OK, now that I think about it, it's closer than millions. The two spacecraft were only drifting apart for a month or two.
Nevertheless, there was very limited battery power on the probe, so you're picking up a low-powered omnidirectional signal from many thousands of miles away, like a glorified walkie-talkie. Even if nobody else is using the same frequencies in that neighborhood, there's a certain background noise dictated by thermodynamics. Information theory gives a well-defined mathematical formula that dictates how many bits per second you can transmit for any given distance, transmitter power level, background noise level and antenna geometry.
This is a mature field that has been studied for over 50 years now; the speed limitations are dictated by the quantum mechanical properties of radio photons. I doubt that there are any breakthroughs that would let them send data at a vastly higher rate given the design constraints of the probe.
Thank you. Although I am now amazed that at the end of the 20th century, this would be the best transmission technology NASA could come up with.
Yes, if you only have a few watts of power and you're swinging from a parachute so you can't point a directional antenna, basic physics says that you can only transmit at a few kilobaud to a receiver millions of miles away.
XML is mostly about transmission over the wire - an inherently sequential operation.
Maybe if non-sequential operations were made more efficient, it would open up more applications than just transmission.
At any rate, if what you claim were totally true, then nobody would be complaining about performance in the first place since transmission is slower than CPUs and gzip is trivial to apply to the stream.
Compression solves the data size problem, but not the random access problem. XML is a tree structure, so in theory it should often be an O(log n) operation to access a random piece of data in the file. However, since it's stored as a text stream that must be linearly parsed from the start of the document, it's usually an O(n) operation to get something out of XML. You can load the whole document into a DOM tree to amortize the one O(n) over many accesses, but then you typically consume even more memory than the original XML document.
An efficient binary format could simultaneously provide compact storage and fast random access.
Talk to Courtney Love, or any one of the beneficiaries of a famous artist about what happens after the artist dies.
You're saying that collecting a metric assload of capital from the general public, converting most of it to illegal drugs, snorting it, randomly attacking people, then spending the rest on high-priced attorneys it is a good thing?
NASA really has something to learn about broadcasting.
It's better than it used to be. I remember watching live moon landing coverage when I was a kid. It was comprised largely of long stretches of fuzzy black-and-white blurs, static, radio beeps and barley decipherable garbled voices. All of that did give the coverage a cool alien feel, though.
An original Beetle, or a Super Beetle? Or even a new water-cooled "New Beetle"?
After NASA's previous troubles with imperial measurements, I'm glad to see that they're moving to standard pop-scientific units. The standard unit of volume is based on the Super Beetle, since that was the current model when this benchmark first came into widespread use.
BTW, the standard Beetle has recently been redefined in terms of human hair; it is now defined as exactly 1.374569443*10^14 cubic human hair widths. The length of a football field and the distance from New York to San Francisco have similarly been redefined as hair multiples. These recent harmonizations will help bring a new consistency to science news stories across all media outlets.
doesn't the probe have an RTG or some power source other than a battery? It's a shame to have come all this way with only a very short operating life for the probe.
Once it leaves the insulating vacuum of space and settles into the -300F atmosphere of Titan (almost as cold as liquid nitrogen), the probe is going to freeze solid in short order. It would probably be hard to include an RTG with enough juice to keep it warm on Titan without it overheating the probe on the 7-year trip.
As another poster put it, there is no expectation of privacy regarding your location as your driving along the road.
What about when my car is not on the road? If I've driven it into a garage on private property, now I have an expectation of privacy, and the government monitoring this gadget without a warrant is a violation of the US constitution.
Could it be possible that they are already black holes that we are able to see only because we are already within the event horizon of the stars' gravitational pulls?
My SuSE system has 300 megabytes of information in over 26000 files '/usr/share/doc', and 34 additional gzipped megabytes in 7000 man pages. Most of what you need is probably already there. What is really lacking is an overall unified index.
If you go down to the computer section of any bookstore, you'll see that OSS software has no monopoly on big fat books either.
For example, if you are gaming and burning a DVD at the same time, dual core chips will come in handy and will definitely give a smooth computing experience.
I doubt it. Today's personal computers are already like those 60s muscle cars from Detroit (a 400 horsepower engine bolted into a car with narrow bias-ply tires, drum brakes and a solid axle).
I was burning DVDs a couple of days ago. The system was mildly sluggish. The CPU meter was pegged at about 2% usage. Then I ran an md5sum to verify the whole disk, and the system ground to a crawl. The CPU meter indicated about 10% load. In both cases the sluggishness was caused entirely by I/O latency and/or all of the working set being flushed out of memory to make room for disk buffering. Dual-cores aren't going to do anything for that.
First, the things we build can barely last a few decades without being destroyed by something as simple as weather.
That's just because NASA failed to order the correct equipment for the mission. These Saturn Vs are the standard spaceflight edition made out of flimsy aluminum sheets.
For archival applications, they really should have ordered the special National Monument Edition Saturn V model. These are constructed entirely out of inch-thick solid bronze, and are designed to withstand centuries of exposure to the elements.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that one reason CRT glass contains lead is to shield against X-rays. If so, wouldn't that be independent of optical quality?
The lead in solder accounts for a very, VERY tiny percentage of the lead we use and dispose of.
It seems to me that the whole lead issue is addressed very erratically. The solder in a circuit board is a huge problem, but anybody can go down to Wal-Mart and buy a tin of airgun pellets containing about a 1/4 pound of pure lead and spray it all over their back yard. Lead encased in computer monitor glass is a huge crisis, but nobody talks much about 36-inch TV tubes, and if you shop for wine glasses some of them brag about the the fact that they contain 24% lead.
It seems to me that all the focus goes on new types of products, while many old products that use lead are ignored.
Remember when 9600 baud was close to the limit of copper?
That was never the limit of copper. It was the limit of voiceband phone lines, which have artificially constrained bandwidth. Since voiceband is now transmitted digitally at 64Kbs, that's the hard theoretical limit, and 56K analog modems are already asymptotically close to that.
If you hook different equipment to the phone wires without the self-imposed bandwidth filters, then it's easy to get higher bandwidth. Ethernet and its predecessors has been pushing megabits or more over twisted pair for decades.
Private citizens are too well armed (legally) and too, for lack of a better term, righteous. If we were to have car bombs and suicide bombings start, you would see every rifle rack in a every pickup full.
How is a firearm supposed to deter a suicide bomber, especially considering that most of the time they do sneak attacks? What the hell do you think you're going to shoot at? Shredded chunks of flesh on the sidewalk?
Re:Americans have brought much of this on ourselve
on
Business Under Fire
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· Score: 1
With retirement accounts it is possible to come out much richer than one would get with SS.
It's also possible to come out with zilch. If your mother-in-law is bad with money (and whose isn't?), she just might end up having to move in with you. Nobody wants to risk that, and that's why Social Security isn't going away any time soon.
The "shuttle replacement" studies continue the tradition of trying to advance rocket tech, not keep it stagnant.
That's exactly what's wrong with it.
In fact, NASA has always been a research-oriented institution.
That's fine. What they should do then is separate their rocket research from their other operational areas. There's no reason to have all of their manned operations dependent on risky unproven and chronically late bleeding-edge technology.
Personally, however, I want to see costs drop, and that involves pushing the envelope.
The only evelope that they need to be pushing is not technical. We already have the technology to go into space at a fraction of current costs without the need for more blue-sky inventions. The envelope to be pushed is operational efficiency. They have never really been able to achieve this outside of a few short years in their glory days. Getting a large bureaucratic organization to run a smooth, predictable streamlined space operation under budget with no surprises would be a truly groundbreaking achievement for manned space operations. Buck Rodgers gadgets can wait until after that day.
It's not overdesign to try and make the sort of rockets they've been working on; "bells and whistles" haven't kept them on the ground, but running up to materials and technology barriers that they tried to pass but were unable to at the time.
They shouldn't be running into materials and technology barriers! Like I originally said, they need to develop a new, reliable, low-cost low-performance rocket! After they get that running smoothly and cheaply like an airline, then they can go onto gee-whiz schemes. The space vehicles are supposed to be a means to an end, not and end in themselves.
I strongly support them in not wanting to be a "rocket launch company", but instead a research organization that tries to advance rocket tech.
If they have a bunch of space missions to run, but they think it's too "boring" to develop a simple cost-effective launch system, then they *should* outsource the bulk of the launches to someone who is willing to do it. As it stands, by sending all of their manned missions on their 31337 designs, they've poured countless $billions of our tax dollars into a pointless black hole.
Still, Gemini was hardly an example of cost efficiency.
It seems to me that that was mostly because they launched them on Titan-IIs, which was among the most pricey of the US rocket families. It was designed to be a high-performance ICBM that could be deployed in a compact silo for decades, not a low-cost space launcher.
A modern-day capsule could of course be reusable, so that wouldn't be a big factor in the cost. The key to lowering cost would be to develop a simple, cheap, reliable, low-performance rocket to put the capsule on. Unfortunately, NASA doesn't seem to be capable of grasping anything remotely similar to that idea.
They continue to do studies for "shuttle replacements" that will take many more years than it did to pioneer spaceflight in the first place. I've got a suggestion: buy a couple of good rocket motors; they're commercially available today off-the-shelf. Add fuel tanks, a simple capsule, and an *escape tower* (they seem to have forgotten that bit last time). Bolt them together, and leave out the bells and whistles. Don't overdesign the damned thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Sheesh... you would think that they could have at least Googled for the correct spelling.
Nevertheless, there was very limited battery power on the probe, so you're picking up a low-powered omnidirectional signal from many thousands of miles away, like a glorified walkie-talkie. Even if nobody else is using the same frequencies in that neighborhood, there's a certain background noise dictated by thermodynamics. Information theory gives a well-defined mathematical formula that dictates how many bits per second you can transmit for any given distance, transmitter power level, background noise level and antenna geometry.
This is a mature field that has been studied for over 50 years now; the speed limitations are dictated by the quantum mechanical properties of radio photons. I doubt that there are any breakthroughs that would let them send data at a vastly higher rate given the design constraints of the probe.
Yes, if you only have a few watts of power and you're swinging from a parachute so you can't point a directional antenna, basic physics says that you can only transmit at a few kilobaud to a receiver millions of miles away.
Not the particular highly radioactive plutonium *isotope* used in RTGs.
Another example: iodine is actually good for you, unless it's the radioactive isotope that is produced by nuclear fission. Then it's very bad.
Maybe if non-sequential operations were made more efficient, it would open up more applications than just transmission.
At any rate, if what you claim were totally true, then nobody would be complaining about performance in the first place since transmission is slower than CPUs and gzip is trivial to apply to the stream.
An efficient binary format could simultaneously provide compact storage and fast random access.
You're saying that collecting a metric assload of capital from the general public, converting most of it to illegal drugs, snorting it, randomly attacking people, then spending the rest on high-priced attorneys it is a good thing?
It's better than it used to be. I remember watching live moon landing coverage when I was a kid. It was comprised largely of long stretches of fuzzy black-and-white blurs, static, radio beeps and barley decipherable garbled voices. All of that did give the coverage a cool alien feel, though.
After NASA's previous troubles with imperial measurements, I'm glad to see that they're moving to standard pop-scientific units. The standard unit of volume is based on the Super Beetle, since that was the current model when this benchmark first came into widespread use.
BTW, the standard Beetle has recently been redefined in terms of human hair; it is now defined as exactly 1.374569443*10^14 cubic human hair widths. The length of a football field and the distance from New York to San Francisco have similarly been redefined as hair multiples. These recent harmonizations will help bring a new consistency to science news stories across all media outlets.
Once it leaves the insulating vacuum of space and settles into the -300F atmosphere of Titan (almost as cold as liquid nitrogen), the probe is going to freeze solid in short order. It would probably be hard to include an RTG with enough juice to keep it warm on Titan without it overheating the probe on the 7-year trip.
What about when my car is not on the road? If I've driven it into a garage on private property, now I have an expectation of privacy, and the government monitoring this gadget without a warrant is a violation of the US constitution.
Yeah, then we could resume vital activities like looking after zero-G ant farms.
Let me guess... it will be called the "HO-Gage".
No.
If you go down to the computer section of any bookstore, you'll see that OSS software has no monopoly on big fat books either.
I doubt it. Today's personal computers are already like those 60s muscle cars from Detroit (a 400 horsepower engine bolted into a car with narrow bias-ply tires, drum brakes and a solid axle).
I was burning DVDs a couple of days ago. The system was mildly sluggish. The CPU meter was pegged at about 2% usage. Then I ran an md5sum to verify the whole disk, and the system ground to a crawl. The CPU meter indicated about 10% load. In both cases the sluggishness was caused entirely by I/O latency and/or all of the working set being flushed out of memory to make room for disk buffering. Dual-cores aren't going to do anything for that.
That's just because NASA failed to order the correct equipment for the mission. These Saturn Vs are the standard spaceflight edition made out of flimsy aluminum sheets.
For archival applications, they really should have ordered the special National Monument Edition Saturn V model. These are constructed entirely out of inch-thick solid bronze, and are designed to withstand centuries of exposure to the elements.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that one reason CRT glass contains lead is to shield against X-rays. If so, wouldn't that be independent of optical quality?
It seems to me that the whole lead issue is addressed very erratically. The solder in a circuit board is a huge problem, but anybody can go down to Wal-Mart and buy a tin of airgun pellets containing about a 1/4 pound of pure lead and spray it all over their back yard. Lead encased in computer monitor glass is a huge crisis, but nobody talks much about 36-inch TV tubes, and if you shop for wine glasses some of them brag about the the fact that they contain 24% lead.
It seems to me that all the focus goes on new types of products, while many old products that use lead are ignored.
You'd have to give the award to the users who don't bother to switch, not the OS. I've been using Linux as a desktop for years.
That was never the limit of copper. It was the limit of voiceband phone lines, which have artificially constrained bandwidth. Since voiceband is now transmitted digitally at 64Kbs, that's the hard theoretical limit, and 56K analog modems are already asymptotically close to that.
If you hook different equipment to the phone wires without the self-imposed bandwidth filters, then it's easy to get higher bandwidth. Ethernet and its predecessors has been pushing megabits or more over twisted pair for decades.
How is a firearm supposed to deter a suicide bomber, especially considering that most of the time they do sneak attacks? What the hell do you think you're going to shoot at? Shredded chunks of flesh on the sidewalk?
It's also possible to come out with zilch. If your mother-in-law is bad with money (and whose isn't?), she just might end up having to move in with you. Nobody wants to risk that, and that's why Social Security isn't going away any time soon.
That's exactly what's wrong with it.
In fact, NASA has always been a research-oriented institution.
That's fine. What they should do then is separate their rocket research from their other operational areas. There's no reason to have all of their manned operations dependent on risky unproven and chronically late bleeding-edge technology.
Personally, however, I want to see costs drop, and that involves pushing the envelope.
The only evelope that they need to be pushing is not technical. We already have the technology to go into space at a fraction of current costs without the need for more blue-sky inventions. The envelope to be pushed is operational efficiency. They have never really been able to achieve this outside of a few short years in their glory days. Getting a large bureaucratic organization to run a smooth, predictable streamlined space operation under budget with no surprises would be a truly groundbreaking achievement for manned space operations. Buck Rodgers gadgets can wait until after that day.
It's not overdesign to try and make the sort of rockets they've been working on; "bells and whistles" haven't kept them on the ground, but running up to materials and technology barriers that they tried to pass but were unable to at the time.
They shouldn't be running into materials and technology barriers! Like I originally said, they need to develop a new, reliable, low-cost low-performance rocket! After they get that running smoothly and cheaply like an airline, then they can go onto gee-whiz schemes. The space vehicles are supposed to be a means to an end, not and end in themselves.
I strongly support them in not wanting to be a "rocket launch company", but instead a research organization that tries to advance rocket tech.
If they have a bunch of space missions to run, but they think it's too "boring" to develop a simple cost-effective launch system, then they *should* outsource the bulk of the launches to someone who is willing to do it. As it stands, by sending all of their manned missions on their 31337 designs, they've poured countless $billions of our tax dollars into a pointless black hole.
It seems to me that that was mostly because they launched them on Titan-IIs, which was among the most pricey of the US rocket families. It was designed to be a high-performance ICBM that could be deployed in a compact silo for decades, not a low-cost space launcher.
A modern-day capsule could of course be reusable, so that wouldn't be a big factor in the cost. The key to lowering cost would be to develop a simple, cheap, reliable, low-performance rocket to put the capsule on. Unfortunately, NASA doesn't seem to be capable of grasping anything remotely similar to that idea.
They continue to do studies for "shuttle replacements" that will take many more years than it did to pioneer spaceflight in the first place. I've got a suggestion: buy a couple of good rocket motors; they're commercially available today off-the-shelf. Add fuel tanks, a simple capsule, and an *escape tower* (they seem to have forgotten that bit last time). Bolt them together, and leave out the bells and whistles. Don't overdesign the damned thing.