The benefits of clang are that it uses llvm as the compiler, which produces better optimized machine code than gcc currently does. Also, it supports Apple's block syntax (kind of like a pointer to a function), which allows things like libdispatch to do its magic. Also, as a C front end, it has much less cryptic error messages, and actually does a pretty good job of finding missed initializations and other hard to find bugs that usually will get caught at the code execution stage.
You should check out Siricusa's more thorough explanation at arstechnica, in his Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard review. He goes into some detail to show how Apple's use of clang in the new XCode is almost "pornographic for developers..." You wouldn't have the same IDE in BSD or Linux, but the same functionality is there. Someone posted a link much higher in the thread.
Corrected I stand. Were there any signs at the site telling who owned or operated the towers, or what format they were broadcasting? All of the towers I've seen have been rather non-descript as to what signals they were carrying.
These ELF people may not be bright, but I assure you that they know that AM radio will not give you cancer. They took out the antennae because they did not like what was being broadcast from them, and because they could.
In one of their typical "look at me" extreme vandalism moves, they get to silence some major critics pre-emptively, and still get lots of attention.
I have to believe it was Dick not Burt that said he'd fly aerobatics in WhiteKnightTwo at Oshkosh next year.
You are wrong.
White Knight Two was designed to be a fully acrobatic aircraft. Burt said what he said. Only a handful of Scaled test pilots has flown this aircraft, and Dick is neither a Scaled test pilot, nor one of those few men.
To everyone else who cares, this particular plane is a proof of concept vehicle, a proto-type. It will be the first of many, and it will be the vehicle that launches the industry. The decals for windows on the left fuselage are to indicate where the design is intended to go. As of right now, there is no reason to waste resources on installing windows, seats, and other things into the left fuselage. The crew flies from the right side.
Disclaimer -- I work for Scaled Composites. I am only clarifying public knowledge that has been given by the customer (Virgin Galactic) or people much higher on the totem pole than myself (Burt Rutan). I cannot provide any further insight.
I looked at a handful of his mapped locations, and seriously worry about where he is steering people. Sure, the Joseph Priestly House would be a good place to visit for the budding chemistry geek, but some of the others are seriously misguided.
Take for example the Nikolai Tesla museum in Belgrade, Serbia. A budding mad scientist should know that Tesla, although Serbian, never set foot in Belgrade. His contributions to science started in Graz, Austria, and then really took off in the US. There is no placemarks for Tesla in Pittsburgh, Colorado Springs, nor New York City, where he had his various laboratories, producing things like fluorescent lights and tesla coils.
Or the abundance of atomic bomb test sites, but the absence of places like Edwards Air Force Base, where the speed of sound was first broken. The Glenn-Curtiss museum is included, but not one for the Wright brothers in Dayton, OH.
Other underwhelming things like the Carl Sagan Planet Walk (in Ithaca, NY), should have been dropped all together. I think it went in after he died, and I'm not sure if his widow's pot-smoking paraphernalia shop still exists near the center of the model, anymore.
My anecdotal data set indicates that with a modern engine (turbo-charged and non-turbo, tuned port or direct-injection gasoline) with a modern ECU, you will most certainly get better fuel economy with higher octane fuel. My data comes from my personal studies on four different engines from VW, Audi, and Mercedes Benz. The Turbo-charged direct injection I4 benefited the most, followed by the twin-turbo V6, then the normally aspirated V8, then the normally aspirated I4. I have seen between 2-5 mpg increases (before the ethanol mandate). E10 just sucks all around.
Why is this? Well, as you stated, higher octane fuels are more resistant to pre-detonation than lower octane fuels. This is what gives better efficiency. Most modern engines are equipped with knock sensors, which the ECU's use to advance or retard the spark as required. This is what clues in the ECU to what kind of octane rating the fuel has. If you are running a higher-octane fuel, the ECU will lean out the mixture and adjust the spark timing to maximize the power for the amount of fuel used. Lower octane fuels burn hotter, and must be kept at a richer mixture (lowering mpg).
In the case of the turbo-charged engines, pre-detonation is a much bigger issue, as the turbo makes sure that there will be an abundance of oxygen to combust with the fuel. Because of this, most turbo-charged engines require a high-octane fuel to start with. Running a lower-octane fuel on a modern engine (turbo or not) causes the ECU to advance the spark to avoid knocking and pre-detonation, which wastes some of the combustion energy on the compression stroke.
I have a 2006 VW GLI. It has a 2.0L turbo-charged, direct injected engine in it. While driving across the country a few years ago (before the federal mandate hit), I averaged 34 mpg while driving in non-ethanol states. Once I hit states that had already started adding ethanol to the gasoline, my fuel economy dropped to 27 mpg.
I was shocked! Changing the fuel to 10% ethanol resulted in a drop in fuel economy by 21%. I couldn't reconcile the drop, as it didn't make sense that ethanol would drive my economy worse by an amount greater than the percentage of ethanol added.
I don't drive like a maniac, and discovering this caused me to reform my driving habits to get better fuel economy. The best I have been able to manage since the mandate is 29 mpg. Again, I was getting 34 mpg on straight non-ethanol gasoline, while driving more aggressively.
I did some further research, and found that Volkswagen's stance on ethanol is to absolutely not use it, ever. My engine uses a new technology (gasoline direct injection) that is emerging in just about every high-efficiency gasoline engine that is on the current or near horizon. All of them will have the same detrimental performance with ethanol blend fuels.
This will set up a situation where the non-government controlled auto industry, attempting to meet the new aggressive CAFE standards will be fighting against the government castrated companies and the ethanol lobby. I hate to admit that we will all be losers in the end, as the former winning will increase fuel economy, but probably cause fuel taxes to rise to make up for lost revenue from increased mileage. The latter's win will also increase the cost of fuel, while further decreasing mileage on new direct-injection engines.
No, the homophobic or heterophobic bigot stories don't do anything for me.
Perhaps I shouldn't have said "exact same thing" because I was taking the connotation of frivolous, useless, or pedantic, for the word that got your panties all bunched up.
I'll keep in mind that I should politically cleanse my quoted material, least I transgress a member of our community who is easily offended or aroused by words that may call into question the asexuality of the Lego Soup Spoon builders. I wouldn't want to imply that they may have found sexual partners of either same or opposite sex.
You are referring to the YF-12A, which did fly and successfully launch an air-to-air guided missle, while flying at mach 3.2 at 74,000 feet, hitting a target drone flying at 500 feet altitude. Amazing, given the state of electronics and guidance technology at the time. Hell, all of the technology for the A-12 / YF-12 / SR-71 is still amazing today.
Anyway, the YF-12 was acknowledged and publicized so it could be used as a cover for the similar A-12 and follow-on RS-71 planes. It wasn't much of a stretch to think that we had ever-faster interceptors, but a stratospheric, Mach 3+ spy plane? That was science fiction. The RS-71 was re-named the SR-71 after Lyndon Johnson flubbed the name on live television. They changed all drawings and documents for the program, an amazingly expensive waste of tax-payers dollars, just so that no one would have to correct the Commander in Chief.
I don't know if it was a compliment or an insult. Not that I or anyone else with basic video editing skills couldn't insert the audio of someone yelling "Kill Him!" after the fact.
I prefer to look at facts like what the Secret Service investigation found, rather than a questionably sourced video. I guess that makes me a troll to those that find the truth inconvenient.
In case you missed it, there were these "town meetings" things held by McCain during the election where nice folk(whom I would personally term rabid) were screaming things like "Kill him!" about the senator's opponent. Remember that?
Yeah, I remember that, because it supposedly happened in my home state. Unfortunately, it was a complete fabrication by the reporter who ascribed the comment to the anonymous crowd. This defaming lie was discovered a few days later and then not discussed again, because it had done its damage and was only useful as a dodge or diversion from serious questions about Obama's past affiliations and his suitability to lead the country.
I don't have any familiarity with "Mudflats" but I suspect her actions were in the same vein as the reporter who fabricated the "kill him!" story. Politics is ugly, and use of anonymity to defame should have no place.
When you have got those kinds of nutballs running around wouldn't YOU not want them to know where you live if you were writing about their precious leader? I know I would.
And it is a good thing that they didn't exist, except in the minds of the paranoid and bigoted who just know what kind of people republicans or conservatives are.
I think there should be an IMMEDIATE investigation. Not because he outed the blogger, but because i can't picture a rep doing the work required to find this out on his own, and I doubt very seriously he paid out of his own pocket to have it done. That makes it a misuse of government resources and an abuse of power. if he did abuse his power and privilege to get the identity of this blogger, then bust his ass. Because the last thing we need right now is politicians using their power to go after one of the last places we still have free speech. I agree that if he did the work himself and found out that is one thing, but how many here actually believe he did that? Nope, me neither.
I'm sure that's how Joe the Plumber feels. Wait a second, he was real, and people did abuse their power to go after him for publicly daring to ask Obama a serious and real question, using his own name! If I remember correctly, people were accusing him of using a pseudonym, because his middle name, not his first name, is Joe, and that he didn't have a plumber's license, so how could he be a plumber. Nevermind that he asked the first pertinent question that our current President had faced for at least the two weeks prior to that event. Destroy him!
You're way off base with regards to Apple and 64-bit. OS X (generic including iPhone, AppleTV and Mac OS X), has a really elegant mechanism for having multiple architecture binaries included for each program, without triggering.DLL hell. In this way, Apple, as well as developers, can target multiple architectures during the build, and deliver for multiple architectures. I think it is as easy or easier for them to support multiple architectures as it is for Microsoft and the NT derivatives. For God's sake, NeXT Step/OpenStep, the core of what became Cocoa was ported to PA-Risc, SPARC, x86, i960, 680x0, and PowerPC, as well as to run as a system atop the NT kernel, Solaris, and HP-UX; all before Apple bought NeXT. This code has been portable from day one.
Snow Leopard at this point, may or may not be Intel only, but it will be built and delivered for both 64-bit and legacy x86 in the same packages, just as contemporary Leopard ships with PowerPC 32, PowerPC 64, intel x86 and intel x86-64 binaries in one package. Subsets of the same Snow Leopard codebase will be delivered in a stripped down version for ARM9 for the iPhone. The decision to make Snow Leopard Intel-only, will likely be a pure marketing decision, just as how I cannot buy a version of Vista, XP, or Server 2008 for any chips other than Intel 32 or 64.
On to the issue of running sub-systems for compatibility, it sounds like you are describing the NT kernel as a version of the Mach kernel, and then denying that any other OS other than NT has the ability to do this. News flash, OS X, AIX, and OSF/1, MkLinux, and the GNU/Hurd are all Mach-based to some degree or other, and all have this capability for the last twenty years.
I do agree with your statements on developer tools. Microsoft has done the right thing by facilitating development with good tools, but I think Apple has got a good start at tackling that problem. Their choice of using GCC was a pragmatic decision, and now they are filling their portfolio of tools with much better options, as well as contributing back to OpenSource. Integrating dTrace, LLVM, and a few other tools that escape my mind, show the direction that they are going. XCode has had steady improvements and is a pretty good IDE. Also, Apple does not charge for tools, and are likely not going to do that in the near future. How much does a seat of VS cost now?
The default behavior for Windows has a 2GB limit because Windows gives a 4GB VM space to 32-bit programs, but it partitions it into 2GB for the program and 2GB for the kernel. This behavior does not change with 64-bit windows
As per your link, you can set program specific parameters to enlarge the program window to 3GB on 32-bit systems or the full 4GB on 64-bit systems, but this is not the default case. Since both of these rely on PAE being present, only newer programs, where the developer made the proper provisions, will work well. You have to have a system that uses PAE, and most 32-bit systems doe not have this support. Every program that I have used that had support for large images, were shipped with this parameter un-set, and cautionary notes were attached about enabling this capability.
You need to check out how Snow Leopard is built a little better, as it will not be 100% 64bit. It will be 'more' of a hybrid, but still not a full 64bit OS.
Actually, it will be a full 64-bit OS from kernel to user with legacy support for 32-bit carbon and cocoa. By your reasoning, XP 64 and Vista 64-bit aren't 100% either as both use the less-elegant WoW for 32-bit stuff and System32 for the 64-bit bits. This, in addition to the fact that Microsoft requires separate versions, rather than just shipping a product that covers both architectures. There's also that pesky problem that most programs for Windows are 32-bit apps, and many are very fragile on the 64-bit Windows platform. I'll stop now.
Because it DOESN'T matter in the Windows world. 32bit applications get performance benefits on the 64bit OS.
As it also happens with Snow Leopard, as the kernel goes full 64-bit (on Core 2 and newer machines). Current Leopard already gives the 64-bit benefits of increased registers and larger VM space to 64-bit programs, so there isn't a lot more to gain. These capabilities are not magically transferred to 32-bit apps under any OS, as the architecture is different, so there is no way that Vista-64 or Win7-64 will gift 32-bit apps with more than the 2GB of address space that they are currently allowed (vs. the full 4GB that OS X gives to 32-bit apps). Any speed increase comes from taking less time for register shuffles on 64-bit programs, giving more time to all processes.
Also if developers want to provide a full 64bit version, it is a simple recompile, you don't have to re-write the application like a lot of people (Adobe for example) find they have to do on OS X. This is why if you want a 64bit version of Adobe software, you need Vistax64, as the development APIs Apple sold Adobe never got moved to 64bit as promised.
Oh ho! What a canard. A simple re-compile was what has been hamstringing 64-bit graphics drivers and codecs for the last three years or so on XP-64 and Vista-64? Apple doesn't sell it's API's, it just publishes them. Adobe had 8 years of warning and opportunity to move it's cruft from Carbon to a cleaner, more modern API, and they decided to play chicken because Apple started eating their lunch with Final Cut Pro and Aperture. Being Carbon developers, they knew that it would not be an easy to clean up all of the legacy crap in the API without breaking backwards compatibility. Developing the iPhone was the final nail in Carbon's coffin.
All MS API sets(development platforms) move to 64bit, even old 16bit applications can be recompiled as 64bit applications. (You can't do this with System 9 applications, nor even the whole early 32bit transition APIs Apple provided.)
Yes, this is why Microsoft came up with thunking and the 16-bit \System folder and the 32-bit \System32 folder for Win32, which became the 32-bit \WoW and 64-bit \System32 folder. Brilliant. It isn't quite fair to drag System 9 applications into this mess. Do old Borland TurboPascal programs magically compile to 64-bit? Most System 9 programs were done as projects in Metrowerks Code Warrior with the PowerPlant framework, a system that was bought and buried by Motorola. Mac OS 9 was a cooperatively multi-tasked mix of PowerPC and 680x0 code, which used legacy system calls that needed Paschal syntax. OS X is basically a BSD Unix with no 680x0 code that uses GCC for compilation. Different architectures, compilers, system calls, hell the only things that are the same are the word "Mac" and "Apple". Up until the the Intel switch, you could run Mac OS 9 code, similar to WoW, without a re-compile. In most cases, the question is why would you want to.
Do you remember the Apple ads talking about the FIRST 64bit Personal Computer? How ironic that this many years later it still isn't even running a native 64bit OS, where Windows has been doing 64bit versions s
I met a few students from Iran at a robotics competition when I was in my graduate studies. They were remarkably resourceful, mostly because they couldn't get many components that we take for granted.
While most robots in the contest had modern solid-state motor controls, the Iranians were attempting to do PWM with electromechanical relays. We had slick SMT chips, they had discrete wire-leaded components. They did very well, in spite of their extremely limited electronic part availability and most of their components came from cannibalizing something else.
I remember not too long ago people talking about making small clusters of PS3's to crunch heavy calcs. I'm sure that if the Iranian government could get a hold of enough of them, they would probably build the largest cluster of PS3's in the world. The same could be done by resourceful people with a bunch of printer RISC processors. I mean, doesn't Linux run on just about anything now?
Just because it doesn't seem like a good or efficient idea to you because you can get a farm of dual-quad-core boxes with multi-TB storage and Many-gig RAM, doesn't mean that it isn't a great idea for people who could only dream of getting something as powerful as a 486DX with 20 Meg of RAM.
My conscience is clear and I no longer work for that firm.
I had to deal with months of sleepless nights, wrestling with that information. The anthrax scare in the immediate period after the 9/11 attacks brought fears of culpability through inaction. Those letters ended up being sent by one of our own deranged scientists.
Likewise, having friends and children of friends being sent to Iraq, clearly focused for me the tangled web we weave. Has anything you designed, built or coded been used to hurt other people? How about indirectly? What about actions taken for profit motives? Our equipment was designed for beneficial biological research. The actions of our CEO were arguably for the benefit of the shareholders and employees who depended on that order to stay in business. When the actual end use context is applied, the situation looks much uglier and quite scandalous.
The shocking thing for me about this episode is the amount of stuff that happened "above board". Sure, this company had a back-up plan of using foreign intermediaries. Instead, they went to the Commerce Department. The donation from our CEO showed up on public transparency websites dealing with campaign finance. The extremely close timing between the donation and the commerce department approval is not obviously linked, unless you know to look.
Transparency did not prevent this transaction, because there aren't enough watch dogs. Who is to say that every export license granted is for exactly what it says it is for? Sure we were sending equipment related to medical research, but there was a known absence of medical research and a known massive biological weapons program in existence at the time in Iraq. The dual-use nature of the equipment should have stopped the order in Commerce, but the right lubrication ($$) and the application of selective omission got the whole deal through.
We got Dr. Germ and her friend Dr. Anthrax. My gut feeling is that most of the equipment in this transaction was destroyed in the initial invasion, or looted in the aftermath. Either way, the equipment is no longer traceable and the biological weapons program no longer viable.
Just because you didn't see it on 24/7 cable news, doesn't mean that it didn't get found. A friend of mine was in the first wave of troops, and found a large WMD cache. The shells were in much better shape than those that were found later in the first month. That site was secured and there was no news of his find. While it does not make sense to the casual observer, not all discoveries are announced for political gain. I only found out about this because he was injured in a non-combat accident, and sent home.
The particular equipment I mentioned in my GP post looks quite innocuous and would probably be ignored by the first wave of troops, and likely looted for scrap by the Iraqis after Saddam's fall.
If you remember back to the Colin Powell UN Sec. Council presentation, we (the U.S,) were looking for mobil mass-production units. The equipment we sold was not for producing large amounts, but for the very large scale research effort required to identify successful strains of bacteria and viruses. Think millions of test tubes in a lab vs. large vats in a production process.
Without the research and strain isolation, the "weaponization" couldn't exist. There are thousands of labs all over the world that used our equipment to grow cultures. Iraq bought the equivalent of 70% of our annual production of our largest equipment, and plenty of accessories to keep all of them filled and productive. For some reason, I don't think that Iraq was trying to have a bacterial or viral space race to cure the common cold or to fight MRSA while dealing with crippling economic sanctions. The more likely use of this equipment was their acknowledged germ warfare program, especially given the massive amount of bacterial culture media used by this program.
Around 1998 I got hired by a company that manufactured medical lab equipment. Just before I started, they got a HUGE order from Iraq, which at the time, was under UN embargo and the scandal-ridden oil-for-food program.
The type and quantity of equipment that was ordered was ASTOUNDING, and sent alarm bells off through-out my organization. This was an enormous order, which amounted to about 70% of our typical annual production (world-wide) for the specific products. On top of that, there was a second order for spare parts to fully rebuild 2/3 of the original order. The equipment was specifically designed to grow bacterial and viral cultures on a very large scale for research. 60 Minutes had just done an investigative report on Saddam's chief biological weapons expert, who to most western news was only known as "Dr. Germ".
Our organization was struggling, and we really needed the revenue. To the workers on the floor, it meant that the lay-offs had stopped, for the moment.
I was dismayed that the organization was not in the position just reject the order on principle. Instead, they submitted the order to Clinton Administration's Commerce Department and set up a contingency plan to sell the equipment through multiple intermediary companies if permission was denied. Our CEO then made a large donation to the Democratic National Committee, and magically the sale was approved and blessed by the Commerce Department as "Humanitarian Medical Equipment", which it clearly was not.
Many can claim that no WMD's were found in Iraq, but I have a very good insight to the scale of the program that they had put in place. Almost all politicians have a price, and none are as pure as the wind-driven snow. Where there is money to be made, the barriers can be overcome.
One would think that HP's consumer goods could not be easily adapted to nefarious purposes (beyond counterfeiting), but you never know. Most laser printers do contain processors that are far beyond the capability allowed to pass through the embargo. Desperate people become very resourceful.
My daughter, who is now four years old, is very attuned to large spaces that echo. She can hear them coming and as she approaches, she usually shouts "Ha!" to hear it come back to her.
That being said, she doesn't need to click her tongue to sense walls and such. Even in quiet rooms, there is enough ambient noise from her motion and things around, that she can sense the location and more importantly the nearness of objects. When she "looks" at something, she is rarely looking straight at it. She lowers her head and leans one ear closer to the object. It is difficult for extended family members to understand this, as she has perfectly good eyes, but they rarely are looking at whatever she is focusing on.
Her stroke has left her with some other side effects. She is developmentally delayed and suffers some moderate cerebral palsy. It is not easy for her to clearly repeat words back to us. Still, it is absolutely amazing to see how refined her sense of hearing is, with regard to overcoming her diminished vision.
My daughter had a stroke before she was born, and as a result, she suffers from Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI), like the subject of this story. At nine months of age, she couldn't tell light from dark, which really screwed up our sleep cycles. Her eyes were fine, but her brain could not process the signals that they were sending to her.
Eventually, she did regain some amount of vision, but her hearing is still her primary way of "seeing" things. Whenever we go into places that are pitch dark, my wife and I are walking into things left and right. My daughter, on the other hand, cruises right around like a bat. She hears walls and other obstructions, and corrects her course to avoid them. Her object avoidance skills greatly diminish when she can use her eyes to see, as her brain has to work much harder to decode what she sees with her eyes.
I know, getting new aircraft to production can be a nightmare.:) I feel your pain though. I worked on a recent Scaled VLJ that unfortunately didn't go into production actually (name omitted, but I'm sure you can guess what it was). That was where I got my first exposure to how annoying bringing a great idea to production in the aerospace world can be. You know, I always wondered where the prototype of that jet ended up. If that aircraft had gone into production, Eclipse probably wouldn't exist, Cessna would have scrambled to get the Mustang out, and Piper would have built something even stupider than the PiperJet.
Oh boy. I can think of two Scaled VVLJ's concepts that happened around the same time. The first is on display in Oshkosh Wisconsin, and the second one (that I think you were probably involved with), I have no clue as to its whereabouts. I saw the spirit of the first fly this summer at Airventure with a spiffy orange and white paint scheme. I think it was a last ditch effort to save the company that is aspiring to produce it. The second, well, that is history now.
The canard on the P180 isn't there simply for looks; its the key to a three-surface design.
Agreed. I'm only correcting a common misconception that the P180 is a canard design like the Starship. They are totally different. The P180 does not have elevators on the canard, as would be required for a canard type aircraft. The Starship, on the other hand, has elevators on the canard.
The P180 had significant testing and analysis performed on it, something Rutan doesn't do much of.
Here, you are quite wrong. Burt, and by extension Scaled, does not do production aircraft, but we do plenty of testing.
Where the Starship was made primarily as a technology demonstrator (composites) and to look cool, the P180 was built for performance. To date, I believe it is still the fastest turboprop aircraft in the world.
You believe incorrectly. The fastest turboprop in the world is the Tupelov Tu-95 bear bomber. The original Starship prototype (Rutan/Scaled model 115), the 85% scale technology demonstrator matched the top speed of the P180, and greatly exceeded it's takeoff and landing performance, two decades before the P180.
This was not a production plane, only a prototype. The process to refine this aircraft into a certifiable production plane basically doomed the eventual craft that was made available for sale, because the FAA regulations at the time were only for aluminum aircraft, not an airframe made from composite materials. The Starship was supposed to be a replacement for the Beech King Air, not just a technology demonstrator. Because it was the first composite airframe to have to grind against government regulations that had no provisions for composite materials, it suffered the typical slings and arrows that pioneers tend to collect. Now, composites are becoming the norm in aerospace materials.
No. They sit side by side. The pilots really need to communicate so they are about a foot apart.
White Knight 2 is not the first twin-fuselage plane to have been built. For example, North American built a twin P-51 at the end of World War II. You couldn't put the co-pilots of a twin P-51 in the same fuselage, as there simply was no room. That is not the case with this plane.
Slightly off-topic, but the Piaggio Avanti is not really a canard design, and it is definately not a Rutan design. Scaled did a plane in the late-80's to early 90's called the Triumph, which was basically a three-surface design like the Avanti, but with familial resemblance to the Beech Starship. It never went into production, because of Beechcraft/Raytheon selling off Scaled Composites in the middle of the design phase.
The fact that a Starship was used on the SS1 flights has more to do with the generosity of its owner. Scaled Composites does not own a plane with comparable capacity.
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It will support C++ soon enough.
The benefits of clang are that it uses llvm as the compiler, which produces better optimized machine code than gcc currently does. Also, it supports Apple's block syntax (kind of like a pointer to a function), which allows things like libdispatch to do its magic. Also, as a C front end, it has much less cryptic error messages, and actually does a pretty good job of finding missed initializations and other hard to find bugs that usually will get caught at the code execution stage.
You should check out Siricusa's more thorough explanation at arstechnica, in his Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard review. He goes into some detail to show how Apple's use of clang in the new XCode is almost "pornographic for developers..." You wouldn't have the same IDE in BSD or Linux, but the same functionality is there. Someone posted a link much higher in the thread.
-- Len
Corrected I stand. Were there any signs at the site telling who owned or operated the towers, or what format they were broadcasting? All of the towers I've seen have been rather non-descript as to what signals they were carrying.
-- Len
These ELF people may not be bright, but I assure you that they know that AM radio will not give you cancer. They took out the antennae because they did not like what was being broadcast from them, and because they could.
In one of their typical "look at me" extreme vandalism moves, they get to silence some major critics pre-emptively, and still get lots of attention.
-- Len
I have to believe it was Dick not Burt that said he'd fly aerobatics in WhiteKnightTwo at Oshkosh next year.
You are wrong.
White Knight Two was designed to be a fully acrobatic aircraft. Burt said what he said. Only a handful of Scaled test pilots has flown this aircraft, and Dick is neither a Scaled test pilot, nor one of those few men.
To everyone else who cares, this particular plane is a proof of concept vehicle, a proto-type. It will be the first of many, and it will be the vehicle that launches the industry. The decals for windows on the left fuselage are to indicate where the design is intended to go. As of right now, there is no reason to waste resources on installing windows, seats, and other things into the left fuselage. The crew flies from the right side.
Disclaimer -- I work for Scaled Composites. I am only clarifying public knowledge that has been given by the customer (Virgin Galactic) or people much higher on the totem pole than myself (Burt Rutan). I cannot provide any further insight.
-- Len
I looked at a handful of his mapped locations, and seriously worry about where he is steering people. Sure, the Joseph Priestly House would be a good place to visit for the budding chemistry geek, but some of the others are seriously misguided.
Take for example the Nikolai Tesla museum in Belgrade, Serbia. A budding mad scientist should know that Tesla, although Serbian, never set foot in Belgrade. His contributions to science started in Graz, Austria, and then really took off in the US. There is no placemarks for Tesla in Pittsburgh, Colorado Springs, nor New York City, where he had his various laboratories, producing things like fluorescent lights and tesla coils.
Or the abundance of atomic bomb test sites, but the absence of places like Edwards Air Force Base, where the speed of sound was first broken. The Glenn-Curtiss museum is included, but not one for the Wright brothers in Dayton, OH.
Other underwhelming things like the Carl Sagan Planet Walk (in Ithaca, NY), should have been dropped all together. I think it went in after he died, and I'm not sure if his widow's pot-smoking paraphernalia shop still exists near the center of the model, anymore.
-- Len
My anecdotal data set indicates that with a modern engine (turbo-charged and non-turbo, tuned port or direct-injection gasoline) with a modern ECU, you will most certainly get better fuel economy with higher octane fuel. My data comes from my personal studies on four different engines from VW, Audi, and Mercedes Benz. The Turbo-charged direct injection I4 benefited the most, followed by the twin-turbo V6, then the normally aspirated V8, then the normally aspirated I4. I have seen between 2-5 mpg increases (before the ethanol mandate). E10 just sucks all around.
Why is this? Well, as you stated, higher octane fuels are more resistant to pre-detonation than lower octane fuels. This is what gives better efficiency. Most modern engines are equipped with knock sensors, which the ECU's use to advance or retard the spark as required. This is what clues in the ECU to what kind of octane rating the fuel has. If you are running a higher-octane fuel, the ECU will lean out the mixture and adjust the spark timing to maximize the power for the amount of fuel used. Lower octane fuels burn hotter, and must be kept at a richer mixture (lowering mpg).
In the case of the turbo-charged engines, pre-detonation is a much bigger issue, as the turbo makes sure that there will be an abundance of oxygen to combust with the fuel. Because of this, most turbo-charged engines require a high-octane fuel to start with. Running a lower-octane fuel on a modern engine (turbo or not) causes the ECU to advance the spark to avoid knocking and pre-detonation, which wastes some of the combustion energy on the compression stroke.
-- Len
I have a 2006 VW GLI. It has a 2.0L turbo-charged, direct injected engine in it. While driving across the country a few years ago (before the federal mandate hit), I averaged 34 mpg while driving in non-ethanol states. Once I hit states that had already started adding ethanol to the gasoline, my fuel economy dropped to 27 mpg.
I was shocked! Changing the fuel to 10% ethanol resulted in a drop in fuel economy by 21%. I couldn't reconcile the drop, as it didn't make sense that ethanol would drive my economy worse by an amount greater than the percentage of ethanol added.
I don't drive like a maniac, and discovering this caused me to reform my driving habits to get better fuel economy. The best I have been able to manage since the mandate is 29 mpg. Again, I was getting 34 mpg on straight non-ethanol gasoline, while driving more aggressively.
I did some further research, and found that Volkswagen's stance on ethanol is to absolutely not use it, ever. My engine uses a new technology (gasoline direct injection) that is emerging in just about every high-efficiency gasoline engine that is on the current or near horizon. All of them will have the same detrimental performance with ethanol blend fuels.
This will set up a situation where the non-government controlled auto industry, attempting to meet the new aggressive CAFE standards will be fighting against the government castrated companies and the ethanol lobby. I hate to admit that we will all be losers in the end, as the former winning will increase fuel economy, but probably cause fuel taxes to rise to make up for lost revenue from increased mileage. The latter's win will also increase the cost of fuel, while further decreasing mileage on new direct-injection engines.
-- Len
No, the homophobic or heterophobic bigot stories don't do anything for me.
Perhaps I shouldn't have said "exact same thing" because I was taking the connotation of frivolous, useless, or pedantic, for the word that got your panties all bunched up.
I'll keep in mind that I should politically cleanse my quoted material, least I transgress a member of our community who is easily offended or aroused by words that may call into question the asexuality of the Lego Soup Spoon builders. I wouldn't want to imply that they may have found sexual partners of either same or opposite sex.
-- Len
(Never have mod points except when tedious faggotry like the World's Biggest Lego Soup Spoon stories are up....)
Absolutely! I was thinking the exact same thing, but your hypothetical article title was better.
-- Len
You are referring to the YF-12A, which did fly and successfully launch an air-to-air guided missle, while flying at mach 3.2 at 74,000 feet, hitting a target drone flying at 500 feet altitude. Amazing, given the state of electronics and guidance technology at the time. Hell, all of the technology for the A-12 / YF-12 / SR-71 is still amazing today.
Anyway, the YF-12 was acknowledged and publicized so it could be used as a cover for the similar A-12 and follow-on RS-71 planes. It wasn't much of a stretch to think that we had ever-faster interceptors, but a stratospheric, Mach 3+ spy plane? That was science fiction. The RS-71 was re-named the SR-71 after Lyndon Johnson flubbed the name on live television. They changed all drawings and documents for the program, an amazingly expensive waste of tax-payers dollars, just so that no one would have to correct the Commander in Chief.
-- Len
I don't know if it was a compliment or an insult. Not that I or anyone else with basic video editing skills couldn't insert the audio of someone yelling "Kill Him!" after the fact.
I prefer to look at facts like what the Secret Service investigation found, rather than a questionably sourced video. I guess that makes me a troll to those that find the truth inconvenient.
-- Len
In case you missed it, there were these "town meetings" things held by McCain during the election where nice folk(whom I would personally term rabid) were screaming things like "Kill him!" about the senator's opponent. Remember that?
Yeah, I remember that, because it supposedly happened in my home state. Unfortunately, it was a complete fabrication by the reporter who ascribed the comment to the anonymous crowd. This defaming lie was discovered a few days later and then not discussed again, because it had done its damage and was only useful as a dodge or diversion from serious questions about Obama's past affiliations and his suitability to lead the country.
I don't have any familiarity with "Mudflats" but I suspect her actions were in the same vein as the reporter who fabricated the "kill him!" story. Politics is ugly, and use of anonymity to defame should have no place.
When you have got those kinds of nutballs running around wouldn't YOU not want them to know where you live if you were writing about their precious leader? I know I would.
And it is a good thing that they didn't exist, except in the minds of the paranoid and bigoted who just know what kind of people republicans or conservatives are.
I think there should be an IMMEDIATE investigation. Not because he outed the blogger, but because i can't picture a rep doing the work required to find this out on his own, and I doubt very seriously he paid out of his own pocket to have it done. That makes it a misuse of government resources and an abuse of power. if he did abuse his power and privilege to get the identity of this blogger, then bust his ass. Because the last thing we need right now is politicians using their power to go after one of the last places we still have free speech. I agree that if he did the work himself and found out that is one thing, but how many here actually believe he did that? Nope, me neither.
I'm sure that's how Joe the Plumber feels. Wait a second, he was real, and people did abuse their power to go after him for publicly daring to ask Obama a serious and real question, using his own name! If I remember correctly, people were accusing him of using a pseudonym, because his middle name, not his first name, is Joe, and that he didn't have a plumber's license, so how could he be a plumber. Nevermind that he asked the first pertinent question that our current President had faced for at least the two weeks prior to that event. Destroy him!
Nothing to see here, move along...
-- Len
You're way off base with regards to Apple and 64-bit. OS X (generic including iPhone, AppleTV and Mac OS X), has a really elegant mechanism for having multiple architecture binaries included for each program, without triggering .DLL hell. In this way, Apple, as well as developers, can target multiple architectures during the build, and deliver for multiple architectures. I think it is as easy or easier for them to support multiple architectures as it is for Microsoft and the NT derivatives. For God's sake, NeXT Step/OpenStep, the core of what became Cocoa was ported to PA-Risc, SPARC, x86, i960, 680x0, and PowerPC, as well as to run as a system atop the NT kernel, Solaris, and HP-UX; all before Apple bought NeXT. This code has been portable from day one.
Snow Leopard at this point, may or may not be Intel only, but it will be built and delivered for both 64-bit and legacy x86 in the same packages, just as contemporary Leopard ships with PowerPC 32, PowerPC 64, intel x86 and intel x86-64 binaries in one package. Subsets of the same Snow Leopard codebase will be delivered in a stripped down version for ARM9 for the iPhone. The decision to make Snow Leopard Intel-only, will likely be a pure marketing decision, just as how I cannot buy a version of Vista, XP, or Server 2008 for any chips other than Intel 32 or 64.
On to the issue of running sub-systems for compatibility, it sounds like you are describing the NT kernel as a version of the Mach kernel, and then denying that any other OS other than NT has the ability to do this. News flash, OS X, AIX, and OSF/1, MkLinux, and the GNU/Hurd are all Mach-based to some degree or other, and all have this capability for the last twenty years.
I do agree with your statements on developer tools. Microsoft has done the right thing by facilitating development with good tools, but I think Apple has got a good start at tackling that problem. Their choice of using GCC was a pragmatic decision, and now they are filling their portfolio of tools with much better options, as well as contributing back to OpenSource. Integrating dTrace, LLVM, and a few other tools that escape my mind, show the direction that they are going. XCode has had steady improvements and is a pretty good IDE. Also, Apple does not charge for tools, and are likely not going to do that in the near future. How much does a seat of VS cost now?
-- Len
The default behavior for Windows has a 2GB limit because Windows gives a 4GB VM space to 32-bit programs, but it partitions it into 2GB for the program and 2GB for the kernel. This behavior does not change with 64-bit windows
As per your link, you can set program specific parameters to enlarge the program window to 3GB on 32-bit systems or the full 4GB on 64-bit systems, but this is not the default case. Since both of these rely on PAE being present, only newer programs, where the developer made the proper provisions, will work well. You have to have a system that uses PAE, and most 32-bit systems doe not have this support. Every program that I have used that had support for large images, were shipped with this parameter un-set, and cautionary notes were attached about enabling this capability.
-- Len
You need to check out how Snow Leopard is built a little better, as it will not be 100% 64bit. It will be 'more' of a hybrid, but still not a full 64bit OS.
Actually, it will be a full 64-bit OS from kernel to user with legacy support for 32-bit carbon and cocoa. By your reasoning, XP 64 and Vista 64-bit aren't 100% either as both use the less-elegant WoW for 32-bit stuff and System32 for the 64-bit bits. This, in addition to the fact that Microsoft requires separate versions, rather than just shipping a product that covers both architectures. There's also that pesky problem that most programs for Windows are 32-bit apps, and many are very fragile on the 64-bit Windows platform. I'll stop now.
Because it DOESN'T matter in the Windows world. 32bit applications get performance benefits on the 64bit OS.
As it also happens with Snow Leopard, as the kernel goes full 64-bit (on Core 2 and newer machines). Current Leopard already gives the 64-bit benefits of increased registers and larger VM space to 64-bit programs, so there isn't a lot more to gain. These capabilities are not magically transferred to 32-bit apps under any OS, as the architecture is different, so there is no way that Vista-64 or Win7-64 will gift 32-bit apps with more than the 2GB of address space that they are currently allowed (vs. the full 4GB that OS X gives to 32-bit apps). Any speed increase comes from taking less time for register shuffles on 64-bit programs, giving more time to all processes.
Also if developers want to provide a full 64bit version, it is a simple recompile, you don't have to re-write the application like a lot of people (Adobe for example) find they have to do on OS X. This is why if you want a 64bit version of Adobe software, you need Vistax64, as the development APIs Apple sold Adobe never got moved to 64bit as promised.
Oh ho! What a canard. A simple re-compile was what has been hamstringing 64-bit graphics drivers and codecs for the last three years or so on XP-64 and Vista-64? Apple doesn't sell it's API's, it just publishes them. Adobe had 8 years of warning and opportunity to move it's cruft from Carbon to a cleaner, more modern API, and they decided to play chicken because Apple started eating their lunch with Final Cut Pro and Aperture. Being Carbon developers, they knew that it would not be an easy to clean up all of the legacy crap in the API without breaking backwards compatibility. Developing the iPhone was the final nail in Carbon's coffin.
All MS API sets(development platforms) move to 64bit, even old 16bit applications can be recompiled as 64bit applications. (You can't do this with System 9 applications, nor even the whole early 32bit transition APIs Apple provided.)
Yes, this is why Microsoft came up with thunking and the 16-bit \System folder and the 32-bit \System32 folder for Win32, which became the 32-bit \WoW and 64-bit \System32 folder. Brilliant. It isn't quite fair to drag System 9 applications into this mess. Do old Borland TurboPascal programs magically compile to 64-bit? Most System 9 programs were done as projects in Metrowerks Code Warrior with the PowerPlant framework, a system that was bought and buried by Motorola. Mac OS 9 was a cooperatively multi-tasked mix of PowerPC and 680x0 code, which used legacy system calls that needed Paschal syntax. OS X is basically a BSD Unix with no 680x0 code that uses GCC for compilation. Different architectures, compilers, system calls, hell the only things that are the same are the word "Mac" and "Apple". Up until the the Intel switch, you could run Mac OS 9 code, similar to WoW, without a re-compile. In most cases, the question is why would you want to.
Do you remember the Apple ads talking about the FIRST 64bit Personal Computer? How ironic that this many years later it still isn't even running a native 64bit OS, where Windows has been doing 64bit versions s
I met a few students from Iran at a robotics competition when I was in my graduate studies. They were remarkably resourceful, mostly because they couldn't get many components that we take for granted.
While most robots in the contest had modern solid-state motor controls, the Iranians were attempting to do PWM with electromechanical relays. We had slick SMT chips, they had discrete wire-leaded components. They did very well, in spite of their extremely limited electronic part availability and most of their components came from cannibalizing something else.
I remember not too long ago people talking about making small clusters of PS3's to crunch heavy calcs. I'm sure that if the Iranian government could get a hold of enough of them, they would probably build the largest cluster of PS3's in the world. The same could be done by resourceful people with a bunch of printer RISC processors. I mean, doesn't Linux run on just about anything now?
Just because it doesn't seem like a good or efficient idea to you because you can get a farm of dual-quad-core boxes with multi-TB storage and Many-gig RAM, doesn't mean that it isn't a great idea for people who could only dream of getting something as powerful as a 486DX with 20 Meg of RAM.
-- Len
My conscience is clear and I no longer work for that firm.
I had to deal with months of sleepless nights, wrestling with that information. The anthrax scare in the immediate period after the 9/11 attacks brought fears of culpability through inaction. Those letters ended up being sent by one of our own deranged scientists.
Likewise, having friends and children of friends being sent to Iraq, clearly focused for me the tangled web we weave. Has anything you designed, built or coded been used to hurt other people? How about indirectly? What about actions taken for profit motives? Our equipment was designed for beneficial biological research. The actions of our CEO were arguably for the benefit of the shareholders and employees who depended on that order to stay in business. When the actual end use context is applied, the situation looks much uglier and quite scandalous.
The shocking thing for me about this episode is the amount of stuff that happened "above board". Sure, this company had a back-up plan of using foreign intermediaries. Instead, they went to the Commerce Department. The donation from our CEO showed up on public transparency websites dealing with campaign finance. The extremely close timing between the donation and the commerce department approval is not obviously linked, unless you know to look.
Transparency did not prevent this transaction, because there aren't enough watch dogs. Who is to say that every export license granted is for exactly what it says it is for? Sure we were sending equipment related to medical research, but there was a known absence of medical research and a known massive biological weapons program in existence at the time in Iraq. The dual-use nature of the equipment should have stopped the order in Commerce, but the right lubrication ($$) and the application of selective omission got the whole deal through.
We got Dr. Germ and her friend Dr. Anthrax. My gut feeling is that most of the equipment in this transaction was destroyed in the initial invasion, or looted in the aftermath. Either way, the equipment is no longer traceable and the biological weapons program no longer viable.
-- Len
Just because you didn't see it on 24/7 cable news, doesn't mean that it didn't get found. A friend of mine was in the first wave of troops, and found a large WMD cache. The shells were in much better shape than those that were found later in the first month. That site was secured and there was no news of his find. While it does not make sense to the casual observer, not all discoveries are announced for political gain. I only found out about this because he was injured in a non-combat accident, and sent home.
The particular equipment I mentioned in my GP post looks quite innocuous and would probably be ignored by the first wave of troops, and likely looted for scrap by the Iraqis after Saddam's fall.
If you remember back to the Colin Powell UN Sec. Council presentation, we (the U.S,) were looking for mobil mass-production units. The equipment we sold was not for producing large amounts, but for the very large scale research effort required to identify successful strains of bacteria and viruses. Think millions of test tubes in a lab vs. large vats in a production process.
Without the research and strain isolation, the "weaponization" couldn't exist. There are thousands of labs all over the world that used our equipment to grow cultures. Iraq bought the equivalent of 70% of our annual production of our largest equipment, and plenty of accessories to keep all of them filled and productive. For some reason, I don't think that Iraq was trying to have a bacterial or viral space race to cure the common cold or to fight MRSA while dealing with crippling economic sanctions. The more likely use of this equipment was their acknowledged germ warfare program, especially given the massive amount of bacterial culture media used by this program.
-- Len
Around 1998 I got hired by a company that manufactured medical lab equipment. Just before I started, they got a HUGE order from Iraq, which at the time, was under UN embargo and the scandal-ridden oil-for-food program.
The type and quantity of equipment that was ordered was ASTOUNDING, and sent alarm bells off through-out my organization. This was an enormous order, which amounted to about 70% of our typical annual production (world-wide) for the specific products. On top of that, there was a second order for spare parts to fully rebuild 2/3 of the original order. The equipment was specifically designed to grow bacterial and viral cultures on a very large scale for research. 60 Minutes had just done an investigative report on Saddam's chief biological weapons expert, who to most western news was only known as "Dr. Germ".
Our organization was struggling, and we really needed the revenue. To the workers on the floor, it meant that the lay-offs had stopped, for the moment.
I was dismayed that the organization was not in the position just reject the order on principle. Instead, they submitted the order to Clinton Administration's Commerce Department and set up a contingency plan to sell the equipment through multiple intermediary companies if permission was denied. Our CEO then made a large donation to the Democratic National Committee, and magically the sale was approved and blessed by the Commerce Department as "Humanitarian Medical Equipment", which it clearly was not.
Many can claim that no WMD's were found in Iraq, but I have a very good insight to the scale of the program that they had put in place. Almost all politicians have a price, and none are as pure as the wind-driven snow. Where there is money to be made, the barriers can be overcome.
One would think that HP's consumer goods could not be easily adapted to nefarious purposes (beyond counterfeiting), but you never know. Most laser printers do contain processors that are far beyond the capability allowed to pass through the embargo. Desperate people become very resourceful.
-- Len
My daughter, who is now four years old, is very attuned to large spaces that echo. She can hear them coming and as she approaches, she usually shouts "Ha!" to hear it come back to her.
That being said, she doesn't need to click her tongue to sense walls and such. Even in quiet rooms, there is enough ambient noise from her motion and things around, that she can sense the location and more importantly the nearness of objects. When she "looks" at something, she is rarely looking straight at it. She lowers her head and leans one ear closer to the object. It is difficult for extended family members to understand this, as she has perfectly good eyes, but they rarely are looking at whatever she is focusing on.
Her stroke has left her with some other side effects. She is developmentally delayed and suffers some moderate cerebral palsy. It is not easy for her to clearly repeat words back to us. Still, it is absolutely amazing to see how refined her sense of hearing is, with regard to overcoming her diminished vision.
-- Len
My daughter had a stroke before she was born, and as a result, she suffers from Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI), like the subject of this story. At nine months of age, she couldn't tell light from dark, which really screwed up our sleep cycles. Her eyes were fine, but her brain could not process the signals that they were sending to her.
Eventually, she did regain some amount of vision, but her hearing is still her primary way of "seeing" things. Whenever we go into places that are pitch dark, my wife and I are walking into things left and right. My daughter, on the other hand, cruises right around like a bat. She hears walls and other obstructions, and corrects her course to avoid them. Her object avoidance skills greatly diminish when she can use her eyes to see, as her brain has to work much harder to decode what she sees with her eyes.
-- Len
I know, getting new aircraft to production can be a nightmare. :) I feel your pain though. I worked on a recent Scaled VLJ that unfortunately didn't go into production actually (name omitted, but I'm sure you can guess what it was). That was where I got my first exposure to how annoying bringing a great idea to production in the aerospace world can be. You know, I always wondered where the prototype of that jet ended up. If that aircraft had gone into production, Eclipse probably wouldn't exist, Cessna would have scrambled to get the Mustang out, and Piper would have built something even stupider than the PiperJet.
Oh boy. I can think of two Scaled VVLJ's concepts that happened around the same time. The first is on display in Oshkosh Wisconsin, and the second one (that I think you were probably involved with), I have no clue as to its whereabouts. I saw the spirit of the first fly this summer at Airventure with a spiffy orange and white paint scheme. I think it was a last ditch effort to save the company that is aspiring to produce it. The second, well, that is history now.
-- Len
The canard on the P180 isn't there simply for looks; its the key to a three-surface design.
Agreed. I'm only correcting a common misconception that the P180 is a canard design like the Starship. They are totally different. The P180 does not have elevators on the canard, as would be required for a canard type aircraft. The Starship, on the other hand, has elevators on the canard.
The P180 had significant testing and analysis performed on it, something Rutan doesn't do much of.
Here, you are quite wrong. Burt, and by extension Scaled, does not do production aircraft, but we do plenty of testing.
Where the Starship was made primarily as a technology demonstrator (composites) and to look cool, the P180 was built for performance. To date, I believe it is still the fastest turboprop aircraft in the world.
You believe incorrectly. The fastest turboprop in the world is the Tupelov Tu-95 bear bomber. The original Starship prototype (Rutan/Scaled model 115), the 85% scale technology demonstrator matched the top speed of the P180, and greatly exceeded it's takeoff and landing performance, two decades before the P180.
This was not a production plane, only a prototype. The process to refine this aircraft into a certifiable production plane basically doomed the eventual craft that was made available for sale, because the FAA regulations at the time were only for aluminum aircraft, not an airframe made from composite materials. The Starship was supposed to be a replacement for the Beech King Air, not just a technology demonstrator. Because it was the first composite airframe to have to grind against government regulations that had no provisions for composite materials, it suffered the typical slings and arrows that pioneers tend to collect. Now, composites are becoming the norm in aerospace materials.
-- Len
No. They sit side by side. The pilots really need to communicate so they are about a foot apart.
White Knight 2 is not the first twin-fuselage plane to have been built. For example, North American built a twin P-51 at the end of World War II. You couldn't put the co-pilots of a twin P-51 in the same fuselage, as there simply was no room. That is not the case with this plane.
-- Len
Slightly off-topic, but the Piaggio Avanti is not really a canard design, and it is definately not a Rutan design. Scaled did a plane in the late-80's to early 90's called the Triumph, which was basically a three-surface design like the Avanti, but with familial resemblance to the Beech Starship. It never went into production, because of Beechcraft/Raytheon selling off Scaled Composites in the middle of the design phase.
The fact that a Starship was used on the SS1 flights has more to do with the generosity of its owner. Scaled Composites does not own a plane with comparable capacity.