You sorta glossed over that "properly designed" bit. Every flying wing ever built (and yes, I'm including the B-2 and all of the old Northrop designs) have a small tendency to "hunt" a bit left-to-right, which is part of the problem that killed the old bombers (a two-degree offset in a bombing run was awful for the ballistic bombing of the 1950s, and will make a planeload of passengers a lot more prone to airsickness). The B-2 handles that problem with a lot of computer power, and the BWB will almost certainly have to do the same thing, to a lesser degree (a BWB suffers less from this problem).
Of course, BWBs have been built in the past (one such design in the 1940s, as I recall), but pressurization has been a problem. Building a plane with pressurized cylinder for a cabin is pretty easy. Building a flight-capable structure the size and shape of a hotel ballroom is something else altogether. Modern composites (with custom-designed rigidity and ultra-light weight) probably made more of a difference than the flight computers...
In case you haven't noticed, payphones are nowhere near as common as they used to be. In a lot of cities, you have to go a couple of blocks (or more) just to find one (if you know where it is). Within three or four years, pay phones will be bordering on the endangered list...
...since you put it in those particular words, you'd have a chance of being prosecuted for public use of profanity in any number of countries if this were accepted practice worldwide.
There's a relatively new theory that the oil reserves we see are not the result of rotting dinosaurs and such, but are rather leftovers from the time the Earth was formed. A fellow named Gold has found petroleum deposits much deeper than the biogenic theory could possibly account for. Some "depleted" oil fields have shown signs of replenishing themselves from much lower depths.
There are some indications that the oil reserves of our little planet have barely been touched, and that as much as 99% of them are still waiting to be discovered...
The guys who run RoadRunner mail hosts seem to be a bit out of it when it comes to how "the Internet" works. Sure, they can figure out some of the stuff, but they get clueless really fast.
For example: They used to have the "From:" header screwed up. When you sent some mail, it said that the sender was "username at the machine that handled all of the mail for the area," not "username at the real address." So for six months or so, when some folks tried to reply to my RR address, their replies bounced. I had to add a "Reply-to" line just to get mail back.
A few years back, I got this odd letter from Nigeria.
Beautiful paper in the envelope and letter - sort of a marbled blue/white. Handwritten in incredible penmanship (not laser or inkjet).
I felt really bad turning it in to the Postal Inspection Service (and even that guy thought it was "one of the prettiest scam letters" he'd ever seen.
You just don't get that sort of workmanship with email.
Hell, even in the Really Old Days (I started playing D&D in 1977 or so, and still have a first-edition set of manuals around somewhere), we used to come up with alternate magic and combat systems. I had a full-out spellpoint system for magic in 1979 or so, and we used everything from a deck of cards on up for hand-to-hand combat.
Note that Steve Jackson's The Fantasy Trip was created (partially) in response to the kludgy D&D combat system.
Then you get into the whole first/second/third generation FRP system theory, with D&D/AD&D being First Gen, EPT and the like being Second Gen, and TFT/Hero/GURPS being Third Gen...
Lou Zocchi helped MAR Barker with the EPT copyright issues, but he was also known for whipping out not-too-good "clones" of popular games in short order.
TSR was known for pulling nasty crap on a regular basis, and while they'd sue at the drop of a hat for copyright infringement, they'd use "inspirations" from other games and sources quite freely. All of the smart gamers made sure to never show any works in progress to TSR employees, because those works would be the next TSR "invention." For example, Steve Jackson Games was working on a vampire-hunting game called, of course, "Vampire," and after some TSR employees got wind of it, TSR announced a game with that exact same title (and no game to sell with that title - that came later. Shades of Microsoft, there).
Those "counter" systems don't really count the OS or machine. They count what the machine's browser claims to be. For example, my Mac's browser pretends to be Explorer 5 running on NT, because of all of the silly morons who use "you must use Explorer on this site" code on their front pages (which is seldom, if ever, necessary).
Those "webcounter" pages all seem to use software based off of the same original flawed code, and seldom count anything like what their sellers claim.
...is a bit over a hundred years of somewhat accurate measurements. After coming out of a century (the 1800s) which was known for being somewhat on the cold side.
...which program to read Word docs? Microsoft Word 4, 95, 97, 2000? I have Word on my computer, and it won't read the "new" Word formats. Although I have some other programs that read Word documents just fine. On the other hand, most of Microsoft's HTML tools can't make HTML that reads well in anything except Explorer...
I get crappy, munged-up email from Outlook users every single day, often with one or another worm or virus as a payload. Anything that encourages Windows users to get a real email/news program is a good thing.
Supposedly, we're getting VOD on Time Warner cable this spring. Some areas had it here about five years back, in the big experiment that Time-Warner ran. Movies on demand, news on demand, restaurant reviews on demand (all through streaming video). I worked in the control room for the local production arm, and it was a pain in the ass (we had a dedicated video compression rig based on a Sun workstation).
The server farm was a large room full of SGI hardware. They said it was the biggest data storage center in the southeast (lots of terabytes involved when you start serving movies). At least, until they gave up on the test and sold it all at auction...
This year's images are nice, but the one I like most is here:
For one thing, it could affect us directly... and some scenarios could make it an extinction event.
I was one of the first dozen or so Americans to log into an "open" BBS in Moscow (and, AFAIK, the whole Soviet Union) back in the late 1980s in a direct phone hookup, after I heard about it on Relay.
Having a power plant that mostly generates power during the times when people are awake and using more power is a good idea, overall. Having a number of different power plants of different designs that generate power in different ways is an even better one.
The Albertson's grocery stores here changed over to an NT-based system this year. A couple of weeks ago, the computer decided that the stores weren't making ebough money. So it took the ATM charges people made at the registers and ran them through five to eight more times each...
Back in 1980/81, when I lived in Austin, this friend of mine was working on his second computer game. The first one was a little-known thing called Akalabeth. So Richard was working on his new product, something called "Ultima" ("the ultimate role playing game"). I play-tested that sucker for *hours*, and ended up as a character in the game.
They bought it from the guy who did. If Microsoft hadn't existed, IBM would have bought it directly from Gary Kildall, or used the real deal (CP/M, which was what DOS was inspired by), or any of a number of other operating systems that were easily available in the 1980 time frame.
All Microsoft did was the same thing they always did... sold something that someone else invented after sticking their name on it.
Slashdot Mirror
You sorta glossed over that "properly designed" bit. Every flying wing ever built (and yes, I'm including the B-2 and all of the old Northrop designs) have a small tendency to "hunt" a bit left-to-right, which is part of the problem that killed the old bombers (a two-degree offset in a bombing run was awful for the ballistic bombing of the 1950s, and will make a planeload of passengers a lot more prone to airsickness). The B-2 handles that problem with a lot of computer power, and the BWB will almost certainly have to do the same thing, to a lesser degree (a BWB suffers less from this problem).
Of course, BWBs have been built in the past (one such design in the 1940s, as I recall), but pressurization has been a problem. Building a plane with pressurized cylinder for a cabin is pretty easy. Building a flight-capable structure the size and shape of a hotel ballroom is something else altogether. Modern composites (with custom-designed rigidity and ultra-light weight) probably made more of a difference than the flight computers...
In case you haven't noticed, payphones are nowhere near as common as they used to be. In a lot of cities, you have to go a couple of blocks (or more) just to find one (if you know where it is). Within three or four years, pay phones will be bordering on the endangered list...
...since you put it in those particular words, you'd have a chance of being prosecuted for public use of profanity in any number of countries if this were accepted practice worldwide.
Compared to a high-end Pentium IV, a vacuum tube probably counts as a heat sink...
There's a relatively new theory that the oil reserves we see are not the result of rotting dinosaurs and such, but are rather leftovers from the time the Earth was formed. A fellow named Gold has found petroleum deposits much deeper than the biogenic theory could possibly account for. Some "depleted" oil fields have shown signs of replenishing themselves from much lower depths.
There are some indications that the oil reserves of our little planet have barely been touched, and that as much as 99% of them are still waiting to be discovered...
The guys who run RoadRunner mail hosts seem to be a bit out of it when it comes to how "the Internet" works. Sure, they can figure out some of the stuff, but they get clueless really fast.
For example: They used to have the "From:" header screwed up. When you sent some mail, it said that the sender was "username at the machine that handled all of the mail for the area," not "username at the real address." So for six months or so, when some folks tried to reply to my RR address, their replies bounced. I had to add a "Reply-to" line just to get mail back.
A few years back, I got this odd letter from Nigeria.
Beautiful paper in the envelope and letter - sort of a marbled blue/white. Handwritten in incredible penmanship (not laser or inkjet).
I felt really bad turning it in to the Postal Inspection Service (and even that guy thought it was "one of the prettiest scam letters" he'd ever seen. You just don't get that sort of workmanship with email.
Hell, even in the Really Old Days (I started playing D&D in 1977 or so, and still have a first-edition set of manuals around somewhere), we used to come up with alternate magic and combat systems. I had a full-out spellpoint system for magic in 1979 or so, and we used everything from a deck of cards on up for hand-to-hand combat.
Note that Steve Jackson's The Fantasy Trip was created (partially) in response to the kludgy D&D combat system.
Then you get into the whole first/second/third generation FRP system theory, with D&D/AD&D being First Gen, EPT and the like being Second Gen, and TFT/Hero/GURPS being Third Gen...
Lou Zocchi helped MAR Barker with the EPT copyright issues, but he was also known for whipping out not-too-good "clones" of popular games in short order.
TSR was known for pulling nasty crap on a regular basis, and while they'd sue at the drop of a hat for copyright infringement, they'd use "inspirations" from other games and sources quite freely. All of the smart gamers made sure to never show any works in progress to TSR employees, because those works would be the next TSR "invention." For example, Steve Jackson Games was working on a vampire-hunting game called, of course, "Vampire," and after some TSR employees got wind of it, TSR announced a game with that exact same title (and no game to sell with that title - that came later. Shades of Microsoft, there).
Ogre *was* made into a computer game once, you know... a number of years after the board game.
They do move around.
Oh, yeah, you can't.
Those "counter" systems don't really count the OS or machine. They count what the machine's browser claims to be. For example, my Mac's browser pretends to be Explorer 5 running on NT, because of all of the silly morons who use "you must use Explorer on this site" code on their front pages (which is seldom, if ever, necessary). Those "webcounter" pages all seem to use software based off of the same original flawed code, and seldom count anything like what their sellers claim.
...is a bit over a hundred years of somewhat accurate measurements. After coming out of a century (the 1800s) which was known for being somewhat on the cold side.
Not a helluva significant trend.
...which program to read Word docs? Microsoft Word 4, 95, 97, 2000? I have Word on my computer, and it won't read the "new" Word formats. Although I have some other programs that read Word documents just fine. On the other hand, most of Microsoft's HTML tools can't make HTML that reads well in anything except Explorer...
I get crappy, munged-up email from Outlook users every single day, often with one or another worm or virus as a payload. Anything that encourages Windows users to get a real email/news program is a good thing.
Supposedly, we're getting VOD on Time Warner cable this spring. Some areas had it here about five years back, in the big experiment that Time-Warner ran. Movies on demand, news on demand, restaurant reviews on demand (all through streaming video). I worked in the control room for the local production arm, and it was a pain in the ass (we had a dedicated video compression rig based on a Sun workstation).
The server farm was a large room full of SGI hardware. They said it was the biggest data storage center in the southeast (lots of terabytes involved when you start serving movies). At least, until they gave up on the test and sold it all at auction...
This year's images are nice, but the one I like most is here:
For one thing, it could affect us directly... and some scenarios could make it an extinction event.
I've noticed quite a few of the old posts and threads from the late 1980s are just plain missing. A bunch of the old sf-lovers stuff, for example.
I was one of the first dozen or so Americans to log into an "open" BBS in Moscow (and, AFAIK, the whole Soviet Union) back in the late 1980s in a direct phone hookup, after I heard about it on Relay.
Having a power plant that mostly generates power during the times when people are awake and using more power is a good idea, overall. Having a number of different power plants of different designs that generate power in different ways is an even better one.
For every thing that someone deems "significant" but will be forgotten in six weeks, there are a thousand things that really matter...
The Albertson's grocery stores here changed over to an NT-based system this year. A couple of weeks ago, the computer decided that the stores weren't making ebough money. So it took the ATM charges people made at the registers and ran them through five to eight more times each...
Back in 1980/81, when I lived in Austin, this friend of mine was working on his second computer game. The first one was a little-known thing called Akalabeth. So Richard was working on his new product, something called "Ultima" ("the ultimate role playing game"). I play-tested that sucker for *hours*, and ended up as a character in the game.
Wizardry? Heh. Newbies.
Much more fun, and plenty of actual examples.
They bought it from the guy who did. If Microsoft hadn't existed, IBM would have bought it directly from Gary Kildall, or used the real deal (CP/M, which was what DOS was inspired by), or any of a number of other operating systems that were easily available in the 1980 time frame.
All Microsoft did was the same thing they always did... sold something that someone else invented after sticking their name on it.