In orbit (at the hypersonic velocities experienced, think mach 30 or so with really, really tiny pressure), your drag is proportional to your area, so your orbital decay is proportional to your mass to area ratio. An orbiter is really heavy, but isn't very big, area wise. On the other hand, the ISS is mostly thin solar panel, so it has a much smaller mass to area ratio, and therefore decays faster than the orbiter itself, or even the orbiter+station stack. I know this was true when the shuttle docked with Mir, and I believe that it is true with the ISS.
Here's another way to think about it. if you drop a cardboard box, will it not fall faster with a bowling ball duct taped to it? Similarly, the shuttle/ISS will "fall" around the earth faster than the ISS alone.
The problem with this sort of discussion is that in academia, when you have a huge collection of really smart people, intelligence isn't general purpose. I'm a computational engineering guy. That's what I do, that's what I'm good at. I'm not good at balancing budgets, I can't do chem worth shit, and politics is way, way beyond me. However, I can simulate stuff.
A lot of my friends are math people. They do math. If the policy people need math, my friends will be there for them. They're good at math. I'm good at computational engineering. If you need something simulated, I can do that. We build computers. That's what we do. Rocket guys build rockets, math guys do math, and I build computers to simulate stuff.
Russia's "old-tech" rockets are far more reliable/effective/economical than the shuttle could ever hope to be. The shuttle was supposed to drop launch to LEO/GTO from $150mil to $10mil. Instead, it costs $500mil to fly the thing, and you don't get nearly the payload of a heavy-lift booster, nor the reliability. The shuttle hasn't been used for commercial or military launch in quite some time. That's because of one simple fact.
It's really hard to get shit out of space. We've got the launch thing down (light a big fire at the top of a cone, and go up for a while, then go over really fast), but it's really hard to get things back. Both shuttle failures have been as a direct result of their reusuable nature. If you didn't need to reuse the SRBs, you wouldn't need the field-joint O-rings to come on and off, and STS-51L would have flown safely to orbit. If you didn't need to bring back the same vehicle you launched with, you wouldn't need the giant delta wings, nor the overly complex thermal protection system, and then no amount of falling foam would have done jack to STS-114, and they'd be fine.
People like SpaceX have the right idea. Keep it simple, keep it cheap, reuse what you can, but what goes to orbit stays in orbit except for what you absolutely have to get back (i.e. crew). Yes, a reusuable spacecraft would be nice. However, right now, it's just not the way to go.
Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago
on
A History of Icons
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· Score: 1
Everybody knows how to swim in Texas. It's too fucking hot outside here to do much else.
It wouldn't take anything to port MacOS X to POWER4, because the IBM PowerPC 970 (the G5) is a POWER4 chip with the AltiVec SIMD unit grafted onto it. The PowerPC isn't POWER4--, it's POWER4++. (it is not, however, POWER5, which is probably gonna be the G6 someday)
Wow. Your machine collection is simply luscious. Not the largest I've seen, but damn is it of really, really high quality. I've wanted to get an O2 for some time now... (dare I ask what the server box is on the floor?)
It's called the Earned Income Credit. It means that you get a larger refund than you actually paid. Under the US tax system, if you make a little bit of , but under a certain threshold, the government will pay YOU money, instead of you paying it. It's a system of welfare for those who work, but don't make very much.
This is entirely incorrect. When you connect to an XMPP server, you have a username@thatserver.tld. If you want to talk to foo@bar.net, thatserver.tld queries bar.net for presence information. It works just like email does.
I don't believe that Jabber has ever not had that feature.
Re:Talk about backwards compatibility
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
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· Score: 1
This is actually pretty misleading.
I will be willing to bet that a lot of users of Longhorn will be on 64-bit computers, but Win64 for x86-64 will NOT support Win16 calls (and I also take that to mean DOS apps, but I could be wrong), so that means that only apps written AFTER '95 (apart from those not-too-common WinNT Win32 apps. Just about everything was Win16 in that era) will run on Longhorn if you have a modern 64-bit chip.
On the other hand, I can run MacDraw circa 1984 without a hitch on OS X 10.3.7 on my PowerBook G4 (doing it right now...), and I'd bet a cookie it'd run on a 64-bit G5 (I'll test it out on the other side of campus tomorrow). Sure, it's under the classic environment, but it's built into the OS, and it's entirely transparent. There's 20 years of backward compatability.
The Mac mini uses a Freescale (aka Motorola) chip. IBM makes the G5, and they made the G3s right at the end of their life. Motorola is the sole source for the G4.
Amateur Radio isn't at all relegated back to a hobby without development.
Go pick up a copy of QST (the ARRL's magazine). Flip through it. You'll see all kinds of articles on people developing more and more transmission and encoding techniques. Pretty much all of the development focuses on digital (packet) radio systems, and since power outputs are limited, (sometimes by law, but usually just because it's fun to be challenged) amateur radio operators have developed pretty much the best ways of dealing with interference and robustness in transmission of data.
AMD is shipping half the BOXED CPUs. These are the CPUs for the people who build their own computers. It doesn't take into account the people who buy preassembled computers (the VAST majority).
Trust me, Intel is still far and away the market leader in desktop x86 CPUs.
As a matter of fact, I'd bet that NASA was helping with development of things like wind power. Most of the research into systems like this rely on Computational Fluid Dynamics, a field that wouldn't be nearly as advanced and mature if it was not for the space program.
Sun has this nasty habit of somehow getting themselves stuck in a rut with a particular major version number. For example, Solaris started on version 2.x and got all the way up to 2.6 something like 10 years later. With version 2.7, they kinda just said 'fuck it, marketing can call it Solaris 7', and they did. But to this day, "uname -a" on a Solaris 9 box says "SunOS turing 5.9 Generic_112233-05 sun4u sparc". (SunOS 5.0 was Solaris 2.0. Don't think too hard about it;-) )
I guess they decided that they were never going to release Java 2 Version 2.0, so they decided to call it Java 5.
I was thinking about this for a while, and had an interesting thought. So, MacOS (9 and X) runs on PowerMac hardware only, right? But, you can use Mac-on-Linux on Linux/PPC, any Linux/PPC. Not just Linux/PowerMac. That means that you can "run" MacOS on an RS/6000, the same computer that NT/PPC ran on. It's like VMWare. It's not emulation, it's virtualization.
Here's my question: Would it be possible to run NT/PPC on PowerMac hardware through a MOL like virtualization layer? I don't know how useful this would be, but it might be fun. (Actually, I can think of a couple of uses for it, like recompiling existing Win32/x86 apps to Win32/PPC and running them on the Mac, albeit in an NT virtual machine. It would, however, run at native CPU speed.)
Your main point that IE isn't the primary browser on the Mac is correct (pretty much nobody uses it anymore... It is, however, a LOT better than IE/Win32), however it is still there on 10.3, by default. It was on my PowerBook that shipped a couple of months ago, and I use it once in a while for the sites that still just don't go with Safari or Firefox.
At my college, Harvey Mudd (Claremont, CA. great school), there is 802.11 in every common area of campus. Yes, this includes exterior locations, lounges, things like that. There's ethernet to the dorm rooms, too. However, since a dorm room isn't a common area, wireless isn't supported here, and is spotty. I want to work in bed, in my chair, somewhere besides my desk. So, I set up an access point in my room using the ethernet connection. (they let us do this, we just have to tell them that we're doing it) Now, I have full signal strength anywhere near my room and am not chained to my desk.
This is probably what the University students here were after.
Yeah, I think the System Preferences, iPhoto and things like that actually are following HIG because they aren't document based. They never have more than their window, so if you don't need that window, you don't need the app.
This just flat isn't going to work until it syncs with a TiVo.
Apple seems the best company to be able to make one of these sell. If they sold a video iPod that would sync with a TiVo, it'd just sync the higest rated x gigs of unwatched video whenever the iPod went into the TiVo cradle. This would be when the sort of device works. It'd be wonderful for people in the northeast with a long train commute every day. Or places in Europe. Make it simple, have it work with a TiVo, then this will take off.
Not really. The PowerPC that the mac uses now has very little to do with the 68000 series chip that used to be in the mac. The PowerPC is a decendent of the IBM POWER chips found in their high end RISC servers and workstations at the time. The transition from the 68k to PPC was very transparent to the user, primarily because Apple did a damn good job with it, but it was a completely fresh start CPU wise.
Kodak really did try to drum up support for this. It was a semi-pro camera (I remember several pros actually drooling pretty hard over it when I had it. ) It was FlashPoint (the guys who made DigitaOS) that blew it. They didn't deliver the SDKs that we needed when we still cared. For all I know, they've since shipped them, but that DC260 just doesn't cut it anymore.
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In orbit (at the hypersonic velocities experienced, think mach 30 or so with really, really tiny pressure), your drag is proportional to your area, so your orbital decay is proportional to your mass to area ratio. An orbiter is really heavy, but isn't very big, area wise. On the other hand, the ISS is mostly thin solar panel, so it has a much smaller mass to area ratio, and therefore decays faster than the orbiter itself, or even the orbiter+station stack. I know this was true when the shuttle docked with Mir, and I believe that it is true with the ISS.
Here's another way to think about it. if you drop a cardboard box, will it not fall faster with a bowling ball duct taped to it? Similarly, the shuttle/ISS will "fall" around the earth faster than the ISS alone.
E=(gamma)mc^2 .511MeV/c^2 * c^2 = 1.17 MeV
gamma = (1 - v^2/c^2) ^ (-1/2) =2.3
E = 2.3 *
Yes, that is, in fact, one bad ass beta particle.
The problem with this sort of discussion is that in academia, when you have a huge collection of really smart people, intelligence isn't general purpose. I'm a computational engineering guy. That's what I do, that's what I'm good at. I'm not good at balancing budgets, I can't do chem worth shit, and politics is way, way beyond me. However, I can simulate stuff.
A lot of my friends are math people. They do math. If the policy people need math, my friends will be there for them. They're good at math. I'm good at computational engineering. If you need something simulated, I can do that. We build computers. That's what we do. Rocket guys build rockets, math guys do math, and I build computers to simulate stuff.
Money can be repurposed. People can't.
Russia's "old-tech" rockets are far more reliable/effective/economical than the shuttle could ever hope to be. The shuttle was supposed to drop launch to LEO/GTO from $150mil to $10mil. Instead, it costs $500mil to fly the thing, and you don't get nearly the payload of a heavy-lift booster, nor the reliability. The shuttle hasn't been used for commercial or military launch in quite some time. That's because of one simple fact.
It's really hard to get shit out of space. We've got the launch thing down (light a big fire at the top of a cone, and go up for a while, then go over really fast), but it's really hard to get things back. Both shuttle failures have been as a direct result of their reusuable nature. If you didn't need to reuse the SRBs, you wouldn't need the field-joint O-rings to come on and off, and STS-51L would have flown safely to orbit. If you didn't need to bring back the same vehicle you launched with, you wouldn't need the giant delta wings, nor the overly complex thermal protection system, and then no amount of falling foam would have done jack to STS-114, and they'd be fine.
People like SpaceX have the right idea. Keep it simple, keep it cheap, reuse what you can, but what goes to orbit stays in orbit except for what you absolutely have to get back (i.e. crew). Yes, a reusuable spacecraft would be nice. However, right now, it's just not the way to go.
Everybody knows how to swim in Texas. It's too fucking hot outside here to do much else.
It wouldn't take anything to port MacOS X to POWER4, because the IBM PowerPC 970 (the G5) is a POWER4 chip with the AltiVec SIMD unit grafted onto it. The PowerPC isn't POWER4--, it's POWER4++. (it is not, however, POWER5, which is probably gonna be the G6 someday)
Wow. Your machine collection is simply luscious. Not the largest I've seen, but damn is it of really, really high quality. I've wanted to get an O2 for some time now... (dare I ask what the server box is on the floor?)
It's called the Earned Income Credit. It means that you get a larger refund than you actually paid. Under the US tax system, if you make a little bit of , but under a certain threshold, the government will pay YOU money, instead of you paying it. It's a system of welfare for those who work, but don't make very much.
Try opening a Safari link in a new window.
Command+Click
Also, I haven't found out how you can switch between windows in a single application without using the mouse.
Command+Apostrophy
This is entirely incorrect. When you connect to an XMPP server, you have a username@thatserver.tld. If you want to talk to foo@bar.net, thatserver.tld queries bar.net for presence information. It works just like email does.
I don't believe that Jabber has ever not had that feature.
This is actually pretty misleading.
I will be willing to bet that a lot of users of Longhorn will be on 64-bit computers, but Win64 for x86-64 will NOT support Win16 calls (and I also take that to mean DOS apps, but I could be wrong), so that means that only apps written AFTER '95 (apart from those not-too-common WinNT Win32 apps. Just about everything was Win16 in that era) will run on Longhorn if you have a modern 64-bit chip.
On the other hand, I can run MacDraw circa 1984 without a hitch on OS X 10.3.7 on my PowerBook G4 (doing it right now...), and I'd bet a cookie it'd run on a 64-bit G5 (I'll test it out on the other side of campus tomorrow). Sure, it's under the classic environment, but it's built into the OS, and it's entirely transparent. There's 20 years of backward compatability.
The Mac mini uses a Freescale (aka Motorola) chip. IBM makes the G5, and they made the G3s right at the end of their life. Motorola is the sole source for the G4.
Amateur Radio isn't at all relegated back to a hobby without development.
Go pick up a copy of QST (the ARRL's magazine). Flip through it. You'll see all kinds of articles on people developing more and more transmission and encoding techniques. Pretty much all of the development focuses on digital (packet) radio systems, and since power outputs are limited, (sometimes by law, but usually just because it's fun to be challenged) amateur radio operators have developed pretty much the best ways of dealing with interference and robustness in transmission of data.
Today's ham tech is 2007 commercial tech.
AMD is shipping half the BOXED CPUs. These are the CPUs for the people who build their own computers. It doesn't take into account the people who buy preassembled computers (the VAST majority).
Trust me, Intel is still far and away the market leader in desktop x86 CPUs.
As a matter of fact, I'd bet that NASA was helping with development of things like wind power. Most of the research into systems like this rely on Computational Fluid Dynamics, a field that wouldn't be nearly as advanced and mature if it was not for the space program.
Thr phrase "VB Linux" is one of the most frightening things I have ever seen.
Sun has this nasty habit of somehow getting themselves stuck in a rut with a particular major version number. For example, Solaris started on version 2.x and got all the way up to 2.6 something like 10 years later. With version 2.7, they kinda just said 'fuck it, marketing can call it Solaris 7', and they did. But to this day, "uname -a" on a Solaris 9 box says "SunOS turing 5.9 Generic_112233-05 sun4u sparc". (SunOS 5.0 was Solaris 2.0. Don't think too hard about it;-) )
I guess they decided that they were never going to release Java 2 Version 2.0, so they decided to call it Java 5.
I know you were kidding, but a parser generator really can be written in a couple of hours with a logical programming language like Prolog.
I was thinking about this for a while, and had an interesting thought. So, MacOS (9 and X) runs on PowerMac hardware only, right? But, you can use Mac-on-Linux on Linux/PPC, any Linux/PPC. Not just Linux/PowerMac. That means that you can "run" MacOS on an RS/6000, the same computer that NT/PPC ran on. It's like VMWare. It's not emulation, it's virtualization.
Here's my question: Would it be possible to run NT/PPC on PowerMac hardware through a MOL like virtualization layer? I don't know how useful this would be, but it might be fun. (Actually, I can think of a couple of uses for it, like recompiling existing Win32/x86 apps to Win32/PPC and running them on the Mac, albeit in an NT virtual machine. It would, however, run at native CPU speed.)
Your main point that IE isn't the primary browser on the Mac is correct (pretty much nobody uses it anymore... It is, however, a LOT better than IE/Win32), however it is still there on 10.3, by default. It was on my PowerBook that shipped a couple of months ago, and I use it once in a while for the sites that still just don't go with Safari or Firefox.
At my college, Harvey Mudd (Claremont, CA. great school), there is 802.11 in every common area of campus. Yes, this includes exterior locations, lounges, things like that. There's ethernet to the dorm rooms, too. However, since a dorm room isn't a common area, wireless isn't supported here, and is spotty. I want to work in bed, in my chair, somewhere besides my desk. So, I set up an access point in my room using the ethernet connection. (they let us do this, we just have to tell them that we're doing it) Now, I have full signal strength anywhere near my room and am not chained to my desk.
This is probably what the University students here were after.
Yeah, I think the System Preferences, iPhoto and things like that actually are following HIG because they aren't document based. They never have more than their window, so if you don't need that window, you don't need the app.
This just flat isn't going to work until it syncs with a TiVo.
Apple seems the best company to be able to make one of these sell. If they sold a video iPod that would sync with a TiVo, it'd just sync the higest rated x gigs of unwatched video whenever the iPod went into the TiVo cradle. This would be when the sort of device works. It'd be wonderful for people in the northeast with a long train commute every day. Or places in Europe. Make it simple, have it work with a TiVo, then this will take off.
Not really. The PowerPC that the mac uses now has very little to do with the 68000 series chip that used to be in the mac. The PowerPC is a decendent of the IBM POWER chips found in their high end RISC servers and workstations at the time. The transition from the 68k to PPC was very transparent to the user, primarily because Apple did a damn good job with it, but it was a completely fresh start CPU wise.
Kodak really did try to drum up support for this. It was a semi-pro camera (I remember several pros actually drooling pretty hard over it when I had it. ) It was FlashPoint (the guys who made DigitaOS) that blew it. They didn't deliver the SDKs that we needed when we still cared. For all I know, they've since shipped them, but that DC260 just doesn't cut it anymore.