Do you know how much most rocket designers would love to have the level of tolerance that would allow them to build out of *STEEL*?
IIRC, the original Atlas boosters were built out of stainless steel. The trick was that they were built like a soda can out of extremely thin stock. They would crumple under their own weight if internal gas pressure wasn't maintained in the fuel tanks.
I would hope they would make it come down to that temperature, I don't know of any kind of insulation that would actually do that.
It shouldn't be all that hard since in space thermal control based almost solely on radiant energy. Even though the side facing the sun will get very hot, the side facing away from the sun is exposed to empty space with a temperature near absolute zero. If you simply reflect most of the sunlight away on the hot side, slow down what gets absorbed with a little insulation, and arrange to radiate what does get through the insulation (along with any internally generated heat) on the cold side, you should be able to maintain a reasonable temperature.
From what I've read, one of the hardest parts about controlling temperature on this probe is to handle the times when it passes in front of Mercury. Then, the near-zero chill on the "cold" side is temporarily replaced with the radiant heat from the > 400 C surface of the planet. At these times the probe has to be closed up like an ice chest to maintain its internal temperature at reasonable levels until it gets away from the planet.
We don't compare the Hanford site to coal-fired plants because the main use of this facility was to produce nuclear weapons materials, not electrical power generation.
I think dual-mode vehicles make sense, but on an individual scale rather than for buses or trains. If you imagine a kind of scaled-up hotwheels track, fill it with smallish electric vehicles, then add centralized computer control, you could get a transportation system that has the best of both worlds: individual trip scheduling like cars, but avoiding the huge waste of time of having to control the car yourself. This could free up time to write public works pipe-dream posts on/. while you commute to work.
The cars could have smallish batteries that allow for short range driving under human control off of the tracks to/from your final destination (they would recharge from the grid and would run under fully automatic control while on the tracks). In urban settings, you might always be less than 1 mile from the nearest track on-ramp, so range wouldn't be a issue. For long drives in the boondocks, a small trailer or module with a gasoline or diesel engine could be attached to create a hybrid vehicle.
People would punch in their destination at the start of the trip, and the central control system would schedule the entire trip ahead of time, thus avoiding all traffic jams (barring software bugs). If the system lacks the capacity to instantly add the trip, it could make a reservation and tell the rider to chill out and get something done before starting; this would be much better than sitting in traffic.
What if you need to haul cargo? You might check out a virtual trailer at the lumber yard that's programmed to follow a few feet behind your vehicle. Unload it, guide it back to the on-ramp, and then it automatically returns to the store. Or, if you move a lot of stuff, you could buy your own trailer(s); you could make a whole train if you want.
The vast majority of standard truck and train cargo is comprised of packages small enough to fit in these smallish vehicles. Large numbers of them could automatically move most cargo around the country when traffic is otherwise low. This could save a lot of money on labor, but current truckers would not be pleased.
Of course, the Denver airport baggage handling system fiasco demonstrates just how hard something like this would be to implement. However, I think that it's still worth thinking about ways to improve over our current choices of wasteful overpowered, oversized automobiles and inconvenient slow public transportation (which is also wasteful because of its low average load factor).
What if you really just like to drive? I think that the freed-up Interstates could be reallocated as amusement parks. Remove all speed limits and rent out Ferraris and Porches for high-speed joy riding.
I have always had to install M$ fonts or run the webfonts.sh script to get decent fonts. This is shameful!
Why is it shameful? Microsoft donated their fonts to the world at large just like OSS developers have donated their work. (...even if they now wish they hadn't and have stopped distributing the fonts themselves. However, the cat is out of the bag.) There is no problem if you take advantage of their largess. From the font EULA:
Installation and Use. You may install and use an unlimited number of copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT. Reproduction and Distribution. You may reproduce and distribute an unlimited number of copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT; provided that each copy shall be a true and complete copy, including all copyright and trademark notices, and shall be accompanied by a copy of this EULA. Copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT may not be distributed for profit either on a standalone basis or included as part of your own product.
You have to go through a small extra step to comply with their not-for-profit condition, but many distros have totally automated that. I always set my systems to use Verdana by default. It's unequaled for comfortably reading text on a computer monitor.
Its as if Colombus had come back to Spain and been told "hey, nice that you found a new continent and everything, but we'd rather sit here with our thumbs up our asses than spend the money to go there".
That actually might have been a better choice for Spain. As it was, in the first couple of decades they focused on hauling back as much of the New World's plentiful gold as possible. Instead of making Spain fantastically wealthy, the new glut of gold caused a crash in its value in the Old World, which was a major hit on Spain's economy.
It took many decades, even centuries, before the European contries derived truly profitable proceeds from colonization and trade in the New World.
One of the main reasons that we built so many nukes is that they are actually very cheap compared to conventional forces of similar capacity. This especially applies to the defensive posture. We don't need to pay for large expensive standing armies stationed in the U.S. to fend off possible invasions because we could simply nuke an invading country instead. Similarly, Russia has been able to remain a major world power even as it went through a nearly total collapse of its economy because they were able to maintain their nukes with what money they had.
If all nukes magically disappeared one day, world military spending would almost certainly dramatically increase as nations rushed to build up their conventional defensive forces.
One menu item was rejected in field tests...
on
Just Add, Umm, Water
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· Score: 1
This is a version we think is close to done, but KNOW isn't. It's close to final.
Then why do they call it "Release Candidate"? That implies that it is a candidate for release: they feel that this exact build should be bug-free enough to go gold unless they find some new show-stopping bugs.
If they KNOW it isn't final, then by definition it can't be a candidate for final release.
So what models of licensing do you WANT that will keep the vendor and the buyer in business and happy?
Why not have your software measure how much real work it's doing. If over time it exceeds the amount of processing that the user paid for, then it starts to throttle itself back. That would be a lot more accurate than going with a crude measure like "number of CPUs" anyway.
Adding the F* word at every place possible does not make for "funny" prose. It simply means that someone has too small of a vocabulary to say anything enlightening or truly amusing.
That's exactly why the Onion article is so funny. They present the astronauts and ground controllers as that type of person. The humor results from the jarring contrast between The Onion's version and the actual cool-headed transcripts that we've heard replayed hundreds of times.
This dishonest crap of changing one letter in a name, or naming it something very similar, or making the logo similar, has been going on for far too long; long before commerical computer programs.
That's why we have the USPTO to sort things out.
Whether you like it or not, whether its trademarkable or not, people associate 'Windows' with Microsoft Windows.
It doesn't matter whether you or I like it. The only thing that matters is if it's trademarkable or not. If it's not, then Microsoft should have picked a better name, and any confusion is due to them picking a lousy term for a trademark attempt. Lindows can't infringe on a trademark if the trademark isn't valid. End of story.
(It looks like microsoft agrees with me and decided to punt rather than having this definitively proved in court.)
Solaris scales to hundreds of processors out-of-the-box. Until the vanilla Linux kernel accepts these changes and scale, Solaris still has a big edge in this area.
If someone buys one of these clusters from SGI, then it does scale "out of the box" as far as they're concerned.
i just dont care anymore and a lot of people feel the same
I think it's about time to give the Olympics another 2000-year hiatus. What started out as a revival of an ancient track and field meet has turned into a bloated overhyped monstrosity overshadowed by never-ending doping scandals.
My high school also gave out letters for math competitions. However, the letters had the word "Math" embroidered on them; letters for normal sports were not marked like that.
The conventional wisdom was that it was OK to put academic games letters on your jackets so long as you *also* had at least one set of normal athletic letters for that year. OTOH, if you only had math letters on your jacket, you were considered to be a dork. (I managed to narrowly avoid dorkdom by getting both types of letters.)
So this leads to the high school conformist conclusion: math can be a sport, but only if the player participates in a normal sports as well.
Bad quarter != downfall. At any rate, my assessment is far more realistic than the possibility that they will post a profit for the next 600 consecutive quarters, as the grandparent poster seems to think.
Since the vast majority of their revenue comes from maintaining huge profit margins on two software categories that are rapidly undergoing commoditization, they are in a rather unstable situation. They have not yet successfully demonstrated the ability to move into new areas on the same scale as their current primary businesses. Most likely, this will catch up with them and they will have a very bad quarter within 5-10 years, if not sooner.
I don't know whether operational software can last that long, but vaporware can be very durable. Ada Lovelace wrote vaporware that is now almost 200 years old and still going strong.
That makes it sound simple, but Red Hat will still have to fork out enormous legal fees to win this case, or settle with the firm (hereafter referred to as "ambulance chasers" or "greedy bastards") and fork over cash that way.
Red Hat will come out unscathed if they go with the precedent set by the current OS market leader in recent class action suits. They should arrange a settlement where they give coupons for free copies of Linux to the shareholders and random unrelated school districts.
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IIRC, the original Atlas boosters were built out of stainless steel. The trick was that they were built like a soda can out of extremely thin stock. They would crumple under their own weight if internal gas pressure wasn't maintained in the fuel tanks.
It shouldn't be all that hard since in space thermal control based almost solely on radiant energy. Even though the side facing the sun will get very hot, the side facing away from the sun is exposed to empty space with a temperature near absolute zero. If you simply reflect most of the sunlight away on the hot side, slow down what gets absorbed with a little insulation, and arrange to radiate what does get through the insulation (along with any internally generated heat) on the cold side, you should be able to maintain a reasonable temperature.
From what I've read, one of the hardest parts about controlling temperature on this probe is to handle the times when it passes in front of Mercury. Then, the near-zero chill on the "cold" side is temporarily replaced with the radiant heat from the > 400 C surface of the planet. At these times the probe has to be closed up like an ice chest to maintain its internal temperature at reasonable levels until it gets away from the planet.
Not necessarily. Spacetime may be quantized at the Planck scale.
We don't compare the Hanford site to coal-fired plants because the main use of this facility was to produce nuclear weapons materials, not electrical power generation.
So you're saying that they should have fired the reporter who wrote that article?
The cars could have smallish batteries that allow for short range driving under human control off of the tracks to/from your final destination (they would recharge from the grid and would run under fully automatic control while on the tracks). In urban settings, you might always be less than 1 mile from the nearest track on-ramp, so range wouldn't be a issue. For long drives in the boondocks, a small trailer or module with a gasoline or diesel engine could be attached to create a hybrid vehicle.
People would punch in their destination at the start of the trip, and the central control system would schedule the entire trip ahead of time, thus avoiding all traffic jams (barring software bugs). If the system lacks the capacity to instantly add the trip, it could make a reservation and tell the rider to chill out and get something done before starting; this would be much better than sitting in traffic.
What if you need to haul cargo? You might check out a virtual trailer at the lumber yard that's programmed to follow a few feet behind your vehicle. Unload it, guide it back to the on-ramp, and then it automatically returns to the store. Or, if you move a lot of stuff, you could buy your own trailer(s); you could make a whole train if you want.
The vast majority of standard truck and train cargo is comprised of packages small enough to fit in these smallish vehicles. Large numbers of them could automatically move most cargo around the country when traffic is otherwise low. This could save a lot of money on labor, but current truckers would not be pleased.
Of course, the Denver airport baggage handling system fiasco demonstrates just how hard something like this would be to implement. However, I think that it's still worth thinking about ways to improve over our current choices of wasteful overpowered, oversized automobiles and inconvenient slow public transportation (which is also wasteful because of its low average load factor).
What if you really just like to drive? I think that the freed-up Interstates could be reallocated as amusement parks. Remove all speed limits and rent out Ferraris and Porches for high-speed joy riding.
Why is it shameful? Microsoft donated their fonts to the world at large just like OSS developers have donated their work. (...even if they now wish they hadn't and have stopped distributing the fonts themselves. However, the cat is out of the bag.) There is no problem if you take advantage of their largess. From the font EULA:
You have to go through a small extra step to comply with their not-for-profit condition, but many distros have totally automated that. I always set my systems to use Verdana by default. It's unequaled for comfortably reading text on a computer monitor.
That actually might have been a better choice for Spain. As it was, in the first couple of decades they focused on hauling back as much of the New World's plentiful gold as possible. Instead of making Spain fantastically wealthy, the new glut of gold caused a crash in its value in the Old World, which was a major hit on Spain's economy.
It took many decades, even centuries, before the European contries derived truly profitable proceeds from colonization and trade in the New World.
If all nukes magically disappeared one day, world military spending would almost certainly dramatically increase as nations rushed to build up their conventional defensive forces.
Asparagus
Then why do they call it "Release Candidate"? That implies that it is a candidate for release: they feel that this exact build should be bug-free enough to go gold unless they find some new show-stopping bugs.
If they KNOW it isn't final, then by definition it can't be a candidate for final release.
That's pretty crazy. I guess it proves that:
"16 bytes ought t
Why not have your software measure how much real work it's doing. If over time it exceeds the amount of processing that the user paid for, then it starts to throttle itself back. That would be a lot more accurate than going with a crude measure like "number of CPUs" anyway.
Yes, that's what made it so damned funny.
That's exactly why the Onion article is so funny. They present the astronauts and ground controllers as that type of person. The humor results from the jarring contrast between The Onion's version and the actual cool-headed transcripts that we've heard replayed hundreds of times.
That's why we have the USPTO to sort things out.
Whether you like it or not, whether its trademarkable or not, people associate 'Windows' with Microsoft Windows.
It doesn't matter whether you or I like it. The only thing that matters is if it's trademarkable or not. If it's not, then Microsoft should have picked a better name, and any confusion is due to them picking a lousy term for a trademark attempt. Lindows can't infringe on a trademark if the trademark isn't valid. End of story.
(It looks like microsoft agrees with me and decided to punt rather than having this definitively proved in court.)
All that came from China too?
If someone buys one of these clusters from SGI, then it does scale "out of the box" as far as they're concerned.
I think it's about time to give the Olympics another 2000-year hiatus. What started out as a revival of an ancient track and field meet has turned into a bloated overhyped monstrosity overshadowed by never-ending doping scandals.
The conventional wisdom was that it was OK to put academic games letters on your jackets so long as you *also* had at least one set of normal athletic letters for that year. OTOH, if you only had math letters on your jacket, you were considered to be a dork. (I managed to narrowly avoid dorkdom by getting both types of letters.)
So this leads to the high school conformist conclusion: math can be a sport, but only if the player participates in a normal sports as well.
Bad quarter != downfall. At any rate, my assessment is far more realistic than the possibility that they will post a profit for the next 600 consecutive quarters, as the grandparent poster seems to think.
Since the vast majority of their revenue comes from maintaining huge profit margins on two software categories that are rapidly undergoing commoditization, they are in a rather unstable situation. They have not yet successfully demonstrated the ability to move into new areas on the same scale as their current primary businesses. Most likely, this will catch up with them and they will have a very bad quarter within 5-10 years, if not sooner.
Wait until they have their first really bad quarter. Then we'll see what happens.
I don't know whether operational software can last that long, but vaporware can be very durable. Ada Lovelace wrote vaporware that is now almost 200 years old and still going strong.
Red Hat will come out unscathed if they go with the precedent set by the current OS market leader in recent class action suits. They should arrange a settlement where they give coupons for free copies of Linux to the shareholders and random unrelated school districts.