Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I was under the impression that the reason we don't currently have nuclear outfitted space technology (not counting decay powered satelites i.e voyager) was that if the Challenger/Columbia thing happens again it sprays the planet with refined nuclear material.
That impression is quite wrong. Nuclear technology has not been used because:
1. It hasn't met the mission profiles. (It was even considered for the Shuttle upper stages.) 2. People are afraid of nuclear.
In the case of CEV Spiral Two, the engines would be used for pure orbital work, so there would be little to no concern of any materials reaching Earth.
If anyone knows of a way to get thrust from fission I'd love to hear it.
Man, I thought I'd gotten everyone around here trained in how Nuclear Thermal Rockets work. Here's the short of it:
Most nuclear reactors derive their power production from the thermal aspect of the reaction. As the core heats up, the heat is pumped into a generator where a turbine is turned. During the push to reach the moon, some enterprising engineers figured that if you could heat a propellant using a nuclear reactor, you could dump as much thermal energy into a working fluid as the materials could withstand. The result is that massive amounts of thrust can be obtained by simply heating a stream of hydrogen, oxygen, or even plain old air. (See: Project Pluto; rather nasty weapon that was.) Since hydrogen and oxygen can't become radioactive, there would be little issue of spreading nuclear materials. Unfortunately, there was a Graphite Ablation problem from the heat, but the modern TRITON engine fixes that by utilizing Tungsten cladding.
I love the Liberty Ship concept. Unfortunately, there's only one problem: Gas-Core Nuclear Rockets are as of yet unproven. Many engineers have their doubts that they will even work. (Although I think with enough money behind it, the concept can be made to work.;-)) As a result, the GCNR proposal is a bad idea for early space access. It would be another miracle technology that may or may not pan out. It's a much better idea to wait on the GCNR rockets until a market exists.
In the meantime, we should be able to build some very nice first-gen super-boosters by chaining a few of these babies together into a second stage. Once you have the OOMPH to get the rocket off the ground, you can ditch the first stage and coast a massive amount of cargo to orbit on your afterburning engines (~500 Isp). Once sufficient velocity has been built up, you can drop the afterburning and take the cargo the rest of the way on ~900+ Isp engines.
Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 2
Energy-wise it's a good idea but the expense of getting an ore factory and a railgun (for launcing payloads) going would be incredible...
The cost is only incredible if you're looking at a single-shot to the moon trajectory. An orbital rendezvous with reusable engines can drive those costs down significantly. Which is the plan of the CEV program. Instead of misusing a super-booster to send a rather pathetic amount of material directly to the moon, boosters would be used to get the materials into orbit. From orbit, a space tug/transport would haul the cargo from LEO all the way up to the moon. Since the transport would be likely to use Nuclear or Ion fuels, it could then refuel at the moon using local materials.
The concept still isn't *cheap*, but it's not astronomical. And as the demand for boosters increases, the price of those boosters will go down. With any luck, we may even see a revival of the only remaining super-boosters: The Titan IV and Energia. Well, I can hope anyway.:-)
Personally, I think we ought to develop cheaper means of getting into orbit before we try anything really ambitious in space.
If the last 30 years have proven anything, it's that space access is a chicken and egg problem. You won't get competition for cheaper vehicles until you have a market for those vehicles. Yet you can't create the market without having cheap space access. The Space Shuttle actually drove UP launch costs instead of realizing the promised launch savings! That's why the Delta and Atlas rockets have been making a comeback.
The key to accessing space is to bootstrap an industry in as inexpensive of a way as you can. Once the industry is bootstraped, uses will emerge and companies will begin competing on technology. At that point, there will be no stopping the space industry.
Just keep in mind that 50 years ago there was a market for only about six computers in the entire world. Look what happened to that market.:-)
Not true. The Saturn V was a superb super-booster that was capable of lifting just about anything into orbit. For example, a Saturn V was used to lift the entire Skylab Space Station in one flight. Von Braun was also a big proponent of using a Saturn V to lift a Mini Orion into orbit for interplanetary travel.
The reason why the Saturn V *seems* useless is that the primary focus of the Apollo and Gemini programs was to develop the technology and execute a plan to reach the moon. If the Saturn V was still flying today, you can bet it wouldn't cost several billion dollars to get the ISS up there. We'd launch the stupid thing in two or three pieces, only minor assembly required. Compare that to the dozens of shuttle flights and Russian launches necessary to get the current structure up there. And it's not even done!
Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Why the moon?
Babysteps. Since the 1960s we've lost the capability to send anything large on an interplanetary cruise. In fact, we shelved most of the technologies that would allow us to perform such cruises quickly and efficiently. As a result, we need to rebuild our space infrastrucutre. Part of that rebuilding is an inexpensive method for getting to and from the moon. CEV Spiral two will most likely use nuclear engines for moving passengers to and from the moon. As we gain real world experience with those engines, we can begin contemplating the task of sending a manned mission to Mars.
The key thing to remember about the current CEV program is that it's built on real technology we have today. This is a big change for NASA which has always expected some sort of miracle technology for their next vehicle. The bright side of this change is that we'll have the CEV completed in a relatively short period of time, and it will cost a reasonable amount compared to the $$$ that went into the Shuttle program.
But most camcorders don't use VHS. They use the smaller tape cartridges.
Doesn't matter. Camcorders come with an adapter cassette. You just plug the smaller cassette into the adapter cassette and pop the entire thing into the VCR.
They need to also claim they have increased their market share by 100,000 users.
Who says they don't? Market share figures are often over-inflated so as to make a company seem more important. If I were you, I wouldn't underestimate the ability of most companies to make the best out of the worst.
The problem with so many blogs like this is that they lead to a low signal to noise ratio. i.e. How does one go about finding useful blogs when the blog listings are full of garbage? Not to mention, how do you keep Ms. Kitty Owner from spilling her junk over to useful blogs via the community features?
That's why it's a problem. If those blogs could somehow be removed from searches for useful blogs (topical index, maybe?), then everyone could be happy.:-)
Umm... okaaayy. You really have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?
Let me clarify something: Back in the day, IBM made several decisions about the PC architecture based on component prices and software design. Most of those decisions seemed to be good at the time. As the PC architecture grew, however, it was quickly found that these original decisions wouldn't support modern hardware designs. Unfortunately, backward compatibility needed to be maintains, so a compromise was reached. Interrupts were chained to provide a larger number of them, the A20 gate was set on boot, then ignored, the 0xA0000 and 0xB0000 areas of memory were still initialized and reserved on boot, etc, etc, etc.
PC manufacturers have wanted to get rid of this cruft for a long time, but couldn't. Their machines would immediately become incompatible with all the software that depended on this cruftiness.
Apple, OTOH, has no such need to maintain compatibility. They can happily ditch the PC architecture, and life will be good for all.
Seriously, the guy's daydreaming or something, as no matter how much he should wish for it to be so, blogs aren't going nowhere
Lord, I hope the majority are leaving the Internet. What your cat did today is not news for the entire world to hear. Nor is your diary-online. While a lot of people get a kick out of such Voyuerism, the rest of the civilized world doesn't really want to hear about it.
What we do want to hear about are intelligent thoughts on current issues, professional quality articles, "man on the street" information from hot areas (e.g. Iraqi bloggers), and other very USEFUL types of information. These bloggers are hopefully not going anywhere.:-)
You mean the world doesn't want to hear about the latest dress you got, or your personal problems with your boyfriend/girlfriend?
What a shocker.
Maybe next they'll take reality TV off the air. Nah, that's probably a bit much to hope for.
I don't have anything against the idea of blogging (I recently set one up myself), but my opinion is that it should be kept as professional as any good magazine. Once that professionalism is breached, it becomes nothing more than a massive IM topic.
In the context I used it in, I was actually trying to say "maintain a super-tight grip". Although I do understand your confusion. You hear so much negativity around here that it's easy to mistake a positive post for a negative one. Lord knows I've done it a few times.:-)
You do realize that *BSD systems don't use init.d, right? They use the much more sensible (albeit less "flexible") rc.d system. The concept is simple:
This is the master startup script. After it runs, it loads subscripts from this directory. Life is good.
My own feels have always been that init.d's flexibility comes at far too high of a price in maintainence and ease of use. I'm sure there are others who would disagree, though. (No, I don't want to hear about it.)
I think you misinterpreted my post. I was not *complaining* about the situation. I was making observations on Apple's market strategy, plus some speculation on where they might take it.
Let me put it this way: I've got an iBook sitting right next to me. You can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.;-)
Combined with an Open Source/Forkable license, what more could a Solaris Geek want? Get out the party hats people, because this has got to be THE most awesome thing Sun has ever done!
(I'm excited, can you tell? *Happy Dance* *Happy Dance*):-P
Now for the bad news. Sun has taken the tack of encouraging users to build their own system. That is a good thing. Unfortuntely, all builds require a system to bootstrap the build. At the moment, the only option is Solaris Community Edition, a non-Torrented download. (Boo!) That being said, I don't think we'll have to wait too long for the OSS community to fix that little issue.:-D
Yes, I recall that quite well. But things are not quite what they were then. Can you imagine going to purchase a computer from an online store and being given the option to install Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X? The consumer's decision at that juncture will say more about which OS is considered superior than any other marketing method that Apple could try.:-)
This really isn't all that surprising. Apple wants to have a stranglehold on their OS. If they don't maintain that stranglehold, then issues with non-Apple hardware will begin to crop up. When those issues crop up, they'll make headlines. Those headlines will then damage Apple's reputation. Remember, Apple is a complete solution provider, not just a software provider.
That being said, I keep kicking around in my head the concept of Apple allowing other PC manufacturers to build OS X compatible machines. While Apple attempts to stand for quality, it might be feasible for them to license their software to others. That way there could be the "cheap PC" version of OS X, and Apple would still make money with little damage to their rep. I can't quite decide whether it's a *good* idea, though. Once they start licensing to other manufacturers, they lose a modicum of control over their quality control.
Microsoft gets away with it because the majority of their users are either stupid or don't care. Apple, OTOH, is still in a vulnerable position. Their growth has been enormous, but one wrong move on their part could bring the whole stack of cards tumbling down.
How is Apple going to use the DRM features of a chip I do not have to prevent me from installing OSX on my P4? Am I missing something?
There's a couple of methods they could use:
1. Have Mac OS X check for the presence of an authorization chip ala NES Carts. If no chip is found, refuse to install.
2. Make the OS rely on OpenBoot features. Since PCs have a BIOS instead it would be difficult (if not impossible) to install OS X without swapping out your BIOS.
3. Replace all the crappy PC hardware (e.g. chained interrupt controllers, A20 gate, etc.) and replace it with something more sensible. OS X would then only run on a machine with sensible hardware.
This may be more true than you think. Back in the days of Win3.1, there were rumors flying about of revealing Microsoft memos. According to these rumors, Microsoft recognized that Win3.1 was the most pirated piece of software ever. The memos also detailed that Win3.1 never would have reached its current level of popularity without rampant piracy.
I don't have any sources to back this one up, so take it with a grain of salt. But if true, it means that Microsoft recognized that they never would have made their fortune without pirates. A bit odd, no?
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I was under the impression that the reason we don't currently have nuclear outfitted space technology (not counting decay powered satelites i.e voyager) was that if the Challenger/Columbia thing happens again it sprays the planet with refined nuclear material.
That impression is quite wrong. Nuclear technology has not been used because:
1. It hasn't met the mission profiles. (It was even considered for the Shuttle upper stages.)
2. People are afraid of nuclear.
In the case of CEV Spiral Two, the engines would be used for pure orbital work, so there would be little to no concern of any materials reaching Earth.
If anyone knows of a way to get thrust from fission I'd love to hear it.
Man, I thought I'd gotten everyone around here trained in how Nuclear Thermal Rockets work. Here's the short of it:
Most nuclear reactors derive their power production from the thermal aspect of the reaction. As the core heats up, the heat is pumped into a generator where a turbine is turned. During the push to reach the moon, some enterprising engineers figured that if you could heat a propellant using a nuclear reactor, you could dump as much thermal energy into a working fluid as the materials could withstand. The result is that massive amounts of thrust can be obtained by simply heating a stream of hydrogen, oxygen, or even plain old air. (See: Project Pluto; rather nasty weapon that was.) Since hydrogen and oxygen can't become radioactive, there would be little issue of spreading nuclear materials. Unfortunately, there was a Graphite Ablation problem from the heat, but the modern TRITON engine fixes that by utilizing Tungsten cladding.
Does that answer your question?
I love the Liberty Ship concept. Unfortunately, there's only one problem: Gas-Core Nuclear Rockets are as of yet unproven. Many engineers have their doubts that they will even work. (Although I think with enough money behind it, the concept can be made to work. ;-)) As a result, the GCNR proposal is a bad idea for early space access. It would be another miracle technology that may or may not pan out. It's a much better idea to wait on the GCNR rockets until a market exists.
In the meantime, we should be able to build some very nice first-gen super-boosters by chaining a few of these babies together into a second stage. Once you have the OOMPH to get the rocket off the ground, you can ditch the first stage and coast a massive amount of cargo to orbit on your afterburning engines (~500 Isp). Once sufficient velocity has been built up, you can drop the afterburning and take the cargo the rest of the way on ~900+ Isp engines.
Energy-wise it's a good idea but the expense of getting an ore factory and a railgun (for launcing payloads) going would be incredible...
:-)
The cost is only incredible if you're looking at a single-shot to the moon trajectory. An orbital rendezvous with reusable engines can drive those costs down significantly. Which is the plan of the CEV program. Instead of misusing a super-booster to send a rather pathetic amount of material directly to the moon, boosters would be used to get the materials into orbit. From orbit, a space tug/transport would haul the cargo from LEO all the way up to the moon. Since the transport would be likely to use Nuclear or Ion fuels, it could then refuel at the moon using local materials.
The concept still isn't *cheap*, but it's not astronomical. And as the demand for boosters increases, the price of those boosters will go down. With any luck, we may even see a revival of the only remaining super-boosters: The Titan IV and Energia. Well, I can hope anyway.
Personally, I think we ought to develop cheaper means of getting into orbit before we try anything really ambitious in space.
:-)
If the last 30 years have proven anything, it's that space access is a chicken and egg problem. You won't get competition for cheaper vehicles until you have a market for those vehicles. Yet you can't create the market without having cheap space access. The Space Shuttle actually drove UP launch costs instead of realizing the promised launch savings! That's why the Delta and Atlas rockets have been making a comeback.
The key to accessing space is to bootstrap an industry in as inexpensive of a way as you can. Once the industry is bootstraped, uses will emerge and companies will begin competing on technology. At that point, there will be no stopping the space industry.
Just keep in mind that 50 years ago there was a market for only about six computers in the entire world. Look what happened to that market.
Not true. The Saturn V was a superb super-booster that was capable of lifting just about anything into orbit. For example, a Saturn V was used to lift the entire Skylab Space Station in one flight. Von Braun was also a big proponent of using a Saturn V to lift a Mini Orion into orbit for interplanetary travel.
The reason why the Saturn V *seems* useless is that the primary focus of the Apollo and Gemini programs was to develop the technology and execute a plan to reach the moon. If the Saturn V was still flying today, you can bet it wouldn't cost several billion dollars to get the ISS up there. We'd launch the stupid thing in two or three pieces, only minor assembly required. Compare that to the dozens of shuttle flights and Russian launches necessary to get the current structure up there. And it's not even done!
Why the moon?
Babysteps. Since the 1960s we've lost the capability to send anything large on an interplanetary cruise. In fact, we shelved most of the technologies that would allow us to perform such cruises quickly and efficiently. As a result, we need to rebuild our space infrastrucutre. Part of that rebuilding is an inexpensive method for getting to and from the moon. CEV Spiral two will most likely use nuclear engines for moving passengers to and from the moon. As we gain real world experience with those engines, we can begin contemplating the task of sending a manned mission to Mars.
The key thing to remember about the current CEV program is that it's built on real technology we have today. This is a big change for NASA which has always expected some sort of miracle technology for their next vehicle. The bright side of this change is that we'll have the CEV completed in a relatively short period of time, and it will cost a reasonable amount compared to the $$$ that went into the Shuttle program.
Darn. You can't copy Amazon searches any longer. The search was for: VHS-C Camcorder which returns several new JVC and Panasonic VHS-C camcorders.
I didn't even know they still sold analogue camcorders.
Indeed they do. Though they are slowly disappearing, there's still quite a base of existing camcorders out there that use the VHS-C format.
MiniDV is a digital media. I was speaking of Analog cassettes, which are still quite popular.
But most camcorders don't use VHS. They use the smaller tape cartridges.
Doesn't matter. Camcorders come with an adapter cassette. You just plug the smaller cassette into the adapter cassette and pop the entire thing into the VCR.
They need to also claim they have increased their market share by 100,000 users.
Who says they don't? Market share figures are often over-inflated so as to make a company seem more important. If I were you, I wouldn't underestimate the ability of most companies to make the best out of the worst.
You forgot:
4) Many camcorders still use tape.
The problem with so many blogs like this is that they lead to a low signal to noise ratio. i.e. How does one go about finding useful blogs when the blog listings are full of garbage? Not to mention, how do you keep Ms. Kitty Owner from spilling her junk over to useful blogs via the community features?
:-)
That's why it's a problem. If those blogs could somehow be removed from searches for useful blogs (topical index, maybe?), then everyone could be happy.
ROFL!
Umm... okaaayy. You really have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?
Let me clarify something: Back in the day, IBM made several decisions about the PC architecture based on component prices and software design. Most of those decisions seemed to be good at the time. As the PC architecture grew, however, it was quickly found that these original decisions wouldn't support modern hardware designs. Unfortunately, backward compatibility needed to be maintains, so a compromise was reached. Interrupts were chained to provide a larger number of them, the A20 gate was set on boot, then ignored, the 0xA0000 and 0xB0000 areas of memory were still initialized and reserved on boot, etc, etc, etc.
PC manufacturers have wanted to get rid of this cruft for a long time, but couldn't. Their machines would immediately become incompatible with all the software that depended on this cruftiness.
Apple, OTOH, has no such need to maintain compatibility. They can happily ditch the PC architecture, and life will be good for all.
Seriously, the guy's daydreaming or something, as no matter how much he should wish for it to be so, blogs aren't going nowhere
:-)
Lord, I hope the majority are leaving the Internet. What your cat did today is not news for the entire world to hear. Nor is your diary-online. While a lot of people get a kick out of such Voyuerism, the rest of the civilized world doesn't really want to hear about it.
What we do want to hear about are intelligent thoughts on current issues, professional quality articles, "man on the street" information from hot areas (e.g. Iraqi bloggers), and other very USEFUL types of information. These bloggers are hopefully not going anywhere.
You mean the world doesn't want to hear about the latest dress you got, or your personal problems with your boyfriend/girlfriend?
What a shocker.
Maybe next they'll take reality TV off the air. Nah, that's probably a bit much to hope for.
I don't have anything against the idea of blogging (I recently set one up myself), but my opinion is that it should be kept as professional as any good magazine. Once that professionalism is breached, it becomes nothing more than a massive IM topic.
In the context I used it in, I was actually trying to say "maintain a super-tight grip". Although I do understand your confusion. You hear so much negativity around here that it's easy to mistake a positive post for a negative one. Lord knows I've done it a few times. :-)
You do realize that *BSD systems don't use init.d, right? They use the much more sensible (albeit less "flexible") rc.d system. The concept is simple:
This is the master startup script. After it runs, it loads subscripts from this directory. Life is good.
My own feels have always been that init.d's flexibility comes at far too high of a price in maintainence and ease of use. I'm sure there are others who would disagree, though. (No, I don't want to hear about it.)
Come on... seriously... what's more cuter than a Penguin or a Daemon?
A Sun with a smiley face?
I think you misinterpreted my post. I was not *complaining* about the situation. I was making observations on Apple's market strategy, plus some speculation on where they might take it.
;-)
Let me put it this way: I've got an iBook sitting right next to me. You can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Combined with an Open Source/Forkable license, what more could a Solaris Geek want? Get out the party hats people, because this has got to be THE most awesome thing Sun has ever done!
(I'm excited, can you tell? *Happy Dance* *Happy Dance*)
Now for the bad news. Sun has taken the tack of encouraging users to build their own system. That is a good thing. Unfortuntely, all builds require a system to bootstrap the build. At the moment, the only option is Solaris Community Edition, a non-Torrented download. (Boo!) That being said, I don't think we'll have to wait too long for the OSS community to fix that little issue.
Yes, I recall that quite well. But things are not quite what they were then. Can you imagine going to purchase a computer from an online store and being given the option to install Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X? The consumer's decision at that juncture will say more about which OS is considered superior than any other marketing method that Apple could try. :-)
This really isn't all that surprising. Apple wants to have a stranglehold on their OS. If they don't maintain that stranglehold, then issues with non-Apple hardware will begin to crop up. When those issues crop up, they'll make headlines. Those headlines will then damage Apple's reputation. Remember, Apple is a complete solution provider, not just a software provider.
That being said, I keep kicking around in my head the concept of Apple allowing other PC manufacturers to build OS X compatible machines. While Apple attempts to stand for quality, it might be feasible for them to license their software to others. That way there could be the "cheap PC" version of OS X, and Apple would still make money with little damage to their rep. I can't quite decide whether it's a *good* idea, though. Once they start licensing to other manufacturers, they lose a modicum of control over their quality control.
Microsoft gets away with it because the majority of their users are either stupid or don't care. Apple, OTOH, is still in a vulnerable position. Their growth has been enormous, but one wrong move on their part could bring the whole stack of cards tumbling down.
How is Apple going to use the DRM features of a chip I do not have to prevent me from installing OSX on my P4? Am I missing something?
;-)
There's a couple of methods they could use:
1. Have Mac OS X check for the presence of an authorization chip ala NES Carts. If no chip is found, refuse to install.
2. Make the OS rely on OpenBoot features. Since PCs have a BIOS instead it would be difficult (if not impossible) to install OS X without swapping out your BIOS.
3. Replace all the crappy PC hardware (e.g. chained interrupt controllers, A20 gate, etc.) and replace it with something more sensible. OS X would then only run on a machine with sensible hardware.
4. All of the above.
Worked for MS :)
This may be more true than you think. Back in the days of Win3.1, there were rumors flying about of revealing Microsoft memos. According to these rumors, Microsoft recognized that Win3.1 was the most pirated piece of software ever. The memos also detailed that Win3.1 never would have reached its current level of popularity without rampant piracy.
I don't have any sources to back this one up, so take it with a grain of salt. But if true, it means that Microsoft recognized that they never would have made their fortune without pirates. A bit odd, no?