it would be like trying to hover in mid-air without helicopter blades. You'd fall because of gravity.
To gain orbital 'altitude' you have to increase your orbiting speed tangental to the earth by firing your engines. Similarly, when you want to re-enter the atmosphere you fire your retro rockets to slow you down, but as you slow down you decrease your orbital altitude. At a certain speed you'll re-enter the atmosphere, but this speed is still relatively high and requires heat shields.
So to sum it up, orbital altitude is related to the speed you're orbitting the earth.
at least in my life. I first encountered zip on a wide scale basis my last year of high school, several years ago when they install parallel zip 100 drives for the new 'digital art' class that combined photography with photoshop.
So I bought my own USB zip 100 which i still use a couple times a month to back up some files I frequently change.
UTexas Austin also has built in zip drives on most of their machines in the windows based labs.
some cheap third party batteries leave out short circuit prevention circuitry. If you short one of these batteries out and it doesnt have that circuitry, it will rapidly overheat and likely blow.
There could be other risks involved with different chemical formulas as well. Recall the blown capacitor debacle a year ago or so where the one cheap taiwanese company left out the ingredients to make the electrolyte in capacitors not create hydrogen gas. Gas build-ups blew out capacitors on many devices and motherboards (including a Soltek I owned at the time).
The amish aren't anti-technology, they're anti technology that requires them to depend on the outside world whether it be through electricity or repairs they can't make themselves with tools they made for themselves etc.
Anyway, automobile to carriage accidents happen and are usually fatal. Its mainly because the carriages are difficult to see at night. They've tried things like putting reflectors on them but haven't been successful.
So a company out there has invented a solar-powered LED flasher that requires zero maintenance and comes with a pretty large battery and some sophisticated charging circuitry to keep it alive for about a dozen years per light. Very high tech stuff. Their first customer was the Amish.
Basically columbia's structure was overengineered as it was the first. Gotta remember, shuttle was designed in the early 70s when computer simulations were still very crude. Actually the foundations of shuttle design started not long after apollo 11 landed...
While columbia was being built, the designers went and reworked the structure to be optimized as much as possible. They built a test structure and loaded onto a vibration stand since computer simulators were still not up to the challenge. Later on this structure would become Challenger and saved a couple thousand pounds.
Further refinements (thanks in part to huge improvements in computing power) led to Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavor which were all pretty similar in structure, and weighed nearly 7000 lbs less than columbia.
Each shuttle has had increment improvements over earlier versions, and some of the shuttle have been retrofitted with newer avionics systems among other improvements. One of the lesser known ones was the main engine upgrades that made them much more reliable..early engines seem like ticking timebombs when you read about some of the upgrades they've done lately.
columbia can't reach the ISS orbit, even through normal launches. It's too heavy. as pointed out earlier, this is why it has no docking ring.
Much less change orbits while already in orbit. Changing orbit requires ALOT of fuel, and the ISS is in a pretty difficult orbit. Orbital mechanics aren't like ground ones where you point yourself at something and go. You have to accelerate and fly around the planet a few times.
the main advantage to this motor is the increased amount of torque you get for the energy you put in. By putting the rotor on the outside of the stator, you get increased leverage.
To use an example I used on fark last night to explain it... imagine if you jacked your car up off the ground and stuck your finger in a slot in the middle of the wheel. Try to turn the wheel that way. Difficult, because the wheel is heavy and your finger is pretty small. This is how a normal electric motor works.
Now imagine you wrapping your arm around the outside of the wheel in its axis of rotation and pushing or pulling your arm. Quite a bit easier to rotate the wheel, even though the potential energy (contained in your body) is the same.
Like direct drive, ring motors aren't terribly new either. Ceiling fans use them. But a ring motor used for a vehicle... that is new.
few people that post here have more than a very shallow understanding of computer science, engineering and academia. Those of us who do actually have an education - or even degree - in said fields only wish we had the kind of budget and intellectual resources MSR has.
Cause you know, writing shell scripts makes you an expert at all things electronic... at least compared to the rest of your high school computer literacy class.
space hardware is considerably different than what you find terrestrially. Mainly because space is a really harsh environment. The part of your craft pointed at the sun may be a +200 degrees. The opposite side might be -200. And if you turn the craft around, you'll be creating one hell of a thermal shock. This affects everything from any grease you may have in folding joints to simple soldering connections that can break from the rapid expansion/contraction.
Then there is radiation - space is full of it. And if you have a solar storm, god help you. The massive solar storms a few weeks ago are likely what damaged the japanese probe beyond repair.
So you have to factor all these into the design of your craft. Rad-hardened electronics are very expensive to come by and build. Its virtually all custom work. And even if you build 100 craft, thats still too small an order to have economy of scale prices kick in. Every single component in the craft has to be able to handle the rigors.
That said space probes are *amazingly* robust. Often times something will malfunction and the mission controllers will reload new software on it from billions of miles away on a signal thats only a handful of watts. Other times they can reprogram certain components to do things way outside of their intended use if it will help rescue the probe, or parts of it.
On the other hand, sometimes something as simple as a jammed joint or slipped screw can wreck the whole thing.
If they got a patent when they created FAT, it would be near the end of its life (FAT32 might have a few years to go). But other FAT implementations have been around since before the patent was applied for OR microsoft has simply ignored them. If you don't defend your patent with due diligance, (say, wait 15 years to sue someone) you can run into legal difficulties.
And since FAT implementations are nearly ubiquitous today, trying to sue them all would be an exercise in wasting time and the patent would expire before you've even begun litigation.
It seems pretty pointless to try and enforce the patent at this point. The article addresses this to an extent in m-soft's IP policy ideals...
For those of you too lazy or of poor reading comprehension skills...
FAT is an old time file system created in the days of DOS. Its very simple, requiring little overhead in computation and space. Modern file systems are much more efficient at large media sizes, but for your floppies, flash cards and other small portable media, FAT works really, really well since you don't need a beefy device processor to handle it, and its simple enough to create the software to work with it that any competant OS programmer could write a FAT wrapper.
Microsoft is NOT charging for FAT itself. Most people for the past 20 years have reverse engineered FAT because it is very simple. It is widespread, virtually every widely used OS supports it. They're not trying to squeeze money from any of these people.
What they are charging for is their own implementation of FAT. Since they did in fact create the standard, presumably a microsoft licensed FAT implementation will be entirely compatible with FAT since they give you the code and official specs to base your system around. This is what they are charging for. Nothing else.
Now for those who are going to ask "but why would someone pay when you can find those reverse engineered specs easily...". Well, thats a business decision. Do you trust those specs enough? Or "just to be safe" do you want to pay microsoft for their guaranteed implementation?
And thats all this is about. Really, honestly, a non-issue.
They're charging for their own implementation of it. Say you reverse engineer FAT (as virtually everyone has up to this point, its very simple and well documented now...). Then good for you. You're not required to spend a dime, or hire a lawyer, or sacrifice your first born or do anything whatsoever.
But M-soft did in fact create the standard and spec and if you want to be absolutely sure your FAT implementation is completely standards compliant...you can buy theirs. If you want.
for small devices and portable media like flash cards for its simplicity.
So simple in fact, many companies have rolled their own FAT-alikes that are backwards compatible with it and thus likely avoid licensing fees. M-Soft likely sees it as a opportunity to squeeze the last bits out of the old tech... such as "is your FAT system *really* compliant? Why not just buy ours and we guarantee it is!"
I don't see why this is worthy of a story...pretty common business practice out there.
I figure if you're reading this on slashdot you don't need screenshots to find your way around a monitor...
Obviously, this should be done before you plug the machine into any kind of internet connection.
-Go to Start and then Control Panel. -Once in Control Panel, choose Network Connections -Right click on your connection of choice (if there's more than one, do it for all of them) and choose Properties. -Go to the advanced tab and check the Firewall check box.
If you want to know more about how to configure it and modify the settings, click the link below that checkbox for directions.
The 50series of drivers for WinXP cause a system crash when playing certain games with Punkbuster. On my system it hosed some system file requiring a reinstall of the OS off its boot disk. I have a MSI GF3 Ti200.
XP makes the process fairly painless (all your settings are saved for everything), but it still requires a couple of hours to reload off the disk and then reacquire service pack 1 and assorted patches to bring it back up to date. And theres the occasional need to reload a driver or two.
I downgraded to a 40series driver thats about a year old, and it works flawlessly...
I rarely upgrade video drivers due to the old adage "if it aint broke, don't fix it" is a good thing to live by. (case in point: upgrading to the newest 50-series drivers causes Win XP to core dump and wrecks certain system files when playing Enemy Territory on my system)
Because of this, I might only upgrade my drivers once a year or less, basically only if I run into a problem. Trying to remember the exact card model I have after months of never thinking about it is rather difficult. "Hm, GF3..Ti200? Ti400? Which one did I buy again..."
and not concerns by engineers, then the project is doomed already.
Ambitious international projects like this (space station, anyone?) are almost always political hot potatoes, run ridiculously overbudget, and never achieve what they're originally meant to, ie orbitting giant space outpost of useful science, or a gateway to common supersonic air travel.
See also: The Concorde.
The only thing worse than one nation's beauracrats running huge projects that are mainly of engineering and technical expertise, is many nations' beauracrats doing it.
if you even bothered to look at the page you would see the vaccinations he donates. They're to third world nations, things like polio, diptheria and other diseases which have been wiped out in the western world but cause havoc in the third world for no good reason except for the fact they're poor.
cost almost as much as all of SS1's development and launches.
Private industry is the future of space. Another notable thing about SS1's development, is that all of their subcontractors doing things like the rocket motor (except perhaps Thiokol who I believe supplies their graphite fabric) are small businesses themselves.
Dumont's aircraft couldn't even steer or turn and its "flight" was a tiny hop. Wright's 1903 flyer could do that. And as mentioned, the Wright's were flying for several hours in the air prior to Dumont. And if you saw dumont's design, it was more like a box kite with a steam engine attached to it and no control surfaces.
The catapult you speak of was for light-wind conditions. The 1903 flyer made no use of it, it was a later development so they could work in Dayton. And as far as catapults go...how do you think planes get launched off of an aircraft carrier?
The wright's were secretive as a consequence of patent law at the time which prohibited public demonstrations while patents were pending. The patent office was very slow during this period of time as there many technological innovations during the 1900-1910 period.
I was reading it and seeing the pictures on scaled but couldnt quite follow, other than it seems to allow them to adjust the angle the rocket nozzle points in relation to the wings.
Slashdot Mirror
it would be like trying to hover in mid-air without helicopter blades. You'd fall because of gravity.
To gain orbital 'altitude' you have to increase your orbiting speed tangental to the earth by firing your engines. Similarly, when you want to re-enter the atmosphere you fire your retro rockets to slow you down, but as you slow down you decrease your orbital altitude. At a certain speed you'll re-enter the atmosphere, but this speed is still relatively high and requires heat shields.
So to sum it up, orbital altitude is related to the speed you're orbitting the earth.
at least in my life. I first encountered zip on a wide scale basis my last year of high school, several years ago when they install parallel zip 100 drives for the new 'digital art' class that combined photography with photoshop.
So I bought my own USB zip 100 which i still use a couple times a month to back up some files I frequently change.
UTexas Austin also has built in zip drives on most of their machines in the windows based labs.
some cheap third party batteries leave out short circuit prevention circuitry. If you short one of these batteries out and it doesnt have that circuitry, it will rapidly overheat and likely blow.
There could be other risks involved with different chemical formulas as well. Recall the blown capacitor debacle a year ago or so where the one cheap taiwanese company left out the ingredients to make the electrolyte in capacitors not create hydrogen gas. Gas build-ups blew out capacitors on many devices and motherboards (including a Soltek I owned at the time).
This is kind of offtopic, but its interesting.
The amish aren't anti-technology, they're anti technology that requires them to depend on the outside world whether it be through electricity or repairs they can't make themselves with tools they made for themselves etc.
Anyway, automobile to carriage accidents happen and are usually fatal. Its mainly because the carriages are difficult to see at night. They've tried things like putting reflectors on them but haven't been successful.
So a company out there has invented a solar-powered LED flasher that requires zero maintenance and comes with a pretty large battery and some sophisticated charging circuitry to keep it alive for about a dozen years per light. Very high tech stuff. Their first customer was the Amish.
orbiters page at nasa
Basically columbia's structure was overengineered as it was the first. Gotta remember, shuttle was designed in the early 70s when computer simulations were still very crude. Actually the foundations of shuttle design started not long after apollo 11 landed...
While columbia was being built, the designers went and reworked the structure to be optimized as much as possible. They built a test structure and loaded onto a vibration stand since computer simulators were still not up to the challenge. Later on this structure would become Challenger and saved a couple thousand pounds.
Further refinements (thanks in part to huge improvements in computing power) led to Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavor which were all pretty similar in structure, and weighed nearly 7000 lbs less than columbia.
Each shuttle has had increment improvements over earlier versions, and some of the shuttle have been retrofitted with newer avionics systems among other improvements. One of the lesser known ones was the main engine upgrades that made them much more reliable..early engines seem like ticking timebombs when you read about some of the upgrades they've done lately.
and don't turn.
Unless these busses have 4 wheel steering, but I doubt they do.
columbia can't reach the ISS orbit, even through normal launches. It's too heavy. as pointed out earlier, this is why it has no docking ring.
Much less change orbits while already in orbit. Changing orbit requires ALOT of fuel, and the ISS is in a pretty difficult orbit. Orbital mechanics aren't like ground ones where you point yourself at something and go. You have to accelerate and fly around the planet a few times.
the main advantage to this motor is the increased amount of torque you get for the energy you put in. By putting the rotor on the outside of the stator, you get increased leverage.
To use an example I used on fark last night to explain it... imagine if you jacked your car up off the ground and stuck your finger in a slot in the middle of the wheel. Try to turn the wheel that way. Difficult, because the wheel is heavy and your finger is pretty small. This is how a normal electric motor works.
Now imagine you wrapping your arm around the outside of the wheel in its axis of rotation and pushing or pulling your arm. Quite a bit easier to rotate the wheel, even though the potential energy (contained in your body) is the same.
Like direct drive, ring motors aren't terribly new either. Ceiling fans use them. But a ring motor used for a vehicle... that is new.
few people that post here have more than a very shallow understanding of computer science, engineering and academia. Those of us who do actually have an education - or even degree - in said fields only wish we had the kind of budget and intellectual resources MSR has.
Cause you know, writing shell scripts makes you an expert at all things electronic... at least compared to the rest of your high school computer literacy class.
is still faintly available (I believe, if conditions are right). It transmits at 8 watts. And its reached the edge of the solar system.
thats about twice the wattage of an old style car phone.
space hardware is considerably different than what you find terrestrially. Mainly because space is a really harsh environment. The part of your craft pointed at the sun may be a +200 degrees. The opposite side might be -200. And if you turn the craft around, you'll be creating one hell of a thermal shock. This affects everything from any grease you may have in folding joints to simple soldering connections that can break from the rapid expansion/contraction.
Then there is radiation - space is full of it. And if you have a solar storm, god help you. The massive solar storms a few weeks ago are likely what damaged the japanese probe beyond repair.
So you have to factor all these into the design of your craft. Rad-hardened electronics are very expensive to come by and build. Its virtually all custom work. And even if you build 100 craft, thats still too small an order to have economy of scale prices kick in. Every single component in the craft has to be able to handle the rigors.
That said space probes are *amazingly* robust. Often times something will malfunction and the mission controllers will reload new software on it from billions of miles away on a signal thats only a handful of watts. Other times they can reprogram certain components to do things way outside of their intended use if it will help rescue the probe, or parts of it.
On the other hand, sometimes something as simple as a jammed joint or slipped screw can wreck the whole thing.
If they got a patent when they created FAT, it would be near the end of its life (FAT32 might have a few years to go). But other FAT implementations have been around since before the patent was applied for OR microsoft has simply ignored them. If you don't defend your patent with due diligance, (say, wait 15 years to sue someone) you can run into legal difficulties.
And since FAT implementations are nearly ubiquitous today, trying to sue them all would be an exercise in wasting time and the patent would expire before you've even begun litigation.
It seems pretty pointless to try and enforce the patent at this point. The article addresses this to an extent in m-soft's IP policy ideals...
For those of you too lazy or of poor reading comprehension skills...
FAT is an old time file system created in the days of DOS. Its very simple, requiring little overhead in computation and space. Modern file systems are much more efficient at large media sizes, but for your floppies, flash cards and other small portable media, FAT works really, really well since you don't need a beefy device processor to handle it, and its simple enough to create the software to work with it that any competant OS programmer could write a FAT wrapper.
Microsoft is NOT charging for FAT itself. Most people for the past 20 years have reverse engineered FAT because it is very simple. It is widespread, virtually every widely used OS supports it. They're not trying to squeeze money from any of these people.
What they are charging for is their own implementation of FAT. Since they did in fact create the standard, presumably a microsoft licensed FAT implementation will be entirely compatible with FAT since they give you the code and official specs to base your system around. This is what they are charging for. Nothing else.
Now for those who are going to ask "but why would someone pay when you can find those reverse engineered specs easily...". Well, thats a business decision. Do you trust those specs enough? Or "just to be safe" do you want to pay microsoft for their guaranteed implementation?
And thats all this is about. Really, honestly, a non-issue.
They're charging for their own implementation of it. Say you reverse engineer FAT (as virtually everyone has up to this point, its very simple and well documented now...). Then good for you. You're not required to spend a dime, or hire a lawyer, or sacrifice your first born or do anything whatsoever.
But M-soft did in fact create the standard and spec and if you want to be absolutely sure your FAT implementation is completely standards compliant...you can buy theirs. If you want.
Thats all this is.
for small devices and portable media like flash cards for its simplicity.
So simple in fact, many companies have rolled their own FAT-alikes that are backwards compatible with it and thus likely avoid licensing fees. M-Soft likely sees it as a opportunity to squeeze the last bits out of the old tech... such as "is your FAT system *really* compliant? Why not just buy ours and we guarantee it is!"
I don't see why this is worthy of a story...pretty common business practice out there.
I figure if you're reading this on slashdot you don't need screenshots to find your way around a monitor...
Obviously, this should be done before you plug the machine into any kind of internet connection.
-Go to Start and then Control Panel.
-Once in Control Panel, choose Network Connections
-Right click on your connection of choice (if there's more than one, do it for all of them) and choose Properties.
-Go to the advanced tab and check the Firewall check box.
If you want to know more about how to configure it and modify the settings, click the link below that checkbox for directions.
The 50series of drivers for WinXP cause a system crash when playing certain games with Punkbuster. On my system it hosed some system file requiring a reinstall of the OS off its boot disk. I have a MSI GF3 Ti200.
XP makes the process fairly painless (all your settings are saved for everything), but it still requires a couple of hours to reload off the disk and then reacquire service pack 1 and assorted patches to bring it back up to date. And theres the occasional need to reload a driver or two.
I downgraded to a 40series driver thats about a year old, and it works flawlessly...
I rarely upgrade video drivers due to the old adage "if it aint broke, don't fix it" is a good thing to live by. (case in point: upgrading to the newest 50-series drivers causes Win XP to core dump and wrecks certain system files when playing Enemy Territory on my system)
Because of this, I might only upgrade my drivers once a year or less, basically only if I run into a problem. Trying to remember the exact card model I have after months of never thinking about it is rather difficult. "Hm, GF3..Ti200? Ti400? Which one did I buy again..."
Ambitious international projects like this (space station, anyone?) are almost always political hot potatoes, run ridiculously overbudget, and never achieve what they're originally meant to, ie orbitting giant space outpost of useful science, or a gateway to common supersonic air travel.
See also: The Concorde.
The only thing worse than one nation's beauracrats running huge projects that are mainly of engineering and technical expertise, is many nations' beauracrats doing it.
if you even bothered to look at the page you would see the vaccinations he donates. They're to third world nations, things like polio, diptheria and other diseases which have been wiped out in the western world but cause havoc in the third world for no good reason except for the fact they're poor.
gates has given away billions in vaccinations and AIDS research. In fact, he's the worlds largest donator, ever.
Gates Foundation
Private industry is the future of space. Another notable thing about SS1's development, is that all of their subcontractors doing things like the rocket motor (except perhaps Thiokol who I believe supplies their graphite fabric) are small businesses themselves.
Best known for cell phones, they were originally a paper company and are still a rubber snowboot and tire company.
Dumont's aircraft couldn't even steer or turn and its "flight" was a tiny hop. Wright's 1903 flyer could do that. And as mentioned, the Wright's were flying for several hours in the air prior to Dumont. And if you saw dumont's design, it was more like a box kite with a steam engine attached to it and no control surfaces.
The catapult you speak of was for light-wind conditions. The 1903 flyer made no use of it, it was a later development so they could work in Dayton. And as far as catapults go...how do you think planes get launched off of an aircraft carrier?
The wright's were secretive as a consequence of patent law at the time which prohibited public demonstrations while patents were pending. The patent office was very slow during this period of time as there many technological innovations during the 1900-1910 period.
I was reading it and seeing the pictures on scaled but couldnt quite follow, other than it seems to allow them to adjust the angle the rocket nozzle points in relation to the wings.