funded, perhaps. But not built. The US govt doesnt build any spacecraft. Other companies do, like boeing, TRW etc. Also, many of these companies put a significant stake themselves in the projects rather than 100% govt. funding. Then there is competition between the companies for the awarding of the contract, so building a machine that works right the first time and consistently pays, literally.
In europe, most of the major aerospace companies are actually government owned, and there arent very many of them as a result.
Indeed, the most difficult part is how to describe it. This is a field of study though, one that interestingly, SETI has a part in. How would we communicate with extraterrestrials in a meaningful way?
Presumably, one way would be mathematics. 2+2=4 everywhere in the universe. Therefore, a system based on some fundamental math properties would be useful.
The book 'Contact' briefly dived into this, as the contacters sent diagrams for the machine, along with a primer on how to make sense of them by using various universal things to describe the concepts used in the schematics.
For example, to describe what the symbol for pi is, you might try drawing a circle, a line halfway across the circle and a couple of dots to describe "2piR", which is the universal equation for circumference.
100101010... etc. What does a text file look like in binary? 1010100100 etc.
There is no difference between a text file and a video file, except in how the voltage pulses are acted upon. Thus, an explanation must be given as to how to properly interpret the strings of binary digits. Suppose you compress the data, why would they be using the same compression algorithm, or even know how to detect it? If you want someone to be able to read it, wouldn't you want to make it as easy as possible for them?
I was reading an anecdote the other day about early NASA data tapes. The machines to read them have long since disappeared, so in order to get the data off they pulled some 80 year old engineers who built the things out of retirement to interpret the data.
Awhile back I was brainstorming up some ways to preserve current mediums which only exist in digital or magnetic forms. Like audio and video. Suppose you want to preserve a specific bit of video for viewing 2000 years from now. Not only do you need a medium for storage that will last that long, but you must deal with the certainty that no equipment will exist capable of playing it.
So one way would be to both preserve a general specification of how to read the data, and then the data itself. So not only would you need a method of encoding the song onto paper, but you'd need to include the details of an algorithm - simple enough that people whose language may be very different from ours - can recreate it using their machines of the time. And then they can feed the data into it, and replay the music/video/whatever as we intended it to be seen.
Kodak's been working on this problem for quite some time. Endura paper
When properly stored, this paper will suffer no degradation for 200 years. And that's even with complex color photo development. Something like storing binary data or barcodes should be readable on such paper for much longer than that.
i thought of this the other day. It's kind of amusing, but it would work for absolutely important data.
Get alot of archive quality, acid-free paper. Get a printer with alot of archive quality ink and print out the data in binary. Dots or slashes would work fine for the 1's and 0's.
Archive quality paper and ink lasts for hundreds of years. Should you lose the data on a magnetic or other storage medium, you could always run these papers through a scanner with some OCR and retrieve the data.
Sure, a fire or flood could damage these if you don't have them protected against that, but at least you won't have to worry about deteoriation of the medium.
we did use vhdl for most of it though. I recall an early design class I had where the professor demanded we design a multiplier - at the transistor level.
most people here know very little about how the machines actually work. They just like to claim they do because they can write insignificant shell scripts.
Some things, like microprocessor design, simply can't be gleaned without a proper education and then experience working in the field. Even the best undergrad program will only take you to about the pentium II level in design. I had a course where we built (paper design, and simulated of course) a processor that was a PII equivalent.
Anything higher than that... well, go get a job with amd or intel.
Are slashdotters extremely naive or something? Every company takes a look at the competition and compares it to their own product, distributing memos on whats better about the competition so that they can improve on their own products.
Considering how warm laptops can get on the bottom these days you have more to fear from that. Sperm is very sensitive to temperature changes and heat is a prime enemy of them (which is why the testicles are outside the body instead of inside)
You miss the point of the tablet pc. My father on one hand IS the target at his work. Down in the machine shop and testing areas they're always taking down notes and entering numbers from the machines. This requires running all over the rather large shop. It's not physically nice to carry around a laptop (no place to set it down), so they use a pad of paper.
These numbers still have to be entered into a computer later on to be crunched (via excel usually), errors happen as a result of messy handwriting transferance, resulting in big headaches. Solution: Use the tablet PC to enter the numbers directly into excel as they're standing at the machinery. Crunch there. No mess, no errors, instant results.
This is the market of the tablet PC. Not your uncle.
I had (prior to purchasing a much, much, better netgear router) the same problems the above poster had with UDP packets hanging the thing, and no firmware upgrade would fix it.
Maybe they had a bad run of the things early on? I got mine a few months after they first appeared (March 2000 i think was the original firmware date) It wouldnt surprise me if they cut corners to keep them $20 under competitors.
I had one of these piles of shit for a year! Anything UDP packet heavy (gaming, streaming audio/video...) will take this thing down. Weird thing is, it was intermittant. There was a couple months out of the year it did it with only 5 minutes worth, and other times when it never crashed at all.
It also CORRUPTS data within the network. I was running apache on my system and when i accessed it with loopback (or from any other computer on the network), the pages would come back garbled in some way half the time. It did this for people outside the network too on early versions of firmware, but they fixed the outside problem. I guess they didnt bother to check inside. When I plugged the system straight into the modem, problems disappeared.
After getting no support (box says '24/7'...I tried 8 times for a total of 16 hours worth of being put on hold) and no returned emails, I kicked this piece of shit to the curb and bought a Netgear.
Havent had a problem since. Spend the extra $20 and buy a netgear.
Artillery shells are easily tracked by radar. There are radar systems designed specifically for this so MLRS systems can launch rockets at artillery guns as they fire.
Now you can attach a laser turret to your fire-finding radar and blow the shells down AND use your MLRS to destroy the artillery setup.
The face of war has changed quite a bit with this bit of technology.
instances like the above case are extremely rare. like they say, 25 feet is a max range. My keyboard doesnt work beyond 10. Except for people living in areas with certain environmental conditions (which are intermittant), this isnt a problem. Unless the hacker decides to steal your info by getting in the same room as you (this is of course, after actually FINDING you) its simply not going to happen.
Ever since reading about the print/paintability of OLED's and the like i've always wondered 'can you combine this with a camera and create a kind of cloaking device?'
Like have a rear facing camera which projects what it sees on the front end of the vehicle. It wouldn't be perfect, im sure there'd be quite a bit of distortion and the like, but surely better than just a mottled paint job.
the orbit is as such that after orbiting earth for awhile, it builds the momentum to escape earth's orbit and fling itself back out and around the sun.
Interplanetary probes use this method all the time for escaping earth's gravity. After launch, they orbit the earth for awhile building up momentum (this is known as a 'gravity assist') then fling themselves out.
This is actually a much more common cosmic event than actually capturing something in permanent orbit. Doing that requires careful placement in the case of artificial satellites or just random chance in the case of natural ones.
The radiator would have to be enormous to get cooling levels that one approaches on earth (this being of course, that heat transfers well into molecular mixes such as the atmosphere. Since space is a vacuum the only method of losing heat is radiation)
I don't have any good hard figures on this, but it seems to me that if you want to cool something down that near absolute zero, you're going to need something a bit more active than a big radiator. In labs here on earth that sort of cooling can only be done on a nanoscopic level, generally using lasers to slow down atoms.
You even quoted it...'related material'. I read about this a few days ago in a more in depth piece. He stole many things, the movie being only one of them. He also stole assorted props and other things. The cops raided his mom's basement where he was living (no, really) and found it chock full of star wars goods.
is measured in lb/sq. inch. The reason the blast is so damaging to buildings is because of wall size magnifies the force to a few tons of pressure on the side of the wall. The towers if you notice, are open, thin bars that present little surface area for the blast to contact. What is exposed is well anchored.
Slashdot Mirror
thats the first funny and logical one of those ive read on slashdot. Most of them are just stupid. You guys ain't got nothing on fark...
In europe, most of the major aerospace companies are actually government owned, and there arent very many of them as a result.
Presumably, one way would be mathematics. 2+2=4 everywhere in the universe. Therefore, a system based on some fundamental math properties would be useful.
The book 'Contact' briefly dived into this, as the contacters sent diagrams for the machine, along with a primer on how to make sense of them by using various universal things to describe the concepts used in the schematics.
For example, to describe what the symbol for pi is, you might try drawing a circle, a line halfway across the circle and a couple of dots to describe "2piR", which is the universal equation for circumference.
There is no difference between a text file and a video file, except in how the voltage pulses are acted upon. Thus, an explanation must be given as to how to properly interpret the strings of binary digits. Suppose you compress the data, why would they be using the same compression algorithm, or even know how to detect it? If you want someone to be able to read it, wouldn't you want to make it as easy as possible for them?
I was reading an anecdote the other day about early NASA data tapes. The machines to read them have long since disappeared, so in order to get the data off they pulled some 80 year old engineers who built the things out of retirement to interpret the data.
So one way would be to both preserve a general specification of how to read the data, and then the data itself. So not only would you need a method of encoding the song onto paper, but you'd need to include the details of an algorithm - simple enough that people whose language may be very different from ours - can recreate it using their machines of the time. And then they can feed the data into it, and replay the music/video/whatever as we intended it to be seen.
Endura paper
When properly stored, this paper will suffer no degradation for 200 years. And that's even with complex color photo development. Something like storing binary data or barcodes should be readable on such paper for much longer than that.
Get alot of archive quality, acid-free paper. Get a printer with alot of archive quality ink and print out the data in binary. Dots or slashes would work fine for the 1's and 0's.
Archive quality paper and ink lasts for hundreds of years. Should you lose the data on a magnetic or other storage medium, you could always run these papers through a scanner with some OCR and retrieve the data.
Sure, a fire or flood could damage these if you don't have them protected against that, but at least you won't have to worry about deteoriation of the medium.
That was fun, let me tell you.
Some things, like microprocessor design, simply can't be gleaned without a proper education and then experience working in the field. Even the best undergrad program will only take you to about the pentium II level in design. I had a course where we built (paper design, and simulated of course) a processor that was a PII equivalent.
Anything higher than that... well, go get a job with amd or intel.
on something similar for awhile, though its web-based. Link to my site is in the sig, the project is on sourceforge at here.
This isn't news. It's business.
I think its okay to dispose of them like those others. Probably safer to drop them in the trash than regular nicads..
Considering how warm laptops can get on the bottom these days you have more to fear from that. Sperm is very sensitive to temperature changes and heat is a prime enemy of them (which is why the testicles are outside the body instead of inside)
require more power than a pda provides and need a full PC. Excel is the most commonly used one, but they interface with much larger engineering apps.
These numbers still have to be entered into a computer later on to be crunched (via excel usually), errors happen as a result of messy handwriting transferance, resulting in big headaches. Solution: Use the tablet PC to enter the numbers directly into excel as they're standing at the machinery. Crunch there. No mess, no errors, instant results.
This is the market of the tablet PC. Not your uncle.
Maybe they had a bad run of the things early on? I got mine a few months after they first appeared (March 2000 i think was the original firmware date) It wouldnt surprise me if they cut corners to keep them $20 under competitors.
It also CORRUPTS data within the network. I was running apache on my system and when i accessed it with loopback (or from any other computer on the network), the pages would come back garbled in some way half the time. It did this for people outside the network too on early versions of firmware, but they fixed the outside problem. I guess they didnt bother to check inside. When I plugged the system straight into the modem, problems disappeared.
After getting no support (box says '24/7'...I tried 8 times for a total of 16 hours worth of being put on hold) and no returned emails, I kicked this piece of shit to the curb and bought a Netgear.
Havent had a problem since. Spend the extra $20 and buy a netgear.
Now you can attach a laser turret to your fire-finding radar and blow the shells down AND use your MLRS to destroy the artillery setup.
The face of war has changed quite a bit with this bit of technology.
instances like the above case are extremely rare. like they say, 25 feet is a max range. My keyboard doesnt work beyond 10. Except for people living in areas with certain environmental conditions (which are intermittant), this isnt a problem. Unless the hacker decides to steal your info by getting in the same room as you (this is of course, after actually FINDING you) its simply not going to happen.
Like have a rear facing camera which projects what it sees on the front end of the vehicle. It wouldn't be perfect, im sure there'd be quite a bit of distortion and the like, but surely better than just a mottled paint job.
Interplanetary probes use this method all the time for escaping earth's gravity. After launch, they orbit the earth for awhile building up momentum (this is known as a 'gravity assist') then fling themselves out.
This is actually a much more common cosmic event than actually capturing something in permanent orbit. Doing that requires careful placement in the case of artificial satellites or just random chance in the case of natural ones.
'quite some time' is quite a bit longer than 12 months.
I don't have any good hard figures on this, but it seems to me that if you want to cool something down that near absolute zero, you're going to need something a bit more active than a big radiator. In labs here on earth that sort of cooling can only be done on a nanoscopic level, generally using lasers to slow down atoms.
You even quoted it ...'related material'. I read about this a few days ago in a more in depth piece. He stole many things, the movie being only one of them. He also stole assorted props and other things. The cops raided his mom's basement where he was living (no, really) and found it chock full of star wars goods.
is measured in lb/sq. inch. The reason the blast is so damaging to buildings is because of wall size magnifies the force to a few tons of pressure on the side of the wall. The towers if you notice, are open, thin bars that present little surface area for the blast to contact. What is exposed is well anchored.