Or are they just referring to the noise level when in subsonic operation?
You obviously havn't heard concorde flying subsonic. It must be the loudest civil aircraft by a long way.
In which case, like the Concorde, it could only go supersonic over water... but then how could it "operate far more widely" than the Concorde?
The want to fly this between Japan and the US. LAX is more or less due west from Kansi. With nothing other than the Pacific in between. They also want to make a supersonic airliner with much greater range, since there is no way Concorde could cross the Pacific without finding places to land and refuel.
When you carry an aerodynamic vehicle on a rocket (the Shuttle, for instance) the aerodynamic control surfaces are locked in neutral until separation. The rocket gets all the guidance it needs by gimballing its engine(s), and doesn't need any outside help.
IIRC the shuttle uses both engine gimballing and the control surfaces on the orbiter. Notably for the initial roll it makes immediatly after lift off.
A lot of (heavily tech impaired) users have trouble understanding that there are TLD's besides ".com"
How do these people manage to use a telephone? Telephone numbering is hierachical, as are postal addresses.
Re:This Is An Ancient Problem
on
Digital Dark Ages?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
More than 90% of the works of ancient the more famous Roman or Greek authors have vanished, to say nothing of the more lesser known writers.
Something which is a greater loss to historians and archeologists is the lack of documents from regular people. Private letters, business records, etc. These can tell a lot more about society than pieces of fiction.
One of the trends in historical research has been to refocus analysis on the lives of ordinary people. As it turns out, this is a problem since ordinary people didn't tend to write in the public record. Often, things that were incredibly popular are virtually undocumented because no one thought them important enough to preserve.
You also have the problem of people tending not to document the "obvious".
Landmines are the only battlefield munition that is incapable of distinguishing between friend, foe and/or innocents.
Munitions arn't sentient, any munition left laying around after the war has ended is a danger. Thing with land mines is that they tend to be frequently left laying around and are concealed in the first place. Unexploded bombs and shells tend to be either obvious on the surface or burried deeply so that the are not a danger to most people (except construction workers).
In the current technology, American landmines are now battery-powered. When the battery goes out, the landmine doesn't work anymore. Meaning, by design, the landmines have a built-in lifespan past which point they don't harm anyone unless a 12-year old digs up an unexploded mines.
What it someone digs them up, replaces the batteries and uses them for their own minefield. Or even simply uses them to make their own weapons. What is the explosive used? More specifically is it an explosive which becomes more unstable and dangerous over time...
Re:How about a real Digital Tuntable?
on
Digital DJ Turntable
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
DJ's generally HATE anything but vinyl. DJing is a community of luddites.
IMHO calling them that is unfair since the supposedly new and improved technology can't do something the old technology can.
This stems from the fact that Linux doesn't try to remember what PCI slot a given card is in, or any such nonsense. It simply looks around, figures out what hardware is installed, and attempts to drive whatever it finds.
It's also that you can run into a situation where you need a driver for each sub version (or even simply each badge) of a certain piece of hardware with Windows. Whereas you can have one Linux driver covering all versions, making changes at runtime to how the hardware is controlled, assuming this is necessary.
Compare with Windows, which remembers all sorts of details about installed hardware, even though most of those details (such as which PCI slot it's in) are completely useless.
Indeed worst than useless storing the information dosn't really serve much practical purpose. But it can seriously confuse the whole thing.
As an example, I have a USB mouse in a Windows box, and another of the same kind of USB mice in a Linux box. If I remove the mouse from the Linux box, it'll stop trying to drive it, and I (not surprisingly) lose mouse control in X. If I plug it into the other USB socket, Linux drives it again, attaches it to the input core, sends its signals to/dev/input/mice for the X server to pick up, and voila, I have mouse control again.
And people moan that Linux isn't "plug and play".
In the Windows box, it complains about how I unplugged the device, blah blah blah, and breaks. If I plug it into the other USB slot, it asks for a CD with the device drivers on it, even though the drivers are installed already!
Apparently no-one at Microsoft though of the concept of looking at the local HDD before asking for a disk. Windows claims to be "plug and play", whereas this is more "plug and attempt to install some drivers".
Yet another instance of Microsoft adding an unnecessary "feature" (remembering what hardware is attached where, and remembering various useless configuration information) that does worlds of harm and no good whatsoever.
Sounds not unlike that various Windows "features" who's main application is the spreading viruses.
you see, windows users are like, 'huh, i gotta read something, what? reading sucks man!'
Windows programs simply don't tend to have manuals. Typically simply install instructions and online "help". Both of which typically cover things which are blatently obvious to anyone familiar with Windows. So Windows users never tend to read documentation... That's even before discovering that undocumented options with Windows programs arn't that uncommon.
It is very different. The majority of cubicle minions only need the damn thing to boot and work. They don't install hardware or even install the OS -- the IT department does that.
Indeed messing with the configuration is unlikely to be encouraged, more likely strongly discouraged.
With that said -- I still agree with you until Linux becomes easier to roll-out onto 1000 desktops, the barriers to implementation are too high -
How can it be any harder than with 1000 Windows desktops.
especially when it is not unlikely that of 100 new computers from the same manufacturer, there is likely to be some kind of difference in one or two machines to become a major headache for the IT guy installing linux.
IME Linux is a lot less fussed by minor differences (including such things as PCI cards being in different slots) than Windows.
common idiots can barely figure out how to click on things in windows, much less type something in a command line. e.g. some people don't even know what OS they have if you ask them
In which case they probably wouldn't notice if they wern't running Windows in the first place. The command line comment is irrelevent. If anything it might be easier for them to get started with a unix type system, since there is no funny "domain" box on the login window.
The problem is that a "balanced diet" as described in just about every piece of nutritional literature written in the last thirty years just might be not so balanced after all.
One interesting thing is that a "balanced diet" does not mean that every meal must be balanced. Indeed attempting to make every meal "balanced" could end up not being healthy as it dosn't take acount of whatever nutrition your body needs at the time.
Why upgrade? Why force users to learn a new desktop for no extra benefit? Why junk perfectly good hardware to get more powerful stuff just to run XP? What, in short, is the point?
If you wanted to change things in that situation the real killer question would be something like "why stick with Microsoft?".
There's a huge installed base of NT4 in the corporate world, a tiny installed base of W2K and absolutely zero base of XP. MS should support its paying customers.
As a monopoly they don't feel obliged to. Most likely they will come up with a creative way to lable continuing to use old Windows as "copyright infringment"...
The computer comes with a license for XP that can be downgraded to use with 2000, but not licenses for both. I believe some other OEMS do a similar dual boot, which seems to be what this is referring to. Disallowing this practice would mean that the consumer would be forced to load 2k themselves, rather then having it come preconfigured.
Plenty of corporate customers would probably rather load machines themselves anyway. That wey they get something set up to their liking, in a standard configuration. Rather than having to make do with what ever the OEM though was a good idea.
I think the reason for the slow response time to new software is because: a. The enigineers simply do not like (or, more likely, fear) change, and
Engineers tend not to be into change for changes sake. What does the next version of Windows offer the engineer?
b. A lot of the documents we work with are 20-year-old government documents written in programs like Word Perfect, so upgrading would cause a lot of compatibility issues.
Governments hold onto documents for a lot longer than 20 years, stick a 1 on the beginning or a zero on the end and you'd end up with something more realistic.
All I see is the huge pain in the neck caused by having to rebuild all these brand new WinXP systems into Win98 boxes because thats what our standard platform is, and will be, unless we want Peoplesoft to stop working.
Even if you standard platform was XP you'd probably still have to rebuild. Unless you could get the supplier to ship it as you wanted it. IMHO to most corporate customers OEM preloads are at best a complete waste of time.
M$ isn't considering that without 100% backward compatibility, they are putting alot of people in a bind, especially if they are using apps/systems that are tuned to specific OS's (like Win98)
They have no reason to consider this. Without competition they can stiff the customer however they like.
This is why many people are still using Windows NT or Solaris 2.6 as in the earlier post (i.e., their working business is more important than a software "upgrade").
This is where the only risk is to profits. When you come to computers controlling a chemical/nuclear plant or a weapons system worst case senario is now "lots of people might wind up dead if it breaks". Microsoft has been pushing Windows as an embedded platform and as fit for military usage. Whilst given their idea of a product lifespan is simply daft.
From a company's point of view windows and Office are fine the way they are now, just like they don't need a new type of screwdriver they don't need a new OS or office suite.
This how regular commercial businesses are thinking. These are often more likely to consider upgrading than governments and embedded systems (especially embedded systems in areas such as areospace, process control and military applications. Where years of evaluation may be required before its considered ready for primetime.)
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Or are they just referring to the noise level when in subsonic operation?
You obviously havn't heard concorde flying subsonic. It must be the loudest civil aircraft by a long way.
In which case, like the Concorde, it could only go supersonic over water... but then how could it "operate far more widely" than the Concorde?
The want to fly this between Japan and the US. LAX is more or less due west from Kansi. With nothing other than the Pacific in between. They also want to make a supersonic airliner with much greater range, since there is no way Concorde could cross the Pacific without finding places to land and refuel.
When you carry an aerodynamic vehicle on a rocket (the Shuttle, for instance) the aerodynamic control surfaces are locked in neutral until separation. The rocket gets all the guidance it needs by gimballing its engine(s), and doesn't need any outside help.
IIRC the shuttle uses both engine gimballing and the control surfaces on the orbiter. Notably for the initial roll it makes immediatly after lift off.
I always find it amazing just how high the failure rate is for what should, after 50 years, be routine rocketry.
Rockets tend to be highly complicated and fragile machines. Most of a rocket is fuel. When they fail a large explosion is rather typical.
A lot of (heavily tech impaired) users have trouble understanding that there are TLD's besides ".com"
How do these people manage to use a telephone? Telephone numbering is hierachical, as are postal addresses.
More than 90% of the works of ancient the more famous Roman or Greek authors have vanished, to say nothing of the more lesser known writers.
Something which is a greater loss to historians and archeologists is the lack of documents from regular people. Private letters, business records, etc. These can tell a lot more about society than pieces of fiction.
One of the trends in historical research has been to refocus analysis on the lives of ordinary people. As it turns out, this is a problem since ordinary people didn't tend to write in the public record. Often, things that were incredibly popular are virtually undocumented because no one thought them important enough to preserve.
You also have the problem of people tending not to document the "obvious".
Landmines are the only battlefield munition that is incapable of distinguishing between friend, foe and/or innocents.
Munitions arn't sentient, any munition left laying around after the war has ended is a danger. Thing with land mines is that they tend to be frequently left laying around and are concealed in the first place. Unexploded bombs and shells tend to be either obvious on the surface or burried deeply so that the are not a danger to most people (except construction workers).
I was just thinking that politicians' signatures on a piece of paper whose words are true for about as long as the ink dries
:)
That long
Well, not to soil this discussion with any facts, but military minefields are not repeat not intended to kill the enemy.
Anti peronnell mines are specfically intended to wound and not kill. a wounded solider is more of a drain on an army than a dead one.
They are meant to deny territory.
Which they also do to civilians, quite often even after the war is over.
In the current technology, American landmines are now battery-powered. When the battery goes out, the landmine doesn't work anymore. Meaning, by design, the landmines have a built-in lifespan past which point they don't harm anyone unless a 12-year old digs up an unexploded mines.
What it someone digs them up, replaces the batteries and uses them for their own minefield. Or even simply uses them to make their own weapons. What is the explosive used? More specifically is it an explosive which becomes more unstable and dangerous over time...
DJ's generally HATE anything but vinyl. DJing is a community of luddites.
IMHO calling them that is unfair since the supposedly new and improved technology can't do something the old technology can.
This stems from the fact that Linux doesn't try to remember what PCI slot a given card is in, or any such nonsense. It simply looks around, figures out what hardware is installed, and attempts to drive whatever it finds.
/dev/input/mice for the X server to pick up, and voila, I have mouse control again.
It's also that you can run into a situation where you need a driver for each sub version (or even simply each badge) of a certain piece of hardware with Windows. Whereas you can have one Linux driver covering all versions, making changes at runtime to how the hardware is controlled, assuming this is necessary.
Compare with Windows, which remembers all sorts of details about installed hardware, even though most of those details (such as which PCI slot it's in) are completely useless.
Indeed worst than useless storing the information dosn't really serve much practical purpose. But it can seriously confuse the whole thing.
As an example, I have a USB mouse in a Windows box, and another of the same kind of USB mice in a Linux box. If I remove the mouse from the Linux box, it'll stop trying to drive it, and I (not surprisingly) lose mouse control in X. If I plug it into the other USB socket, Linux drives it again, attaches it to the input core, sends its signals to
And people moan that Linux isn't "plug and play".
In the Windows box, it complains about how I unplugged the device, blah blah blah, and breaks. If I plug it into the other USB slot, it asks for a CD with the device drivers on it, even though the drivers are installed already!
Apparently no-one at Microsoft though of the concept of looking at the local HDD before asking for a disk. Windows claims to be "plug and play", whereas this is more "plug and attempt to install some drivers".
Yet another instance of Microsoft adding an unnecessary "feature" (remembering what hardware is attached where, and remembering various useless configuration information) that does worlds of harm and no good whatsoever.
Sounds not unlike that various Windows "features" who's main application is the spreading viruses.
you see, windows users are like, 'huh, i gotta read something, what? reading sucks man!'
Windows programs simply don't tend to have manuals. Typically simply install instructions and online "help". Both of which typically cover things which are blatently obvious to anyone familiar with Windows.
So Windows users never tend to read documentation... That's even before discovering that undocumented options with Windows programs arn't that uncommon.
It is very different. The majority of cubicle minions only need the damn thing to boot and work. They don't install hardware or even install the OS -- the IT department does that.
Indeed messing with the configuration is unlikely to be encouraged, more likely strongly discouraged.
With that said -- I still agree with you until Linux becomes easier to roll-out onto 1000 desktops, the barriers to implementation are too high -
How can it be any harder than with 1000 Windows desktops.
especially when it is not unlikely that of 100 new computers from the same manufacturer, there is likely to be some kind of difference in one or two machines to become a major headache for the IT guy installing linux.
IME Linux is a lot less fussed by minor differences (including such things as PCI cards being in different slots) than Windows.
common idiots can barely figure out how to click on things in windows, much less type something in a command line. e.g. some people don't even know what OS they have if you ask them
In which case they probably wouldn't notice if they wern't running Windows in the first place. The command line comment is irrelevent. If anything it might be easier for them to get started with a unix type system, since there is no funny "domain" box on the login window.
Humans are neither chemistry sets nor simple heat engines.
But the methods of working out the calorific value of food do involve simple chemistry. Like burning in pure oxygen.
And I've never heard of a natural pesticide that is as dangerous as man-made ones.
Plants produce a whole array of chemicals to discourage their being eaten by everything from insects to grazing mammals.
The problem is that a "balanced diet" as described in just about every piece of nutritional literature written in the last thirty years just might be not so balanced after all.
One interesting thing is that a "balanced diet" does not mean that every meal must be balanced. Indeed attempting to make every meal "balanced" could end up not being healthy as it dosn't take acount of whatever nutrition your body needs at the time.
Why upgrade? Why force users to learn a new desktop for no extra benefit? Why junk perfectly good hardware to get more powerful stuff just to run XP? What, in short, is the point?
If you wanted to change things in that situation the real killer question would be something like "why stick with Microsoft?".
There's a huge installed base of NT4 in the corporate world, a tiny installed base of W2K and absolutely zero base of XP. MS should support its paying customers.
As a monopoly they don't feel obliged to. Most likely they will come up with a creative way to lable continuing to use old Windows as "copyright infringment"...
The computer comes with a license for XP that can be downgraded to use with 2000, but not licenses for both. I believe some other OEMS do a similar dual boot, which seems to be what this is referring to. Disallowing this practice would mean that the consumer would be forced to load 2k themselves, rather then having it come preconfigured.
Plenty of corporate customers would probably rather load machines themselves anyway. That wey they get something set up to their liking, in a standard configuration. Rather than having to make do with what ever the OEM though was a good idea.
I just hope that MS-software is illegal in most countries in a couple of years..
Technically it most likely is in most parts of the world already. The problem is enforcement..
I think the reason for the slow response time to new software is because:
a. The enigineers simply do not like (or, more likely, fear) change, and
Engineers tend not to be into change for changes sake. What does the next version of Windows offer the engineer?
b. A lot of the documents we work with are 20-year-old government documents written in programs like Word Perfect, so upgrading would cause a lot of compatibility issues.
Governments hold onto documents for a lot longer than 20 years, stick a 1 on the beginning or a zero on the end and you'd end up with something more realistic.
All I see is the huge pain in the neck caused by having to rebuild all these brand new WinXP systems into Win98 boxes because thats what our standard platform is, and will be, unless we want Peoplesoft to stop working.
Even if you standard platform was XP you'd probably still have to rebuild. Unless you could get the supplier to ship it as you wanted it.
IMHO to most corporate customers OEM preloads are at best a complete waste of time.
M$ isn't considering that without 100% backward compatibility, they are putting alot of people in a bind, especially if they are using apps/systems that are tuned to specific OS's (like Win98)
They have no reason to consider this. Without competition they can stiff the customer however they like.
This is why many people are still using Windows NT or Solaris 2.6 as in the earlier post (i.e., their working business is more important than a software "upgrade").
This is where the only risk is to profits. When you come to computers controlling a chemical/nuclear plant or a weapons system worst case senario is now "lots of people might wind up dead if it breaks".
Microsoft has been pushing Windows as an embedded platform and as fit for military usage. Whilst given their idea of a product lifespan is simply daft.
From a company's point of view windows and Office are fine the way they are now, just like they don't need a new type of screwdriver they don't need a new OS or office suite.
This how regular commercial businesses are thinking. These are often more likely to consider upgrading than governments and embedded systems (especially embedded systems in areas such as areospace, process control and military applications. Where years of evaluation may be required before its considered ready for primetime.)