I don't think Xilman was proposing using raw, exposed nuclear waste as the heatsource, but rather to encapsulate it in an RTG similar to designs used in dozens of spacecraft. Thus, there'd be no/minimal contamination of the environment, low radiation levels emitted by the probe, and plenty of heat generated to move through the ice.
The problem I see presented is: once you have your bot in place under twelve miles of ice, how do you get your signal back? Through a tether? Then how do you get the tether through all that ice without it freezing in place and jamming the probe during descent? There are some neat engineering challenges in this idea...
Why not? They're talking about using them to power aircraft the size of dust particles; people will inevitably inhale these things -- and they'll be just fine. We are surrounded by radioactive sources that emit alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, but they are at low enough levels that the energy does either no damage, or might actually be beneficial to us.
Given the assumption that a PDA powered by a collection of these things would put out less radiation than a brick (yes, they're radioactive, kids!), why would you have any problem relying on a power source that wouldn't have to be replaced until your children retire?
HA! I remember an article in Byte magazine from ten or so years ago detailing a holographic terabyte storage medium on a piece of glass the size and shape of a microscope slide -- hows that for your isolinear chip? The article said such devices could be available for commercial use within one to three years.
One must approach these kinds of announcements with a degree of skepticism. Sometimes they are little more than fishing expeditions intended to drum up a little shareholder interest. Sometimes, they are completely legitimate, but other market pressures prevent the technologies from coming out in anything close to the stated time frame.
Not that I disagree in any way with your solid state goal! I'm with you 99.9997% on that one!
Wait. If Westford Needles put up that much debris in 1961 (wasn't it '63?), then doesn't that argue against the threat of a debris cloud cutting off access to space? After all, we've been operating plenty of spacecraft in LEO all these years while the Westford junk has been up there.
Yep, but every one of those collisions results in a loss of inertia. As orbital velocity drops, altitude drops. As orbital altitude drops, atmospheric drag rises.
Almost 500 posts in here and about ten of them had something to say other than "Yo, futzheads, thanks for spoiling the show." Don't ya think the idea that he shouldn't have spoiled the ending was pretty thoroughly conveyed by the first, oh, 100 posts that lashed ChrisD?
I was hoping for a little intelligent conversation about how X-Files wrapped up the Lone Gunmen, and instead I was forced to wade through a sewer of repetitive drivel. Hey, but that's okay, folks. *I* was the one who was misguided.
Um...Chris Carter didn't pull TLG, Fox did. Carter wanted to wrap up X-Files and focus all his attention on TLG, but Fox wanted X-Files around for yet another season. So they canned his new show to keep him working on X-Files.
And last night's episode wrapped up the cliff-hanger from TLG. Big time.
If I'm not mistaken, water vapor traps much more heat than carbon dioxide, so if you're worried about global warming now just wait until every car on the planet is putting out water vapor.
Keep at that keyboard, meara! I'm able to touch-type lower-case without too much difficulty, and I've had it a week too. In a month, I expect to be able to pull about 20-25 wpm on it. The software does need some improvement, and extra chargers and batteries are a must.
I have one, and the thing isn't flimsy at all -- except for the display guard, and that's designed to come off. While the software needs a bit more polish, that's real easy to do since the OS is in flash memory and there are already alternative distributions to choose from.
I'm VERY happy with this device, and view its shortcomings as temporary and of no concern at all to my applications.
RevAaron, how else do you write a word other than by one character at a time? Maybe I slept through a class or two in grammar school, but as best as I can recall, there was no training in writing a whole word at once. (There may be a preconception bias at work here: I abandoned "cursive" handwriting ages ago because printing is more legible and precise. This is actually rather common in engineering and other tech-related industries. Now if you're trying to make a case for a system that recognizes cursive writing rather than printing, I'll concede that point, but you're still forming your words one-letter-at-a-time, connecting strokes and fancy swirls notwithstanding.)
"...lack of better means for using the device..." That's what the keyboard is for. I've typed much faster than I could ever write for years, and although this pygmy wonder on the Zaurus is a little tough, I'm already getting a handle on touch-typing with it. This thing has five different ways to get information into it, I can even enter data one-handed while standing -- I'm not being held back from using it at all!
The litany of development you recite is the exact reason these archaeologists are surprised. The more recent achievements built upon earlier accomplishments. Unless you subscribe to some of Erich van Daniken's ideas, the overall sophistication of artistic and scientific accomplishments of more primative cultures gets...well, even more primative the further back you look. By the time your poking around 5000 years ago any sophisticated understanding of the world around our ancestors is quite rare.
To some degree, I share a bit of your incredulity. A few thousand years shouldn't be enough to have the profound impact on our culture and knowledge that it obviously has. Biologically, we don't appear to be any different from our forebears from 35,000 years ago -- and yet we fail to find any evidence that the human condition, culturally speaking doesn't begin to change until quite recently.
This isn't arrogance on the part of the archaeologists, it's a simple understanding that has built up over decades of careful research and excavation. And generally, people living 5000 years ago evidenced very little understanding of the world around them. That isn't saying that they couldn't, but they didn't exactly have the benefit of a guaranteed public education to give them a leg up. And transportation options, beyond one foot in front of the other, were a bit limited too, so there wasn't much opportunity to share accumulated wisdom with other tribes that weren't nearby.
It's beginning to look like there's a certain population density that needs to be reached in a region before people start to have the time to do anything more than sketch in the dirt. Infrastructure, however primative, has to be in place to allow some people to hunt for a living, and others to think and create. And once you have the ability for a large group of people to take time off from basic survival needs -- culture, at least the kind that goes beyond pictures of animals carved into cave walls, begins to rapidly blossum.
Bzzt! Bzzt! And exactly what is the functional difference, hmm? You're not being forced to learn a new alphabet, it learns your particular style, and it keeps up very nicely. The only improvement would be the ability to recognize an entire string of characters at once, and I'd really rather not have to scroll back through an entire line of text to correct a single recognition error at the start of it.
Once you get out of the Graffiti trap, the differences become trivial.
For all of it's virtues (I've had mine since Thursday night and loving every moment), this sucker drinks batteries faster than juice boxes in the desert. Rule #1: reduce settings on sound and light. Rule #2: get extra batteries and chargers. Under heavy use, my SL-5500 seems to last about six or seven hours before it needs a recharge. Note that I have not yet placed a wireless network card in it yet, which I expect to reduce time between recharges by another hour.
Fortunately, the battery packs are small -- about the size of a fat CF card. I plan on getting two or three extras and keeping them around for emergency use. The unit also can be recharged with IPAQ power accessories, so I have a selection to choose from.
Oh, I have to disagree about the keyboard. I've had my new SL-5500 since Thursday night, and although I worried at first about the tiny buttons, I soon realized that they work better than I feared. I've gotten up to around 15 wpm on it and I'm close to being able to touch type lower-case letters already. Uppercase and numbers will take longer, of course.
Bzzzt! Sorry, but I've been playing with my new SL-5500 and guess what? Handwriting recognition is one of five ways to get text into the unit. On-screen keyboard (in two flavors), pickboard, handwriting recognition, Unicode selection chart, and that wonderful hardware keyboard.
And that isn't Graffiti that's being used for handwriting recognition, but a trainable algorithm that actually recognizes multi-stroke letters!
PigleT, while your comparison seems legitimate, it really isn't; most people who use computers these days are familiar with the Windows world and the Microsoft way of doing things. They might not be experts on the Control Panel thing, but they know it's there, what it does, and there are pseudo-help files stuck in there to try to explain what everything does.
You aren't introducing a bunch of naive neophytes to computers, you are introducing a bunch of Windows users to something completely new. The simpler the transition, the more will come across.
I've seen this behavior with every computer that has had any sort of a following. It doesn't matter what brand or OS: Amiga, Microsoft, Mac, Linux, TI, or TRS-80 -- what you describe is common to fanatics of any flavor.
Now the real reason Amiga died is because Commodore waited years before they even began to advertise the computer in any comprehensive way, and even that lasted only a handful of months. From acquisition to bankruptcy, Commodore had no clue how to handle a computer that was hands down superior to and cheaper than any competition.
You should have stuck it out, Andy. I too came from other programs and was disoriented by the product, but it was the only one available on a range of machines I was likely to use that had most of the features I wanted. So I worked through the tutorials and eventually found the environment very useful for developing and animating models.
Of course, now I've also spent a lot of time on an application that may never see another update again...
I've been burned by 3D application makers before...anyone remember Imagine? While you're right that some have been burned by the loss of NaN, I can argue that most haven't. I have the latest (free) copy of the software. It is still extensible with python scripting. And for almost anything I want to do, the application itself has been more than capable for the last six or seven releases. The most intriguing developments (from a modeling and rendering standpoint) were taking place under the control of independent/grassroots developers who probably won't stop their work just because the main application may now be frozen.
Still, I am hoping for someone to decide to GPL it or for the company or product to return to market.
Absolutely! Blender was/is a fantastic tool. I built a model of the Soviet helicopter carrier Moskva in it, and found the software very easy to use. There was a bit of a learning ledge when I first tried to use it, but once I was over that, I fell in love with it.
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I don't think Xilman was proposing using raw, exposed nuclear waste as the heatsource, but rather to encapsulate it in an RTG similar to designs used in dozens of spacecraft. Thus, there'd be no/minimal contamination of the environment, low radiation levels emitted by the probe, and plenty of heat generated to move through the ice.
The problem I see presented is: once you have your bot in place under twelve miles of ice, how do you get your signal back? Through a tether? Then how do you get the tether through all that ice without it freezing in place and jamming the probe during descent? There are some neat engineering challenges in this idea...
And that is known as an ad hominem logical fallacy.
Why not? They're talking about using them to power aircraft the size of dust particles; people will inevitably inhale these things -- and they'll be just fine. We are surrounded by radioactive sources that emit alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, but they are at low enough levels that the energy does either no damage, or might actually be beneficial to us.
Given the assumption that a PDA powered by a collection of these things would put out less radiation than a brick (yes, they're radioactive, kids!), why would you have any problem relying on a power source that wouldn't have to be replaced until your children retire?
HA! I remember an article in Byte magazine from ten or so years ago detailing a holographic terabyte storage medium on a piece of glass the size and shape of a microscope slide -- hows that for your isolinear chip? The article said such devices could be available for commercial use within one to three years.
One must approach these kinds of announcements with a degree of skepticism. Sometimes they are little more than fishing expeditions intended to drum up a little shareholder interest. Sometimes, they are completely legitimate, but other market pressures prevent the technologies from coming out in anything close to the stated time frame.
Not that I disagree in any way with your solid state goal! I'm with you 99.9997% on that one!
Thank you for preserving your wits in the face of alarmism. I wish I had some mod points for you!
Wait. If Westford Needles put up that much debris in 1961 (wasn't it '63?), then doesn't that argue against the threat of a debris cloud cutting off access to space? After all, we've been operating plenty of spacecraft in LEO all these years while the Westford junk has been up there.
Yep, but every one of those collisions results in a loss of inertia. As orbital velocity drops, altitude drops. As orbital altitude drops, atmospheric drag rises.
Great post! I wish I had some moderator points to throw your way, but then you've already racked up a bunch. Thanks for the links.
Almost 500 posts in here and about ten of them had something to say other than "Yo, futzheads, thanks for spoiling the show." Don't ya think the idea that he shouldn't have spoiled the ending was pretty thoroughly conveyed by the first, oh, 100 posts that lashed ChrisD?
I was hoping for a little intelligent conversation about how X-Files wrapped up the Lone Gunmen, and instead I was forced to wade through a sewer of repetitive drivel. Hey, but that's okay, folks. *I* was the one who was misguided.
Um...Chris Carter didn't pull TLG, Fox did. Carter wanted to wrap up X-Files and focus all his attention on TLG, but Fox wanted X-Files around for yet another season. So they canned his new show to keep him working on X-Files.
And last night's episode wrapped up the cliff-hanger from TLG. Big time.
If I'm not mistaken, water vapor traps much more heat than carbon dioxide, so if you're worried about global warming now just wait until every car on the planet is putting out water vapor.
Keep at that keyboard, meara! I'm able to touch-type lower-case without too much difficulty, and I've had it a week too. In a month, I expect to be able to pull about 20-25 wpm on it. The software does need some improvement, and extra chargers and batteries are a must.
And where are you finding $25 batteries?!
I have one, and the thing isn't flimsy at all -- except for the display guard, and that's designed to come off. While the software needs a bit more polish, that's real easy to do since the OS is in flash memory and there are already alternative distributions to choose from. I'm VERY happy with this device, and view its shortcomings as temporary and of no concern at all to my applications.
RevAaron, how else do you write a word other than by one character at a time? Maybe I slept through a class or two in grammar school, but as best as I can recall, there was no training in writing a whole word at once. (There may be a preconception bias at work here: I abandoned "cursive" handwriting ages ago because printing is more legible and precise. This is actually rather common in engineering and other tech-related industries. Now if you're trying to make a case for a system that recognizes cursive writing rather than printing, I'll concede that point, but you're still forming your words one-letter-at-a-time, connecting strokes and fancy swirls notwithstanding.)
"...lack of better means for using the device..." That's what the keyboard is for. I've typed much faster than I could ever write for years, and although this pygmy wonder on the Zaurus is a little tough, I'm already getting a handle on touch-typing with it. This thing has five different ways to get information into it, I can even enter data one-handed while standing -- I'm not being held back from using it at all!
The litany of development you recite is the exact reason these archaeologists are surprised. The more recent achievements built upon earlier accomplishments. Unless you subscribe to some of Erich van Daniken's ideas, the overall sophistication of artistic and scientific accomplishments of more primative cultures gets...well, even more primative the further back you look. By the time your poking around 5000 years ago any sophisticated understanding of the world around our ancestors is quite rare.
To some degree, I share a bit of your incredulity. A few thousand years shouldn't be enough to have the profound impact on our culture and knowledge that it obviously has. Biologically, we don't appear to be any different from our forebears from 35,000 years ago -- and yet we fail to find any evidence that the human condition, culturally speaking doesn't begin to change until quite recently.
This isn't arrogance on the part of the archaeologists, it's a simple understanding that has built up over decades of careful research and excavation. And generally, people living 5000 years ago evidenced very little understanding of the world around them. That isn't saying that they couldn't, but they didn't exactly have the benefit of a guaranteed public education to give them a leg up. And transportation options, beyond one foot in front of the other, were a bit limited too, so there wasn't much opportunity to share accumulated wisdom with other tribes that weren't nearby.
It's beginning to look like there's a certain population density that needs to be reached in a region before people start to have the time to do anything more than sketch in the dirt. Infrastructure, however primative, has to be in place to allow some people to hunt for a living, and others to think and create. And once you have the ability for a large group of people to take time off from basic survival needs -- culture, at least the kind that goes beyond pictures of animals carved into cave walls, begins to rapidly blossum.
Bzzt! Bzzt! And exactly what is the functional difference, hmm? You're not being forced to learn a new alphabet, it learns your particular style, and it keeps up very nicely. The only improvement would be the ability to recognize an entire string of characters at once, and I'd really rather not have to scroll back through an entire line of text to correct a single recognition error at the start of it.
Once you get out of the Graffiti trap, the differences become trivial.
For all of it's virtues (I've had mine since Thursday night and loving every moment), this sucker drinks batteries faster than juice boxes in the desert. Rule #1: reduce settings on sound and light. Rule #2: get extra batteries and chargers. Under heavy use, my SL-5500 seems to last about six or seven hours before it needs a recharge. Note that I have not yet placed a wireless network card in it yet, which I expect to reduce time between recharges by another hour.
Fortunately, the battery packs are small -- about the size of a fat CF card. I plan on getting two or three extras and keeping them around for emergency use. The unit also can be recharged with IPAQ power accessories, so I have a selection to choose from.
Oh, I have to disagree about the keyboard. I've had my new SL-5500 since Thursday night, and although I worried at first about the tiny buttons, I soon realized that they work better than I feared. I've gotten up to around 15 wpm on it and I'm close to being able to touch type lower-case letters already. Uppercase and numbers will take longer, of course.
Bzzzt! Sorry, but I've been playing with my new SL-5500 and guess what? Handwriting recognition is one of five ways to get text into the unit. On-screen keyboard (in two flavors), pickboard, handwriting recognition, Unicode selection chart, and that wonderful hardware keyboard.
And that isn't Graffiti that's being used for handwriting recognition, but a trainable algorithm that actually recognizes multi-stroke letters!
I'm trying very hard not to think of either Hobbits or Sir Ian naked. DOH!
PigleT, while your comparison seems legitimate, it really isn't; most people who use computers these days are familiar with the Windows world and the Microsoft way of doing things. They might not be experts on the Control Panel thing, but they know it's there, what it does, and there are pseudo-help files stuck in there to try to explain what everything does.
You aren't introducing a bunch of naive neophytes to computers, you are introducing a bunch of Windows users to something completely new. The simpler the transition, the more will come across.
I've seen this behavior with every computer that has had any sort of a following. It doesn't matter what brand or OS: Amiga, Microsoft, Mac, Linux, TI, or TRS-80 -- what you describe is common to fanatics of any flavor.
Now the real reason Amiga died is because Commodore waited years before they even began to advertise the computer in any comprehensive way, and even that lasted only a handful of months. From acquisition to bankruptcy, Commodore had no clue how to handle a computer that was hands down superior to and cheaper than any competition.
You should have stuck it out, Andy. I too came from other programs and was disoriented by the product, but it was the only one available on a range of machines I was likely to use that had most of the features I wanted. So I worked through the tutorials and eventually found the environment very useful for developing and animating models.
Of course, now I've also spent a lot of time on an application that may never see another update again...
I've been burned by 3D application makers before...anyone remember Imagine? While you're right that some have been burned by the loss of NaN, I can argue that most haven't. I have the latest (free) copy of the software. It is still extensible with python scripting. And for almost anything I want to do, the application itself has been more than capable for the last six or seven releases. The most intriguing developments (from a modeling and rendering standpoint) were taking place under the control of independent/grassroots developers who probably won't stop their work just because the main application may now be frozen.
Still, I am hoping for someone to decide to GPL it or for the company or product to return to market.
Absolutely! Blender was/is a fantastic tool. I built a model of the Soviet helicopter carrier Moskva in it, and found the software very easy to use. There was a bit of a learning ledge when I first tried to use it, but once I was over that, I fell in love with it.