because ABS actually INCRESES stopping distance vs. properly trained drivers w/o ABS --in every circumstance
I'll grant you in most circumstances; but there are a few instances where antilock brakes can beat a properly trained driver. Basically all of them are situations where there is a large difference in traction between some of the wheels.
Situations like, half the car in on ice, gravel, dirt, and half on pavement. Braking during high speed cornering... These are situations where the antilock brake system's ability to control each wheel independently can beat out a trained driver, who only has the one brake pedal.
But the point of antilock brakes, is that it becomes very hard to lose steering ability, even when braking hard, and it becomes very hard to lock up the wheels and slide. (I say very hard because during a driver training course we were required, as a learning experience, to use the antilock brakes while in a very tight fast turn; The car slit out sideways despite the best efforts of the ABS system.)
I think that a web site for a small shop will not do any good unless the costumers can find it in google when they are searching for the products directly, and the site has, at least, descriptions, photos and prices of the items to be sold
It can be useful just to have a website with store hours, directions, and contact info.
I know I've looked up web sites just to find the hours a store it open. It's faster than getting out the phone book, looking up the store, calling them and asking how late they are open.
A simple web site that just states the general sort of store they are (hardware, bridal, groceries, etc) hours of operation, directions and a phone number / email is a decent start for a small business. Especially since small businesses tend to deal with small local areas (obviously there are execptions); for places that don't sell the stuff online listing every item is overkill. You don't care if someone half way across the country can see every item you sell if the only people who stop by are from the surrounding community.
My father's bill was $2.00 less than mine, but he finally gave in when his ISP stopped accepting rotary calls after an equipment upgrade.
How could an ISP "stop accepting rotary calls" The ISP doesn't handle the dialing; their modems just answer the phone line ring. The phone company is the one that has to handle tone vs. pulse, but one they have figured out the number you are calling the rest of the call is identical.
Unless you meant that the ISP's tech support switched to a tone based voicemail/navigation system. So a pulse phone could call but not navigate the system... You could switch the phone to tone after you got the ISP on the line and the set it back to pulse after the call is over, but that is a bit of a hassle.
Are you saying that your plane is the same as a concussion wave, or that it even follows the same rules? You wouldn't really be going any faster at 20,000 feet than you would be going at 15,000, you would just be saying "I'm going 2x the speed of sound up here, but I'm actually travelling with the same velocity."
The speed of sound may be variable, but it doesn't really have an bearing upon the speed of your aircraft
No, you've got it backwards. The airspeed that is equivalent to Mach 1 goes up as the air gets thinner. So to hit Mach 1 requires a faster airspeed at 20,000 feet than at 15,000 feet.
But this is the good part; the aerodynamic drag and heating of the plane are nearly eqvialent for a given mach number at any (obtainable) altitude.
So the top speed of the aircraft is based on the Mach number (which varies with altitude; and humidty; and temperature; but mainly with altitude), but the time it takes to fly between two points is based on the absolute ground speed (which is the absolute airspeed +/- relivant wind speed)
So the previous poster was suggesting that by flying an aircraft that can obtain Mach.95 at a higher altitude it would allow the plane to shave some time off its flight while still flying Mach.95, becuase its absolute airspeed would be faster.
I don't feel you. Does weak mean predictable? I just never understood the quest for *more* randon numbers. Practically, random is random!
How can one possibly predict the number a weak random number generator will create!?
Random is the hoped for result of a random number generator, it is not guarinted. Weak RNGs can fall into patterns, so that after observing their output you for a while you can begin to make good guesses about upcomming numbers.
An example of a weak non-deterministic RNG would be if you used the full temperature of you processor as an "random number" (clearly this is a stupidly extreme case), if you watch the temp for a little while you would notice that it really doesn't change very much and additionally you can guess how much it is going to change based on what the computer is doing at the moment.
For an example of weak deterministic random number generators I would point you to the page on TCP/IP Sequence numbers for various operating systems that Slashdot linked to a while back.
You can see the "random number" output of many of the generators fall into clear patterns in the pictures.
Calling something a random number generator doesn't mean that the numbers is generates are very random.
propably. But the fact is that S@H was first. That alone makes it worthwhile project: for the sole reason of showing that distributed projects of this nature could be done. Whether you like it or not, Folding@home and others owe their existence to Seti@home.
As far as I can tell by looking at the Seti@home history page the project started in October 1998.
Distributed.net began their first distributed project, the brute force discovery of an RC5-56 bit key, on January 28, 1997.
So it appears that Seti@home was not the first of the distrubuted computing projects; however I will grant you that it is by far the best known.
I have a video card, an nVidia TNT2 if you are curious, which developed a weird behavior. When it is installed in a computer, that computer will not power up unless there is a monitor attached to the video card. If you try to run the computer headless it just doesn't power on. I tried reseating the card, tried removing and reinstalling it, even moved it to another computer. If there was no monitor attached, the computer would not power on.
The monitor didn't need to be turned on, or even plugged into the wall, but it had to be connected to the computer. Simply attaching a monitor cable to the card wouldn't allow the computer to boot. (Connecting the computer to a KVM switch also worked fine).
I've still got the card installed on a system, which is connected to a KVM and as far as I know the card still won't allows the computer to boot without a monitor attached.
They don't include a docking port to take on more fuel, for the same reason that the Shuttle has never performed its design goal of returning a sat to earth for servicing.
The satellites electronics go obsolete before they run out of fuel. In general it is better for a company / country to boost a whole new sat with higher bandwidth, better resolution, more accuracy (depending on the sats design goal) and move the old one into a graveyard orbit.
The exceptions to this tend to be science sats which are hard to get funding for and / or in weird orbits. In those cases it is a choice between doing ground side changes to prolong the sats functional life or having no sat at all.
This instance was a unusual one becuase it was a brand new com sat that failed to achieve proper orbit; not an end of life sat running out of station keeping fuel. It isn't cost effective to add expensive refueling capability (and pay for the launch of refueling 'cargo satellites') to save the rare satellite that ends up in a wrong orbit that doesn't send it back into atmosphere and whose payload is fully functional. On a cost basis it is better to just get the insurance payout and build another sat.
A short average MPG readout would probably work better. By short I mean like the last 2 to 5 min, as opposed to instant like the parent post said.
The reason for that is that an instant MPG indicator like BMWs have, or that the trip computer in my Jeep displays fluctuate too much to get a good feal for how much gas you are using. You touch the gas and the MPG goes to 2 or 3 mpg, let up a bit and it hits 100 mpg! About the only time it gives a useful reading is if your are on the highway, its flat, and you have the cruise control set. Not real useful.
We don't have large passenger traffic via rail because it's slow. We don't have fast rail because most rail traffic isn't passenger. ---
One problem with breaking this loop, is that only Amtrack is allowed to carry long distance passanger service, but the railroads own all the tracks. Since the railroads only move freight, and slow bulky freight at that, they have no motivation to upgrade their tracks or modify the routes to facilitate high speed trains.
Amtrack can't make changes becuase they don't own the tracks or the right of way. Since high speed trains need straighter tracks, wider turns, and better tolerances than normal trains it is hard for Amtrack to run high speed trains.
For example their Accela train (which has other problems of its own) only cuts about 30 minutes off the trip from Washinton DC to New York, even through it is much faster than the normal Amtrack trains. Partly this is becuase Amtrack has is stop at most of the stations on the route, which slows it down, but also the tracks aren't configured to allow high speed runs. The main lines run too close to the train stations so it has to slow down for station that it doesn't stop at.
I would love if OSDN could have their own root certificate and let us public folks buy from them. Any malicious signers will be found out quickly so whats the big deal???
The problem with this scheme is that practically no browser implements an automatic check of a CLR, certificate revocation list. So all of these certificate issuing places have to place a lot of security upfront to make sure someone is who they say they are, because the cert issuer has no way to effectively revoke a certificate until it naturally expires. If you revoke a certificate but nobody knows then everyone thinks it is still valid, so discovering that someone is malicious does you no good because you can't yank their cert.
That is why microsoft had to release a patch for internet explorer to add a couple of fake microsoft certificates to a revoked list. There was no automatic way to do so!
Do you think Microsoft is going to issue a patch to revoke Joe Blows cert if OSDN discovers he is malicious?
Actually, given the info we have, you overlooked the easiest way he could have had a corrupted ISO with a md5sum that match that listed on the website.
The person putting the ISO together screwed up and didn't test it, and so computed a valid md5 hash on a corrupt ISO.
It isn't clear that the md5 hash he had matched an evetual working ISO, or if it just matched the md5 value listed with the bad ISO.
If you saw how Pearl Harbor was made, you would not have made that comment.
Pearl Harbor is a perfect example of a movie that didn't do enough SFX. The movie goes to all the trouble of recreating pearl harbor the morning of Dec 7 1941, filling the sky with appropriate japanese aircraft, but when you start seeing close-ups of the harbor more than half the scenes have 1970's era guided missile destroyers sitting in them complete with helicopter landing pads!!
That ripped me right out of my suspension of disbelief. I noticed it almost immediately in the theater, and then after the DVD came out it was possible to pause the shot and look up one of the ships hull numbers to confirm.
I wish that there was a little more CG to replace those out of era ships with pre-WWII destroyers or just delete them entirely.
with a toll transponder you have to slow down to like 5mph *anyway*, not like certain (fairly old) VW commercial showing somebody in a passat zooming by at 40. --
Not where I live; Northern Virginia. You can go through the toll booth at up to or greater than the speed limit and it will still read your transponder every time. The sign for the SmartTag lanes only says speed limit 20 mph, but I've seen people go through and be accepted at up to 70 or so. (15 over the road's speed limit)
An inventor named Lemelson was notorious for doing this sort of thing (see the article). He delayed one patent for 40 years after filing for it
And that is why Congress changed the rules on patents. The old rules, IIRC, were 17 years from date of issues; protection from date of filing. The new rules are 17 years from date of issue or 20 years from date of filing, whichever is shorter. So you can do a classic submarine patent but it is still only good for 20 years. In this case the patent wasn't delayed, it just didn't look like it applied, and the company didn't try to make it apply / enforce it until now.
The other problem with the YB-49s performance was that the early jet engines of the day were huge fuel hogs. Much more so than the piston engines they replaced. Because the 49 was really a fast re-engining of a YB-35 it had insufficient fuel capacity for its designed range, making it far to short ranged to be practical. While that could be worked around, the only way to do it on the existing airframe would be to sacrifice bomb capacity for fuel; which also wouldn't meet the design parameters. The aircraft would have had to be fully redesigned; and expensive and long process, so the Air Force opted for a more conventional design.
Also, the test flights reviled that while the bomber was stable and if fact very maneuverable, it did have a slight tendency to oscillate back and forth in the horizontal plane. While this effect was far too small to pose any sort of control issue it made high altitude bombing with unguided bombs (all the existed at the time) even more inaccurate than it already inherently was. It turns out that to damp out this last bit of oscillation you do need computer controls, but it doesn't affect the flyablity of the airframe.
Actually going back to the maneuverability thing, the YB-49 actually had a much tighter turning radius than the jet fighters of the day. During one of the flight tests the YB-49's pilot performed a elegancy turn procedure, and due to the high surface area of the wing was able to turn several miles inside of the ability of the jet powered chase plane that was observing the flight.
This wasn't a bug so much as a missing feature
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 1
I was programming a simple program for work MS windows, Visual Studio, MSDN. Anyway, the program had to have the ability to grab an updated file from a remote computer over one of several protocols, HTTP, FTP, windows file share, and I was just using the Microsoft foundation classes to do it since the program already used them and they had internet protocol support.
I decided that it would be a nice thing to provide a status meter to show how much of the file had been downloaded (a simple % meter). I got it working for HTTP no problem and started to implement it for FTP. There was a function FtpGetFileSize, it would do exactly what I wanted grab the size of the remote file. Clearly documented a piece of cake to add. The only problem is this useful function that was fully documented didn't actually exist!! It generated link errors. I finally did a string dump of the whole dll containing the FTP related function and there wasn't any function that allowed grabbing the file size. All the other FTP functions in the MSDN documentation were there, just not FtpGetFileSize...
I can think of two problems with having the electric motor as the wheel hubs.
First it would place the motor in close procimity of both water from the road/wheels, and brake dust from the brakes (admittedly the latter can be reduced using regenative braking). Both of these are things that are harmfull to have in an electric motor, so a lot of care would have to be taken to seal the motor.
The 2nd is a handleing issue. In general cars handle best when the unsprung weight (i.e. everything that is not isolated from the road by the suspention) is as light as possible. A heavy wheel assembily will, due to inertia, take longer to re-establish firm contact with the road after a bump than a lighter one. Placing the motors, which tend to be heavy items, directly on the wheels, they add greatly to the unsprung weight of the vehicle and adversly affect vehicle handling and ride comfort.
Actually Balders Gate was great. While it did come on 5 cds, there was a ini file in the game directory that told it the path to each of the cds seperatly.
since at the time I didn't have enough hard disk space to hold the whole game, but I did have several friends who owned it, we set up a semi-perminant lan party, mapped each others cd rom drive and modified the ini file accordingly. 5 cds, 5 computer, no switching. Worked great.
"Carriers have always been the most fragile of warships, modern carriers are far less protected than those of WWII"
You are kidding right? US aircraft carriers in WWII had wooden decks. That's right, their flight decks were painted hardwood. It was a weight tradeoff, it allowed them to carry significantly more planes at the required cruising speed.
British carriers which were designed to fight in the much more crowded Mediterranean had armored flight decks and carried fewer planes, but were much more survivable against kamikazes and dive bombers.
The deck of a modern US aircraft carrier is fairly well armored. It doesn't match the armoring of a battleship, but we don't have any of those anymore. While the British helicopter assault carriers got messed up pretty bad in the Falklands war, they are much smaller and less well armored than a US CVN.
Now if you want to argue that today's carriers have less effective protection relative to today's weapons you might have a point, for the top of the line Russian antiship missile. But the commonly proliferated missile, the Exocet and its knockoffs just mount far to small a warhead to threaten a modern carrier.
Of course if you get a lucky hit while a lot of planes are sitting on the deck fueled are armed its a different story, but even then modern firefighting equipment is more effective than that carried on WWII carriers.
I have an original SoundBlaster. 8bit ISA card, anchient, with box. It even sayes AT recomended (ie it will run in an IBM XT (8088) computer).
It also says 100% Ad-Lib compatable; becuase Ad-Lib came first and Creative Labs SoundBlaster killed them
And nVidia, ATI, S3, and Matrox were fighting it out for 3d acceleration long before 3dfx came on the scene. Of course they didn't hold a candle to the voodoo card, but they were the first. The nVidia Riva128, ATI Rage - Rage Pro, the S3 Virge (graphics decelerator), and matrox's m3d all predate the voodoo, and for quite a while 3dfx smeared them and took everying but the OEM market away from them. Except matrox for 2D only work...
Slashdot Mirror
because ABS actually INCRESES stopping distance vs. properly trained drivers w/o ABS --in every circumstance
I'll grant you in most circumstances; but there are a few instances where antilock brakes can beat a properly trained driver. Basically all of them are situations where there is a large difference in traction between some of the wheels.
Situations like, half the car in on ice, gravel, dirt, and half on pavement. Braking during high speed cornering... These are situations where the antilock brake system's ability to control each wheel independently can beat out a trained driver, who only has the one brake pedal.
But the point of antilock brakes, is that it becomes very hard to lose steering ability, even when braking hard, and it becomes very hard to lock up the wheels and slide.
(I say very hard because during a driver training course we were required, as a learning experience, to use the antilock brakes while in a very tight fast turn; The car slit out sideways despite the best efforts of the ABS system.)
It can be useful just to have a website with store hours, directions, and contact info.
I know I've looked up web sites just to find the hours a store it open. It's faster than getting out the phone book, looking up the store, calling them and asking how late they are open.
A simple web site that just states the general sort of store they are (hardware, bridal, groceries, etc) hours of operation, directions and a phone number / email is a decent start for a small business. Especially since small businesses tend to deal with small local areas (obviously there are execptions); for places that don't sell the stuff online listing every item is overkill. You don't care if someone half way across the country can see every item you sell if the only people who stop by are from the surrounding community.
My father's bill was $2.00 less than mine, but he finally gave in when his ISP stopped accepting rotary calls after an equipment upgrade.
How could an ISP "stop accepting rotary calls" The ISP doesn't handle the dialing; their modems just answer the phone line ring. The phone company is the one that has to handle tone vs. pulse, but one they have figured out the number you are calling the rest of the call is identical.
Unless you meant that the ISP's tech support switched to a tone based voicemail/navigation system. So a pulse phone could call but not navigate the system...
You could switch the phone to tone after you got the ISP on the line and the set it back to pulse after the call is over, but that is a bit of a hassle.
No, you've got it backwards. The airspeed that is equivalent to Mach 1 goes up as the air gets thinner. So to hit Mach 1 requires a faster airspeed at 20,000 feet than at 15,000 feet.
But this is the good part; the aerodynamic drag and heating of the plane are nearly eqvialent for a given mach number at any (obtainable) altitude.
So the top speed of the aircraft is based on the Mach number (which varies with altitude; and humidty; and temperature; but mainly with altitude), but the time it takes to fly between two points is based on the absolute ground speed (which is the absolute airspeed +/- relivant wind speed)
So the previous poster was suggesting that by flying an aircraft that can obtain Mach .95 at a higher altitude it would allow the plane to shave some time off its flight while still flying Mach .95, becuase its absolute airspeed would be faster.
Random is the hoped for result of a random number generator, it is not guarinted. Weak RNGs can fall into patterns, so that after observing their output you for a while you can begin to make good guesses about upcomming numbers.
An example of a weak non-deterministic RNG would be if you used the full temperature of you processor as an "random number" (clearly this is a stupidly extreme case), if you watch the temp for a little while you would notice that it really doesn't change very much and additionally you can guess how much it is going to change based on what the computer is doing at the moment.
For an example of weak deterministic random number generators I would point you to the page on TCP/IP Sequence numbers for various operating systems that Slashdot linked to a while back. You can see the "random number" output of many of the generators fall into clear patterns in the pictures.
Calling something a random number generator doesn't mean that the numbers is generates are very random.
As far as I can tell by looking at the Seti@home history page the project started in October 1998.
Distributed.net began their first distributed project, the brute force discovery of an RC5-56 bit key, on January 28, 1997.
So it appears that Seti@home was not the first of the distrubuted computing projects; however I will grant you that it is by far the best known.
I have a video card, an nVidia TNT2 if you are curious, which developed a weird behavior. When it is installed in a computer, that computer will not power up unless there is a monitor attached to the video card. If you try to run the computer headless it just doesn't power on.
I tried reseating the card, tried removing and reinstalling it, even moved it to another computer. If there was no monitor attached, the computer would not power on.
The monitor didn't need to be turned on, or even plugged into the wall, but it had to be connected to the computer. Simply attaching a monitor cable to the card wouldn't allow the computer to boot. (Connecting the computer to a KVM switch also worked fine).
I've still got the card installed on a system, which is connected to a KVM and as far as I know the card still won't allows the computer to boot without a monitor attached.
I've got the Trek 4 4 led flashlight. Working great and still on its orignal set of batteries after 8 months.
They don't include a docking port to take on more fuel, for the same reason that the Shuttle has never performed its design goal of returning a sat to earth for servicing.
The satellites electronics go obsolete before they run out of fuel. In general it is better for a company / country to boost a whole new sat with higher bandwidth, better resolution, more accuracy (depending on the sats design goal) and move the old one into a graveyard orbit.
The exceptions to this tend to be science sats which are hard to get funding for and / or in weird orbits. In those cases it is a choice between doing ground side changes to prolong the sats functional life or having no sat at all.
This instance was a unusual one becuase it was a brand new com sat that failed to achieve proper orbit; not an end of life sat running out of station keeping fuel. It isn't cost effective to add expensive refueling capability (and pay for the launch of refueling 'cargo satellites') to save the rare satellite that ends up in a wrong orbit that doesn't send it back into atmosphere and whose payload is fully functional. On a cost basis it is better to just get the insurance payout and build another sat.
That reminds me of: A red sign on the door of a physics professor: 'If this sign is blue, you're going too fast.'
I saw that on a red bumper sticker on the back of a minivan. 'If this sticker is blue you driving to fast'
A short average MPG readout would probably work better. By short I mean like the last 2 to 5 min, as opposed to instant like the parent post said.
The reason for that is that an instant MPG indicator like BMWs have, or that the trip computer in my Jeep displays fluctuate too much to get a good feal for how much gas you are using. You touch the gas and the MPG goes to 2 or 3 mpg, let up a bit and it hits 100 mpg! About the only time it gives a useful reading is if your are on the highway, its flat, and you have the cruise control set. Not real useful.
Sounds more like a "hole in the bucket" problem.
We don't have large passenger traffic via rail because it's slow.
We don't have fast rail because most rail traffic isn't passenger.
---
One problem with breaking this loop, is that only Amtrack is allowed to carry long distance passanger service, but the railroads own all the tracks. Since the railroads only move freight, and slow bulky freight at that, they have no motivation to upgrade their tracks or modify the routes to facilitate high speed trains.
Amtrack can't make changes becuase they don't own the tracks or the right of way. Since high speed trains need straighter tracks, wider turns, and better tolerances than normal trains it is hard for Amtrack to run high speed trains.
For example their Accela train (which has other problems of its own) only cuts about 30 minutes off the trip from Washinton DC to New York, even through it is much faster than the normal Amtrack trains. Partly this is becuase Amtrack has is stop at most of the stations on the route, which slows it down, but also the tracks aren't configured to allow high speed runs. The main lines run too close to the train stations so it has to slow down for station that it doesn't stop at.
The problem with this scheme is that practically no browser implements an automatic check of a CLR, certificate revocation list. So all of these certificate issuing places have to place a lot of security upfront to make sure someone is who they say they are, because the cert issuer has no way to effectively revoke a certificate until it naturally expires. If you revoke a certificate but nobody knows then everyone thinks it is still valid, so discovering that someone is malicious does you no good because you can't yank their cert.
That is why microsoft had to release a patch for internet explorer to add a couple of fake microsoft certificates to a revoked list. There was no automatic way to do so!Do you think Microsoft is going to issue a patch to revoke Joe Blows cert if OSDN discovers he is malicious?
If your going to list Three Mile Island you should also have the really bad nuclear accident
April 26 (1986) Chernobyl Power Plant exposion.
Actually, given the info we have, you overlooked the easiest way he could have had a corrupted ISO with a md5sum that match that listed on the website.
The person putting the ISO together screwed up and didn't test it, and so computed a valid md5 hash on a corrupt ISO.
It isn't clear that the md5 hash he had matched an evetual working ISO, or if it just matched the md5 value listed with the bad ISO.
If you saw how Pearl Harbor was made, you would not have made that comment.
Pearl Harbor is a perfect example of a movie that didn't do enough SFX. The movie goes to all the trouble of recreating pearl harbor the morning of Dec 7 1941, filling the sky with appropriate japanese aircraft, but when you start seeing close-ups of the harbor more than half the scenes have 1970's era guided missile destroyers sitting in them complete with helicopter landing pads!!
That ripped me right out of my suspension of disbelief. I noticed it almost immediately in the theater, and then after the DVD came out it was possible to pause the shot and look up one of the ships hull numbers to confirm.
I wish that there was a little more CG to replace those out of era ships with pre-WWII destroyers or just delete them entirely.
(Is this a middle-click thing feature of Windows browsers, too? eg. Windows Mozilla? I'm pretty sure IE doesn't do this...?)
While I don't believe IE allows a middle click to open a new window (at least by default) shift+click does open a link in a new window.
with a toll transponder you have to slow down to like 5mph *anyway*, not like certain (fairly old) VW commercial showing somebody in a passat zooming by at 40.
--
Not where I live; Northern Virginia. You can go through the toll booth at up to or greater than the speed limit and it will still read your transponder every time. The sign for the SmartTag lanes only says speed limit 20 mph, but I've seen people go through and be accepted at up to 70 or so. (15 over the road's speed limit)
An inventor named Lemelson was notorious for doing this sort of thing (see the article). He delayed one patent for 40 years after filing for it
And that is why Congress changed the rules on patents. The old rules, IIRC, were 17 years from date of issues; protection from date of filing. The new rules are 17 years from date of issue or 20 years from date of filing, whichever is shorter.
So you can do a classic submarine patent but it is still only good for 20 years. In this case the patent wasn't delayed, it just didn't look like it applied, and the company didn't try to make it apply / enforce it until now.
The other problem with the YB-49s performance was that the early jet engines of the day were huge fuel hogs. Much more so than the piston engines they replaced. Because the 49 was really a fast re-engining of a YB-35 it had insufficient fuel capacity for its designed range, making it far to short ranged to be practical.
While that could be worked around, the only way to do it on the existing airframe would be to sacrifice bomb capacity for fuel; which also wouldn't meet the design parameters. The aircraft would have had to be fully redesigned; and expensive and long process, so the Air Force opted for a more conventional design.
Also, the test flights reviled that while the bomber was stable and if fact very maneuverable, it did have a slight tendency to oscillate back and forth in the horizontal plane. While this effect was far too small to pose any sort of control issue it made high altitude bombing with unguided bombs (all the existed at the time) even more inaccurate than it already inherently was. It turns out that to damp out this last bit of oscillation you do need computer controls, but it doesn't affect the flyablity of the airframe.
Actually going back to the maneuverability thing, the YB-49 actually had a much tighter turning radius than the jet fighters of the day. During one of the flight tests the YB-49's pilot performed a elegancy turn procedure, and due to the high surface area of the wing was able to turn several miles inside of the ability of the jet powered chase plane that was observing the flight.
I was programming a simple program for work MS windows, Visual Studio, MSDN. Anyway, the program had to have the ability to grab an updated file from a remote computer over one of several protocols, HTTP, FTP, windows file share, and I was just using the Microsoft foundation classes to do it since the program already used them and they had internet protocol support.
I decided that it would be a nice thing to provide a status meter to show how much of the file had been downloaded (a simple % meter).
I got it working for HTTP no problem and started to implement it for FTP. There was a function FtpGetFileSize, it would do exactly what I wanted grab the size of the remote file. Clearly documented a piece of cake to add. The only problem is this useful function that was fully documented didn't actually exist!! It generated link errors. I finally did a string dump of the whole dll containing the FTP related function and there wasn't any function that allowed grabbing the file size. All the other FTP functions in the MSDN documentation were there, just not FtpGetFileSize...
Very weird.
I can think of two problems with having the electric motor as the wheel hubs.
First it would place the motor in close procimity of both water from the road/wheels, and brake dust from the brakes (admittedly the latter can be reduced using regenative braking). Both of these are things that are harmfull to have in an electric motor, so a lot of care would have to be taken to seal the motor.
The 2nd is a handleing issue. In general cars handle best when the unsprung weight (i.e. everything that is not isolated from the road by the suspention) is as light as possible. A heavy wheel assembily will, due to inertia, take longer to re-establish firm contact with the road after a bump than a lighter one. Placing the motors, which tend to be heavy items, directly on the wheels, they add greatly to the unsprung weight of the vehicle and adversly affect vehicle handling and ride comfort.
Actually Balders Gate was great. While it did come on 5 cds, there was a ini file in the game directory that told it the path to each of the cds seperatly.
since at the time I didn't have enough hard disk space to hold the whole game, but I did have several friends who owned it, we set up a semi-perminant lan party, mapped each others cd rom drive and modified the ini file accordingly. 5 cds, 5 computer, no switching. Worked great.
"Carriers have always been the most fragile of warships, modern carriers are far less protected than those of WWII"
You are kidding right? US aircraft carriers in WWII had wooden decks. That's right, their flight decks were painted hardwood. It was a weight tradeoff, it allowed them to carry significantly more planes at the required cruising speed.
British carriers which were designed to fight in the much more crowded Mediterranean had armored flight decks and carried fewer planes, but were much more survivable against kamikazes and dive bombers.
The deck of a modern US aircraft carrier is fairly well armored. It doesn't match the armoring of a battleship, but we don't have any of those anymore. While the British helicopter assault carriers got messed up pretty bad in the Falklands war, they are much smaller and less well armored than a US CVN.
Now if you want to argue that today's carriers have less effective protection relative to today's weapons you might have a point, for the top of the line Russian antiship missile. But the commonly proliferated missile, the Exocet and its knockoffs just mount far to small a warhead to threaten a modern carrier.
Of course if you get a lucky hit while a lot of planes are sitting on the deck fueled are armed its a different story, but even then modern firefighting equipment is more effective than that carried on WWII carriers.
Soundblaster wasn't first.
I have an original SoundBlaster. 8bit ISA card, anchient, with box. It even sayes AT recomended (ie it will run in an IBM XT (8088) computer).
It also says 100% Ad-Lib compatable; becuase Ad-Lib came first and Creative Labs SoundBlaster killed them
And nVidia, ATI, S3, and Matrox were fighting it out for 3d acceleration long before 3dfx came on the scene. Of course they didn't hold a candle to the voodoo card, but they were the first. The nVidia Riva128, ATI Rage - Rage Pro, the S3 Virge (graphics decelerator), and matrox's m3d all predate the voodoo, and for quite a while 3dfx smeared them and took everying but the OEM market away from them. Except matrox for 2D only work...
Bad examples