For those who didn't go to the company's site, it has four 10Hp engines. (10 horsepower is ~7.5 kW for you metric types) Each engine has it's own clutch and they claim it can hover on three, and descend safely on two.
And I agree you'd want a helmet - with a good strong visor.
Urban airspace: yes and no. In many circumstances you would fly below ATCs airspace.
Licensing: no. This would qualiy as an ultralight under FAR Part 103 (FAR = Federal Aviation Regulations, for you non-pilot types). So you can fly it (legally, in class G airspace) with zero experience. Now, that may not be very wise...
Will we see applications (and distributions) developed by Corel for the Arm and other non-x86 distributions in the near future? Love to get the wordeperfect suite on my netwinder (purchased when it was 'Corel Netwinder' and not rebel.com) Also, what plans do you have for the netwinder and Arm architcture in general in light of your stake in rebel.com?
And, as a follow up, considering the ARM's low power consumption, would you consider creating an ARM-based laptop?
I've been working on new and interesting ways to almost kill myself.
As you may or may not know, I have this passing interest in metalworking. I've always wanted to build a rocket to the moon, and I figure that I'll need to know how to weld, cast and machine metal to do it. So I built a small foundry, according to a series of books entitled "Build Your Own Machine Shop From Scrap". Book one is "The Charcoal Foundry". Which I built. It's low-capacity; I can cast about a quart of molten aluminum. (Albeit poorly.)
Anyhow, back when I lived in Oklahoma, I bought a whole bunch of scrap aluminum from my welding instructor. (8 or 9 VW Bug transmission housings) And I also picked up some other large castings from work (IBM 3390 disk-pack housings) that were being thrown out.
These pieces are too large to fit in my tiny little crucible, so I would smash them to bits with a sledgehammer. But parts of the scrap were too heavy to be smashed, no matter how hard I tried. There was a paragraph about this in the foundry book, that suggested building a fire around any castings that were too heavy to smash with a sledge, and heating them till they were soft. I decided to try this.
So, last night, I crept down the road in the inky blackness to an abandoned barn that's slowly succumbing to the Mississippi foliage and has a large pile of broken timbers. I dragged the wood out to the road, and came back for it with the truck. Then I built a bonfire of the dry timbers, interspersed with VW transmission housings and 3390 disk pack cases. Lacking somewhere better, I built the fire on the 12x12 concrete pad that forms my back patio.
I was moderately safety conscious. I built the pile as far from the house as I could (which wasn't very far). I took the propane tank out of my grill and moved it to the other side of the house. I had the garden hose pouring water continuously into the grass. I had my kitchen fire extinguisher and welding gloves near at hand. Thus prepared, I lit the fire.
It took a while for the fire to catch. I was concerned that the pile had too many castings and not enough wood, and that the fire wouldn't spread all the way around. But eventually it was getting pretty hot, and I could break up some of the smaller castings with a light blow from a steel bar.
So I pulled out the big guns, and tried to hit one of the large castings with the sledgehammer. It broke, but it also sparked and sputtered and caught on fire. The metal was on fire. When metal burns, it has a flame that's quite distinctive from a wood flame. Wood burns yellow and red; metal burns white-hot like a welder's spark. I could definitely tell that there was a metal fire at the base of my bonfire.
Now, I knew that magnesium will burn, and titanium too. I knew that sodium and potassium will burn in water. I didn't know that aluminum would burn. I never really considered that the castings would ignite. Perhaps aluminum needs to be a magnesium alloy to support combustion. I don't know. Whatever it was, it was burning.
Metal fires are tremendously hotter than wood fires, which caused the rest of the pile to rapidly ignite from a nice controlled bonfire, to what I can only describe as a raging inferno from the depths of hell. Oh shit. So I grabbed the already-running garden hose and I tried to put the fire out. Unfortunately, this typically made things worse. Metal burns so hot that when water touches it, the water vaporizes explosively, showering the area with molten, burning metal droplets. The rate at which metal burns is limited by its surface area, and breaking up a molten metal glob by pouring water on it accelerates the process.
So I grabbed the chemical fire extinguisher and tried to use that. Which worked, somewhat. But a small kitchen fire extinguisher has about 4 seconds worth of charge in it, and did not appreciably diminish the fire before it coughed and ran empty. Ah, shit.
Fires, as I recall, are categorized into four classes: A, B, C, and D. I was planning on having a Class-A fire: paper and wood. Class B is an oil or grease fire; Class C is an electrical fire. But what I really had was the worst of all: Class D, a metal fire. They make special fire extinguishers for Class D fires. Unfortunately, I didn't have one.
At this point, the flames were shooting up about 15 feet into the sky. Every so often, the pieces of burning aluminum would pop, throwing sparks and metal droplets everywhere. To complete the scene, also note that I had the stereo turned up inside the house, so as you visualize it, remember that BB King is wailing in the background.
I did what I could. I had a big steel pole that I used to knock the fire apart, to dissipate the heat. I used the hose carefully to try to cool the fire down. I wore the welding gloves and dragged the burning timbers away from the fire where I could safely douse the wood with the hose.
People stopped by and offered to help. They had seen the sparks and flames from the road, shooting above the house. They offered to call the fire department, an offer that a wise man would have readily accepted. But if I were a wise man, I wouldn't have done this in the first place, now would I?
So I asked them to standby on the offer to call the fire department, and said I thought I was getting it under control. I was basically wrong, since the worst explosions, the ones that shot molten metal directly at the house, were still yet to come. But the fire was quieting down somewhat.
(The house is brick. But the roof is not.)
The problem that I had was that there was no obvious way to finish putting out the fire. I removed pretty much all the burning wood from the fire, and separated the metal fire into smaller fires, but how to put out the burning aluminum? All I had was water and a steel pole, neither of which really seemed to help. In hindsight, I also had a shovel nearby, which probably would have been the best tool. Hindsight is a marvelous thing, no?
So, with a combination of patience (just letting the metal burn itself out), and cautious, gentle spraying with the hose, I got the fire out. In the end, no damage to the house, no serious injuries. My patio is a mess, my fingers are a little singed. (I later discovered that the concrete under the fire was destroyed to a depth of 3-4 inches.) My scrap metal supply is largely vaporized. I have a large new supply of humility, and a moderately good story.
I'm sure there's some deep lesson in this cautionary tale, but I'm not precisely sure what it is. I guess the big lesson is that aluminum burns. Forget that they make engine blocks and piston heads from the stuff. It burns, I know.
32000*1150~36000000 = ALOT of braincells to simulate.
Sure. It's totally feasible if you use the right hardware. I remember back when de Garis was just starting his CAM-brain stuff, he was using my old research group's hardware, the CAM-8 (which is probably where he got the "CAM" part of his project's name.) We did plenty of volumetric simulations on the CAM-8 with 2^24 sites in realtime, and that was back in 1994. Considering the tech advance since then, and that he's now using his own custom hardware, it sounds completely resonable.
The problem is, as least back when he was still collaborating with us, his stuff just didn't work very well, and his ideas were kinda flaky. (At least in the opinion of the MIT undergrad who worked in both groups.) But hopefully he's worked things out since then. I wish him the best of luck.
Aside: There's something to be said for spatially organized computation, such as the CAM-brain. Fundamentally, the physics that we use to do calculation constrains all interactions to be uniform and local. It's sometimes easy to forget when we're writing software (which seems very ethereal) that the actual computation is constrained by physical laws that really do impose limits on speed and efficiency. So any calculation that is spatially organized (such as most physical simulations) is inherently parallelizable (of course) especially for fine-grained hardware. (or SIMD machines)
Once upon a time there was a man with a dream. His dream was to build rockets that would revolutionize space travel. He was convinced that he could build rockets that would be safer than any ever made, and ten times cheaper, to boot. So, he started a company to build rockets. He scrabbled around for investors. He fought, tooth and nail, to make his dream a reality. To make spaceflight cheap enough, safe enough, that you and I could go. If I recall correctly (and I might not), he called his rocket the Phoenix, and his name was Gary Hudson. He was not the only such innovator of his day, but he'll serve as an example.
He got as far as building prototypes before NASA announced the advent of the Space Transportation System, aka the space shuttle. It would make space flight so cheap and easy that all other launchers would be obsolete, they claimed. They told the giants of aerospace to stop building rockets that wouldn't be needed. The space shuttle would take care of all our launch needs.
Garys investors pulled out. His contracts disappeared. He learned the folly of trying to compete with the U S Gov't. They have the money, they control the industry.
As it turned out, the space shuttle was a huge failure. Instead of costing $100 per pound to orbit, it cost $10,000 per pound. Far from being the least expensive launcher, it was the most expensive ever. Once again, the STS proved that bureaucracy and efficiency do not mix. How often do you hear someone exclaim how clever and efficient a government agency is?
And, tragically, not the safest either. After Challenger, the shuttle was grounded, for a long, long time. The US launch industry was crippled. The Aerospace giants hurried to restart production of their more traditional launchers. The innovative start-ups had long since gone away.
Eventually, people started to think innovatively about cheap space flight again. Gary started a new company. Others, such as Mitchell Burnside Clapp and Walt Kistler did likewise. Lots of new companies started springing up, each determined to lower the cost of space launch; to make it cheaper, or safer, or both.
What would the world be like today if NASA hadn't crushed the entrepreneurs of yesteryear? Would one of them have succeeded? Might we have commercial launches at reasonable prices?
And now, NASA will do it again. Would you invest in a start-up company if you knew that it's competitor was subsidized by the government, or that it's closest competitor was a large government agency with a 10+ G$ budget?
I am not, as you see, a big believer in monopolies. Especially government monopolies. I believe that competition breeds innovation, and that people who work hard and take risks deserved the fruits of their labor.
I'm not knocking NASA. There are certain research areas that are so fundamental that they aren't commercializable in the near term. There are some areas too speculative for investor money. I don't think it's unreasonable for the government to spend my tax dollars persuing these areas, and NASA and the NSF serve these roles. Heck, even the once-and-current ARPA does the same.
But it is not the government's place to compete with industry! Again, how often do you hear someone exclaim how clever and efficient a government agency is?
Another story: A man named Rand Simberg also had a dream. If he couldn't bring spaceflight to the masses, well, he could simulate it for 30 seconds at a time. He bought a jet, outfitted it for zero-g flight, and started the only company in the US devoted to selling zero-g experiences. He called it Interglobal Space Lines, Inc.
When Ron Howard was making the film Apollo 13, Rand knew that this could be a big break. Howard wanted the film to be as realistic as possible, and planned to shoot many of the sequences in actual weightless conditions. This would be a big boost for Interglobal, since they were the only company poised to offer this service.
But before a deal was struck, NASA offered to let Howard use their KC-135 "Vomit Comet" gratis. Think about this a minute. Why? For what justification was my tax dollars (duly allocated for research by Congress) spent to subsidize Universal Pictures? Why was Simberg, who staked his whole life out trying to provide a unique service, shafted by his own government?
I'll tell you: because bureacracies like NASA are unthinking, inefficient and, well, bureaucratic! Far from fostering innovation, commercializing NASA will only serve to stifle it! Let NASA focus on research, on science, not on the operation of launch services.
I wonder if man will walk on the moon in my lifetime.
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For those who didn't go to the company's site, it has four 10Hp engines. (10 horsepower is ~7.5 kW for you metric types) Each engine has it's own clutch and they claim it can hover on three, and descend safely on two.
And I agree you'd want a helmet - with a good strong visor.
Urban airspace: yes and no. In many circumstances you would fly below ATCs airspace.
Licensing: no. This would qualiy as an ultralight under FAR Part 103 (FAR = Federal Aviation Regulations, for you non-pilot types). So you can fly it (legally, in class G airspace) with zero experience. Now, that may not be very wise...
Protect our children from exposure to rape, incest, genocide, murder - outlaw the bible.
Painfully true.
And, as a follow up, considering the ARM's low power consumption, would you consider creating an ARM-based laptop?
An email message I sent a while back:
I've been working on new and interesting ways to almost kill myself.
As you may or may not know, I have this passing interest in metalworking. I've always wanted to build a rocket to the moon, and I figure that I'll need to know how to weld, cast and machine metal to do it. So I built a small foundry, according to a series of books entitled "Build Your Own Machine Shop From Scrap". Book one is "The Charcoal Foundry". Which I built. It's low-capacity; I can cast about a quart of molten aluminum. (Albeit poorly.)
Anyhow, back when I lived in Oklahoma, I bought a whole bunch of scrap aluminum from my welding instructor. (8 or 9 VW Bug transmission housings) And I also picked up some other large castings from work (IBM 3390 disk-pack housings) that were being thrown out.
These pieces are too large to fit in my tiny little crucible, so I would smash them to bits with a sledgehammer. But parts of the scrap were too heavy to be smashed, no matter how hard I tried. There was a paragraph about this in the foundry book, that suggested building a fire around any castings that were too heavy to smash with a sledge, and heating them till they were soft. I decided to try this.
So, last night, I crept down the road in the inky blackness to an abandoned barn that's slowly succumbing to the Mississippi foliage and has a large pile of broken timbers. I dragged the wood out to the road, and came back for it with the truck. Then I built a bonfire of the dry timbers, interspersed with VW transmission housings and 3390 disk pack cases. Lacking somewhere better, I built the fire on the 12x12 concrete pad that forms my back patio.
I was moderately safety conscious. I built the pile as far from the house as I could (which wasn't very far). I took the propane tank out of my grill and moved it to the other side of the house. I had the garden hose pouring water continuously into the grass. I had my kitchen fire extinguisher and welding gloves near at hand. Thus prepared, I lit the fire.
It took a while for the fire to catch. I was concerned that the pile had too many castings and not enough wood, and that the fire wouldn't spread all the way around. But eventually it was getting pretty hot, and I could break up some of the smaller castings with a light blow from a steel bar.
So I pulled out the big guns, and tried to hit one of the large castings with the sledgehammer. It broke, but it also sparked and sputtered and caught on fire. The metal was on fire. When metal burns, it has a flame that's quite distinctive from a wood flame. Wood burns yellow and red; metal burns white-hot like a welder's spark. I could definitely tell that there was a metal fire at the base of my bonfire.
Now, I knew that magnesium will burn, and titanium too. I knew that sodium and potassium will burn in water. I didn't know that aluminum would burn. I never really considered that the castings would ignite. Perhaps aluminum needs to be a magnesium alloy to support combustion. I don't know. Whatever it was, it was burning.
Metal fires are tremendously hotter than wood fires, which caused the rest of the pile to rapidly ignite from a nice controlled bonfire, to what I can only describe as a raging inferno from the depths of hell. Oh shit. So I grabbed the already-running garden hose and I tried to put the fire out. Unfortunately, this typically made things worse. Metal burns so hot that when water touches it, the water vaporizes explosively, showering the area with molten, burning metal droplets. The rate at which metal burns is limited by its surface area, and breaking up a molten metal glob by pouring water on it accelerates the process.
So I grabbed the chemical fire extinguisher and tried to use that. Which worked, somewhat. But a small kitchen fire extinguisher has about 4 seconds worth of charge in it, and did not appreciably diminish the fire before it coughed and ran empty. Ah, shit.
Fires, as I recall, are categorized into four classes: A, B, C, and D. I was planning on having a Class-A fire: paper and wood. Class B is an oil or grease fire; Class C is an electrical fire. But what I really had was the worst of all: Class D, a metal fire. They make special fire extinguishers for Class D fires. Unfortunately, I didn't have one.
At this point, the flames were shooting up about 15 feet into the sky. Every so often, the pieces of burning aluminum would pop, throwing sparks and metal droplets everywhere. To complete the scene, also note that I had the stereo turned up inside the house, so as you visualize it, remember that BB King is wailing in the background.
I did what I could. I had a big steel pole that I used to knock the fire apart, to dissipate the heat. I used the hose carefully to try to cool the fire down. I wore the welding gloves and dragged the burning timbers away from the fire where I could safely douse the wood with the hose.
People stopped by and offered to help. They had seen the sparks and flames from the road, shooting above the house. They offered to call the fire department, an offer that a wise man would have readily accepted. But if I were a wise man, I wouldn't have done this in the first place, now would I?
So I asked them to standby on the offer to call the fire department, and said I thought I was getting it under control. I was basically wrong, since the worst explosions, the ones that shot molten metal directly at the house, were still yet to come. But the fire was quieting down somewhat.
(The house is brick. But the roof is not.)
The problem that I had was that there was no obvious way to finish putting out the fire. I removed pretty much all the burning wood from the fire, and separated the metal fire into smaller fires, but how to put out the burning aluminum? All I had was water and a steel pole, neither of which really seemed to help. In hindsight, I also had a shovel nearby, which probably would have been the best tool. Hindsight is a marvelous thing, no?
So, with a combination of patience (just letting the metal burn itself out), and cautious, gentle spraying with the hose, I got the fire out. In the end, no damage to the house, no serious injuries. My patio is a mess, my fingers are a little singed. (I later discovered that the concrete under the fire was destroyed to a depth of 3-4 inches.) My scrap metal supply is largely vaporized. I have a large new supply of humility, and a moderately good story.
I'm sure there's some deep lesson in this cautionary tale, but I'm not precisely sure what it is. I guess the big lesson is that aluminum burns. Forget that they make engine blocks and piston heads from the stuff. It burns, I know.
Sure. It's totally feasible if you use the right hardware. I remember back when de Garis was just starting his CAM-brain stuff, he was using my old research group's hardware, the CAM-8 (which is probably where he got the "CAM" part of his project's name.) We did plenty of volumetric simulations on the CAM-8 with 2^24 sites in realtime, and that was back in 1994. Considering the tech advance since then, and that he's now using his own custom hardware, it sounds completely resonable.
The problem is, as least back when he was still collaborating with us, his stuff just didn't work very well, and his ideas were kinda flaky. (At least in the opinion of the MIT undergrad who worked in both groups.) But hopefully he's worked things out since then. I wish him the best of luck.
Aside: There's something to be said for spatially organized computation, such as the CAM-brain. Fundamentally, the physics that we use to do calculation constrains all interactions to be uniform and local. It's sometimes easy to forget when we're writing software (which seems very ethereal) that the actual computation is constrained by physical laws that really do impose limits on speed and efficiency. So any calculation that is spatially organized (such as most physical simulations) is inherently parallelizable (of course) especially for fine-grained hardware. (or SIMD machines)
Apparently not. But considering that your post is off-topic, it's likely to be moderated down just as quickly.
As is this one, I suppose.
He got as far as building prototypes before NASA announced the advent of the Space Transportation System, aka the space shuttle. It would make space flight so cheap and easy that all other launchers would be obsolete, they claimed. They told the giants of aerospace to stop building rockets that wouldn't be needed. The space shuttle would take care of all our launch needs.
Garys investors pulled out. His contracts disappeared. He learned the folly of trying to compete with the U S Gov't. They have the money, they control the industry.
As it turned out, the space shuttle was a huge failure. Instead of costing $100 per pound to orbit, it cost $10,000 per pound. Far from being the least expensive launcher, it was the most expensive ever. Once again, the STS proved that bureaucracy and efficiency do not mix. How often do you hear someone exclaim how clever and efficient a government agency is?
And, tragically, not the safest either. After Challenger, the shuttle was grounded, for a long, long time. The US launch industry was crippled. The Aerospace giants hurried to restart production of their more traditional launchers. The innovative start-ups had long since gone away.
Eventually, people started to think innovatively about cheap space flight again. Gary started a new company. Others, such as Mitchell Burnside Clapp and Walt Kistler did likewise. Lots of new companies started springing up, each determined to lower the cost of space launch; to make it cheaper, or safer, or both.
What would the world be like today if NASA hadn't crushed the entrepreneurs of yesteryear? Would one of them have succeeded? Might we have commercial launches at reasonable prices?
And now, NASA will do it again. Would you invest in a start-up company if you knew that it's competitor was subsidized by the government, or that it's closest competitor was a large government agency with a 10+ G$ budget?
I am not, as you see, a big believer in monopolies. Especially government monopolies. I believe that competition breeds innovation, and that people who work hard and take risks deserved the fruits of their labor.
I'm not knocking NASA. There are certain research areas that are so fundamental that they aren't commercializable in the near term. There are some areas too speculative for investor money. I don't think it's unreasonable for the government to spend my tax dollars persuing these areas, and NASA and the NSF serve these roles. Heck, even the once-and-current ARPA does the same.
But it is not the government's place to compete with industry! Again, how often do you hear someone exclaim how clever and efficient a government agency is?
Another story: A man named Rand Simberg also had a dream. If he couldn't bring spaceflight to the masses, well, he could simulate it for 30 seconds at a time. He bought a jet, outfitted it for zero-g flight, and started the only company in the US devoted to selling zero-g experiences. He called it Interglobal Space Lines, Inc.
When Ron Howard was making the film Apollo 13, Rand knew that this could be a big break. Howard wanted the film to be as realistic as possible, and planned to shoot many of the sequences in actual weightless conditions. This would be a big boost for Interglobal, since they were the only company poised to offer this service.
But before a deal was struck, NASA offered to let Howard use their KC-135 "Vomit Comet" gratis. Think about this a minute. Why? For what justification was my tax dollars (duly allocated for research by Congress) spent to subsidize Universal Pictures? Why was Simberg, who staked his whole life out trying to provide a unique service, shafted by his own government?
I'll tell you: because bureacracies like NASA are unthinking, inefficient and, well, bureaucratic! Far from fostering innovation, commercializing NASA will only serve to stifle it! Let NASA focus on research, on science, not on the operation of launch services.
I wonder if man will walk on the moon in my lifetime.