It took me a moment to decode what you were saying. So that other people don't have to, allow me to restate.
He's saying that the copper in a penny is worth 1.4 cents. i.e. A 40% gross profit for each coin. You still have to pay for the cost of heating the metal, however, so your margins would be signficantly reduced.
I see you don't anticipate mankind's future in space, where wired solutions would be slower (to deploy at least), more expensive (a wire cable to Mars?-not likeley), worse(perhaps you imagine asteroid mining colonies with telephone poles sticking out of them?).
Actually, you'll again have the same type of situation. As soon as a local area has been settled, the infrastructure will slowly move from wireless to wired in order to accomidate higher transmission rates as well as free up the local wireless bandwidth.
I think com lasers are definately the way to go,
Lasers are another form of fixed installation, a bit like wired. They'll be great for some long distance interlinks, but they probably won't replace wired on a local level.
plus they could double as weapons in a pinch.
I'm sure you're modifying your laser pointer as we speak.
Wired still is, and always will be, faster, cheaper, and better than wireless communications. The problem with wireless is that the bands are limited. If you keep adding transmitters, everyone's signal quality will drop, eventually to the point of uselessness. On top of that, wireless has to account for a lot of signal noise that wired does not. This allows wired signals to run at much higher data rates than wireless.
The reason why developing countries are starting with wireless is because:
1. They don't have much of a pre-existing wireless setup to disrupt. 2. It's cheaper than building a wired infrastructure.
As these countries develop, I think you'll see them go from wireless to wired for much of their high-speed communications.
So anyone know any good asteroids that are rich in copper?;-)
More realistically, I imagine that we'll move to other materials. Data lines don't need to use copper, but they do so because it's common and inexpensive. If the price of copper goes up, you might see fiber optics come down in price.
Same with power transmission lines. There's nothing stopping them from using Aluminum if copper becomes too expensive.
My guess, however, is that more emphasis will be placed on recycling copper. The price will rise some, pushing out the uses where it isn't needed. The remaining uses will continue to use copper supplied heavily by the recycling centers.
Users weren't interested in using the PCjr as a gaming machine. (Technically, they just weren't interested in the PCjr, but I digress.) IBM targetted the small-business and home office markets with their "Personal Computer". As a result, the key software was BASIC (for writing your own business software) and various business apps for calendaring, accounting, and reporting. Remember, we're talking about a day when calculators were expensive. The ability to write a program in BASIC that could do all your computations, double-check them, then print out the equivalent of a paper tape automatically, was a technology that was worth a lot of money. And unlike a paper-tape calculator, you could store the data on a thin, easy-to-file floppy disk as opposed to keeping rolls and rolls of paper tape.
What people need to know is what part of the computer does what type of job and how to at least say where the problem is.
No, what they need is a machine that's reliable so that if something goes REALLY wrong, they don't feel stupid about calling a computer technician or taking it to a repair desk to fix it.
e.g.:
My Computer is Broken! When When MS Word fails to open.
MS Word shouldn't be so darn fickle. There are hundreds of ways to break it, that will easily put a user out of commission. My favorite? When Windows corrupts the preferences and decides that the Word window should now be located at +100000 by +100000 pixels. (Thank God Microsoft finally fixed that one.)
Windows Sucks! When the system wont Boot because the computer hardware failed. The Internet Is Down! When Windows somehow lost all its drives and fails boot.
Users are used to Windows failing. Ergo, the computer must not boot because of Windows. If faults were rare, the computer would go to a repair center and be fixed up quickly and cheaply.
My Computer is slow, I need a faster one! When there are 1000s of spyware apps running
Such programs need to be properly dealt with. Under OS X it can be very hard to install spyware. The primary method of "hiding" it requires sudo permissions. While the user can be tricked into giving up his password, it's much more difficult and bound to be far less legal.
The secondary method would involve installing a program that the user can ALWAYS see. And if they can see it, they can kill it. Ergo, not too much spyware on Macs at the moment. (We'll see if spyware manufacturers figure out ways around this. It would be interesting to see Apple's response.)
People need to understand that computers are magical boxes that run on white smoke and fairy dust.
Reminds me of that BOFH issue where the BOFH got a user to fry his power supply. "See that puff of smoke? Your computer doesn't work any more because you let the magic smoke escape!" Priceless.
Consistently, since even the early 486 and Pentium days, AMD (and in fact also Cyrix) CPUs routinely beat Intel CPUs running at somewhat higher clock rates.
Too far back in history, chief. In the 486 days, the AMD and Cyrixes were nothing more than a "cheap" upgrade for a 386. They simply didn't compete. Consumers were thus able to somewhat trust the MHz rating of Intel chips as a general performance indicator.
When the Pentium era arrived, AMD was still not a competitor, but they did manage to produce chips that were "good enough" to be considered cheap alternatives to the Intel processors. As a result, the PC industry did start producing AMD-based machines for their "low cost" product lines.
When the Athlon and PIII came to market, however, is when things got interesting. For the first time, AMD managed to put out an extremely capable chip in comparison to Intel's offerings. But far more interesting was that AMD started ramping their chips to exceptionally high MHz levels to pass up Intel's chips. This practice gave the AMD chips a reputation for high performance, but extreme heat levels and lower reliability. This left Intel with the server market as their chips proved more reliable over the long haul, and performed just as well in most non-gaming situations.
Long story short, Intel and AMD traded various blows in performance, each one gaining a slight lead for a short time only to be quickly shown up by their competitor. AMD, however, managed to keep the MHz trophy the entire time.
Intel got the bright idea to beat AMD at its own game and thus produced the Pentium IV chip. Now the PIV isn't a very good chip, but it can be ramped up in MHz in ways that AMD's Athlons couldn't. AMD struggled for awhile, but quickly realized that they could no longer win the MHz trophy. So they came up with a Jedi Marketing Trick to make consumers think that AMD's chips were running at the same clock levels. That trick was to assign an arbitrarily created "speed rating" that placed the direct competitors to Intel's chips right next to the Intel MHz rating. That way reviewers would pick up the slower AMD chip and compare it with the Intel chip, rather than look at the real MHz.
AMD got a lot of bad press for the decision, but it did eventually pay off. Consumers accepted the PR rating as the "real speed" of the chip, and Intel again started losing market share. AMD finally ripped the market away from Intel with their AMD64 platform, which proved to be much more popular with consumers than Intel's own Itanium line.
So to summarize, AMD started competing with Intel. Knowing that Intel customers used MHz to judge performance, they ramped up their chips to extreme levels. Intel responded with their PIV Northwood core and took the MHz trophy back. AMD got smart and skewed the market by printing a number on the box that wasn't actually a MHz rating, while convincing many consumers that it was.
AMD set about dispelling the "myth of the megahertz", but they did it in a reasonable fashion.
AMD set about misleading the public based on the "myth of the megahertz" that they helped create. Whether you find it "reasonable" or not is irrelevant. It's still a deceptive practice used to combat another deceptive practice that was a response to the original deceptive practice that AMD started.
That being said, I appreciate the AMD64 performance lead quite a bit. However, I can accept the bad with good without a need to rationalize their marketing department. (Is such a thing possible, anyway? I thought marketing departments were inherently irrational?;-))
Hrumph. You young whipper-snappers don't know anything. Back in my day, the Apple Macintosh was referred to as a "home computer" or (more technically) a "microcommputer". The IBM "Personal Computer" was nothing more than an invention of IBM's marketing department. And now everyone seems to think that "Personal Computer" is a better definition than "microcomputer" just because IBM says so. Would one of you young'uns care to explain to me exactly how my rack mounted servers are "Personel Computers"? What's so "Personal" about a computer that serves hundreds to thousands of users each day? Huh? Huh? Answer me that, future-boy!
EvilTwinSkippy is correct. AMD is practicing just as much deception with this scheme as the rest of the industy. I'd remind you that it was AMD who used started the MHz war by consistently clocking their CPUs higher than Intel's. Intel responded with the Pentium IV which was able to clock higher than the AMD chips even if the performance wasn't better. AMD responded with their "speed rating system" which is intended to trick consumers into believing that they are getting a faster clock rate than they are actually getting.
For example, an Athlon XP-M 2400+ is clocked at 1800 MHz, not 2400 as one would expect. The AMD Athlon XP-M 3000+ is clocked at 2200 MHz rather than 3000 MHz. Even more deceivingly, there is another chip called Athlon XP-M 3000+ ("Dublin") which is only clocked at 1600 MHz! How am I, as a consumer, supposed to sort all this nonsense out?
So you can keep your comments about "conservative" ratings. The industry is all about deceptive practices, and (most likely) always will be. Learn to deal with it.
You've really just shown your bias haven't you? Absolutely 100% accurate, oh, unless they're not accurate.
I think you've missed his point. This is a common industry practice used for just about every piece of hardware and software on the market. To single Steve Jobs out for this practice rather than accepting it as the "norm" shows a distinct anti-Mac bias.
Steve Jobs may not have been lying, but he was most certainly being deliberately deceitful.
It's hard to be deceitful when it comes to something as nebulous as benchmarks. Every benchmark you run will tell a different story. The result is that you can pull a variety of different conclusions from the benchmarks depending on how you spin it. Given that Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, we can expect that he will spin the benchmarks positively. On the flip-side, we can expect that the Mac haters will spin the benchmarks negatively. The ones to really listen to are the moderates who tell us whether we're generally being delivered what we're promised or not.
Why is there all this talk about running windows on it? Honestly, it's like buying a new Porsche and ripping out the engine and putting a Dodge Neon engine in it.
Indeed. I'm personally waiting for WINE to be ported to the Mactel platform. That should provide pretty much everything people want, as well as provide an easy migration path for video game producers. Or in other words:
1. Compile game against WINELIB 2. Release game for Macintosh 3. Profit!!!
IIRC some of the solid core nuclear thermal rocket designs were supposed to have good enough thrust to weight ratios to escape Earth's gravity under their own power (e.g. DUMBO).
Is this the report you're thinking of? DUMBO was indeed a paper design intended to show that the engines could be lighter and more powerful. Even so, I don't think the design was ever sufficient to reach orbit. Project Timberwind continued the work for the StarWars project and had a thrust to weight of 30:1. In comparison, the Space Shuttle Main Engines have a 73:1 thrust ratio and they still need assistance from the higher thrust SRBs. (The SRBs provide 71.4% of the Space Shuttle's thrust during liftoff, each providing 3,300,000 lbf vs. the 400,000 lbf each SSME generates.)
The only reliable way to overcome the thrust-to-weight problems that plague the NTR engines is to run the reactor so hot it melts the uranium fuel. As you can imagine, anything that can melt Uranium can melt most materials we have available. The solution to this problem is the Gas Core Nuclear Rocket which relies on the "nuclear lightbulb" concept to keep the reactor gasses from interacting with the walls of the engine. I've spoken with a former NASA Nuclear Propulsion engineer on the issue, however, and he's very concerned about whether the concept is feasible or not. It seems that there's a lot of research that still needs to be done on the subject. It's a wonderful dream, however.:-)
Besides those, you have nuclear pulse propulsion (e.g. Orion), which most definitively would have a good enough thrust to weight ratio.
I do believe we were talking about NTR engines, but Orion can certainly attain orbit. The only problem (which is also one of the reasons why the Orion was never built) is that the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 made it illegal to launch an Orion from inside the atmosphere. This relegates it to being a space-only engine, and/or a useful craft for Moon or Mars launches.
The only real problem with the Apollo spacecraft is that it only has life support for just a couple of weeks at best.... just enough time to go to the Moon, plant the flag, and return. Shuttle astronauts in comparison are riding around in an orbital multi-deck RV with cable and internet access by comparison to the austerity the Apollo astronauts had to live with.
Isn't that amazingly frustrating? The Endeavour has been outfitted with extended mission life support, giving it an operational period of a month or better. And yet the damn thing is too heavy to fly to the moon even if you attached a booster pod! (I'm slightly exaggerating, but 15 Delta II flights to get enough fuel up there just isn't in the cards.) All of which makes the Shuttle the most useless piece of amazing engineering ever developed.
If we wanted to use the Space Shuttle for something useful, we'd stop flying cargo and convert the bay into a passenger area. NASA should be able to move ~60 people each flight.
Mmm. Both of those seem great on paper, but I can't help but question how practical they really are. The space elevator would be an absolute revolution if it was successful, but my fear is that everyone is just a little too optimistic about the carbon nanotube technology developing fast enough. We've barely managed to spin an inch or two and we're already talking about spinning hundreds of kilometers in a single strand? I'm just not so sure.
Electromagnetic catapulting is a really great idea, but that also suffers from a severe flaw: The atmosphere. Rockets are usually high in the atmosphere by the time they hit hypersonic velocities. To launch a craft from the earth to orbit using only a magnetic catapult, it would have to be travelling over at Mach 30 in dense atmosphere! Cargo maybe, but humans are a lot trickier. Using the catapult as a first stage might work, but there are still a lot of issues to resolve.
For now I think that LHOx is still the best launch solution. Reusable craft and round the clock launching is what could bring the prices down to reasonable levels. Once we have that, the market will start pushing new launch technologies. We'll see if maybe they can get those Gas Core Nuclear Rockets working.;-)
That's incorrect. The thrust to weight ratios on the Nuclear Thermal Rockets (NERVA to be precise) just weren't good enough for a ground launch. The idea was to use the F-1 engine stage to get the sucker off the ground, then use the NTR as the last stage. The NTR program was cancelled after the 3 stage Saturn V (with J-2 engines in the upper stages) was successfully tested.
Since the NERVA program, the NTR concept has been pulled off the shelf several times. The latest engines tend to be dual mode engines that allow them to act like slightly higher performance LHOx engines with high thrust in the atmosphere and ultra-high performance engines with low thrust outside of the atmosphere. Even then, the engines don't have a great enough thrust-to-weight ratio to get into orbit themselves. They'd need to be supplemented by greater thrust to weight engines such as kerosine powered or solid rocket boosters.
Google will continue to roll out new products and services as it builds out its infrastructure for a huge push in 2007. They'll need money, of course, so I predict a supplemental stock offering timed with a 20-to-1 stock split.
I already know this one is wrong. Page believes in keeping the stock priced out of the range of the average investor as a way of preventing the company from becoming too focused on the individual quarterly returns. They're not splitting, plain and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's Axis, but they're kind of hard to deal with...
:-|
;-)
Very funny.
Do you know that I just spent five minutes trying to look up an asteriod named Axis? *grumble* *grumble*
GP: Same with power transmission lines. There's nothing stopping them from using Aluminum if copper becomes too expensive.
P: What about aluminum?
Me: Scratches head. *shrug*
It took me a moment to decode what you were saying. So that other people don't have to, allow me to restate.
He's saying that the copper in a penny is worth 1.4 cents. i.e. A 40% gross profit for each coin. You still have to pay for the cost of heating the metal, however, so your margins would be signficantly reduced.
I see you don't anticipate mankind's future in space, where wired solutions would be slower (to deploy at least), more expensive (a wire cable to Mars?-not likeley), worse(perhaps you imagine asteroid mining colonies with telephone poles sticking out of them?).
Actually, you'll again have the same type of situation. As soon as a local area has been settled, the infrastructure will slowly move from wireless to wired in order to accomidate higher transmission rates as well as free up the local wireless bandwidth.
I think com lasers are definately the way to go,
Lasers are another form of fixed installation, a bit like wired. They'll be great for some long distance interlinks, but they probably won't replace wired on a local level.
plus they could double as weapons in a pinch.
I'm sure you're modifying your laser pointer as we speak.
Is it possible for a one cent piece to be worth more than one cent?
A penny is a penny is a penny. Unless you melt it. Then how much is it worth?
Wired still is, and always will be, faster, cheaper, and better than wireless communications. The problem with wireless is that the bands are limited. If you keep adding transmitters, everyone's signal quality will drop, eventually to the point of uselessness. On top of that, wireless has to account for a lot of signal noise that wired does not. This allows wired signals to run at much higher data rates than wireless.
The reason why developing countries are starting with wireless is because:
1. They don't have much of a pre-existing wireless setup to disrupt.
2. It's cheaper than building a wired infrastructure.
As these countries develop, I think you'll see them go from wireless to wired for much of their high-speed communications.
Hilarious! Mod parent up. :-)
So anyone know any good asteroids that are rich in copper? ;-)
More realistically, I imagine that we'll move to other materials. Data lines don't need to use copper, but they do so because it's common and inexpensive. If the price of copper goes up, you might see fiber optics come down in price.
Same with power transmission lines. There's nothing stopping them from using Aluminum if copper becomes too expensive.
My guess, however, is that more emphasis will be placed on recycling copper. The price will rise some, pushing out the uses where it isn't needed. The remaining uses will continue to use copper supplied heavily by the recycling centers.
Last I heard, Microsoft told him that nosmoke.exe is incompatible with his power supply and that he needed to get a new one.
Users weren't interested in using the PCjr as a gaming machine. (Technically, they just weren't interested in the PCjr, but I digress.) IBM targetted the small-business and home office markets with their "Personal Computer". As a result, the key software was BASIC (for writing your own business software) and various business apps for calendaring, accounting, and reporting. Remember, we're talking about a day when calculators were expensive. The ability to write a program in BASIC that could do all your computations, double-check them, then print out the equivalent of a paper tape automatically, was a technology that was worth a lot of money. And unlike a paper-tape calculator, you could store the data on a thin, easy-to-file floppy disk as opposed to keeping rolls and rolls of paper tape.
What people need to know is what part of the computer does what type of job and how to at least say where the problem is.
No, what they need is a machine that's reliable so that if something goes REALLY wrong, they don't feel stupid about calling a computer technician or taking it to a repair desk to fix it.
e.g.:
My Computer is Broken! When When MS Word fails to open.
MS Word shouldn't be so darn fickle. There are hundreds of ways to break it, that will easily put a user out of commission. My favorite? When Windows corrupts the preferences and decides that the Word window should now be located at +100000 by +100000 pixels. (Thank God Microsoft finally fixed that one.)
Windows Sucks! When the system wont Boot because the computer hardware failed.
The Internet Is Down! When Windows somehow lost all its drives and fails boot.
Users are used to Windows failing. Ergo, the computer must not boot because of Windows. If faults were rare, the computer would go to a repair center and be fixed up quickly and cheaply.
My Computer is slow, I need a faster one! When there are 1000s of spyware apps running
Such programs need to be properly dealt with. Under OS X it can be very hard to install spyware. The primary method of "hiding" it requires sudo permissions. While the user can be tricked into giving up his password, it's much more difficult and bound to be far less legal.
The secondary method would involve installing a program that the user can ALWAYS see. And if they can see it, they can kill it. Ergo, not too much spyware on Macs at the moment. (We'll see if spyware manufacturers figure out ways around this. It would be interesting to see Apple's response.)
People need to understand that computers are magical boxes that run on white smoke and fairy dust.
Reminds me of that BOFH issue where the BOFH got a user to fry his power supply. "See that puff of smoke? Your computer doesn't work any more because you let the magic smoke escape!" Priceless.
Consistently, since even the early 486 and Pentium days, AMD (and in fact also Cyrix) CPUs routinely beat Intel CPUs running at somewhat higher clock rates.
Too far back in history, chief. In the 486 days, the AMD and Cyrixes were nothing more than a "cheap" upgrade for a 386. They simply didn't compete. Consumers were thus able to somewhat trust the MHz rating of Intel chips as a general performance indicator.
When the Pentium era arrived, AMD was still not a competitor, but they did manage to produce chips that were "good enough" to be considered cheap alternatives to the Intel processors. As a result, the PC industry did start producing AMD-based machines for their "low cost" product lines.
When the Athlon and PIII came to market, however, is when things got interesting. For the first time, AMD managed to put out an extremely capable chip in comparison to Intel's offerings. But far more interesting was that AMD started ramping their chips to exceptionally high MHz levels to pass up Intel's chips. This practice gave the AMD chips a reputation for high performance, but extreme heat levels and lower reliability. This left Intel with the server market as their chips proved more reliable over the long haul, and performed just as well in most non-gaming situations.
Long story short, Intel and AMD traded various blows in performance, each one gaining a slight lead for a short time only to be quickly shown up by their competitor. AMD, however, managed to keep the MHz trophy the entire time.
Intel got the bright idea to beat AMD at its own game and thus produced the Pentium IV chip. Now the PIV isn't a very good chip, but it can be ramped up in MHz in ways that AMD's Athlons couldn't. AMD struggled for awhile, but quickly realized that they could no longer win the MHz trophy. So they came up with a Jedi Marketing Trick to make consumers think that AMD's chips were running at the same clock levels. That trick was to assign an arbitrarily created "speed rating" that placed the direct competitors to Intel's chips right next to the Intel MHz rating. That way reviewers would pick up the slower AMD chip and compare it with the Intel chip, rather than look at the real MHz.
AMD got a lot of bad press for the decision, but it did eventually pay off. Consumers accepted the PR rating as the "real speed" of the chip, and Intel again started losing market share. AMD finally ripped the market away from Intel with their AMD64 platform, which proved to be much more popular with consumers than Intel's own Itanium line.
So to summarize, AMD started competing with Intel. Knowing that Intel customers used MHz to judge performance, they ramped up their chips to extreme levels. Intel responded with their PIV Northwood core and took the MHz trophy back. AMD got smart and skewed the market by printing a number on the box that wasn't actually a MHz rating, while convincing many consumers that it was.
Clear as mud?
AMD set about dispelling the "myth of the megahertz", but they did it in a reasonable fashion.
;-))
AMD set about misleading the public based on the "myth of the megahertz" that they helped create. Whether you find it "reasonable" or not is irrelevant. It's still a deceptive practice used to combat another deceptive practice that was a response to the original deceptive practice that AMD started.
That being said, I appreciate the AMD64 performance lead quite a bit. However, I can accept the bad with good without a need to rationalize their marketing department. (Is such a thing possible, anyway? I thought marketing departments were inherently irrational?
Hrumph. You young whipper-snappers don't know anything. Back in my day, the Apple Macintosh was referred to as a "home computer" or (more technically) a "microcommputer". The IBM "Personal Computer" was nothing more than an invention of IBM's marketing department. And now everyone seems to think that "Personal Computer" is a better definition than "microcomputer" just because IBM says so. Would one of you young'uns care to explain to me exactly how my rack mounted servers are "Personel Computers"? What's so "Personal" about a computer that serves hundreds to thousands of users each day? Huh? Huh? Answer me that, future-boy!
:-P
Bah humbug! </grumpy-old-man>
EvilTwinSkippy is correct. AMD is practicing just as much deception with this scheme as the rest of the industy. I'd remind you that it was AMD who used started the MHz war by consistently clocking their CPUs higher than Intel's. Intel responded with the Pentium IV which was able to clock higher than the AMD chips even if the performance wasn't better. AMD responded with their "speed rating system" which is intended to trick consumers into believing that they are getting a faster clock rate than they are actually getting.
For example, an Athlon XP-M 2400+ is clocked at 1800 MHz, not 2400 as one would expect. The AMD Athlon XP-M 3000+ is clocked at 2200 MHz rather than 3000 MHz. Even more deceivingly, there is another chip called Athlon XP-M 3000+ ("Dublin") which is only clocked at 1600 MHz! How am I, as a consumer, supposed to sort all this nonsense out?
So you can keep your comments about "conservative" ratings. The industry is all about deceptive practices, and (most likely) always will be. Learn to deal with it.
You've really just shown your bias haven't you? Absolutely 100% accurate, oh, unless they're not accurate.
I think you've missed his point. This is a common industry practice used for just about every piece of hardware and software on the market. To single Steve Jobs out for this practice rather than accepting it as the "norm" shows a distinct anti-Mac bias.
Steve Jobs may not have been lying, but he was most certainly being deliberately deceitful.
It's hard to be deceitful when it comes to something as nebulous as benchmarks. Every benchmark you run will tell a different story. The result is that you can pull a variety of different conclusions from the benchmarks depending on how you spin it. Given that Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, we can expect that he will spin the benchmarks positively. On the flip-side, we can expect that the Mac haters will spin the benchmarks negatively. The ones to really listen to are the moderates who tell us whether we're generally being delivered what we're promised or not.
Why is there all this talk about running windows on it? Honestly, it's like buying a new Porsche and ripping out the engine and putting a Dodge Neon engine in it.
Indeed. I'm personally waiting for WINE to be ported to the Mactel platform. That should provide pretty much everything people want, as well as provide an easy migration path for video game producers. Or in other words:
1. Compile game against WINELIB
2. Release game for Macintosh
3. Profit!!!
Support for System 6 is slated to be released at the same time as the latest BeBox. You'd better hurry and pre-order your system!
IIRC some of the solid core nuclear thermal rocket designs were supposed to have good enough thrust to weight ratios to escape Earth's gravity under their own power (e.g. DUMBO).
:-)
Is this the report you're thinking of? DUMBO was indeed a paper design intended to show that the engines could be lighter and more powerful. Even so, I don't think the design was ever sufficient to reach orbit. Project Timberwind continued the work for the StarWars project and had a thrust to weight of 30:1. In comparison, the Space Shuttle Main Engines have a 73:1 thrust ratio and they still need assistance from the higher thrust SRBs. (The SRBs provide 71.4% of the Space Shuttle's thrust during liftoff, each providing 3,300,000 lbf vs. the 400,000 lbf each SSME generates.)
The only reliable way to overcome the thrust-to-weight problems that plague the NTR engines is to run the reactor so hot it melts the uranium fuel. As you can imagine, anything that can melt Uranium can melt most materials we have available. The solution to this problem is the Gas Core Nuclear Rocket which relies on the "nuclear lightbulb" concept to keep the reactor gasses from interacting with the walls of the engine. I've spoken with a former NASA Nuclear Propulsion engineer on the issue, however, and he's very concerned about whether the concept is feasible or not. It seems that there's a lot of research that still needs to be done on the subject. It's a wonderful dream, however.
Besides those, you have nuclear pulse propulsion (e.g. Orion), which most definitively would have a good enough thrust to weight ratio.
I do believe we were talking about NTR engines, but Orion can certainly attain orbit. The only problem (which is also one of the reasons why the Orion was never built) is that the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 made it illegal to launch an Orion from inside the atmosphere. This relegates it to being a space-only engine, and/or a useful craft for Moon or Mars launches.
The only real problem with the Apollo spacecraft is that it only has life support for just a couple of weeks at best.... just enough time to go to the Moon, plant the flag, and return. Shuttle astronauts in comparison are riding around in an orbital multi-deck RV with cable and internet access by comparison to the austerity the Apollo astronauts had to live with.
Isn't that amazingly frustrating? The Endeavour has been outfitted with extended mission life support, giving it an operational period of a month or better. And yet the damn thing is too heavy to fly to the moon even if you attached a booster pod! (I'm slightly exaggerating, but 15 Delta II flights to get enough fuel up there just isn't in the cards.) All of which makes the Shuttle the most useless piece of amazing engineering ever developed.
If we wanted to use the Space Shuttle for something useful, we'd stop flying cargo and convert the bay into a passenger area. NASA should be able to move ~60 people each flight.
GERRRROOONNNNIMO! :-D
Mmm. Both of those seem great on paper, but I can't help but question how practical they really are. The space elevator would be an absolute revolution if it was successful, but my fear is that everyone is just a little too optimistic about the carbon nanotube technology developing fast enough. We've barely managed to spin an inch or two and we're already talking about spinning hundreds of kilometers in a single strand? I'm just not so sure.
;-)
Electromagnetic catapulting is a really great idea, but that also suffers from a severe flaw: The atmosphere. Rockets are usually high in the atmosphere by the time they hit hypersonic velocities. To launch a craft from the earth to orbit using only a magnetic catapult, it would have to be travelling over at Mach 30 in dense atmosphere! Cargo maybe, but humans are a lot trickier. Using the catapult as a first stage might work, but there are still a lot of issues to resolve.
For now I think that LHOx is still the best launch solution. Reusable craft and round the clock launching is what could bring the prices down to reasonable levels. Once we have that, the market will start pushing new launch technologies. We'll see if maybe they can get those Gas Core Nuclear Rockets working.
That's incorrect. The thrust to weight ratios on the Nuclear Thermal Rockets (NERVA to be precise) just weren't good enough for a ground launch. The idea was to use the F-1 engine stage to get the sucker off the ground, then use the NTR as the last stage. The NTR program was cancelled after the 3 stage Saturn V (with J-2 engines in the upper stages) was successfully tested.
Since the NERVA program, the NTR concept has been pulled off the shelf several times. The latest engines tend to be dual mode engines that allow them to act like slightly higher performance LHOx engines with high thrust in the atmosphere and ultra-high performance engines with low thrust outside of the atmosphere. Even then, the engines don't have a great enough thrust-to-weight ratio to get into orbit themselves. They'd need to be supplemented by greater thrust to weight engines such as kerosine powered or solid rocket boosters.
Google will continue to roll out new products and services as it builds out its infrastructure for a huge push in 2007. They'll need money, of course, so I predict a supplemental stock offering timed with a 20-to-1 stock split.
I already know this one is wrong. Page believes in keeping the stock priced out of the range of the average investor as a way of preventing the company from becoming too focused on the individual quarterly returns. They're not splitting, plain and simple.