where "Normal" view is not WYSIWYG.
Sorry, they may like to, they don't reliably achieve it.
combo boxes - is it a text field or a menu? if there's a finite menu, do what the mac osx registration screen does for states - you can type to get to an absolute or probable place in the menu or just pick starting from where you typed - tough to explain, infinitely easier to use.
tab sets or rows - in property boxes (and enywhere else they're used) in windows swap the top row to the bottom row when you click on a top row tab. this makes buttons you are going to soon press change position as you press something else near them. this is probably the most bizzarre behavior in a GUI element that is still shipping. explain the logic.
start menu - go look at the most recent screen shots at supersite. osx dock and finder icons are size-able, the dock is hide-able and animation can be turned off.
So now Mac users can look forward to combo boxes, tab sets that flip around as you click them, and a start menu that eats half the screen just to choose a program...
We worked with this about 20 years ago - Pasteurella sp., though this species is similar. It needs incubation at body temperature, outside of that it doesn't do well - IIRC cultures were dead in less than a day out of their ranges, but we autoclaved everything jsut for good measure. Plus we signed a big piece of paper from NIH saying we'd take full responsibility for it all. Some good news is that not all strains are human pathogens. More good news is it doesn't form spores, so dead bacteria is dead bacteria. Plus it responds well to antibiotics. What we call "plague" bacteria are very common in livestock - ag people call it "shipping fever" because it's usually not a problem until you stuff lots of animals in a stock trailer or car and let them breath, scratch and bite each other for a week, and you can have high mortality on arrival. The wild strains of some of these are nearly ubiquitous in rabbits, and more common than you'd think in household and farm animals.
MAL ONS - MAL SON - LAM ONS LAM SON - SALMON - ALMS NO ALMS ON - SLAM NO - SLAM ON MA SOLN - AM SOLN - MAN LOS MAN SOL - MANS LO
"Salmon" has more logo possibilities; "Slam On!" will appeal to the x-treme and H4x0r crowd, but "Man, S.O.L.!" is probably closer to what most people think of this development.
"We know that this can work." Uh huh. And how do "we" know that this idea can work?
A saharan dust storm stopping a tropical wave is a small feat compared to drying out 400 mile diameter hurricane in progress and with a predictable path - and that's a baby one.
And remember - you also have to stop the heat driving this thing. That's the biggest variable in meteorology, and there's really no way to calculate it to a reliable degree.
Which "dessicant" are you speaking of? And how much of it do you need? How much ammonia or salt are you going to add to the water (or drop on the land) from the breakdown of the two most common biodegradable dessicants?
And how many missions of a hurricane chasing plane (there are only two of them in existence, they are heavily modified Lockheed Orions with a ceiling of 27,000 feet and load capacity of 30 tons) are you going to get for a reasonable amount of money?
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." Look up "cane toad" or "gypsy moth". These were *reasonable* solutions to problems that we had already had a hand in causing.
Phil Shapiro needs to spend a season on a commercial fishing boat in hurricane season before he thinks about running a foltilla of gangly sprinkler boats all over the ocean at a few days' notice.
As for project Stormfury - it showed that you need a certain very predictable set of conditions to get even some noticable seeding effect, conditions hurricanes generally are lacking. It basically concluded that we don't know anywhere near enough to do this in any reilable fashion.
Reducing the severity of of a hurricane seems *noble*, I'll grant you that - but there's nothing to suggest it's a *reasonable* expectation.
Of course the settlers of New Orleans thought it would be reasonable to build on a flood plain - they didn't calculate the effect that boxing in the flood plain would have - no more silt to keep those plains at their original level, lotsa buildings to compress the only silt they'd ever have again. New Orleans has been sinking under its own weight, while the silt builds up around it instead of in it, which is how a flood plain maintains itself.
You'll get much further if you work on the structures and stop building things that snowball with failure when natural things occur.
Vin Schaefer figured this out decades ago - but it's not used to control weather.
Imagine you make it rain here when it was going to rain there.
The people deprived of the rain there will sue your rainmaking keister when they don't get their rain.
Hurricanes happen. They destroy what we put in their path (sometimes I imagine we name them because it helps ascribe blame). But the rain they bring after they run out of steam is needed moisture somewhere.
How about we stop building vulnerable things in well known paths of bad storms? It'll cost lots less and it will mostly work.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yes, why not? In theory you just need to go a short distance past Geosynchronous orbit, which is about half that, but only if you have a very heavy counterweight."
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
Like Jobs likes to do and like Wallin did here:
"Last, but not least: Within a year, KOffice will likely run on Windows as well."
I hope MS already knew that, but if they didn't, I'd expect that will be the sphintcer moment.
They should be imagining this reaction from managers: We can have (Open) Office running for free (ok - worst case - $30 CD including TFM) on all our existing platforms? Vista who?
Bill tips his hand years in advance, then takes twice as long to implement. While the first one may seem necessary given the corporate customer base, the second is still inexcusable and leads to smaller faster organizations (Allchin's breathless tell-alls nonwithstanding) can do something like this. Make something work, ship sooner, and make the choice pretty simple for managers of comanies mostly much more agile than MS. They can alternately wait for Vista and the MS Office that will ride on its coattails, pay full price for both of them *OR* get a much cheaper version for a platform MS will be supporting for at least a few more years (they carried 98 for 7 years...)
They haven't needed it since the solar max and hubble servicing missions, until recently with Hubble's diminished capacity - and what happens? People start talking about some imagined robotic mission to service the hubble again as if it were a near-term possibility. That's the daydream/
Only no such robotic capabilities exist, while the human/shuttle servicing missions are proven solutions.
The last statment is simply derision masking as glibness - ask a pilot or astronaut if they think the reality is that the "most capable machine" is "often not a good choice".
And it's really a question of decision making and nerve - apparently we're planning to go to the moon in a gilded Apollo replica, when a week earlier almost none of us thought we needed to go to the moon. But it makes headlines and "Returning to the moon is an important component of the President's Vision for Space Exploration." Who knew.
That's the record for the Soyuz FG lifting body - not for manned missions on the Soyuz T/TM/TMA.
Yes, I understand when and the respective rates. Much of this discussion has begun to sound like "NASA kills astronauts, Russia doesn't." That impression is not true.
/Progress are lifeboat and tugboat respectively. They are not attempting anywhere near what the Shuttle is capable of.
Soyuz
Plus, it may work but it's hardly the path to what we eventually want to do in space. Ever seen any photos from inside a Soyuz? There's barely room to get a camera far enough away from you to take a picture. Three people, as much room as a subcompact front seat. It's a three day have-to trip, not a want-to. The pressure suits are secured with a giant rubber band. I'm not making this up - watch SpaceStation IMAX and Sue Helms suiting up for a ride in the Soyuz.
Soyuz as it stands won't go to Mars, it won't go back to the moon. It can't even approach doing things like satellite capture and repair.
Renault made the model 4 and the model 5 side by side as late as 1992, the 4 being a 60s throwback but it worked, sliding windows and all and it cost very little money. This is parallel to the use of the Soyuz.
But it's not the path to the future.
The Soyuz record is "Near 100%", true. But that's not 100%. Neither record is 100%.
/. such as "nasa's core competencies whish seem to be killing astroanuts in groups of seven" is glib and gratuitously derisive.
We had Apollo 1 on the pad (3 dead) - they had R-16 on the pad (over 90 dead).
We had Challenger and Columbia, both fatal flights (14 dead), they had Souyz 1 and 11 - both fatal flights (4 dead).
We had a near miss on Apollo 13, they had one on Soyuz 5.
We each tossed a space station into the drink, arguably prematurely on both accounts.
Both have a full compliment of Charlie Foxtrot flight moments, and ground crew / training fatalities.
The usual rhetoric includes references here on
C'mon. Three out of every four people in an office spend an hour a week wandering the halls like Diogenes with a lantern to find out what (insert term here) means. I call BS. Horrifically crap research at the very least. Just because Chloe says they might as well speak Arabic doesn't mean that users are as tested as if they were actually speaking Arabic. It's a FIGURE OF SPEECH. You don't report research results based on one comment. And let's see - they rounded up a mess of office workers, who excuse me, but most cubicle dwellers would probably hold up their hands if they could anonymously vote on anything even mildly annoying in displacement of (insert gripe here), as bludgeoning your boss often offends.
And Christ, from what I've seen of Welsh, they could be thinking every consonant laden acronym is some obscure Welsh word and they spend the hour looking for a dictionary. (I suspect I'll hear about that one but hey - google "BWRDD".)
Thanks for the insight that "worms" work until they completely fill your hard drive. Either they couldn't even be bothered to ask the expert firm for definitions, or the expert firm is crap for having given those.
I never referred to airsoft as paintball - I said call me when they SWAP IN the paintball rig - cuz it's a much better effect on those black Jehovah's Witnesses' suits.
Lazy susan bearing - $3 at Big Lots.
Raggedy PIII to run the controllers - $50 on eBay.
Video of your little brother running like a frightened baby bunny while being peppered with BBs for all the world to see on the internet - Priceless.
Call me when they swap in the paintball rig and it can feature recognize Jehovah's Witnesses.
Under "Customize it!"
"Save $50 with mail-in Dell/Yahoo rebate. Price shown before rebate. [Included in Price] "
Well, that's clear as mud. The DJ Ditty is apparently so compact, there's no space left for articles, pronouns and modfiers, not even in the ad copy.
Sure makes you appreciate "Do not eat iPod Shuffle." At least we knew exctly what they meant.
... when every school programming exercise began with the single letter variable names you'd use in algebra. First variable was X, second one you needed was Y, the third was Z, the fourth... was... *narf* OMG we've run out of variable names we're doomed!
Jeez. Just go around to A again. It's not like there's not enough other data about these things so we'd never distinguish them, the name is not tied to a date, so you always give a hurricane's name and then mention the month and year anyway...
... they created a word processor with over 1,100 commands, where type controls are two layers deep in the GUI, and where "Normal" view is not WYSIWYG.
Sorry, they may like to, they don't reliably achieve it.
combo boxes - is it a text field or a menu? if there's a finite menu, do what the mac osx registration screen does for states - you can type to get to an absolute or probable place in the menu or just pick starting from where you typed - tough to explain, infinitely easier to use.
tab sets or rows - in property boxes (and enywhere else they're used) in windows swap the top row to the bottom row when you click on a top row tab. this makes buttons you are going to soon press change position as you press something else near them. this is probably the most bizzarre behavior in a GUI element that is still shipping. explain the logic.
start menu - go look at the most recent screen shots at supersite. osx dock and finder icons are size-able, the dock is hide-able and animation can be turned off.
So now Mac users can look forward to combo boxes, tab sets that flip around as you click them, and a start menu that eats half the screen just to choose a program...
We worked with this about 20 years ago - Pasteurella sp., though this species is similar. It needs incubation at body temperature, outside of that it doesn't do well - IIRC cultures were dead in less than a day out of their ranges, but we autoclaved everything jsut for good measure. Plus we signed a big piece of paper from NIH saying we'd take full responsibility for it all. Some good news is that not all strains are human pathogens. More good news is it doesn't form spores, so dead bacteria is dead bacteria. Plus it responds well to antibiotics. What we call "plague" bacteria are very common in livestock - ag people call it "shipping fever" because it's usually not a problem until you stuff lots of animals in a stock trailer or car and let them breath, scratch and bite each other for a week, and you can have high mortality on arrival. The wild strains of some of these are nearly ubiquitous in rabbits, and more common than you'd think in household and farm animals.
though it would be laggy if not dampened...
So here's the anagrams for AOL and MSN...
MAL ONS - MAL SON - LAM ONS
LAM SON - SALMON - ALMS NO
ALMS ON - SLAM NO - SLAM ON
MA SOLN - AM SOLN - MAN LOS
MAN SOL - MANS LO
"Salmon" has more logo possibilities;
"Slam On!" will appeal to the x-treme and H4x0r crowd,
but "Man, S.O.L.!" is probably closer to what most people think of this development.
...to the post-iceberg Titanic. When they get there, they'll start selling lifeboats.
Voila, an MSN almost the population of AOL.
Unless Bill is simply tired of actually lighting his money on fire, this seems to be a fruitful motive.
Bill McLellan, the guy who won Feynman's motor challenge would have won sooner but he kept losing his motor in the dust on his workbench.
that $745 is sans drive and OS - $1295 for the 80GB SATA & Solaris.
That's still half the price of the low-end xServe. Hmmm....
They have lots of those.
Be careful for four weeks?
0. Backup
(In the military tradition of "Shred this, but make a copy first.")
"We know that this can work."
Uh huh. And how do "we" know that this idea can work?
A saharan dust storm stopping a tropical wave is a small feat compared to drying out 400 mile diameter hurricane in progress and with a predictable path - and that's a baby one.
And remember - you also have to stop the heat driving this thing. That's the biggest variable in meteorology, and there's really no way to calculate it to a reliable degree.
Which "dessicant" are you speaking of?
And how much of it do you need?
How much ammonia or salt are you going to add to the water (or drop on the land) from the breakdown of the two most common biodegradable dessicants?
And how many missions of a hurricane chasing plane (there are only two of them in existence, they are heavily modified Lockheed Orions with a ceiling of 27,000 feet and load capacity of 30 tons) are you going to get for a reasonable amount of money?
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."
Look up "cane toad" or "gypsy moth". These were *reasonable* solutions to problems that we had already had a hand in causing.
Phil Shapiro needs to spend a season on a commercial fishing boat in hurricane season before he thinks about running a foltilla of gangly sprinkler boats all over the ocean at a few days' notice.
As for project Stormfury - it showed that you need a certain very predictable set of conditions to get even some noticable seeding effect, conditions hurricanes generally are lacking. It basically concluded that we don't know anywhere near enough to do this in any reilable fashion.
Reducing the severity of of a hurricane seems *noble*, I'll grant you that - but there's nothing to suggest it's a *reasonable* expectation.
Of course the settlers of New Orleans thought it would be reasonable to build on a flood plain - they didn't calculate the effect that boxing in the flood plain would have - no more silt to keep those plains at their original level, lotsa buildings to compress the only silt they'd ever have again. New Orleans has been sinking under its own weight, while the silt builds up around it instead of in it, which is how a flood plain maintains itself.
You'll get much further if you work on the structures and stop building things that snowball with failure when natural things occur.
Vin Schaefer figured this out decades ago - but it's not used to control weather.
Imagine you make it rain here when it was going to rain there.
The people deprived of the rain there will sue your rainmaking keister when they don't get their rain.
Hurricanes happen. They destroy what we put in their path (sometimes I imagine we name them because it helps ascribe blame). But the rain they bring after they run out of steam is needed moisture somewhere.
How about we stop building vulnerable things in well known paths of bad storms? It'll cost lots less and it will mostly work.
I usually could run the board on that one.