Why yes, if you increase your displacement at one meter per second away from the stationary earth, you will eventually reach a distance such that the effects of the earth's gravity are infinitesimially small. It is true too that in a perfect earth-moon system, provided you could not colide with the earth or sun, you can use the momentum of the earth to attain an orbit with an infinitely long period. The fellow who spoke about escape velocity at the surface of the earth neglected to recognize your brilliant observations of the principle of acceleration, and the astounding rocket. We are truly ignorant. It is good that you raised this practical solution to a theoretical problem. I am humbled.
No you won't, you'll just reach a slightly eccentric orbit. That's no more escaping earth's gravity than me sitting here on my chair.
But for you to escape the earth's gravity, you need to have enough gravitational potential energy such that if, instead of being theoretically outside the earth's gravitational influence, you were at sea level, you'd be moving at Mach 32.
Whether you build that energy up in drips and drabs doesn't matter. The absurd speed isn't a jibberish figure, it's just being taken out of context. It's much more accurate to say that you'd need to be moving at that speed at sea level to escape the earth's gravity than it is to say that pushing away from a geosynchronous orbit will fling you hoplessly into space.
So how fast would you hit the atmosphere if you cut your engines at that near-infinite distance from the earth?
Where did that energy come from?
Ignoring energy requirements and declaring that your distance increases 1m every second as you leave the earth, is a really boring way to speak about the physics of the situation. Theoretically, unless gravity is quantinized, you can never escape the earth's gravity. When you cut that engine, a few hundred million millenia later, you'll graze sea level of the atmosphere-devoid earth somewhere around Mach 32. . .
. . . assuming an empty infinite universe with nothing but you and the somewhat stationary earth of course. But even in a full universe, the gravitational effect of the earth will still be there. You just won't get to measure the impact because something else will have a stronger attraction than the earth.
So if you start the experiment with the mach 32 object at sea level on the atmosphere devoid earth, it will fire out to the near-infinite point once again, hanging around for near-infinite time.
. . . Any faster and it will be an "infinite" time, but that's getting mathematically obtuse.
I think there's some trolling moderation going on... but I have to agree with the fellow who everyone is calling a twit. Here we go:
"However, if you provide a continual thrust that everywhere is greater than the local acceleration due to Earth's gravity, you will never fall back down."
*cough* If you're providing continual thrust to counteract the acceleration due to earth's gravity YOU HAVEN'T ESCAPED GRAVITY!
By your logic, a helicopter has escaped the earth's gravity. It produces a constant thrust which keeps it in "orbit" or as it accelerates vertically away from the earth, it's "escaped".
When you alter the definition of the phrase "escape the earth's gravity", then yes, mach 25 is meaningless! (and some rough numbers I worked out have it closer to Mach 32)
You're being silly and ignoring the physics of the whole thing. Of course sucking away the Earth's atmosphere and instantaneously accelerating an object to Mach32 is not a practical way to launch an object into an infinite orbit... but it is the speed you would posess on the earth, at sea level, measured in mach (prior to sucking away the atmosphere) to be able to get there.
Somehow you must attain that velocity relative to the earth which dictates the energy required to escape the earth's gravity.
Oddly, a bunch of big companies... you know, the BIG ones... share salary information with one another. They use the information regularly to try to impress upon employees that the grass isn't greener on the other side... it has been designed infact to be exactly the same shade of green.
The speeds are stunning. 1.6 seconds at 200mph is 143 meters. If stopping speed is linear (which it isn't of course), that's still about 70 meters to come to a stop... most impressive to me is that the tires can hold that well to the road.
It's impossible to catch up to MS Word. I think the parent's point was that Word XP will mess up some Word 2k docs, and some Word 97 docs, it will also mess up Word for mac docs... it's a closed spec, but even if OO were to implement it 100% perfectly, it could only be as good as yet another version of Word... which for most people isn't good enough.
I don't think sharing office docs between incompatable wordprocessors should be encouraged. It will just make people think OO is broken. If you want to share, stick to a common format before you polish up the final draft... but then even if you were to use something like simple paragraphs in RTF, Word would probably make a mess of it.
Now here's a question... why if one person has Word XP and another has Word 2k is the expectation always to upgrade Word? Why don't both people just grab OpenOffice to collaborate? It's free, and it will handle the final markup fine too.
For your more extreme case, where it's MSOffice v.s. OO. Unless you're a supplier or something, it doesn't make sense to force you to use OO... but then why would a supplier be collaborating with a customer? Use a PDF, spare yourself the embarassment of them opening the doc in another version of Office and having it come out weird, or with hidden revision info, macro viruses etc.
It took me weeks to figure it out. No Unix background, a proprietary CDROM and an RLL HDD.
Everything from finding the documentation to figuring out the exact parameters to pass to LILO, then installing... getting mysterious read errors on my CDROM... I'd leave the kernel compiling while I went to class. Don't forget there were no modules in the 1.x series.
I never did get ppp working.... but before Windows 95, ISPs weren't very standard in their dial up configurations.
Are you really lucky, or have you just been brainwashed by your hard working forefathers into appreciating those things in society which their efforts provided you an abundance of?
Ultimately, guilt for not doing enough is a lack of contentment and purpose. Maybe your 'gift' of intelligence will ensure you will never be content and never have a satisfying purpose.
Maybe that lack of satisfaction is nothing more than an important trait which grants populations an evolutionary edge over their neighbours.
Too many "intellectuals" and the population suffers. Too few, and the population suffers.
Of course none of this addresses purpose, but it does address using reason, why you need to find a purpose, but you can't find one.
Books are not uniform rectangles, they're stacks of papers which have three dimensional form and many different two dimensional projections. Icons of books are often icons of books at angles so as to help show that they are indeed books. They may also be icons of the bindings of books on a bookshelf, or icons of books spread open. Some icons of books have pens in them to make it clear that the book is for writing in.
Of course in a field of right-angle rectangles, the pencil sitting at an angle will stick out. Since I'm talking about problems with icon oriented environments, it would be reasonable to assume that I'm talking about situations which might occur in an field of icons in such an environment.
Now I could be speaking about a field of uniform rectangles and a yellow pencil at an angle, or to take it in a different extreme, I could be speaking about an array of slightly different yellow book bindings sitting at an angle with red bookmarks popping out the top amongst a single red-erasered yellow pencil sitting at an angle.
I think it safe to assume that I'm talking about neither. If I were writing a position paper I'd be more clear and probably include graphics, but this is nothing but a post to Slashdot.
1. In an array of ten thousand randomly placed squares and rectangles? That's not what I said. How about if you may or may not place an unfamiliar pencil in an array of ten thousand randomly placed office objects?
2. Put a hundred slightly different 32x32 pixel icons of pencils in a rainbow pattern across the screen. Ask them to find the stapler.
3. Spotting disorder in a state of order is not what an icon oriented UI is about. There is no order.
4. Why don't Americans just use pictograms then? Language is different, the symbols are studied and understood. It takes an instant for you to memorize '4', someone who wasn't familiar with the symbol would have to memorize it as a perpendicular cross-hatch joined at the top left. Once you know what your pencil roughly looks like, you'll be a bit faster, but it will be moved around.
To take icon oriented environments to an extreme, let's take the position and scale out of the equation so that you can no longer search an unfamiliar picture in a grid pattern. Find Waldo:
http://scientium.com/drmatrix/waldo.htm
Once you've reached a conclusion about the picture, you'll be able to repeat your experience very quickly. Icon oriented envrionments scramble the pictures.
An intuative UI draws upon an existing common base of knowledge to provide a user interface.
A user friendly UI is designed to provide maximum functionality and efficiency for the task.
An intuative keyboard would be alphabetaic.
An intuative pointing device would be a touch screen.
An intuative automobile would use a joystick.
Drawing upon the "common person's" intuition to allow somebody to perform a task is, by definition , not designing the tool for the task at hand, but instead designing it for someone who does not know, nor wants to learn how to accomplish the task at hand.
Extend this idea to wordprocessing and you'll see that most of the really bad features of MS Word are designed to hide the complexity of the act of wordprocessing.
This is not to say that you can't make a specialized program which minimizes the complexity of the task at hand.
I think it harkens back to a dark time where people used to percieve a difference between culture and product. The idea being that the audience of a radio station should not be the marketers, but it should be the listeners, and the listeners have a vested interest in the subculture which the radio station purported to the FCC or whatnot to represent.
These are old value systems though. Today it is naive to think that a popular local band would be picked up by a local radio station without being represented by a major label.
(University and public radio stations being notable exceptions of course.)
An utter failure of icon-oriented menu or index interfaces is that not only do people remember the image, but more importantly, they remember the shape, size and position of the image.
People can find a pencil on a desk just fine, but finding a pencil in a 16x16 icon grid array of books and papers all evenly spaced randomly is nearly impossible... despite being icon oriented.
Now oddly, it's easier to find the shape of the word "pencil" in a paragraph than it is to find an icon of a pencil in a grid of icons.
Faster still is "ctrl-f" "pencil"
And yet faster is to type "ls pencil" on the command line.
Just because a UI is intuative does not mean it is user friendly... infact, it's usually the opposite.
The realism for me would be me sitting in the bushes thinking "Why can't we all just get along? This is so stupid, I'm going to be sent out to kill some guy because he's been sent out to kill me because somebody's F*ed up ideologies dictate that somebody else's F*ed up ideologies are F*ed up!"
Realistic? I've never played the game, but isn't the objective of most combat to not have a fair fight? In games, an unfair fight generally isn't fun.
Overwhelm your opponent, demoralize your opponent, and never, so to speak, put their back against the wall... you don't want to fight people who think/know they are fighting for their lives. Treat your enemy prisoners fairly and your enemy combatants will be making a daily decision as to whether or not to follow their leader. Of course your friendly combatants are making the same decision daily...
The objective of war is to change your opponent's mind.
Ditto for Canada, but you do need to figure in the cost of the line. Unlimited internet access over dial up with a second phone line is significantly more expensive than broadband.
Yeah, RIM's product is the integration with the back end. A secure corporate email solution? There's only one out there. Nobody seems to be able to figure this out... it's so f*ing obvious. I thought RIM would have died years ago when Motorola started doing RIM-like devices and Palms began incorporating wireless. But both of them stuck to a fancy-email and text messaging cell-phone kind of business model rather than a "interfaces with your corporate mail server" business model.
RIM's R&D is moving at a snail's pace, I still expect they'll be scooped any day with better technology.
It doesn't explore a phenomenon or principle using a scientific method (i.e. it's an engineering problem)
Teachers will think you didn't come up with the idea
I guess you could come up with a science project if you changed it from building the machine to something like "had automated computational methods of the 1940's exceeded the capability of the human professional?"
Get some stats of human computational speed at the time, get students to try to beat them, and compare your computer's capabilty and cost to the human methods.
To get teachers to understand, show them shiny plastic slide rules.
I guess I could be wrong... it's been a long time since then.
Slashdot Mirror
Why yes, if you increase your displacement at one meter per second away from the stationary earth, you will eventually reach a distance such that the effects of the earth's gravity are infinitesimially small. It is true too that in a perfect earth-moon system, provided you could not colide with the earth or sun, you can use the momentum of the earth to attain an orbit with an infinitely long period. The fellow who spoke about escape velocity at the surface of the earth neglected to recognize your brilliant observations of the principle of acceleration, and the astounding rocket. We are truly ignorant. It is good that you raised this practical solution to a theoretical problem. I am humbled.
No you won't, you'll just reach a slightly eccentric orbit. That's no more escaping earth's gravity than me sitting here on my chair.
But for you to escape the earth's gravity, you need to have enough gravitational potential energy such that if, instead of being theoretically outside the earth's gravitational influence, you were at sea level, you'd be moving at Mach 32.
Whether you build that energy up in drips and drabs doesn't matter. The absurd speed isn't a jibberish figure, it's just being taken out of context. It's much more accurate to say that you'd need to be moving at that speed at sea level to escape the earth's gravity than it is to say that pushing away from a geosynchronous orbit will fling you hoplessly into space.
It'll be quite the trick to get it to do that without sucking your battery dry.
I'd be happy with a car stereo with a USB memory key. I think CDs suck in cars. Bad idea since inception.
So how fast would you hit the atmosphere if you cut your engines at that near-infinite distance from the earth?
Where did that energy come from?
Ignoring energy requirements and declaring that your distance increases 1m every second as you leave the earth, is a really boring way to speak about the physics of the situation. Theoretically, unless gravity is quantinized, you can never escape the earth's gravity. When you cut that engine, a few hundred million millenia later, you'll graze sea level of the atmosphere-devoid earth somewhere around Mach 32. . .
. . . assuming an empty infinite universe with nothing but you and the somewhat stationary earth of course. But even in a full universe, the gravitational effect of the earth will still be there. You just won't get to measure the impact because something else will have a stronger attraction than the earth.
So if you start the experiment with the mach 32 object at sea level on the atmosphere devoid earth, it will fire out to the near-infinite point once again, hanging around for near-infinite time.
. . . Any faster and it will be an "infinite" time, but that's getting mathematically obtuse.
Don't forget http://www.colinux.org/ which is spooky as hell.
I think there's some trolling moderation going on... but I have to agree with the fellow who everyone is calling a twit. Here we go:
"However, if you provide a continual thrust that everywhere is greater than the local acceleration due to Earth's gravity, you will never fall back down."
*cough* If you're providing continual thrust to counteract the acceleration due to earth's gravity YOU HAVEN'T ESCAPED GRAVITY!
By your logic, a helicopter has escaped the earth's gravity. It produces a constant thrust which keeps it in "orbit" or as it accelerates vertically away from the earth, it's "escaped".
When you alter the definition of the phrase "escape the earth's gravity", then yes, mach 25 is meaningless! (and some rough numbers I worked out have it closer to Mach 32)
You're being silly and ignoring the physics of the whole thing. Of course sucking away the Earth's atmosphere and instantaneously accelerating an object to Mach32 is not a practical way to launch an object into an infinite orbit... but it is the speed you would posess on the earth, at sea level, measured in mach (prior to sucking away the atmosphere) to be able to get there.
Somehow you must attain that velocity relative to the earth which dictates the energy required to escape the earth's gravity.
I'd compare the 1.x series of Abiword to Wordpad, not Word. I mean, it's basically Wordpad with tables and spell check.
2.0 seems to add better tables and the all important footnotes. I'll have to try it again some time. OO is pretty slick though.
Oddly, a bunch of big companies... you know, the BIG ones... share salary information with one another. They use the information regularly to try to impress upon employees that the grass isn't greener on the other side... it has been designed infact to be exactly the same shade of green.
The speeds are stunning. 1.6 seconds at 200mph is 143 meters. If stopping speed is linear (which it isn't of course), that's still about 70 meters to come to a stop... most impressive to me is that the tires can hold that well to the road.
It's impossible to catch up to MS Word. I think the parent's point was that Word XP will mess up some Word 2k docs, and some Word 97 docs, it will also mess up Word for mac docs... it's a closed spec, but even if OO were to implement it 100% perfectly, it could only be as good as yet another version of Word... which for most people isn't good enough.
I don't think sharing office docs between incompatable wordprocessors should be encouraged. It will just make people think OO is broken. If you want to share, stick to a common format before you polish up the final draft... but then even if you were to use something like simple paragraphs in RTF, Word would probably make a mess of it.
Now here's a question... why if one person has Word XP and another has Word 2k is the expectation always to upgrade Word? Why don't both people just grab OpenOffice to collaborate? It's free, and it will handle the final markup fine too.
For your more extreme case, where it's MSOffice v.s. OO. Unless you're a supplier or something, it doesn't make sense to force you to use OO... but then why would a supplier be collaborating with a customer? Use a PDF, spare yourself the embarassment of them opening the doc in another version of Office and having it come out weird, or with hidden revision info, macro viruses etc.
It took me weeks to figure it out. No Unix background, a proprietary CDROM and an RLL HDD.
Everything from finding the documentation to figuring out the exact parameters to pass to LILO, then installing... getting mysterious read errors on my CDROM... I'd leave the kernel compiling while I went to class. Don't forget there were no modules in the 1.x series.
I never did get ppp working.... but before Windows 95, ISPs weren't very standard in their dial up configurations.
Some sick bastard is trying to fix this using Stylesheets:
http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/intro/
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/04/03/12 /0454228.shtml
He even included the png hack. Sick sick sick.
Are you really lucky, or have you just been brainwashed by your hard working forefathers into appreciating those things in society which their efforts provided you an abundance of?
Ultimately, guilt for not doing enough is a lack of contentment and purpose. Maybe your 'gift' of intelligence will ensure you will never be content and never have a satisfying purpose.
Maybe that lack of satisfaction is nothing more than an important trait which grants populations an evolutionary edge over their neighbours.
Too many "intellectuals" and the population suffers. Too few, and the population suffers.
Of course none of this addresses purpose, but it does address using reason, why you need to find a purpose, but you can't find one.
Books are not uniform rectangles, they're stacks of papers which have three dimensional form and many different two dimensional projections. Icons of books are often icons of books at angles so as to help show that they are indeed books. They may also be icons of the bindings of books on a bookshelf, or icons of books spread open. Some icons of books have pens in them to make it clear that the book is for writing in.
Of course in a field of right-angle rectangles, the pencil sitting at an angle will stick out. Since I'm talking about problems with icon oriented environments, it would be reasonable to assume that I'm talking about situations which might occur in an field of icons in such an environment.
Now I could be speaking about a field of uniform rectangles and a yellow pencil at an angle, or to take it in a different extreme, I could be speaking about an array of slightly different yellow book bindings sitting at an angle with red bookmarks popping out the top amongst a single red-erasered yellow pencil sitting at an angle.
I think it safe to assume that I'm talking about neither. If I were writing a position paper I'd be more clear and probably include graphics, but this is nothing but a post to Slashdot.
1. In an array of ten thousand randomly placed squares and rectangles? That's not what I said. How about if you may or may not place an unfamiliar pencil in an array of ten thousand randomly placed office objects?
2. Put a hundred slightly different 32x32 pixel icons of pencils in a rainbow pattern across the screen. Ask them to find the stapler.
3. Spotting disorder in a state of order is not what an icon oriented UI is about. There is no order.
4. Why don't Americans just use pictograms then? Language is different, the symbols are studied and understood. It takes an instant for you to memorize '4', someone who wasn't familiar with the symbol would have to memorize it as a perpendicular cross-hatch joined at the top left. Once you know what your pencil roughly looks like, you'll be a bit faster, but it will be moved around.
To take icon oriented environments to an extreme, let's take the position and scale out of the equation so that you can no longer search an unfamiliar picture in a grid pattern. Find Waldo:
http://scientium.com/drmatrix/waldo.htm
Once you've reached a conclusion about the picture, you'll be able to repeat your experience very quickly. Icon oriented envrionments scramble the pictures.
Intuativeness v.s. user friendliness?
An intuative UI draws upon an existing common base of knowledge to provide a user interface.
A user friendly UI is designed to provide maximum functionality and efficiency for the task.
An intuative keyboard would be alphabetaic.
An intuative pointing device would be a touch screen.
An intuative automobile would use a joystick.
Drawing upon the "common person's" intuition to allow somebody to perform a task is, by definition , not designing the tool for the task at hand, but instead designing it for someone who does not know, nor wants to learn how to accomplish the task at hand.
Extend this idea to wordprocessing and you'll see that most of the really bad features of MS Word are designed to hide the complexity of the act of wordprocessing.
This is not to say that you can't make a specialized program which minimizes the complexity of the task at hand.
I think it harkens back to a dark time where people used to percieve a difference between culture and product. The idea being that the audience of a radio station should not be the marketers, but it should be the listeners, and the listeners have a vested interest in the subculture which the radio station purported to the FCC or whatnot to represent.
These are old value systems though. Today it is naive to think that a popular local band would be picked up by a local radio station without being represented by a major label.
(University and public radio stations being notable exceptions of course.)
An utter failure of icon-oriented menu or index interfaces is that not only do people remember the image, but more importantly, they remember the shape, size and position of the image.
People can find a pencil on a desk just fine, but finding a pencil in a 16x16 icon grid array of books and papers all evenly spaced randomly is nearly impossible... despite being icon oriented.
Now oddly, it's easier to find the shape of the word "pencil" in a paragraph than it is to find an icon of a pencil in a grid of icons.
Faster still is "ctrl-f" "pencil"
And yet faster is to type "ls pencil" on the command line.
Just because a UI is intuative does not mean it is user friendly... infact, it's usually the opposite.
The realism for me would be me sitting in the bushes thinking "Why can't we all just get along? This is so stupid, I'm going to be sent out to kill some guy because he's been sent out to kill me because somebody's F*ed up ideologies dictate that somebody else's F*ed up ideologies are F*ed up!"
Realistic? I've never played the game, but isn't the objective of most combat to not have a fair fight? In games, an unfair fight generally isn't fun.
Overwhelm your opponent, demoralize your opponent, and never, so to speak, put their back against the wall... you don't want to fight people who think/know they are fighting for their lives. Treat your enemy prisoners fairly and your enemy combatants will be making a daily decision as to whether or not to follow their leader. Of course your friendly combatants are making the same decision daily...
The objective of war is to change your opponent's mind.
Am I the only person who liked SO5.2 desktop replacement system?
Wow... I think you are. I didn't think there was anyone.
Ditto for Canada, but you do need to figure in the cost of the line. Unlimited internet access over dial up with a second phone line is significantly more expensive than broadband.
What the hell are the people who DO have one reading?
Harlequins. No, really.
Unions make a little bit of sense when there is some risk that the unions can make demands which can put the company out of business.
When the organization is part of the government, the union can't possibly make demands which will put the organization out of business
Yeah, RIM's product is the integration with the back end. A secure corporate email solution? There's only one out there. Nobody seems to be able to figure this out... it's so f*ing obvious. I thought RIM would have died years ago when Motorola started doing RIM-like devices and Palms began incorporating wireless. But both of them stuck to a fancy-email and text messaging cell-phone kind of business model rather than a "interfaces with your corporate mail server" business model.
RIM's R&D is moving at a snail's pace, I still expect they'll be scooped any day with better technology.
Cool yes, but it'd be flawed as a project:
I guess you could come up with a science project if you changed it from building the machine to something like "had automated computational methods of the 1940's exceeded the capability of the human professional?"
Get some stats of human computational speed at the time, get students to try to beat them, and compare your computer's capabilty and cost to the human methods.
To get teachers to understand, show them shiny plastic slide rules.
I guess I could be wrong... it's been a long time since then.