Achieving orbit means that the craft is actually a craft capable of flight outside the influence of our gravity.
No it just means the craft has enough angular velocity tangental to the earth that it essentially outruns the earth's ballistic gravitational pull. Gravity still definiately has an effect though as it pulls the craft around the earth.
While achieving orbital velocity is an order of magnitude more difficult than reaching space and coming back down ballistically, reaching escape velocity to break orbit is even harder. Hence the massive 'moon rocket' Saturn V's that propelled the moon craft to over 24,000 mph (orbital velocity is closer to 17,000). The moon craft actually re-entered earth's atmosphere at over 30,000 mph!
Your info is completely wrong. There are several hybrid models available now, and none of them require being plugged in to charge its battery. They use the car's kinetic energy to do it rather than having the brakes convert it to heat (like any non-hybrid vehicle does) Honda, AFAIK, has never sold a "plug in" electric car.
Their most efficient hybrid is the insight, which is a small two-seater that makes 65 mpg. They also have a normal sized civic hybrid that makes around 51.
More impressive is toyota's prius line which in 2004 now is a medium-sized 4 door hatchback that competes with models along the line of 4 cylinder accords in price and performance.
The next couple of years will see hybrid SUV's, notably toyota highlander (and its Lexus counterpart) and the ford escape. Toyota has pledged to have a hybrid version of every vehicle model by 2010.
1 well maintained power plant that can charge say, 10,000 vehicles, has a much higher efficiency and lower pollution than if those 10,000 vehicles were running their own gas motors.
What we need are better cheaper cars, perhaps cars that have solar panels to add energy so a car is not 100% gas driven
These are already here. They are called hybrids, perhaps you've heard of them. They have battery banks that are recharged by a generator that engages when you let off the accelerator.
In 10-15 years, there will probably be more hybrids sold than gas-only vehicles.
Unless you go straight up as far as you can, and try to make a sharp turn.
And have some magical engine capable of thrusting you to 17,000 mph in a short instant (and some kind of dampening field so you wont be killed from the acceleration)
That's why space vehicles curve backwards as they accelerate through the atmosphere so they have plenty of angular velocity once they reach the proper altitude. Maintaining orbit is all about getting to the proper angular speed tangental to the earth.
Orbitting the earth is much more difficult than touching space on a ballistic trajectory. You need way more engine power and heat ablative materials and design to handle the re-entry friction.
Most vehicles today are pretty clean emissions wise. Your average modern SUV that gets 15 mpg will put out less emissions than a 20 year old civic that gets 30 mpg, simply because the modern engine has better pollution controls and burns the fuel more completely.
Small engines tend to be big polluters because they don't burn the fuel completely. Early hybrids faced this - the first generation of the honda insight put out more than many 4 cylinder cars. They've largely fixed this, though.
Lawn equipment is notorious. You can drive an SUV 500 miles and it will put out less emissions than half an hour of running the average lawn mower. It's one reason many cities have put restrictions on the hours lawn equipment can be ran, in order to avoid having the pollution from them staying low in the air.
I don't. I had one for about a year and a half, and then it broke. I just replaced it with a cheaper cd burner. What do I need a dvd drive on my pc for when I prefer to watch movies on my much larger tv?
There aren't exactly alot of software out there only on dvd...
I thought slashdot was full of nerds? What kind of nerds don't understand simple physics?
These lasers emit energy in the megawatt region. A mirror takes photons - absorbs them - and then reemits them. There aren't many mirrors that can absorb 10 million watts of energy.
In fact, that very problem is what makes laser weaponry so damn expensive and difficult to do. They need very heavy, exotic and expensive mirror systems to focus and aim the laser energy without being destroyed by the laser themselves. You can't just go down to home depot and buy a big mirror. You can't just coat a missile in some silly bike reflectors or shiny foil.
Even if you were to somehow invent a reflective coating that could handle megawatts of energy - and still be light enough to just paint on a missile - you'd have to deal with the coating becoming marred in flight, as anything the laser comes in contact with (ie, birdshit or what have you) its going to superheat to thousands of degrees and burn right through and destroy the missile.
contrary to slashdot ignorance and FUD, the OS doesn't spend most of its time running the CPU.
Most of what the OS does is IO, which idles the chip while waiting for the IO to complete. Tthis is why all operating systems switch to the next task while waiting on IO. If your CPU is running at less than 100% usage its because every program is waiting for IO for most of the time.
The P4 is basically the limits of single core engineering. It's not efficient at all - the big mhz increases don't create corresponding performance increases because of all the additional hardware you need to wrangle in that speed. Long pipelines, huge die area = lots of signal buffering, extremely complex and hot hardware. The long term reliability of these chips probably is not great.
The P3 is an elegant design. Its (relative) simplicity allows for better scaling into multicore processing for added performance at lower power. Theres no loss of capability associated with this and probably better reliablity.
They did not release 64-bit chips before anyone cared,
I think this should be clarified to "64 bit x86 chips before anyone cared". 64 bit computing has been around for decades in scientific applications. But why put it in creaky old x86? The world would be better off leaving it back in the vax era it came from. I'm curious as to why you think its been "overwhelmingly popular" - what major OS supports all of it yet? Who is actually making use of it?
I think the reason 64 bit hasn't hit hard yet is because theres not much of a market for it in PCs. Think about what 64 bit gives you. More than 4 gigs of RAM, and perhaps a few ancillary things.
The consumer isn't going to have more than 4 gigs of ram in a machine for several years. Server and scientific apps can benefit from it now, but they would also benefit alot from moving away from x86 (almost 30 years old!) and with less of the backwards compatability problems.
So far the only non-server and non-scientific use of amd's 64 bit chips was in an OpenLabs OpenSynth instrument that loaded everything into its 8 gigs of ram for maximum response time.
Most consumer software sold today is multi-threaded and would definitaly benefit from a parallel operating multicore system. Most modern OS's also support SMP already, and switching to a multicore is no big deal in that area or difficult to take immediate advantage of.
And you're right. The cores will be derived from the pentium M - not the 4.
will be mostly based on set theory and discrete math as relational databases are really grounded in that. A study of database languages will also have alot on the automata theory side of things. So do take a database class:)
I have a friend who invited me who is not a google employee. By your logic, he would, at the most, be 2nd tier and I would be 3rd. However, I can invite people.
I had to use the service for a week before I could invite anyone.
then again, on linux there arent too many (if any) decent photo printers that work with it. Nonetheless, i dont see how anyone could take an image manipulating program seriously without even basic color management.
This still happens. Thats how credit card companies make money. As an example, at univ of texas austin if you want to pay tuition by credit card theres an additional 1.5% (i think) charge.
It wasnt all that long ago that many places on narrow profit margins (like fast food) wouldnt even accept credit cards because of this. These days they're so ubiquitous everyone just raises prices to cover it.
Slashdot Mirror
Achieving orbit means that the craft is actually a craft capable of flight outside the influence of our gravity.
No it just means the craft has enough angular velocity tangental to the earth that it essentially outruns the earth's ballistic gravitational pull. Gravity still definiately has an effect though as it pulls the craft around the earth.
While achieving orbital velocity is an order of magnitude more difficult than reaching space and coming back down ballistically, reaching escape velocity to break orbit is even harder. Hence the massive 'moon rocket' Saturn V's that propelled the moon craft to over 24,000 mph (orbital velocity is closer to 17,000). The moon craft actually re-entered earth's atmosphere at over 30,000 mph!
Your info is completely wrong. There are several hybrid models available now, and none of them require being plugged in to charge its battery. They use the car's kinetic energy to do it rather than having the brakes convert it to heat (like any non-hybrid vehicle does) Honda, AFAIK, has never sold a "plug in" electric car.
Their most efficient hybrid is the insight, which is a small two-seater that makes 65 mpg. They also have a normal sized civic hybrid that makes around 51.
More impressive is toyota's prius line which in 2004 now is a medium-sized 4 door hatchback that competes with models along the line of 4 cylinder accords in price and performance.
The next couple of years will see hybrid SUV's, notably toyota highlander (and its Lexus counterpart) and the ford escape. Toyota has pledged to have a hybrid version of every vehicle model by 2010.
1 well maintained power plant that can charge say, 10,000 vehicles, has a much higher efficiency and lower pollution than if those 10,000 vehicles were running their own gas motors.
What we need are better cheaper cars, perhaps cars that have solar panels to add energy so a car is not 100% gas driven
These are already here. They are called hybrids, perhaps you've heard of them. They have battery banks that are recharged by a generator that engages when you let off the accelerator.
In 10-15 years, there will probably be more hybrids sold than gas-only vehicles.
ah, yeah makes sense there would be a little at the leading edges, they are going at a substantial mach number.
Nonetheless, its not heat shielding on the order required by a orbiting craft like the space shuttle which re-enters earth's atmosphere at 17,000 mph.
Do you know how much energy would be required to move an *asteroid* from its orbit?
Even a very small asteroid would require hundreds, perhaps thousands, of megatons of nuclear detonations to nudge it a degree or two.
SS1 doesnt have heat shields for reentry. It's basic aerodynamic design doesn't really take re-entry into account.
Unless you go straight up as far as you can, and try to make a sharp turn.
And have some magical engine capable of thrusting you to 17,000 mph in a short instant (and some kind of dampening field so you wont be killed from the acceleration)
That's why space vehicles curve backwards as they accelerate through the atmosphere so they have plenty of angular velocity once they reach the proper altitude. Maintaining orbit is all about getting to the proper angular speed tangental to the earth.
Orbitting the earth is much more difficult than touching space on a ballistic trajectory. You need way more engine power and heat ablative materials and design to handle the re-entry friction.
as i pointed out, the first generation of the insight was a 55mpg car, but got worse emissions ratings than other 4 cylinders that got 25-30 mpg.
You cannot solely base emissions on mpg. That is much too simplistic and inaccurate.
They are most certainly not the same thing.
Most vehicles today are pretty clean emissions wise. Your average modern SUV that gets 15 mpg will put out less emissions than a 20 year old civic that gets 30 mpg, simply because the modern engine has better pollution controls and burns the fuel more completely.
Small engines tend to be big polluters because they don't burn the fuel completely. Early hybrids faced this - the first generation of the honda insight put out more than many 4 cylinder cars. They've largely fixed this, though.
Lawn equipment is notorious. You can drive an SUV 500 miles and it will put out less emissions than half an hour of running the average lawn mower. It's one reason many cities have put restrictions on the hours lawn equipment can be ran, in order to avoid having the pollution from them staying low in the air.
I don't. I had one for about a year and a half, and then it broke. I just replaced it with a cheaper cd burner. What do I need a dvd drive on my pc for when I prefer to watch movies on my much larger tv?
There aren't exactly alot of software out there only on dvd...
I thought slashdot was full of nerds? What kind of nerds don't understand simple physics?
These lasers emit energy in the megawatt region. A mirror takes photons - absorbs them - and then reemits them. There aren't many mirrors that can absorb 10 million watts of energy.
In fact, that very problem is what makes laser weaponry so damn expensive and difficult to do. They need very heavy, exotic and expensive mirror systems to focus and aim the laser energy without being destroyed by the laser themselves. You can't just go down to home depot and buy a big mirror. You can't just coat a missile in some silly bike reflectors or shiny foil.
Even if you were to somehow invent a reflective coating that could handle megawatts of energy - and still be light enough to just paint on a missile - you'd have to deal with the coating becoming marred in flight, as anything the laser comes in contact with (ie, birdshit or what have you) its going to superheat to thousands of degrees and burn right through and destroy the missile.
contrary to slashdot ignorance and FUD, the OS doesn't spend most of its time running the CPU.
Most of what the OS does is IO, which idles the chip while waiting for the IO to complete. Tthis is why all operating systems switch to the next task while waiting on IO. If your CPU is running at less than 100% usage its because every program is waiting for IO for most of the time.
The P4 is basically the limits of single core engineering. It's not efficient at all - the big mhz increases don't create corresponding performance increases because of all the additional hardware you need to wrangle in that speed. Long pipelines, huge die area = lots of signal buffering, extremely complex and hot hardware. The long term reliability of these chips probably is not great.
The P3 is an elegant design. Its (relative) simplicity allows for better scaling into multicore processing for added performance at lower power. Theres no loss of capability associated with this and probably better reliablity.
They did not release 64-bit chips before anyone cared,
I think this should be clarified to "64 bit x86 chips before anyone cared". 64 bit computing has been around for decades in scientific applications. But why put it in creaky old x86? The world would be better off leaving it back in the vax era it came from. I'm curious as to why you think its been "overwhelmingly popular" - what major OS supports all of it yet? Who is actually making use of it?
I think the reason 64 bit hasn't hit hard yet is because theres not much of a market for it in PCs. Think about what 64 bit gives you. More than 4 gigs of RAM, and perhaps a few ancillary things.
The consumer isn't going to have more than 4 gigs of ram in a machine for several years. Server and scientific apps can benefit from it now, but they would also benefit alot from moving away from x86 (almost 30 years old!) and with less of the backwards compatability problems.
So far the only non-server and non-scientific use of amd's 64 bit chips was in an OpenLabs OpenSynth instrument that loaded everything into its 8 gigs of ram for maximum response time.
Most consumer software sold today is multi-threaded and would definitaly benefit from a parallel operating multicore system. Most modern OS's also support SMP already, and switching to a multicore is no big deal in that area or difficult to take immediate advantage of.
And you're right. The cores will be derived from the pentium M - not the 4.
i believe she graduates with a degree in english on the 22nd or so says CNN.
UTPD had installed a hidden camera in some staff member's office without their knowledge to find out who was 'vandalizing furniture'
will be mostly based on set theory and discrete math as relational databases are really grounded in that. A study of database languages will also have alot on the automata theory side of things. So do take a database class :)
have you seen a 2004 prius? Its a medium sized car about the same class as an accord.
I have a friend who invited me who is not a google employee. By your logic, he would, at the most, be 2nd tier and I would be 3rd. However, I can invite people.
I had to use the service for a week before I could invite anyone.
i started forwarding much of my other email addresses to gmail and a couple of them are spam sinks. I get quite a bit of spam through it, still.
Don't go posting your email just yet. About 30-40% still makes it through.
then again, on linux there arent too many (if any) decent photo printers that work with it. Nonetheless, i dont see how anyone could take an image manipulating program seriously without even basic color management.
This still happens. Thats how credit card companies make money. As an example, at univ of texas austin if you want to pay tuition by credit card theres an additional 1.5% (i think) charge.
It wasnt all that long ago that many places on narrow profit margins (like fast food) wouldnt even accept credit cards because of this. These days they're so ubiquitous everyone just raises prices to cover it.