I've been playing lotsa games on my PocketPC lately. NES games are perfect for my PDA because the buttons match up. And NES games had such wonderful gameplay. I have quite a few NES roms on mine.;)
PDAs are great for gaming because you are probably buying and carying them around anyway. They already need lotsa muscle to run real applications, so the games don't cost "extra".
Best part of all, people don't associate it with gaming. You could be looking at your schedule, for all they know.;)
The phone companies in the US will try to provision it to death, like they do everything else, which knocks it out here. But that's just the start.
You are knocking out a lot of the prospective audience by making it a games device first and a phone second. You can get away with having your employer buy a phone with games, as long as it doesn't look like a GBA. You can get away with buying a PDA and putting games on it because it still looks businesslike. This screams "I'm playing games". Older folk aren't going to go for it, which leaves the younger folk, who aren't necessarily going to have enough cash.
It also doesn't bring any cool network functionality to the table. All of the games are just that... games. I might as well get a GBA and a phone. No MMORPGs. You have to use cartrages and they are a pain in the rear to install, instead of just letting you download stuff.
Of course, they may make the v2.0 or v3.0 version actually good.
It should also be said that he unfairly denounced another scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, as a comunist. Because Oppenheimer didn't think we should go for the H-bomb.
Not exactly a nice guy, glowing obituaries asside.
Good point on the reprocessing being harder than it looks. We will probably end up needing to reprocess at some point, however, if we start to run low on easy-to-isolate Uranium. It's not exactly practical to mine the core, you know.
It just occured to me that the political question of storage becomes a lot easier if you just tell everybody that it's storage for 10-20 years until we get better at reprocessing, even if we won't really be at the point where it's crucial for hundereds or perhaps thousands of years.
The reason why Chernobyl blew was because of extremely poor design, even with 2D simulations of reactor beds. It also doesn't have the sort of defense-in-depth that US reactors have. It doesn't even have a proper containment dome over the reactor core like a modern reactor.
TMI is pretty much the limit of how bad a PWR reactor can get -- the meltdown was contained before it could even breach the first line of defense (the reactor core). This includes molten fuel rods sitting on the bottom of the reactor vessel. They had a hydrogen bubble explode inside of the core and the pressure vessel wasn't breached. They didn't even use the extra-fun boron flood system that would give you a guaranteed stop to the meltdown.
I dono. The way I see it, we've got either solar power or nuclear power. Nuclear power requires less trouble to expand the usage of. So we might as well try to make nuclear work for us, because it's better than the entire industrialized world reverting back to the stone age.
Because it's a dirty word. Our entire doctorine of nuclear non-proliferation is build around keeping relevant bomb technologies away from non-nuclear states. Reprocessing is one of those technologies that can be abused to make nuclear bombs.
If people would actually look at the facts, it's different, but congressmen and other policy makers are not known for any in-depth research not provided by a lobbyist.
But the second somebody starts talking about reprocessing plants, somebody will invoke the Plutonium Defense (kinda like the wookie defense) and people will go back, tail between their legs, and start talking about Yucca Mountain again.
I mean, you do want to store that stuff away from other people, where it's geologically stable. Yucca Mountain looks to be quite good for that sort of thing. And the fact that there aren't as many people there works to its advantage, in that they aren't quite as politically influential.
It's very simple. You reprocess the fuel to recover the usefull stuff out of it. Some of the U235 wasn't used up, so you can save that. Some of the U238 absorbed neutrons and turned into Pu239 and Pu240, which can also be used. Plus there's a smattering of other useful heavy isotopes, some of which (potentially of the Platinum group) would be useful to isolate and sell.
The problem is that you are creating Plutonium, which is bad on the grounds of nuclear proliferation. Although, the Plutonium produced isn't actually too useful for nuclear warheads anyways because the Pu240 contaminates the warhead-friendly Pu239.
The remaining stuff is generally not suitable for reactor usage but is occasionally reactive. It looks like you might be able to make it either a net-gain or, at least, not a substantial waste of energy, to bombard it with neutrons so that it will decay much faster.
The fun thing is that, once the nasty stuff that's very radioactive has had a chance to decay, you are talking about stuff that is actually less radioactive than the source rock. Even without reprocessing, you are talking about storing the stuff for maybe a thousand years.
The problem is that it's a bad word because we're trying to get all of the little countries of the world to *not* have nukes, and one of the good ways to do this is to build some reactors, put in rods of U238, and then isolate out some Pu239 before the Pu239 has a chance to absorb another neutron and become Pu240. Somebody got the bright idea that if nobody had access to a reprocessing plant that they'd never be able to get enough Plutonium to make a bomb. It's really kinda dumb and just makes us further beholden to the oil and coal reserves.
The problem is that there's so many whackos of every variety (including overzealous environmentalists) who oppose nuclear power, every single move, even it's a really good idea, is heavily argued about.
Oh, I'm not sure if plan A has been actually abandoned.
IBM seems to have decided that it's cheaper to sue SCO into oblivion at this point. Which makes Plan B a nice option to get some money out of the deal. Plus, if IBM changes their mind, a higher stock price means that IBM has to pay more, which means that they make more.
Actually, it's an email virus, not an Outlook virus.
It uses a efficent multi-threaded internal mail engine that uses any available mail addresses it can find on your system (browser cache, address book -- which Domino will register itself as too, etc).
It spreads because people are generally stupid and will open up attachments.
Outlook is not needed. It can even spread if you are using webmail.
Not to be excessively paranoid, but SGI makes a great strategic choice for SCO to sue.
They, unlike IBM, don't have buckets of cash in the bank to throw at a legal defense. If SCO can force SGI to do their bidding and potentially spit out some documentation that makes IBM's case look bad, they will be at a better position to take on IBM.
We really haven't explored the limits of reusability or expendability.
If we were to contract out for expendable boosters, built in as cheaply and expendably as possible in batches of 100, it would end up with the launch costs way below what they are now. Our current batch of expendable boosters are far too complicated and are built far too slowly to give us savings like this. This is what is called the "Big Dumb Booster" notion.
The shuttle is a poor example of reusable boosters. The cost for refurbishing between launches, maintaining an army of technicians, etc. is incredible. If we were able to fly one, with the same safety and without appreciable yearly budget increase, once every week, the shuttle would start to look good.
The CAIB's trying to say what has been repeated over and over and over again. One of the reasons why the shuttle has problems is because they tried to create one space vehicle that can do everything. It's like trying to combine a sedan, truck, and crane into one vehicle.
And it's probably easier to build an inexpensive production-grade partially or fully reusable craft before somebody gets a better idea if it just has to do one or the other.
The security of a voting system is generally predicated upon the ease of observation of fraud and the correct interpretation of what the voter thinks that they said.
You *know* that a paper ballot says what you mean when you see the marks that you made on it, and anybody, if so inclined, can go through the paper ballots and do an accounting of the vote to make sure that any electronics on the back-end of things are actually operational.
You could know the same about an electronic voting system, if you were able to do a ROM dump and verify that the software was what you thought it was, examined somebody else's formal proof that everything works properly, etc. But nobody's going to do that before voting. Plus it would take too long.
Paper, although inefficent and antiquated, works well here, because there's fewer steps between you and the voting record. The electronic voting machine needs to have each wire that goes between the keypad and processor considered and each instruction considered to be called secure.
Furthermore, paper is a mostly indellable perminant record, always available for spot checks if the large black-box in the back that's doing the accounting. So if there's any questions, you run the whole thing through again. If there aren't, you still do random spot checks to make sure that everything's OK.
You can view the election system as being more important than even a life-critical system. An airplane that is experencing electronics failures may still fly well enough to land. And it only needs to deal with wear on the components for failure; people aren't routinely trying to sabotage or subvert the fly-by-wire on your average A320 -- the guards make sure of that one. But people do try to subvert voting systems all the time. The penalty for massive failure is the psychotic canidate who really got 1% of the vote getting 99% of the vote and enslaving each and every human on earth.
I'm not sure weather the voting system is more or less critical than the ignition circuit on the big fsking thermonuclear bomb designed to deflect a killer asteroid on the way the size of the one that did the dinasaurs in.
- Working from home - Hitting my home desktop from work to dig up an old email on my home email box. - Trading files too large to be emailed with other folks - Downloading far too many copies of the SoBig virus - Browsing without wanting to kill 95% of all web designers - Being able to run a LAN at home without needing to have a dialup gateway set up. Also the accompanying ability to synch the computer clocks to NTP and other such nicities. - Downloading huge files like Linux, BSD, or massive Microsoft SDKs.
I'm not an expert, but I don't think it would work out so well.
The shuttle is already using a more gentle trajectory than a capsule for braking. It also happens to be quite If it gets too much more gentle of a trajectory, it's going to skip off the atmosphere like a rock. That's the problem -- the trajectory is already the gentlest they could get away with, so there's no room for degraded performance.
Now, as for deaccelerating more before landing, that's certainly feasable. You'd need a completely new vehicle to make it work because you'd need to carry signifigantly more propellant. The reason why there's so much heating on re-entry is not a matter of inherent need, it's a matter of it being the easiest way to get something from mach 25 to a 200 knots landing speed. In fact, given the shuttle, you probably wouldn't have any room for payload with enough propellant to make much of a difference.
The problem is not necessarily the re-entry itself, it's more that you have constraints that weren't followed. If you flew an airliner with a substantial hole in the front of the wing, that wouldn't be safe either. If you flew a SR-71, which is on the limits of how fast you can go with a metallic skin, with a hole in the front of the wing, it would probably crash.
Of course, all of this would have been mildly simpler if the shuttle was heads-up instead of heads-down at takeoff. But there's some constraints there and they'd have to completely rearange the trajectory, which is not a simple or safe task.
The problem is that you'd most likely want different engines. Because the SSME's are very reusable, they are also very expensive.
It probably wouldn't be particularly hard to do, except that nobody wants it badly enough to pay for the startup costs. Most of the projects it would be useful for (launching missions to mars, large space stations, solar power sats, etc.) haven't been getting especially large amounts of funding.
The closest we came was the Space Station C proposal, which would have been interesting, but there were some very good reasons why it was not chosen.
I'm not sure where they got the figure for the Ariane 5V, that sounds a tad heavy.
I wouldn't bank on the return of the Energia. It's big and requires cooperation between the Ukraine and Russia, which doesn't happen so easily. Right now, there's some good potential for heavy lift boosters via straightforward structural modifications of the Delta and Atlas boosters (to allow them to support a heavier payload) clustered in various configurations -- they don't have to stop at three boosters. It's theoretically possible, and I'm wagering that the people who designed the Delta and Atlas probably had that in mind for future development, because satelites keep getting bigger.
See, the interesting part, and the thing that makes it impossible for NASA to get a shuttle replacement together, is that you generally don't need to get even 28,000kg to a useful orbit. If you could get 5,000 kg to a useful orbit cheaply, you'd send up your satelite in 5,000 kg chunks and put it together while up there. But in order to do that you either need spacesuits that don't require prebreathing and extended preperations, an inflatable, presurized drydock, or really good robotics. And you'd need to fly it on a regular schedule.
The problem is that we need to keep the shuttle around until we're at least done building the space station because none of the exsisting modules would fit on it and would require a LOT of modification in order to be launched on a Delta or an Atlas booster, and might require some booster modifications to boot. And NASA really didn't want to give up their existing abilities, so they kept trying to avoid this.
I think that part of the drive for the OSP by NASA is because they realize that they are eventually going to be forced to give up the shuttle. The timings might be such that the shuttle is canceled shortly after all of the completed station modules are sent up. So the OSP is insurance that they will be able to stay in the manned spaceflight business after that happens, even if it takes a while before a true shuttle replacement shows up. They are going to railroad it through congress and hope that they can get it built and operational before they have to give up the shuttle.
And the railroading of the OSP is probably a good thing. Part of the problem with the X-30 and X-33 projects was that they took far too long to produce anything even mildly useful with them, so people would try to get a nice career as a middle manager, instead of designing and building the fscking thing. Remember that the most impressive aircraft of the cold war (U-2, SR-71, F-117) were build in the Skunk Works using an astonishingly small number of people in an incredibly short time span.
Not just lawn ornaments.... Some of them had the joy of proper preservation, and the ignomy of being cut up as museum pieces, too.;)
I will admit that them doing that was dumb then and now. Except they figured that: a) they'd have the shuttle to reboost Skylab I b) they'd have the new station that was better up soon enough anyway.
The larger problem is that they needed to keep around one last Apollo for rescue purposes, just in case. So they needed an Apollo capsule and a Saturn IB handy, just in case.
I mean, they were just *screwed* in general. Von Braun wanted to take the route that would give us pre-exsting infrastructure for future projects but the Apollo way of doing things was slightly faster and more likely to succeed. Then NASA gets told that it's either a limited number of future Apollo shots or the space transportation system because we already beat the damn commies to the moon.
The problem was that NASA couldn't make the shuttle happen cheap enough. So the Space Transportation System lost the space-tug portion, the military got involved and changed a bunch of the requirements.
In retrospect, yes, NASA shouldn't have bothered developing the shuttle and should have just kept with Saturn-derived boosters.
But, at that point, the only way that NASA could fund any sort of manned space flight program was to promise that it would be reusable and would dramatically decrease the cost of all launchers. Also, given that the Saturn V line needed to be shut down, it had to be capable of assembling a space station out of parts, instead of being one or two Saturn launches. And everything piled on from there, with the NASA chiefs going on with blinders on hoping that everything would work its way out in the end.
You haven't been keeping up. The Delta IV Large, which is the current largest available production booster, has a 5 m diamater fairing and can lift 25,800 kg to LEO. The Hubble Space Telescope is a mere 10,863 kg. At that rate, even the Delta IV Medium could lift it.
Yeah. However, I bet if you'd make the buttons work style sheets by default, it would further confuse and annoy the users, so if anybody tried it, it would flunk the usability testing.
The biggest problem is that you try to explain this to people and you get a blank stare. They don't care. I feel like the guy who bought a Sun instead of a PC even though he just does email and surfs the web because PCs annoy him.
Well, in my experience, Word has some nice formatting tools if you use them exactly the way that they are designed.
Except that nobody *ever* uses them the way they are supposed to be used. Because, unless you are a technical writer and you openly assault anybody else who messes with the document without obeying the style sheet, people don't really get style sheets.
I used to take class notes using Word with a set of style sheets and keyboard macros. I could often keep up with just about eveything outside of hardcore math classes with it, and produce very well formatted and indexed notes, to boot.
One of the few features that my really really obnoxiously
bad thinkpad did right was somehow making the speakers so that they sound fine while you are right up next to them at a quiet volume, but isn't audible if you aren't sitting in front of it.
No, I do know what I'm talking about. Try it on your machine, if you are so inclined.
NT Workstation, 2k Pro, and XP Pro all support dynamic disks but *not* fault tolerance (defined as RAID 1 or RAID 5). They do support RAID 0, however.
The disk management interface *can* create a fault tollerant set from a workstation OS on a remote machine running NT server, 2K server, etc. That's why it's in the help file.
You can hack the dynamic disk stuff to make it think it's running a server OS (same executable images between versions) at your own discression (With the accompanying threat of trained MS attack newts killing you and everybody you care about for such a flagrant violation of the EULA.;) )
Note that all of the controllers listed have one common quality.
They are a garden-variety IDE controller with some extra BIOS and driver code. They are charging you extra because you are willing to pay a premium for it.
Unfortunately, Windows XP and Windows 2000 workstation both ship with the mirroring code disabled, which is unfortunate.
Having said that, there's very little benefit in worying about if the extra BIOS and driver code is going to work under Linux. As long as the chip lets you get to the drives, don't sweat it.
We already have a good lightbulb replacement...
on
Light Bulb Replacements
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Florescent lights work just fine, are more efficent (especially if you want white light) than incandescent bulbs or LEDs, and are cheap and well developed in comparison.
They've got a whole spectrum of colored tubes using the same technology as they use to make neon signs, if you so desire.
The only thing that you get with LEDs is the ability to get small amounts of light from very small amounts of power.
They are great for microlights and flashlights and medium-sized jumbotrons and a few special purpose applications where normal lights just won't work. The LED manufacturers are getting sick of just making indicator lights, so they are trying to push their new toys as much as they can.
Not quite a correct analogy. It's pretty easy to make a battery explode without malicious intent. I have a project that will probably involve rechargable batteries and between that and working with a simulator, I would believe that a battery that the charge controller isn't prepared to accept would explode and catch on fire. You are talking about an astonishing number of joules stored in a pretty small package. All you need to do is not put a temperature sensor in, or put the wrong one in, and that'll do it, which is what some of the news reports seem to indicate.
If I replace a bunch of parts on my honda's engine with substandard alternative parts, is Honda really responsible if it pukes while I'm driving to work? Not really. If I'm going to put in a non-honda part at least I can make sure that it meets manufacturer's spec.
In order to make cellphones cheap and inexpensive, you've gotta comprimise. I've done a little bit of analog electronics over time and I started to feel like I knew what I was doing when I said "Yeah, so I should lose at least a volt here, which should give me somewhere around 14 volts"
Now, don't get me wrong, it's still inexcusable that the cellphone manufacturers are charging such a suckey markup on batteries and accessories. But when they design the charge controller, they are assuming that you are giving them a battery with all of the paramaters where they expect them to be. The only alternative is to loosen the requirements, which means that their phone won't have the same performance as other ones and people will hate it.
Eventually, batteries will be like the battery in your car, where you can swap them out easier. I was thinking that Li-Ion and NiMH batteries were about as good as they could get, but there are some new batteries that are supposedly better on the way out, so we'll have at least one more cycle in compact batteries. None of the rechargable markets besides the car, other than replacing the lettered cells in personal electronics, have reached enough of a stable point where a group of manufacturers can standardize the battery. The problem is they think they can make some extra ensured cash by locking you in to their batteries.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh hell yeah.
;)
;)
I've been playing lotsa games on my PocketPC lately. NES games are perfect for my PDA because the buttons match up. And NES games had such wonderful gameplay. I have quite a few NES roms on mine.
PDAs are great for gaming because you are probably buying and carying them around anyway. They already need lotsa muscle to run real applications, so the games don't cost "extra".
Best part of all, people don't associate it with gaming. You could be looking at your schedule, for all they know.
I'm not banking on it. Why?
The phone companies in the US will try to provision it to death, like they do everything else, which knocks it out here. But that's just the start.
You are knocking out a lot of the prospective audience by making it a games device first and a phone second. You can get away with having your employer buy a phone with games, as long as it doesn't look like a GBA. You can get away with buying a PDA and putting games on it because it still looks businesslike. This screams "I'm playing games". Older folk aren't going to go for it, which leaves the younger folk, who aren't necessarily going to have enough cash.
It also doesn't bring any cool network functionality to the table. All of the games are just that... games. I might as well get a GBA and a phone. No MMORPGs. You have to use cartrages and they are a pain in the rear to install, instead of just letting you download stuff.
Of course, they may make the v2.0 or v3.0 version actually good.
It should also be said that he unfairly denounced another scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, as a comunist. Because Oppenheimer didn't think we should go for the H-bomb.
Not exactly a nice guy, glowing obituaries asside.
Good point on the reprocessing being harder than it looks. We will probably end up needing to reprocess at some point, however, if we start to run low on easy-to-isolate Uranium. It's not exactly practical to mine the core, you know.
It just occured to me that the political question of storage becomes a lot easier if you just tell everybody that it's storage for 10-20 years until we get better at reprocessing, even if we won't really be at the point where it's crucial for hundereds or perhaps thousands of years.
The reason why Chernobyl blew was because of extremely poor design, even with 2D simulations of reactor beds. It also doesn't have the sort of defense-in-depth that US reactors have. It doesn't even have a proper containment dome over the reactor core like a modern reactor.
TMI is pretty much the limit of how bad a PWR reactor can get -- the meltdown was contained before it could even breach the first line of defense (the reactor core). This includes molten fuel rods sitting on the bottom of the reactor vessel. They had a hydrogen bubble explode inside of the core and the pressure vessel wasn't breached. They didn't even use the extra-fun boron flood system that would give you a guaranteed stop to the meltdown.
I dono. The way I see it, we've got either solar power or nuclear power. Nuclear power requires less trouble to expand the usage of. So we might as well try to make nuclear work for us, because it's better than the entire industrialized world reverting back to the stone age.
Because it's a dirty word. Our entire doctorine of nuclear non-proliferation is build around keeping relevant bomb technologies away from non-nuclear states. Reprocessing is one of those technologies that can be abused to make nuclear bombs.
If people would actually look at the facts, it's different, but congressmen and other policy makers are not known for any in-depth research not provided by a lobbyist.
But the second somebody starts talking about reprocessing plants, somebody will invoke the Plutonium Defense (kinda like the wookie defense) and people will go back, tail between their legs, and start talking about Yucca Mountain again.
I mean, you do want to store that stuff away from other people, where it's geologically stable. Yucca Mountain looks to be quite good for that sort of thing. And the fact that there aren't as many people there works to its advantage, in that they aren't quite as politically influential.
They've had a solution since the 70s, actually.
It's very simple. You reprocess the fuel to recover the usefull stuff out of it. Some of the U235 wasn't used up, so you can save that. Some of the U238 absorbed neutrons and turned into Pu239 and Pu240, which can also be used. Plus there's a smattering of other useful heavy isotopes, some of which (potentially of the Platinum group) would be useful to isolate and sell.
The problem is that you are creating Plutonium, which is bad on the grounds of nuclear proliferation. Although, the Plutonium produced isn't actually too useful for nuclear warheads anyways because the Pu240 contaminates the warhead-friendly Pu239.
The remaining stuff is generally not suitable for reactor usage but is occasionally reactive. It looks like you might be able to make it either a net-gain or, at least, not a substantial waste of energy, to bombard it with neutrons so that it will decay much faster.
The fun thing is that, once the nasty stuff that's very radioactive has had a chance to decay, you are talking about stuff that is actually less radioactive than the source rock. Even without reprocessing, you are talking about storing the stuff for maybe a thousand years.
The problem is that it's a bad word because we're trying to get all of the little countries of the world to *not* have nukes, and one of the good ways to do this is to build some reactors, put in rods of U238, and then isolate out some Pu239 before the Pu239 has a chance to absorb another neutron and become Pu240. Somebody got the bright idea that if nobody had access to a reprocessing plant that they'd never be able to get enough Plutonium to make a bomb. It's really kinda dumb and just makes us further beholden to the oil and coal reserves.
The problem is that there's so many whackos of every variety (including overzealous environmentalists) who oppose nuclear power, every single move, even it's a really good idea, is heavily argued about.
Oh, I'm not sure if plan A has been actually abandoned.
IBM seems to have decided that it's cheaper to sue SCO into oblivion at this point. Which makes Plan B a nice option to get some money out of the deal. Plus, if IBM changes their mind, a higher stock price means that IBM has to pay more, which means that they make more.
Actually, it's an email virus, not an Outlook virus.
It uses a efficent multi-threaded internal mail engine that uses any available mail addresses it can find on your system (browser cache, address book -- which Domino will register itself as too, etc).
It spreads because people are generally stupid and will open up attachments.
Outlook is not needed. It can even spread if you are using webmail.
Not to be excessively paranoid, but SGI makes a great strategic choice for SCO to sue.
They, unlike IBM, don't have buckets of cash in the bank to throw at a legal defense. If SCO can force SGI to do their bidding and potentially spit out some documentation that makes IBM's case look bad, they will be at a better position to take on IBM.
You are using it all the time.
We really haven't explored the limits of reusability or expendability.
If we were to contract out for expendable boosters, built in as cheaply and expendably as possible in batches of 100, it would end up with the launch costs way below what they are now. Our current batch of expendable boosters are far too complicated and are built far too slowly to give us savings like this. This is what is called the "Big Dumb Booster" notion.
The shuttle is a poor example of reusable boosters. The cost for refurbishing between launches, maintaining an army of technicians, etc. is incredible. If we were able to fly one, with the same safety and without appreciable yearly budget increase, once every week, the shuttle would start to look good.
The CAIB's trying to say what has been repeated over and over and over again. One of the reasons why the shuttle has problems is because they tried to create one space vehicle that can do everything. It's like trying to combine a sedan, truck, and crane into one vehicle.
And it's probably easier to build an inexpensive production-grade partially or fully reusable craft before somebody gets a better idea if it just has to do one or the other.
I don't think you want a mathematical proof.
The security of a voting system is generally predicated upon the ease of observation of fraud and the correct interpretation of what the voter thinks that they said.
You *know* that a paper ballot says what you mean when you see the marks that you made on it, and anybody, if so inclined, can go through the paper ballots and do an accounting of the vote to make sure that any electronics on the back-end of things are actually operational.
You could know the same about an electronic voting system, if you were able to do a ROM dump and verify that the software was what you thought it was, examined somebody else's formal proof that everything works properly, etc. But nobody's going to do that before voting. Plus it would take too long.
Paper, although inefficent and antiquated, works well here, because there's fewer steps between you and the voting record. The electronic voting machine needs to have each wire that goes between the keypad and processor considered and each instruction considered to be called secure.
Furthermore, paper is a mostly indellable perminant record, always available for spot checks if the large black-box in the back that's doing the accounting. So if there's any questions, you run the whole thing through again. If there aren't, you still do random spot checks to make sure that everything's OK.
You can view the election system as being more important than even a life-critical system. An airplane that is experencing electronics failures may still fly well enough to land. And it only needs to deal with wear on the components for failure; people aren't routinely trying to sabotage or subvert the fly-by-wire on your average A320 -- the guards make sure of that one. But people do try to subvert voting systems all the time. The penalty for massive failure is the psychotic canidate who really got 1% of the vote getting 99% of the vote and enslaving each and every human on earth.
I'm not sure weather the voting system is more or less critical than the ignition circuit on the big fsking thermonuclear bomb designed to deflect a killer asteroid on the way the size of the one that did the dinasaurs in.
Appologies for the theatrics, of course.
- Working from home
- Hitting my home desktop from work to dig up an old email on my home email box.
- Trading files too large to be emailed with other folks
- Downloading far too many copies of the SoBig virus
- Browsing without wanting to kill 95% of all web designers
- Being able to run a LAN at home without needing to have a dialup gateway set up. Also the accompanying ability to synch the computer clocks to NTP and other such nicities.
- Downloading huge files like Linux, BSD, or massive Microsoft SDKs.
I'm not an expert, but I don't think it would work out so well.
The shuttle is already using a more gentle trajectory than a capsule for braking. It also happens to be quite If it gets too much more gentle of a trajectory, it's going to skip off the atmosphere like a rock. That's the problem -- the trajectory is already the gentlest they could get away with, so there's no room for degraded performance.
Now, as for deaccelerating more before landing, that's certainly feasable. You'd need a completely new vehicle to make it work because you'd need to carry signifigantly more propellant. The reason why there's so much heating on re-entry is not a matter of inherent need, it's a matter of it being the easiest way to get something from mach 25 to a 200 knots landing speed. In fact, given the shuttle, you probably wouldn't have any room for payload with enough propellant to make much of a difference.
The problem is not necessarily the re-entry itself, it's more that you have constraints that weren't followed. If you flew an airliner with a substantial hole in the front of the wing, that wouldn't be safe either. If you flew a SR-71, which is on the limits of how fast you can go with a metallic skin, with a hole in the front of the wing, it would probably crash.
Of course, all of this would have been mildly simpler if the shuttle was heads-up instead of heads-down at takeoff. But there's some constraints there and they'd have to completely rearange the trajectory, which is not a simple or safe task.
That's been studied to death.
The problem is that you'd most likely want different engines. Because the SSME's are very reusable, they are also very expensive.
It probably wouldn't be particularly hard to do, except that nobody wants it badly enough to pay for the startup costs. Most of the projects it would be useful for (launching missions to mars, large space stations, solar power sats, etc.) haven't been getting especially large amounts of funding.
The closest we came was the Space Station C proposal, which would have been interesting, but there were some very good reasons why it was not chosen.
I'm not sure where they got the figure for the Ariane 5V, that sounds a tad heavy.
I wouldn't bank on the return of the Energia. It's big and requires cooperation between the Ukraine and Russia, which doesn't happen so easily. Right now, there's some good potential for heavy lift boosters via straightforward structural modifications of the Delta and Atlas boosters (to allow them to support a heavier payload) clustered in various configurations -- they don't have to stop at three boosters. It's theoretically possible, and I'm wagering that the people who designed the Delta and Atlas probably had that in mind for future development, because satelites keep getting bigger.
See, the interesting part, and the thing that makes it impossible for NASA to get a shuttle replacement together, is that you generally don't need to get even 28,000kg to a useful orbit. If you could get 5,000 kg to a useful orbit cheaply, you'd send up your satelite in 5,000 kg chunks and put it together while up there. But in order to do that you either need spacesuits that don't require prebreathing and extended preperations, an inflatable, presurized drydock, or really good robotics. And you'd need to fly it on a regular schedule.
The problem is that we need to keep the shuttle around until we're at least done building the space station because none of the exsisting modules would fit on it and would require a LOT of modification in order to be launched on a Delta or an Atlas booster, and might require some booster modifications to boot. And NASA really didn't want to give up their existing abilities, so they kept trying to avoid this.
I think that part of the drive for the OSP by NASA is because they realize that they are eventually going to be forced to give up the shuttle. The timings might be such that the shuttle is canceled shortly after all of the completed station modules are sent up. So the OSP is insurance that they will be able to stay in the manned spaceflight business after that happens, even if it takes a while before a true shuttle replacement shows up. They are going to railroad it through congress and hope that they can get it built and operational before they have to give up the shuttle.
And the railroading of the OSP is probably a good thing. Part of the problem with the X-30 and X-33 projects was that they took far too long to produce anything even mildly useful with them, so people would try to get a nice career as a middle manager, instead of designing and building the fscking thing. Remember that the most impressive aircraft of the cold war (U-2, SR-71, F-117) were build in the Skunk Works using an astonishingly small number of people in an incredibly short time span.
Not just lawn ornaments.... Some of them had the joy of proper preservation, and the ignomy of being cut up as museum pieces, too. ;)
I will admit that them doing that was dumb then and now. Except they figured that:
a) they'd have the shuttle to reboost Skylab I
b) they'd have the new station that was better up soon enough anyway.
The larger problem is that they needed to keep around one last Apollo for rescue purposes, just in case. So they needed an Apollo capsule and a Saturn IB handy, just in case.
I mean, they were just *screwed* in general. Von Braun wanted to take the route that would give us pre-exsting infrastructure for future projects but the Apollo way of doing things was slightly faster and more likely to succeed. Then NASA gets told that it's either a limited number of future Apollo shots or the space transportation system because we already beat the damn commies to the moon.
The problem was that NASA couldn't make the shuttle happen cheap enough. So the Space Transportation System lost the space-tug portion, the military got involved and changed a bunch of the requirements.
And the one thing that NASA should have really done, they didn't.
In retrospect, yes, NASA shouldn't have bothered developing the shuttle and should have just kept with Saturn-derived boosters.
But, at that point, the only way that NASA could fund any sort of manned space flight program was to promise that it would be reusable and would dramatically decrease the cost of all launchers. Also, given that the Saturn V line needed to be shut down, it had to be capable of assembling a space station out of parts, instead of being one or two Saturn launches. And everything piled on from there, with the NASA chiefs going on with blinders on hoping that everything would work its way out in the end.
You haven't been keeping up. The Delta IV Large, which is the current largest available production booster, has a 5 m diamater fairing and can lift 25,800 kg to LEO. The Hubble Space Telescope is a mere 10,863 kg. At that rate, even the Delta IV Medium could lift it.
Yeah. However, I bet if you'd make the buttons work style sheets by default, it would further confuse and annoy the users, so if anybody tried it, it would flunk the usability testing.
The biggest problem is that you try to explain this to people and you get a blank stare. They don't care. I feel like the guy who bought a Sun instead of a PC even though he just does email and surfs the web because PCs annoy him.
Well, in my experience, Word has some nice formatting tools if you use them exactly the way that they are designed.
Except that nobody *ever* uses them the way they are supposed to be used. Because, unless you are a technical writer and you openly assault anybody else who messes with the document without obeying the style sheet, people don't really get style sheets.
I used to take class notes using Word with a set of style sheets and keyboard macros. I could often keep up with just about eveything outside of hardcore math classes with it, and produce very well formatted and indexed notes, to boot.
One of the few features that my really really obnoxiously bad thinkpad did right was somehow making the speakers so that they sound fine while you are right up next to them at a quiet volume, but isn't audible if you aren't sitting in front of it.
No, I do know what I'm talking about. Try it on your machine, if you are so inclined.
;) )
NT Workstation, 2k Pro, and XP Pro all support dynamic disks but *not* fault tolerance (defined as RAID 1 or RAID 5). They do support RAID 0, however.
The disk management interface *can* create a fault tollerant set from a workstation OS on a remote machine running NT server, 2K server, etc. That's why it's in the help file.
You can hack the dynamic disk stuff to make it think it's running a server OS (same executable images between versions) at your own discression (With the accompanying threat of trained MS attack newts killing you and everybody you care about for such a flagrant violation of the EULA.
Note that all of the controllers listed have one common quality.
They are a garden-variety IDE controller with some extra BIOS and driver code. They are charging you extra because you are willing to pay a premium for it.
Unfortunately, Windows XP and Windows 2000 workstation both ship with the mirroring code disabled, which is unfortunate.
Having said that, there's very little benefit in worying about if the extra BIOS and driver code is going to work under Linux. As long as the chip lets you get to the drives, don't sweat it.
Florescent lights work just fine, are more efficent (especially if you want white light) than incandescent bulbs or LEDs, and are cheap and well developed in comparison.
They've got a whole spectrum of colored tubes using the same technology as they use to make neon signs, if you so desire.
The only thing that you get with LEDs is the ability to get small amounts of light from very small amounts of power.
They are great for microlights and flashlights and medium-sized jumbotrons and a few special purpose applications where normal lights just won't work. The LED manufacturers are getting sick of just making indicator lights, so they are trying to push their new toys as much as they can.
Not quite a correct analogy. It's pretty easy to make a battery explode without malicious intent. I have a project that will probably involve rechargable batteries and between that and working with a simulator, I would believe that a battery that the charge controller isn't prepared to accept would explode and catch on fire. You are talking about an astonishing number of joules stored in a pretty small package. All you need to do is not put a temperature sensor in, or put the wrong one in, and that'll do it, which is what some of the news reports seem to indicate.
If I replace a bunch of parts on my honda's engine with substandard alternative parts, is Honda really responsible if it pukes while I'm driving to work? Not really. If I'm going to put in a non-honda part at least I can make sure that it meets manufacturer's spec.
In order to make cellphones cheap and inexpensive, you've gotta comprimise. I've done a little bit of analog electronics over time and I started to feel like I knew what I was doing when I said "Yeah, so I should lose at least a volt here, which should give me somewhere around 14 volts"
Now, don't get me wrong, it's still inexcusable that the cellphone manufacturers are charging such a suckey markup on batteries and accessories. But when they design the charge controller, they are assuming that you are giving them a battery with all of the paramaters where they expect them to be. The only alternative is to loosen the requirements, which means that their phone won't have the same performance as other ones and people will hate it.
Eventually, batteries will be like the battery in your car, where you can swap them out easier. I was thinking that Li-Ion and NiMH batteries were about as good as they could get, but there are some new batteries that are supposedly better on the way out, so we'll have at least one more cycle in compact batteries. None of the rechargable markets besides the car, other than replacing the lettered cells in personal electronics, have reached enough of a stable point where a group of manufacturers can standardize the battery. The problem is they think they can make some extra ensured cash by locking you in to their batteries.