Why shouldn't I be allowed to open my own iTunes compatible store if I wanted? Maybe I just want to sell my own bands songs, and dont want the RIAA/Apple in the middle.
Be my guest. No one is stopping you. Sell all the MP3-formatted tracks you want.
The problem is that if you want to sell anything besides your OWN music, you're going to have to deal with labels sooner or later, and labels have said that DRM is required for them to participate. Without DRM, your iTunes-compatible store can be as open and as compatible as you like, but it won't have any content besides your own work. And no offence, but I don't think that's going to be the commercial success you're looking for.
Well, yeah. I concur. Which is why I think a device like the HP iPaq 6300 series is a lot more useful: you have seamless Internet connectivity. WiFi is primary, GPRS is your backup, and Bluetooth is your PC connection. Why spend $129 to have a Palm that can only do two of the three?
(Yeah, it runs WinCE. Yeah, I hate that too. But I really want one nonetheless, because this can replace two devices with one, reduce my pocket clutter, and give me more functionality than the two devices it replaces had.)
Both the poster and the mod(s) who called this "insightful" are idiots.
The radio transmitter in a cell fone is still in the cell fone whether you're using a handsfree or not. A handsfree device does NOT -- let me repeat that for effect: IT DOES NOT -- act as an external antenna for the RF communication signal of the cell fone.
Note to the mods: just because someone says "tests have shown" doesn't mean they know what they're talking about. Headsets make things worse my ass...sheesh.
Either that, or the difference in ground effect over the distance between the lower rotor and the upper rotor was enough to make a difference. Doubly so if the upper rotor's ground effect was severely limited by the fact that there was another rotor two feet beneath it doing all sorts of things to the air.
Looking back on it, I don't think I'm too surprised about that, actually. Has anyone *ever* succeeded with a helicopter design that consisted of two counter-rotating rotors on a common shaft mounted that close together? I don't know helicopters as well as I know fixed-wing craft, but nothing is coming to mind here...
I've driven both -- a 1992 Dodge Caravan SE whose PS pump failed after the serpentine belt slipped (over the western half of the Tail of the Dragon, actually) and a 1989 Honda Civic DX sedan that was my main ride for about five years that never had power steering to begin with.
The Civic was a lot easier to handle than the malfunctioning Caravan at normal driving speeds, but in low speed tight manoevering, both were pretty bad. I *hated* parallel parking the Civic, not because it was a difficult chassis to park, but because the lack of power steering and manual transmission combined to give your forearms a real workout.
So yeah.:) Basically, I'm just giving you a counter-example to what you just claimed -- that the mechanical leverage in a system designed for power assist isn't necessarily any less than in a purely mechanical system. A lot of that depends on the size of the car, the design of the steering system, etc., too, so the Civic-Caravan comparison is probably only valid for those two models and probably only for a limited set of model years.
The black-footed ferret is wild in North America, though severely endangered. At this point in time, there may no longer *be* any wild black-footed ferrets (though there are several captive -- but, I emphasise, not domesticated -- populations intended for replenishment of the species), but they were at one time the dominant Mustela species in western North America.
Pet ferrets were domesticated about a thousand years ago or so, and are a completely different species from the wild ferret.
And black-footed ferrets in the wild are just as mean-tempered and vicious as weasels.
Which really makes me wonder if you *are* indeed a chimpanzee typing from your cage.
Ferrets and weasels are both from the same family of mammals, tend to have the same mean, nasty habits, and etc. The difference is what, exactly? That "ferret" has somewhat less of a negative connotation? Great. It's still a stupid (from their standpoint) and amazingly appropriate (from everyone else's standpoint) choice for a mascot.
Ah yes. That's just too appropriate. Weasels are the snakes of the mammal family. (Yeah, it's not proper taxonomic jargon. So sue me.) Always sneaking around behind other animals' backs, and fighting like holy hell whenever they get cornered. Oh, and weasels particularly like to eat young things.
Heck, just the fact that they've picked a weasel is funny enough for me. Could they possibly have picked a WORSE animal mascot? Maybe the cockroach...
And this is more difficult than hydraulically assisted power steering with a wheel why?
Here's something for you to try. Find a car with a manual transmission and a sloping parking lot or fairly low-traffic, hilly road with some curves. Get to the top of the slope, kill the engine, and put the car in neutral. Try to steer. Notice the extreme effort you have to put forth.
This is why power steering was invented. The amount of boost that the power steering system provides is fairly easily adjusted. There's no operational reason why a stick couldn't be substituted for the steering wheel. The only good reason is because nobody drives cars like that. It's the same reason you don't see a mass migration to the Dvorak keyboard -- steering wheels, like QWERTY keyboards, are exactly what everyone is used to.
Speed-sensitive power steering isn't a particularly new innovation; much lower-market cars than BMWs have had it for several years now. Honda and Toyota come to mind as two brands that have implemented it in their cars at the sub-$30K level.
Third axis on an aircraft[1] joystick? I Don't think so. Bank and pitch makes two.
Yeah, erm...what I *meant* was that a steering wheel works really well in one axis of motion, whilst a stick works really well in two axes of motion. While I prefer flying a yoke rather than a stick in a plane, I must admit that the stick seems rather less awkward and doesn't tend to whack your co-pilot in the knees in steep turns.;)
Get over it. Many of you have full use of both of your hands. That's great. This keyboard isn't for you.
Many people do not have full use of thier hands.
I sort of got the impression it wasn't for them, either. What percentage of people with the use of one hand do you think are likely to spend $25 on a keyboard, then spend the next month or so writing their own drivers, developing and perfecting their own chording scheme, and then learning said chording scheme? At least if they spend the extra $100 or so to get a product targeted specifically at this market, they can get drivers and probably a tutorial CD that makes the learning process a lot simpler.
This is about a guy saying, "Look what could be done if someone took it on as a project," not "Here's a ready-made solution for the handicapped."
BTW, open-source drivers are only half the picture. What about an open-source teach-people-how-to-use-this-weirdass-one-handed-k eyboard application? It isn't as simple as it sounds. Someone has to do some ergonomics research to determine the most efficient way to use it, lest we be saddled with another QWERTY disaster.
Let me preface this with "I think a joystick is a horrible way to drive a car" and "Change for the sake of change is almost always bad." So in principle, I agree with the spirit of your comment.
A stick is ideal for a plane as you are banking the plane towards the left and to the right, in a car you are rotating the wheel and so a rotating control method works best.
Uh, what? This reasoning sounds awfully circular (honestly, no pun intended) to me. There are plenty of planes that use a wheel instead of a stick. The main reason for using a stick with an aircraft is that a wheel doesn't easily (or as conveniently, anyway) lend itself to motion in a third axis. Using a stick removes a lot of that awkwardness.
Also, to use a stick you would need control systems, fully powered hydraulic steering...
There are plenty of planes that don't have hydraulic systems associated with a control stick, and there are a lot more that have systems no more complicated than what's in a car. There's no reason a hydraulic-assist stick, much like today's power steering, couldn't be developed for use in a car.
I can almost guarantee you that helicopter (and maybe fighter) pilots would be the only people who would be able to drive such a system with any sort of precision, though. Your point about having to turn a steering wheel a very large distance to effect a fairly small change is a good one. Without some sort of serious speed sensitivity, the smaller range of control input inherent in a stick would make for VERY lively steering (read: easily overcontrolled).
Of course, if cars had *always* had a joystick-type steering mechanism (some early ones did, in fact), we'd be sitting here having this discussion from the opposite perspective. There's really nothing inherent in a steering wheel that makes it the perfect solution to steering a car. It's more a matter of "what's always been done."
To get this back on topic, there's really nothing inherently superior about a QWERTY keyboard, and many arguments can be made that there are inherently inferior aspects of it. The problem is, QWERTY layouts have been in use for so long that they're the de facto standard, no matter what other great technology comes along. QWERTY keyboards will rule the world until either voice recognition or direct brain control is perfected.
Yeah, but that's because Mark Burnett isn't producing it. Say what you like about Survivor and The Apprentice, but the guy knows how to make seemingly boring television fairly exciting for the unwashed masses.
I was just hoping for something more along the cost lines of homebuilt aircraft, appropriately increased for the obviously harsher environment and more difficult launch conditions. If $20 million is what it takes, I'm afraid there won't be nearly as much public interest as one would hope. See previous comment...;)
I was hoping that comment might bring some of the more reasonable Kansans out of the woodwork. Glad to see everyone there doesn't agree with the politicians.:)
The sigh was mostly because I was hoping someone who's more of a "little guy" would be a bit more competitive. Being bankrolled by Paul Allen isn't exactly pocket change.:(
Then again, commercial aviation didn't come to the masses until some 30 years after it got started. I'm just not that patient;)
...that the guys at Armadillo would be used to the/. traffic by now, having been on here so many times before.
Sadly, it seems they have yet to learn from history. Or, perhaps, their bandwidth costs are being spent on new rocket parts.
Well, here's a copy of the news article from Armadillo, anyway.
Armadillo Aerospace News Archive
Good tests, Complete loss of vehicle
August 8, 2004 notes
Good Tests
On Tuesday we did a very successful set of hover tests with the big vehicle. I had two changes that I wanted to test: an optional PWM of the throttle movement to make it change position slower when it was in hunt-for-an-acceleration mode, and testing a 50% gain increase which I might enable during high speed flights if it looks like it is having a hard time controlling the attitude. I had these set up momentary overrides on the joystick, so I could lift the vehicle up, engage the change, let go real fast if it isn't working, then try the other one, all on a single propellant load.
When we tipped the vehicle up, several catalyst rings fell out of the engine nozzle. We looked up the engine with a boroscope and found that the screen at the bottom had pulled past one section of the support plate, allowing some rings to escape. This had also happened on the previous 12" engine after a few runs (you could see a couple red hot catalyst rings fly out in one of the static test videos). It didn't seem to be progressive last time, so we went ahead and left it alone, expecting the test run to squash the rings down into an interference fit again.
Because this was set up to be a 25 second hover (tethered), which would be our longest hover test, we decided to make this a no-direct-view test, with my flying it from behind a concrete wall looking at a monitor instead of directly viewing it. The engine warmed up fine and lifted off and hovered fine. I was about to engage the first test when the vehicle just set itself back down on the ground. It took me a few moments to figure out what happened - I had moved the computer and wireless antenna behind the wall with me, so the telemetry link was very ratty, dropping quite a few packets. Eventually it dropped enough in a row to hit the internal limit and triggered a loss-of-telemetry abort, which is an auto land. Perfect!
I moved the antenna back in view of the vehicle, and we completed both of the control system tests without incident. We used our new propellant disposal burner to catalyze the remaining propellant, which worked pretty well. The foam coming out was probably still 10% peroxide or so, but a little water was fine for washing it away. We might consider adding a spark ignition system to it so it would completely burn everything away, but that would be a more complex system, and would leave us with a red hot propellant burner.
When we set the vehicle back down on the cradle, a few more catalyst rings came out, but the engine still seemed to be working perfectly.
Based on these results, I changed the flight control code to use the PWM valve movement when it is hunting back and forth past a desired acceleration. If it hasn't crossed it in 500 msec, or the desired valve position is fully open or closed, it goes back to full speed.
We also weighed the vehicle, and surprisingly found it lighter than we had estimated, right at 1000 pounds.
Complete Loss of Vehicle
Saturday was a perfect day for flying, so we went out to the 100 acres for a boosted hop. We had high expectations for success, since the vehicle had been operating perfectly on all tests so far.
After we loaded up the propellant and pressurized the vehicle, we ran into a problem. When I opened it up to 20% throttle for the warmup it looked like it cleared up fine, but the telemetry was only reading 100C, as if the hot pack hadn't started heating. We were a long way from the vehicle, so we couldn't really tell what was going on. I gave it a bu
The Kensington locks are flimsy as heck. We had better cables than that on the computers in the labs in college, and I got a couple old Macs from them with the security tabs/cables still in place. A Dremel took it out in 30 seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if they use Windows...
Not a whole lot of "choice" there if you ask me.
p
Why shouldn't I be allowed to open my own iTunes compatible store if I wanted? Maybe I just want to sell my own bands songs, and dont want the RIAA/Apple in the middle.
Be my guest. No one is stopping you. Sell all the MP3-formatted tracks you want.
The problem is that if you want to sell anything besides your OWN music, you're going to have to deal with labels sooner or later, and labels have said that DRM is required for them to participate. Without DRM, your iTunes-compatible store can be as open and as compatible as you like, but it won't have any content besides your own work. And no offence, but I don't think that's going to be the commercial success you're looking for.
p
Well, yeah. I concur. Which is why I think a device like the HP iPaq 6300 series is a lot more useful: you have seamless Internet connectivity. WiFi is primary, GPRS is your backup, and Bluetooth is your PC connection. Why spend $129 to have a Palm that can only do two of the three?
(Yeah, it runs WinCE. Yeah, I hate that too. But I really want one nonetheless, because this can replace two devices with one, reduce my pocket clutter, and give me more functionality than the two devices it replaces had.)
p
Insightful? INSIGHTFUL?
Both the poster and the mod(s) who called this "insightful" are idiots.
The radio transmitter in a cell fone is still in the cell fone whether you're using a handsfree or not. A handsfree device does NOT -- let me repeat that for effect: IT DOES NOT -- act as an external antenna for the RF communication signal of the cell fone.
Note to the mods: just because someone says "tests have shown" doesn't mean they know what they're talking about. Headsets make things worse my ass...sheesh.
p
Either that, or the difference in ground effect over the distance between the lower rotor and the upper rotor was enough to make a difference. Doubly so if the upper rotor's ground effect was severely limited by the fact that there was another rotor two feet beneath it doing all sorts of things to the air.
Looking back on it, I don't think I'm too surprised about that, actually. Has anyone *ever* succeeded with a helicopter design that consisted of two counter-rotating rotors on a common shaft mounted that close together? I don't know helicopters as well as I know fixed-wing craft, but nothing is coming to mind here...
p
I've driven both -- a 1992 Dodge Caravan SE whose PS pump failed after the serpentine belt slipped (over the western half of the Tail of the Dragon, actually) and a 1989 Honda Civic DX sedan that was my main ride for about five years that never had power steering to begin with.
:) Basically, I'm just giving you a counter-example to what you just claimed -- that the mechanical leverage in a system designed for power assist isn't necessarily any less than in a purely mechanical system. A lot of that depends on the size of the car, the design of the steering system, etc., too, so the Civic-Caravan comparison is probably only valid for those two models and probably only for a limited set of model years.
The Civic was a lot easier to handle than the malfunctioning Caravan at normal driving speeds, but in low speed tight manoevering, both were pretty bad. I *hated* parallel parking the Civic, not because it was a difficult chassis to park, but because the lack of power steering and manual transmission combined to give your forearms a real workout.
So yeah.
p
*cough* Bullshit.
The black-footed ferret is wild in North America, though severely endangered. At this point in time, there may no longer *be* any wild black-footed ferrets (though there are several captive -- but, I emphasise, not domesticated -- populations intended for replenishment of the species), but they were at one time the dominant Mustela species in western North America.
Pet ferrets were domesticated about a thousand years ago or so, and are a completely different species from the wild ferret.
And black-footed ferrets in the wild are just as mean-tempered and vicious as weasels.
Which really makes me wonder if you *are* indeed a chimpanzee typing from your cage.
By the way, this guy explained it well too.
p
Ferrets and weasels are both from the same family of mammals, tend to have the same mean, nasty habits, and etc. The difference is what, exactly? That "ferret" has somewhat less of a negative connotation? Great. It's still a stupid (from their standpoint) and amazingly appropriate (from everyone else's standpoint) choice for a mascot.
p
For you American types, that's like calling the ferret "Benedict Arnold." Which wouldn't be a bad name either, really.
How about naming it after the head of the Gestapo?
(BTW, thx for the link, isomeme. I was wondering who the hell Quisling was, too, when I saw it in another comment.)
p
Ah yes. That's just too appropriate. Weasels are the snakes of the mammal family. (Yeah, it's not proper taxonomic jargon. So sue me.) Always sneaking around behind other animals' backs, and fighting like holy hell whenever they get cornered. Oh, and weasels particularly like to eat young things.
Heck, just the fact that they've picked a weasel is funny enough for me. Could they possibly have picked a WORSE animal mascot? Maybe the cockroach...
p
And this is more difficult than hydraulically assisted power steering with a wheel why?
Here's something for you to try. Find a car with a manual transmission and a sloping parking lot or fairly low-traffic, hilly road with some curves. Get to the top of the slope, kill the engine, and put the car in neutral. Try to steer. Notice the extreme effort you have to put forth.
This is why power steering was invented. The amount of boost that the power steering system provides is fairly easily adjusted. There's no operational reason why a stick couldn't be substituted for the steering wheel. The only good reason is because nobody drives cars like that. It's the same reason you don't see a mass migration to the Dvorak keyboard -- steering wheels, like QWERTY keyboards, are exactly what everyone is used to.
p
Speed-sensitive power steering isn't a particularly new innovation; much lower-market cars than BMWs have had it for several years now. Honda and Toyota come to mind as two brands that have implemented it in their cars at the sub-$30K level.
p
Third axis on an aircraft[1] joystick? I Don't think so. Bank and pitch makes two.
;)
Yeah, erm...what I *meant* was that a steering wheel works really well in one axis of motion, whilst a stick works really well in two axes of motion. While I prefer flying a yoke rather than a stick in a plane, I must admit that the stick seems rather less awkward and doesn't tend to whack your co-pilot in the knees in steep turns.
p
Get over it. Many of you have full use of both of your hands. That's great. This keyboard isn't for you.
k eyboard application? It isn't as simple as it sounds. Someone has to do some ergonomics research to determine the most efficient way to use it, lest we be saddled with another QWERTY disaster.
Many people do not have full use of thier hands.
I sort of got the impression it wasn't for them, either. What percentage of people with the use of one hand do you think are likely to spend $25 on a keyboard, then spend the next month or so writing their own drivers, developing and perfecting their own chording scheme, and then learning said chording scheme? At least if they spend the extra $100 or so to get a product targeted specifically at this market, they can get drivers and probably a tutorial CD that makes the learning process a lot simpler.
This is about a guy saying, "Look what could be done if someone took it on as a project," not "Here's a ready-made solution for the handicapped."
BTW, open-source drivers are only half the picture. What about an open-source teach-people-how-to-use-this-weirdass-one-handed-
p
Let me preface this with "I think a joystick is a horrible way to drive a car" and "Change for the sake of change is almost always bad." So in principle, I agree with the spirit of your comment.
A stick is ideal for a plane as you are banking the plane towards the left and to the right, in a car you are rotating the wheel and so a rotating control method works best.
Uh, what? This reasoning sounds awfully circular (honestly, no pun intended) to me. There are plenty of planes that use a wheel instead of a stick. The main reason for using a stick with an aircraft is that a wheel doesn't easily (or as conveniently, anyway) lend itself to motion in a third axis. Using a stick removes a lot of that awkwardness.
Also, to use a stick you would need control systems, fully powered hydraulic steering...
There are plenty of planes that don't have hydraulic systems associated with a control stick, and there are a lot more that have systems no more complicated than what's in a car. There's no reason a hydraulic-assist stick, much like today's power steering, couldn't be developed for use in a car.
I can almost guarantee you that helicopter (and maybe fighter) pilots would be the only people who would be able to drive such a system with any sort of precision, though. Your point about having to turn a steering wheel a very large distance to effect a fairly small change is a good one. Without some sort of serious speed sensitivity, the smaller range of control input inherent in a stick would make for VERY lively steering (read: easily overcontrolled).
Of course, if cars had *always* had a joystick-type steering mechanism (some early ones did, in fact), we'd be sitting here having this discussion from the opposite perspective. There's really nothing inherent in a steering wheel that makes it the perfect solution to steering a car. It's more a matter of "what's always been done."
To get this back on topic, there's really nothing inherently superior about a QWERTY keyboard, and many arguments can be made that there are inherently inferior aspects of it. The problem is, QWERTY layouts have been in use for so long that they're the de facto standard, no matter what other great technology comes along. QWERTY keyboards will rule the world until either voice recognition or direct brain control is perfected.
p
How long until to drive you need to blow into a device to make sure you are not drunk and then the car won't go above the speed limit, etc?
For convicted drunk drivers in many jurisdictions, such devices are already a fact of life, minus the speed governing capabilities you allude to.
p
Yeah, but that's because Mark Burnett isn't producing it. Say what you like about Survivor and The Apprentice, but the guy knows how to make seemingly boring television fairly exciting for the unwashed masses.
p
Yeah, I know.
;)
I was just hoping for something more along the cost lines of homebuilt aircraft, appropriately increased for the obviously harsher environment and more difficult launch conditions. If $20 million is what it takes, I'm afraid there won't be nearly as much public interest as one would hope. See previous comment...
p
I was hoping that comment might bring some of the more reasonable Kansans out of the woodwork. Glad to see everyone there doesn't agree with the politicians. :)
p
That all depends on your frame of reference ;)
p
The sigh was mostly because I was hoping someone who's more of a "little guy" would be a bit more competitive. Being bankrolled by Paul Allen isn't exactly pocket change. :(
;)
Then again, commercial aviation didn't come to the masses until some 30 years after it got started. I'm just not that patient
p
It's mods like these that keep my sig alive. Morons. Where in this ENTIRE thread has a Dremel been mentioned before my comment?
Thought so.
p
Sadly, it seems they have yet to learn from history. Or, perhaps, their bandwidth costs are being spent on new rocket parts.
Well, here's a copy of the news article from Armadillo, anyway.
A cordless Dremel.
The Kensington locks are flimsy as heck. We had better cables than that on the computers in the labs in college, and I got a couple old Macs from them with the security tabs/cables still in place. A Dremel took it out in 30 seconds.
p