So how will he define science fiction? Will LOTR be taxed? (Aliens) Will Bond be taxed? (Gismos) Would Shrek/Monsters inc/Toy story be taxed? Would stories featuring missiles or fighter planes have the space tax?
I personally favour the idiot tax. All politicians favouring new and innovative taxes will give 50% of their earnings to NASA. That oughta fix it.
The most common form of this problem is two pendulums hanging from a string. Stretch a string, the tightness is not important. hang two strings from the first string. put weights on the bottoms of the hanging string. swing the pendula across the axis of the first string. voila! coupled pendulums. It's a standard problem in hamiltonian dynamics, and taught in most university physics courses.
another example is a pendulum with one or more hinges in the middle of a stiff rod.
"That's why I'm stunned that so many kinds of sharing have suddenly, without public debate, become criminal acts. For instance, lending a book to a friend is still all right, but letting him read the same book electronically is now a theft."
This kind of statement has always stunned me. The division between lending and copying is pretty clear. If I lend something, then I don't have it any more. The value of the object is preserved (or nearly). If I print copies of my favourite books, and give them to my friends, then I still have a copy, and the value of the object is divided by (some fraction of) the copies made. The justification of Napster is that people go out and buy more music because of it. Even assuming that's true, will it be true in 10 years? 50 years?
If you can't afford a car, because of collusion and price fixing, is it OK to steal a car from the dealer? Not liking price fixing is obvious. Not stealing is also obvious. I'm clear that when I copy music, I am doing something that is both legally and _morally_ wrong.
People writing here should consider that to produce a journal paper, which is not an incremental paper (That is, the work has not been mostly published before- what the public thinks of as publishing your work) takes somewhere between 1 and 2 weeks of full time work.
Consider the dilemma, scientists have to choose between telling others about their work, or doing science. Which would you choose?
Mathcad or mathematica can to calculations from a graphical interface, but are difficult to program and slow for anything requiring big loops.
matlab is a higher level language like the two above, but isn't a graphical interface, so it's easier to do things a little more complicated.
fortran is the mathematical workhorse for small to medium programs with hard maths. The style is reasonably intuitive. In addition, a familiarity with fortran will never go to waste, since the scientific community has been using it for 35 years, and there's a lot of legacy code. There's free compilers too.
c, c++ are the mathematical workhorses for medium to large programs. In general, better data structure handling than fortran, and fewer mathematical libraries. Most CFD code and indeed most finite element code is written in some brand of c. I think that it would be fair to say that professional programmers know about c, where scientists who do some programming know fortran. There are free compilers for c as well.
Choose one to meet your project size and execution speed required.
Thanks for the prices, clearly it's a lot cheaper than some of the systems I've been looking at for our lab, maybe in part due to the lack of precision triggering features I talked about in the main post.
The point I was trying to make is that for most people buying a camera of this sort, they want to buy a finished system. I certainally don't have the time to fiddle to make a system work. I don't want to modify the operating system. And that's easily worth USD 1000 to me. The old argument as to whether a free operating system is cheaper.
In part also the people owning this camera already own something capable of creating bright light bursts down to 10ns (high speed photography is always flash photography) and so are not short of money in order to make their expensive system work.
I can't say I know about this product intimately, but my experience is that these products start at about USD 15000 and go up to about USD 50000. With these kind of prices, nobody cares about an operating system which costs USD 1000.
As a side point, The camera seems to have no external trigger, and be only network triggerable. If you're taking 10ns frames, this is not going to be useful.
On the other hand, the integration of the frame grabber gets around the problem of many cameras (especially pulnix) in that the camera needs a lot of fiddling before it works with a third party framegrabber.
For an orbit at 200km, the required energy to raise the satellite is 2MJ/kg. The required energy to accelerate the satellite from zero to the orbital velocity is 28MJ/kg, or only 24.5 MJ/kg for an earth-rotation assist from cape canaveral.
In any case the energy savings by lifting the payload to 20km are minimal at best. Most of the advantage comes from being weather independant, due to being above the clouds.
It's pretty clear why there's no great energy being directed at these systems.
Not to be overly rude, but this is untrue. Each will have roughly the same number of variables in each country. I have no idea why you think that the French burocracy or tax system is simpler, this contradicts the facts. The only difference is then roughly 4 times the population. In computing terms, the difference between 30 million and 300 million pages is a matter of hardware. Not an excuse.
As for who runs it, a private company runs it. It's a service isn't it?
Try putting your analog computer next to a microwave, TV, speaker, heater, source of vibration atc. Try comparing the error on an analog calculation under near-perfect circumstancesto that of a digital calculation. How will you store the data? If the data is stored digitally, how do you deal with AD converter errors.
In short, analog computers are fast and accurate for small calculations under controlled conditions. Digital computers are better for difficult calculations (Despite what you'd think, calculating orbits is not a difficult calculation by modern standards) and under arbitrary conditions, a digital signal is less prone to error.
The good:
Consumers pay first world prices, and companies pay slightly more than third world wages, while transferring technology and trading skills.
The bad:
Consumers pay first world prices, and companies use slave labour.
The ugly:
The third world countries nationalise the assets of companies using work practices unacceptable in their country of origin. First world countries vigorously assert the rights of companies to use slave labour and impose trade sanctions.
The best:
First world countries buy everything that third world countries produce at first world prices, so long as its made by a third world company.
that there are a lot more bad ideas still out there. Okay maybe they're not all bad, but I still don't want to:
Use wireless when I could be using a cable
surf the web on my phone.
have my personal documents on somebody else's computer.
do anything in virtual reality.
oh, and I'm never going to bug groceries, clothes or pets over the web, or install linux on my grandmother's computer.
Here's a great business plan: If nobody wants to buy what you're selling........
I do a lot of product checking online, and I'm amazed by how few businesses there are that follow even the simple step of putting their current junk mail pamphlet on the web. I'm wondering how effective they think the advertising would be if the paper flyer which was widely distributed showed the product, listed features, and then asked the customer to call them for a price.
I think that there is a middle ground between giving name and address and offering online shopping.
I know that they want the feedback, but for a lot of the equipment I'm searching for, mainly scientific apparatus, price variations of 10 times the cheapest price are not unusual, this is really stupid.
Why can't they use the same trick as the paper version and print a disclaimer about the price changing without notice?
I've noticed that for a lot of companies, their web presence isn't measured up to the same standard as their bricks and mortar company. One of the best examples of this is publishing companies, mostly because it's these that I would expect to have the best idea of what constitutes a good looking site. An early poor example was apcmag.com which had a complete refit of their web site a few years ago, even involving the server being down for a few days. When it came back up, it had a new look. One of the factors in the new look was that the link for the contact addresses was in blue type on a blue background.
I'm sure that everybody else here has examples of the same problems.
I'd like to pose a challenge:
Give one example of a site which uses java, javascript, or frames, where the same think couldn't have been done better with simple, single frame HTML.
Exactly. Perhaps it should have read that instead of a $50,000 low power, directional, narrowband antenna, they used a high power, broadband, nondirectional antenna, not permitted for commercial use due to the interference it causes, as well as not useful because of the power drain.
Similarly for the solar arrays, they used a commercial array with an efficiency under 5%, compared to a high quality array with an efficiency over 30%.
There's a reason why people spend the money, and its not because they're complete idiots. It's like comparing a 2GHz Pentium to a 200 Mhz Athlon. Oh wait...
Yep, it's another urban legend. The US also used pencils, until the "space pen" was privately developed. Then they bought a handful of pressurised ink pens at the local newsagency like everyone else. Generally NASA's follies lie in other directions, like wanting an all-USA gas and liquid recycling facility, rather than using and upgrading the fully-functional facility used for years on Mir. It's pretty well known that Mir had a funny smell inside, but the recycler _worked_, and has had years of stress testing in a space environment. It's just ego behind the non-adoptance of the russian system. IT's worth noting that the ISS might even be on budget without this problem.
A lot of people frown on cheap satellites because what the expensive ones are paying for is in large part reliability, long life, and accessories like the ability to de-orbit at the end of its working life. If NASA started to put up loads of cheap satellites with an unknown, but short, working life and no ability to deorbit we'd be on their backs in a minute accusing them of creating space junk, so why are we applauding it here? Yes, it's great that the satellite is working, but lets keep the eyes on the ball. Cheap satellites increase the hazard for everyone else, and that's where my patience stops.
Slashdot Mirror
So how will he define science fiction?
Will LOTR be taxed? (Aliens)
Will Bond be taxed? (Gismos)
Would Shrek/Monsters inc/Toy story be taxed?
Would stories featuring missiles or fighter planes have the space tax?
I personally favour the idiot tax. All politicians favouring new and innovative taxes will give 50% of their earnings to NASA. That oughta fix it.
The most common form of this problem is two pendulums hanging from a string. Stretch a string, the tightness is not important. hang two strings from the first string. put weights on the bottoms of the hanging string. swing the pendula across the axis of the first string. voila! coupled pendulums. It's a standard problem in hamiltonian dynamics, and taught in most university physics courses.
another example is a pendulum with one or more hinges in the middle of a stiff rod.
"That's why I'm stunned that so many kinds of sharing have suddenly, without public debate, become criminal acts. For instance, lending a book to a friend is still all right, but letting him read the same book electronically is now a theft."
This kind of statement has always stunned me. The division between lending and copying is pretty clear. If I lend something, then I don't have it any more. The value of the object is preserved (or nearly). If I print copies of my favourite books, and give them to my friends, then I still have a copy, and the value of the object is divided by (some fraction of) the copies made. The justification of Napster is that people go out and buy more music because of it. Even assuming that's true, will it be true in 10 years? 50 years?
If you can't afford a car, because of collusion and price fixing, is it OK to steal a car from the dealer? Not liking price fixing is obvious. Not stealing is also obvious. I'm clear that when I copy music, I am doing something that is both legally and _morally_ wrong.
People writing here should consider that to produce a journal paper, which is not an incremental paper (That is, the work has not been mostly published before- what the public thinks of as publishing your work) takes somewhere between 1 and 2 weeks of full time work.
Consider the dilemma, scientists have to choose between telling others about their work, or doing science. Which would you choose?
Depends entirely on what you want to do:
Mathcad or mathematica can to calculations from a graphical interface, but are difficult to program and slow for anything requiring big loops.
matlab is a higher level language like the two above, but isn't a graphical interface, so it's easier to do things a little more complicated.
fortran is the mathematical workhorse for small to medium programs with hard maths. The style is reasonably intuitive. In addition, a familiarity with fortran will never go to waste, since the scientific community has been using it for 35 years, and there's a lot of legacy code. There's free compilers too.
c, c++ are the mathematical workhorses for medium to large programs. In general, better data structure handling than fortran, and fewer mathematical libraries. Most CFD code and indeed most finite element code is written in some brand of c. I think that it would be fair to say that professional programmers know about c, where scientists who do some programming know fortran. There are free compilers for c as well.
Choose one to meet your project size and execution speed required.
The last five years have all been the year of wireless networking. How about a surprise?
The year of realising that wireless networking is at best a niche market.
or maybe
The year of realising that most people want their old broadband connection back, more than any low speed network.
Or have these businesses already forgotten the dot com problem of basing your business model on niche markets: there is no room for expansion.
Thanks for the prices, clearly it's a lot cheaper than some of the systems I've been looking at for our lab, maybe in part due to the lack of precision triggering features I talked about in the main post.
The point I was trying to make is that for most people buying a camera of this sort, they want to buy a finished system. I certainally don't have the time to fiddle to make a system work. I don't want to modify the operating system. And that's easily worth USD 1000 to me. The old argument as to whether a free operating system is cheaper.
In part also the people owning this camera already own something capable of creating bright light bursts down to 10ns (high speed photography is always flash photography) and so are not short of money in order to make their expensive system work.
I can't say I know about this product intimately, but my experience is that these products start at about USD 15000 and go up to about USD 50000. With these kind of prices, nobody cares about an operating system which costs USD 1000.
As a side point, The camera seems to have no external trigger, and be only network triggerable. If you're taking 10ns frames, this is not going to be useful.
On the other hand, the integration of the frame grabber gets around the problem of many cameras (especially pulnix) in that the camera needs a lot of fiddling before it works with a third party framegrabber.
For an orbit at 200km, the required energy to raise the satellite is 2MJ/kg. The required energy to accelerate the satellite from zero to the orbital velocity is 28MJ/kg, or only 24.5 MJ/kg for an earth-rotation assist from cape canaveral.
In any case the energy savings by lifting the payload to 20km are minimal at best. Most of the advantage comes from being weather independant, due to being above the clouds.
It's pretty clear why there's no great energy being directed at these systems.
Considering 1000m/s as a minimum speed for scramjets, then you'd have to drop from 100km altitude to achieve this (very conservative) speed.
Doing the maths is the difference between science and science fiction. (With the exception of mars missions.)
and it should work on my pentium 2.
One has a finished, working code that needs patching, the other looks to me like someone who wants others to do his homework.
At that I've got an open source project I'd like finished:
A 3D first person RPG with overhead views that has MMP, LAN, and single player potential. Easy to mod, fantastic graphics and addictive gameplay.
work done:
downloaded gcc
anyone interested?
So you're sending your credit card details to an anonymising service. How long will you stay anonymous?
Not to be overly rude, but this is untrue. Each will have roughly the same number of variables in each country. I have no idea why you think that the French burocracy or tax system is simpler, this contradicts the facts. The only difference is then roughly 4 times the population. In computing terms, the difference between 30 million and 300 million pages is a matter of hardware. Not an excuse.
As for who runs it, a private company runs it. It's a service isn't it?
Try putting your analog computer next to a microwave, TV, speaker, heater, source of vibration atc. Try comparing the error on an analog calculation under near-perfect circumstancesto that of a digital calculation. How will you store the data? If the data is stored digitally, how do you deal with AD converter errors.
In short, analog computers are fast and accurate for small calculations under controlled conditions. Digital computers are better for difficult calculations (Despite what you'd think, calculating orbits is not a difficult calculation by modern standards) and under arbitrary conditions, a digital signal is less prone to error.
The good:
Consumers pay first world prices, and companies pay slightly more than third world wages, while transferring technology and trading skills.
The bad:
Consumers pay first world prices, and companies use slave labour.
The ugly:
The third world countries nationalise the assets of companies using work practices unacceptable in their country of origin. First world countries vigorously assert the rights of companies to use slave labour and impose trade sanctions.
The best:
First world countries buy everything that third world countries produce at first world prices, so long as its made by a third world company.
that now I want to spelling flame myself. I wonder what that's called- burning myself in the foot?
that there are a lot more bad ideas still out there. Okay maybe they're not all bad, but I still don't want to:
Use wireless when I could be using a cable
surf the web on my phone.
have my personal documents on somebody else's computer.
do anything in virtual reality.
oh, and I'm never going to bug groceries, clothes or pets over the web, or install linux on my grandmother's computer.
Here's a great business plan: If nobody wants to buy what you're selling........
Sell it on the web.
I do a lot of product checking online, and I'm amazed by how few businesses there are that follow even the simple step of putting their current junk mail pamphlet on the web. I'm wondering how effective they think the advertising would be if the paper flyer which was widely distributed showed the product, listed features, and then asked the customer to call them for a price.
I think that there is a middle ground between giving name and address and offering online shopping.
I know that they want the feedback, but for a lot of the equipment I'm searching for, mainly scientific apparatus, price variations of 10 times the cheapest price are not unusual, this is really stupid.
Why can't they use the same trick as the paper version and print a disclaimer about the price changing without notice?
I've noticed that for a lot of companies, their web presence isn't measured up to the same standard as their bricks and mortar company. One of the best examples of this is publishing companies, mostly because it's these that I would expect to have the best idea of what constitutes a good looking site. An early poor example was apcmag.com which had a complete refit of their web site a few years ago, even involving the server being down for a few days. When it came back up, it had a new look. One of the factors in the new look was that the link for the contact addresses was in blue type on a blue background.
I'm sure that everybody else here has examples of the same problems.
I'd like to pose a challenge:
Give one example of a site which uses java, javascript, or frames, where the same think couldn't have been done better with simple, single frame HTML.
We need to get our children interested in ham. Just not the potted variety, or its more edible namesake.
Exactly. Perhaps it should have read that instead of a $50,000 low power, directional, narrowband antenna, they used a high power, broadband, nondirectional antenna, not permitted for commercial use due to the interference it causes, as well as not useful because of the power drain.
Similarly for the solar arrays, they used a commercial array with an efficiency under 5%, compared to a high quality array with an efficiency over 30%.
There's a reason why people spend the money, and its not because they're complete idiots. It's like comparing a 2GHz Pentium to a 200 Mhz Athlon. Oh wait...
On the topic of cutting edge vs everyday.
/184lb, Low earth orbit), compared to what it cost then?
Anyone got an estimate of how much it would cost to launch Sputnik today (83kg
Yep, it's another urban legend. The US also used pencils, until the "space pen" was privately developed. Then they bought a handful of pressurised ink pens at the local newsagency like everyone else. Generally NASA's follies lie in other directions, like wanting an all-USA gas and liquid recycling facility, rather than using and upgrading the fully-functional facility used for years on Mir. It's pretty well known that Mir had a funny smell inside, but the recycler _worked_, and has had years of stress testing in a space environment. It's just ego behind the non-adoptance of the russian system. IT's worth noting that the ISS might even be on budget without this problem.
A lot of people frown on cheap satellites because what the expensive ones are paying for is in large part reliability, long life, and accessories like the ability to de-orbit at the end of its working life. If NASA started to put up loads of cheap satellites with an unknown, but short, working life and no ability to deorbit we'd be on their backs in a minute accusing them of creating space junk, so why are we applauding it here? Yes, it's great that the satellite is working, but lets keep the eyes on the ball. Cheap satellites increase the hazard for everyone else, and that's where my patience stops.