. . . produced the big bike companies (huffy, trek, etc.) using the most cutting edge techniques and materials.
I'll just pretend I didn't year that.
a bit of bike racing history
on
Biking @ 80 MPH
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The truth is a fully faired recumbent would devastate the Tour de France. They are terrible for hill climbing but going downhill they could easily go twice as fast as the pack of upright cyclists.
Aside from the ultra-conservative rules governing the Tour de France, there are some practical problems.
'Bents are longer and lower. They handle differently. The peloton would behave differently if it were made up a pack of recumbent cycles...
In fact, there would be less need for a peloton in the first place, as individual riders would encounter less wind resistance. The entire strategy and tactics of the sport would the thrown off.
You said it yourself-- recumbents can't climb. Neither can they sprint. In a hypothetical mixed recumbent/upright Tour, the green (sprinting) and polka dot (climbing) jerseys would still remain on upright riders.
In the early 20th century the Tour was comprised only of simple bikes with "fixed/free" rear wheels. Rear wheels had two cogs--one on each side. One side had a freewheel, the other was fixed. To change their gear ratios the riders had to stop and flip their wheels around.
Derailleurs were common in touring bikes well before it was accepted in professional racing. Let me quote an excerpt from http://chainguard.org/jfderail.html:
"derailleurs were not generally allowed in road races because derailleurs required freewheeling, and mixing riders with fixed and free wheels produced problems on the turns, when fixed-gear riders were limited by pedal scrape on the turns while free-wheeled riders were not. However, there was also a series of special races for derailleur-equipped bicycles, typically hill climbs, that were sponsored, at least in part, by the derailleur manufacturers."
Perhaps if the racing sponsors and cycle manufacturers sponsored recumbent-only races, recumbent cycling would become more widely accepted.
The atmosphere destroyed the Challenger. Space shuttle stacks aren't meant to go through the air sideways. Dynamic air pressure caused the external tank to rupture. Once the stack was torn apart, the orbiter was likewise torn apart by the atmosphere.
I'll bite anyway.... Challenger disintegrated because of dynamic air pressure. The external tank ruptured. The orbiter disintegrated shortly afterwards as well, also because of dynamic air pressure.
Very interesting! I'd mod you up if I could.
Jet-A1, which is the fuel used at this time of year
Do they use other fuel types at different times of year?
Thank you for explaing how it really failed. I had just replied to a "it blew up because of the oxygen and hydrogen" post before reading your post.
Pressure ruputure... poke a hole in it... whatever:-). The point is, that's what actually happened. Challenger did not "explode" in the normal sense because of combustion.
The Challenger violently exploded because of the liquid oxygen.
Not really. (IAARS) Actually, Challenger was torn apart because it yawed too much after the right SRB (solid rocket booster) mount broke. Dynamic pressure caused the ET (external tank) to rupture. The as the vehicle got crooked in the wind, the dynamic pressure of the atmosphere screaming past caused the ET to rupture. The ET is strong enough to fly straight but it'll be torn apart by the atmosphere (aaah, the atmosphere) if it starts to go sideways.
Combustion as a result of mixing between the LH and LOX was a secondary effect, which happened after the stack had disintegrated.
The Challenger orbiter was not destroyed by the combustion of fuel and oxidizer, but was insead torn apart by dynamic pressure, same as the ET. The shuttle able stay in one piece while tumbling through the atmosphere at high Mach numbers.
A few years ago, NASA decided to launch several spare TDRSS satellites even though they weren't really needed yet to replace the ones we already had on orbit.
Why? Because it cost more to keep them in storage on earth than it did to launch them and keep them on standby.
*Sigh* Leave the enthusiastic MCSE's alone.. they just won't ever "get it".
On the other hand, there are talented CS people out there who find themselves getting MCSE certified because their managers demand it, or simply for the hell of it.
I really think there is something to be said for face to face collaboration, or at least having everyone working under the same roof. You can peep over the cubicle wall or walk over and talk to your coworkers. It makes working together on things go a whole lot more smoothly.
QSSL (the company that makes QNX) has that kind of philosophy. All the OS engineers work in the same place and they're able to just talk about stuff together.
Distributed development, especially on large projects, is hard to do. Getting everyone together via IRC in realtime can help, but people still end up going off for hours or days at a time without really getting in touch with the other people on the project. Sometimes, CVS changelogs are not a good substitue for quality facetime.
Yeah, Sun is really where it's at:-) I'd be thrilled if everyone ran nothing but Solaris, but they don't. Sun seems most popular in engineering and manufacturing businesses. AIX, coming from none other than big blue IBM themselves, has a big following in commerce and beancounting, etc.
A lot of it comes down to *politics* too, of course. The department next door to me used to run all their services on some older 32 bit Sun machines. As they started to outgrow it they were lucky to get some nice new Compaq Alpha hardware donated from some folks who had surplus machines.
The two guys who knew anything about Unix worked regular jobs most of the time--systems administration was something they did part time. They grumbled a bit about having to change everything and then they got down to business and learned enough about Tru64 to make things work.
Several months later, upper management outlawed all "rogue" computing services and forced everyone departments to centralize their stuff onto NT machines kept in a different building--machines adminned by contract labor. The 6 year old Suns and the 1 year old Alphas got shipped off to a government surplus warehouse. All politics.
Losing a lab full of HP-UX developers may not seem that horrible from the perspective of open source *nix users. However, these folks are damn talented developers who would be able to contribute a lot to most any project.
I worry that without a steady income to put food on the table, many longtime Unix gurus will find themselves doing other jobs. It would be great if the HP-UX people getting layed off would contribute to Linux or Darwin or FreeBSD or whatever; some of them probably already have contributed in their spare time, as a hobby. Unfortunately, when you become unemployed your hobbies take the back seat.
Not everyone layed off is going to luck out and get a new job working on some cool new project. They'll find other things to do. Possibly, we'll lose some great brains who might have made computing better.
<Sergeant>: If you jump at at an altitude of 800 feet and your main parachute screws up, how long do you have to deploy your reserve? <grunts>: . .. <Sergeant>: The rest of your life.
Fonstad's descriptions of the pain-staking process she used to create these hundreds of details maps...
Ouch! That sounds like some kind of medieval torture method.;-) I can just imagine a bunch of Hobbit-cartographers running about Middle Earth with their GPS receivers and surveying equipment, for all intensive purposes, reeking havoc upon the land.
Thanks for remining me why I drifted away from Slashdot awhile back.
"The app" in this case is the entire operating system. The GPL license refers to it as "The Work" with a capital W. I'd quote the relevant text again, but there isn't much point. After all, I have a small mind.
Can you imagine the circus that would ensue if it turned out that Windows depended on GPLed software to boot? Be was able to get away with it only because they were a small target and few people noticed or cared.
There's a big difference between depending on GNU software . . . and being derived from GNU software.
Please, read the fine print. According to the GNU Public License:
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
It is crystal clear yet?
BeOS CONTAINS GPL'ed software.
BeOS IS DERIVED FROM GPL'ed software
BeOS DEPENDS UPON GPL'ed software.
divin said: those scripts can be reweritten
Modifying the OS so as not to depend on GNU bash will solve the violation, yes. Haven't you even NOTICED that Be Inc has not done that? BeOS has been in violation of the GPL all along.
"Gee I'm sorry officer, you see...I was doing 80 MPH in a 45 zone back there, but now I'm going to slow down and keep things legal... mmm'kay?"
Digging up the dead corpse of BeOS to rewrite some system scripts makes very little sense now. Be Inc sold their assets to Palm. Palm doesn't care about BeOS and has already announced that they will do nothing with the desktop BeOS operating system.
This GPL violation is a perfect chance to scuttle the ship, so to speak. Be Inc is no longer involved. Nobody is left onboard except the enemy, who bought the ship for a pittance and now plans to scrap it. The remaining crew is standing on the shoreline, wishing they could have salvaged some parts themselves. This GPL violation is the perfect opportunity to torpedo Palm's new floating wreck and get some of the goods ourselves.
The problem is,
/boot/beos/system/Bootscript
/boot/beos/system/Netscript
/boot/beos/system/SetupEnviromnet
/boot/beos/system/ShutdownScript
/boot/beos/system/ShutdownFinishScript
etc...
all depend on bash.
Unless someone was to rewrite them in such a way that you could use a non-GPLed alternative like ksh or ash or something, the operating system *depends* on GNU softwar.
Slashdot Mirror
Or even as homebuilt cars built by enthusiasts. Check out the magnificent all-wood construction Tryane II, based on a Citroen 2CV.
Not year... *hear*. Hmm, Yuffy bikes?
I'll just pretend I didn't year that.
Aside from the ultra-conservative rules governing the Tour de France, there are some practical problems.
In the early 20th century the Tour was comprised only of simple bikes with "fixed/free" rear wheels. Rear wheels had two cogs--one on each side. One side had a freewheel, the other was fixed. To change their gear ratios the riders had to stop and flip their wheels around.
Derailleurs were common in touring bikes well before it was accepted in professional racing. Let me quote an excerpt from http://chainguard.org/jfderail.html:
"derailleurs were not generally allowed in road races because derailleurs required freewheeling, and mixing riders with fixed and free wheels produced problems on the turns, when fixed-gear riders were limited by pedal scrape on the turns while free-wheeled riders were not. However, there was also a series of special races for derailleur-equipped bicycles, typically hill climbs, that were sponsored, at least in part, by the derailleur manufacturers."
Perhaps if the racing sponsors and cycle manufacturers sponsored recumbent-only races, recumbent cycling would become more widely accepted.
The atmosphere destroyed the Challenger. Space shuttle stacks aren't meant to go through the air sideways. Dynamic air pressure caused the external tank to rupture. Once the stack was torn apart, the orbiter was likewise torn apart by the atmosphere.
(-1, Troll)
I'll bite anyway.... Challenger disintegrated because of dynamic air pressure. The external tank ruptured. The orbiter disintegrated shortly afterwards as well, also because of dynamic air pressure.
B-25 Mitchell. (two engines, single wing). but yes, it was in 1945 ;)
Very interesting! I'd mod you up if I could. Jet-A1, which is the fuel used at this time of year Do they use other fuel types at different times of year?
Thank you for explaing how it really failed. I had just replied to a "it blew up because of the oxygen and hydrogen" post before reading your post.
... poke a hole in it... whatever :-). The point is, that's what actually happened. Challenger did not "explode" in the normal sense because of combustion.
Pressure ruputure
s/The shuttle able/The shuttle is not able/
Not really. (IAARS) Actually, Challenger was torn apart because it yawed too much after the right SRB (solid rocket booster) mount broke. Dynamic pressure caused the ET (external tank) to rupture. The as the vehicle got crooked in the wind, the dynamic pressure of the atmosphere screaming past caused the ET to rupture. The ET is strong enough to fly straight but it'll be torn apart by the atmosphere (aaah, the atmosphere) if it starts to go sideways.
Combustion as a result of mixing between the LH and LOX was a secondary effect, which happened after the stack had disintegrated.
The Challenger orbiter was not destroyed by the combustion of fuel and oxidizer, but was insead torn apart by dynamic pressure, same as the ET. The shuttle able stay in one piece while tumbling through the atmosphere at high Mach numbers.
A few years ago, NASA decided to launch several spare TDRSS satellites even though they weren't really needed yet to replace the ones we already had on orbit.
Why? Because it cost more to keep them in storage on earth than it did to launch them and keep them on standby.
On the other hand, there are talented CS people out there who find themselves getting MCSE certified because their managers demand it, or simply for the hell of it.
My Clients Support Extravagance
I really think there is something to be said for face to face collaboration, or at least having everyone working under the same roof. You can peep over the cubicle wall or walk over and talk to your coworkers. It makes working together on things go a whole lot more smoothly.
QSSL (the company that makes QNX) has that kind of philosophy. All the OS engineers work in the same place and they're able to just talk about stuff together.
Distributed development, especially on large projects, is hard to do. Getting everyone together via IRC in realtime can help, but people still end up going off for hours or days at a time without really getting in touch with the other people on the project. Sometimes, CVS changelogs are not a good substitue for quality facetime.
I'm a Sun guy though.
:-) I'd be thrilled if everyone ran nothing but Solaris, but they don't. Sun seems most popular in engineering and manufacturing businesses. AIX, coming from none other than big blue IBM themselves, has a big following in commerce and beancounting, etc.
Yeah, Sun is really where it's at
A lot of it comes down to *politics* too, of course. The department next door to me used to run all their services on some older 32 bit Sun machines. As they started to outgrow it they were lucky to get some nice new Compaq Alpha hardware donated from some folks who had surplus machines.
The two guys who knew anything about Unix worked regular jobs most of the time--systems administration was something they did part time. They grumbled a bit about having to change everything and then they got down to business and learned enough about Tru64 to make things work.
Several months later, upper management outlawed all "rogue" computing services and forced everyone departments to centralize their stuff onto NT machines kept in a different building--machines adminned by contract labor. The 6 year old Suns and the 1 year old Alphas got shipped off to a government surplus warehouse. All politics.
Losing a lab full of HP-UX developers may not seem that horrible from the perspective of open source *nix users. However, these folks are damn talented developers who would be able to contribute a lot to most any project.
I worry that without a steady income to put food on the table, many longtime Unix gurus will find themselves doing other jobs. It would be great if the HP-UX people getting layed off would contribute to Linux or Darwin or FreeBSD or whatever; some of them probably already have contributed in their spare time, as a hobby. Unfortunately, when you become unemployed your hobbies take the back seat.
Not everyone layed off is going to luck out and get a new job working on some cool new project. They'll find other things to do. Possibly, we'll lose some great brains who might have made computing better.
<Sergeant>: If you jump at at an altitude of 800 feet and your main parachute screws up, how long do you have to deploy your reserve? .
<grunts>: . .
<Sergeant>: The rest of your life.
how about...
singular: box, unix, lamer
plural: boxes, unices, lam0rz
Ouch! That sounds like some kind of medieval torture method. ;-) I can just imagine a bunch of Hobbit-cartographers running about Middle Earth with their GPS receivers and surveying equipment, for all intensive purposes, reeking havoc upon the land.
Thanks for remining me why I drifted away from Slashdot awhile back.
"The app" in this case is the entire operating system. The GPL license refers to it as "The Work" with a capital W. I'd quote the relevant text again, but there isn't much point. After all, I have a small mind.
Can you imagine the circus that would ensue if it turned out that Windows depended on GPLed software to boot? Be was able to get away with it only because they were a small target and few people noticed or cared.
Try to get with the program.
I'll try. Fuck you too!
There's a big difference between depending on GNU software . . . and being derived from GNU software. Please, read the fine print. According to the GNU Public License: You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. It is crystal clear yet? BeOS CONTAINS GPL'ed software. BeOS IS DERIVED FROM GPL'ed software BeOS DEPENDS UPON GPL'ed software. divin said: those scripts can be reweritten Modifying the OS so as not to depend on GNU bash will solve the violation, yes. Haven't you even NOTICED that Be Inc has not done that? BeOS has been in violation of the GPL all along. "Gee I'm sorry officer, you see...I was doing 80 MPH in a 45 zone back there, but now I'm going to slow down and keep things legal... mmm'kay?" Digging up the dead corpse of BeOS to rewrite some system scripts makes very little sense now. Be Inc sold their assets to Palm. Palm doesn't care about BeOS and has already announced that they will do nothing with the desktop BeOS operating system. This GPL violation is a perfect chance to scuttle the ship, so to speak. Be Inc is no longer involved. Nobody is left onboard except the enemy, who bought the ship for a pittance and now plans to scrap it. The remaining crew is standing on the shoreline, wishing they could have salvaged some parts themselves. This GPL violation is the perfect opportunity to torpedo Palm's new floating wreck and get some of the goods ourselves.
Read the GPL. Section 2, paragraph b.
oops, make that "shutdown".
The problem is,
/boot/beos/system/Bootscript
/boot/beos/system/Netscript
/boot/beos/system/SetupEnviromnet
/boot/beos/system/ShutdownScript
/boot/beos/system/ShutdownFinishScript
etc...
all depend on bash.
Unless someone was to rewrite them in such a way that you could use a non-GPLed alternative like ksh or ash or something, the operating system *depends* on GNU softwar.
Here's a simple demonstration:
$ rm /bin/sh
$ shudown -r now
Once you can do that, I'll gladly continue this discussion
Okay...
Yes, teh Krat is a slashdotter. Ph33r!
I rarely do more than just glance at the headlines these days, though.