Actually, this seems pretty reasonable. I would want to be able to print or save a few pages though at a time for reference. Sometimes I just need the paper version!
It needs attitude jets as in "The Ringworld Engineers" because if slighlty nudged, the instabilities would increase much more than with an orbiting body. A nudge could occur just from something like a solar flare or even over time, solar wind.
Could they block wget? It can give any browser ID that you want, plus referrers. All they can do is to rate limit you.
Personally, I have my Perl bookshelf for on the road. I don't need Safari yet, but the breakeven isn't much considering the price of new books. (a 10 bookshelf is about the same cost as between 4 and 5 real books on your shelf). I guess the next time I need to extend my zoo or to get newer animals, I'll expect to go on safari.
The problem is that most telescopes these days, whether optical or radio are project financed. They depend on a stream of researchers with time financed by funding authorities. They don't tend to have much time that is just 'open', as in unallocated. The pros could definitely do the job, remember when Jodrell Bank was used to pull down images from one of the Soviet Lunar missions. The problem is to get a number of telescopes tasked would be nigh on impossible unless someone could convince the authorities in the various countries that it was a good idea.
Amateurs do what they want. Their dishes are smaller, but they can choose where they look. The same goes for smaller University instruments. As regards timing, with the advent of GPS, getting good atomic time really isn't a major issue. In earlier times, people could lock to standard frequency transmissions but these are only good over a limited range.
What you pick up when you point your antenna somewhere in the cosmos is essentially just noise. The signal sits under the noise and when you amplify the signal, the noise is amplified with it.
When you have more than one antenna, interferometry allows you to look for coincidences between the signals which would not necessarily be reflected in the noise level. Multiply the antennaes and you have a very nice synthetic antenna which would exceed the resolution (and signal pulling ability) of a single DSN antenna. The paricipants would have to use some fairly high tech though, especially for cooled RF front-ends.
Why? You do not need a rigid antenna in space. A lot of the solidity of a ground based antenna is because it has to withstand a lot of wind. Then the head amp has to be kept cold to reduce the noise. Both of these are a lot easier in space. There also isn't the problem of ground (or even air based) interference, not to many microwave ovens or mobile phones in space!
One of the early satellite projects sent out an aluminiumised mylar ball that was inflated. Radio waves were bounced off the thing from the ground. The technology isn't difficult.
It wouldn't be hard to put something up that could be inflated. Sure it would deflate with micrometiorites or whatever, but that would take time and a little gas goes a long way in space.
The main asset would be the ability to do really large baseline interferometry.
The client may specify implementation languages for the deliverables but the other issues are maintenance and code reuse. However most programmers can maintain most scripting languages, but the converse isn't always true. Managers may care about this.
but certain contracts let by the government contractually define a difference between 'coding' and'scripting'
Um, why? I know that managing interferes with deep coding (lots of interruptions), but that shouldn't stop managers who can code from helping with some of the 'grunt' routines, especially with the tech leads. As far as I can tell there really shouldn't be a distinction except when the customer is specifying high performance (need for compiled code) or a scripted component to allow for simple customisation and extension.
I don't think anyone can disagree that Perl is not an appropriate choice of language for production systems.
Maybe not, but it (or another scripting language) definitely holds one heck of a lot of productions systems together. You can write obfuscated Perl, but you don't have to. You can also write Obfuscated C.
The VAX architecture did end up being subsetted and some of the string instructions were dumped (to be implemented via emulation, or in-line code generated during compilation). However, block moves stayed.
The main point about the VAX arcitecture is that there was very close liasion between the OS architects and the hardware developers, the result being a secure operating system that worked well with little reources.
Interestingly enough, VMS did get ported to the Alpha, and some of the OS level MACRO-32 assembler code ended up being compiled for the Alpha. Some of the biggest apps still run on OpenVMS Alpha, and I await with trepidation the port to Itanium.
George Soros is a Hungarian born derivatives and currency speculator. To put it mildly, he makes a lot of money. He does like to give something back to the former comunist states through his "Open Studies Institute" and Soros Foundation which has been quietly doing good helping in a variety of programmes to help them transition to market economies and to better engage them with the west. They have also been involved with health care projects and education.
Essentially, he has been at it since the fall of communism and over the years has probably equalled the Bill and Melissa fund.
Fixed point arithmetic is definitely one use. Floating point always takes more times than fixed to process so the idea is that some people try to do as much as possible by scaling numbers to fit inside an integer.
One of the other winner's is cryptography which has to do multiple precision calculations. 64 bits means approximately half the number of operations as with 32-bits. Cryptography is hardly a major user of resources at the moment, but by the time we have the signing of executables and so on as part of the TCPA, there will be a lot of cryptography going on in the background starting from boot.
The other issue is ATC. It is easier to move around one big aircraft than lots of smaller ones. However, I would be interested to know ehat they do about separation.
One day, ATC will be sufficiently upgraded to allow aircraft to fly shortest path routes and to cope with increased congestion. At the moment, most aircraft do not fly "as the crow" and ATC delays form one of the largest problems in congested areas.
I dunno about fraud but the company was organised in an interesting way with CargoLifter AG and a separate CargoLifter Financ AG. The first sat in the former DDR and enjoyed a lot of state support. The other part sat in Frankfurt and as far as I know, needed some better accounting.
When they obtained a listing, instead of going to the Neuer Markt with a high disclosure requirements (like quarterly balance sheets to US-GAAPor IAS), they went to the Geregelt Markt, a sort of exchange based OTC market.
If the project had a link to any of the existing German blimp constructors, maybe it would have worked. However, it may just have been a way of taking state aid money and running. I agree with you that the market for such ships is quite large, but CargoLifter has given this kind of thing a bad name for the moment.
Amazingly enough it looks like Universal Express may be trying to pick up the pieces.
There is actually quite a market for moving large pieces of equipment around, and it would be good to get them off the roads. River/Canal helps but they usually have to move the last few km over land, which is always problematic.
OTOH, Citrix can be slow and expensive. Windows wasn't really designed for networking so simple stuff like scrolling through a document on the server can eat up large amounts of CPU.
A question on the pricing, I guess you still have to buy client licences for Win2K Server in addition to the Citrix costs?
It certainly helps with the management of applications (you just deploy on the server). The price differentials now for clients means that you end up with 8 users killing the 1GHz server dead, whilst they have 1.6GHz systems on their desktops doing almost nothing.
You are quite right and one of the major issues is the holes in the grid, even at 3Km. Satellite based observation dosn't help much as you only 'see' the tops of any clouds and have no way to measure barometric pressure.
Many ships record information for the meteorlogical services, but the trouble is that only works where there are ships. In some of the meteorologically interesting places such as the poles are often shrouded in clouds and have few weather stations.
The truth is that many points must be interpolated. Points closest to civilisation are quite good because there are enough measuring stations. This means that short-term weather forecasts are quite good (except in the UK, where they may be right but delayed or advanced by up to a day) but deteriorates over about three days and over a week or so is extremely difficult.
Forget the calculations, if you don't have data points, you are just speculating.
You mean to tell me that MS has disable the copy-and-paste, too?
A long time ago, Digital were working on Mandatory Access Controls for X WIndows. You could copy text, but you could only paste to a window of the same or higher level of trust unless you had a special 'DISCLOSURE' privilege. Same goes for printers, you could only print a document on a printer that had the associated trust level.
I know what happened with Microsoft before on getting their security certifications. They tend to forget a lot of the grunt work around implementations so you will probably still be able to screenshot and paste, let alone paste documents.
Actually, I know Cargolifter very well. They may end up with their assets being taken over by someone else so the project may not totally die.
Their idea wasn't so revolutionary but they seemed to be doiing somethings in a very interesting way. The company was split into two, one half for finance and one for production. When the company listed, it went onto the "Geregelt Markt", which is technically an exchange based OTC with minimal listing requirements. If they had gone to the "Neuer Markt", they would have had to produce US-GAAP or IAS accounts. As their producion facility sat in the fomer East-Germany, they had a lot of state help. Unfortunately the old skills were on the Boden See (Lake Constance) where the Zeppelins were built (and some newer blimps in recent times).
I understand through my own connections that there was some wauestionable goings on in Cargo-Lifter Finance AG, so only part of the money ended up in Cargo Lifter AG's production facility. They did lead their shareholders on somewhat, but they could have had production by next year and profitability a couple of years after that. Their product was unique and absolutely ideal for some specific purposes where there is little or no infrastructure (I suppose thats why a US company is interested in picking up the pieces).
Mind you all of this was gleaned after some beers with various market people (and one of their senior management) so is probably totally unreliable. The take-over isn't and was reported in the German edition of the financial times this week.
You are right in that it isn't a hive collective, but you would be suprised how much knowhow spreads around a large industy. Ok, U-boats haven't been made in bulk in 50 years, but pressure vessels are - Germany still has a reputation for chemical engineering, which means designing for huge pressures. If you are in the right place, picking up knowhow is relatively easy (it isn't as though this is secret stuff).
They have also been very conservative with their design (almost dissappointly so). I didn't catch the bit about the robot welder, but the tubular constrction would make this easier.
Yes, I agree with you about the resources. These guys must have access to a lot of cash and/or equipment.
The idea is that you buy parts that are designed to handle the pressure. This isn't difficult and it is quite easy to find good industrial compoinents in germany (may be expensive though). Although sub engineering sounds difficult, remember, in reality we are talking about pressure vessels and their associated bits - not much different to the chemical industry.
Also remember that Germans built rather a lot of diesel-electric subs over the years. Probably more than anyone else, so there is a lot of knowhow around. So what if they use lead-acid battries, many hundreds have done so before.
I guess the constructors know a lot about subs. Having hand-built the thing, they probably have a better idea than most about the construction quality. It is one thing to depend on a weld that the lowest bidder did, it is another to depend on one that you did yourself.
I wonder if the guy who posted this had made an ad against piracy out of this, whether AOL would have been so terrible to him? It would have still been as funny by the rest of us.
Th trouble is that the screen shots that accopany the pictiures are of such a high quality that this is definitely upsetting for the copyright owners, who like to guard every image (publicity stills are carefully selected).
The DVDs that go out as screeners don't have subtitles, at least no subtitles, English or otherwise when they are ripped. Someone who decides to make the bootlegs available in a foreign country then gets the subtitles prepared locally. They have no script and their Engrish may be laughable, hence the poor quality of the translation. Some countries (particularly former Soviet countries) will mix a single voice reading the lines on top of the soundtrack (with the original sound in the background).
Mind you, living in Europe, I see some pretty awful local synch translations of films anyway. A friend who is in the translation business tells me that you get the same money to translate a movie as you do to translate a letter.
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Actually, this seems pretty reasonable. I would want to be able to print or save a few pages though at a time for reference. Sometimes I just need the paper version!
It needs attitude jets as in "The Ringworld Engineers" because if slighlty nudged, the instabilities would increase much more than with an orbiting body. A nudge could occur just from something like a solar flare or even over time, solar wind.
Personally, I have my Perl bookshelf for on the road. I don't need Safari yet, but the breakeven isn't much considering the price of new books. (a 10 bookshelf is about the same cost as between 4 and 5 real books on your shelf). I guess the next time I need to extend my zoo or to get newer animals, I'll expect to go on safari.
What confusion?
Amateurs do what they want. Their dishes are smaller, but they can choose where they look. The same goes for smaller University instruments. As regards timing, with the advent of GPS, getting good atomic time really isn't a major issue. In earlier times, people could lock to standard frequency transmissions but these are only good over a limited range.
When you have more than one antenna, interferometry allows you to look for coincidences between the signals which would not necessarily be reflected in the noise level. Multiply the antennaes and you have a very nice synthetic antenna which would exceed the resolution (and signal pulling ability) of a single DSN antenna. The paricipants would have to use some fairly high tech though, especially for cooled RF front-ends.
One of the early satellite projects sent out an aluminiumised mylar ball that was inflated. Radio waves were bounced off the thing from the ground. The technology isn't difficult.
It wouldn't be hard to put something up that could be inflated. Sure it would deflate with micrometiorites or whatever, but that would take time and a little gas goes a long way in space.
The main asset would be the ability to do really large baseline interferometry.
The last thing we want is a rerun of ST:TMP.
The client may specify implementation languages for the deliverables but the other issues are maintenance and code reuse. However most programmers can maintain most scripting languages, but the converse isn't always true. Managers may care about this.
The main point about the VAX arcitecture is that there was very close liasion between the OS architects and the hardware developers, the result being a secure operating system that worked well with little reources.
Interestingly enough, VMS did get ported to the Alpha, and some of the OS level MACRO-32 assembler code ended up being compiled for the Alpha. Some of the biggest apps still run on OpenVMS Alpha, and I await with trepidation the port to Itanium.
Essentially, he has been at it since the fall of communism and over the years has probably equalled the Bill and Melissa fund.
One of the other winner's is cryptography which has to do multiple precision calculations. 64 bits means approximately half the number of operations as with 32-bits. Cryptography is hardly a major user of resources at the moment, but by the time we have the signing of executables and so on as part of the TCPA, there will be a lot of cryptography going on in the background starting from boot.
One day, ATC will be sufficiently upgraded to allow aircraft to fly shortest path routes and to cope with increased congestion. At the moment, most aircraft do not fly "as the crow" and ATC delays form one of the largest problems in congested areas.
When they obtained a listing, instead of going to the Neuer Markt with a high disclosure requirements (like quarterly balance sheets to US-GAAPor IAS), they went to the Geregelt Markt, a sort of exchange based OTC market.
If the project had a link to any of the existing German blimp constructors, maybe it would have worked. However, it may just have been a way of taking state aid money and running. I agree with you that the market for such ships is quite large, but CargoLifter has given this kind of thing a bad name for the moment.
There is actually quite a market for moving large pieces of equipment around, and it would be good to get them off the roads. River/Canal helps but they usually have to move the last few km over land, which is always problematic.
A question on the pricing, I guess you still have to buy client licences for Win2K Server in addition to the Citrix costs?
It certainly helps with the management of applications (you just deploy on the server). The price differentials now for clients means that you end up with 8 users killing the 1GHz server dead, whilst they have 1.6GHz systems on their desktops doing almost nothing.
Many ships record information for the meteorlogical services, but the trouble is that only works where there are ships. In some of the meteorologically interesting places such as the poles are often shrouded in clouds and have few weather stations.
The truth is that many points must be interpolated. Points closest to civilisation are quite good because there are enough measuring stations. This means that short-term weather forecasts are quite good (except in the UK, where they may be right but delayed or advanced by up to a day) but deteriorates over about three days and over a week or so is extremely difficult.
Forget the calculations, if you don't have data points, you are just speculating.
The kind of places that would be buying this do not allow cameras to be brought in. Mobiles with cameras would definitely not be allowed.
I know what happened with Microsoft before on getting their security certifications. They tend to forget a lot of the grunt work around implementations so you will probably still be able to screenshot and paste, let alone paste documents.
Their idea wasn't so revolutionary but they seemed to be doiing somethings in a very interesting way. The company was split into two, one half for finance and one for production. When the company listed, it went onto the "Geregelt Markt", which is technically an exchange based OTC with minimal listing requirements. If they had gone to the "Neuer Markt", they would have had to produce US-GAAP or IAS accounts. As their producion facility sat in the fomer East-Germany, they had a lot of state help. Unfortunately the old skills were on the Boden See (Lake Constance) where the Zeppelins were built (and some newer blimps in recent times).
I understand through my own connections that there was some wauestionable goings on in Cargo-Lifter Finance AG, so only part of the money ended up in Cargo Lifter AG's production facility. They did lead their shareholders on somewhat, but they could have had production by next year and profitability a couple of years after that. Their product was unique and absolutely ideal for some specific purposes where there is little or no infrastructure (I suppose thats why a US company is interested in picking up the pieces).
Mind you all of this was gleaned after some beers with various market people (and one of their senior management) so is probably totally unreliable. The take-over isn't and was reported in the German edition of the financial times this week.
They have also been very conservative with their design (almost dissappointly so). I didn't catch the bit about the robot welder, but the tubular constrction would make this easier.
Yes, I agree with you about the resources. These guys must have access to a lot of cash and/or equipment.
Also remember that Germans built rather a lot of diesel-electric subs over the years. Probably more than anyone else, so there is a lot of knowhow around. So what if they use lead-acid battries, many hundreds have done so before.
I guess the constructors know a lot about subs. Having hand-built the thing, they probably have a better idea than most about the construction quality. It is one thing to depend on a weld that the lowest bidder did, it is another to depend on one that you did yourself.
Th trouble is that the screen shots that accopany the pictiures are of such a high quality that this is definitely upsetting for the copyright owners, who like to guard every image (publicity stills are carefully selected).
Mind you, living in Europe, I see some pretty awful local synch translations of films anyway. A friend who is in the translation business tells me that you get the same money to translate a movie as you do to translate a letter.