See, I didn't mind the adverts, what I mostly wanted was a feed-for-geeks where it had cockpit chatter, a PR loop like they have for NASA flights, and maybe some light classical music during the quiet parts.
The last launch, you could see them all flying in formation, with the Extra 300 nosing underneath to check out the dents, etc. Half the beauty was the ballet of the three chase planes, White Knight, and SpaceShipOne the whole way through.
It's a success as long as everybody lands and the plane isn't damaged. And, in this case, it made it to the correct altitude.
The big thing to remember is that *all* it was doing was rolling, which, given the thrust/weight ratio was disconcerting but didn't actually do much to the trajectory (in fact, it made the trajectory more stable because it prevented yaw and pitch changes)
Well, given that there's already one commercial partner buying up licenses for SS1's technology, I'd say that another prize isn't needed quite yet; they've provided the push necessary, with merely the X-cup to give everybody else a chance at exposure.
Well, as a person who does have religon, I can assure you that most of us get as pissed off about most of those whackos as you do.
Because it's not enough with them for somebody to believe in a higher power, or a god, or even the same god as them. You have to believe the exact same belief system as they do, or else you are going to hell.
So not only do all of us non-whacko christians get ministered to in the same exact way as non-christians, we get annoyed because every time we say "Christian", you generally either think of the whackos on the street or, lately, pedophile priests and altar boys. So it gives all of us a really bad name.
The problem is that the die-hard aethists are just as obnoxious as the fundamentalists, just in new and different ways.
I dono. I kinda miss having the mormons or christians come out, because I always wanted to really mess with them. Out where I am, all I've ever gotten was a scientologist and I was so flustered, I gave him the wrong Clambake URL.
As a transplant, I'd say that it's at least partially because of the transplants.
It's panning for gold. Loads and loads of starry-eyed college grads come out here. Every now and again, somebody gets a really great idea, and generates a startup and recruits friends. And then some of those people make it big. The companies who make it big then bring college grads in to increase the nerd population again to fuel more startups and such.
Of course, usually the big guys then expand outside of the "expensive" bay area to other places, over time, to make space for the new crop of folks.
Indeed. With an outsourced staff comes loss of control.
Which means that if you can find a good outsourcing partner, everything's good. If you can't, you either pay a hefty premium for something you can do yourself for far less, or you end up getting *nothing* done properly.
Which is funny because he totally misses the boat in his own logic. The other nice part about 26 year old nerds is that the afforementioned easygoing silicon valley nerd, who has been compensated properly with options, is going to be more than happy to do all kinds of not-requiring-a-full-person jobs if that's what the company needs to succeed.
Especially if all you are doing is product development.
See, the big problem is that your ability to take advantage of depth-of-field effects is dependent on sensor size. So a tiny sensor gives you a very large depth of field, which is great for conveying reality, but not so good for re-interpreting reality as a photographer.
So there's more than just the "mental math". Having a larger image sensing area is better. 35mm is actually a pretty good size, in that it's good enough to get some bluriness when you want it, but also is such that you can collect a lot of light and skip the flash. (assuming, of course, that you have a real lens instead of a crappy, dim, zoom lens)
You are pretty much stuck with the unchanging rules of optics. You could put an extra group of lenses in place to "correct" the image size so that a APS-sized sensor can take a 35mm lens with no multiplier. However, it still hurts your depth of field and also cuts down on available light. You can add some more complicated projection optics that suck up even more light and get the depth of field and no multiplier, but that causes other problems. Or you can just have a second scale on the zoom lens so that the numbers are in 35mm equivelent for the image sensor size you are using.
You can always build your system around something other than 35mm, as the 4/3 system does and/or extend the lens pieces farther into the camera like the D20 and Digital Rebel are doing so that you have an easier time of making a wide-angle lens.
I'm not sure if the Falcon V could be made man-rated, mind you. It's a smidge too small for a reasonable sized manned capsule. I'm imagining that whatever comes after the Falcon V will at least try to preserve the man-rated option, however.
See, the problem is that a explosive flight termination system is nearly required.
As far as the current licensing regeme is concerned, the lives of the passengers are not important. What is important is the possibility of a worst case impact on populated areas. You basicly need to assume that every steering device on your craft will conspire against you and send it hurtling towards the nearest populated area.
So, Black Armadillo isn't allowed to have a parachute in case the engines run out of juice/fail/etc. Because they have to assume that it will deploy in conspiracy with the steering system, all at the worst possible moments, and take it into populated area.
So if it fails, it pancakes, as one of the recent videos shows. The next one has a streamer, which should give the passengers more options for not becoming hot man-salsa.
It's going to be decades before these things will be loosened, I fear.
Ummm... The Shuttle, Apollo, Gemini, Mercury, etc. all had range safety devices on them.
The Falcon, oddly enough, doesn't. They are the first vehicle certified for range safety without requiring a bomb... errr... explosive flight termination device.
It's not incredibly hard to make an existing booster "man-rated". Generally, it just means that you need a certain level of redundancy over that necessary for payload operations, favorable possibilities for abort, etc. The Falcon series is already designed for a greater level of reliability, so they'd just have to make sure that the vibration/noise/acceleration environment is compatable with humans.
See, I don't see that being as much of a problem as you'd think.
The point is, once you lower the cost to orbit (As any orbital tourism vehicle would) there's a lot of markets or improvements to markets that can open up.
National Geographic routinely sends out photographers exploring the world. If they could offset the cost of an expedition by magazine sales, you know they'd be launching their own space exploration missions. It's just too expensive right now.
Imagine communications satellites with 100x the power available, antennas signifigantly larger, etc. Suddenly an Iridium-like system can actually penetrate through a building and not require a massive phone. Remember, more decibels of gain means more information can be packed in the same frequency space.
The big thing to remember is that when the Internet finally hit the Average Joe, there were a lot of notions about what it could and couldn't do. It's hard to say what people will build on top of the infrastructure once it's there. But somebody's got to build the infrastructure.
See, again, there's not a lot of good answers here because nobody's tried them.
I still think you are overcrediting scramjets. The problem is that, not only are they heavy, but you incur a lot of drag from the intakes. And you have to design the entire craft around the scramjet intake, which means there's a lot of design comprimizes to be incurred. And they need to be supersonic before they get going. And there's a lot of heating problems with a scramjet vehicle, because you are staying in the atmosphere for quite a long time. Your second and third stages are going to get awfully hot.
Hitting 40-50k feet at subsonic speeds is good for a sub-orbital X-prize launch. However, it's a drop-in-the-bucket for orbital launch. The first stage really needs to go to supersonic speeds and probably to 100+k feet to make any sort of a difference.
Now, the big thing to remember is that the heat of reentry scales depending on density. Any sort of space-shuttle-configuration design is going to have wretched reentry heat because it's very dense. A large but not-very dense craft can make do with a variety of reusable and durable refractory supermetals (Titanium alloys and such). This way, you slow down a lot more in the very fringes of the atmosphere before you have a chance to get hot.
The interesting thing is that rocket engines are actually pretty good about reliability. The standard failure mode for a solid rocket booster is a casing failure, where it develops a crack in the side and either spews superheated gasses on the craft in flight or just suffers structural failure and explodes. Smaller solid rocket boosters can actually safely be shut down for abort modes, it's just that they didn't realize until too late that the shuttle wouldn't be able to work like that.
With liquid rocket engines, generally computer control makes it such that they either shut down early or, worst case scenerio, they spew turbopump blades much in the same way that a jet engine spews turbine or fan blades -- something that can be fixed with careful engineering.
The problem with the shuttle is that it's very hard to seperate the part you care about (the shuttle crew) from the rest of it, because they were pinched on the design. So you can't just jetison the SRBs a minute into flight if they fail. You aren't guaranteed that you can recover from a thrust inadequacy all of the time. And there's a bunch of stuff that *must* work, or else the craft will break apart before you could even hit the ejection buttion if you had one (like if only one SRB seperates -- it's instant loss of vehicle in a second or two).
Whereas, if you designed a craft with the designed purpose of having more favorable abort options, it would be able to shut down the engines and glide down, just like most other flying vehicles.
My personal suspicion is, if you wanted to build a reasonable yet not-just-incremental-improvement booster (I'll talk about the merits of incremental improvement a little later), the best answer is two simple-yet-fully-reusable stages, neither of which necessarily requires a scramjet. I'm thinking that you could probably make some combination of commercial jet engines for lower atmosphere, turborockets (a jet engine with LOX-injection at higher altitudes), normal off-the-shelf rocket engines, or aerospike rocket engines powered by dense fuels (Kerosine + LOX) get to a reasonable suborbital trajectory. And then a hydrogen-and-oxygen fueled reusable second stage that relies on being mostly empty on reentry so it can use simpler thermal protection materials. Which leaves you with somewhat understood problems in design, the only one that's especially hard is supersonic staging. If you have jet engines or turborockets, you have the luxury of spiraling up a la SpaceShipOne, assuring that you can suffer total thrust failure and still get home, instead of being over the Atlantic and relying on there being clear weather over on the Europe/Africa coasts. You have a single seperation event for a si
It's bad when the weight of multiple engines and/or airbreathing parts exceeds the weight, cost, performance, or maintenence penalties of just using a rocket with oxidizer.
Although, given that none of the rockets using any sort of air-breathing stages except for standard jet engines in a carrier aircraft, so it's really hard to draw conclusions...
I mean, rebuilding a fallen empire like in Andromeda has been done over and over and over again, all the way back to Roman time. Battlestar Galactica? Aneid?
Remember the MICE quotient? Milieu, Idea, Characters, Event. Rebuilding a fallen empire is just an Event. A story's not just about an event, it's about the characters and ideas and milieu, too.
Indeed, when an independent scientific body critiqued Goresat, they pointed out that there's probably enough satellite data that we could "reconstruct" the same view without needing Goresat.
The reason why it's bad, primarily, is because people *want* it to fail, real bad, so that Intel will be knocked off their high horse. It's the same way that people want Microsoft to fail.
The initial goal of the Itanium was to replace the commercial-Unix MIPS, Alpha, and PA-RISC processors for servers, and then also replace the x86 architecture for desktops, starting with the servers. Remember, the more chips of a specific model you sell, the cheaper they are. MIPS, Alpha, and PA-RISC processors would be in the same price range as desktops if people were buying them.
At the same time, the Itanium was built with a number of assumptions about the future that are currently considered wrong. It's designed to be a simpler processor that the compiler handles optimizations for, therefore making the die smaller. These things happen. The 6502 was built at the time where RAM was fast, relative to the processor, so it has very few registers but an easy and fast way to access the first 256 bytes of RAM and use it almost as a second set of registers. The AS/400 was built when everybody thought that bubble memory was going to be the big thing and was rescued by a virtual machine.
The problem is, Intel has been trying, since the 80s, to make a revolutionary new processor. First it was the i432. Then it was the i860 and i960. Now it's the Itannic. The i860 is especially telling -- it was also very much dependent on the compiler's ability to optimize and, in the end, it turned out that you had to write in i860 assembly language to get any sort of performance out of it.
Now, when the MIPS/ARM/SPARC/etc. processors came out, beginning the RISC revolution, they were able to blow the doors off of the existing CISC processors. Half of the fun of the Itanic is that it was hyped like the next RISC but didn't actually manage to blow the doors off of the RISC or even CISC processors on the market.
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life"
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See, it's probably a Sony Trinitron or Mitsubishi Diamondtron tube. The "breakage lines" are the wires used to hold the appeture grill up. And, mind you, even the Sony-brand Trinitrons were pretty damn good. My last two work monitors were Sonys (and the one before it was a SGI-branded Trinitron).
It replaced a "genuine" Sony Trinitron, which, in turn, replaced another Trinitron, which replaced the Packard Hell monitor that I inherited, which replaced an Apple IIgs with a fried flyback transformer on the Apple-brand monitor, which replaced a Apple II+ with a composite Apple-brand screen, which replaced... well... air.
Of course, of late, Sony stuff isn't as good as it used to be, and LCDs are replacing CRTs.
Still, I'm holding onto the Sun until it croaks. Then, maybe, I'll see about getting an LCD that's both economical and has a native resolution of 1600x1200.;)
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life"
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No, actually, they were because the previous owner didn't want to deal with properly getting rid of them, so he put them on the side of the road, with a "TAKE ME" sign on them.
But thanks for asking.
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life"
on
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· Score: 1
I can beat that.
On the side of the road, I found a 21" Sun monitor (complete with 13W3->VGA adapter), two semi-complete and mostly-working machines, and some clean but flimsy wine racks.
There's a few times I notice that it's slow. I notice hard drive performance acutely at work. The slower the hard drive, the more time it takes to build, seemingly independent of CPU and often times RAM (although All Praise The Company, who equips us by default with loads of RAM)
I think it depends on what sorts of stuff you do. I have pretty much given goofing with 3D modeling a rest for the past year or two because I just don't have enough CPU anymore on my home system to compare favorably to my mental images. I haven't played any recent games, either.
I think the big thing that will eventually do a system in is wearing out. Hard drives are only "safe" for 3-5 years (history will bear me out on that one). Fans collect dust. My main system has become more sensitive to temperature extremes (My just-about-moved-out-of-apartment doesn't have AC and only gets hot during Fall) as time has gone on and started to bluescreen. The electrolyte in capacitors will eventually change in formulation (the water in it evaporates and such) and they will do a progressively less effective job and eventually let more spikes and swings and stuff (remember that you can clip some of the capacitors on a motherboard and get away with it. At one point, there was a cap that protruded into the AGP-zone and interfered with the graphics card, and the manufacturer told people to just snip the interfering cap off) and eventually it won't insulate the parts from each other.
Remember, the primary cost of space exploration is getting stuff *up*. Without that cost, all you need to do is make sure that stuff still works without gravity and doesn't leak, which is a relatively trivial problem.
If there was an asteroid composed entirely of gold, you could maybe bother with wrapping it in some metal or refractories and then push it, perhaps just by painting one side of it a different color, or putting a small ion drive on the side, towards the desert in Utah/Arizona/Nevada/etc. The total cost would probably be less than the gold, even after the accompanying hit the commodity market would take, although you'd probably want a lot more than 2 blackhawk helicopters for escort when it splats.;)
There's a minimum standard of comfort necessary, psychologically, for mental health. I, personally, would rate at least one working crapper to be part of that. Remember, people in tight proximity like this can do really bizare things that psychoanalysis doesn't do much to explore.
And when ATTWS/Cingular finish their merger and get UMTS properly rolled out and stuffed into the 800/850 MHz bands, Verizon's going to have a rude adjustment ahead of them.
You have to remember that if there was a demand for it, they could make a card that's mildly more expensive than 802.11 but also uses one of the two 3G formats.
But you'd have to have it "catch on" where people were buying it and promoting the economy of scale.
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See, I didn't mind the adverts, what I mostly wanted was a feed-for-geeks where it had cockpit chatter, a PR loop like they have for NASA flights, and maybe some light classical music during the quiet parts.
The last launch, you could see them all flying in formation, with the Extra 300 nosing underneath to check out the dents, etc. Half the beauty was the ballet of the three chase planes, White Knight, and SpaceShipOne the whole way through.
It's a success as long as everybody lands and the plane isn't damaged. And, in this case, it made it to the correct altitude.
The big thing to remember is that *all* it was doing was rolling, which, given the thrust/weight ratio was disconcerting but didn't actually do much to the trajectory (in fact, it made the trajectory more stable because it prevented yaw and pitch changes)
Well, given that there's already one commercial partner buying up licenses for SS1's technology, I'd say that another prize isn't needed quite yet; they've provided the push necessary, with merely the X-cup to give everybody else a chance at exposure.
Well, as a person who does have religon, I can assure you that most of us get as pissed off about most of those whackos as you do.
Because it's not enough with them for somebody to believe in a higher power, or a god, or even the same god as them. You have to believe the exact same belief system as they do, or else you are going to hell.
So not only do all of us non-whacko christians get ministered to in the same exact way as non-christians, we get annoyed because every time we say "Christian", you generally either think of the whackos on the street or, lately, pedophile priests and altar boys. So it gives all of us a really bad name.
The problem is that the die-hard aethists are just as obnoxious as the fundamentalists, just in new and different ways.
I dono. I kinda miss having the mormons or christians come out, because I always wanted to really mess with them. Out where I am, all I've ever gotten was a scientologist and I was so flustered, I gave him the wrong Clambake URL.
Gee. If you projectile vomited it, you'd Kung Pow.
Thanks. I'll be here all week.
They actually did shut off about 20 seconds earlier than they were going to, on account of the roll.
It can be hand-flown the whole time.
And, there's a made-by-some-different-folks Dynon attitude display so that it's not just seat-of-the-pants.
As a transplant, I'd say that it's at least partially because of the transplants.
It's panning for gold. Loads and loads of starry-eyed college grads come out here. Every now and again, somebody gets a really great idea, and generates a startup and recruits friends. And then some of those people make it big. The companies who make it big then bring college grads in to increase the nerd population again to fuel more startups and such.
Of course, usually the big guys then expand outside of the "expensive" bay area to other places, over time, to make space for the new crop of folks.
Indeed. With an outsourced staff comes loss of control.
Which means that if you can find a good outsourcing partner, everything's good. If you can't, you either pay a hefty premium for something you can do yourself for far less, or you end up getting *nothing* done properly.
Which is funny because he totally misses the boat in his own logic. The other nice part about 26 year old nerds is that the afforementioned easygoing silicon valley nerd, who has been compensated properly with options, is going to be more than happy to do all kinds of not-requiring-a-full-person jobs if that's what the company needs to succeed.
Especially if all you are doing is product development.
See, the big problem is that your ability to take advantage of depth-of-field effects is dependent on sensor size. So a tiny sensor gives you a very large depth of field, which is great for conveying reality, but not so good for re-interpreting reality as a photographer.
So there's more than just the "mental math". Having a larger image sensing area is better. 35mm is actually a pretty good size, in that it's good enough to get some bluriness when you want it, but also is such that you can collect a lot of light and skip the flash. (assuming, of course, that you have a real lens instead of a crappy, dim, zoom lens)
You are pretty much stuck with the unchanging rules of optics. You could put an extra group of lenses in place to "correct" the image size so that a APS-sized sensor can take a 35mm lens with no multiplier. However, it still hurts your depth of field and also cuts down on available light. You can add some more complicated projection optics that suck up even more light and get the depth of field and no multiplier, but that causes other problems. Or you can just have a second scale on the zoom lens so that the numbers are in 35mm equivelent for the image sensor size you are using.
You can always build your system around something other than 35mm, as the 4/3 system does and/or extend the lens pieces farther into the camera like the D20 and Digital Rebel are doing so that you have an easier time of making a wide-angle lens.
I'm not sure if the Falcon V could be made man-rated, mind you. It's a smidge too small for a reasonable sized manned capsule. I'm imagining that whatever comes after the Falcon V will at least try to preserve the man-rated option, however.
See, the problem is that a explosive flight termination system is nearly required.
As far as the current licensing regeme is concerned, the lives of the passengers are not important. What is important is the possibility of a worst case impact on populated areas. You basicly need to assume that every steering device on your craft will conspire against you and send it hurtling towards the nearest populated area.
So, Black Armadillo isn't allowed to have a parachute in case the engines run out of juice/fail/etc. Because they have to assume that it will deploy in conspiracy with the steering system, all at the worst possible moments, and take it into populated area.
So if it fails, it pancakes, as one of the recent videos shows. The next one has a streamer, which should give the passengers more options for not becoming hot man-salsa.
It's going to be decades before these things will be loosened, I fear.
Ummm... The Shuttle, Apollo, Gemini, Mercury, etc. all had range safety devices on them.
The Falcon, oddly enough, doesn't. They are the first vehicle certified for range safety without requiring a bomb... errr... explosive flight termination device.
It's not incredibly hard to make an existing booster "man-rated". Generally, it just means that you need a certain level of redundancy over that necessary for payload operations, favorable possibilities for abort, etc. The Falcon series is already designed for a greater level of reliability, so they'd just have to make sure that the vibration/noise/acceleration environment is compatable with humans.
See, I don't see that being as much of a problem as you'd think.
The point is, once you lower the cost to orbit (As any orbital tourism vehicle would) there's a lot of markets or improvements to markets that can open up.
National Geographic routinely sends out photographers exploring the world. If they could offset the cost of an expedition by magazine sales, you know they'd be launching their own space exploration missions. It's just too expensive right now.
Imagine communications satellites with 100x the power available, antennas signifigantly larger, etc. Suddenly an Iridium-like system can actually penetrate through a building and not require a massive phone. Remember, more decibels of gain means more information can be packed in the same frequency space.
The big thing to remember is that when the Internet finally hit the Average Joe, there were a lot of notions about what it could and couldn't do. It's hard to say what people will build on top of the infrastructure once it's there. But somebody's got to build the infrastructure.
See, again, there's not a lot of good answers here because nobody's tried them.
I still think you are overcrediting scramjets. The problem is that, not only are they heavy, but you incur a lot of drag from the intakes. And you have to design the entire craft around the scramjet intake, which means there's a lot of design comprimizes to be incurred. And they need to be supersonic before they get going. And there's a lot of heating problems with a scramjet vehicle, because you are staying in the atmosphere for quite a long time. Your second and third stages are going to get awfully hot.
Hitting 40-50k feet at subsonic speeds is good for a sub-orbital X-prize launch. However, it's a drop-in-the-bucket for orbital launch. The first stage really needs to go to supersonic speeds and probably to 100+k feet to make any sort of a difference.
Now, the big thing to remember is that the heat of reentry scales depending on density. Any sort of space-shuttle-configuration design is going to have wretched reentry heat because it's very dense. A large but not-very dense craft can make do with a variety of reusable and durable refractory supermetals (Titanium alloys and such). This way, you slow down a lot more in the very fringes of the atmosphere before you have a chance to get hot.
The interesting thing is that rocket engines are actually pretty good about reliability. The standard failure mode for a solid rocket booster is a casing failure, where it develops a crack in the side and either spews superheated gasses on the craft in flight or just suffers structural failure and explodes. Smaller solid rocket boosters can actually safely be shut down for abort modes, it's just that they didn't realize until too late that the shuttle wouldn't be able to work like that.
With liquid rocket engines, generally computer control makes it such that they either shut down early or, worst case scenerio, they spew turbopump blades much in the same way that a jet engine spews turbine or fan blades -- something that can be fixed with careful engineering.
The problem with the shuttle is that it's very hard to seperate the part you care about (the shuttle crew) from the rest of it, because they were pinched on the design. So you can't just jetison the SRBs a minute into flight if they fail. You aren't guaranteed that you can recover from a thrust inadequacy all of the time. And there's a bunch of stuff that *must* work, or else the craft will break apart before you could even hit the ejection buttion if you had one (like if only one SRB seperates -- it's instant loss of vehicle in a second or two).
Whereas, if you designed a craft with the designed purpose of having more favorable abort options, it would be able to shut down the engines and glide down, just like most other flying vehicles.
My personal suspicion is, if you wanted to build a reasonable yet not-just-incremental-improvement booster (I'll talk about the merits of incremental improvement a little later), the best answer is two simple-yet-fully-reusable stages, neither of which necessarily requires a scramjet. I'm thinking that you could probably make some combination of commercial jet engines for lower atmosphere, turborockets (a jet engine with LOX-injection at higher altitudes), normal off-the-shelf rocket engines, or aerospike rocket engines powered by dense fuels (Kerosine + LOX) get to a reasonable suborbital trajectory. And then a hydrogen-and-oxygen fueled reusable second stage that relies on being mostly empty on reentry so it can use simpler thermal protection materials. Which leaves you with somewhat understood problems in design, the only one that's especially hard is supersonic staging. If you have jet engines or turborockets, you have the luxury of spiraling up a la SpaceShipOne, assuring that you can suffer total thrust failure and still get home, instead of being over the Atlantic and relying on there being clear weather over on the Europe/Africa coasts. You have a single seperation event for a si
It's bad when the weight of multiple engines and/or airbreathing parts exceeds the weight, cost, performance, or maintenence penalties of just using a rocket with oxidizer.
Although, given that none of the rockets using any sort of air-breathing stages except for standard jet engines in a carrier aircraft, so it's really hard to draw conclusions...
"Dacek said Wednesday that she fears that critics of the new voting system may try to physically sabotage the machines."
Wow. That's so..... scaremongering.....
Well, here's the thing.
Very few books written are actually origional.
I mean, rebuilding a fallen empire like in Andromeda has been done over and over and over again, all the way back to Roman time. Battlestar Galactica? Aneid?
Remember the MICE quotient? Milieu, Idea, Characters, Event. Rebuilding a fallen empire is just an Event. A story's not just about an event, it's about the characters and ideas and milieu, too.
Indeed, when an independent scientific body critiqued Goresat, they pointed out that there's probably enough satellite data that we could "reconstruct" the same view without needing Goresat.
The reason why it's bad, primarily, is because people *want* it to fail, real bad, so that Intel will be knocked off their high horse. It's the same way that people want Microsoft to fail.
The initial goal of the Itanium was to replace the commercial-Unix MIPS, Alpha, and PA-RISC processors for servers, and then also replace the x86 architecture for desktops, starting with the servers. Remember, the more chips of a specific model you sell, the cheaper they are. MIPS, Alpha, and PA-RISC processors would be in the same price range as desktops if people were buying them.
At the same time, the Itanium was built with a number of assumptions about the future that are currently considered wrong. It's designed to be a simpler processor that the compiler handles optimizations for, therefore making the die smaller. These things happen. The 6502 was built at the time where RAM was fast, relative to the processor, so it has very few registers but an easy and fast way to access the first 256 bytes of RAM and use it almost as a second set of registers. The AS/400 was built when everybody thought that bubble memory was going to be the big thing and was rescued by a virtual machine.
The problem is, Intel has been trying, since the 80s, to make a revolutionary new processor. First it was the i432. Then it was the i860 and i960. Now it's the Itannic. The i860 is especially telling -- it was also very much dependent on the compiler's ability to optimize and, in the end, it turned out that you had to write in i860 assembly language to get any sort of performance out of it.
Now, when the MIPS/ARM/SPARC/etc. processors came out, beginning the RISC revolution, they were able to blow the doors off of the existing CISC processors. Half of the fun of the Itanic is that it was hyped like the next RISC but didn't actually manage to blow the doors off of the RISC or even CISC processors on the market.
See, it's probably a Sony Trinitron or Mitsubishi Diamondtron tube. The "breakage lines" are the wires used to hold the appeture grill up. And, mind you, even the Sony-brand Trinitrons were pretty damn good. My last two work monitors were Sonys (and the one before it was a SGI-branded Trinitron).
;)
It replaced a "genuine" Sony Trinitron, which, in turn, replaced another Trinitron, which replaced the Packard Hell monitor that I inherited, which replaced an Apple IIgs with a fried flyback transformer on the Apple-brand monitor, which replaced a Apple II+ with a composite Apple-brand screen, which replaced... well... air.
Of course, of late, Sony stuff isn't as good as it used to be, and LCDs are replacing CRTs.
Still, I'm holding onto the Sun until it croaks. Then, maybe, I'll see about getting an LCD that's both economical and has a native resolution of 1600x1200.
No, actually, they were because the previous owner didn't want to deal with properly getting rid of them, so he put them on the side of the road, with a "TAKE ME" sign on them.
But thanks for asking.
I can beat that.
On the side of the road, I found a 21" Sun monitor (complete with 13W3->VGA adapter), two semi-complete and mostly-working machines, and some clean but flimsy wine racks.
There's a few times I notice that it's slow. I notice hard drive performance acutely at work. The slower the hard drive, the more time it takes to build, seemingly independent of CPU and often times RAM (although All Praise The Company, who equips us by default with loads of RAM)
I think it depends on what sorts of stuff you do. I have pretty much given goofing with 3D modeling a rest for the past year or two because I just don't have enough CPU anymore on my home system to compare favorably to my mental images. I haven't played any recent games, either.
I think the big thing that will eventually do a system in is wearing out. Hard drives are only "safe" for 3-5 years (history will bear me out on that one). Fans collect dust. My main system has become more sensitive to temperature extremes (My just-about-moved-out-of-apartment doesn't have AC and only gets hot during Fall) as time has gone on and started to bluescreen. The electrolyte in capacitors will eventually change in formulation (the water in it evaporates and such) and they will do a progressively less effective job and eventually let more spikes and swings and stuff (remember that you can clip some of the capacitors on a motherboard and get away with it. At one point, there was a cap that protruded into the AGP-zone and interfered with the graphics card, and the manufacturer told people to just snip the interfering cap off) and eventually it won't insulate the parts from each other.
You aren't entirely correct there.
;)
Remember, the primary cost of space exploration is getting stuff *up*. Without that cost, all you need to do is make sure that stuff still works without gravity and doesn't leak, which is a relatively trivial problem.
If there was an asteroid composed entirely of gold, you could maybe bother with wrapping it in some metal or refractories and then push it, perhaps just by painting one side of it a different color, or putting a small ion drive on the side, towards the desert in Utah/Arizona/Nevada/etc. The total cost would probably be less than the gold, even after the accompanying hit the commodity market would take, although you'd probably want a lot more than 2 blackhawk helicopters for escort when it splats.
See, you do have good points, but...
There's a minimum standard of comfort necessary, psychologically, for mental health. I, personally, would rate at least one working crapper to be part of that. Remember, people in tight proximity like this can do really bizare things that psychoanalysis doesn't do much to explore.
Indeed.
And when ATTWS/Cingular finish their merger and get UMTS properly rolled out and stuffed into the 800/850 MHz bands, Verizon's going to have a rude adjustment ahead of them.
You have to remember that if there was a demand for it, they could make a card that's mildly more expensive than 802.11 but also uses one of the two 3G formats.
But you'd have to have it "catch on" where people were buying it and promoting the economy of scale.