What's keeping the fragile space progam in Florida anyway? Politics?
Momentum.
No, seriously.
You see, the Earth is spinning. As we live on the Earth, we are therefore also spinning. At the poles, you are merely rotating around your axis and it is not very interesting at all. On the equator, on the other hand, you are being whipped around at about 1 circumference of the Earth per day, which is a fairly good clip. If one wants to get into space, the centripetal force pushing one outward is increased greatly the closer you get to the equator.
Naturally, NASA wants to take advantage of that, as it makes a measurable difference in payloads and fuel. You'll notice that the ESA and most private space agencies launch from places like Equatorial Guinea. The closer to the equator, the better. It's only the cold-war space programs, such as USA and Russia's, that keep their space launch centres within their own borders.
Unfortunately, they will continue to do so for now, because they've invested so much infrastructure there.
But the fact is, if they're going to move, it wouldn't make sense to move to Arizona. They would move to the equator like all the newer space programs have done.
I'd say that if you're somewhat familiar with Linux/BSD you'll be very comfortable in OS X. Just start in the Terminal and work your way out. If you want your traditional UNIXy tools, install the Fink project (which often leaves much to be desired, especially when installing fink itself, but it'll get the job done)
For me, other essentials include Adium (a multi-protocol instant messenger), Firefox (sorry Safari) USB Overdrive (I find USB mice to move much too slowly even at max system settings), and Meteorologist (little weather-sensing menubar app).
macosxhints also has a good number of tips and tricks that you might want to through.
Other than that, I can't think of any real problems I had migrating over. It takes a few days to get used to, but it really is fairly intuitive. Try to experiment a bit, particularly with your normal 'window' habits. You may find you like to do things a different way. I used to run everything maximized, now I don't ever run something maximized anymore, despite having a smaller screen. I couldn't tell you why, it just feels more comfortable to do things this way for me. If you have any question, just remember there's a 'help' command in every application, the help docs are usually very nice.
Microsoft may be the 400lb gorilla, but only in the software side of things.
IBM, on the other hand, is the 4 ton gorilla (ie, King Kong) in the semiconductor and hardware industries. They make somewhere around 90% of the ICs in the world, if I recall correctly.
Intel and AMD are toy companies in comparison. They may be cutting edge, but they're tiny. If you need an analogy, they are like id software. Top-quality stuff, highly respected, but generally not a major industry force. A major consumer force, yes, but not an industry force. They're a very specialized company, and don't seem particularly eager to try and diversify. EA and the other mega-developers view them as outsourced game engine R&D. IBM views AMD and Intel and, on the software side of things, the Open Source community, in the same sort of way. Cheap R&D.
Perhaps you should consider that they don't actually shun technology "because it is an evil, a sin!" or something, but rather because they figure that it detracts from their quality of life.
It's not hypocracy, it's a choice. Even moral boycotts usually get ignored at some level of urgency. But this isn't even a moral boycott, it's a pragmatic one.
Since the NCC-1701(A) was a Battlecruiser, unlike all the other Enterprises, it is possible they just felt that CRTs were a more battle-hardened technology than LCDs.
Welp, I guess that's it, I'm officially a Star Trek Continuity Apologist. *sigh*
Actually, nuclear bombs in general, and hydrogen bombs in particular, are not much of a risk for accidental detonation. In most known configurations they require a truly ridiculous amount of precision in the detonation sequence that uses the conventional explosives to fire the nuclear materials together into something that will detonate.
Which isn't to say they wouldn't be dangerous from a molten radioactive metal standpoint if the conventional triggers started going off randomly. But the risk of actual nuclear explosion is very very low.
Not as effectively anymore after a change to the law in 2003, but you still can do it as described. File a patent, keep amending with slightly more detail it to force continuations, and stop amending it once you're happy that existing tech falls under your heavily amended patent.
It's definitely the game players that "don't get it". Although saying that your target audience "doesn't get it" because they want something you view as inferior is a tough argument to support.
In any case, it's certainly true: People (and as a subset of people, gamers) have a marked affinity for rehashes, sequels, and clones. For the most part, they display aversion to anything new or innovative. We humans are strange that way, we find comfort in familiarity. I'm very much guilty of this myself. Rather than an innovative new game I'd much rather play a remake of one of my old favourites, whether that be X-COM, Master of Magic/Orion, Doom, Diablo, whatever, it doesn't matter.
And, regarding your last question, literary devices rarely translate well to a game, just as movie devices rarely translate well to a game. It can be done, but it's a delicate process, and will require changes to be made the literary devices to make it work.
If you let someone use something under a license which cannot be revoked (e.g., GPL) then you cannot turn around and sue them for either patent or copyright infringment.
Oh, but you can. It may not be legally valid to do so, but would you be willing to bring it all the way up to the supreme court if necessary? If you wouldn't, who would? The answer: Nobody.
Oh hooray! Some completely unscientific, unresearched, blown out of proportion anti-green propaganda with not a single damn link to back it up. I'm so impressed!
We put up solar panels everywhere we possibly could. We get unlimited free energy. After a few years, the temprature of the Earth begins to drop due to the fact that the energy which would have been converted to heat is now used for other things... We put solar panels in space and beam the energy to the surface. Exact oppisite problem.
Ignoring the fact that the amount of change we even despite our self-important belief that human beings cover the entire Earth, could possisbly make to the self-correcting climate system is basically infinitesimal, and also ignoring the fact that heating up the Earth is already being done by greenhouse gasses and deforestation, did it ever occur to your divine wisdom that perhaps we could use both of the systems you berate in your post? We could regulate the Earth's climate ourselves. Why not, we've started taking over for Mother Nature in basically every other area of managing Earth's ecosystems, and it works decently well although we still get reminders of our inadequacy from time to time.
We put up big windmils everywhere. All the birds fly into them.
One link please. Just one. A single link.
Have you ever even seen a wind turbine? In your life, have you seen a single one? Have you noticed how the blades get stained red with the blood of animals? No? Perhaps because they don't? Because the blades spin at around 10 rotations per minute. The shock of being hit by one of these is right up there with having a baseball bat pressed against your shoulder. Yes, being beaten to death with a baseball bat would suck, do you think the same thing would happen if it was only lightly pressed against you? Of course not. We're talking about great big windmills slowly spinning in the wind, not jet turbine compressors.
Birds face much more danger of running into buildings, especially modern all-glass-exterior buildings. Why don't you go about wasting your effort trying to get rid of those.
[Waves] Same prob as wind.
And that would be? The scale of the ocean probably eludes you, but let me offer you a hint: IT'S HUGE. You know the saying, "it's like pissing in the ocean", well, tidal power is basically like that. By the way, tidal power is actually graviational power that comes from the moon's orbit.
You know what's more of an environmental concern? Nuclear power plants (this will include fusion, sorry) that eject their (now very hot) cooling water into lakes, rivers, and oceans. That kills fish, and disrupts water currents.
Oh, and not to scare you, but the north atlantic conveyor current is showing signs of shutting down already, despite the fact that we really have no tidal power plants to speak of, and it has nothing to do with that. It happens. It has happened long before humans around, and it's going to happen again. Get used to it. Currents change. Climates change. We may all die, but it's sort of unlikely, given what a resourceful bunch of lunatics we are.
Let's take heat from the crust that escapes anyway and use it to drive turbines.
I'm going to ignore the silliness of the claim that increasing the pressure inside the earth by a few kilopascals here and there, a place where the pressure is measured in giga- or terapascals will make any difference whatsoever in whether gigantic plates of rock will move or not. By the way, that increase in pressure you presume isn't even necessarily true as the heat is generally captured after it has already been released from the crust and would otherwise be entering the atmosphere (see section above about whether adding or removing heat from the climate makes is a big deal).
Other than that, you might have a point there.
Re:Biologically speaking, how...
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Yes, our eyes only have three types of cones, but unlike the color projected by a TV, they are not designed to respond to just one frequency of red, one of green, and one of blue. they have broad, overlapping response curves, each cone giving a different level of signal depending on the frequency of the light. The brain figures out the color based on the response of all three types of cones, not just the one that is active.
The stuff above is fact, the rest of this post is my pointless, unscientific, meandering hypothesis:
Obviously we use this concept with RGB signals to create colors like yellow, by tickling both the red and green cones at once with neighboring phosphors, but since the two colors are coming from very very slightly different places, the brain is not necessarily satisfied that it really is the color yellow. Basically, the more spectrum we can cover natively, the less chance there will be of someone's brain mumbling "that color doesn't seem... right"
For most intents and purposes (all that I've come across), cygwin is effectively seamless, and is at least as reliable as Windows is.
Obviously, though, you should take an intelligent approach. Some things don't make much sense to run under cygwin. cron comes to mind. It's available, but if you want it to be a little more integrated, I'd invest a little bit of effort to get those things that need to be cronned running as a windows service or under task scheduler or something native to Windows. Not only will it be more efficient and more intuitive for the Windows admin, it may be more reliable too. There are plenty of other examples too, I'm sure.
Anyway, cygwin will have no trouble at all handling the scripts, but I don't think simply dropping everything into a cygwin installation is the nicest way to go. Put a little effort into it and cygwin will serve you well for the rest.
You can see the headlines now, 'Six astronauts die to fix a bloody telescope we dont really need'.
Yes, I sure do remember all those headlines blasting NASA after the Columbia Accident happened: '7 astronauts killed after performing pointless science experiments'
Most of the things that seem trivial to the public in space research are actually very important, and I've been amazed to discover that the media seems to realize this as well. The HST has done far more for astronomy than produce pretty pictures (which are important in their own way -- getting the public involved is something scientists continue to struggle with as it's surprisingly beneficial). The HST has developed the foundation of current cosmology and astronomy faster than any instrument before it. The discoveries it has made don't seem significant yet, but once the rest of the house has been built on top of it people might start to think it's a little more worthwhile.
I do agree with the majority of your post though. Robots are the way to go for most missions. There is plenty that humans could be doing up there that doesn't involve such menial tasks, and the more often they have to go up there and do these repetive and boring jobs, the more likely there's going to be an accident. If a robot gets blown off into space, no big deal. If a person does, that's a little more sucky, for them and just in general.
Probably a good idea: this is the first comment I saw on this story, this particular pageview was the one that gave me modpoints, and yes, I am left-handed.
(not that I actually would've modded you anything other than +1 Funny.;)
You are misunderstanding. He or she is trying to say that even the most computer-illiterate person around knows what iTunes is. The suggestion that knowing what spyware is defines computer literacy is somewhat silly, but there you go.
Because it is a solid, it won't remain in "orbit", but will degenerate, with one edge sliding into the sun, in spite of rotation?
How do you figure? Assuming it is perfectly spherical and centered around the sun: gravitational force exerted by the sun on the "right" side pulls it to the left. gravitational force exerted by the sun on the "left" side pulls it to the right. Same with top-to-bottom and any other direction you can think of. You can see the same principle at work in those little magnetic "floating" balls they sell at novelty/science stores. It uses a magnet to exactly counteract the force of Earth's gravity, and the ball floats in mid-air. All the different forces on each side cancel each other out.
Back to the Ringworld "problem": Even if the sun happens to insist upon hurling out CMEs in one particular direction for awhile or if the light emitted by the sun is more than a bit irregular, the solar wind, even a lot of it, contains realistically zero motive force on any object of reasonable mass.
So, while it might need tiny orbital correction from time to time, as long as you are absorbing all of the sun's energy, I doubt you'll be breaking your back to avoid running a bunch of ion engines now and then.
Wow, that surprised me. I thought they actually used the solar wind to power them, not light. But that is not so. The article says the light produces 9 newtons per square mile (3.5 newtons per km^2) whereas by my calculations, an average strength solar wind stream of 1 proton per cm^3 at 500km/s would only produce about 0.0004 newtons per km^2.
Kind of counterintuitive. I thought the unbelievably small mass of a proton would still outweigh the nearly infinitesimal mass of a photon. But I guess our star puts out enough photons to make it count.
Price breaks? You're getting your imagination confused with reality again, Dr. Science. They bought them at retail prices.
Their final budget was $5.2 million. They bought an 1100 node cluster. Everything except the nodes themselves were volunteer jobs. That means the price of a single node was $5.2M / 1100 = $4,727. Guess what cost almost $5,000 at the time? That's right! A Dual 2.0GHz PowerMac G5.
They didn't even use an educational discount. It must hurt to be so wrong.
The same thing holds for all current forms of solar energy.
Not true. Both hydroelectric and wind are basically solar-powered. And neither of those have much in the way of a set lifetime, nor do they take large amounts of energy to develop.
There are also solar powerplants that use large arrays of mirrors to boil water into steam and run turbines. Again, I don't see these having any specific lifetime so there isn't any cost of recreation, just maintenance (which should be small)
As far as I know, it's basically only photovoltaic cells that are a net-loss of energy. And even that could be fixed by increasing efficiency in the production process or increasing the lifespan of the panels.
Gamers shouldn't be too disappointed since the nickel metal hydride batteries that power the PalmPSone provide a whopping one and a half hours of continuous gameplay
Is that sarcasm, or does he actually believe this?
My laptop can do twice that. Don't even think about comparing that battery life to an actual Gameboy, it's not even in the same league.
Yes, and while you're at it, shoot yourself in the face. It's a lot more fun than trying to figure out autoconf. Trust me, I've done it.
autoconf works. That's about the only good thing anyone could ever say about it.
P.S. is there any fucking reason they feel the need to make new versions incompatible with older config files and vice versa? Have they ever heard of backward compatability?
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What's keeping the fragile space progam in Florida anyway? Politics?
Momentum.
No, seriously.
You see, the Earth is spinning. As we live on the Earth, we are therefore also spinning. At the poles, you are merely rotating around your axis and it is not very interesting at all. On the equator, on the other hand, you are being whipped around at about 1 circumference of the Earth per day, which is a fairly good clip. If one wants to get into space, the centripetal force pushing one outward is increased greatly the closer you get to the equator.
Naturally, NASA wants to take advantage of that, as it makes a measurable difference in payloads and fuel. You'll notice that the ESA and most private space agencies launch from places like Equatorial Guinea. The closer to the equator, the better. It's only the cold-war space programs, such as USA and Russia's, that keep their space launch centres within their own borders.
Unfortunately, they will continue to do so for now, because they've invested so much infrastructure there.
But the fact is, if they're going to move, it wouldn't make sense to move to Arizona. They would move to the equator like all the newer space programs have done.
I'd say that if you're somewhat familiar with Linux/BSD you'll be very comfortable in OS X. Just start in the Terminal and work your way out. If you want your traditional UNIXy tools, install the Fink project (which often leaves much to be desired, especially when installing fink itself, but it'll get the job done)
For me, other essentials include Adium (a multi-protocol instant messenger), Firefox (sorry Safari) USB Overdrive (I find USB mice to move much too slowly even at max system settings), and Meteorologist (little weather-sensing menubar app).
macosxhints also has a good number of tips and tricks that you might want to through.
Other than that, I can't think of any real problems I had migrating over. It takes a few days to get used to, but it really is fairly intuitive. Try to experiment a bit, particularly with your normal 'window' habits. You may find you like to do things a different way. I used to run everything maximized, now I don't ever run something maximized anymore, despite having a smaller screen. I couldn't tell you why, it just feels more comfortable to do things this way for me. If you have any question, just remember there's a 'help' command in every application, the help docs are usually very nice.
Then all you have to do is replace 'taht' with 'that' to get a passingly professional news story.
Microsoft may be the 400lb gorilla, but only in the software side of things.
IBM, on the other hand, is the 4 ton gorilla (ie, King Kong) in the semiconductor and hardware industries. They make somewhere around 90% of the ICs in the world, if I recall correctly.
Intel and AMD are toy companies in comparison. They may be cutting edge, but they're tiny. If you need an analogy, they are like id software. Top-quality stuff, highly respected, but generally not a major industry force. A major consumer force, yes, but not an industry force. They're a very specialized company, and don't seem particularly eager to try and diversify. EA and the other mega-developers view them as outsourced game engine R&D. IBM views AMD and Intel and, on the software side of things, the Open Source community, in the same sort of way. Cheap R&D.
Still, not a bad deal.
Perhaps you should consider that they don't actually shun technology "because it is an evil, a sin!" or something, but rather because they figure that it detracts from their quality of life.
It's not hypocracy, it's a choice. Even moral boycotts usually get ignored at some level of urgency. But this isn't even a moral boycott, it's a pragmatic one.
Since the NCC-1701(A) was a Battlecruiser, unlike all the other Enterprises, it is possible they just felt that CRTs were a more battle-hardened technology than LCDs.
Welp, I guess that's it, I'm officially a Star Trek Continuity Apologist. *sigh*
Actually, nuclear bombs in general, and hydrogen bombs in particular, are not much of a risk for accidental detonation. In most known configurations they require a truly ridiculous amount of precision in the detonation sequence that uses the conventional explosives to fire the nuclear materials together into something that will detonate.
Which isn't to say they wouldn't be dangerous from a molten radioactive metal standpoint if the conventional triggers started going off randomly. But the risk of actual nuclear explosion is very very low.
Say I have an patent from 1970. I can't "extend" it and tack on TCP/IP and then claim I have a patent on the internet.
Oh, but you can!
Not as effectively anymore after a change to the law in 2003, but you still can do it as described. File a patent, keep amending with slightly more detail it to force continuations, and stop amending it once you're happy that existing tech falls under your heavily amended patent.
It's definitely the game players that "don't get it". Although saying that your target audience "doesn't get it" because they want something you view as inferior is a tough argument to support.
In any case, it's certainly true: People (and as a subset of people, gamers) have a marked affinity for rehashes, sequels, and clones. For the most part, they display aversion to anything new or innovative. We humans are strange that way, we find comfort in familiarity. I'm very much guilty of this myself. Rather than an innovative new game I'd much rather play a remake of one of my old favourites, whether that be X-COM, Master of Magic/Orion, Doom, Diablo, whatever, it doesn't matter.
And, regarding your last question, literary devices rarely translate well to a game, just as movie devices rarely translate well to a game. It can be done, but it's a delicate process, and will require changes to be made the literary devices to make it work.
If you let someone use something under a license which cannot be revoked (e.g., GPL) then you cannot turn around and sue them for either patent or copyright infringment.
Oh, but you can. It may not be legally valid to do so, but would you be willing to bring it all the way up to the supreme court if necessary? If you wouldn't, who would? The answer: Nobody.
Oh hooray! Some completely unscientific, unresearched, blown out of proportion anti-green propaganda with not a single damn link to back it up. I'm so impressed!
... We put solar panels in space and beam the energy to the surface. Exact oppisite problem.
We put up solar panels everywhere we possibly could. We get unlimited free energy. After a few years, the temprature of the Earth begins to drop due to the fact that the energy which would have been converted to heat is now used for other things
Ignoring the fact that the amount of change we even despite our self-important belief that human beings cover the entire Earth, could possisbly make to the self-correcting climate system is basically infinitesimal, and also ignoring the fact that heating up the Earth is already being done by greenhouse gasses and deforestation, did it ever occur to your divine wisdom that perhaps we could use both of the systems you berate in your post? We could regulate the Earth's climate ourselves. Why not, we've started taking over for Mother Nature in basically every other area of managing Earth's ecosystems, and it works decently well although we still get reminders of our inadequacy from time to time.
We put up big windmils everywhere. All the birds fly into them.
One link please. Just one. A single link.
Have you ever even seen a wind turbine? In your life, have you seen a single one? Have you noticed how the blades get stained red with the blood of animals? No? Perhaps because they don't? Because the blades spin at around 10 rotations per minute. The shock of being hit by one of these is right up there with having a baseball bat pressed against your shoulder. Yes, being beaten to death with a baseball bat would suck, do you think the same thing would happen if it was only lightly pressed against you? Of course not. We're talking about great big windmills slowly spinning in the wind, not jet turbine compressors.
Birds face much more danger of running into buildings, especially modern all-glass-exterior buildings. Why don't you go about wasting your effort trying to get rid of those.
[Waves] Same prob as wind.
And that would be? The scale of the ocean probably eludes you, but let me offer you a hint: IT'S HUGE. You know the saying, "it's like pissing in the ocean", well, tidal power is basically like that. By the way, tidal power is actually graviational power that comes from the moon's orbit.
You know what's more of an environmental concern? Nuclear power plants (this will include fusion, sorry) that eject their (now very hot) cooling water into lakes, rivers, and oceans. That kills fish, and disrupts water currents.
Oh, and not to scare you, but the north atlantic conveyor current is showing signs of shutting down already, despite the fact that we really have no tidal power plants to speak of, and it has nothing to do with that. It happens. It has happened long before humans around, and it's going to happen again. Get used to it. Currents change. Climates change. We may all die, but it's sort of unlikely, given what a resourceful bunch of lunatics we are.
Let's take heat from the crust that escapes anyway and use it to drive turbines.
I'm going to ignore the silliness of the claim that increasing the pressure inside the earth by a few kilopascals here and there, a place where the pressure is measured in giga- or terapascals will make any difference whatsoever in whether gigantic plates of rock will move or not. By the way, that increase in pressure you presume isn't even necessarily true as the heat is generally captured after it has already been released from the crust and would otherwise be entering the atmosphere (see section above about whether adding or removing heat from the climate makes is a big deal).
Other than that, you might have a point there.
Yes, our eyes only have three types of cones, but unlike the color projected by a TV, they are not designed to respond to just one frequency of red, one of green, and one of blue. they have broad, overlapping response curves, each cone giving a different level of signal depending on the frequency of the light. The brain figures out the color based on the response of all three types of cones, not just the one that is active.
The stuff above is fact, the rest of this post is my pointless, unscientific, meandering hypothesis:
Obviously we use this concept with RGB signals to create colors like yellow, by tickling both the red and green cones at once with neighboring phosphors, but since the two colors are coming from very very slightly different places, the brain is not necessarily satisfied that it really is the color yellow. Basically, the more spectrum we can cover natively, the less chance there will be of someone's brain mumbling "that color doesn't seem... right"
For most intents and purposes (all that I've come across), cygwin is effectively seamless, and is at least as reliable as Windows is.
Obviously, though, you should take an intelligent approach. Some things don't make much sense to run under cygwin. cron comes to mind. It's available, but if you want it to be a little more integrated, I'd invest a little bit of effort to get those things that need to be cronned running as a windows service or under task scheduler or something native to Windows. Not only will it be more efficient and more intuitive for the Windows admin, it may be more reliable too. There are plenty of other examples too, I'm sure.
Anyway, cygwin will have no trouble at all handling the scripts, but I don't think simply dropping everything into a cygwin installation is the nicest way to go. Put a little effort into it and cygwin will serve you well for the rest.
You can see the headlines now, 'Six astronauts die to fix a bloody telescope we dont really need'.
Yes, I sure do remember all those headlines blasting NASA after the Columbia Accident happened: '7 astronauts killed after performing pointless science experiments'
Most of the things that seem trivial to the public in space research are actually very important, and I've been amazed to discover that the media seems to realize this as well. The HST has done far more for astronomy than produce pretty pictures (which are important in their own way -- getting the public involved is something scientists continue to struggle with as it's surprisingly beneficial). The HST has developed the foundation of current cosmology and astronomy faster than any instrument before it. The discoveries it has made don't seem significant yet, but once the rest of the house has been built on top of it people might start to think it's a little more worthwhile.
I do agree with the majority of your post though. Robots are the way to go for most missions. There is plenty that humans could be doing up there that doesn't involve such menial tasks, and the more often they have to go up there and do these repetive and boring jobs, the more likely there's going to be an accident. If a robot gets blown off into space, no big deal. If a person does, that's a little more sucky, for them and just in general.
Probably a good idea: this is the first comment I saw on this story, this particular pageview was the one that gave me modpoints, and yes, I am left-handed.
;)
(not that I actually would've modded you anything other than +1 Funny.
You are misunderstanding. He or she is trying to say that even the most computer-illiterate person around knows what iTunes is. The suggestion that knowing what spyware is defines computer literacy is somewhat silly, but there you go.
I don't care if it uses two screens or not. Portable, wireless multiplayer Goldeneye? Sign me up!
Because it is a solid, it won't remain in "orbit", but will degenerate, with one edge sliding into the sun, in spite of rotation?
How do you figure? Assuming it is perfectly spherical and centered around the sun: gravitational force exerted by the sun on the "right" side pulls it to the left. gravitational force exerted by the sun on the "left" side pulls it to the right. Same with top-to-bottom and any other direction you can think of. You can see the same principle at work in those little magnetic "floating" balls they sell at novelty/science stores. It uses a magnet to exactly counteract the force of Earth's gravity, and the ball floats in mid-air. All the different forces on each side cancel each other out.
Back to the Ringworld "problem": Even if the sun happens to insist upon hurling out CMEs in one particular direction for awhile or if the light emitted by the sun is more than a bit irregular, the solar wind, even a lot of it, contains realistically zero motive force on any object of reasonable mass.
So, while it might need tiny orbital correction from time to time, as long as you are absorbing all of the sun's energy, I doubt you'll be breaking your back to avoid running a bunch of ion engines now and then.
Wow, that surprised me. I thought they actually used the solar wind to power them, not light. But that is not so. The article says the light produces 9 newtons per square mile (3.5 newtons per km^2) whereas by my calculations, an average strength solar wind stream of 1 proton per cm^3 at 500km/s would only produce about 0.0004 newtons per km^2.
Kind of counterintuitive. I thought the unbelievably small mass of a proton would still outweigh the nearly infinitesimal mass of a photon. But I guess our star puts out enough photons to make it count.
Cool, anyway.
Price breaks? You're getting your imagination confused with reality again, Dr. Science. They bought them at retail prices.
Their final budget was $5.2 million. They bought an 1100 node cluster. Everything except the nodes themselves were volunteer jobs. That means the price of a single node was $5.2M / 1100 = $4,727. Guess what cost almost $5,000 at the time? That's right! A Dual 2.0GHz PowerMac G5.
They didn't even use an educational discount. It must hurt to be so wrong.
The same thing holds for all current forms of solar energy.
Not true. Both hydroelectric and wind are basically solar-powered. And neither of those have much in the way of a set lifetime, nor do they take large amounts of energy to develop.
There are also solar powerplants that use large arrays of mirrors to boil water into steam and run turbines. Again, I don't see these having any specific lifetime so there isn't any cost of recreation, just maintenance (which should be small)
As far as I know, it's basically only photovoltaic cells that are a net-loss of energy. And even that could be fixed by increasing efficiency in the production process or increasing the lifespan of the panels.
Ahh, *that* would make a lot more sense.
Someone mod this guy up.
Gamers shouldn't be too disappointed since the nickel metal hydride batteries that power the PalmPSone provide a whopping one and a half hours of continuous gameplay
Is that sarcasm, or does he actually believe this?
My laptop can do twice that. Don't even think about comparing that battery life to an actual Gameboy, it's not even in the same league.
Yes, and while you're at it, shoot yourself in the face. It's a lot more fun than trying to figure out autoconf. Trust me, I've done it.
autoconf works. That's about the only good thing anyone could ever say about it.
P.S. is there any fucking reason they feel the need to make new versions incompatible with older config files and vice versa? Have they ever heard of backward compatability?
I've got acceleron in my computer.
Woohoo, that was the worst pun ever! Someone shoot me.