What if people were hovering around the Sony stations simply to play games, and they didn't want to go anywhere else because they couldn't play games? That means that Sony has an unfair advantage to attracting people
You mean Sony might have been guilty of monopolizing the crowd's attention?
Hell, no wonder Microsoft were annoyed. After all, they have the monopoly on monopolies don't they?
There's absolutely no doubt that OS/2 was a vastly superior product to Windows (and probably still is).
The only problem was that IBM really didn't have a very clever strategy for dealing with the competition from Microsoft.
Their single biggest mistake was to treat developers as a cash-cow rather than a valuable resource.
I did some development work for OS/2 and it cost me a fortune to tool up with all the necessary compilers, libraries, tools and documentation.
Most developers at the time already had the tools I needed to develop Windows 3 programs so it made little sense for IBM to raise a barrier to developers by charging like a wounded bull for its tools -- but they did.
IBM mistakenly thought that they could just spend $50 million on advertising the product to the end-user and ignore the needs, complaints and hearts of the developer community.
They paid dearly for this neglect -- simply because it resulted in a dearth of good quality "off the shelf" OS/2 applications to rival those offered for Windows.
Even worse, IBM kept touting its great ability to run Windows 3 programs alongside native OS/2 apps.
How smart was that? Not very!
Faced with IBM demanding outrageous prices for new tools (and even more outrageous upgrade fees for the same tools) -- or simply writing Windows code that OS/2 users could run anyway -- the choice was obvious.
Mainstream programmers kept pumping out Windows applications while almost completely ignoring OS/2. Oh sure, there were small groups of devout OS/2 developers who cherished the technical superiority of the operating system -- but that old catch-22 soon popped up.
Despite all that expensive advertising, consumers said "why buy OS/2 just to run Windows 3 software when you can buy Windows 3 for less?" Don't forget that OS/2 really needed about twice as much (expensive in 1992) RAM to properly run a Win3 program than did Win3 itself.
All in all, the public weren't about to pay extra without some real benefits -- and there wouldn't be any such benefits until there were enough native OS/2 apps to rival Windows apps.
And (here it comes) there wouldn't be enough native OS/2 apps until there were more OS/2 developers -- who were not about to fork out the price of a good used car just to write code for the tiny community of OS/2 users.
If IBM had half a brain they would have realised that the hurdle to the acceptance of any new OS is the availability of applications.
In stead of trying to screw big profits out of developers they should have given away their tools, SDKs, etc. This would have endeared them to the developer community (rather than alienate them as they did) and the result would likely have been some damned fine apps that matched Win3 versions for functionality and blew them away from a reliability perspective.
Of course this is what's happening now with Linux but I fear that it's simply too late to overtake the beast. Ten years ago there were many more large software companies and competing with Microsoft was hard but not impossible. These days you're sunk before you get your boat to the water.
Maybe 20-20 hindsight is a wonderful thing -- but I was telling them this ten years ago -- except they were so arrogant that they felt they didn't need to go out of their way to help developers and that end-users were far more important.
Having designed, built and flown a lot of conventional and unorthodox model aircraft (including flying wings, flying disks, canards, lifting-body craft, a flying lawnmower and a flying dog-house) in my time, I have to say that the craft looks decidedly unstable to me.
All that vertical surface at the wing-tips will produce a very significant dutch-rolling tendency.
While I'm sure that such instability could be compensated for using a fly-by-wire computer system, I can't see any aerodynamic benefit to having such a large amount of tip-fin area.
Tip-fins are usually used to reduce the size of vorticies produced when the high pressure air below the wing meets the low pressure air above it.
At high angles of attack, these vorticies create huge amounts of drag and reduce the wing's efficiency quite substantially.
You'll notice that some modern passenger jets use tip-fins as a method of reducing tip vorticies and they show quite significant improvements in fuel-efficiency as a result -- however, I believe that the 747 required extra vertical stabilizer area to compensate for the destabilizing effect of the tip-fins when they were added.
However, the fins on the Russian craft are much larger than would be necessary to obtain the required vortex-reducing effect and smack of being the work of a cartoonist rather than an aerodynamic engineer.
This mock-up looks more like just a marketing tool than a genuine attempt to produce an accurate facsimile of a workable design.
It makes sense really -- don't waste any money on design or testing until you've built a shuttle-like plywood mock-up to gauge the level of interest and maybe even collect a few booking deposits from wannabe travellers.
When judging this matter it would pay to remember that most security people are probably just average Joes and probably never even heard of this guy before.
They had an obligation to verify his claims and to check that some guy who turns up in a "wired" state isn't just another crazy terrorist.
That they knew nothing about the technology or the way it was being used probably explains why the incident was so problematic.
But hey, this is a post Sept-11 environment and if you turn up at an airport, wired up like a Christmas tree, then you're going to have to expect that you're going to draw the unwelcomed attention of security.
Just imagine if they'd took his claims at face value and it turned out that he had five pounds of C4 up his backside, wired to a detonator under his tongue, controlled by a timer in his cool dark glasses.
Better safe than sorry.
Unfortunately, unless we want to replace those brawny security guys with ComSci PhDs then this kind of thing will happen.
I wonder exactly how cooperative the guy was, or whether he might perhaps have been a little arrogant or outraged that his word and documentation had been challenged? Remember -- he's the one who'd just spent hours in the cramped confinement of a commercial flight and that makes most of us a bit snotty sometimes.
I've been telecommuting (mainly) for over 15 years now (even before the Net was widely available)and have found that you really need some redundancy for both your phone and internet connection.
It's pretty easy to get a couple of flat-rate internet accounts which will generally protect you from all but the worst disasters.
As for phone lines -- I have three lines coming into my house (voice, fax, modem) which gives me a little redundancy but, unfortunately, it seems that when one line goes out, so do the other two.
For this reason I also have a cellphone and cellular data modem on the shelf for "worst case" situations.
Of course you also need a spare PC, a good UPS and a backup generator if you really want 100% up-time (yes I have all of the above).
As a result of these measures, I've never lost more than an hour or two due to ISP or telco foul-ups.
The price of this redundancy is nothing when you compare it to the loss of a day's work.
I run a daily Net-news and commentary site at Aardvark.co.nz and in order to cover the cost of bandwidth and hosting without resorting to carrying front-page advertising, I invite regular readers to offer a donation.
The level of donations is covering my hosting costs and some people have even donated twice -- which is very encouraging.
However, I have been regularly pestered by companies which want to advertise on my site (it's the most popular Net-news/commentary site in NZ) so in order to accomodate them without burdening regular visitors, I've created
separate page that carries the ads.
The idea behind this is that those who want to offer a donation can do so and get the warm fuzzies that come from such philanthropy -- while those who can't afford or don't want to pay can, if they so choose, visit the advertising page and generate revenues for the site that way.
Of course that still leaves those who will neither donate nor support the advertisers -- but hey, you'll always get people who fall into that classification.
My philosophy is that if you provide good quality content in a fair and resonable way, you will end up being paid what it's worth to those who use it. If you find you're not getting any donations then obviously you need to improve your content to increase its value.
Dial... up? I think... I remember that. Something is coming back to me... Ahhhhgh!... Bad memories... surfacing... Ah!
Hey, I'm not from the USA. Thanks to a very effective market-monopoly by our largest Telco who has exclusive rights to the copper, there are less than 25,000 DSL subscribers in the whole of New Zealand.
And then, even if you are lucky enough to live in an area where DSL is available, you face the prospect of
paying by the megabyte for data sent/received (including traffic generated by DOS attacks, spam etc).
But wait -- it gets worse!
This large telco also appears to have placed severe throttling on P2P traffic such that some people are reporting speeds as low as 1KB/S when using the cheapest DSL accounts.
You guys in the USA should think yourselves lucky!
What? Do slashdot users actually surf with their graphics turned on?
I don't -- and, as a result, I haven't seen a banner in ages. All I get is the outline of the rectangle where the ad should appear.
Believe me -- when you're still using a dial-up connection, turning off the graphics makes all the difference in the world as far as surfing speed goes.
Re:Simple solution, work for yourself
on
Do You Like Your Job?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Mind informing us what line of work you are self-employed in and how you go about your business. Frankly, it seems your example is one of what not to do. What pitfalls can us 'young'ns' avoid?
After I resigned as a resource manager for a large Telco, I started up my own online communications company (back in the days when 2400bps modems were the standard and 9600 was truly exotic).
I was too early -- it was only 1989 and email wasn't even a feature on local area networks, let alone nation-wide ones.
However, I sold that company and started up a software venture that developed some very successful email/fax bridging software. I also sold that company as well when it started to get so big that I was entering "management drift"
About that time the Net really started to take off (1995) so I started up several online ventures including a couple of news sites
7am.com and
Aardvark.
For several years I ran 7am.com with the aid of just one US-based reporter which meant that I had to be "on call" 24/7 for 365 days of the year. That was really hard.
Making it worse was the fact that I live in a timezone that is up to 14 hours ahead of the USA which meant that I had to work from 10pm through to about 5pm local-time -- snatching just four or five hours a day in the late afternoon/early-evening.
Thanks to the efficiencies of being a small operation (and some smart marketing) I built 7am.com up into a syndicated news service that provided news headlines to over 200,000 websites by way of its Java newsticker which was loaded about a million times a day (not bad for a 1.5 person operation).
I eventually sold 66% of that business to some investors because it needed to grow and, once again, I didn't want to drift into a management role. Unfortunately the investors had no clue about where the value was and, in my opinion, really stuffed things up.
With the money I made from selling part of my shareholding, I started building jet engines (yeah, I'm the guy with the jet-powered gokart that featured on slashdot a while back).
Now I'm working 14/7 trying to keep up with the orders (a little accident a while back didn't help at all) and am in the process of organising a number of licensing deals so that I can get back to R&D rather than production work. The obvious alternative was to employ people to do what I do now and move myself into a managerial role (no, that ain't going to happen!).
You want tips about being self-employed?
1. Make sure you like what you're doing.
It's really easy to put in the hours and produce good quality work if you're enjoying yourself.
If you're not enjoying yourself than it can be awfully hard to roll out of bed and you'll find yourself looking for excuses not to work -- which means you'll probably piss people off and won't make any money.
2. Get an expert to do your taxes.
I have fought with the taxman for years -- even went to court over a tax issue and won. Unfortunately, you can't beat the system and as we left the court-room, one of the people from the tax office said "we'll get you" -- and they kept the pressure on right up until I got an professional to file my taxes for me.
Besides which -- I find all that paperwork to be really boring -- and therefore it's the kind of thing which you're tempted to leave to the last moment -- not good.
3. Don't underestimate how much money you'll need.
If possible, ease yourself into self-employment. It's much easier if you can work on your own stuff evenings and weekends until you're making more (tax-paid) money from it than you get from your day-job. Then you can dump the day-job, safe in the knowledge that you're not going to be living off your savings.
And remember, billing someone isn't the same as banking the money. Some companies will try to delay paying you for as long as they can -- and that can really screw you up if you don't have money in the bank to tide you over.
4. Get some good business advice.
You might be the best programmer in the world - but that don't mean squat unless you've got a plan. Spend a few bucks to get some quality business advice. There are people out there who will take you through all the steps -- right from working out exactly what it is you'll be offering customers through to the details of incorporation.
You need to stay in touch with these people and get a regular checkup to make sure that you're sticking to your business plan.
5. Keep your overheads down.
I've been working from home ever since I went out on my own -- and it's great.
Not having to suffer a long commute every day means that I'm already at least a couple of hours ahead of those who have to travel to their office and back. I also save money on gas, wear and tear, parking and the like.
Remember -- the days of dot-com excesses are long gone. Unless you can find someone to bankroll you with millions of dollars in venture capital, the money you'll be spending is probably your own.
However, while on the subject of working from home, it really pays to set yourself up an office in a separate room if you can. This provides a virtual border between work and play.
If you set yourself up in the living room or your bedroom you'll be sitting right next to temptation such as the TV, your bed and other stuff which sometimes looks a lot more attractive than a subtle bug lurking in a piece of code you've already been pawing over for hours.
Hey, I could write a book on this stuff -- hmmm, maybe that could be my next project;-)
Simple solution, work for yourself
on
Do You Like Your Job?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I've been working for myself since 1989.
I always found it incredibly difficult to suffer the incompetence of "managers" who, more often than not, get paid far too much money to do far too little work -- at least that's what I thought.
Since becoming self-employed however, I have a much greater respect for the time, effort and skill required to "manage" a business.
In fact, I've deliberately kept my own operations small whenever possible so as to avoid getting caught in the inevitable drift towards management that occurs when you start expanding and employing others. I'd rather remain down and dirty at the coalface.
One unfortunate side-effect of being self-employed in a fast-moving and highly competitive industry is that you can find yourself working 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I haven't had a vacation for over a decade and most years Christmas passed by almost without me noticing.
This type of thing is okay when you're young and you can survive on 4 hours sleep a night with a constant diet of Coke and pizza -- but I'm knocking on 50 now and it's getting bloody hard.
Sometimes I dream of retiring to become just another employee. Let someone else worry about paying my salary, keeping the overdraft topped up and filing endless government forms -- I'll just pop in for 8-9 hours a day and go fishing on the weekends.
If you're thinking of bitching about management, don't forget the old saying "never judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes."
There are some real asshole managers out there -- but then again, there are also some real asshole employees.
If you're really ticked off -- break away and start your own corporation.
Clearly using free-floating weather balloons has a number of limitations and disadvantages.
Now we know that NASA has great plans for its solar-powered airplane -- including acting as a semi-permanent flying repeater-station, but I wonder if smaller, cheaper options might not be available.
For example... what about a much smaller (say 20-30 foot span) autonomous craft designed to soar thermals during the day (while charging its batteries and gaining as much altitude as it can) -- then revert to battery power and/or gradually descend during the hours of darkness.
If the energy required to keep these craft airborn in the longer nights of winter was greater than that availble to be stored during the day then they could carry a fuel-load to power a high-efficiency internal combustion engine (probably a very small diesel engine). Every week or so the craft would have to land for refueling and maintenance -- but that's not a big deal.
Just like the US military's Predator RPV, they could be programmed to land on a runway set aside specially for the purpose.
The cost of a smaller craft, particularly one that wasn't totally reliant on solar-cells, would likely be much less than NASA's efforts -- thus allowing more of them to be built for a given budget.
By using more craft, they could cruise at a much lower altititude than either the weather balloon or the NASA craft.
Using modern composites, low cost GPS, and other "affordable" technologies, such a craft could likely be built for less than US$10K.
Assuming a 50% duty cycle, a fleet of 10 craft could cover a huge area at a much lower cost than towers, and with the ability to dynamically vary the coverage area if required -- simply by repositioning the craft.
Imagine if there was once advanced, possibly even intelligent, life on Mars.
Would it be too far-fetched to speculate that perhaps that all higher life forms were wiped out by some virus or bacterial disease?
With the plant and animal life gone, the climate of the planet would change radically -- to the extent that we see today - but the cause of the catastrophy could stil be lurking in the soil.
What guarantees do we have that bringing back a sample of soil or rock from Mars wouldn't expose this planet to the same catastrophic outcome?
From what I read, scientists are still debating whether those odd fossil-like oddities discovered in meteoric fragments from Mars are actually petrified bacteria.
I think it makes a lot of sense to take every possible precaution when it comes to bringing stuff back from Mars. It might even be a good idea to do the initial analysis up in the ISS just in case it's really bad news. After all, how do we know that we could actually contain a pathogen such as that which might be returned from the red planet?
Anyone who buys a brand-name PC needs their head read and deserves everything (every problem) they get.
I swore off buying "big name" PCs back in 1989 when I spent a huge amount of $ on an IBM PS/2 model 70. (20MHZ 386 CPU, 4MB RAM, 120MB HD)
Within 11 months the PSU failed but was replaced under warranty.
At 14 months the 120 MB HDD died (stiction) and IBM wanted an extortionate amount for one of their proprietory replacements. In the end I simply junked the PS/2 and, for less than they were going to charge me to replace the drive, I bought a no-name clone with twice the processing power, four times the memory and a 220MB HD.
Then there was a friend of mine who bought a DEC laptop and ended up having to pay nearly ten times as much for RAM as I paid for the same amount of extra memory on my no-name clone laptop. And when his LCD display crapped out, they took eight weeks to fix it and wouldn't even give him a loaner!
At the risk of generalizing, I have to say that a lot of the money you hand over when you buy a "big name" PC goes into advertising the brand and not into providing you with better quality or service.
These days I buy good, reliable no-name clones and I know that they are:
1. easily upgradable
2. easily repaired with readily available parts
3. great value for money
4. compatible with just about every OS/app I try
The shop I buy my machines from will even sell me a PC sans Windows -- and without bitching about it! But if I do buy a machine with Windows, I get a legit copy of the disk and certificate.
Given that the activation code is used to secure XP from unauthorized use -- I guess you could say that this is a security issue.
Given Microsoft's rather lackluster track-record in the area of security, is it any wonder that their own protection scheme has (allegedly) been cracked so soon?
Many years ago (about 1989), I decided to demonstrate to some of the IT staff I was supervising (as PC-resource manager) just how delicate these hard drives were.
We proceded to pull the cover of a 20MB Seagate HD (an ST225 or something from memory).
The drive was then reconnected and spun up.
Naturally, having read about the risks of head crashes and the effects of even microscopic specs of cigarette smoke, I expected the damned thing to at least lose data -- and hopefully come to a screeching halt with a fine shower of iron oxide dust everywhere.
Well that damned drive kept on working for several days without missing a beat.
The machine with the open drive was on a LAN and users could access it to check whether it was still running -- so it got quite a thrashing.
Eventually we got so frustrated that we deliberately blew smoke onto it -- and still nothing happened.
Even blowing dust directly at the platters still didn't kill it.
After a week of operation without its lid, the novelty wore off and we simply took to dropping it from ever-increasing heights to try and get a head-crash.
Eventually we managed to ding it up pretty bad -- but my smart move kind of backfired. Instead of convincing the staff that hard drives were delicate and things to be treated with great care, it turns out that they were (at least in those days) a hell of a lot more robust (at least in the short term) than we gave them credit for.
Of course since those early days, I've lost numerous Seagate drives to mechanical failures. I have a couple of 2.5GB units that both dropped their heads within a few weeks of each other -- and they were sitting quietly in a tower case with a UPS and no exposure to vibration or excessive temperature fluctuations.
Hey, aren't Google breaching the copyright of at least some of those whose pages are included in the sample data being used -- especially the CDROM's worth that will be sent out?
As for the cost-savings involved in running such a contest, I expect the fact that they only have to pay $10,000 will be more than offset by the fact that they'll have to sort through a mountain of crappy submissions. That'll take a lot of people a lot of time.
You say "For those who don't know, the signal is also buffered by several seconds which keeps it from dropping out. It works great"
How the hell can it handle drop-outs when it's a one-way data-stream?
CD players and media streamed over a 2-way link can be buffered against drop-outs because you can always go back and re-read the lost data. How on earth are you supposed to do this with a one-way satellite stream.
I love the way people talk about the "pure, clean" nature of hydrogen as a fuel.
Unfortunately the reality is that it has a long list of problems associated with it -- and a number of them are environmental.
As others have pointed out -- it's a fuel with a very low energy density (by volume), it's very difficult/expensive to store, and most of it is produced by "dirty" methods such as the cracking of hydrocarbons which come from -- you guessed it -- oil!
In short, hydrogen is a fuel for the academics amongst us -- those who find the easiest way to deal with reality is to ignore it.
You know -- these are the kind of people who write computer software that does no error-checking on its input data. When such a program crashes, the response tends to be "well don't enter bad data then."
Unfortunately, if we want to write software for the general public -- or in this case if we want to create a practical, clean fuel, then reality can't be dismissed.
We've got a long way to go before hydrogen becomes everything it's cracked up to be.
By the way, what ever happened to those breakthroughs in solar-cell technology that were going to bring us ultra-low cost energy from the sun?
Bah... humbug... I think I'll just go and burn a few more gallons of dinosaur-extract in my pulsejet:-)
Way back in the dark dawn of the desktop PC age, I was a programmer and service tech for the local importer of Intertec Superbrain computers.
These were a CP/M based machine with two Z80 processors (the second one was dedicated to disk I/O but configured so that the main CPU was placed in a busy-wait loop while the IO occured. Obviously this was a crappy hardware solution to a problem caused by an inability to write decent firmware on Intertec's part.
Anyway -- these machines were originally designed for the US market, so the PSUs were all 110V. Around these parts the mains voltage is 230V so they included a 230V-110V transformer with machines shipped here -- and it was mounted inside the all-encompassing case that also incorporated the screen and keyboard.
Cooling on the machines was by way of a weak fan that exhausted down onto the table beneathe the machine. It was barely adequate for the 110V machine so when the extra heat from the transformer was added to the thermal input -- the machines began to overheat.
The manufacturer was useless -- offering no suggestions and losing all interest in supporting the product.
The solution was pretty simple -- use a bigger fan.
However -- there was a rather unfortunate side-effect. When you turned on the computer, the fan-blast would blow every single piece of paper off your desk. Funny as hell -- the first time.
Although attempts were made with the fan reversed so that it blew up into the machine, a couple of machines expired after a sheet of paper found its way under the case and got sucked up against the fan grill -- effectively stopping all cooling.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean Sony might have been guilty of monopolizing the crowd's attention?
Hell, no wonder Microsoft were annoyed. After all, they have the monopoly on monopolies don't they?
There's absolutely no doubt that OS/2 was a vastly superior product to Windows (and probably still is).
The only problem was that IBM really didn't have a very clever strategy for dealing with the competition from Microsoft.
Their single biggest mistake was to treat developers as a cash-cow rather than a valuable resource.
I did some development work for OS/2 and it cost me a fortune to tool up with all the necessary compilers, libraries, tools and documentation.
Most developers at the time already had the tools I needed to develop Windows 3 programs so it made little sense for IBM to raise a barrier to developers by charging like a wounded bull for its tools -- but they did.
IBM mistakenly thought that they could just spend $50 million on advertising the product to the end-user and ignore the needs, complaints and hearts of the developer community.
They paid dearly for this neglect -- simply because it resulted in a dearth of good quality "off the shelf" OS/2 applications to rival those offered for Windows.
Even worse, IBM kept touting its great ability to run Windows 3 programs alongside native OS/2 apps.
How smart was that? Not very!
Faced with IBM demanding outrageous prices for new tools (and even more outrageous upgrade fees for the same tools) -- or simply writing Windows code that OS/2 users could run anyway -- the choice was obvious.
Mainstream programmers kept pumping out Windows applications while almost completely ignoring OS/2. Oh sure, there were small groups of devout OS/2 developers who cherished the technical superiority of the operating system -- but that old catch-22 soon popped up.
Despite all that expensive advertising, consumers said "why buy OS/2 just to run Windows 3 software when you can buy Windows 3 for less?" Don't forget that OS/2 really needed about twice as much (expensive in 1992) RAM to properly run a Win3 program than did Win3 itself.
All in all, the public weren't about to pay extra without some real benefits -- and there wouldn't be any such benefits until there were enough native OS/2 apps to rival Windows apps.
And (here it comes) there wouldn't be enough native OS/2 apps until there were more OS/2 developers -- who were not about to fork out the price of a good used car just to write code for the tiny community of OS/2 users.
If IBM had half a brain they would have realised that the hurdle to the acceptance of any new OS is the availability of applications.
In stead of trying to screw big profits out of developers they should have given away their tools, SDKs, etc. This would have endeared them to the developer community (rather than alienate them as they did) and the result would likely have been some damned fine apps that matched Win3 versions for functionality and blew them away from a reliability perspective.
Of course this is what's happening now with Linux but I fear that it's simply too late to overtake the beast. Ten years ago there were many more large software companies and competing with Microsoft was hard but not impossible. These days you're sunk before you get your boat to the water.
Maybe 20-20 hindsight is a wonderful thing -- but I was telling them this ten years ago -- except they were so arrogant that they felt they didn't need to go out of their way to help developers and that end-users were far more important.
Having designed, built and flown a lot of conventional and unorthodox model aircraft (including flying wings, flying disks, canards, lifting-body craft, a flying lawnmower and a flying dog-house) in my time, I have to say that the craft looks decidedly unstable to me.
All that vertical surface at the wing-tips will produce a very significant dutch-rolling tendency.
While I'm sure that such instability could be compensated for using a fly-by-wire computer system, I can't see any aerodynamic benefit to having such a large amount of tip-fin area.
Tip-fins are usually used to reduce the size of vorticies produced when the high pressure air below the wing meets the low pressure air above it.
At high angles of attack, these vorticies create huge amounts of drag and reduce the wing's efficiency quite substantially.
You'll notice that some modern passenger jets use tip-fins as a method of reducing tip vorticies and they show quite significant improvements in fuel-efficiency as a result -- however, I believe that the 747 required extra vertical stabilizer area to compensate for the destabilizing effect of the tip-fins when they were added.
However, the fins on the Russian craft are much larger than would be necessary to obtain the required vortex-reducing effect and smack of being the work of a cartoonist rather than an aerodynamic engineer.
This mock-up looks more like just a marketing tool than a genuine attempt to produce an accurate facsimile of a workable design.
It makes sense really -- don't waste any money on design or testing until you've built a shuttle-like plywood mock-up to gauge the level of interest and maybe even collect a few booking deposits from wannabe travellers.
When judging this matter it would pay to remember that most security people are probably just average Joes and probably never even heard of this guy before.
They had an obligation to verify his claims and to check that some guy who turns up in a "wired" state isn't just another crazy terrorist.
That they knew nothing about the technology or the way it was being used probably explains why the incident was so problematic.
But hey, this is a post Sept-11 environment and if you turn up at an airport, wired up like a Christmas tree, then you're going to have to expect that you're going to draw the unwelcomed attention of security.
Just imagine if they'd took his claims at face value and it turned out that he had five pounds of C4 up his backside, wired to a detonator under his tongue, controlled by a timer in his cool dark glasses.
Better safe than sorry.
Unfortunately, unless we want to replace those brawny security guys with ComSci PhDs then this kind of thing will happen.
I wonder exactly how cooperative the guy was, or whether he might perhaps have been a little arrogant or outraged that his word and documentation had been challenged? Remember -- he's the one who'd just spent hours in the cramped confinement of a commercial flight and that makes most of us a bit snotty sometimes.
Don't these science guys go to the movies?
The solution to desktop fusion is simple:
You take P and F's deuterium electrolysis experiment and stick it inside a sonoluminescence vessel.
The electrolysis produces the bubbles, the sound waves batter them so hard that fusion is created within them.
Hell, if Keanau Reeves can do it in the movie Chain Reaction then surely these researcher types can manage it.
(big fat grin)
I've been telecommuting (mainly) for over 15 years now (even before the Net was widely available)and have found that you really need some redundancy for both your phone and internet connection.
It's pretty easy to get a couple of flat-rate internet accounts which will generally protect you from all but the worst disasters.
As for phone lines -- I have three lines coming into my house (voice, fax, modem) which gives me a little redundancy but, unfortunately, it seems that when one line goes out, so do the other two.
For this reason I also have a cellphone and cellular data modem on the shelf for "worst case" situations.
Of course you also need a spare PC, a good UPS and a backup generator if you really want 100% up-time (yes I have all of the above).
As a result of these measures, I've never lost more than an hour or two due to ISP or telco foul-ups.
The price of this redundancy is nothing when you compare it to the loss of a day's work.
The level of donations is covering my hosting costs and some people have even donated twice -- which is very encouraging.
However, I have been regularly pestered by companies which want to advertise on my site (it's the most popular Net-news/commentary site in NZ) so in order to accomodate them without burdening regular visitors, I've created separate page that carries the ads.
The idea behind this is that those who want to offer a donation can do so and get the warm fuzzies that come from such philanthropy -- while those who can't afford or don't want to pay can, if they so choose, visit the advertising page and generate revenues for the site that way.
Of course that still leaves those who will neither donate nor support the advertisers -- but hey, you'll always get people who fall into that classification.
My philosophy is that if you provide good quality content in a fair and resonable way, you will end up being paid what it's worth to those who use it. If you find you're not getting any donations then obviously you need to improve your content to increase its value.
Hey, I'm not from the USA. Thanks to a very effective market-monopoly by our largest Telco who has exclusive rights to the copper, there are less than 25,000 DSL subscribers in the whole of New Zealand.
And then, even if you are lucky enough to live in an area where DSL is available, you face the prospect of paying by the megabyte for data sent/received (including traffic generated by DOS attacks, spam etc).
But wait -- it gets worse!
This large telco also appears to have placed severe throttling on P2P traffic such that some people are reporting speeds as low as 1KB/S when using the cheapest DSL accounts.
You guys in the USA should think yourselves lucky!
What? Do slashdot users actually surf with their graphics turned on?
I don't -- and, as a result, I haven't seen a banner in ages. All I get is the outline of the rectangle where the ad should appear.
Believe me -- when you're still using a dial-up connection, turning off the graphics makes all the difference in the world as far as surfing speed goes.
After I resigned as a resource manager for a large Telco, I started up my own online communications company (back in the days when 2400bps modems were the standard and 9600 was truly exotic).
I was too early -- it was only 1989 and email wasn't even a feature on local area networks, let alone nation-wide ones.
However, I sold that company and started up a software venture that developed some very successful email/fax bridging software. I also sold that company as well when it started to get so big that I was entering "management drift"
About that time the Net really started to take off (1995) so I started up several online ventures including a couple of news sites 7am.com and Aardvark.
For several years I ran 7am.com with the aid of just one US-based reporter which meant that I had to be "on call" 24/7 for 365 days of the year. That was really hard.
Making it worse was the fact that I live in a timezone that is up to 14 hours ahead of the USA which meant that I had to work from 10pm through to about 5pm local-time -- snatching just four or five hours a day in the late afternoon/early-evening.
Thanks to the efficiencies of being a small operation (and some smart marketing) I built 7am.com up into a syndicated news service that provided news headlines to over 200,000 websites by way of its Java newsticker which was loaded about a million times a day (not bad for a 1.5 person operation).
I eventually sold 66% of that business to some investors because it needed to grow and, once again, I didn't want to drift into a management role. Unfortunately the investors had no clue about where the value was and, in my opinion, really stuffed things up.
With the money I made from selling part of my shareholding, I started building jet engines (yeah, I'm the guy with the jet-powered gokart that featured on slashdot a while back).
Now I'm working 14/7 trying to keep up with the orders (a little accident a while back didn't help at all) and am in the process of organising a number of licensing deals so that I can get back to R&D rather than production work. The obvious alternative was to employ people to do what I do now and move myself into a managerial role (no, that ain't going to happen!).
You want tips about being self-employed?
1. Make sure you like what you're doing.
It's really easy to put in the hours and produce good quality work if you're enjoying yourself.
If you're not enjoying yourself than it can be awfully hard to roll out of bed and you'll find yourself looking for excuses not to work -- which means you'll probably piss people off and won't make any money.
2. Get an expert to do your taxes.
I have fought with the taxman for years -- even went to court over a tax issue and won. Unfortunately, you can't beat the system and as we left the court-room, one of the people from the tax office said "we'll get you" -- and they kept the pressure on right up until I got an professional to file my taxes for me.
Besides which -- I find all that paperwork to be really boring -- and therefore it's the kind of thing which you're tempted to leave to the last moment -- not good.
3. Don't underestimate how much money you'll need.
If possible, ease yourself into self-employment. It's much easier if you can work on your own stuff evenings and weekends until you're making more (tax-paid) money from it than you get from your day-job. Then you can dump the day-job, safe in the knowledge that you're not going to be living off your savings.
And remember, billing someone isn't the same as banking the money. Some companies will try to delay paying you for as long as they can -- and that can really screw you up if you don't have money in the bank to tide you over.
4. Get some good business advice.
You might be the best programmer in the world - but that don't mean squat unless you've got a plan. Spend a few bucks to get some quality business advice. There are people out there who will take you through all the steps -- right from working out exactly what it is you'll be offering customers through to the details of incorporation.
You need to stay in touch with these people and get a regular checkup to make sure that you're sticking to your business plan.
5. Keep your overheads down.
I've been working from home ever since I went out on my own -- and it's great.
Not having to suffer a long commute every day means that I'm already at least a couple of hours ahead of those who have to travel to their office and back. I also save money on gas, wear and tear, parking and the like.
Remember -- the days of dot-com excesses are long gone. Unless you can find someone to bankroll you with millions of dollars in venture capital, the money you'll be spending is probably your own.
However, while on the subject of working from home, it really pays to set yourself up an office in a separate room if you can. This provides a virtual border between work and play.
If you set yourself up in the living room or your bedroom you'll be sitting right next to temptation such as the TV, your bed and other stuff which sometimes looks a lot more attractive than a subtle bug lurking in a piece of code you've already been pawing over for hours.
Hey, I could write a book on this stuff -- hmmm, maybe that could be my next project ;-)
I've been working for myself since 1989.
I always found it incredibly difficult to suffer the incompetence of "managers" who, more often than not, get paid far too much money to do far too little work -- at least that's what I thought.
Since becoming self-employed however, I have a much greater respect for the time, effort and skill required to "manage" a business.
In fact, I've deliberately kept my own operations small whenever possible so as to avoid getting caught in the inevitable drift towards management that occurs when you start expanding and employing others. I'd rather remain down and dirty at the coalface.
One unfortunate side-effect of being self-employed in a fast-moving and highly competitive industry is that you can find yourself working 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I haven't had a vacation for over a decade and most years Christmas passed by almost without me noticing.
This type of thing is okay when you're young and you can survive on 4 hours sleep a night with a constant diet of Coke and pizza -- but I'm knocking on 50 now and it's getting bloody hard.
Sometimes I dream of retiring to become just another employee. Let someone else worry about paying my salary, keeping the overdraft topped up and filing endless government forms -- I'll just pop in for 8-9 hours a day and go fishing on the weekends.
If you're thinking of bitching about management, don't forget the old saying "never judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes."
There are some real asshole managers out there -- but then again, there are also some real asshole employees.
If you're really ticked off -- break away and start your own corporation.
Slashdot seems to be having a spaz-attack tonight. It wouldn't let me post before -- telling me that the Post operation was illegal.
:-)
Then it kept dropping me back to the front page when I hit the reply button.
Hey, they haven't switched it over to XP have they?
Clearly using free-floating weather balloons has a number of limitations and disadvantages.
Now we know that NASA has great plans for its solar-powered airplane -- including acting as a semi-permanent flying repeater-station, but I wonder if smaller, cheaper options might not be available.
For example... what about a much smaller (say 20-30 foot span) autonomous craft designed to soar thermals during the day (while charging its batteries and gaining as much altitude as it can) -- then revert to battery power and/or gradually descend during the hours of darkness.
If the energy required to keep these craft airborn in the longer nights of winter was greater than that availble to be stored during the day then they could carry a fuel-load to power a high-efficiency internal combustion engine (probably a very small diesel engine). Every week or so the craft would have to land for refueling and maintenance -- but that's not a big deal.
Just like the US military's Predator RPV, they could be programmed to land on a runway set aside specially for the purpose.
The cost of a smaller craft, particularly one that wasn't totally reliant on solar-cells, would likely be much less than NASA's efforts -- thus allowing more of them to be built for a given budget.
By using more craft, they could cruise at a much lower altititude than either the weather balloon or the NASA craft.
Using modern composites, low cost GPS, and other "affordable" technologies, such a craft could likely be built for less than US$10K.
Assuming a 50% duty cycle, a fleet of 10 craft could cover a huge area at a much lower cost than towers, and with the ability to dynamically vary the coverage area if required -- simply by repositioning the craft.
"Osama, here come those infidels in that big bird with the laser beam of death"
"Quickly Mohamed, my mirror!"
Imagine if there was once advanced, possibly even intelligent, life on Mars.
Would it be too far-fetched to speculate that perhaps that all higher life forms were wiped out by some virus or bacterial disease?
With the plant and animal life gone, the climate of the planet would change radically -- to the extent that we see today - but the cause of the catastrophy could stil be lurking in the soil.
What guarantees do we have that bringing back a sample of soil or rock from Mars wouldn't expose this planet to the same catastrophic outcome?
From what I read, scientists are still debating whether those odd fossil-like oddities discovered in meteoric fragments from Mars are actually petrified bacteria.
I think it makes a lot of sense to take every possible precaution when it comes to bringing stuff back from Mars. It might even be a good idea to do the initial analysis up in the ISS just in case it's really bad news. After all, how do we know that we could actually contain a pathogen such as that which might be returned from the red planet?
Is it really worth the risk?
Anyone who buys a brand-name PC needs their head read and deserves everything (every problem) they get.
I swore off buying "big name" PCs back in 1989 when I spent a huge amount of $ on an IBM PS/2 model 70. (20MHZ 386 CPU, 4MB RAM, 120MB HD)
Within 11 months the PSU failed but was replaced under warranty.
At 14 months the 120 MB HDD died (stiction) and IBM wanted an extortionate amount for one of their proprietory replacements. In the end I simply junked the PS/2 and, for less than they were going to charge me to replace the drive, I bought a no-name clone with twice the processing power, four times the memory and a 220MB HD.
Then there was a friend of mine who bought a DEC laptop and ended up having to pay nearly ten times as much for RAM as I paid for the same amount of extra memory on my no-name clone laptop. And when his LCD display crapped out, they took eight weeks to fix it and wouldn't even give him a loaner!
At the risk of generalizing, I have to say that a lot of the money you hand over when you buy a "big name" PC goes into advertising the brand and not into providing you with better quality or service.
These days I buy good, reliable no-name clones and I know that they are:
1. easily upgradable
2. easily repaired with readily available parts
3. great value for money
4. compatible with just about every OS/app I try
The shop I buy my machines from will even sell me a PC sans Windows -- and without bitching about it! But if I do buy a machine with Windows, I get a legit copy of the disk and certificate.
Caveat emptor folks!
Given that the activation code is used to secure XP from unauthorized use -- I guess you could say that this is a security issue.
:-)
Given Microsoft's rather lackluster track-record in the area of security, is it any wonder that their own protection scheme has (allegedly) been cracked so soon?
Maybe they wrote it with the new C++ compiler
What? When did Microsoft stop shipping MBasic?
Never mind, CBASIC is better anyway -- it's semi-compiled and has BCD math. Cool!
What will they think of next -- something more powerful than my 8080-based CP/M machine. Nah, it'll never happen!
Many years ago (about 1989), I decided to demonstrate to some of the IT staff I was supervising (as PC-resource manager) just how delicate these hard drives were.
We proceded to pull the cover of a 20MB Seagate HD (an ST225 or something from memory).
The drive was then reconnected and spun up.
Naturally, having read about the risks of head crashes and the effects of even microscopic specs of cigarette smoke, I expected the damned thing to at least lose data -- and hopefully come to a screeching halt with a fine shower of iron oxide dust everywhere.
Well that damned drive kept on working for several days without missing a beat.
The machine with the open drive was on a LAN and users could access it to check whether it was still running -- so it got quite a thrashing.
Eventually we got so frustrated that we deliberately blew smoke onto it -- and still nothing happened.
Even blowing dust directly at the platters still didn't kill it.
After a week of operation without its lid, the novelty wore off and we simply took to dropping it from ever-increasing heights to try and get a head-crash.
Eventually we managed to ding it up pretty bad -- but my smart move kind of backfired. Instead of convincing the staff that hard drives were delicate and things to be treated with great care, it turns out that they were (at least in those days) a hell of a lot more robust (at least in the short term) than we gave them credit for.
Of course since those early days, I've lost numerous Seagate drives to mechanical failures. I have a couple of 2.5GB units that both dropped their heads within a few weeks of each other -- and they were sitting quietly in a tower case with a UPS and no exposure to vibration or excessive temperature fluctuations.
They don't build them like they used to eh?
Hey, aren't Google breaching the copyright of at least some of those whose pages are included in the sample data being used -- especially the CDROM's worth that will be sent out?
As for the cost-savings involved in running such a contest, I expect the fact that they only have to pay $10,000 will be more than offset by the fact that they'll have to sort through a mountain of crappy submissions. That'll take a lot of people a lot of time.
You say "For those who don't know, the signal is also buffered by several seconds which keeps it from dropping out. It works great"
How the hell can it handle drop-outs when it's a one-way data-stream?
CD players and media streamed over a 2-way link can be buffered against drop-outs because you can always go back and re-read the lost data. How on earth are you supposed to do this with a one-way satellite stream.
Please explain -- inquiring minds need to know!
Now, where can I get one of those pulsejets??
Try here:
http://aardvark.co.nz/pjet/pjetkit.htm
I love the way people talk about the "pure, clean" nature of hydrogen as a fuel.
:-)
Unfortunately the reality is that it has a long list of problems associated with it -- and a number of them are environmental.
As others have pointed out -- it's a fuel with a very low energy density (by volume), it's very difficult/expensive to store, and most of it is produced by "dirty" methods such as the cracking of hydrocarbons which come from -- you guessed it -- oil!
In short, hydrogen is a fuel for the academics amongst us -- those who find the easiest way to deal with reality is to ignore it.
You know -- these are the kind of people who write computer software that does no error-checking on its input data. When such a program crashes, the response tends to be "well don't enter bad data then."
Unfortunately, if we want to write software for the general public -- or in this case if we want to create a practical, clean fuel, then reality can't be dismissed.
We've got a long way to go before hydrogen becomes everything it's cracked up to be.
By the way, what ever happened to those breakthroughs in solar-cell technology that were going to bring us ultra-low cost energy from the sun?
Bah... humbug... I think I'll just go and burn a few more gallons of dinosaur-extract in my pulsejet
There are a lot of alternatives to disclosing your *real* email address on the web or in usenet postings.
Here's one.
Way back in the dark dawn of the desktop PC age, I was a programmer and service tech for the local importer of Intertec Superbrain computers.
These were a CP/M based machine with two Z80 processors (the second one was dedicated to disk I/O but configured so that the main CPU was placed in a busy-wait loop while the IO occured. Obviously this was a crappy hardware solution to a problem caused by an inability to write decent firmware on Intertec's part.
Anyway -- these machines were originally designed for the US market, so the PSUs were all 110V. Around these parts the mains voltage is 230V so they included a 230V-110V transformer with machines shipped here -- and it was mounted inside the all-encompassing case that also incorporated the screen and keyboard.
Cooling on the machines was by way of a weak fan that exhausted down onto the table beneathe the machine. It was barely adequate for the 110V machine so when the extra heat from the transformer was added to the thermal input -- the machines began to overheat.
The manufacturer was useless -- offering no suggestions and losing all interest in supporting the product.
The solution was pretty simple -- use a bigger fan.
However -- there was a rather unfortunate side-effect. When you turned on the computer, the fan-blast would blow every single piece of paper off your desk. Funny as hell -- the first time.
Although attempts were made with the fan reversed so that it blew up into the machine, a couple of machines expired after a sheet of paper found its way under the case and got sucked up against the fan grill -- effectively stopping all cooling.