I volunteered with Lawrence Freenet (LFN) when it was starting up. Its a 501c3 nonprofit organization that has collaborated with the city to provide low cost and free wireless internet access in the city of Lawrence, Kansas, the sixth largest city in the state with a population now close to 100,000 (based on growth and the last census). LFN provides linux or windows based PCs and Internet access to needy families. Users of the service have a no-maintenance box with an antenna mounted outside at their residence and a cat5 cable coming in. The main downtown area is soon to be lit up as one giant WiFi hotspot thanks to LFN. Anybody downtown can use the connection.
There have been some successes. Lawrence Freenet has been running for a couple years now. The service is reliable and costs less than the local cutthroat cable company. The staff is friendly and works for LFN because they love the idea of a community wireless project. Its been great to watch them grow from the office in the founder's garage and the only vehicle his beat up Winnebago into an organization with an office, high-end equipment, quality staff, and some nice new vans. But they still have the Winnebago.:)
As screwed up as the state of Kansas is, we got this right. Community wireless internet that works. There is a consulting company founded by the same guy that dreamed up Lawrence Freenet called Community Wireless Communications that helps set up municipal wifi networks. They are a good resource for cities that want to enjoy the same success Lawrence has with community wireless.
I did a study on the SSHCL two years ago and had a little bit of help from Dr. Yamamoto. Specifically, I determined the viability of an airborne SSHCL-based weapons platform and wrote a paper on it. This included new aircraft design, avionics, power systems, adaptive optics, and system integration. Boeing PhantomWorks has a solid oxide fuel cell in the works that is 75% efficient and runs on the same fuel the engines burn. The SOFCs would charge ultracapacitor banks which would in turn power the laser. The laser peak power output would be about 100kW. The ultracapacitor systems have integrated liquid cooling, and the laser system would be cooled by bypass air (its cold way up high). Building aerial refueling capabilities into the aircraft gave you range and firepower only limited by pilot and gunner fatigue.
For an airplane, generators cannot provide anywhere near the amount of power necessary to drive a directed energy weapon. A few quick efficiency calculations will show this. The Air Force has their "hard on" for laser weapon systems because they are seeing the economy in reusable weapons. Why spend $250,000 on a missile when you can accomplish your goal with a couple gallons of JP8 fuel converted into electricity? Need to stop a convoy? Why bomb it when all you need is to blow out the wheels of the trucks at the front and back? The precision of a laser weapon is simply unmatched. Additionally, the per shot and per kill costs are extremely low, and the risk of collateral damage is significantly reduced.
For aircraft defense, current technology (utilizing the SSHCL) will allow for the detection, tracking, engagement, and destruction of MANPADS in just under 10 seconds for an aircraft flying at 10,000 feet. This has a very complex calculation behind it, you're just going to have to take my word for it.
Chemical lasers are not the answer for an airplane because of the weight. Attack and fighter aircraft simply cannot handle the weight. An interesting note is that the F-35 is designed to accept a solid state heat capacity laser when one is in production. The attack aircraft I was a designer for easily incorporated the laser.
The SSHCL project has been very successful. I believed in it two years ago when they were just creeping up around 10kW, and I continue to believe in the program today.
This is not always true. I have a PPC6700 and a basic Power Vision plan, and Sprint definitely knows when I'm using it as a modem. Every time I connect, it works great for about 45 seconds and then the connection drops. I called up and was like "WTF, mate?" and Sprint says it is because they can tell what kind of traffic I'm sending and that their system can tell that I'm using the 6700 as a modem, which is not permitted with my plan. When I asked them if that meant they were sniffing my packets they didn't have a good answer.
I told them they could shove the extra $35 per month they wanted to charge me to use it as a modem. Perhaps a firmware change will fix this...
I did research a couple years ago on how to implement the SSHCL from Dr. Yamamoto's lab into an attack aircraft. It is a pulsed laser, and thus damage is inflicted with an ablative effect; every pulse is an individual impulse on the target, inflicting significant damage in little time. consider someone punching you and then holding their fist against you. now consider someone punching you repeatedly in the same spot. which do you think is going to hurt more? the "pulsed" punching.
From TFA: "We are higher priced, but we bring greater value," Ballmer added."
From my windows server systeminfo:
OS Name: Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Server 2003, Standard Edition OS Version: 5.2.3790 Service Pack 1 Build 3790 System Up Time: 13 Days, 17 Hours, 46 Minutes, 39 Seconds
Linux server 1: $ uptime
16:23:45 up 162 days, 18:58, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.01
Linux server 2: $ uptime
16:23:21 up 162 days, 19:01, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
The windows server is for active directory and acts as a file and printer server. The linux servers are web, database, mail, and file servers. The windows server cost over $3,000 for hardware and software. The more powerful and versatile linux servers were $400 specials. Tell me where the value is, Steve-o.
Oh, and the reason the linux server uptime is 162 days is because something blew up at the local power substation and we had no power for a day.
As a aircraft systems and avionics developer in the aerospace industry, I would have done my moral, ethical, and professional duty and shot the presenter.:)
I work with a $100,000 helicopter UAV that is controlled by a 486DX-33 with 8MB of RAM that boots off a 128MB CF. The CF has linux and all navigation and flight control software. She flies great.
Right, so because I live in Kansas means that I shouldn't have this 5Mbps Internet connection at home and 405Mbps connection at the office that is right across the street from an Internet2 drop. Heck, my research office (which is an old airplane hangar) in rural Douglas County has a 10Mbps line.
But I live in Kansas, a farming state, so I have "no idea" what I can do with all that bandwidth.
That is a presumptuous statement. Not every state requires a notary for private auto sales. In Illinois, you sign the title on the seller's line, I sign the title on the buyer's line, and now the car is mine. I just have to take it to a DMV for a new title.
Of course, in the courtroom it was the discovery of a new witness and the state's desire to put said witness on the stand which was the defendant's grounds to move for a mistrial. But had the comment not been discovered, the witness would not have been discovered. Had the witness not been discovered, the trial would have gone on. However, since the witness was discovered _because_ the comment was discovered, is it not reasonable to say the comment caused the mistrial by setting in motion events that led to the mistrial?
...on the Internet can lead to very bad or unexpected things for you or those around you. Just this week someone "anonymously" posting on a local newspaper online forum caused a mistrial in a multiple first degree murder and aggravated arson case where I live.
This would be a good way to bring old aircraft back to life. There are lots of people who have old aircraft that have a lot of trouble keeping them functioning. Now, homebuilders could conceivably make true-to-spec replicas of early aircraft. I'm sure the Save A Connie people over in Kansas City are going to be happy about this as well.
Care to share what companies states give your donated organs to in the US? No company profits from your organs when you sign an organ donor card. Your organs go to a person who would otherwise die. As far as blood donations go, whats wrong with the Red Cross? They're a non-profit.
The title of this post is misleading. Who said Gulfstream did ANY skywriting during this test flight? They had no smoke machine, they drew no message in the sky. Usually, aircraft are stripped down during test flights to make room for instrumentation, data acquisition equipment, and flight test engineers. A smoke machine would have been pointless. The path you see is their ACTUAL flightpath, not some smoke trail. If you were on the ground, you never would have seen anything other than another business jet flying over you.
Damages (as would be awarded in a civil suit) are irrelevant here. Upon issuing a DMCA takedown notice, Viacom did assert copyright over the material in question. They asserted this copyright under penalty of perjury, which is a criminal offense. Therefore, Viacom has committed a criminal offense and is subject to federal prosecution.
Ah, the young and naive. Its not that there are people "moving on" but that more people who don't know the old stuff are entering the work force. Our company used to be a unix shop, with HP Apollos, HP PA-RISCs, Suns, SGIs, and RS/6000s. Along came the late 1990s, and some new engineers were hired. They said, "hey, look at these super Dell machines we can get! They run Windows! Everyone loves Windows! We don't have to pay for OS maintenance, and they cost $10,000 less than our current workstations!" And so the Windows migration began. We have gone through three generations of Dells in that time. Sadly, most of the old unix stations were trashed before I got here. Remaining are an SGI Iris Indigo R3000, a Sun Sparcstation IPC, and a Sun Ultra 1 C3D. Although they do not see a lot of action these days, when I do need them, they work flawlessly.
In this day and age where linux is starting to become a real engineering and commercial OS, more people are saying, "we want software on linux." With Apple slowly gaining market share, people are saying "we want software on Mac OS X." Did the people in our company ever think that once we ported our software from unix to windows we would ever be faced with the possibility of going back? Probably not. However, all these years later it isn't that far fetched now.
Radical innovation is irrelevant when you need reliable systems. If you are an IT manager that believes consistent radical innovation is key to developing reliable products, you are wasting money and should be fired. It is irresponsible to assume that something new is reliable. Who cares that X is 23 years old? Apple is using X11 on BSD and they are laughing all the way to the bank.
Where have you been the past 15 years? SGI _invented_ photorealistic 3D graphics, did you not see "Jurassic Park"? Sun systems have been able to do high-performance 3D CAD for almost as long. Heck, my two year old Dell Precision 670 runs the EXACT same CAD software as my Sun Ultra 10 C3D (UGS NX5) complete with photorendering. The Sun isn't much slower. Matter of fact, when I had Vista on the 670, NX5 actually ran FASTER on the Sun. Not bad for a computer I bought for $40. Half the software we need to run on that 670 won't run on that machine whether in XPx64 or Vista. Investing in radical innovation when we needed reliability got us NOTHING but a bill from Dell for $3,600.
For robotics control, perhaps you are not familiar with the Sun SPOT. Nifty little self contained computers, with sensors, ADCs, and communications. When they hit the market, I'm considering using them to drive a UAV.
Innovation and reliability are two completely different things. If you need reliability, why does innovation matter? When you need your data, you need it, nifty features be damned. Now, I have some FORTRAN programming to do. Time to fire up the SGI.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been some successes. Lawrence Freenet has been running for a couple years now. The service is reliable and costs less than the local cutthroat cable company. The staff is friendly and works for LFN because they love the idea of a community wireless project. Its been great to watch them grow from the office in the founder's garage and the only vehicle his beat up Winnebago into an organization with an office, high-end equipment, quality staff, and some nice new vans. But they still have the Winnebago. :)
As screwed up as the state of Kansas is, we got this right. Community wireless internet that works. There is a consulting company founded by the same guy that dreamed up Lawrence Freenet called Community Wireless Communications that helps set up municipal wifi networks. They are a good resource for cities that want to enjoy the same success Lawrence has with community wireless.
My mystical crystal ball says you live in Kansas City, Kansas. :)
"all their profitable software remains proprietary."
So what you're saying is they make money off the software they charge you for, and they don't make money off the free software.
Shocking!
I did a study on the SSHCL two years ago and had a little bit of help from Dr. Yamamoto. Specifically, I determined the viability of an airborne SSHCL-based weapons platform and wrote a paper on it. This included new aircraft design, avionics, power systems, adaptive optics, and system integration. Boeing PhantomWorks has a solid oxide fuel cell in the works that is 75% efficient and runs on the same fuel the engines burn. The SOFCs would charge ultracapacitor banks which would in turn power the laser. The laser peak power output would be about 100kW. The ultracapacitor systems have integrated liquid cooling, and the laser system would be cooled by bypass air (its cold way up high). Building aerial refueling capabilities into the aircraft gave you range and firepower only limited by pilot and gunner fatigue.
For an airplane, generators cannot provide anywhere near the amount of power necessary to drive a directed energy weapon. A few quick efficiency calculations will show this. The Air Force has their "hard on" for laser weapon systems because they are seeing the economy in reusable weapons. Why spend $250,000 on a missile when you can accomplish your goal with a couple gallons of JP8 fuel converted into electricity? Need to stop a convoy? Why bomb it when all you need is to blow out the wheels of the trucks at the front and back? The precision of a laser weapon is simply unmatched. Additionally, the per shot and per kill costs are extremely low, and the risk of collateral damage is significantly reduced.
For aircraft defense, current technology (utilizing the SSHCL) will allow for the detection, tracking, engagement, and destruction of MANPADS in just under 10 seconds for an aircraft flying at 10,000 feet. This has a very complex calculation behind it, you're just going to have to take my word for it.
Chemical lasers are not the answer for an airplane because of the weight. Attack and fighter aircraft simply cannot handle the weight. An interesting note is that the F-35 is designed to accept a solid state heat capacity laser when one is in production. The attack aircraft I was a designer for easily incorporated the laser.
The SSHCL project has been very successful. I believed in it two years ago when they were just creeping up around 10kW, and I continue to believe in the program today.
Congratulations, Dr. Yamamoto, well done.
This is not always true. I have a PPC6700 and a basic Power Vision plan, and Sprint definitely knows when I'm using it as a modem. Every time I connect, it works great for about 45 seconds and then the connection drops. I called up and was like "WTF, mate?" and Sprint says it is because they can tell what kind of traffic I'm sending and that their system can tell that I'm using the 6700 as a modem, which is not permitted with my plan. When I asked them if that meant they were sniffing my packets they didn't have a good answer.
I told them they could shove the extra $35 per month they wanted to charge me to use it as a modem. Perhaps a firmware change will fix this...
I did research a couple years ago on how to implement the SSHCL from Dr. Yamamoto's lab into an attack aircraft. It is a pulsed laser, and thus damage is inflicted with an ablative effect; every pulse is an individual impulse on the target, inflicting significant damage in little time. consider someone punching you and then holding their fist against you. now consider someone punching you repeatedly in the same spot. which do you think is going to hurt more? the "pulsed" punching.
Back in high school I had a large gas-powered RC helicopter and a couple estes rockets mounted on pylons. Nobody EVER screwed with me.
From TFA: "We are higher priced, but we bring greater value," Ballmer added."
From my windows server systeminfo:
OS Name: Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Server 2003, Standard Edition
OS Version: 5.2.3790 Service Pack 1 Build 3790
System Up Time: 13 Days, 17 Hours, 46 Minutes, 39 Seconds
Linux server 1:
$ uptime
16:23:45 up 162 days, 18:58, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.01
Linux server 2:
$ uptime
16:23:21 up 162 days, 19:01, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
The windows server is for active directory and acts as a file and printer server. The linux servers are web, database, mail, and file servers. The windows server cost over $3,000 for hardware and software. The more powerful and versatile linux servers were $400 specials. Tell me where the value is, Steve-o.
Oh, and the reason the linux server uptime is 162 days is because something blew up at the local power substation and we had no power for a day.
As a aircraft systems and avionics developer in the aerospace industry, I would have done my moral, ethical, and professional duty and shot the presenter. :)
I work with a $100,000 helicopter UAV that is controlled by a 486DX-33 with 8MB of RAM that boots off a 128MB CF. The CF has linux and all navigation and flight control software. She flies great.
Not quite sure what you mean, I'm pretty sure R134a is significantly cheaper than R12...
You must be new to CAD. You will soon outgrow silly children's toys such as AutoCad and 3D Studio Max. If you only knew the power of the dark side.
Scotty: Hello, computer.
Engineer: Try the keyboard.
Scotty: Ah, a keyboard. How quaint.
Right, so because I live in Kansas means that I shouldn't have this 5Mbps Internet connection at home and 405Mbps connection at the office that is right across the street from an Internet2 drop. Heck, my research office (which is an old airplane hangar) in rural Douglas County has a 10Mbps line.
But I live in Kansas, a farming state, so I have "no idea" what I can do with all that bandwidth.
That is a presumptuous statement. Not every state requires a notary for private auto sales. In Illinois, you sign the title on the seller's line, I sign the title on the buyer's line, and now the car is mine. I just have to take it to a DMV for a new title.
Of course, in the courtroom it was the discovery of a new witness and the state's desire to put said witness on the stand which was the defendant's grounds to move for a mistrial. But had the comment not been discovered, the witness would not have been discovered. Had the witness not been discovered, the trial would have gone on. However, since the witness was discovered _because_ the comment was discovered, is it not reasonable to say the comment caused the mistrial by setting in motion events that led to the mistrial?
...on the Internet can lead to very bad or unexpected things for you or those around you. Just this week someone "anonymously" posting on a local newspaper online forum caused a mistrial in a multiple first degree murder and aggravated arson case where I live.
Sure, we can stop using C.
We'll just suddenly and completely rewrite nearly every operating system we use. Yeah, that shouldn't be too hard!
This would be a good way to bring old aircraft back to life. There are lots of people who have old aircraft that have a lot of trouble keeping them functioning. Now, homebuilders could conceivably make true-to-spec replicas of early aircraft. I'm sure the Save A Connie people over in Kansas City are going to be happy about this as well.
Care to share what companies states give your donated organs to in the US? No company profits from your organs when you sign an organ donor card. Your organs go to a person who would otherwise die. As far as blood donations go, whats wrong with the Red Cross? They're a non-profit.
Are you uninformed or just an insensitive clod?
"No, they AREN'T using X11"
So what was this package marked "X11" I just installed of my 10.4 Tiger DVD?
The title of this post is misleading. Who said Gulfstream did ANY skywriting during this test flight? They had no smoke machine, they drew no message in the sky. Usually, aircraft are stripped down during test flights to make room for instrumentation, data acquisition equipment, and flight test engineers. A smoke machine would have been pointless. The path you see is their ACTUAL flightpath, not some smoke trail. If you were on the ground, you never would have seen anything other than another business jet flying over you.
Damages (as would be awarded in a civil suit) are irrelevant here. Upon issuing a DMCA takedown notice, Viacom did assert copyright over the material in question. They asserted this copyright under penalty of perjury, which is a criminal offense. Therefore, Viacom has committed a criminal offense and is subject to federal prosecution.
Ah, the young and naive. Its not that there are people "moving on" but that more people who don't know the old stuff are entering the work force. Our company used to be a unix shop, with HP Apollos, HP PA-RISCs, Suns, SGIs, and RS/6000s. Along came the late 1990s, and some new engineers were hired. They said, "hey, look at these super Dell machines we can get! They run Windows! Everyone loves Windows! We don't have to pay for OS maintenance, and they cost $10,000 less than our current workstations!" And so the Windows migration began. We have gone through three generations of Dells in that time. Sadly, most of the old unix stations were trashed before I got here. Remaining are an SGI Iris Indigo R3000, a Sun Sparcstation IPC, and a Sun Ultra 1 C3D. Although they do not see a lot of action these days, when I do need them, they work flawlessly.
In this day and age where linux is starting to become a real engineering and commercial OS, more people are saying, "we want software on linux." With Apple slowly gaining market share, people are saying "we want software on Mac OS X." Did the people in our company ever think that once we ported our software from unix to windows we would ever be faced with the possibility of going back? Probably not. However, all these years later it isn't that far fetched now.
Radical innovation is irrelevant when you need reliable systems. If you are an IT manager that believes consistent radical innovation is key to developing reliable products, you are wasting money and should be fired. It is irresponsible to assume that something new is reliable. Who cares that X is 23 years old? Apple is using X11 on BSD and they are laughing all the way to the bank.
Where have you been the past 15 years? SGI _invented_ photorealistic 3D graphics, did you not see "Jurassic Park"? Sun systems have been able to do high-performance 3D CAD for almost as long. Heck, my two year old Dell Precision 670 runs the EXACT same CAD software as my Sun Ultra 10 C3D (UGS NX5) complete with photorendering. The Sun isn't much slower. Matter of fact, when I had Vista on the 670, NX5 actually ran FASTER on the Sun. Not bad for a computer I bought for $40. Half the software we need to run on that 670 won't run on that machine whether in XPx64 or Vista. Investing in radical innovation when we needed reliability got us NOTHING but a bill from Dell for $3,600.
For robotics control, perhaps you are not familiar with the Sun SPOT. Nifty little self contained computers, with sensors, ADCs, and communications. When they hit the market, I'm considering using them to drive a UAV.
Innovation and reliability are two completely different things. If you need reliability, why does innovation matter? When you need your data, you need it, nifty features be damned. Now, I have some FORTRAN programming to do. Time to fire up the SGI.
I ordered them the day I read the slashdot article. I still haven't received them.