Absolutely. Something in the order of 95% of the Shuttle's energy goes into "going forward", with the remaining 5% spent on "going up". In a very real sense, the requirement necessary to win the X-Prize (Reaching 100 km altitude) is the easy part of getting into orbit.
That's why the second and third requirements for the X-Prize are much more interesting: After reaching 100 km, do the same thing again within two weeks and do it with 3 people on board (Or 1 person and an equivalent mass for 2 more people).
Those requirements, combined with the shoe-string budget the contestants have to work with, mean they will _need_ to keep things simple, and be able to operate with as few people as possible.
The x-prize is for a sub-orbital shot only. So they won't need a place to stay for a while yet.
Of course, once the proposed yearly x-prize competitions get going (races for height, shortest turnaround etc), it may only be a few years before a private party is able to launch people into actual orbit. Then it will be cool if someone has an of-the-shelf inflatable habitat ready for use.
While indeed sites like monster and dice have been no help at all, having a resume online and making sure it can be found through search engines worked out well for me.
What I did was this: Put a version of my resume online. Not on one of the job-sites, but on my own website. Make it available in several formats: Word, HTML, plain text and maybe PDF. Then I submitted the url to a number of search-engines, including Google and the Open Directory Project.
What I found is that sites specializing in tech-resumes often copy the content of the ODP resume section. Many hits for my resume come from such sites.
The rest come from keyword search-engines, so it's a good idea to put the right keywords in your resume: Try to think of which terms a recruiter (NOT the tech-manager) would search for when looking for a candidate in your field. Remember, this is a non-technical person, so "buzz-words" (annoying as they are) tend to work best.
The result is that even 7 months after I found a job, my resume gets 50-60 hits a month and every once in a while I get an email from a serious recruiter.
In the town where I live, "Mensa" is the name of the student union's restaurant. Every student can get a Mensa membership card and eat there for 3 bucks.
An alternative to renting space is to make completely separate work-area in your own home. Set it up in a room of its own, and make sure everything you need is there.
Having a separate connection to the Outside World (In the form of a door, I mean) helps too.
After work, leave the designated work-area, and DON'T GO THERE until the next morning. Lock it up and give the key to someone else if you have to, but keep work and play SEPARATE!
All this doesn't help woth the human interaction part of course, but it's a cheap alternative to renting office space.
I have noticed this before, and it is the very reason I stopped labeling my CD-R's with fancy labels.
It makes sense too. The material properties of a label _must_ be completely different from the properties of the CD's data-layer and polycarbonate substrate. Just imagine the data-layer stuk between plastic and paper, which shrink and expand in different ways as the temperature and humidity change.
Specifically, if the plastic substrate shrinks less than the paper label, the data-layer will be quite literally ripped apart. Not good for the readability of the CD.
I've been creating one-off email addresses for pretty much anything that requires an email address for almost a year now. At this moment, I have almost a hundred email addresses made specifically for anything ranging from Slashdot to job-sites to mailinglists.
So far, the only addresses that generated any spam at all have been de one I used for Google Groups (well, DUH) and one that was published on a website in plain HTML.
All the other ones, so far, have not generated a _single_ spam email. All in all, it seems like the companies and websites that require you to give them your email really do keep it confidential.
Note that this player is powered by the Sigma Designs EM8500 chip.
Apart from the issue some people may have with SD (They were the ones who stole some Open Source code from the XVid project), this is the same chip that powers this company's XCard DVD/DivX PC-card.
I own one of these XCards and have basically given up on using it for DivX playback. It's works great for DVD, and the image quality is much better than their older Hollywood Plus, but DivX playback is just terrible.
Among other issues, the the XCard does not support DivX 3.11 and some advanced features from DivX 5. More seriously, even a theoretically compatible DivX movie is often unwatchable because of Jerky playback. This is partly due to poor support for VBR audio, but there also seems to be an issue with the frame-rate: It seems to use 30 fps, instead of 29.970. Small difference, but enough to be clearly noticable. Oh, and did I mention their software is quite buggy and unstable (Yes, this includes the driver)?
In short, this is potentially a nice product, but definitely something I want to have reviewed THOROUGHLY, using a lot of different movies and encodings, before I trust it.
The bulk of a launch vehicle's mass, especially the Shuttle, is NOT it's computer-system, but the super-structure. It is there that advances in material and construction can make the difference that will make reusable launchers cheaper than expendable ones. We're not there yet, but it's not distant Sci-Fi either. X-33 had some interesting things going on in that department.
Space is all about launch-costs. This is determined by several factors, including effective payload. Decreasing the weight of a vehicle in favor of the payload is a good way to cut costs, but a large part of modern developments center around improvements in structure and materials, not the computers and stuff inside the vehicle.
NASA is, in fact, already upgrading the Shuttles to have a lighter, flat-screen based cockpit instead of using those heavy CRT-screens, but it will simply not change the fundamentals of the vehicle.
In the US, each provider insists on having their own network and poviding their own phones. This severely aggravates the problem, since, as another person pointed out, people get a new phone every time they switch plans/providers. I've gone through 3 phones in 2 years, while I would have been happy keeping the first one.
This is less of an issue in Europe (At least in the Netherlands) where providers use standard phones that accept a small SIM-card with the relevant data on it. When you switch providers, just slide the new SIM-card into your old phone and you're all set. When you want to upgrade, slide your SIM-card in a new phone and you're set.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. Something in the order of 95% of the Shuttle's energy goes into "going forward", with the remaining 5% spent on "going up". In a very real sense, the requirement necessary to win the X-Prize (Reaching 100 km altitude) is the easy part of getting into orbit.
That's why the second and third requirements for the X-Prize are much more interesting: After reaching 100 km, do the same thing again within two weeks and do it with 3 people on board (Or 1 person and an equivalent mass for 2 more people).
Those requirements, combined with the shoe-string budget the contestants have to work with, mean they will _need_ to keep things simple, and be able to operate with as few people as possible.
The x-prize is for a sub-orbital shot only. So they won't need a place to stay for a while yet.
Of course, once the proposed yearly x-prize competitions get going (races for height, shortest turnaround etc), it may only be a few years before a private party is able to launch people into actual orbit. Then it will be cool if someone has an of-the-shelf inflatable habitat ready for use.
While indeed sites like monster and dice have been no help at all, having a resume online and making sure it can be found through search engines worked out well for me.
What I did was this: Put a version of my resume online. Not on one of the job-sites, but on my own website. Make it available in several formats: Word, HTML, plain text and maybe PDF. Then I submitted the url to a number of search-engines, including Google and the Open Directory Project.
What I found is that sites specializing in tech-resumes often copy the content of the ODP resume section. Many hits for my resume come from such sites.
The rest come from keyword search-engines, so it's a good idea to put the right keywords in your resume: Try to think of which terms a recruiter (NOT the tech-manager) would search for when looking for a candidate in your field. Remember, this is a non-technical person, so "buzz-words" (annoying as they are) tend to work best.
The result is that even 7 months after I found a job, my resume gets 50-60 hits a month and every once in a while I get an email from a serious recruiter.
In the town where I live, "Mensa" is the name of the student union's restaurant. Every student can get a Mensa membership card and eat there for 3 bucks.
So I don't know what all the fuss is about.
An alternative to renting space is to make completely separate work-area in your own home. Set it up in a room of its own, and make sure everything you need is there.
Having a separate connection to the Outside World (In the form of a door, I mean) helps too.
After work, leave the designated work-area, and DON'T GO THERE until the next morning. Lock it up and give the key to someone else if you have to, but keep work and play SEPARATE!
All this doesn't help woth the human interaction part of course, but it's a cheap alternative to renting office space.
I have noticed this before, and it is the very reason I stopped labeling my CD-R's with fancy labels. It makes sense too. The material properties of a label _must_ be completely different from the properties of the CD's data-layer and polycarbonate substrate. Just imagine the data-layer stuk between plastic and paper, which shrink and expand in different ways as the temperature and humidity change. Specifically, if the plastic substrate shrinks less than the paper label, the data-layer will be quite literally ripped apart. Not good for the readability of the CD.
Transparent displays would also be a significant advance for the field of Augmented Reality.
I've been creating one-off email addresses for pretty much anything that requires an email address for almost a year now. At this moment, I have almost a hundred email addresses made specifically for anything ranging from Slashdot to job-sites to mailinglists. So far, the only addresses that generated any spam at all have been de one I used for Google Groups (well, DUH) and one that was published on a website in plain HTML. All the other ones, so far, have not generated a _single_ spam email. All in all, it seems like the companies and websites that require you to give them your email really do keep it confidential.
Note that this player is powered by the Sigma Designs EM8500 chip.
Apart from the issue some people may have with SD (They were the ones who stole some Open Source code from the XVid project), this is the same chip that powers this company's XCard DVD/DivX PC-card.
I own one of these XCards and have basically given up on using it for DivX playback. It's works great for DVD, and the image quality is much better than their older Hollywood Plus, but DivX playback is just terrible.
Among other issues, the the XCard does not support DivX 3.11 and some advanced features from DivX 5. More seriously, even a theoretically compatible DivX movie is often unwatchable because of Jerky playback. This is partly due to poor support for VBR audio, but there also seems to be an issue with the frame-rate: It seems to use 30 fps, instead of 29.970. Small difference, but enough to be clearly noticable. Oh, and did I mention their software is quite buggy and unstable (Yes, this includes the driver)?
In short, this is potentially a nice product, but definitely something I want to have reviewed THOROUGHLY, using a lot of different movies and encodings, before I trust it.
The bulk of a launch vehicle's mass, especially the Shuttle, is NOT it's computer-system, but the super-structure. It is there that advances in material and construction can make the difference that will make reusable launchers cheaper than expendable ones. We're not there yet, but it's not distant Sci-Fi either. X-33 had some interesting things going on in that department.
Space is all about launch-costs. This is determined by several factors, including effective payload. Decreasing the weight of a vehicle in favor of the payload is a good way to cut costs, but a large part of modern developments center around improvements in structure and materials, not the computers and stuff inside the vehicle.
NASA is, in fact, already upgrading the Shuttles to have a lighter, flat-screen based cockpit instead of using those heavy CRT-screens, but it will simply not change the fundamentals of the vehicle.
In the US, each provider insists on having their own network and poviding their own phones. This severely aggravates the problem, since, as another person pointed out, people get a new phone every time they switch plans/providers. I've gone through 3 phones in 2 years, while I would have been happy keeping the first one. This is less of an issue in Europe (At least in the Netherlands) where providers use standard phones that accept a small SIM-card with the relevant data on it. When you switch providers, just slide the new SIM-card into your old phone and you're all set. When you want to upgrade, slide your SIM-card in a new phone and you're set.