Not once did I see something that made me want to watch it for more than maybe 30 minutes, and nothing made me want to see it again the next day or week.
And it's not gone anyway, just monopoly-restructured into its competitor.
What do you mean what happened?
on
The 3Com Saga
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· Score: 1
They spun off their profitable product lines (Palm, i.e.) thus eliminating money that would have kept them afloat.
Old CEO trick. If you find something good, don't share it with the f'ing shareholders, for chrissakes.
Nixon ordered troop reductions. And escalated the bombing campaign. And then lost the war. Something Ike, Kennedy, and Johnson hadn't even come close to doing.
Look at the color picture with "Le Larzac" on the right side.
Looks more like a canyon wall than a valley. You need at least some reasonable slope on either extreme of an S-curve to make the turn. And if they'd just gone over a ways and done a single grade along the wall, it would have had to deal with those deep side-canyons and the jutting butte in the middle, probably leading to tunnels or rabbets.
At that point, they realize they might have to cantilever straight out from that wall. And once they're out into space, they're hanging over yet another drop to the river. So there's nowhere to go but across to the other side.
Or maybe Wile E. Coyote was on the design team and impressed them with the wisdom of always having something under you if you reach the edge of a precipice.
It doesn't matter that Britney Spears has nothing to say and is about as deep as a birdbath. It matters that she has cute tits, and that's all that matters. -David Crosby
It's not the sentiment. He's absolutely correct about that.
He's also dead-on about Britney's meaning to the universe.
But he's wrong about her body. She's a pudgy skank with sagging triangular knobs who wouldn't make a dollar ever again if she showed those things outside of a pre-stressed support device.
Which wouldn't be an issue if, as he got absolutely correct, she were deeper than a cumshot.
No, the only physical obstacle is how are you going to keep it up when a payload starts climbing it?
The thing can't support a shearing load, and gaining orbital velocity requires transverse acceleration (ask a rocket scientist which direction you fire your main thrusters to increase and decrease altitude outside the atmosphere; hint: it's not perpendicular to the surface of the planet you're orbiting).
Frankly, the energy budget should tell you that every time you raise a payload, you'll have to use that much thrust at the distal end to realign the fiber to a radial orientation. And guess how much energy that will take. Uh-huh.
Functions aren't a problem. They have a strict syntax. MACROS are the fucking problem.
Macros that evaluate to include directives that include executable code are the particular problem I'm dealing with right now. No debugger I've tried can browse into that code until I cut and paste it over the offending macro. Which kind of defeats the purpose, dunnit?
The things some people (myself at one time) consider "clever" are how other people get hurt.
And remember how the PowerPC used to be the champion of RISC? Eh, not so much no more. 150 defined mnemonics for conditional branch instructions. The Eskimos don't have that many words for "snow".
We need a way to lay down a trail of popcorn when these weasels are dragging us down these ratholes.
Actually, the government curtailed activity at Groom Lake because the Cold War was over and we weren't spending money to refurbish a Cold-War facility unless we needed one, and certainly not one that wasn't much of a secret any more.
P.S. As for the "maps and photos" people are googling up, well, l-o-l, but the DoD knows how to make a deal with anyone in the satellite geometrology biz to crock the data for certain coordinates to alter or erase things. I personally know of two other actual places where you can walk up to the fence and see the vast array of constructed objects of clearly governmental design that have (a) never shown up on a map on paper or electronically and, (b) don't show up on any satellite photo, either. Neither facility is likely to be a total secret, given the light perimeter security (one has a public highway splitting it in two), but they're clearly not advertising them for obviosly good reason (so I won't, either). Now Area 51 is a good distraction. Keep the nutbars chasing what they can "uncover with enough effort" and away from active facilities.
When you pluck a guitar string, do you stretch your fingers from capo to bridge? Or is your pick just a tiny sliver compared to its full length? The latter, I think. Which should open your mind a little. Here's what to allow into it:
The wind at the bottom will act more like a violin bow, and the harmonics of the primary mode of vibration (i.e., all the multiples of f=1/(7*3600) cycles/second) will be induced into the cable in the stable state.
These vibrations won't be simply transverse, but helical as well (take a long jump rope tied to a doorknob and swing the free end in circles about the rope's axis)
And, if the cable is a ribbon, it will develop torsional vibrations (twisting waves).
Induced oscillations would be a major worry, and unavoidable given an unavoidable and underestimated source of mechanical input in the atmosphere.
I wish ignorant people would stop calling me ignorant.
It will be stable in position as long as its position is stable. I.e., its stability is bounded, and beyond those bounds, it's a horror. One good storm and the whole thing will start vibrating and bowing. With a blimp, if the weather is lousy today, you hang out until tomorrow. With the blimp-system transfer platform, you don't fight the wind, you ride along with it.
Second, what is the initial velocity of a wire under tension that suddenly breaks in the middle? Now add that every portion of the ribbon nearer the Earth pulls down on the portion above it as it's falling. The broken end will be moving well over the speed of sound as it whips to the ground. I'm not afraid of a bit of colored christmas wrapping, but this super-tough "thin ribbon of carbon nanotube fibers" will become a giant knife.
Further, any small nick in the cable will require the whole system to shut down for repair to avoid exactly this sort of accident. You can forget about finding anyone to insure the thing.
Third, "No competent professional has ever said such a thing."
Well, now one has. I make (some of) my money validating software to DO-178B standards so that it can be used as an integral part of the airframe control system. If no other "competent professional" has ever said that, then it's probably because they all thought that such a ludicrous idea as a space elevator would never get to where their professional opinions might be needed. They hadn't met someone who needed it as badly as you do, apparently. This one is complimentary (in the pricing sense alone).
And, just to put the whole explosive device to your crackpot argument, if the terminal velocity of the ribbon is so inconsequential, then how is it that "most of it, falling down, will burn up in the upper atmosphere?" I presume you think the only failure mode is if it comes free of its Earth-bound, er, binding. Well, in that case, the distal end will pull the ribbon up and away from the planet, not down. It will likewise gain a speed on the order of hundreds if not thousands of miles per hour, which it will retain, spinning in orbit a few hundred miles over our heads, occasionally whipping its free end about for the amusement of astronomers, if they can see it, and NORAD, if they can... But that is not the only failure mode, and it is not the ugliest one, by far.
So before you consider a space elevator an economical means of boosting payloads to LEO, add in the liability-insurance premiums (and payouts), and subtract the value of having a 400-mile-long piece of snarled fishing line wobbling around in our launch windows.
The problem is, you have to keep it up and stable. Major danger given the forces involved. And when it fails, it's a total catastrophe.
This blimps-to-space thing reduces almost all the safety problems to "is the weather nice?" and removes the need for stringent stability. It can bob with the weather and you just push it back into place, or not.
And if it fails, you've got a mess of ultralight microfabric fluttering to earth, not a 400-mile cable that doesn't stop falling and slashing everything near it for several hours.
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I want my idiot neighbor with the yappy little mop-dog and the ungreased pool pump suing me for outage time.
Cringely's schemes always miss one critical fact: people don't get along that well unless they're already separated by miles.
I saw TechTV about 10 times in the past N years.
Not once did I see something that made me want to watch it for more than maybe 30 minutes, and nothing made me want to see it again the next day or week.
And it's not gone anyway, just monopoly-restructured into its competitor.
They spun off their profitable product lines (Palm, i.e.) thus eliminating money that would have kept them afloat.
Old CEO trick. If you find something good, don't share it with the f'ing shareholders, for chrissakes.
Same thing happened to Netgear.
Nixon ordered troop reductions. And escalated the bombing campaign. And then lost the war. Something Ike, Kennedy, and Johnson hadn't even come close to doing.
Give the job back to Jon Postel.
Improve efficiency immeasurably.
Just guessing:
Look at the color picture with "Le Larzac" on the right side.
Looks more like a canyon wall than a valley. You need at least some reasonable slope on either extreme of an S-curve to make the turn. And if they'd just gone over a ways and done a single grade along the wall, it would have had to deal with those deep side-canyons and the jutting butte in the middle, probably leading to tunnels or rabbets.
At that point, they realize they might have to cantilever straight out from that wall. And once they're out into space, they're hanging over yet another drop to the river. So there's nowhere to go but across to the other side.
Or maybe Wile E. Coyote was on the design team and impressed them with the wisdom of always having something under you if you reach the edge of a precipice.
Major writeup of the project:
http://www.a75.com/viaducengl.html
Quick quiz.
What's wrong with this statement?
It doesn't matter that Britney Spears has nothing to say and is about as deep as a birdbath. It matters that she has cute tits, and that's all that matters.
-David Crosby
It's not the sentiment. He's absolutely correct about that.
He's also dead-on about Britney's meaning to the universe.
But he's wrong about her body. She's a pudgy skank with sagging triangular knobs who wouldn't make a dollar ever again if she showed those things outside of a pre-stressed support device.
Which wouldn't be an issue if, as he got absolutely correct, she were deeper than a cumshot.
No, the only physical obstacle is how are you going to keep it up when a payload starts climbing it?
The thing can't support a shearing load, and gaining orbital velocity requires transverse acceleration (ask a rocket scientist which direction you fire your main thrusters to increase and decrease altitude outside the atmosphere; hint: it's not perpendicular to the surface of the planet you're orbiting).
Frankly, the energy budget should tell you that every time you raise a payload, you'll have to use that much thrust at the distal end to realign the fiber to a radial orientation. And guess how much energy that will take. Uh-huh.
The laws of thermodynamics are a bitch.
Something occurs to me, and I feel like a total idiot for not realizing it sooner.
There is no geostationary orbit in LEO. The free end will have to be out somewhere past 20,000 miles...
If anyone has a link to a proof of any mechanically stable position for this nonsense, I'd like to see it.
Functions aren't a problem. They have a strict syntax. MACROS are the fucking problem.
Macros that evaluate to include directives that include executable code are the particular problem I'm dealing with right now. No debugger I've tried can browse into that code until I cut and paste it over the offending macro. Which kind of defeats the purpose, dunnit?
The things some people (myself at one time) consider "clever" are how other people get hurt.
And remember how the PowerPC used to be the champion of RISC? Eh, not so much no more. 150 defined mnemonics for conditional branch instructions. The Eskimos don't have that many words for "snow".
We need a way to lay down a trail of popcorn when these weasels are dragging us down these ratholes.
It's already been done.
The History Channel is actually a video game with one control method:
Watch it and learn; or,
Change the channel.
How about developing Maintainable programming?
It's going to be fun looking up houses 50 years from now and still seing "FUCK BUSH" posters in the windows.
Actually, the government curtailed activity at Groom Lake because the Cold War was over and we weren't spending money to refurbish a Cold-War facility unless we needed one, and certainly not one that wasn't much of a secret any more.
P.S. As for the "maps and photos" people are googling up, well, l-o-l, but the DoD knows how to make a deal with anyone in the satellite geometrology biz to crock the data for certain coordinates to alter or erase things. I personally know of two other actual places where you can walk up to the fence and see the vast array of constructed objects of clearly governmental design that have (a) never shown up on a map on paper or electronically and, (b) don't show up on any satellite photo, either. Neither facility is likely to be a total secret, given the light perimeter security (one has a public highway splitting it in two), but they're clearly not advertising them for obviosly good reason (so I won't, either). Now Area 51 is a good distraction. Keep the nutbars chasing what they can "uncover with enough effort" and away from active facilities.
When you pluck a guitar string, do you stretch your fingers from capo to bridge? Or is your pick just a tiny sliver compared to its full length? The latter, I think. Which should open your mind a little. Here's what to allow into it:
The wind at the bottom will act more like a violin bow, and the harmonics of the primary mode of vibration (i.e., all the multiples of f=1/(7*3600) cycles/second) will be induced into the cable in the stable state.
These vibrations won't be simply transverse, but helical as well (take a long jump rope tied to a doorknob and swing the free end in circles about the rope's axis)
And, if the cable is a ribbon, it will develop torsional vibrations (twisting waves).
Induced oscillations would be a major worry, and unavoidable given an unavoidable and underestimated source of mechanical input in the atmosphere.
I wish ignorant people would stop calling me ignorant.
It will be stable in position as long as its position is stable. I.e., its stability is bounded, and beyond those bounds, it's a horror. One good storm and the whole thing will start vibrating and bowing. With a blimp, if the weather is lousy today, you hang out until tomorrow. With the blimp-system transfer platform, you don't fight the wind, you ride along with it.
Second, what is the initial velocity of a wire under tension that suddenly breaks in the middle? Now add that every portion of the ribbon nearer the Earth pulls down on the portion above it as it's falling. The broken end will be moving well over the speed of sound as it whips to the ground. I'm not afraid of a bit of colored christmas wrapping, but this super-tough "thin ribbon of carbon nanotube fibers" will become a giant knife.
Further, any small nick in the cable will require the whole system to shut down for repair to avoid exactly this sort of accident. You can forget about finding anyone to insure the thing.
Third, "No competent professional has ever said such a thing."
Well, now one has. I make (some of) my money validating software to DO-178B standards so that it can be used as an integral part of the airframe control system. If no other "competent professional" has ever said that, then it's probably because they all thought that such a ludicrous idea as a space elevator would never get to where their professional opinions might be needed. They hadn't met someone who needed it as badly as you do, apparently. This one is complimentary (in the pricing sense alone).
And, just to put the whole explosive device to your crackpot argument, if the terminal velocity of the ribbon is so inconsequential, then how is it that "most of it, falling down, will burn up in the upper atmosphere?" I presume you think the only failure mode is if it comes free of its Earth-bound, er, binding. Well, in that case, the distal end will pull the ribbon up and away from the planet, not down. It will likewise gain a speed on the order of hundreds if not thousands of miles per hour, which it will retain, spinning in orbit a few hundred miles over our heads, occasionally whipping its free end about for the amusement of astronomers, if they can see it, and NORAD, if they can... But that is not the only failure mode, and it is not the ugliest one, by far.
So before you consider a space elevator an economical means of boosting payloads to LEO, add in the liability-insurance premiums (and payouts), and subtract the value of having a 400-mile-long piece of snarled fishing line wobbling around in our launch windows.
What does a 10-thousand-square-mile organism eat to make all this oil? And where would we grow that?
Uh, there are about 10 million people living in the Sonoran Desert.
Space Elevators == folly.
The problem is, you have to keep it up and stable. Major danger given the forces involved. And when it fails, it's a total catastrophe.
This blimps-to-space thing reduces almost all the safety problems to "is the weather nice?" and removes the need for stringent stability. It can bob with the weather and you just push it back into place, or not.
And if it fails, you've got a mess of ultralight microfabric fluttering to earth, not a 400-mile cable that doesn't stop falling and slashing everything near it for several hours.
I vote blimps.
If you see a blue soldier, he is playing in God mode.
This slashdot thing.
It gets the news out in the blink of an eye.
An eye a light-day high...
No, the fact is, Mr. W claimed he had proof that there were WMD in Iraq. And he claimed it many times.
It was clear he had no proof at all, and was hoping that finding something during the illegal search would justify it.
It doesn't justify it when the cops are busting a meth lab, and it won't justify it when Bush is angling for approval.
Nothing like a couple of years playing Medal of Honor: Allied Assault to make you hate cheaters.
These errors and management lapses are unconscionable.
The European aerospace industry is still 40 years behind America's.