It's not quite that easy. It's one thing to have a threaded, single process application; it's another thing to require two separate processes and use IPC between them.
I believe you can't have 64-bit software that uses the GUI.
You can use the 32-bit GUI libraries by threading your app. If you're writing performance code, you should have threaded your app a log time ago.
Compare this to the x64 versions of Windows XP/2003, which are actually 64-bit, use 64-bit drivers, etc., and can run 32-bit and 64-bit GUI software simultaneously. The shell (explorer.exe) is 64-bit, as is most of the OS software (notepad, all the services, etc.) Both 32- and 64-bit versions of IE and Win Media Player are included, for compatibility with old codecs/plugins/etc. You can run a 64-bit Internet Explorer and a 32-bit Firefox simultaneously with no issues.
Why do any of those things need to be 64-bit? Notepad? IE? How could those ever need more than 4 GB of memory?
The main use for 64-bit is for scientists doing number crunching. And Tiger does that... not perfect, in that some libraries are still 32-bit. But 10.5 is promised to be fully 64-bit so that will get rid of annoyances of having to do work-arounds for 32-bit libraries. (A 64-bit app can still use 32-bit libraries, it's just a bit of a pain)
I was referring to an old rumour where a bluetooth ipod broadcasts whatever you're listening to the people around you so you can have you're own private ipod-based mini-radio station. It was just one of those crazy rumours that appear every year in late december and early january... ditto for the mac mini tivo thing, that was a rumour last year too.
The list is meant as a joke... the bluetooth iPod is a recurring rumour, The G5 was super-hyped, but the switch to intel showed that Apple really didn't think it was all that... and the market share being repeated on the list was a joke... So I'm not that funny:) But please don't let my lame joke start a flamewar.
Why do you need to send an EXE attachment? Seems like a sane thing to forbid.
Before Microsoft started allowing email to execute code, email viruses were impossible. It seems like a very good policy for google to try and restore something like the original restrictions on email to stop the virus problem. SFTP, WebDAV, etc are for transferring programs... Windows should just make them easy to use like Apple's iDisk and you can just send a URL.
I'm writing this on a powermac now with the same sort of cooling system...
- High-Definition Video on the PC
this one looks like it's only delayed... the content is now showing up on iTunes... and since it looks like it's going to be very successful, it's only a matter of time before they offer HD too....maybe on the MacIntosh New Year in two weeks
- Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Tiger has been a huge success. (it's 64-bit)
- iPod Competitors Emerge
What's so wrong with the iPod that they're wishing for competitors. None of the competitors really care about mac users, so why should I care about their products? And why do we want WMV to win the DRM battle? And why is the iPod entry level?
ExtremeTech my ass. more like WhatTheGuysWorkingAtBestBuyThinkIsExtremeTech
Shit I wanna see the Mac user list of top ten disappointments....
10. Market share still sucks 9. iPod still can't do bluetooth 8. Market share is what 3% or something now 7. Turns out the G5 wasn't a supercomputer on a chip 6. No Civ IV 5. Have to wait more than 3 months for 10.5 4. Mac mini turned out not do have anything to do with Tivo 3. Damn, that market share sucks 2. OS X still can't read minds 1. Fucking market share
But in the episodes they visited several planets and couldn't find water. Heck in reality not only would most planets have ice on them, but if they had technology to detect planets around other stars, they could easily look at spectra of those planets and determine if they had water before even visiting the star systems.
The episode where they're going from planet to planet looking for water was so stupid it made me cringe. In our solar system anything outside of the asteroid belt is _mostly_ water. And even the inner planets have large deposits of ice or water with the exception of Mercury.
What might be rare are iron and heavier elements (those can only be in solar systems formed in the second generation of star formation or later)... yet they seem to have all of the metal they need as they don't seem overly concerned with salvaging wreckage after battles... I'd think they'd be trying to get every last scrap of metal after each battle....using magnets to pick up spent bullets and all...
Tell me a show that's better than Battlestar Galactica, because i sure can't think of one.
Stargate Atlantis:) Mckay rocks... he's like a whiny arrogant Spock..
seriously though... I've been watching Galactica to try and figure out what it is I don't get that everyone else does... but I don't understand what's so great and that all of geek-dom is lauding this as the next Firefly... And what's not so great about Stargate Atlantis that it hasn't made the cut?
i'm not trying to start a flame-war... I honestly want to know the right mindset to appreciate Galactica and it's airplane-style-flyin spaceships and odd notions that water is scarce in the universe but bullets are plentiful...
Only Microsoft are to blame here for their illegal abuse of their monopoly - no one else. Or do you believe corporations should be exempt from the law?
dude... how does statements like this prove your point? No one is exempt from the law... and governments aren't exempt from the consequences of bad laws.
Furthermore this ruling doesn't strike me as a law so much as an arbitrary use of power. Laws are predictable, and this predictability allows commerce. No matter what the reasons behind such an action, when the action becomes arbitrary it will hurt commerce and the economy as a whole.
Is De Beers require to publish the contact information for all of their suppliers? Is Airbus required to release engineering drawing of all of their parts so anyone can make them?
(In any case, the computer industry in the beginning was much more open - it's only later on that closed source and closed protocols started to appear)
Dude.. when did you start using computers? My Ti-99/4A only worked with Ti peripherals and my friend's C-64 was the same way. If MS doesn't want to interoperate that's their own decision to make. There is nothing stopping people who don't like it from getting a Mac.
They could stop selling XP and only sell Win 98 ME, and open up that. Or they could make a special version of XP for Europe without the features they're being compelled to open up. They could call it Win FU.
Of course if you did that then you'd be lynched by your shareholders straight away. Europe is a huge market and for a company that mostly relies on a monopoly to boost competitors out, and for a company whose products don't interoperate at all with other products of the same class, even Microsoft wouldn't last very long without Europe
*cough* China *cough* India *cough*
In a few years, neither the US nor Europe will matter that much to the bottom line.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft either... but keeping this information to themselves is something that has been done in the computer industry since the beginning. I can't believe the EU would be so fascist as to compel Microsoft to release this information... and with a fine post-dated to Dec 15!! Microsoft should suspend all sales of Windows and Office until this is resolved. Europe is much more heavily dependent on windows than the US... they would most definitely feel the pinch. Hell they might be able to talk Apple into joining the boycott...
I wonder... if I hosted some popular humor video on my site (ala jib jab) that generated many crosslinks from pages unrelated to the content of my site, what would that do to page rank. That is, I'd have a lot of links from web sites about humor and such, but little from websites about polycarbonate sprockets (which is what I really want to be the #1 search result for).
Basically is google smart enough to account for context in page rank? or could I come to the top just by hosting popular content that is unrelated to the main content of my site...
Chemical rockets in deep space probes are unlikely to explode unless something happens to the spacecraft that ruptures a tank or something... this would also cause an ion thruster to explode since the Xenon is pressurized. Sure fuel leaks can be a problem on chemical systems, but they are also problems with ion engines (google Hayabusa).
During a maneuver you briefly pass through many different types of orbits, some of which are dangerous in that the impact something or escape the vicinity of the body that you're trying to get to. For a chemical system you are in these dangerous regions for only milliseconds, for a low thrust system you can be in such regions for weeks at a time... and if the engine fails you might not be able to get out of these regions before you fail.
This is analagous to why insects have a harder time on a windy day than birds. Or row boats have a harder time in a strong current than motor boats.
But Voyager type gravity-assist trajectories don't need much DV after launch. So the chemical rocket + propellant weights much less than the Ion engine + PPU + propellant + solar cells (or nuclear reactor).
Some proposed mission concepts considering ion propulsion include the Comet Nucleus Sampler Return (CNSR), the Saturn Ring Observer, the Titan Explorer, the Neptune Orbiter, and the Europa Lander.
I've seen those studies and they are huge spacecraft, many designs require multiple launches and on-orbit assembly. Competing designs using chemical rocket + aerobraking + gravity-assists greatly outperformed these designs... and as a result, the program that funded these studies has been canceled. And the mission to Europa that was going to be low-thrust is going to be chemical, and it's going to have better science return for less cost.
An ion engine lets you carry MORE payload AND get there faster. It even lets you do something more than float on past when you do get there.
I've done the math and read papers where others have done the math and Ion engines only allow more payload for certain types of mission (usually asteroids and comets) and they are never faster than trajectories with chemical rockets. If someone claims they are faster is because they did a poor design of the chemical rocket trajectory that they're using for comparison.
Around Jupiter's Moons and around Asteroids you may only have a few days to get off of an impacting or an escaping trajectory. Low Thrust engines can take weeks to change the orbit and then you can't do anything to change your fate.
Sure, there are time critical events for chemical rockets, but you can mitigate the risk there with redundant systems and flight software that can recover from problems on its own.
In Engineering lingo, chemical rockets have greater control authority and can then recover from larger disturbances than ion engines can. Therefore chemical engines fare better in regions with unstable dynamics (in fact they can often pass through such regions in the phase space during a few seconds of thrusting, where low thrust missions have to spend weeks in such regions)
Ion engines have much lower thrust than chemical rockets and are not suitable for missions like voyager....even if you had a nuclear reactor to power the ion engines. Mission like voyager are done best with a large rocket to give it a bunch of energy at the start and then a trajectory that mostly coasts.. and chemical rockets are much better suited for those missions because the weigh much, much less, are more reliable.
Now imagine voyager rebuilt with this technology and having the ability 30 years later to still apply thrust vectors.
You couldn't fly Voyager with a low thrust engine... or at least it would end up being a much more massive spacecraft and be able to carry fewer instruments. If we built Voyager today it would still have chemical rockets and would be pretty much the same expect for better computers and instruments.
Once you're in orbit, the amount of thrust becomes a reasonably insignificant detail. The overriding concern is whether or not your craft can produce the necessary Delta-V to reach the required escape trajectory. Since it seems unlikely that the ESA would be investigating these devices as a replacement for ION engines if their performance was sub-par to IONs, it stands to reason that these engines will have no difficulty reaching the required Delta-V.
Delta v is the main concern, but thrust is important too, in that low thrust spacecraft take forever to get anywhere, and the engines are so feeble that they have a lot of trouble when third body effects pose a danger of crashing the spacecraft (i.e. orbiting asteroids or at Jupiter or Saturn). If this engine has significantly higher thrust than gridded Ion engines and hall effect thrusters and even 1/3 of the fuel efficiency (i.e. specific impulse) then this would indeed be a major breakthrough and will open up the solar system to a major exploration effort.... however, I can't find the thrust levels quoted anywhere so I don't know if this is something amazing or just some research group self-promoting and slight improvement to a hall thruster.
I would be much more interested in knowing if it were practical to ionize oxygen then use this technique to improve the oxygen/nitrogen ratio in the engine. If you could, it would improve engine efficiency and may help in reducing the complexity of the engine electronics and mechanics.
Sorry that I don't remember why (something to do with atomic mass and ionization energy) but, Mercury is the most effective propellant for Ion engines, and Xenon is second, Argon is almost as good as Xenon. They usually use Xenon because building and testing a Mercury engine would be much more expensive because of safety concerns.
Cassini has to fire its main engines once every 400 days in order to flush corrosion from the cat beds that might clog the lines otherwise... This has never been much of a problem to do as small maneuvers can be planned without messing up the interplanetary trajectory.
Actually for interplanetary missions chemical rockets are far less risky than low thrust systems. This is because chemical rockets instantly change you from one safe trajectory to another.. low thrust engines make this change over several days and as a reult there are often periods where if the engine fails the spacecraft would be left on an unstable orbit that is likely to crash into something or be thrown into an escape trajectory. JIMO and Dawn both had major problems trying to design trajectories that always left enough time to recover from possible engine failures without crashing.
It all comes down to control authority... bigger thrust gives you more control authority and you can much more easily recover from unexpected trajectory perturbations.
Supposedly this engine is supposed to have much higher thrust than normal Ion engines... but I can't find anywhere that gives the thrust levels is is theorized to achieve. Low Thrust engines are limited to certain types of interplanetary missions - if this thing can give a higher thrust at a comparable Isp (i.e. fuel efficiency) that would open up all sorts of new uses for electric propulsion (manned mars missions, missions to the outer planets, etc)
has anyone found a quote for the thrust levels they expect? something on the order of 0.1-1 N would be revolutionary... something less and I don't know what all of the fuss is about (cuz then it just seems like a new type of Hall thruster).
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It's not quite that easy. It's one thing to have a threaded, single process application; it's another thing to require two separate processes and use IPC between them.
It's not so bad if you use Cocoa and NSTask
I believe you can't have 64-bit software that uses the GUI.
You can use the 32-bit GUI libraries by threading your app. If you're writing performance code, you should have threaded your app a log time ago.
Compare this to the x64 versions of Windows XP/2003, which are actually 64-bit, use 64-bit drivers, etc., and can run 32-bit and 64-bit GUI software simultaneously. The shell (explorer.exe) is 64-bit, as is most of the OS software (notepad, all the services, etc.) Both 32- and 64-bit versions of IE and Win Media Player are included, for compatibility with old codecs/plugins/etc. You can run a 64-bit Internet Explorer and a 32-bit Firefox simultaneously with no issues.
Why do any of those things need to be 64-bit? Notepad? IE? How could those ever need more than 4 GB of memory?
The main use for 64-bit is for scientists doing number crunching. And Tiger does that... not perfect, in that some libraries are still 32-bit. But 10.5 is promised to be fully 64-bit so that will get rid of annoyances of having to do work-arounds for 32-bit libraries. (A 64-bit app can still use 32-bit libraries, it's just a bit of a pain)
I was referring to an old rumour where a bluetooth ipod broadcasts whatever you're listening to the people around you so you can have you're own private ipod-based mini-radio station. It was just one of those crazy rumours that appear every year in late december and early january... ditto for the mac mini tivo thing, that was a rumour last year too.
...does a much better job making the joke that I was trying for...
This site: http://www.misterbg.org/AppleProductCycle/
The list is meant as a joke... the bluetooth iPod is a recurring rumour, The G5 was super-hyped, but the switch to intel showed that Apple really didn't think it was all that... and the market share being repeated on the list was a joke... So I'm not that funny :) But please don't let my lame joke start a flamewar.
Why do you need to send an EXE attachment? Seems like a sane thing to forbid.
Before Microsoft started allowing email to execute code, email viruses were impossible. It seems like a very good policy for google to try and restore something like the original restrictions on email to stop the virus problem. SFTP, WebDAV, etc are for transferring programs... Windows should just make them easy to use like Apple's iDisk and you can just send a URL.
- The BTX Form Factor
...maybe on the MacIntosh New Year in two weeks
I'm writing this on a powermac now with the same sort of cooling system...
- High-Definition Video on the PC
this one looks like it's only delayed... the content is now showing up on iTunes... and since it looks like it's going to be very successful, it's only
a matter of time before they offer HD too.
- Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Tiger has been a huge success. (it's 64-bit)
- iPod Competitors Emerge
What's so wrong with the iPod that they're wishing for competitors. None of the competitors really care about mac users, so why should I care about their products? And why do we want WMV to win the DRM battle? And why is the iPod entry level?
ExtremeTech my ass. more like WhatTheGuysWorkingAtBestBuyThinkIsExtremeTech
Shit I wanna see the Mac user list of top ten disappointments....
10. Market share still sucks
9. iPod still can't do bluetooth
8. Market share is what 3% or something now
7. Turns out the G5 wasn't a supercomputer on a chip
6. No Civ IV
5. Have to wait more than 3 months for 10.5
4. Mac mini turned out not do have anything to do with Tivo
3. Damn, that market share sucks
2. OS X still can't read minds
1. Fucking market share
But in the episodes they visited several planets and couldn't find water. Heck in reality not only would most planets have ice on them, but if they had technology to detect planets around other stars, they could easily look at spectra of those planets and determine if they had water before even visiting the star systems.
Water is relatively scarce
...using magnets to pick up spent bullets and all...
The episode where they're going from planet to planet looking for water was so stupid it made me cringe. In our solar system anything outside of the asteroid belt is _mostly_ water. And even the inner planets have large deposits of ice or water with the exception of Mercury.
What might be rare are iron and heavier elements (those can only be in solar systems formed in the second generation of star formation or later)... yet they seem to have all of the metal they need as they don't seem overly concerned with salvaging wreckage after battles... I'd think they'd be trying to get every last scrap of metal after each battle.
Tell me a show that's better than Battlestar Galactica, because i sure can't think of one.
:) Mckay rocks... he's like a whiny arrogant Spock..
Stargate Atlantis
seriously though... I've been watching Galactica to try and figure out what it is I don't get that everyone else does... but I don't understand what's so great and that all of geek-dom is lauding this as the next Firefly... And what's not so great about Stargate Atlantis that it hasn't made the cut?
i'm not trying to start a flame-war... I honestly want to know the right mindset to appreciate Galactica and it's airplane-style-flyin spaceships and odd notions that water is scarce in the universe but bullets are plentiful...
Only Microsoft are to blame here for their illegal abuse of their monopoly - no one else. Or do you believe corporations should be exempt from the law?
dude... how does statements like this prove your point? No one is exempt from the law... and governments aren't exempt from the consequences of bad laws.
Furthermore this ruling doesn't strike me as a law so much as an arbitrary use of power. Laws are predictable, and this predictability allows commerce. No matter what the reasons behind such an action, when the action becomes arbitrary it will hurt commerce and the economy as a whole.
Is De Beers require to publish the contact information for all of their suppliers? Is Airbus required to release engineering drawing of all of their parts so anyone can make them?
These are monopolies... where's the parity?
(In any case, the computer industry in the beginning was much more open - it's only later on that closed source and closed protocols started to appear)
Dude.. when did you start using computers? My Ti-99/4A only worked with Ti peripherals and my friend's C-64 was the same way. If MS doesn't want to interoperate that's their own decision to make. There is nothing stopping people who don't like it from getting a Mac.
Why? Grandparent post should be marked as flamebait, if anything... I'll bite.
Ouch... if my post was about any company other than Microsoft it would have been moderated as +5 libertarian.
They could stop selling XP and only sell Win 98 ME, and open up that. Or they could make a special version of XP for Europe without the features they're being compelled to open up. They could call it Win FU.
Of course if you did that then you'd be lynched by your shareholders straight away. Europe is a huge market and for a company that mostly relies on a monopoly to boost competitors out, and for a company whose products don't interoperate at all with other products of the same class, even Microsoft wouldn't last very long without Europe
*cough* China *cough* India *cough*
In a few years, neither the US nor Europe will matter that much to the bottom line.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft either... but keeping this information to themselves is something that has been done in the computer industry since the beginning. I can't believe the EU would be so fascist as to compel Microsoft to release this information... and with a fine post-dated to Dec 15!! Microsoft should suspend all sales of Windows and Office until this is resolved. Europe is much more heavily dependent on windows than the US... they would most definitely feel the pinch. Hell they might be able to talk Apple into joining the boycott...
I wonder... if I hosted some popular humor video on my site (ala jib jab) that generated many crosslinks from pages unrelated to the content of my site, what would that do to page rank. That is, I'd have a lot of links from web sites about humor and such, but little from websites about polycarbonate sprockets (which is what I really want to be the #1 search result for).
Basically is google smart enough to account for context in page rank? or could I come to the top just by hosting popular content that is unrelated to the main content of my site...
Chemical rockets in deep space probes are unlikely to explode unless something happens to the spacecraft that ruptures a tank or something... this would also cause an ion thruster to explode since the Xenon is pressurized. Sure fuel leaks can be a problem on chemical systems, but they are also
problems with ion engines (google Hayabusa).
During a maneuver you briefly pass through many different types of orbits, some of which are dangerous in that the impact something or escape the vicinity of the body that you're trying to get to. For a chemical system you are in these dangerous regions for only milliseconds, for a low thrust system you can be in such regions for weeks at a time... and if the engine fails you might not be able to get out of these regions before you fail.
This is analagous to why insects have a harder time on a windy day than birds. Or row boats have a harder time in a strong current than motor boats.
But Voyager type gravity-assist trajectories don't need much DV after launch. So the chemical rocket + propellant weights much less than the Ion engine + PPU + propellant + solar cells (or nuclear reactor).
Some proposed mission concepts considering ion propulsion include the Comet Nucleus Sampler Return (CNSR), the Saturn Ring Observer, the Titan Explorer, the Neptune Orbiter, and the Europa Lander.
I've seen those studies and they are huge spacecraft, many designs require multiple launches and on-orbit assembly. Competing designs using chemical rocket + aerobraking + gravity-assists greatly outperformed these designs... and as a result, the program that funded these studies has been canceled. And the mission to Europa that was going to be low-thrust is going to be chemical, and it's going to have better science return for less cost.
An ion engine lets you carry MORE payload AND get there faster. It even lets you do something more than float on past when you do get there.
I've done the math and read papers where others have done the math and Ion engines only allow more payload for certain types of mission (usually asteroids and comets) and they are never faster than trajectories with chemical rockets. If someone claims they are faster is because they did a poor design of the chemical rocket trajectory that they're using for comparison.
Around Jupiter's Moons and around Asteroids you may only have a few days to get off of an impacting or an escaping trajectory. Low Thrust engines can take weeks to change the orbit and then you can't do anything to change your fate.
Sure, there are time critical events for chemical rockets, but you can mitigate the risk there with redundant systems and flight software that can recover from problems on its own.
In Engineering lingo, chemical rockets have greater control authority and can then recover from larger disturbances than ion engines can. Therefore chemical engines fare better in regions with unstable dynamics (in fact they can often pass through such regions in the phase space during a few seconds of thrusting, where low thrust missions have to spend weeks in such regions)
Ion engines have much lower thrust than chemical rockets and are not suitable for missions like voyager. ...even if you had a nuclear reactor to power the ion engines. Mission like voyager are done best with a large rocket to give it a bunch of energy at the start and then a trajectory that mostly coasts.. and chemical rockets are much better suited for those missions because the weigh much, much less, are more reliable.
Now imagine voyager rebuilt with this technology and having the ability 30 years later to still apply thrust vectors.
You couldn't fly Voyager with a low thrust engine... or at least it would end up being a much more massive spacecraft and be able to carry fewer instruments. If we built Voyager today it would still have chemical rockets and would be pretty much the same expect for better computers and instruments.
Once you're in orbit, the amount of thrust becomes a reasonably insignificant detail. The overriding concern is whether or not your craft can produce the necessary Delta-V to reach the required escape trajectory. Since it seems unlikely that the ESA would be investigating these devices as a replacement for ION engines if their performance was sub-par to IONs, it stands to reason that these engines will have no difficulty reaching the required Delta-V.
Delta v is the main concern, but thrust is important too, in that low thrust spacecraft take forever to get anywhere, and the engines are so feeble that they have a lot of trouble when third body effects pose a danger of crashing the spacecraft (i.e. orbiting asteroids or at Jupiter or Saturn). If this engine has significantly higher thrust than gridded Ion engines and hall effect thrusters and even 1/3 of the fuel efficiency (i.e. specific impulse) then this would indeed be a major breakthrough and will open up the solar system to a major exploration effort.... however, I can't find the thrust levels quoted anywhere so I don't know if this is something amazing or just some research group self-promoting and slight improvement to a hall thruster.
I would be much more interested in knowing if it were practical to ionize oxygen then use this technique to improve the oxygen/nitrogen ratio in the engine. If you could, it would improve engine efficiency and may help in reducing the complexity of the engine electronics and mechanics.
Sorry that I don't remember why (something to do with atomic mass and ionization energy) but, Mercury is the most effective propellant for Ion engines, and Xenon is second, Argon is almost as good as Xenon. They usually use Xenon because building and testing a Mercury engine would be much more expensive because of safety concerns.
Cassini has to fire its main engines once every 400 days in order to flush corrosion from the cat beds that might clog the lines otherwise... This has never been much of a problem to do as small maneuvers can be planned without messing up the interplanetary trajectory.
Actually for interplanetary missions chemical rockets are far less risky than low thrust systems. This is because chemical rockets instantly change you from one safe trajectory to another.. low thrust engines make this change over several days and as a reult there are often periods where if the engine fails the spacecraft would be left on an unstable orbit that is likely to crash into something or be thrown into an escape trajectory. JIMO and Dawn both had major problems trying to design trajectories that always left enough time to recover from possible engine failures without crashing.
It all comes down to control authority... bigger thrust gives you more control authority and you can much more easily recover from unexpected trajectory perturbations.
Supposedly this engine is supposed to have much higher thrust than normal Ion engines... but I can't find anywhere that gives the thrust levels is is theorized to achieve. Low Thrust engines are limited to certain types of interplanetary missions - if this thing can give a higher thrust at a comparable Isp (i.e. fuel efficiency) that would open up all sorts of new uses for electric propulsion (manned mars missions, missions to the outer planets, etc)
has anyone found a quote for the thrust levels they expect? something on the order of 0.1-1 N would be revolutionary... something less and I don't know what all of the fuss is about (cuz then it just seems like a new type of Hall thruster).