Of course, you still have to be careful. A lot of the unfinished articles in Wikipedia are the types of things that Britannica wouldn't tell you about anyway. For example, who would have thought that David Weber of Honor Harrington fame was also responsible for developing the third editions of the famous Starfire board game? And while you were looking that up, who'd have thunk that Sun had done a promotional video called Starfire about the "Office of the Future" circa 2004? (That was an amusing film.)
My point is that Wikipedia is not only going toe to toe with traditional Encyclopedias (sorry, I can't do the ae thing on Slashdot), it's actually surpassing them. Like the Internet was designed to do, Wikipedia is slowly sapping up the sum of human knowledge for all to learn. The process is fraught with difficulties, but it's otherwise a good process.
I would hesitate to call this a "very low thrust" engine, since 100kw is somewhere around 140 horsepower. It may not be enough to escape earth's gravity (if not, maybe the mars or the moon?), but I wouldn't discount the possibility immediately without more information (like what do these thrusters weigh, and how much propellant do they need to carry).
Once you're in orbit, the amount of thrust becomes a reasonably insignificant detail. The overriding concern is whether or not your craft can produce the necessary Delta-V to reach the required escape trajectory. Since it seems unlikely that the ESA would be investigating these devices as a replacement for ION engines if their performance was sub-par to IONs, it stands to reason that these engines will have no difficulty reaching the required Delta-V.
The real question is: How do these thrusters stack up to MPDTs (Magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters)? The article is light on technical details like Isp, engine life, potential design issues, fuels, etc. MPDT is a great upcoming technology. But if this new tech can best it by having a shorter development track and equivalent performance, then let's leapfrog the MPDT technology altogether!:-)
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 1
Python has the same cross-platform issues that Java does. For example, if you use an absolute path containing "c:\", you can expect your code not to work on any operating system except Windows. You're not supposed to do it this way, but programmers do it anyway. This also holds true for C, C++, PERL, Ruby, ColdFusion, PHP, C#, Mono...
Dude, you rock! Sounds like you did the work to get the thing up and going. Now if I only had a 770...;-)
I always thought that Dasher was a neat idea. Unfortunately, I just didn't see it showing up in a useable device any time soon. Now that it's been ported to the 770, it looks like there's finally a really good use for it. Here's hoping that you can get Nokia interested in helpimg to improve your work.
No, I think it comes directly for the probability calculations needed to determine the size for each Dasher node.
God invented Fixed Point math for a reason. That reason was so that calculations on a processor with no FPU could be nice and speedy. Back in my day, we had to make due with 16 bits of fixed point precision, and we liked it that way. (Or more like, we had no idea that anything else existed. BASIC and other contemporary languages used Fixed Point.) Now they've got a 32 bit processor, running at 5 times the speed of a 486, and his excuse is that he can't compute a fractional number without slowing things down?
Give - Me - A - Break
No specs? I can understand that. Too lazy to convert to Fixed Point? Sure, I'll go for that. Can't implement it because the processor is too slow? Bullshit.
It runs too slowly. We did some basic optimisation, but it's still too slow to feel good.
Eh? It's a 250 MHz ARM processor! If they can't get it to work fast enough on there, they need to retake CompSci. I could understand perhaps if graphical performance was the limiting factor, but somehow I don't think so. Since I don't believe that Ball actually failed CompSci, I think the real reason is the second part:
The hildon-input-method dynamic library is closed-source, so we can't get it working as an input method.
I'd really like to know if they talked to Nokia about getting some specs and/or tech support. Given how unproven this device still is, Nokia might have jumped at the chance to help. Source code is nice to have, but tapping the brain of the developer is much better.:-)
Will this be like the previous "Swim the Atlantic" bit? "Oh no! Someone pulled the power cord on the screen, so we can't do it! But we REALLY tried! See? And don't forget to download Opera!"
McDonalds already has something like this. For the past couple of years they've been introducing Happy Meals with more and more sophisticated LCD games as toys. The most recent batch included First Person Shooters of a sort.
The FPSs had to be one of the cooler hacks I've ever seen. The screen itself was transparent, but everything was "dark" be default. By allowing certain lines to go transparent, you could see the edges of the walls/doors/characters. Not much gameplay, but damned cool.
I thought Power PC was the mac? Why did Microsoft pick apple CPU's for their Xbox? Is Intel falling out of favor?
The Power architecture is an IBM design intended for use in their large server machines. About the time that Motorola was struggling with producing better/faster 68000 chips, IBM designed a cut-down version of the Power chip called "PowerPC". Apple adopted PowerPC from IBM, thus leaving Motorola behind. However, Motorola realized that they were losing big business and licensed the PowerPC architecture for manufacture. Eventually, Motorola couldn't keep up and Apple started using IBM for the higher end chips. Thus Apple now uses a combination of manufacturers to get their PowerPC chips from.
The chip itself has nothing to do with Apple other than being their preferred platform.
I was actually a bit more concerned about the "nice slap in their big fat face" remark than the "fundie" remark. I mean, that's not exactly the most professional remark I've ever heard. I shudder to think what the rest of his email was like.
A recent e-mail from Mirecki to members of a student organization referred to religious conservatives as "fundies" and said a course describing intelligent design as mythology would be a "nice slap in their big fat face." Mirecki apologized for those comments.
Me thinks "poorly worded" is an understatement. It's one thing when you're a troll on Slashdot using that language. It's a completely different thing to be in a respected teaching position and acting like a Slashdot troll. And he wonders why people are upset with him. *shakes head*
(P.S. I do hope they catch the assholes who beat him. That's not exactly acceptable behavior, either, no matter what he said.)
Here's a little tidbit to mull over. Dell is presently the highest volume laptop company in the world. Dell sells their Inspiron B120 laptop for $500 and their Lattitude 610 laptop for $1,000. Which do you think sells more? The much cheaper B120 for $500? No! The best selling laptop that Dell has ever had has been and continues to be the Lattitude 610 at fully twice the price of the B120!
Yet the B120 still sells well enough for Dell to keep it in its lineup. Which means that there's a market for cheap PCs, even if it isn't as large as the market for more expensive PCs. The question then comes to: Can this company sell enough cheap PCs to be profitable? The answer to that depends entirely on the size and complexity of their operations.
In theory, their costs might be low now that the product is developed. So now they only have to recoup the costs of R&D. But wait! What about product support? In computers, Tech Support is always one of the most expensive components. How is tech support handled in their business model? Are they saving money by outsourcing to an overseas facility? (Perhaps hiring the very people they trained with these laptops?;-))
It's definitely a complex issue. Just saying "market X is bigger than market Y" does not resolve it.
Of course, no way would MS want to hire smart guys to invent stuff to improve their own software
One would think so. But find me projects that actually ended up producing a key component for Windows, Office, or many of their other products? I used to follow Microsoft Research because it sounded like they were working on interesting stuff. Over time, however, it became clear that NONE of the projects were ever seeing the light of day. The most that was happening is that the researchers would do some work, post a web page, then say the project is still in progress when it was actually dead.
Of course, now that Microsoft is facing stiff competition, perhaps they are finally starting to rely on MS Research. But for the ~5 or so years I followed it, it certainly didn't seem that way.
2k was no different from nt4, xp no different from 95
95 and NT were interesting leaps in technology. 95 was interesting because it set the mold for nearly all GUIs that came after it. NT was interesting becasue it finally put Microsoft on solid ground in respect to OS design. 2000, however, was mostly just a matter of embedding Unix technology and technology swiped from Citrix. XP was more of the same of 2000, except that the GUI wasn't as good and the compatibility with 95 had been improved. (Microsoft has a database of special virtualizers that allow programs running on the NT kernel to perform certain operations that aren't valid, but were allowed under 9x. You can download a package for 2000 that does the same thing as XP's built-in code.)
You know what the kicker is? To the best of my knowledge, NONE of the technology used in the different versions of Windows came from Microsoft Research. What kind of research outfit produces short-lived research projects for a decade, and yet doesn't produce a single useful technology that can be adapted for market use?
As for my conspiracy theory, I have my reasons for wondering. Particularly, a few projects that have gone through research that are really matters that would normally be assigned to engineering. Not to mention that several of them have seemed suspiciously close to products already on the market from companies with "partnerships" with Microsoft. Not that it matters much. Most of that stuff is abandoned as well.
Microsoft licenses TTS technology from Lernout & Hauspie. (Now Nuance, like you said.) Microsoft has their own Speech Recognition engine. However, that engine can be replaced by third parties via the SAPI. Microsoft had an 8% share in the company at one point, though I don't know how much of it they currently hold.
I'm glad Microsoft Research comes up with such brilliant innovations. I LOL at the future of American research!
There is only one purpose to Microsoft Research: To hire off all the computer scientist before they can invent something that would compete with Microsoft. (Or make them irrelevant.) All one needs to do is look at how few technologies produced at MS Research have actually seen the light of day.
I also suspect that Microsoft uses MS Research to launder technology they've stolen or copied. But I can't prove that, so I'll just label that my personal conspiracy theory.;-)
umm a cleanroom is not a vacum your system would either break or just give you slightly lower pressure inside nothing usefull!
Sure it would. Most of the floating dust would be carried out with the air, and the rest would have no air to float around in. (Which isn't to say that you couldn't still get dust in the drive, but the danger isn't as high.)
a cleanbox with a vacum cleaner and an intake filter might work though.
That's an even better idea. A good HEPA filter would remove just about everything that could possibly hurt the harddrive, plus you'd have a constant flow of air that would sweep any remaining particles out of the box.
- 12 Steel Rods - Transparent Plastic Tarp - Rubber Kitchen Gloves - Lots'o'Duct Tape (Or strong packing tape if you want to keep things visible from all angles) - Vacuum cleaner with hose
Step 1: Take the steel rods and weld them into a cube shape. Step 2: Tape pieces of plastic tarp to each side of the cube. Add tape to the edges to ensure that it's air tight. Step 3: Cut small, circular holes in the sides of the cube, and one small circular hole in the front. Step 4: Tape the kitchen gloves to the side holes. Take the vacuum hose to the front hole. Make sure these are air tight and can withstand pressure. Step 5: Turn on vacuum cleaner.
Voila! Your very own clean room, with operating gloves and everything! Just make sure you put the parts and tools you want to work with inside the cube before you finish it. The hole for the vacuum cleaner would be a good place to consistently tape, untape, and retape.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, you still have to be careful. A lot of the unfinished articles in Wikipedia are the types of things that Britannica wouldn't tell you about anyway. For example, who would have thought that David Weber of Honor Harrington fame was also responsible for developing the third editions of the famous Starfire board game? And while you were looking that up, who'd have thunk that Sun had done a promotional video called Starfire about the "Office of the Future" circa 2004? (That was an amusing film.)
My point is that Wikipedia is not only going toe to toe with traditional Encyclopedias (sorry, I can't do the ae thing on Slashdot), it's actually surpassing them. Like the Internet was designed to do, Wikipedia is slowly sapping up the sum of human knowledge for all to learn. The process is fraught with difficulties, but it's otherwise a good process.
I would hesitate to call this a "very low thrust" engine, since 100kw is somewhere around 140 horsepower. It may not be enough to escape earth's gravity (if not, maybe the mars or the moon?), but I wouldn't discount the possibility immediately without more information (like what do these thrusters weigh, and how much propellant do they need to carry).
Once you're in orbit, the amount of thrust becomes a reasonably insignificant detail. The overriding concern is whether or not your craft can produce the necessary Delta-V to reach the required escape trajectory. Since it seems unlikely that the ESA would be investigating these devices as a replacement for ION engines if their performance was sub-par to IONs, it stands to reason that these engines will have no difficulty reaching the required Delta-V.
The real question is: How do these thrusters stack up to MPDTs (Magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters)? The article is light on technical details like Isp, engine life, potential design issues, fuels, etc. MPDT is a great upcoming technology. But if this new tech can best it by having a shorter development track and equivalent performance, then let's leapfrog the MPDT technology altogether! :-)
Python has the same cross-platform issues that Java does. For example, if you use an absolute path containing "c:\", you can expect your code not to work on any operating system except Windows. You're not supposed to do it this way, but programmers do it anyway. This also holds true for C, C++, PERL, Ruby, ColdFusion, PHP, C#, Mono...
If only I had modpoints... ...you couldn't use them because you've already posted. :-D
Details, details. I for one, have an excuse. (The hook on the j is obscured by the underline.) ;-)
Ah, but it's so much fun. Keeps you on your toes. ;-)
Link? He replied to you, not me.
Dude, you rock! Sounds like you did the work to get the thing up and going. Now if I only had a 770... ;-)
I always thought that Dasher was a neat idea. Unfortunately, I just didn't see it showing up in a useable device any time soon. Now that it's been ported to the 770, it looks like there's finally a really good use for it. Here's hoping that you can get Nokia interested in helpimg to improve your work.
Looks like Mig59 already did the job. Time for some serious Kudos! :-)
No, I think it comes directly for the probability calculations needed to determine the size for each Dasher node.
God invented Fixed Point math for a reason. That reason was so that calculations on a processor with no FPU could be nice and speedy. Back in my day, we had to make due with 16 bits of fixed point precision, and we liked it that way. (Or more like, we had no idea that anything else existed. BASIC and other contemporary languages used Fixed Point.) Now they've got a 32 bit processor, running at 5 times the speed of a 486, and his excuse is that he can't compute a fractional number without slowing things down?
Give - Me - A - Break
No specs? I can understand that. Too lazy to convert to Fixed Point? Sure, I'll go for that. Can't implement it because the processor is too slow? Bullshit.
It runs too slowly. We did some basic optimisation, but it's still too slow to feel good.
:-)
Eh? It's a 250 MHz ARM processor! If they can't get it to work fast enough on there, they need to retake CompSci. I could understand perhaps if graphical performance was the limiting factor, but somehow I don't think so. Since I don't believe that Ball actually failed CompSci, I think the real reason is the second part:
The hildon-input-method dynamic library is closed-source, so we can't get it working as an input method.
I'd really like to know if they talked to Nokia about getting some specs and/or tech support. Given how unproven this device still is, Nokia might have jumped at the chance to help. Source code is nice to have, but tapping the brain of the developer is much better.
http://www.opera.com/swim/
Will this be like the previous "Swim the Atlantic" bit? "Oh no! Someone pulled the power cord on the screen, so we can't do it! But we REALLY tried! See? And don't forget to download Opera!"
Meh.
McDonalds already has something like this. For the past couple of years they've been introducing Happy Meals with more and more sophisticated LCD games as toys. The most recent batch included First Person Shooters of a sort.
The FPSs had to be one of the cooler hacks I've ever seen. The screen itself was transparent, but everything was "dark" be default. By allowing certain lines to go transparent, you could see the edges of the walls/doors/characters. Not much gameplay, but damned cool.
I thought Power PC was the mac? Why did Microsoft pick apple CPU's for their Xbox? Is Intel falling out of favor?
The Power architecture is an IBM design intended for use in their large server machines. About the time that Motorola was struggling with producing better/faster 68000 chips, IBM designed a cut-down version of the Power chip called "PowerPC". Apple adopted PowerPC from IBM, thus leaving Motorola behind. However, Motorola realized that they were losing big business and licensed the PowerPC architecture for manufacture. Eventually, Motorola couldn't keep up and Apple started using IBM for the higher end chips. Thus Apple now uses a combination of manufacturers to get their PowerPC chips from.
The chip itself has nothing to do with Apple other than being their preferred platform.
The student organization in question was the Society for Open Minded Athiests and Agnostics.
So your point is that they're not as "Open Minded" as they claim?
I was actually a bit more concerned about the "nice slap in their big fat face" remark than the "fundie" remark. I mean, that's not exactly the most professional remark I've ever heard. I shudder to think what the rest of his email was like.
A recent e-mail from Mirecki to members of a student organization referred to religious conservatives as "fundies" and said a course describing intelligent design as mythology would be a "nice slap in their big fat face." Mirecki apologized for those comments.
Me thinks "poorly worded" is an understatement. It's one thing when you're a troll on Slashdot using that language. It's a completely different thing to be in a respected teaching position and acting like a Slashdot troll. And he wonders why people are upset with him. *shakes head*
(P.S. I do hope they catch the assholes who beat him. That's not exactly acceptable behavior, either, no matter what he said.)
Here's a little tidbit to mull over. Dell is presently the highest volume laptop company in the world. Dell sells their Inspiron B120 laptop for $500 and their Lattitude 610 laptop for $1,000. Which do you think sells more? The much cheaper B120 for $500? No! The best selling laptop that Dell has ever had has been and continues to be the Lattitude 610 at fully twice the price of the B120!
;-))
Yet the B120 still sells well enough for Dell to keep it in its lineup. Which means that there's a market for cheap PCs, even if it isn't as large as the market for more expensive PCs. The question then comes to: Can this company sell enough cheap PCs to be profitable? The answer to that depends entirely on the size and complexity of their operations.
In theory, their costs might be low now that the product is developed. So now they only have to recoup the costs of R&D. But wait! What about product support? In computers, Tech Support is always one of the most expensive components. How is tech support handled in their business model? Are they saving money by outsourcing to an overseas facility? (Perhaps hiring the very people they trained with these laptops?
It's definitely a complex issue. Just saying "market X is bigger than market Y" does not resolve it.
Of course, no way would MS want to hire smart guys to invent stuff to improve their own software
One would think so. But find me projects that actually ended up producing a key component for Windows, Office, or many of their other products? I used to follow Microsoft Research because it sounded like they were working on interesting stuff. Over time, however, it became clear that NONE of the projects were ever seeing the light of day. The most that was happening is that the researchers would do some work, post a web page, then say the project is still in progress when it was actually dead.
Of course, now that Microsoft is facing stiff competition, perhaps they are finally starting to rely on MS Research. But for the ~5 or so years I followed it, it certainly didn't seem that way.
2k was no different from nt4, xp no different from 95
95 and NT were interesting leaps in technology. 95 was interesting because it set the mold for nearly all GUIs that came after it. NT was interesting becasue it finally put Microsoft on solid ground in respect to OS design. 2000, however, was mostly just a matter of embedding Unix technology and technology swiped from Citrix. XP was more of the same of 2000, except that the GUI wasn't as good and the compatibility with 95 had been improved. (Microsoft has a database of special virtualizers that allow programs running on the NT kernel to perform certain operations that aren't valid, but were allowed under 9x. You can download a package for 2000 that does the same thing as XP's built-in code.)
You know what the kicker is? To the best of my knowledge, NONE of the technology used in the different versions of Windows came from Microsoft Research. What kind of research outfit produces short-lived research projects for a decade, and yet doesn't produce a single useful technology that can be adapted for market use?
As for my conspiracy theory, I have my reasons for wondering. Particularly, a few projects that have gone through research that are really matters that would normally be assigned to engineering. Not to mention that several of them have seemed suspiciously close to products already on the market from companies with "partnerships" with Microsoft. Not that it matters much. Most of that stuff is abandoned as well.
Microsoft licenses TTS technology from Lernout & Hauspie. (Now Nuance, like you said.) Microsoft has their own Speech Recognition engine. However, that engine can be replaced by third parties via the SAPI. Microsoft had an 8% share in the company at one point, though I don't know how much of it they currently hold.
I'm glad Microsoft Research comes up with such brilliant innovations. I LOL at the future of American research!
;-)
There is only one purpose to Microsoft Research: To hire off all the computer scientist before they can invent something that would compete with Microsoft. (Or make them irrelevant.) All one needs to do is look at how few technologies produced at MS Research have actually seen the light of day.
I also suspect that Microsoft uses MS Research to launder technology they've stolen or copied. But I can't prove that, so I'll just label that my personal conspiracy theory.
umm a cleanroom is not a vacum your system would either break or just give you slightly lower pressure inside nothing usefull!
Sure it would. Most of the floating dust would be carried out with the air, and the rest would have no air to float around in. (Which isn't to say that you couldn't still get dust in the drive, but the danger isn't as high.)
a cleanbox with a vacum cleaner and an intake filter might work though.
That's an even better idea. A good HEPA filter would remove just about everything that could possibly hurt the harddrive, plus you'd have a constant flow of air that would sweep any remaining particles out of the box.
Hmmm... I can't help but thinking...
:-)
- 12 Steel Rods
- Transparent Plastic Tarp
- Rubber Kitchen Gloves
- Lots'o'Duct Tape (Or strong packing tape if you want to keep things visible from all angles)
- Vacuum cleaner with hose
Step 1: Take the steel rods and weld them into a cube shape.
Step 2: Tape pieces of plastic tarp to each side of the cube. Add tape to the edges to ensure that it's air tight.
Step 3: Cut small, circular holes in the sides of the cube, and one small circular hole in the front.
Step 4: Tape the kitchen gloves to the side holes. Take the vacuum hose to the front hole. Make sure these are air tight and can withstand pressure.
Step 5: Turn on vacuum cleaner.
Voila! Your very own clean room, with operating gloves and everything! Just make sure you put the parts and tools you want to work with inside the cube before you finish it. The hole for the vacuum cleaner would be a good place to consistently tape, untape, and retape.