Nope, read the Snopes article, it says that it is incorrect in some details and that they can not verify that railroad tunnels were a design limitation for the SRB's (they don't say it wasn't, only that it cannot easily be proven). Unlike Snopes I actually know where the legend comes from, it came from an edition of Scientific American's Connections column.
Actually the Shuttle's SRB's are sized to fit on rails, and there's an interesting tale relating that back to ancient times:
American railroad tracks are 56.5" wide (the "gauge") because the English built the first railroads in America and they use that width. Why do they use that width? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that were used for building wagons which used that wheel spacing.
Why did wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Because older wagon ruts throughout England used that spacing, and if they changed it, wagon wheels would break falling into or being forced out of the old ruts, which were 56.5" wide.
The old ruts were that size because the roads were built by the Romans, who arrived in England in 54 BC and left about 400 AD. Their wagons, and their chariots before their wagons, used that spacing, and that spacing was used all over Europe and wherever Rome conquered, because their wagons used the identical wheel base everywhere. So the modern railroad track width derives from the Roman chariot.
Why was the Roman chariot track width 56.5"? Because that was the width of a chariot that would equal the width of two "standard" Roman horses. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever!
Such curious dimensions continue today. A space shuttle sitting on its launch pad has two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs, made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is just wide enough to accomodate a railroad car, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds, (and we now know why) so the booster rockets were made to fit.
The major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse's ass, and the political necessity of building different components in different states (the third ass in the tale being the boobs in Washington).
You forgot the real biggie, "figure out how to design a reusable space plane that can withstand the heat of reentry and which is light enough to launch cheaply", compared to that the new engine is childs play, remember that as cool as Rutan's stunt was it only worked because the plane did not get high enough for reentry to be a big deal.
I live 22 miles away from where I work. I live at the edge of the metroplex of 1.5 million people. I like where I live because I have 1 acre and only one neighbor. It costs me about $1,500 per year in fuel to commute back and forth, my property taxes are three times that on a modest house! My job is in the city but overcrowding and downright abysmal public schools means there is no way in hell I would ever live anywhere near this job. Now as more and more jobs move out to edge city's this lowers the average commute for the educated workforce, but has the negative social impact of further decaying the city core, you are damned if you do, you are damned if you don't.
Try to get a guarenteed rental for a Suburban with a trailer hitch, ain't ever going to happen. You can't get a guarenteed rental for a specific size vehicle ("like model" might mean a 5 seat Durango to the rental company) and I can pretty much rule out any chance of a trailer hitch for insurance and wear and tear reasons.
It depends on what kind of lithium ion batteries he is using. If it's comodity cells then you are correct about lifetime, however the cells that are used in the Prius have been exhaustivly tested and are rated at over 5 years with a very heavy usage pattern. Your points about production costs and disposal problems are spot on though.
I wonder if there was any reason that they were NOT saving files to Office/RTF format rather than native Staroffice format? RTF would allow them to be opened in any OS and just about any modern editor, thus avoiding compatibility problems at the loss of a little bit of functionality.
AFAIK Oracle is moving more and more of their stuff to 10g clusters running on x86. Dell has also moved the majority of their european operations to Oracle 10g running on their own x86 servers. In fact if you look through the Oracle ROI press releases almost all of them involve running a business line app on oracle RAC and/or 10g with Linux and x86. Obviously it's not just Oracle that thinks this stuff is ready for prime time, a LOT of their customers do as well. Since you are already paying boatloads for Oracle licenses it's not like the selection of OS is a big consideration as far as cost is concerned. Running Oracle on x86 hardware and Linux is just a smart move for many of their customers.
Personally I am much more impressed by the fact that Oracle runs almost their entire business, including business line apps off of Oracle RAC on Linux.
Yes, I use compact flourescents in my lamps, in my garage, basement, just about everywhere except the bedroom and computer room where I need a black body light source to color match for daylight. Modern electronic balasts have done away with the nasty flickering and current coatings do a much better job of dealing with the cool color spectrum (although there are no coatings that can yet create anything that close to the 6500K of an ideal white light source or the ~5800K or the sun, there are bulbs that can do ~5200K which is good enough to fake it).
Personally I would look at it as: If tape sucks then go to disk. He's not complaining about the quality of the image captured by his sensor he's complaining about the limitations/perceived problems of tape. The expensive part of a digital imaging solution should be the lens(es) and imaging device, not the storage. HDD's are at $0.50/GB or less, so the problem is merely to figure out a way to attach the storage to the imager, not how to get a better lens/imaging device/tape system. Hell, LTO3 tapes are 400GB which will give you more storage than any digital camera tape spec that I am aware of, so shoot to HDD and backup to LTO3. Sure LTO3 tapes and drives are expensive, but they are cheap compared to investing in a Pro level digital system!
Whether or not she was covert on the day of the unveiling she HAD been a covert agent, and so publicly decloaking her status as a one time covert agent potentially blows the cover of other covert agents she worked with and foreign assets that she may have been responsible for. No matter which way you spin it, it is a complete slimeball act to out someones spouse who is serving this country because you don't like the facts that they brought up.
Huh? OWA from Exchange 2003 works fine with Mozilla/Firefox, albeit with a slightly reduced featureset since some functionality is programmed as ActiveX controlls.
Speaking of the VAB, I don't see how any of the facilities at the cape can handle something that appears to be twice as high as the shuttle (the cargo booster), the VAB is only 525ft tall! The high bay doors are only 465ft tall, and none of the launch sites appear to be setup for such a massive vehicle. I can only how much it would cost to replace the VAB.
Actually NASA spent $0 on the space pen. Fisher spent their own money and in return for producing the device recieved quite a bit of free publicity. You can get the details at snopes. Also I would think that a normal felt tip pen would work as capilary action still functions without gravity =)
He also did something similar at falling waters. There he used pairs of opaque glass block to allow light into the covered walkway between the master house and the guest house, for nighttime applications there are lighbulbs between the blocks so that the path can still be illuminated when the sun is down =) The man was a freaking genius, I hope to eventually see all of his houses.
I wasn't aware that the Linux clients used internally relied on WINE, however that does NOT mean that they didn't exist. They were there and surely could be supported. It's not like IBM doesn't have the source to WINE and the Notes client....
They also push Linux without releasing the Lotus Notes client for Linux that some people use internally. They have a couple of very important internal sites that are IE only like the travel expense reimbursment site, etc. When a company is as large as IBM it shouldn't suprise anyone that inertia and beurocracy keep best practices from being implemented =)
Aye to that. I'm a hiker, a hunter, and a lover of the great outdoors, which means I often get involved in environmental projects and causes. Yet for some reason I think that the French were fully justified in sinking the Rainbow Warrior. Greenpeace are a little far out there. I guess like all things environmentalism needs to be done in moderation =)
NOT! Penny Arcade is sketched in Alias Sketchbook and colored in Photoshop, which is a perfectly rational workflow and one which works better for Gabe then doing everything in Illustrator.
Yes, yes it is. You can make Acrobat Reader MUCH more stable by ripping out most of the stupid, useless plugins, but it's still a bit slow to start up. The best solution I have seen is Macromedia Flash Paper, it allows you to use the Flash plugin to read PDF's, it's lighting quick.
Funny enough our HP ML100 with softare RAID5 on SATA is about 3x faster then our older ML530 with 12x 10K RPM SCSI drives in hardware RAID5 on a $2k controller when doing things like nightly backups. Unfortunatly the ML100 tends to buckle under heavy load and become ever more unresponsive, while the ML530 just keeps trodding along at its slower pace. Also you don't normally need an identical controller, just one in the same family. I know I have moved HDD's between Dell servers of different generations with different model PERC cards without issue.
I'm not sure if Connected was bought by Iron Mountain or if they were always a division, but their backup product rocks. When I was at Cisco I got to learn a bit about it. The way that it works is that during the initial backup you select drives/folders to backup. It then computes an MD5 for each file. These hashes are sent along with filenames to a central server. The server compares those values to existing files in a HUGE database. If the entry is found it merely places a pointer to the file under your user. If the signature does not exist then the file is compressed and sent up to the server. Changes are tracked and only the changes are sent as compressed delta files. Cisco backed up something like 60k desktops and laptops with 4 clusters spread around the globe. Cost a couple million but was damn cheap compared to any other solution, and it saved my users from losing data innumerable times and saved on expensive data retrieval services. One manager went so far as to tell his employees that they would be fired if they lost data and had not been running the software (we repeatadly sent out instructions on how to install and offered to help, yet he still had to send out 3 laptop HDD's at costs of ~$5K for data retrieval).
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Nope, read the Snopes article, it says that it is incorrect in some details and that they can not verify that railroad tunnels were a design limitation for the SRB's (they don't say it wasn't, only that it cannot easily be proven). Unlike Snopes I actually know where the legend comes from, it came from an edition of Scientific American's Connections column.
Actually the Shuttle's SRB's are sized to fit on rails, and there's an interesting tale relating that back to ancient times:
American railroad tracks are 56.5" wide (the "gauge") because the English built the first railroads in America and they use that width. Why do they use that width? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that were used for building wagons which used that wheel spacing.
Why did wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Because older wagon ruts throughout England used that spacing, and if they changed it, wagon wheels would break falling into or being forced out of the old ruts, which were 56.5" wide.
The old ruts were that size because the roads were built by the Romans, who arrived in England in 54 BC and left about 400 AD. Their wagons, and their chariots before their wagons, used that spacing, and that spacing was used all over Europe and wherever Rome conquered, because their wagons used the identical wheel base everywhere. So the modern railroad track width derives from the Roman chariot.
Why was the Roman chariot track width 56.5"? Because that was the width of a chariot that would equal the width of two "standard" Roman horses. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever!
Such curious dimensions continue today. A space shuttle sitting on its launch pad has two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs, made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is just wide enough to accomodate a railroad car, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds, (and we now know why) so the booster rockets were made to fit.
The major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse's ass, and the political necessity of building different components in different states (the third ass in the tale being the boobs in Washington).
You forgot the real biggie, "figure out how to design a reusable space plane that can withstand the heat of reentry and which is light enough to launch cheaply", compared to that the new engine is childs play, remember that as cool as Rutan's stunt was it only worked because the plane did not get high enough for reentry to be a big deal.
I live 22 miles away from where I work. I live at the edge of the metroplex of 1.5 million people. I like where I live because I have 1 acre and only one neighbor. It costs me about $1,500 per year in fuel to commute back and forth, my property taxes are three times that on a modest house! My job is in the city but overcrowding and downright abysmal public schools means there is no way in hell I would ever live anywhere near this job. Now as more and more jobs move out to edge city's this lowers the average commute for the educated workforce, but has the negative social impact of further decaying the city core, you are damned if you do, you are damned if you don't.
Try to get a guarenteed rental for a Suburban with a trailer hitch, ain't ever going to happen. You can't get a guarenteed rental for a specific size vehicle ("like model" might mean a 5 seat Durango to the rental company) and I can pretty much rule out any chance of a trailer hitch for insurance and wear and tear reasons.
It depends on what kind of lithium ion batteries he is using. If it's comodity cells then you are correct about lifetime, however the cells that are used in the Prius have been exhaustivly tested and are rated at over 5 years with a very heavy usage pattern. Your points about production costs and disposal problems are spot on though.
I wonder if there was any reason that they were NOT saving files to Office/RTF format rather than native Staroffice format? RTF would allow them to be opened in any OS and just about any modern editor, thus avoiding compatibility problems at the loss of a little bit of functionality.
AFAIK Oracle is moving more and more of their stuff to 10g clusters running on x86. Dell has also moved the majority of their european operations to Oracle 10g running on their own x86 servers. In fact if you look through the Oracle ROI press releases almost all of them involve running a business line app on oracle RAC and/or 10g with Linux and x86. Obviously it's not just Oracle that thinks this stuff is ready for prime time, a LOT of their customers do as well. Since you are already paying boatloads for Oracle licenses it's not like the selection of OS is a big consideration as far as cost is concerned. Running Oracle on x86 hardware and Linux is just a smart move for many of their customers.
Personally I am much more impressed by the fact that Oracle runs almost their entire business, including business line apps off of Oracle RAC on Linux.
Yes, I use compact flourescents in my lamps, in my garage, basement, just about everywhere except the bedroom and computer room where I need a black body light source to color match for daylight. Modern electronic balasts have done away with the nasty flickering and current coatings do a much better job of dealing with the cool color spectrum (although there are no coatings that can yet create anything that close to the 6500K of an ideal white light source or the ~5800K or the sun, there are bulbs that can do ~5200K which is good enough to fake it).
Personally I would look at it as: If tape sucks then go to disk. He's not complaining about the quality of the image captured by his sensor he's complaining about the limitations/perceived problems of tape. The expensive part of a digital imaging solution should be the lens(es) and imaging device, not the storage. HDD's are at $0.50/GB or less, so the problem is merely to figure out a way to attach the storage to the imager, not how to get a better lens/imaging device/tape system. Hell, LTO3 tapes are 400GB which will give you more storage than any digital camera tape spec that I am aware of, so shoot to HDD and backup to LTO3. Sure LTO3 tapes and drives are expensive, but they are cheap compared to investing in a Pro level digital system!
Whether or not she was covert on the day of the unveiling she HAD been a covert agent, and so publicly decloaking her status as a one time covert agent potentially blows the cover of other covert agents she worked with and foreign assets that she may have been responsible for. No matter which way you spin it, it is a complete slimeball act to out someones spouse who is serving this country because you don't like the facts that they brought up.
Huh? OWA from Exchange 2003 works fine with Mozilla/Firefox, albeit with a slightly reduced featureset since some functionality is programmed as ActiveX controlls.
Speaking of the VAB, I don't see how any of the facilities at the cape can handle something that appears to be twice as high as the shuttle (the cargo booster), the VAB is only 525ft tall! The high bay doors are only 465ft tall, and none of the launch sites appear to be setup for such a massive vehicle. I can only how much it would cost to replace the VAB.
Actually NASA spent $0 on the space pen. Fisher spent their own money and in return for producing the device recieved quite a bit of free publicity. You can get the details at snopes. Also I would think that a normal felt tip pen would work as capilary action still functions without gravity =)
Actually with a black hole you don't get the energy/mass back, you get information back. At least that's Hawking's current theory on the matter.
He also did something similar at falling waters. There he used pairs of opaque glass block to allow light into the covered walkway between the master house and the guest house, for nighttime applications there are lighbulbs between the blocks so that the path can still be illuminated when the sun is down =) The man was a freaking genius, I hope to eventually see all of his houses.
I wasn't aware that the Linux clients used internally relied on WINE, however that does NOT mean that they didn't exist. They were there and surely could be supported. It's not like IBM doesn't have the source to WINE and the Notes client....
They also push Linux without releasing the Lotus Notes client for Linux that some people use internally. They have a couple of very important internal sites that are IE only like the travel expense reimbursment site, etc. When a company is as large as IBM it shouldn't suprise anyone that inertia and beurocracy keep best practices from being implemented =)
Aye to that. I'm a hiker, a hunter, and a lover of the great outdoors, which means I often get involved in environmental projects and causes. Yet for some reason I think that the French were fully justified in sinking the Rainbow Warrior. Greenpeace are a little far out there. I guess like all things environmentalism needs to be done in moderation =)
Like the shuttle.....
Remember the shuttle was conceived in the 60's, designed in the early 70's and built in the late 70's.
NOT! Penny Arcade is sketched in Alias Sketchbook and colored in Photoshop, which is a perfectly rational workflow and one which works better for Gabe then doing everything in Illustrator.
Yes, yes it is. You can make Acrobat Reader MUCH more stable by ripping out most of the stupid, useless plugins, but it's still a bit slow to start up. The best solution I have seen is Macromedia Flash Paper, it allows you to use the Flash plugin to read PDF's, it's lighting quick.
Funny enough our HP ML100 with softare RAID5 on SATA is about 3x faster then our older ML530 with 12x 10K RPM SCSI drives in hardware RAID5 on a $2k controller when doing things like nightly backups. Unfortunatly the ML100 tends to buckle under heavy load and become ever more unresponsive, while the ML530 just keeps trodding along at its slower pace. Also you don't normally need an identical controller, just one in the same family. I know I have moved HDD's between Dell servers of different generations with different model PERC cards without issue.
I'm not sure if Connected was bought by Iron Mountain or if they were always a division, but their backup product rocks. When I was at Cisco I got to learn a bit about it. The way that it works is that during the initial backup you select drives/folders to backup. It then computes an MD5 for each file. These hashes are sent along with filenames to a central server. The server compares those values to existing files in a HUGE database. If the entry is found it merely places a pointer to the file under your user. If the signature does not exist then the file is compressed and sent up to the server. Changes are tracked and only the changes are sent as compressed delta files. Cisco backed up something like 60k desktops and laptops with 4 clusters spread around the globe. Cost a couple million but was damn cheap compared to any other solution, and it saved my users from losing data innumerable times and saved on expensive data retrieval services. One manager went so far as to tell his employees that they would be fired if they lost data and had not been running the software (we repeatadly sent out instructions on how to install and offered to help, yet he still had to send out 3 laptop HDD's at costs of ~$5K for data retrieval).