You can't find a weapons program you don't like, apparently (even the V22 Osprey, which keeps crashing?).
The fact is, the US weapons industry is very big business, and it stays in business not merely by filling orders for the US government, but by selling lots and lots of arms overseas.
This is one of the main reasons the budgets stay so high and that new systems continue to be pushed out to replace old ones -- the weapons makers want to sell the older weapons overseas, and so the US needs newer weapons to counteract the threat posed by these weapons.
It's a vicious cycle, requiring the continual replacement of systems which would be perfectly adequate for their intended uses, but for the fact that they've been sold to nations we don't fully trust (or which might become unstable, allowing the weapons to fall into un-trustworthy hands).
So we have weapons systems which really do have superiority to other things out there becoming outmoded because suddenly they aren't superior -- to themselves!
One solution for significantly reducing costs would be to disallow these massive weapons sales, thus extending the lifetimes of systems by decades, allowing for incremental improvements.
But this is a solution that will not be allowed, because the US military budget isn't really for the benefit of the people, but for the benefit of the military/industrial complex, which Eisenhower warned us all about in his famous speech.
Rather than just being gung-ho America-first, think about the economics at work here. It's all about economics, in the end.
What I'm referring to was that at least in early versions of the logging, you could have it log a message about the fact that it was logging a message... this obviously would kill everything real fast.
Also, logging was synchronous, so if you logged to the hard copy terminal things got rather slow, depending on how low a level of operations you decided to log. And if it ran out of paper, you were screwed.
First of all, the wing could have probably have been inspected using the Hubble Space Telescope.
That would need the right orbit, for the telescope to be capable of focusing on a close object and to be able to observe the shuttle without any bright objects also in the image.
Do you know this? I don't see why the Hubble couldn't have been trained on a location where the shuttle was going to appear and then take a picture quickly as it goes by.
Also, there are dozens of high-resolution spy sattelites in higher orbits than the shuttle, at least one of which should have been able to get a picture.
Secondly, even if that wasn't the case, the shuttle probably had enough fuel to match orbits with the International Space Station, where it could have been inspected by their crew memebers.
It didn't have enough fuel on board to get there.
Do you know that for a fact? If the orbit was so different, why was it so different? Was there a real scientific reason for such a different orbit? NASA has know for many years that there's between a 1 in 50 and a 1 in 100 chance of catastrophic failure of the shuttle. It would make sense to take advantage of the availablilty of the ISS as a safeguard, no?
If the damage had been found to be serious, the shuttle could have docked with the International Space Station
Columbia wasn't fitted with a docking module. No idea if they had preassure suits for all 7 people on board.
How many pressure suits are on the ISS? Several huh? Why couldn't they ferry them over and back, attaching the shuttle with a tether? There are air locks on both spacecraft. Sure there could be some damage to the ISS, but what's worse... damage or deaths?
And again, why wasn't it fitted with a docking module? If all shuttles were fitted with docking modules, then the ISS could help shuttles in need, and vice versa.
and the astronauts could likely have waited there for another shuttle to take them home.
Could be a long wait, without the ISS carrying provisions for an extra 7 people.
The ISS crew is scheduled to be there for MONTHS. They are also resupplied by Soyuz modules. Don't you think that another space craft could be launched within a month or so? I do.
Sorry, but it won't wash. Either NASA could have saved them, or they should have been using procedures which would have allowed the ISS to be of help in such a known possible situation.
From the perspective of a user in a mis-managed VMS environment, I can understand your sentiment, but it was your sysadmins who were at fault, not VMS.
The fact that VMS HAS options which allow extremely fine-grained selection of user privs is a positive thing about the OS. VMS also had all kinds of login security years (break-in detection and evasion) before other systems, and was designated "trusted" quite early on.
VMS could be mismanaged so that it would crash, if ALL logging options were enabled. But that doesn't make it bad for it to have had so many different logging options.
Diskquotas weren't even enabled by default when I was using VMS. You *could* enable them (and obviously your silly sysadmins both enabled them and put very low limits on you), but you never had to.
VMS is a very flexible tool, and tools can be made to do lots of things, some good, some bad.
By the way, even now there aren't that many systems with the availability and redundancy VMS clusters had in 1985 (automatic failover from one machine to another, separate shared disk controllers, etc. etc.).
Finally VAX/VMS virtual memory worked better than any other such system I've seen. You could actually let things page and they didn't slow down much, since the paging was so intelligent.
*sigh* anyway, that was all a long time ago. I haven't used VMS professionally since 1992 or so...
According to this article, they knew that a piece of insulation had hit the left wing on liftoff.
They claimed that there was no way the astronauts could inspect the wing, and nothing they could have done to save themselves if they had been able to inspect it and had found damage.
This seems to me to be false for several reasons.
First of all, the wing could have probably have been inspected using the Hubble Space Telescope.
Secondly, even if that wasn't the case, the shuttle probably had enough fuel to match orbits with the International Space Station, where it could have been inspected by their crew memebers.
If the damage had been found to be serious, the shuttle could have docked with the International Space Station, and the astronauts could likely have waited there for another shuttle to take them home, or a series of soyuz crafts to ferry them all back.
That NASA is making these claims of helplessness already doesn't seem to bode well for the investigation to come.
Amateurs blowing things up is cool and all but am I the only one who sees this student getting grants to build high-power railguns and thinks "future weapons designer"?
I don't think weapons are cool or fun, since their only intended use is to kill people and destroy things.
If this guy wants to keep working on the sort of projects he enjoys, he may very well end up building future WMD (weapons of mass destruction) for some military contractor.
I don't remember the model number, but I saw the new Samsung PalmOS phone at CES in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, and it is the one to wait for.
This thing is 4 oz, the same size as regular phones, it's a flip phone with a real phone keypad, and it has a separate dedicated graffiti area on the bottom half, along with the phone keypad. The top half of the flip is all screen. It's color, it's fast (instantaneous response) and it's big enough to be easy to read, without being bigger than a normal phone.
The fact that your particular place of work happens to have it figured out is no contradiction to the general case.
And you're talking local switching. In banking operations, you have remote hot standby in case your datacenter burns down or something else really bad happens (both COs you're connected to die at once, for instance).
With remote hot standby, switching and switching back is often (note the often) much more painful.
In case you still don't get it, note that switching implies that one of your datacenters is DOWN and you are now on a completely separate system with separate disk drives, communications links, etc. Switching back means that you have to bring everything back up, sync it, and fail back again.
Sure, it works. Is it fun? No. Is testing it and retesting it under every failure condition under a new OS port and processer architecture fun?
Trillions (yes you read that correctly) of dollars per day move around the world on VMS-based money transfer systems (before you question this, think again. I have managed some of these money transfer systems. Over $1 trillion per day moved in and out of ONE bank I worked at several years ago).
Trillions more are controlled internally by such systems. VMS systems also still power major mission-critical business processes at thousands of companies.
You don't just drop a user base like that and say "ok, go convert overnight to a new processer architecture". These companies have long-term plans and are some of the biggest customers for large systems. They have already spent millions of dollars and years of effort converting from VAX to Alpha, and they aren't going to be willing or able to suddenly switch to Itanium.
For those who said "just recompile", they are missing the point. It's not just the programs which need to work absolutely and perfectly, it's the OS, and VMS on Itanium doesn't even exist yet. And once it does, it has to be proven to work reliably. These systems have to have PERFECT uptime. Sure, they have hot standbys, etc. but switching over and back is typically a painful process. Remember: much of the code which runs the world is decades old.
If HP doesn't want to lose billions of dollars worth of business, they won't be pulling the rug out from their VMS/Alpha customers any time soon, and the cancelling of the EV8 could very well be their undoing in this market. Unless they are able to come up with an absolutely reliable VMS port for Itanium and rock solid porting tools, this user base will migrate to some other platform (at great expense and effort) and it may very well be something other than HP.
Whether deliberate or not (and signing an agreement like Sendo's, where your partner has an incentive to make you fail seems really ill-advised), outsourcing makes you vulnerable to these sort of problems.
If you do your own development, there's certainly a possibility that your project will fail, but then at least its your own fault and not something that someone did to you on purpose or because they just didn't care enough (or weren't incented enough) to make it work.
As a development manager (CTO, what have you), I've had to use this argument with various CEOs and boards who were all hot on the potential cost-savings of outsourcing vs. building your own team. It's very simply stated:
"Do you want to bet the entire business on these guys, forever?"
Thought of that way, people often (but not always) come to their senses.
This is not true of products that are generic, and can be replaced easily (and quickly) with something from another manufacturer if need be. But if it's the one thing you're relying on and will continue to rely on, watch out.
If no one can find prior art, this patent #5,253,275 looks pretty good. It seems that it covers not only streaming and buffered play, but things like Tivo and Replay TV.
On the other hand, I can't believe there's no prior art, since it was filed April 2, 1992.
Surely someone here on/. was involved with some kind of interactive, buffered TV project before then. Maybe the MIT Media Lab's Advanced Television Workshop?
C'mon... everyone... start digging and maybe we can find the prior art that's needed to invalidate this thing.
I don't have as much of a problem about my friends knowing where I am as I do about the government knowing where I am.
All this location data will be going right into Admiral Poindexter's meta-database, and you can bet that the fact that you attended that rally will figure into your government security profile...
This embedding patent should be denied on the grounds of obviousness. That being said, here's a more likely scenario:
- The patent is upheld. - Microsoft offers n billion $ for an exclusive license. - The money finally corrupts the patent holders and they grant the exclusive license. - Microsoft offers to license the patent "on reasonable terms" to anyone, thus not breaking the law. - The side effect of this is that no usable open-source browsers can be made any more. - Microsoft thus crushes the open source movement (at least at the desktop).
People who are saying "great!, let's use a stupid software patent to get Microsoft" are making an argument like the "good king" argument, which goes something like: "Yes, arbitrary power is bad, but there were good kings."
Sure, and they were followed by bad kings. The only answer is to get rid of the flawed institution, not hope for a good king.
OK, trying to find some references that prove this is not a new idea.
Here's what I've got so far:
---
Title: Abstracts of concepts of high speed ground transportation systems. Corp Author(s): TRW Systems Group. ; United States.; Office of High-Speed Ground Transportation. Publication: [Washington, D.C.? : TRW Systems Group], Year: 1967 Description: 1 v. (various pagings) : ill. 28 cm. Language: English Abstract: Includes Carveyor, Metro-Belt, Tex Train, Marco System, Starrcar, Urbmobile, Roller-Road, RRollway, Trans Drive, FOA Tubeflight, Gravity-Vacuum transportation, Tubeway, Airmobile, rolling sliding systems, tracked levitation systems, Metran, Urban transit systems.
SUBJECT(S) Descriptor: High speed ground transportation. Note(s): "Prepared under contract no. C-353-66 (Neg) 5 July 1967, for the Office of High Speed Ground Transportation, Department of Transportation."
---
Flat out for trains; ; The Boston Globe; ; ; Jul 01, 1991; ;
Flat out for trains
Can the Swiss lead the way? Maybe so, if they turn out to be the first to exploit emerging transportation technology to slash travel time between major urban centers in their mountainous country. They want to build a train system using magnetic levitation to allow them to achieve speeds of 300 m.p.h. between Geneva and Zurich on one leg and Basel and Bellinzona on the second.
The technology would be enhanced by the construction of tunnels that would be kept under partial vacuum to make passage of the trains easier. The sacrifice for riders: some of the most spectacular scenery on the tourist circuit. Passengers will get there zip-zip but miss plenty of Alpine views on the way. Can't have everything, it seems.
---
Title: Options for sustainable passenger transport: an assessment of policy choices Source: Transportation Planning and Technology 19, no.3-4 (1996) p. 221-233 Language: English Abstract: If the current trends in transport are not changed, a sustainable transport system is not feasible. In order to achieve such a state, new technologies may be an interesting option. In this paper, several success and failure factors for the introduction of new technologies are analyzed. These possibilities are identified in different areas, notably economic, spatial, institutional, social/psychological and technological fields. Within this context the following new options are discussed: the electric car, people movers, subterranean infrastructure, telematics, the high speed train, the high speed maglev train, shuttles in vacuum tunnels and alternative fuels. Finally, some policy choices, which may stimulate future technical developments, are discussed. It is concluded that an active government policy may stimulate the introduction of new technologies, which may make a substantial contribution to achieving a sustainable transport system
This patent is another ridiculous one. It's nothing new at all.
I can't find any reference to it online, but in the early 80s or late 70s NASA came out with a design for a trans-continental train... in a vacuum tube.
The train was to have (guess what?) two tubes, and would be driven by maglev (360 degree maglev -- on all sides of the train, keeping it centered in the tube). There was much discussion of what happened if the power went out, how it would come to a soft landing, etc.
The other idea in the design was that to save energy, most of the power used to accelerate one train would come from the power generated in decelerating the other.
The design document included the projected costs of construction ($100 billion or so, if memory serves me correctly), the speed (5000 MPH), and the projected ticket cost ($40 NYC to LA).
The train cars were designed with chairs which rotated, because half the trip would be acceleration, and half deceleration, so you'd face forwards for the first half and backwards for the second.
The trip was projected to take about 45 minutes.
I wish I could find it online, but I was very impressed with the design at the time, and remember most of the details.
Hey, has anyone read NASA's "Space Communities: A Design Study" from 1976? That's another not-well-remembered document. We're barely at stage 2 (out of 6 or so in the book) so far. The L5 space station NASA's just proposing is in there... these guys think long term (or some of 'em anyway).
There was and is a unix-based server that works like Exchange. It can use Outlook as a client, and can also use Java-based and Web-based clients, as well as other Unix mail clients.
It's pretty clear that whomever wrote that article has never run a really high-volume web site.
I've designed and implemented sites that actually handle millions of dynamic pageviews per day, and they look rather different from what these guys are proposing.
A typical configuration includes some or all of:
- Firewalls (at least two redundant) - Load balancers (again, at least two redundant) - Front-end caches (usually several) -- these cache entire pages or parts of pages (such as images) which are re-used within some period of time (the cache timeout period, which can vary by object) - Webservers (again, several) - these generate the dynamic pages using whatever page generation you're using -- JSP, PHP, etc. - Back-end caches (two or more)-- these are used to cache the results of database queries so you don't have to hit the database for every request. - Read-only database servers (two or more) -- this depends on the application, and would be used in lieu of the back end caches in certain applications. If you're serving lots of dynamic pages which mainly re-use the same content, having multiple, cheap read-only database servers which are updated periodically from a master can give much higher efficiency at lower cost. - One clustered back-end database server with RAID storage. Typically this would be a big Sun box running clustering/failover software -- all the database updates (as opposed to reads) go through this box.
And then:
- The entire setup duplicated in several geographic locations.
If you build -one- server and expect it to do everything, it's not going to be high-performance.
I don't think speed is so much the issue for Intel.
What they really want to do is to come out with a new architecture that no one can copy.
AMD is still making use of old licensing deals with Intel that go back to the 80s and basically allow them to use x86 microcode etc.
If Intel can get Itanium adopted, AMD is SOL... Itaniam will be a bitch to reverse engineer, and is not covered under any of those old pesky licensing deals.
Sure, Intel is trying to advance the architecture, but the reason they're willing to spend whatever it takes to get Itanium accepted is because it removes all direct competition.
As usual, the business world is more cynically motivated than it seems...
Slashdot Mirror
You can't find a weapons program you don't like, apparently (even the V22 Osprey, which keeps crashing?).
The fact is, the US weapons industry is very big business, and it stays in business not merely by filling orders for the US government, but by selling lots and lots of arms overseas.
This is one of the main reasons the budgets stay so high and that new systems continue to be pushed out to replace old ones -- the weapons makers want to sell the older weapons overseas, and so the US needs newer weapons to counteract the threat posed by these weapons.
It's a vicious cycle, requiring the continual replacement of systems which would be perfectly adequate for their intended uses, but for the fact that they've been sold to nations we don't fully trust (or which might become unstable, allowing the weapons to fall into un-trustworthy hands).
So we have weapons systems which really do have superiority to other things out there becoming outmoded because suddenly they aren't superior -- to themselves!
One solution for significantly reducing costs would be to disallow these massive weapons sales, thus extending the lifetimes of systems by decades, allowing for incremental improvements.
But this is a solution that will not be allowed, because the US military budget isn't really for the benefit of the people, but for the benefit of the military/industrial complex, which Eisenhower warned us all about in his famous speech.
Rather than just being gung-ho America-first, think about the economics at work here. It's all about economics, in the end.
What I'm referring to was that at least in early versions of the logging, you could have it log a message about the fact that it was logging a message... this obviously would kill everything real fast.
Also, logging was synchronous, so if you logged to the hard copy terminal things got rather slow, depending on how low a level of operations you decided to log. And if it ran out of paper, you were screwed.
First of all, the wing could have probably have been inspected using the Hubble Space Telescope.
That would need the right orbit, for the telescope to be capable of focusing on a close object and to be able to observe the shuttle without any bright objects also in the image.
Do you know this? I don't see why the Hubble couldn't have been trained on a location where the shuttle was going to appear and then take a picture quickly as it goes by.
Also, there are dozens of high-resolution spy sattelites in higher orbits than the shuttle, at least one of which should have been able to get a picture.
Secondly, even if that wasn't the case, the shuttle probably had enough fuel to match orbits with the International Space Station, where it could have been inspected by their crew memebers.
It didn't have enough fuel on board to get there.
Do you know that for a fact? If the orbit was so different, why was it so different? Was there a real scientific reason for such a different orbit? NASA has know for many years that there's between a 1 in 50 and a 1 in 100 chance of catastrophic failure of the shuttle. It would make sense to take advantage of the availablilty of the ISS as a safeguard, no?
If the damage had been found to be serious, the shuttle could have docked with the International Space Station
Columbia wasn't fitted with a docking module. No idea if they had preassure suits for all 7 people on board.
How many pressure suits are on the ISS? Several huh? Why couldn't they ferry them over and back, attaching the shuttle with a tether? There are air locks on both spacecraft. Sure there could be some damage to the ISS, but what's worse... damage or deaths?
And again, why wasn't it fitted with a docking module? If all shuttles were fitted with docking modules, then the ISS could help shuttles in need, and vice versa.
and the astronauts could likely have waited there for another shuttle to take them home.
Could be a long wait, without the ISS carrying provisions for an extra 7 people.
The ISS crew is scheduled to be there for MONTHS. They are also resupplied by Soyuz modules. Don't you think that another space craft could be launched within a month or so? I do.
Sorry, but it won't wash. Either NASA could have saved them, or they should have been using procedures which would have allowed the ISS to be of help in such a known possible situation.
From the perspective of a user in a mis-managed VMS environment, I can understand your sentiment, but it was your sysadmins who were at fault, not VMS.
The fact that VMS HAS options which allow extremely fine-grained selection of user privs is a positive thing about the OS. VMS also had all kinds of login security years (break-in detection and evasion) before other systems, and was designated "trusted" quite early on.
VMS could be mismanaged so that it would crash, if ALL logging options were enabled. But that doesn't make it bad for it to have had so many different logging options.
Diskquotas weren't even enabled by default when I was using VMS. You *could* enable them (and obviously your silly sysadmins both enabled them and put very low limits on you), but you never had to.
VMS is a very flexible tool, and tools can be made to do lots of things, some good, some bad.
By the way, even now there aren't that many systems with the availability and redundancy VMS clusters had in 1985 (automatic failover from one machine to another, separate shared disk controllers, etc. etc.).
Finally VAX/VMS virtual memory worked better than any other such system I've seen. You could actually let things page and they didn't slow down much, since the paging was so intelligent.
*sigh* anyway, that was all a long time ago. I haven't used VMS professionally since 1992 or so...
It seems to me that NASA IS to blame for this.
According to this article, they knew that a piece of insulation had hit the left wing on liftoff.
They claimed that there was no way the astronauts could inspect the wing, and nothing they could have done to save themselves if they had been able to inspect it and had found damage.
This seems to me to be false for several reasons.
First of all, the wing could have probably have been inspected using the Hubble Space Telescope.
Secondly, even if that wasn't the case, the shuttle probably had enough fuel to match orbits with the International Space Station, where it could have been inspected by their crew memebers.
If the damage had been found to be serious, the shuttle could have docked with the International Space Station, and the astronauts could likely have waited there for another shuttle to take them home, or a series of soyuz crafts to ferry them all back.
That NASA is making these claims of helplessness already doesn't seem to bode well for the investigation to come.
Amateurs blowing things up is cool and all but am I the only one who sees this student getting grants to build high-power railguns and thinks "future weapons designer"?
I don't think weapons are cool or fun, since their only intended use is to kill people and destroy things.
If this guy wants to keep working on the sort of projects he enjoys, he may very well end up building future WMD (weapons of mass destruction) for some military contractor.
Not cool.
I don't remember the model number, but I saw the new Samsung PalmOS phone at CES in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, and it is the one to wait for.
This thing is 4 oz, the same size as regular phones, it's a flip phone with a real phone keypad, and it has a separate dedicated graffiti area on the bottom half, along with the phone keypad. The top half of the flip is all screen. It's color, it's fast (instantaneous response) and it's big enough to be easy to read, without being bigger than a normal phone.
Supposedly out in March.
I said typically.
The fact that your particular place of work happens to have it figured out is no contradiction to the general case.
And you're talking local switching. In banking operations, you have remote hot standby in case your datacenter burns down or something else really bad happens (both COs you're connected to die at once, for instance).
With remote hot standby, switching and switching back is often (note the often) much more painful.
In case you still don't get it, note that switching implies that one of your datacenters is DOWN and you are now on a completely separate system with separate disk drives, communications links, etc. Switching back means that you have to bring everything back up, sync it, and fail back again.
Sure, it works. Is it fun? No. Is testing it and retesting it under every failure condition under a new OS port and processer architecture fun?
Um no.
Trillions (yes you read that correctly) of dollars per day move around the world on VMS-based money transfer systems (before you question this, think again. I have managed some of these money transfer systems. Over $1 trillion per day moved in and out of ONE bank I worked at several years ago).
Trillions more are controlled internally by such systems. VMS systems also still power major mission-critical business processes at thousands of companies.
You don't just drop a user base like that and say "ok, go convert overnight to a new processer architecture". These companies have long-term plans and are some of the biggest customers for large systems. They have already spent millions of dollars and years of effort converting from VAX to Alpha, and they aren't going to be willing or able to suddenly switch to Itanium.
For those who said "just recompile", they are missing the point. It's not just the programs which need to work absolutely and perfectly, it's the OS, and VMS on Itanium doesn't even exist yet. And once it does, it has to be proven to work reliably. These systems have to have PERFECT uptime. Sure, they have hot standbys, etc. but switching over and back is typically a painful process. Remember: much of the code which runs the world is decades old.
If HP doesn't want to lose billions of dollars worth of business, they won't be pulling the rug out from their VMS/Alpha customers any time soon, and the cancelling of the EV8 could very well be their undoing in this market. Unless they are able to come up with an absolutely reliable VMS port for Itanium and rock solid porting tools, this user base will migrate to some other platform (at great expense and effort) and it may very well be something other than HP.
Whether deliberate or not (and signing an agreement like Sendo's, where your partner has an incentive to make you fail seems really ill-advised), outsourcing makes you vulnerable to these sort of problems.
If you do your own development, there's certainly a possibility that your project will fail, but then at least its your own fault and not something that someone did to you on purpose or because they just didn't care enough (or weren't incented enough) to make it work.
As a development manager (CTO, what have you), I've had to use this argument with various CEOs and boards who were all hot on the potential cost-savings of outsourcing vs. building your own team. It's very simply stated:
"Do you want to bet the entire business on these guys, forever?"
Thought of that way, people often (but not always) come to their senses.
This is not true of products that are generic, and can be replaced easily (and quickly) with something from another manufacturer if need be. But if it's the one thing you're relying on and will continue to rely on, watch out.
If no one can find prior art, this patent #5,253,275 looks pretty good. It seems that it covers not only streaming and buffered play, but things like Tivo and Replay TV.
/. was involved with some kind of interactive, buffered TV project before then. Maybe the MIT Media Lab's Advanced Television Workshop?
On the other hand, I can't believe there's no prior art, since it was filed April 2, 1992.
Surely someone here on
C'mon... everyone... start digging and maybe we can find the prior art that's needed to invalidate this thing.
Not heavy perfume, but you could probably fool it with sweat from several individuals, applied to your skin or worn in a slow-release device.
You could also synthesize a bunch of other substances (MHC scents, etc.) and wear them to overpower your own.
-- If the government outlaws perfume, only terrorists will smell good --
Countries are not allowed into the EU unless they eliminate the death penalty.
This is why Turkey recently eliminated theirs... to help them qualify for entry.
I don't have as much of a problem about my friends knowing where I am as I do about the government knowing where I am.
All this location data will be going right into Admiral Poindexter's meta-database, and you can bet that the fact that you attended that rally will figure into your government security profile...
You can read it here.
If you're doing 3d work for a home and don't need all the technical specs for the industry I'd suggest trying http://www.sketchup.com/
It's amazingly simple and quick to use.
Animations between views (and cross sections)
are simple as well.
This embedding patent should be denied on the grounds of obviousness. That being said, here's a more likely scenario:
- The patent is upheld.
- Microsoft offers n billion $ for an exclusive license.
- The money finally corrupts the patent holders and they grant the exclusive license.
- Microsoft offers to license the patent "on reasonable terms" to anyone, thus not breaking the law.
- The side effect of this is that no usable open-source browsers can be made any more.
- Microsoft thus crushes the open source movement (at least at the desktop).
People who are saying "great!, let's use a stupid software patent to get Microsoft" are making an argument like the "good king" argument, which goes something like: "Yes, arbitrary power is bad, but there were good kings."
Sure, and they were followed by bad kings. The only answer is to get rid of the flawed institution, not hope for a good king.
OK, trying to find some references that prove this is not a new idea.
Here's what I've got so far:
---
Title: Abstracts of concepts of high speed ground transportation systems.
Corp Author(s): TRW Systems Group. ; United States.; Office of High-Speed Ground Transportation.
Publication: [Washington, D.C.? : TRW Systems Group],
Year: 1967
Description: 1 v. (various pagings) : ill. 28 cm.
Language: English
Abstract: Includes Carveyor, Metro-Belt, Tex Train, Marco System, Starrcar, Urbmobile, Roller-Road, RRollway, Trans Drive, FOA Tubeflight, Gravity-Vacuum transportation, Tubeway, Airmobile, rolling sliding systems, tracked levitation systems, Metran, Urban transit systems.
SUBJECT(S)
Descriptor: High speed ground transportation.
Note(s): "Prepared under contract no. C-353-66 (Neg) 5 July 1967, for the Office of High Speed Ground Transportation, Department of Transportation."
---
Flat out for trains; ; The Boston Globe; ; ; Jul 01, 1991; ;
Flat out for trains
Can the Swiss lead the way? Maybe so, if they turn out to be the first to exploit emerging transportation technology to slash travel time between major urban centers in their mountainous country. They want to build a train system using magnetic levitation to allow them to achieve speeds of 300 m.p.h. between Geneva and Zurich on one leg and Basel and Bellinzona on the second.
The technology would be enhanced by the construction of tunnels that would be kept under partial vacuum to make passage of the trains easier.
The sacrifice for riders: some of the most spectacular scenery on the tourist circuit. Passengers will get there zip-zip but miss plenty of Alpine views on the way. Can't have everything, it seems.
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Title: Options for sustainable passenger transport: an assessment of policy choices
Source: Transportation Planning and Technology 19, no.3-4 (1996) p. 221-233
Language: English
Abstract: If the current trends in transport are not changed, a sustainable transport system is not feasible. In order to achieve such a state, new technologies may be an interesting option. In this paper, several success and failure factors for the introduction of new technologies are analyzed. These possibilities are identified in different areas, notably economic, spatial, institutional, social/psychological and technological fields. Within this context the following new options are discussed: the electric car, people movers, subterranean infrastructure, telematics, the high speed train, the high speed maglev train, shuttles in vacuum tunnels and alternative fuels. Finally, some policy choices, which may stimulate future technical developments, are discussed. It is concluded that an active government policy may stimulate the introduction of new technologies, which may make a substantial contribution to achieving a sustainable transport system
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This patent is another ridiculous one. It's nothing new at all.
I can't find any reference to it online, but in the early 80s or late 70s NASA came out with a design for a trans-continental train... in a vacuum tube.
The train was to have (guess what?) two tubes, and would be driven by maglev (360 degree maglev -- on all sides of the train, keeping it centered in the tube). There was much discussion of what happened if the power went out, how it would come to a soft landing, etc.
The other idea in the design was that to save energy, most of the power used to accelerate one train would come from the power generated in decelerating the other.
The design document included the projected costs of construction ($100 billion or so, if memory serves me correctly), the speed (5000 MPH), and the projected ticket cost ($40 NYC to LA).
The train cars were designed with chairs which rotated, because half the trip would be acceleration, and half deceleration, so you'd face forwards for the first half and backwards for the second.
The trip was projected to take about 45 minutes.
I wish I could find it online, but I was very impressed with the design at the time, and remember most of the details.
Hey, has anyone read NASA's "Space Communities: A Design Study" from 1976? That's another not-well-remembered document. We're barely at stage 2 (out of 6 or so in the book) so far. The L5 space station NASA's just proposing is in there... these guys think long term (or some of 'em anyway).
That's got to be a mock-up, since their press release of last May said they just completed the first working display, and it was 240x160.
The way the display works, I think the light would have to be reflective, not coming from the back. It appears to use the property of Iridescence.
The lighting would have to come from the side, and would reflect off the display.
One major advantage of this tech is that it should look better as the light gets brighter!
Look here.
Not for general sale yet, but you might convince them to let you have an Evaluation unit...
There was and is a unix-based server that works like Exchange. It can use Outlook as a client, and can also use Java-based and Web-based clients, as well as other Unix mail clients.
HP developed it and used to sell it as Openmail, but they don't sell it any more.
Now it's been picked up by Samsung. Here's the FAQ.
It's pretty clear that whomever wrote that article has never run a really high-volume web site.
I've designed and implemented sites that actually handle millions of dynamic pageviews per day, and they look rather different from what these guys are proposing.
A typical configuration includes some or all of:
- Firewalls (at least two redundant)
- Load balancers (again, at least two redundant)
- Front-end caches (usually several) -- these cache entire pages or parts of pages (such as images) which are re-used within some period of time (the cache timeout period, which can vary by object)
- Webservers (again, several) - these generate the dynamic pages using whatever page generation you're using -- JSP, PHP, etc.
- Back-end caches (two or more)-- these are used to cache the results of database queries so you don't have to hit the database for every request.
- Read-only database servers (two or more) -- this depends on the application, and would be used in lieu of the back end caches in certain applications. If you're serving lots of dynamic pages which mainly re-use the same content, having multiple, cheap read-only database servers which are updated periodically from a master can give much higher efficiency at lower cost.
- One clustered back-end database server with RAID storage. Typically this would be a big Sun box running clustering/failover software -- all the database updates (as opposed to reads) go through this box.
And then:
- The entire setup duplicated in several geographic locations.
If you build -one- server and expect it to do everything, it's not going to be high-performance.
I don't think speed is so much the issue for Intel.
What they really want to do is to come out with a new architecture that no one can copy.
AMD is still making use of old licensing deals with Intel that go back to the 80s and basically allow them to use x86 microcode etc.
If Intel can get Itanium adopted, AMD is SOL... Itaniam will be a bitch to reverse engineer, and is not covered under any of those old pesky licensing deals.
Sure, Intel is trying to advance the architecture, but the reason they're willing to spend whatever it takes to get Itanium accepted is because it removes all direct competition.
As usual, the business world is more cynically motivated than it seems...