I don't know what 'PDT' is, but the crash is at about 5:40 UTC (i.e. Greenwich Mean Time) on September 3, not 2. That would make it late at night on September 2 in the US, I guess.
Also, there is an uncertainty in the time of the crash. Because the lunar topography is not exactly known, the crash might very well be an orbit earlier or later (the period of an orbit is about 5 hours).
You're right, I don't know, sorry. But from people talking I got the impression that it was a servo. Is this possible? A quick look at the user manual revealed that it was a few thousand pages thick, so I didn't go looking for an answer there.
I work in the flight dynamics team for VenusExpress at ESA and I can't let this comment stand. Even though the poster meant it as a joke (I hope;), I don't think having smarter people is the issue. I think it is a matter of experience and money.
We are just beginning to expand beyond near-earth to the interplanetary part of space exploration. VenusExpress is only our fourth interplanetary mission (we count going to the moon as interplanetary). Nonethless, we've arrived at Venus without any problems in the spacecraft systems (this excludes instruments). We've reached our target orbit to within 0.3 seconds (sic!). We only could do this by applying what we'd learned on the previous missions; Smart-1, Rosetta, and MarsExpress.
As for money, our budget is a tenth of NASA's budget. To save cost, VenusExpress was basically built from MarsExpress spare parts. This brings a few problems with it, due to the different geometries: Venus being so much closer to the Sun than Mars, and being inside Earth's orbit poses a whole new set of thermal problems.
Excuse me, BUT can anybody name the three religions that all Egyptains respect and believe? Last time I counted there was only one, and it was out to exterminate the rest of them.
From my dealings with Muslims I surmise that they mean the three religions that believe in the one God (or Allah, or Jehova, or by whichever name you prefer): Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
Interestingly, the Quaran does not differentiate between Muslims and non-Muslims, but rather between those who believe in God, and those who don't (or believe in "false gods").
The holy war was originally intended to be against these unbelievers. This isn't such a brilliant idea either, of course, but have you read the old testament lately?
Smart land mines would protect troops' flanks under one project at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The mines, connected wirelessly, could hop from the ground to fill voids if the minefield is breached. (emphasis mine)
Under the rules of war, minelayers are required to keep accurate maps - not so easy with autonomous mines. Cleaning up afterwards would be almost impossible.
Don't you think that minelayers would simply be able to log on to their mine network and poll the GPS locations from all (not exploded, presumably) mines? They are, after all, wirelessly connected... just a thought.
remember that US gallons are a different size to the gallons the rest of the world uses!
when calculating those mileages (45mpg for the passat and 75 for the Lupo 3l) I used US gallons: 3.785 liters to the gallon. So by your formula, the respective mileages for the 8-year old Passat would be 54mpg and for the Lupo 3l, it would be 90mpg.
And diesel died in the US many years ago.
VW is also beginning to introduce direct injection (or as they like to call it, "fuel stratified injection", or FSI) engines, which run on ordinary (well, sulpher-free) gas and also come to about 45mpg.
It says in the article that the hybrid cars would get 50 miles to the gallon.
We used to own a family sedan (Volkswagen Passat) which got 45 miles to the galon of Diesel fuel. Driven economically, you could get it up to about 70 miles a galon. This was 8 years ago.
And here in Germany VW have had the 3l Lupo, where the 3l standing for 3l/100km consumption, which translates to about 75mpg, out a couple of years also.
Someone mentioned "Zen of Assembly Programming" by Michael Abrash. I can recommend "Zen of Code Optimization", also by Michael Abrash. The latter book might be more to your taste, since it focuses on the fine-tuning rather than assembly language itself.
However, the book is somewhat outdated since it only includes processors up to the Pentium I w/o MMX.
On the other hand, today's processors are so advanced at doing their own optimization (out-of-order execution, branch prediction, R-OPs, and whatnot), and the different processors do it so differently (AMD vs. Intel) that hand-optimization has far less impact than in the olden days. So you might want to consider if you want to do fine-tuning, except for the obvious (unrolling loops, quadword-aligning your data, to name two things). Also, I think a far greater speed-up can be accomplished by optimizing the algorithm you use. Putting some thought into the algorithm can do wonders, and Abrash agrees with me in "Zen of Code Optimization".
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I don't know what 'PDT' is, but the crash is at about 5:40 UTC (i.e. Greenwich Mean Time) on September 3, not 2. That would make it late at night on September 2 in the US, I guess.
Also, there is an uncertainty in the time of the crash. Because the lunar topography is not exactly known, the crash might very well be an orbit earlier or later (the period of an orbit is about 5 hours).
You're right, I don't know, sorry. But from people talking I got the impression that it was a servo. Is this possible? A quick look at the user manual revealed that it was a few thousand pages thick, so I didn't go looking for an answer there.
I work in the flight dynamics team for VenusExpress at ESA and I can't let this comment stand. Even though the poster meant it as a joke (I hope ;), I don't think having smarter people is the issue. I think it is a matter of experience and money.
We are just beginning to expand beyond near-earth to the interplanetary part of space exploration. VenusExpress is only our fourth interplanetary mission (we count going to the moon as interplanetary). Nonethless, we've arrived at Venus without any problems in the spacecraft systems (this excludes instruments). We've reached our target orbit to within 0.3 seconds (sic!). We only could do this by applying what we'd learned on the previous missions; Smart-1, Rosetta, and MarsExpress.
As for money, our budget is a tenth of NASA's budget. To save cost, VenusExpress was basically built from MarsExpress spare parts. This brings a few problems with it, due to the different geometries: Venus being so much closer to the Sun than Mars, and being inside Earth's orbit poses a whole new set of thermal problems.
Interestingly, the Quaran does not differentiate between Muslims and non-Muslims, but rather between those who believe in God, and those who don't (or believe in "false gods").
The holy war was originally intended to be against these unbelievers. This isn't such a brilliant idea either, of course, but have you read the old testament lately?
Don't you think that minelayers would simply be able to log on to their mine network and poll the GPS locations from all (not exploded, presumably) mines? They are, after all, wirelessly connected... just a thought.
remember that US gallons are a different size to the gallons the rest of the world uses!
when calculating those mileages (45mpg for the passat and 75 for the Lupo 3l) I used US gallons: 3.785 liters to the gallon. So by your formula, the respective mileages for the 8-year old Passat would be 54mpg and for the Lupo 3l, it would be 90mpg.
And diesel died in the US many years ago.
VW is also beginning to introduce direct injection (or as they like to call it, "fuel stratified injection", or FSI) engines, which run on ordinary (well, sulpher-free) gas and also come to about 45mpg.
It says in the article that the hybrid cars would get 50 miles to the gallon.
We used to own a family sedan (Volkswagen Passat) which got 45 miles to the galon of Diesel fuel. Driven economically, you could get it up to about 70 miles a galon. This was 8 years ago.
And here in Germany VW have had the 3l Lupo, where the 3l standing for 3l/100km consumption, which translates to about 75mpg, out a couple of years also.
So I ask you: Is 50mpg really that good?
Someone mentioned "Zen of Assembly Programming" by Michael Abrash. I can recommend "Zen of Code Optimization", also by Michael Abrash. The latter book might be more to your taste, since it focuses on the fine-tuning rather than assembly language itself.
However, the book is somewhat outdated since it only includes processors up to the Pentium I w/o MMX.
On the other hand, today's processors are so advanced at doing their own optimization (out-of-order execution, branch prediction, R-OPs, and whatnot), and the different processors do it so differently (AMD vs. Intel) that hand-optimization has far less impact than in the olden days. So you might want to consider if you want to do fine-tuning, except for the obvious (unrolling loops, quadword-aligning your data, to name two things). Also, I think a far greater speed-up can be accomplished by optimizing the algorithm you use. Putting some thought into the algorithm can do wonders, and Abrash agrees with me in "Zen of Code Optimization".
HTH,
Michael