Well, the US might be able to throw a wrench in the works of the 'Net once, but after the subsequent re-routing and such that would happen in the following days, and the pre-emptive fiber lays that would happen in the following months, the world would basically cut the US out of ever being in that position again.
And you know that the FBI knows that, and therefore wouldn't do that except in extreme cases.
So, yeah, it's a trump card right now, that would play once for maybe a week, and never again.
I like it in principle. A lot. What I should have said, though, was "show me a way that I, today, can use my spare CPU cycles to feed the third world." Trying to point out that there's currently nothing better I should be doing right now with my extra processor time.
But, yeah, if such a thing came along, with actual immediate tangible helpful results, I'd be _so_ there instead of distributed.net or SETI.
Doing SETI is completely orthogonal to helping starving Somalians. Show me a way to use spare CPU cycles to feed the third world. Show me a way to use food to find extraterrestrials. I'm waiting....
The world isn't black-and-white -- just because I'm doing one thing doesn't mean I'm not doing something else also. There are lots of different things people can do with their resources and time, without them interfering or affecting each other at all.
Helping SETI@home doesn't mean I'd "rather find out if there's life in another planet" than help my fellow man, it just means that's the best choice I've found for that particular resource, extra CPU cycles. It doesn't say anything else at all about my character or lack thereof.
It takes a little bit of a mindset shift, but I've finally come around to arguing this point:
A Windows application compiled with libwine _IS_ a Linux application. It's a chunk of code that's been compiled on a Linux box and linked with a static library that handles display issues and threading and such. But the binary that's output is a Linux native application -- the only external dependancies are Linux libraries and the kernel. The fact that the source code speaks Win32 is no more important than, for instance, the fact that Perl's source code speaks Posix/Unix -- ActivePerl is still very much a Windows application.
In this configuration, Wine can be thought of as a tangled overcomplicated widget set, handling windowing, display, and threading. It's really only about twice the size of GTK/glib, and less than 50% larger than QT (source tarballs being used for comparison), so the comparison is not too much of a stretch. Plus you get the exciting side bonus of being able to run actual Windows binaries under pseudo-emulation in the other 'traditional' configuration.
I know it's easy to pooh-pooh an application because its source code is originally Win32-based, but really, what is a 'native' Linux application? One that makes only kernel calls? One that only links to libc? If WordPerfect is not 'native' then it could safely be argued that Communicator, for instance, isn't either, since Motif, a display library not 'native' to Linux, is statically linked in.
Once we've compiled an ELF binary whose only external dependencies are libraries that come stock with every Linux distribution, don't we have a native Linux app? --
Too bad what's happened to the Valley. It's just as bad up here in SF. If you hate it so much, go somewhere else. The past is past, it won't come back.
I'm doing what I can to find fun in the new SF. It's harder than it used to be. Is that the City's fault, or am I different now that I'm older? (*shrug) What's the difference?
...for making an effort to validate the story, and stating very clearly that it's currently unsubstantiated. That's such an improvement over the standard quality of research around here. Congrats and thanks.
(Of course, it's kind of sad when standard journalistic due diligence is such the exception that it sticks out like this....)
This is the START of a cool idea, but you'd need some kind of transparent and strong digital signature scheme; otherwise, any wiseass out there could render your MP3 out to a wave file, and then re-encode and re-release it with/HIS/ PayPal information encoded, and the listener would have no way of knowing the difference.
As soon as you start talking about sending money over the Net, you come up against the same issues of authentication and certification that have us all paying Verisign et al to vouch for the fact that we are who we say we are.
Nobody has a perfect scheme yet that is both strong/reliable and easy to use for Joe Average. Once that happens, this kind of idea will be cake to implement.
It's only our binary-obsessed Western mythos that has to cast everything in terms of good/evil, us/them, black/white, and winners/losers.
In a market space, there's plenty of room to be very successful in second or third or tenth place. This isn't a war, it's not a sport, it's not a race.
And that's the way it should be. As soon as you start framing your thoughts in terms of beating the other guy, you have stopped framing your thoughts in terms of being the best you can; being 'on top' is good enough, even if your product is shoddy.
You can say that Microsoft is treating this as a war, and so we need to react in kind, but I maintain that setting "beat Microsoft" as the goal of any alternative project is the death knell for quality in that project. Being better than Microsoft is not hard. Continuing to improve for its OWN sake is the hard part.
It's not a war. It's a competition, in the capitalist sense -- everyone wins different sized slices of the pie, but anyone who has a slice at all is a winner.
Well, there were all sorts of "interesting" plots later on, hinged on the delightfully thin premise that they could use this rocket as a sort of super helicopter, and take off and land just about anywhere on the globe.
I recall an episode of running from Chinese soldiers through some marsh....
The show didn't live up to the movie, but then, what show ever does?
>Honestly, I would say the same thing about a lot of commercial software as well.
Well, yes. But that's not the point. You're playing the ad hominem deflection game: "seeeeee, they're just as bad, toooo!!!"
Boiling this issue down to open versus commercial is completely orthogonal to the actual point: well-designed, specced-out systems are going to be more trustable than ad-hoc slapped together ones.
Where the code comes from should be irrelevant -- if the spec is good and the code actually matches, all is well, regardless of origin. Granted, open source makes bugs easier to find, but also adds an element of chaos into the implementation phase that could be detrimental; the bazaar doesn't necessarily follow specifications. It's a tradeoff....
Trying to cast this issue in the light of open versus closed is really just playing the 'when what you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail' card with the Slashdot open-good-closed-bad mentality.
Not every software development issue can be solved by a free license. Really. I promise. --
FWIW, pro studios have been using a 96/24 format for the past few years, and some DVD audio specs on the drafting board want to use that same scheme.
That pushes the amount of data/time up to something like 320% of standard CD audio (for stereo -- 5.1 would triple THAT), but the fidelity is, as you say, getting into the realm where we're pushing the limits of physics for humans to perceive the granularity.
I once saw it demonstrated that in 32 bits, you have the resolution to capture everything from explosion-style-shock-wave-air-compression on down to the quantum jiggling of molecules due to heat, with a lot left over. 24 bit is just about right to capture the subset of that range that's audible to the human eardrum.
Totally. Good one, too. I wonder if there's a possibility of attaching multiple units to a single PC, and therefore running your MP3 collection "multi-headed" into different rooms of the house. Interesting thought.... --
That's just a normal soundcard with S/PDIF and optical outputs, with a wavetable and other such stuff added, too.
What I'm on about is actually an MP3 to WAV rendering engine onboard the card, and not all that other foo. Poke a raw MP3 stream at the card, get standard full-bandwidth digital audio out the digital outs the other side, without my primary CPU needing to think about the decoding. Save CPU time and frontside/PCI bus bandwidth. --
>The whole napster debate pisses me off. You are not getting cd quality digital audio. You are getting 128k crap. >Sure you can make perfect copies of this 128k crap, but what good is a perfect copy of a piece of shit?
Heh. Yah. I've heard MP3's that sounded 'fine,' even 'good' when you get into the 256K range. But since Napster doesn't have any actual meta information (you can't filter out MP3's made with the insanely bad Xing encoder, for instance), you can never tell what you're getting until it's already assaulting your ears.
I suspect that part of the reason Napster is so popular especially at college campuses is that the target market -- people who definitionally don't care to spend their liquid income on music -- have never owned, probably never HEARD, a proper music reproduction system. And so they believe the myth that "MP3's are CD-quality" because played back over 4" speakers out a $3.99 motherboard-mounted sound chipset, MP3's and CDROM-spun audio CD's _do_ sound about the same.
Not that everyone who hears a proper reference system will become a raving audiophile junkie and disavow anything but first-play virgin vinyl in an anechoic chamber with $35000 in speakers alone; many many people are content to hear their music in 'good enough' fidelity, and I'm not here to bash them for that by any means....
>What, a $250 box from Dell is going to be better?
I don't know yet. But it has a _chance_ to be better. Good DAC's and audio outputs aren't _expensive_, per se, they're just not cheap.
>I somehow doubt the box this article talks about will be much better. It's going to have plenty of noise around it, too.
Totally. But unlike your sound card, which exposes the components and traces directly to the noise field, this will at least have a shielded box around it, cutting the noise floor by tens of dB's. I'm not saying that it's going to be audiophile quality, just that it's starting from a better position than a standard soundcard; that there are benefits to this scheme.
>That's not really a concern for me, I've got a whole other machine for that.
What? You don't run dnetc 24/7 on every machine you have access to?!? Heresy!!! (*grin) --
I'm seeing a lot of "Why not just run a cable from your computer?" posts.
A few points:
-- The average sound card in a computer is crap. Complete and utter garbage when it comes to the fidelity of the audio outputs and the quality of the DACs.
-- You can buy high-end sound cards with much better DACs and outputs, but they're going to cost much more than $199, because of all the extra foo that usually goes into such a card, wavetable synths, PCI chipsets, etc etc.
-- The inside of your computer is one of the electrically noisiest places you have access to (apart from about a foot from your car's distributor...). Your sound card picks up modifications to the signal from this, sometimes as overt as audible noise, sometimes just as subtle changes to the frequency response.
-- Moving the decoder and DACs offboard allows them to be shielded from the above noise, as well as keeps your analog run to the shortest possible. Unless your stereo amp is 12" from your computer, you're running cables that are too long for the best possible sound. You're also probably running some $1.99 Radio Shack 1/8"<->RCA cable, instead of a short run of something good like Monster Cable. Keeping the signal digital as long as possible minimizes analog loss. (Product idea: a PCI card that renders MP3 to standard S/PDIF or optical that can be run directly into the back of your digital-enabled receiver....)
-- You can offload the cycles from your CPU with an outboard box. Nobody's running into CPU crunches with current decoders, it's true, but, hey, that's more distributed.net keys for Team Slashdot, right?
Of course, in case you can't tell, I'm all into extreme fidelity, so I don't understand AT ALL why anyone would want to listen to MP3's as their primary source of music. (*shudder) But I'm just elitist that way, don't mind me....
When Metallica is slow to answer, Slashdot runs a snitty article complaining about it.
When Mr. Adams is even slower to answer, Slashdot takes this "that's-ok-we-know-you're-busy" stance.
Hmmn. Double Standard? Editorial Spin?
Or maybe it's just that putting out a "Douglas Adams slow to answer" article won't generate the same amount of controversy (read: thousand$ of ad banner impre$$ion$) as anything about Metallica?
In either case, it seems Slashdot's description would more correctly be "Strong Opinions from Editor Nerds. Stuff that we think matters."
>and what, precisely, are you going to make the tether out of? thus far (AFAIK) there is no >material that is feasible. carbon nanotubules aren't long enough to make one yet...
>are you planning to tether it to the ground (since this seems to be what you're implying)?
No, no, this isn't a tether. It's a piece of conductive cable of a pretty good length, but nowhere nearly long enough to reach the ground.
This is high-school physics stuff -- moving a conductor through a magnetic field induces current on that conductor; passing current through a conductor conversely generates magnetic field.
By manipulating the amount of current you're letting be generated versus the amount of field you're generating, you can push yourself around relative to the larger field of the earth, speeding up and slowing down, and therefore achieving different orbital velocities.
Basically, you're using a long piece of strong wire as a magnetic "sail."
>and from where comes this "power" that you're running through the cable, if not from propellents? >why would a "nighttime" pass need more energy storage than anything else? this isn't dependent on solar anything.
You've just answered your own question. During the day, the satellite would likely recharge electrical batteries with solar energy as well as with the current induced from pushing through the magnetic field, so nighttime manuevers would have more of a drain on the storage since there was only the one medium of recharging, and it wouldn't be used when you were creating a field to slow down. You'd want to do less moving about at night, for sure.
The art of haiku Rests not in strict meter, but In the final line.
...the above being a perfect example of a VERY bad haiku.
Making an observation in a 575 triplet is simple. What makes a haiku stand out is the twist given to the final line. Consider it an Eastern version of the hoary joke format:
Three people are in a situation. The first one does something interesting. The second one does essentially the same thing. The third one says or does something surprising enough to qualify as funny.
The haiku works the same way: setup, setup, punchline. Not necessarily in the comic sense -- some good haiku are funny, but others are sharp, witty, insightful, probing, and so forth.
But no really excellent haiku is just taking input information and spitting out a formatted version of same. What makes a quality haiku is the same quality of thought that makes a good joke, the sideways-thinking free-association that no algorithm can even approach.
The nice folks at ScrawlSoft had a Z-Machine interpreter, YAZI, four years ago. One of the few third-party Newton widgets worth the sharware fee; it has lots of little buttons and shortcuts for the most popular words, command history, quick cut'n'paste from the output window... makes it almost as easy to play as if you had a keyboard.
And, of course, the shock value of telling your fellow geeks that you were playing "Suspended" on your MessagePad 130 back in 1997 was well worth the price of admission.
I keep pestering them to open the source up, since the project stalled at 2.0b4 when the platform died and still has a couple cosmetic bugs, but they seem to have stopped caring, sigh...
In any case, YAZI can be found at the ftp.gmd.de site mentioned elsewhere, as well as at ScrawlSoft's YAZI Beta Page.
Weird that this article was posted; I was just downloading a fresh mess of.z5 and.z8 games to my MessagePad last night before I went to bed.... --
The actual quote goes: "The first 90% of the job takes the first 90% of the time. The last 10% of the work takes the other 90% of the time." When said that way, it better points out how the picky nature of the final details is usually the problem, not the misjudgment of how much work there was to do.
Given either interpretation of the quote, though, Romero gets no sympathy from me. In a competitive marketplace, there's no "gold star for trying."
Romero and Ion Storm had AMPLE opportunity to realize that they were making a bad game. They had more time than any other computer game in history to take a couple steps back and give a long look to their product with an eye to improving or replacing it. They didn't. They dropped the ball in an incredibly competitive market, a market they chose to compete in, regardless of the risks involved.
This isn't the Special Olympics, the gaming market doesn't run on the "everyone's a winner on the inside" philosophy. More the "can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" philosophy.
(*shrug) It's the ugly facts of life, but calling out that a game is just poo, when in fact it is, is not a bad attitude, it's the free market in action. --
No, 20' of good-quality cable (read: NOT $1.99 Radio Shack RCA cables; drop the $15 for a good Hosa 20' cable from your local pro audio store) will not show any degradation in quality. Pro shielded audio snakes get as long as a quarter mile without noticable degradation, for running mic inputs and the like up to sound boards in stadium settings. So, 20' is not going to cause any problem unless your cable is crappy.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the US might be able to throw a wrench in the works of the 'Net once, but after the subsequent re-routing and such that would happen in the following days, and the pre-emptive fiber lays that would happen in the following months, the world would basically cut the US out of ever being in that position again.
And you know that the FBI knows that, and therefore wouldn't do that except in extreme cases.
So, yeah, it's a trump card right now, that would play once for maybe a week, and never again.
--
I like it in principle. A lot. What I should have said, though, was "show me a way that I, today, can use my spare CPU cycles to feed the third world." Trying to point out that there's currently nothing better I should be doing right now with my extra processor time.
But, yeah, if such a thing came along, with actual immediate tangible helpful results, I'd be _so_ there instead of distributed.net or SETI.
--
It shows no such thing.
Doing SETI is completely orthogonal to helping starving Somalians. Show me a way to use spare CPU cycles to feed the third world. Show me a way to use food to find extraterrestrials. I'm waiting....
The world isn't black-and-white -- just because I'm doing one thing doesn't mean I'm not doing something else also. There are lots of different things people can do with their resources and time, without them interfering or affecting each other at all.
Helping SETI@home doesn't mean I'd "rather find out if there's life in another planet" than help my fellow man, it just means that's the best choice I've found for that particular resource, extra CPU cycles. It doesn't say anything else at all about my character or lack thereof.
--
It takes a little bit of a mindset shift, but I've finally come around to arguing this point:
A Windows application compiled with libwine _IS_ a Linux application. It's a chunk of code that's been compiled on a Linux box and linked with a static library that handles display issues and threading and such. But the binary that's output is a Linux native application -- the only external dependancies are Linux libraries and the kernel. The fact that the source code speaks Win32 is no more important than, for instance, the fact that Perl's source code speaks Posix/Unix -- ActivePerl is still very much a Windows application.
In this configuration, Wine can be thought of as a tangled overcomplicated widget set, handling windowing, display, and threading. It's really only about twice the size of GTK/glib, and less than 50% larger than QT (source tarballs being used for comparison), so the comparison is not too much of a stretch. Plus you get the exciting side bonus of being able to run actual Windows binaries under pseudo-emulation in the other 'traditional' configuration.
I know it's easy to pooh-pooh an application because its source code is originally Win32-based, but really, what is a 'native' Linux application? One that makes only kernel calls? One that only links to libc? If WordPerfect is not 'native' then it could safely be argued that Communicator, for instance, isn't either, since Motif, a display library not 'native' to Linux, is statically linked in.
Once we've compiled an ELF binary whose only external dependencies are libraries that come stock with every Linux distribution, don't we have a native Linux app?
--
Things change. People don't.
People complain. Things still change.
Too bad what's happened to the Valley. It's just as bad up here in SF. If you hate it so much, go somewhere else. The past is past, it won't come back.
I'm doing what I can to find fun in the new SF. It's harder than it used to be. Is that the City's fault, or am I different now that I'm older? (*shrug) What's the difference?
--
...for making an effort to validate the story, and stating very clearly that it's currently unsubstantiated. That's such an improvement over the standard quality of research around here. Congrats and thanks.
(Of course, it's kind of sad when standard journalistic due diligence is such the exception that it sticks out like this....)
--
This is the START of a cool idea, but you'd need some kind of transparent and strong digital signature scheme; otherwise, any wiseass out there could render your MP3 out to a wave file, and then re-encode and re-release it with /HIS/ PayPal information encoded, and the listener would have no way of knowing the difference.
As soon as you start talking about sending money over the Net, you come up against the same issues of authentication and certification that have us all paying Verisign et al to vouch for the fact that we are who we say we are.
Nobody has a perfect scheme yet that is both strong/reliable and easy to use for Joe Average. Once that happens, this kind of idea will be cake to implement.
--
> We are fighting a war.
See, no, we're not.
We're competing in a market space.
It's only our binary-obsessed Western mythos that has to cast everything in terms of good/evil, us/them, black/white, and winners/losers.
In a market space, there's plenty of room to be very successful in second or third or tenth place. This isn't a war, it's not a sport, it's not a race.
And that's the way it should be. As soon as you start framing your thoughts in terms of beating the other guy, you have stopped framing your thoughts in terms of being the best you can; being 'on top' is good enough, even if your product is shoddy.
You can say that Microsoft is treating this as a war, and so we need to react in kind, but I maintain that setting "beat Microsoft" as the goal of any alternative project is the death knell for quality in that project. Being better than Microsoft is not hard. Continuing to improve for its OWN sake is the hard part.
It's not a war. It's a competition, in the capitalist sense -- everyone wins different sized slices of the pie, but anyone who has a slice at all is a winner.
--
Well, there were all sorts of "interesting" plots later on, hinged on the delightfully thin premise that they could use this rocket as a sort of super helicopter, and take off and land just about anywhere on the globe.
I recall an episode of running from Chinese soldiers through some marsh....
The show didn't live up to the movie, but then, what show ever does?
--
>Honestly, I would say the same thing about a lot of commercial software as well.
Well, yes. But that's not the point. You're playing the ad hominem deflection game: "seeeeee, they're just as bad, toooo!!!"
Boiling this issue down to open versus commercial is completely orthogonal to the actual point: well-designed, specced-out systems are going to be more trustable than ad-hoc slapped together ones.
Where the code comes from should be irrelevant -- if the spec is good and the code actually matches, all is well, regardless of origin. Granted, open source makes bugs easier to find, but also adds an element of chaos into the implementation phase that could be detrimental; the bazaar doesn't necessarily follow specifications. It's a tradeoff....
Trying to cast this issue in the light of open versus closed is really just playing the 'when what you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail' card with the Slashdot open-good-closed-bad mentality.
Not every software development issue can be solved by a free license. Really. I promise.
--
FWIW, pro studios have been using a 96/24 format for the past few years, and some DVD audio specs on the drafting board want to use that same scheme.
That pushes the amount of data/time up to something like 320% of standard CD audio (for stereo -- 5.1 would triple THAT), but the fidelity is, as you say, getting into the realm where we're pushing the limits of physics for humans to perceive the granularity.
I once saw it demonstrated that in 32 bits, you have the resolution to capture everything from explosion-style-shock-wave-air-compression on down to the quantum jiggling of molecules due to heat, with a lot left over. 24 bit is just about right to capture the subset of that range that's audible to the human eardrum.
--
Totally. Good one, too. I wonder if there's a possibility of attaching multiple units to a single PC, and therefore running your MP3 collection "multi-headed" into different rooms of the house. Interesting thought....
--
That's just a normal soundcard with S/PDIF and optical outputs, with a wavetable and other such stuff added, too.
What I'm on about is actually an MP3 to WAV rendering engine onboard the card, and not all that other foo. Poke a raw MP3 stream at the card, get standard full-bandwidth digital audio out the digital outs the other side, without my primary CPU needing to think about the decoding. Save CPU time and frontside/PCI bus bandwidth.
--
>The whole napster debate pisses me off. You are not getting cd quality digital audio. You are getting 128k crap.
>Sure you can make perfect copies of this 128k crap, but what good is a perfect copy of a piece of shit?
Heh. Yah. I've heard MP3's that sounded 'fine,' even 'good' when you get into the 256K range. But since Napster doesn't have any actual meta information (you can't filter out MP3's made with the insanely bad Xing encoder, for instance), you can never tell what you're getting until it's already assaulting your ears.
I suspect that part of the reason Napster is so popular especially at college campuses is that the target market -- people who definitionally don't care to spend their liquid income on music -- have never owned, probably never HEARD, a proper music reproduction system. And so they believe the myth that "MP3's are CD-quality" because played back over 4" speakers out a $3.99 motherboard-mounted sound chipset, MP3's and CDROM-spun audio CD's _do_ sound about the same.
Not that everyone who hears a proper reference system will become a raving audiophile junkie and disavow anything but first-play virgin vinyl in an anechoic chamber with $35000 in speakers alone; many many people are content to hear their music in 'good enough' fidelity, and I'm not here to bash them for that by any means....
--
>What, a $250 box from Dell is going to be better?
I don't know yet. But it has a _chance_ to be better. Good DAC's and audio outputs aren't _expensive_, per se, they're just not cheap.
>I somehow doubt the box this article talks about will be much better. It's going to have plenty of noise around it, too.
Totally. But unlike your sound card, which exposes the components and traces directly to the noise field, this will at least have a shielded box around it, cutting the noise floor by tens of dB's. I'm not saying that it's going to be audiophile quality, just that it's starting from a better position than a standard soundcard; that there are benefits to this scheme.
>That's not really a concern for me, I've got a whole other machine for that.
What? You don't run dnetc 24/7 on every machine you have access to?!? Heresy!!! (*grin)
--
I'm seeing a lot of "Why not just run a cable from your computer?" posts.
A few points:
-- The average sound card in a computer is crap. Complete and utter garbage when it comes to the fidelity of the audio outputs and the quality of the DACs.
-- You can buy high-end sound cards with much better DACs and outputs, but they're going to cost much more than $199, because of all the extra foo that usually goes into such a card, wavetable synths, PCI chipsets, etc etc.
-- The inside of your computer is one of the electrically noisiest places you have access to (apart from about a foot from your car's distributor...). Your sound card picks up modifications to the signal from this, sometimes as overt as audible noise, sometimes just as subtle changes to the frequency response.
-- Moving the decoder and DACs offboard allows them to be shielded from the above noise, as well as keeps your analog run to the shortest possible. Unless your stereo amp is 12" from your computer, you're running cables that are too long for the best possible sound. You're also probably running some $1.99 Radio Shack 1/8"<->RCA cable, instead of a short run of something good like Monster Cable. Keeping the signal digital as long as possible minimizes analog loss. (Product idea: a PCI card that renders MP3 to standard S/PDIF or optical that can be run directly into the back of your digital-enabled receiver....)
-- You can offload the cycles from your CPU with an outboard box. Nobody's running into CPU crunches with current decoders, it's true, but, hey, that's more distributed.net keys for Team Slashdot, right?
Of course, in case you can't tell, I'm all into extreme fidelity, so I don't understand AT ALL why anyone would want to listen to MP3's as their primary source of music. (*shudder) But I'm just elitist that way, don't mind me....
--
When Metallica is slow to answer, Slashdot runs a snitty article complaining about it.
When Mr. Adams is even slower to answer, Slashdot takes this "that's-ok-we-know-you're-busy" stance.
Hmmn. Double Standard? Editorial Spin?
Or maybe it's just that putting out a "Douglas Adams slow to answer" article won't generate the same amount of controversy (read: thousand$ of ad banner impre$$ion$) as anything about Metallica?
In either case, it seems Slashdot's description would more correctly be "Strong Opinions from Editor Nerds. Stuff that we think matters."
--
>and what, precisely, are you going to make the tether out of? thus far (AFAIK) there is no
>material that is feasible. carbon nanotubules aren't long enough to make one yet...
>are you planning to tether it to the ground (since this seems to be what you're implying)?
No, no, this isn't a tether. It's a piece of conductive cable of a pretty good length, but nowhere nearly long enough to reach the ground.
This is high-school physics stuff -- moving a conductor through a magnetic field induces current on that conductor; passing current through a conductor conversely generates magnetic field.
By manipulating the amount of current you're letting be generated versus the amount of field you're generating, you can push yourself around relative to the larger field of the earth, speeding up and slowing down, and therefore achieving different orbital velocities.
Basically, you're using a long piece of strong wire as a magnetic "sail."
>and from where comes this "power" that you're running through the cable, if not from propellents?
>why would a "nighttime" pass need more energy storage than anything else? this isn't dependent on solar anything.
You've just answered your own question. During the day, the satellite would likely recharge electrical batteries with solar energy as well as with the current induced from pushing through the magnetic field, so nighttime manuevers would have more of a drain on the storage since there was only the one medium of recharging, and it wouldn't be used when you were creating a field to slow down. You'd want to do less moving about at night, for sure.
--
Damn it all to hell.
Moderators have mercy.
Meant to drop plus-one.
--
(*grin)
That's damned amusing.
I could have taken offense.
But AC's kick ass.
--
Please to let me submit a patched version of this:
Computer haiku:
Poetic rhythm down pat,
But lacking a soul.
--
The art of haiku
Rests not in strict meter, but
In the final line.
...the above being a perfect example of a VERY bad haiku.
Making an observation in a 575 triplet is simple. What makes a haiku stand out is the twist given to the final line. Consider it an Eastern version of the hoary joke format:
Three people are in a situation. The first one does something interesting. The second one does essentially the same thing. The third one says or does something surprising enough to qualify as funny.
The haiku works the same way: setup, setup, punchline. Not necessarily in the comic sense -- some good haiku are funny, but others are sharp, witty, insightful, probing, and so forth.
But no really excellent haiku is just taking input information and spitting out a formatted version of same. What makes a quality haiku is the same quality of thought that makes a good joke, the sideways-thinking free-association that no algorithm can even approach.
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The nice folks at ScrawlSoft had a Z-Machine interpreter, YAZI, four years ago. One of the few third-party Newton widgets worth the sharware fee; it has lots of little buttons and shortcuts for the most popular words, command history, quick cut'n'paste from the output window... makes it almost as easy to play as if you had a keyboard.
.z5 and .z8 games to my MessagePad last night before I went to bed....
And, of course, the shock value of telling your fellow geeks that you were playing "Suspended" on your MessagePad 130 back in 1997 was well worth the price of admission.
I keep pestering them to open the source up, since the project stalled at 2.0b4 when the platform died and still has a couple cosmetic bugs, but they seem to have stopped caring, sigh...
In any case, YAZI can be found at the ftp.gmd.de site mentioned elsewhere, as well as at ScrawlSoft's YAZI Beta Page.
Weird that this article was posted; I was just downloading a fresh mess of
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The actual quote goes: "The first 90% of the job takes the first 90% of the time. The last 10% of the work takes the other 90% of the time." When said that way, it better points out how the picky nature of the final details is usually the problem, not the misjudgment of how much work there was to do.
Given either interpretation of the quote, though, Romero gets no sympathy from me. In a competitive marketplace, there's no "gold star for trying."
Romero and Ion Storm had AMPLE opportunity to realize that they were making a bad game. They had more time than any other computer game in history to take a couple steps back and give a long look to their product with an eye to improving or replacing it. They didn't. They dropped the ball in an incredibly competitive market, a market they chose to compete in, regardless of the risks involved.
This isn't the Special Olympics, the gaming market doesn't run on the "everyone's a winner on the inside" philosophy. More the "can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" philosophy.
(*shrug) It's the ugly facts of life, but calling out that a game is just poo, when in fact it is, is not a bad attitude, it's the free market in action.
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No, 20' of good-quality cable (read: NOT $1.99 Radio Shack RCA cables; drop the $15 for a good Hosa 20' cable from your local pro audio store) will not show any degradation in quality. Pro shielded audio snakes get as long as a quarter mile without noticable degradation, for running mic inputs and the like up to sound boards in stadium settings. So, 20' is not going to cause any problem unless your cable is crappy.
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