Sure you are. It's just that it's not acting in the same direction that it was before. Any mass anywhere affects you gravitationally. You do weigh less though since part of the earth is now pulling you "up" as well as every other direction.
Actually, if I recall the gravitational force of the mass outside the radius of your position cancels out. Such that you only have to account for the mass within the racdius your are at. (Of course this only works for spheres.
Dastardly
Re:Cheaper to build it yourself? Not here :-(
on
PC Prices to Rise?
·
· Score: 1
I find the advantage to building my own system is not so much that it costs less, (it is marginally less I think). But, the ability to get exactly what I want. And, to spread the cost out over time. the best example was going from a K6-2 400 to thunderbird 800. I pretty much just got the case, motherboard and CPU first. A little later decided an upgrade from a TNT to a Geforce2 MX was worthwhile, and added a DVD Drive for movie watching. It is an AMD 750 chipset so memory was unnescesary. (Don't ask. I got a really really good deal on the CPU & MB).
I think my next upgrade will be a little more significant due to the dicontinuity in the market caused by DDR. So, I will need CPU, motherboard, and memory. Plus, by then the Geforce2-MX will be a little long in the tooth, but I am more of a strategy game player, not 3D so it coudl last quite a bit longer.
Web content management is one thing, but it doesn't go far enough for what I am working on. I have been looking into XML aware content management systems that chunk XML documents, and allow reuse of those chunks. For publishing to html, pdf, paper, and whatever might come out in the future. This is so documents created by multiple departments can be accessed by other departments, and reused by documentation groups for customer delivery. And, maintain consistency accross reused information.
Some features I am looking for: 1) XML based documentation. 2) Multiple authoring tool compatibility. 3) Standards compatibility 4) Check-in/Check-out with release versioning a la CVS.
One of the interesting points I have seen is that content management alone won't cut it. You have to have the leadership in the company to push through the cultural changes to get a real return on the investment. A big point of content management is to enable all groups in a company to share information and build on the knowledge of others. The term coined in the article I read is knowledge management. Contenet management is the tool to free up kowledge in the company from departmental web server and file servers and make it available to anyone who needs it.
I woudl call K7 doing it on your own. Just because they hired the best people as they came available as part of the K7 design team doesn't mean the K7 wasn't entirely designed by AMD (except the EV-6 bus).
That's linear advancement. Seeing as you're obviously very involved in the processor arena, you must have heard of a little thing called "Moore's Law," which states that processor speed will increase by a factor of 2 every 18 months. This is certainly not "50MHz every 6 months." Intel had been able to do it for X years before AMD was around, and there was really no evidence suggesting their inability to continue that trend.
Another moron who doesn't know Moore's Law:
Moore's Law states that the number of TRANSISTORS in a processor will double every 18 months.
I hate the way everyone seems to misquote Moore's Law.
Also, Moore's law does not account for marketing and profit maximization. If there is no competition why release a faster processor, until you have squeezed as much profit as possible from the current speed.
I am impressed that AMD had the smarts to develop what amount to a from-scratch CPU core using the original NexGen technology to address the major limitations of the Intel Pentium III CPU.
Umm... K6 was the nexgen processor. Of course all processors build on what was learned previously, but I would not say Athlon was based on NexGen technology.
It's pretty well known at this point that in general, business models that are based around the development of Open Source software typically DO NOT SUCCEED (with very few notable exceptions). This is one very good example of that.
You are an idiot. This is not a very good example,since as far as I know, not a single piece of open source software came out of Loki. They ported closed source games to an open source operating system. They would have had similar problems porting games to just about any other operating system (might have pulled off Apple, but game companies do that port themselves because it is profitable). It is a closed source business model that just didn't work.
That is a very PC centric view point. TSMC and UMC in Taiwan have state of the art fabrication facilities. IBM's probably does more volume as a foundry for other companies than its internal customers (Power4). SPARC accounts for a small fraction of TI's capacity, their Fabs development and capacity are driven by DSPs. Motorola's Fab investments are driven by embedded products. There is also Samsung in Korea and some Japanese semiconductor manufacturers.
Compaq didn't abandon Alpha because of Fab issues. They got Alpha from DEC after Intel had already bought DECs Fabs. I believe Samsung built Compaq's Alphas, possibly in addition to a foundry deal with Intel related to the former DEC Fabs.
There is going to be some consolidation depending on whether some companies can really justify Fab investment based on the return on that Fab. Decreases in die size will help drive this. Considering that AMD is projecting a capacity 50 million/year Athlon/Duron parts from Dresden at 0.13 micron. This is ~50% greater than their total best PC processor shipments from Austin and Dresden combined. Companies will want to reduce die size to reduce cost and increase speed, but will not be able to fill that capacity alone. The billions to invest in a Fab is pretty cheap if you can fully utilize it. I think this is partially why AMD is building their next Fab as a joint venture with UMC, it gives AMD the added capacity and technology of a new Fab, the first dibs at capacity that ownership brings, and the capability of filling the Fab with UMC foundry parts.
I think the big advantage is the likelyhood of hitting more homes at a lower cost than DSL. I would not expect fixed wireless prices to be lower, but I would expect them to be the same and the companies much more profitable and interested in covering greater areas.
It would have to be manufactured on location. Initial equipment would have to be launched from earth, but the key is to launch just enough to make it possible to mine and manufacture the necessary equipment on location. As I have been saying all throughout this thread the point of mining and manufacturing in space and on other planets is not to send the stuff back to earth, it is to make it so earth no longer has to send as much stuff into space to accomplish something.
The only things sent back to earth would not be raw materials, but manufactured items that could only be made under 0G.
The rest is for launching missions to other planets, and hopefully other stars. What NASA really needs is a multi-decade(century) plan to colonize the Solar System starting with a self sustaining refuel and refit facility on the moon. Meaning a lunar food, water, oxygen, and fuel source. The next step is to develop manufacturing capability on the moon to use lunar resources to make reusable interplanetary vehicles. Then, do the same on a martian moon. Then, decide if there is any reason to set up facilities on Mars. Why try to launch stuff from Mars if you can get it from a Martian moon? Although developing Mars might be nice for the people to have solid ground under foot, a sky, gravity, etc... Next pick a jovian moon and develop food, fuel, oxygen and water resources. I think Saturn is an important target due to its lower radiation than jupiter, rings full of ice, and many moons.
When the technology is developed, the ideal step is for conglomerations of comets and asteroids to be put in convenient orbits as refueling and refit stations for interplanetary travelers.
The ulitmate goal of all of this is of course an interstellar colonization. Assembling a self-sustaining habitat from asteroids, comets, chunks of saturn ring ice. Outfit it with nuclear reactors and plenty of nuclear fuel and reaction mass. Then send a large group of colonists to another star, hopefully by then we have found planets capable of sustaining human life. A ship of that size, and with the capabilities inherent in building such a ship, should even be able to add additional chunks of ice and asteroids from a star as it looks for a place to set up shop permanently.
Basically, leaving you with a single use railgun, and making the orbital dynamics calculations even nastier. It would be a hell of a lot esier to put some rockets or ion engine on the hunk of ore and direct it that way. Why waste the time and money building an orbital rail gun that will be a lot less reliable.
At $400 million per launch to get the shuttle into near-earth orbit, how much will it cost to bring home these "precious" minerals?
You missed the point. The point is not to spend $400 million launching stuff into near earth orbit. The point is to try and use stuff that is already their to launch stuff farther into space. The ISS is built 100% from stuff on earth. And, every single kilogram was launched from Earth into orbit. If we had a source of material and manufacturing in orbit, some of that material would not have needed to be launched from Earth. Eliminating some of those $400 million launches.
The real problem is that most of the plans keep skipping the moon. We need to start from the moon because it is closer and therefore cheaper. We need to explore it completely to figure out what resources are available, where, and what can be done with them. Then, we launch the minimum amount of people, equipment, and material to exploit the lunar reqources and build a self sustaining mining and manufacturing operation.
Supposedly there are a lot of very useful materials that could be manufactured in 0G that cannot be done under gravity. By moving production of space stations to the moon where the lower surface gravity and lack of air will make launching much cheaper, we could build a space station much larger than the ISS that could be used to manufacture materials that are impossible to manufacture under gravity. Those materials could be dropped form the station to Earth at very low cost. Especially, if everything except people are received from the moon.
Dastardly
Don't forget that once you have the ability to mine material and manufacture it into space craft, space stations, food, fuel and equipment the cost of moving stuff around in space drops tremendously. You no longer have to launch it from Earth, and waste material that has value on Earth. And, if it is worthwhile dropping something from orbit to the earth is pretty cheap as well. Currently, if we wanted to manufacture something in orbit (drugs, carbon nanotubes) all materials and equipment woudl have to launched from Earth. If the only thing that needed to be launched form earth were people, and posisbly materials unavailable in space the costs would be much lower. This is where developing mining and manifacturing in space is necessary, it reduces the cost of doing things in space that can only be done in space.
If their going to go as far as start mining on Mars, then why not just colonize it and start up some industry and communities there.
Because we should do the moon first, it is closer and therefore cheaper. Once the moon has the facilities to provide at least food and fuel for a trip to Mars. We launch a craft and refeul it at the moon.
as far as the lunar pit stop thing goes, wouldn't it be easier to launch from the earth side of the moon, which would have the earths gravity helping to reduce the force necessary for escape velocity, and then just slingshot around the earth for that extra boost?
I am not sure the change in gravity on teh earth side of the moon vs the other side is really significant. But, some help from an earth slingshot is probably good idea. My orbital dynamics is definitely not up to speed so, I can't say whether earth slingshot from the moon is necessarily worthwhile, or possible.
as far as the planet hopping thing, why not just grab some comets and use them as vehicles, since they are basically snowballs, there is plenty of propellent, and water for life support, and most of them are already moving at a pretty good reletive velocity, so that it would be more a matter of redirecting their orbits than accellerating
Ultimately comet and asteroid pit stops would be ideal. But, that is probably the most difficult to accomplish. I figure the skills involved in getting the moon, mars, martian moons etc. setup are preludes to capturing comets and asteroids. One of the reasons I lean towards lunar orbit for these things is to reduce the chance of earth impact. Maybe earth orbit beyond lunar orbit would be better, or even an earth lagrange point. Maybe even planet hopping to Saturn and slinging ice from the rings into the inner solar system would be good too.
Ultimately this all comes down to having the facilities and materials in space to develop a large, self sustaining colony ship for exploration and colonization of other stars. Possibly a conglomeration of asteroids and comets to provide not only the infrastructure, but the resources to make it to another star. And, if you include the capability to capture additional comets and asteroids at each star the ship could possibly continue on indefinitely.
I just don't see mining other planets to return material to Earth being economically feasible. Launch costs are still a problem. Especially from Mars, maybe the moon could send material to Earth. Probably the only economically feasible space mining for return to Earth would be mining an asteroid after it has been moved into orbit around earth or the moon. But, that kind of capability is much further out.
The primary use of space mining would be to provide resources for continued exploration of space. Getting people and equipment to Mars and the Outer Planet and moons would be much less costly if a lot of the material could be picked up form the Moon, Earth Orbit, or Mars. Currently, a trip to Mars requires launching enough fuel to get to Mars, food for the entire trip, and all equipment.
Let's say then that the Moon has been developed into a space pit stop. With facilities for manufacturing and storing fuel from lunar material.
facilities for growing and processing food for a Mars trip. So from, earth we just need to launch the vehicle, people, and enough fuel and supplies to get to the mooon. The crew lands on the moon picks up enough fuel and supplies to get to Mars, and only has to overcome lunar gravity and earth's gravity 300,000 miles away.
The next step would be to have a reusable Earth/Moon transport, and manufacture a Moon/Mars vehicle that would never return to Earth, but would be maintained, fueled and supplied from the Moon. The step after that would be to completely manufacture supply and fueld non Earth/Moon space vehicles on the moon. The nect step would be the development of the space elevator such that the people and what little couldn't be manufactured in space could be moved to geosynchronous orbit. And, from their be transported via lunar manufactured spacecraft to the moon for refuel and resupply. And, the next step from their is to mvoe resource rich asteroids and comets (for water) into Earth, lunar, Mars, Ganymede orbit as orbital pit stops to reduce the need for a space craft to enter a gravity well for resupply, refit, and/or refuel.
Basically, what it comes down to is that human exploration and development of space needs to involve planet/moon hopping. First, develop facilities on the moon, from there do the same to a martian moon, from their hit Mars, the asteroid belt and Jupiters moons. Then, eliminate the moon from the equation as much as possible and make an asteroid in lunar or earth orbit the way station from Earth to the rest of the solar system.
Any other method is just not efficient, and requires too much stuff to be launched from Earth.
BINGO! The OEMs can buy CPU and Motherbaord from Intel, then go otu an buy the Intel approved Memory and Case. Intel has already done all the testing, so it costs less.
Oh and the other reason Intel is alive. AMD can produce at most 30 million processors a year, although it sounds like at.13 they are talking about up above 50 million. The total market for x86 processors is about 150 million processors a year (AMD's current 20% market share). So, Intel will stay alive just because AMD cannot quintuple their capacity in a short time while maintaining a reasonable cost structure.
What it comes down to is that list prices don't really mean squat for Intel or AMD. The only difference is that a 10000 Unit purchaser probably gets a pretty decent deal relative to list from AMD. While a 10000 Unit buyer probably gets list from Intel.
I finally got to the point of ghosting each of thier machines after they were setup for each user, and handing them a self-booting CD when they screwed up..... again
That is probably a good idea. I don't know what they were doing to screw up the computer, assuming you have an idea of what you are doing. It wasn't product testing, or trying something they really didn't want to have to work around.
But, your description does present the scenario where a developer is trying to do something that is supposed to work, but doen't either due to:
1) Bug in the documentation. They are doing it the way the documenation says, but it is killing their computer.
2) Bug in vendor code/library/OS that they are trying to make work, but can't quite figure out the work around.
3) Nasty bug in their code, that they are trying to track down.
So, giving them a bootable recovery image is a good idea, since it will let them debug/change/test without bugging you about it.
But, is that high level radiation or low level radiation. The problem I see is that any radiation is considered bad. If you take the reactor vessel and crush it into tiny pieces and mix it up with 90% common dirt, just how much additional radiation do you get from standing on top of it?
Plut is not recyclable (except in bombs), has a horrendous half-life, and is completely lethal.
Really! Horrendous half-life and completely lethal. Too bad those two statements are contradictory. The longer the half-life the less radiation emitted over a given period of time.
Plutonium emits alpha particles, which outside the body cannot even penetrate the skin. The half-life of PU-239 created in nuclear reactors is 24,000 year. PU-238 used in RTGs is 86 years. But, again alpha particles cannot penetrate skin.
Basically, it is really hard to inhale enough plutonium to cause a significant increase in cancer risk. Ingestion is the risk you mention of plutonium leaking into a water table, as it turns out that isn't terribly lethal either. Plutonium doesn't disolve or suspend readily in water, it settles out. And, even what does get suspended or dissolved is not absorbed easily by the digestive tract.
So, basically plutonium isn't terribly difficult to deal with, and not terribly deadly. Pick something else to scare people with.
AMD is far from an upstart. They've been making semiconductors since 1969, although most of the initial line was made under license (i.e. they were more of a manufacturer than a maker).
While those products were under license, AMD did differentiate themselves by making ALL of their parts MILSPEC instead of just what was sold to the military.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure you are. It's just that it's not acting in the same direction that it was before. Any mass anywhere affects you gravitationally. You do weigh less though since part of the earth is now pulling you "up" as well as every other direction.
Actually, if I recall the gravitational force of the mass outside the radius of your position cancels out. Such that you only have to account for the mass within the racdius your are at. (Of course this only works for spheres.
Dastardly
I find the advantage to building my own system is not so much that it costs less, (it is marginally less I think). But, the ability to get exactly what I want. And, to spread the cost out over time. the best example was going from a K6-2 400 to thunderbird 800. I pretty much just got the case, motherboard and CPU first. A little later decided an upgrade from a TNT to a Geforce2 MX was worthwhile, and added a DVD Drive for movie watching. It is an AMD 750 chipset so memory was unnescesary. (Don't ask. I got a really really good deal on the CPU & MB).
I think my next upgrade will be a little more significant due to the dicontinuity in the market caused by DDR. So, I will need CPU, motherboard, and memory. Plus, by then the Geforce2-MX will be a little long in the tooth, but I am more of a strategy game player, not 3D so it coudl last quite a bit longer.
Dastardly
Web content management is one thing, but it doesn't go far enough for what I am working on. I have been looking into XML aware content management systems that chunk XML documents, and allow reuse of those chunks. For publishing to html, pdf, paper, and whatever might come out in the future. This is so documents created by multiple departments can be accessed by other departments, and reused by documentation groups for customer delivery. And, maintain consistency accross reused information.
Some features I am looking for:
1) XML based documentation.
2) Multiple authoring tool compatibility.
3) Standards compatibility
4) Check-in/Check-out with release versioning a la CVS.
One of the interesting points I have seen is that content management alone won't cut it. You have to have the leadership in the company to push through the cultural changes to get a real return on the investment. A big point of content management is to enable all groups in a company to share information and build on the knowledge of others. The term coined in the article I read is knowledge management. Contenet management is the tool to free up kowledge in the company from departmental web server and file servers and make it available to anyone who needs it.
Dastardly
I woudl call K7 doing it on your own. Just because they hired the best people as they came available as part of the K7 design team doesn't mean the K7 wasn't entirely designed by AMD (except the EV-6 bus).
That's linear advancement. Seeing as you're obviously very involved in the processor arena, you must have heard of a little thing called "Moore's Law," which states that processor speed will increase by a factor of 2 every 18 months. This is certainly not "50MHz every 6 months." Intel had been able to do it for X years before AMD was around, and there was really no evidence suggesting their inability to continue that trend.
Another moron who doesn't know Moore's Law:
Moore's Law states that the number of TRANSISTORS in a processor will double every 18 months.
I hate the way everyone seems to misquote Moore's Law.
Also, Moore's law does not account for marketing and profit maximization. If there is no competition why release a faster processor, until you have squeezed as much profit as possible from the current speed.
I am impressed that AMD had the smarts to develop what amount to a from-scratch CPU core using the original NexGen technology to address the major limitations of the Intel Pentium III CPU.
Umm... K6 was the nexgen processor. Of course all processors build on what was learned previously, but I would not say Athlon was based on NexGen technology.
It's pretty well known at this point that in general, business models that are based around the development of Open Source software typically DO NOT SUCCEED (with very few notable exceptions). This is one very good example of that.
,since as far as I know, not a single piece of open source software came out of Loki. They ported closed source games to an open source operating system. They would have had similar problems porting games to just about any other operating system (might have pulled off Apple, but game companies do that port themselves because it is profitable). It is a closed source business model that just didn't work.
You are an idiot. This is not a very good example
Don
That is a very PC centric view point. TSMC and UMC in Taiwan have state of the art fabrication facilities. IBM's probably does more volume as a foundry for other companies than its internal customers (Power4). SPARC accounts for a small fraction of TI's capacity, their Fabs development and capacity are driven by DSPs. Motorola's Fab investments are driven by embedded products. There is also Samsung in Korea and some Japanese semiconductor manufacturers.
Compaq didn't abandon Alpha because of Fab issues. They got Alpha from DEC after Intel had already bought DECs Fabs. I believe Samsung built Compaq's Alphas, possibly in addition to a foundry deal with Intel related to the former DEC Fabs.
There is going to be some consolidation depending on whether some companies can really justify Fab investment based on the return on that Fab. Decreases in die size will help drive this. Considering that AMD is projecting a capacity 50 million/year Athlon/Duron parts from Dresden at 0.13 micron. This is ~50% greater than their total best PC processor shipments from Austin and Dresden combined. Companies will want to reduce die size to reduce cost and increase speed, but will not be able to fill that capacity alone. The billions to invest in a Fab is pretty cheap if you can fully utilize it. I think this is partially why AMD is building their next Fab as a joint venture with UMC, it gives AMD the added capacity and technology of a new Fab, the first dibs at capacity that ownership brings, and the capability of filling the Fab with UMC foundry parts.
I think the big advantage is the likelyhood of hitting more homes at a lower cost than DSL. I would not expect fixed wireless prices to be lower, but I would expect them to be the same and the companies much more profitable and interested in covering greater areas.
I think he meant...
"I guess, hosting Reading Rainbow helped."
Interestingthat when I heard the list of players my first guess was that he would win.
It would have to be manufactured on location. Initial equipment would have to be launched from earth, but the key is to launch just enough to make it possible to mine and manufacture the necessary equipment on location. As I have been saying all throughout this thread the point of mining and manufacturing in space and on other planets is not to send the stuff back to earth, it is to make it so earth no longer has to send as much stuff into space to accomplish something.
The only things sent back to earth would not be raw materials, but manufactured items that could only be made under 0G.
The rest is for launching missions to other planets, and hopefully other stars. What NASA really needs is a multi-decade(century) plan to colonize the Solar System starting with a self sustaining refuel and refit facility on the moon. Meaning a lunar food, water, oxygen, and fuel source. The next step is to develop manufacturing capability on the moon to use lunar resources to make reusable interplanetary vehicles. Then, do the same on a martian moon. Then, decide if there is any reason to set up facilities on Mars. Why try to launch stuff from Mars if you can get it from a Martian moon? Although developing Mars might be nice for the people to have solid ground under foot, a sky, gravity, etc... Next pick a jovian moon and develop food, fuel, oxygen and water resources. I think Saturn is an important target due to its lower radiation than jupiter, rings full of ice, and many moons.
When the technology is developed, the ideal step is for conglomerations of comets and asteroids to be put in convenient orbits as refueling and refit stations for interplanetary travelers.
The ulitmate goal of all of this is of course an interstellar colonization. Assembling a self-sustaining habitat from asteroids, comets, chunks of saturn ring ice. Outfit it with nuclear reactors and plenty of nuclear fuel and reaction mass. Then send a large group of colonists to another star, hopefully by then we have found planets capable of sustaining human life. A ship of that size, and with the capabilities inherent in building such a ship, should even be able to add additional chunks of ice and asteroids from a star as it looks for a place to set up shop permanently.
Dastardly
Basically, leaving you with a single use railgun, and making the orbital dynamics calculations even nastier. It would be a hell of a lot esier to put some rockets or ion engine on the hunk of ore and direct it that way. Why waste the time and money building an orbital rail gun that will be a lot less reliable.
At $400 million per launch to get the shuttle into near-earth orbit, how much will it cost to bring home these "precious" minerals?
You missed the point. The point is not to spend $400 million launching stuff into near earth orbit. The point is to try and use stuff that is already their to launch stuff farther into space. The ISS is built 100% from stuff on earth. And, every single kilogram was launched from Earth into orbit. If we had a source of material and manufacturing in orbit, some of that material would not have needed to be launched from Earth. Eliminating some of those $400 million launches.
The real problem is that most of the plans keep skipping the moon. We need to start from the moon because it is closer and therefore cheaper. We need to explore it completely to figure out what resources are available, where, and what can be done with them. Then, we launch the minimum amount of people, equipment, and material to exploit the lunar reqources and build a self sustaining mining and manufacturing operation.
Supposedly there are a lot of very useful materials that could be manufactured in 0G that cannot be done under gravity. By moving production of space stations to the moon where the lower surface gravity and lack of air will make launching much cheaper, we could build a space station much larger than the ISS that could be used to manufacture materials that are impossible to manufacture under gravity. Those materials could be dropped form the station to Earth at very low cost. Especially, if everything except people are received from the moon.
Dastardly
Don't forget that once you have the ability to mine material and manufacture it into space craft, space stations, food, fuel and equipment the cost of moving stuff around in space drops tremendously. You no longer have to launch it from Earth, and waste material that has value on Earth. And, if it is worthwhile dropping something from orbit to the earth is pretty cheap as well. Currently, if we wanted to manufacture something in orbit (drugs, carbon nanotubes) all materials and equipment woudl have to launched from Earth. If the only thing that needed to be launched form earth were people, and posisbly materials unavailable in space the costs would be much lower. This is where developing mining and manifacturing in space is necessary, it reduces the cost of doing things in space that can only be done in space.
Dastardly
If their going to go as far as start mining on Mars, then why not just colonize it and start up some industry and communities there.
Because we should do the moon first, it is closer and therefore cheaper. Once the moon has the facilities to provide at least food and fuel for a trip to Mars. We launch a craft and refeul it at the moon.
as far as the lunar pit stop thing goes, wouldn't it be easier to launch from the earth side of the moon, which would have the earths gravity helping to reduce the force necessary for escape velocity, and then just slingshot around the earth for that extra boost?
I am not sure the change in gravity on teh earth side of the moon vs the other side is really significant. But, some help from an earth slingshot is probably good idea. My orbital dynamics is definitely not up to speed so, I can't say whether earth slingshot from the moon is necessarily worthwhile, or possible.
as far as the planet hopping thing, why not just grab some comets and use them as vehicles, since they are basically snowballs, there is plenty of propellent, and water for life support, and most of them are already moving at a pretty good reletive velocity, so that it would be more a matter of redirecting their orbits than accellerating
Ultimately comet and asteroid pit stops would be ideal. But, that is probably the most difficult to accomplish. I figure the skills involved in getting the moon, mars, martian moons etc. setup are preludes to capturing comets and asteroids. One of the reasons I lean towards lunar orbit for these things is to reduce the chance of earth impact. Maybe earth orbit beyond lunar orbit would be better, or even an earth lagrange point. Maybe even planet hopping to Saturn and slinging ice from the rings into the inner solar system would be good too.
Ultimately this all comes down to having the facilities and materials in space to develop a large, self sustaining colony ship for exploration and colonization of other stars. Possibly a conglomeration of asteroids and comets to provide not only the infrastructure, but the resources to make it to another star. And, if you include the capability to capture additional comets and asteroids at each star the ship could possibly continue on indefinitely.
I just don't see mining other planets to return material to Earth being economically feasible. Launch costs are still a problem. Especially from Mars, maybe the moon could send material to Earth. Probably the only economically feasible space mining for return to Earth would be mining an asteroid after it has been moved into orbit around earth or the moon. But, that kind of capability is much further out.
The primary use of space mining would be to provide resources for continued exploration of space. Getting people and equipment to Mars and the Outer Planet and moons would be much less costly if a lot of the material could be picked up form the Moon, Earth Orbit, or Mars. Currently, a trip to Mars requires launching enough fuel to get to Mars, food for the entire trip, and all equipment.
Let's say then that the Moon has been developed into a space pit stop. With facilities for manufacturing and storing fuel from lunar material.
facilities for growing and processing food for a Mars trip. So from, earth we just need to launch the vehicle, people, and enough fuel and supplies to get to the mooon. The crew lands on the moon picks up enough fuel and supplies to get to Mars, and only has to overcome lunar gravity and earth's gravity 300,000 miles away.
The next step would be to have a reusable Earth/Moon transport, and manufacture a Moon/Mars vehicle that would never return to Earth, but would be maintained, fueled and supplied from the Moon. The step after that would be to completely manufacture supply and fueld non Earth/Moon space vehicles on the moon. The nect step would be the development of the space elevator such that the people and what little couldn't be manufactured in space could be moved to geosynchronous orbit. And, from their be transported via lunar manufactured spacecraft to the moon for refuel and resupply. And, the next step from their is to mvoe resource rich asteroids and comets (for water) into Earth, lunar, Mars, Ganymede orbit as orbital pit stops to reduce the need for a space craft to enter a gravity well for resupply, refit, and/or refuel.
Basically, what it comes down to is that human exploration and development of space needs to involve planet/moon hopping. First, develop facilities on the moon, from there do the same to a martian moon, from their hit Mars, the asteroid belt and Jupiters moons. Then, eliminate the moon from the equation as much as possible and make an asteroid in lunar or earth orbit the way station from Earth to the rest of the solar system.
Any other method is just not efficient, and requires too much stuff to be launched from Earth.
Dastardly
Lower cost bundling to the OEM's
.13 they are talking about up above 50 million. The total market for x86 processors is about 150 million processors a year (AMD's current 20% market share). So, Intel will stay alive just because AMD cannot quintuple their capacity in a short time while maintaining a reasonable cost structure.
BINGO! The OEMs can buy CPU and Motherbaord from Intel, then go otu an buy the Intel approved Memory and Case. Intel has already done all the testing, so it costs less.
Oh and the other reason Intel is alive. AMD can produce at most 30 million processors a year, although it sounds like at
What it comes down to is that list prices don't really mean squat for Intel or AMD. The only difference is that a 10000 Unit purchaser probably gets a pretty decent deal relative to list from AMD. While a 10000 Unit buyer probably gets list from Intel.
Actually, you could argue they never used cars either, just fighter jets, and not necessarily WWII.
The F16-A Thunderbird, Spitfire, Mustang. as it turns out Mustang is a fighter, car, and horse.
I finally got to the point of ghosting each of thier machines after they were setup for each user, and handing them a self-booting CD when they screwed up..... again
That is probably a good idea. I don't know what they were doing to screw up the computer, assuming you have an idea of what you are doing. It wasn't product testing, or trying something they really didn't want to have to work around.
But, your description does present the scenario where a developer is trying to do something that is supposed to work, but doen't either due to:
1) Bug in the documentation. They are doing it the way the documenation says, but it is killing their computer.
2) Bug in vendor code/library/OS that they are trying to make work, but can't quite figure out the work around.
3) Nasty bug in their code, that they are trying to track down.
So, giving them a bootable recovery image is a good idea, since it will let them debug/change/test without bugging you about it.
Dastardly
Don't forget the people who are being paid to writ Open Source software.
But, is that high level radiation or low level radiation. The problem I see is that any radiation is considered bad. If you take the reactor vessel and crush it into tiny pieces and mix it up with 90% common dirt, just how much additional radiation do you get from standing on top of it?
Dastardly
Plut is not recyclable (except in bombs), has a horrendous half-life, and is completely lethal.
Really! Horrendous half-life and completely lethal. Too bad those two statements are contradictory. The longer the half-life the less radiation emitted over a given period of time.
Plutonium emits alpha particles, which outside the body cannot even penetrate the skin. The half-life of PU-239 created in nuclear reactors is 24,000 year. PU-238 used in RTGs is 86 years. But, again alpha particles cannot penetrate skin.
So, what about ingestion or respiration. Well, this site has a very good analysis of the cancer risk of ingesting and/or inhaling plutonium. http://www.llnl.gov/csts/publications/sutcliffe/
Basically, it is really hard to inhale enough plutonium to cause a significant increase in cancer risk. Ingestion is the risk you mention of plutonium leaking into a water table, as it turns out that isn't terribly lethal either. Plutonium doesn't disolve or suspend readily in water, it settles out. And, even what does get suspended or dissolved is not absorbed easily by the digestive tract.
So, basically plutonium isn't terribly difficult to deal with, and not terribly deadly. Pick something else to scare people with.
Datardly
AMD is far from an upstart. They've been making semiconductors since 1969, although most of the initial line was made under license (i.e. they were more of a manufacturer than a maker).
While those products were under license, AMD did differentiate themselves by making ALL of their parts MILSPEC instead of just what was sold to the military.