That's exactly it.
These days, choice of OS and choice of hardware platform is largely an aesthetic decision. Yes, upfront and life-cycle costs weigh in on that, but compared to the value of one's own time and enjoyment, they're practically rendered a petty afterthought.
For me, it's all about the architecture. Same thing as folks caring about the engines in their cars. I can take any machine and put it in the box of my choice or throw in in a rack in the closet, play with multiple evolving OSes, but what's the one constant that I can't change without a major reinvestment? The hardware.
So I go for what best appeals to my personal design and performance preferences as well my own judgement of long-term platform viability, mitigated by costs.
And honestly, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a machine with as well-developed a longterm aftermarket as the Macintosh. I expect they'll keep producting PPC Powermacs for at least a couple more years, and wouldn't be surprised if Apple's 'Intel-only' move doesn't prove quite so cut-and-dry as they've pubicly stated at this point.
Plus, Apple's nascent HPC market won't be quite so processor-agnostic, and if nothing else that might give a nice boost to economies of scale in IBM's future offerings.
No, really, without getting into all the greeblies of X86 vs. PPC CPU design, at a primal level I can probably best characterise my preference that I'm drawn to purposeful design over attrition. That's not to knock X86 performance, and that's not to say that PPC is by any means perfect, but they're driven by different design philosophies (and different strengths) and I find the Power architecture to be a much more elegant expression of deliberate intent than X86's design-by-attrition: for example, regardless of how clean things may be at the microcode level, X86's ducttaped front end strikes me as a redundant kludge.
Putting all that aside, I really favor diversity in the desktop ecosphere, and let's face it - PPC is the last truly viable alternative to X86. Apple's machines have been great desktop PPC implementations (well, at least the Newworld G3s and the new G5 towers) in much the same spirit of clean and purposeful design, and a heck of a lot more affordable than IBM's Power offerings. PPC is well-supported by GNU/Linux and I expect to get at least a good decade out of my G5. Heck, the only reason I had to let my G3 go after eight years was that I foolishly bought into an Oldworld system and found myself painted into a corner.
Now if only the HURD were to reach that same degree of maturity and platform viability...okay, off to traipse blindly through my field of idealistic daisies!;)
I only use an Apple because of its hardware architecture. Newworld machines are great, but I'm by no means married to the OS.
Unless the transition takes long enough for the last of Apple's PPC boxes to linger in the marketplace, my next machine will likely be an IBM PPC workstation.
Very much so. But that's a trend in graphic design carried over to website design carried over to UI design. Heck, look at contemporary Macintosh hardware - it followed this minimalist trend almost as soon as it began taking root amongst the avant-garde. What's a shame is that this UI direction, as much an improvement as it may be, is only that way because it's trendy, not because it's good design.
Remember when HIG were major OS and application selling points? Back when screens were 640x480 and grew through 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024, until they eventually hit 1600x1200, UI designers recognised the value of maximising usable real estate and providing a consistent and neutral interface which disappeared into the background and let those precious pixels be dedicated to the user's *data*. And every major release strove to improve these metrics.
Then something completely unexpected happened around the time 1600x1200 monitors became commonplace. Maybe it was CRT technology hitting its bandwidth limits, maybe it was the advent of 3D gaming accelleration superceding 2D graphics card development, but for whatever reason the desktop resolution race stalled out for the better part of a decade. Some folks moved on to multiple-head systems to compensate, but to most people resolution, no longer a distinguishing factor between systems, became a commodity. And as a commodity, quality became meaningless and the general public ceased to care.
So all the OS and application developers started looking for something else to pander to the herds' attentions - something cheap, flashy, and effective, and something to which HIG were no longer relevant. Elements became inconsistent, blobby, shiny, animated - competing with each other in the same domain as tacky Vegas billboards.
It's only in the past couple of years that desktop resolutions have really started improving once again, and suddenly the public (and consequently designers) are recognising once more that a minimal real-estate maximising UI is a good thing. HIGs are a major selling point once more.
Thank goodness for that. But *man* did the past decade suck on the usability front! Is it any wonder that, in the interim, vintage machines became such prized works for their UI design sensibilities?
Very much so. But that's a trend in graphic design carried over to website design carried over to UI design. Heck, look at contemporary Macintosh hardware - it followed this minimalist trend almost as soon as it began taking root amongst the avant-garde. What's a shame is that this UI direction, as much an improvement as it may be, is only that way because it's trendy, not because it's good design.
Remember when HIG were major OS and application selling points? Back when screens were 640x480 and grew through 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024, until they eventually hit 1600x1200, UI designers recognised the value of maximising usable real estate and providing a consistent and neutral interface which disappeared into the background and let those precious pixels be dedicated to the user's *data*. And every major release strove to improve these metrics.
Then something completely unexpected happened around the time 1600x1200 monitors became commonplace. Maybe it was CRT technology hitting its bandwidth limits, maybe it was the advent of 3D gaming accelleration superceding 2D graphics card development, but for whatever reason the desktop resolution race stalled out for the better part of a decade. Some folks moved on to multiple-head systems to compensate, but to most people resolution, no longer a distinguishing factor between systems, became a commodity. And as a commodity, quality became meaningless and the general public ceased to care.
So all the OS and application developers started looking for something else to pander to the herds' attentions - something cheap, flashy, and effective, and something to which HIG were no longer relevant. Elements became inconsistent, blobby, shiny, animated - competing with each other in the same domain as tacky Vegas billboards.
It's only in the past couple of years that desktop resolutions have really started improving once again, and suddenly the public (and consequently designers) are recognising once more that a minimal real-estate maximising UI is a good thing. HIGs are a major selling point once more.
Thank goodness for that. But *man* did the past decade suck on the usability front! Is it any wonder that, in the interim, vintage machines became such prized works for their UI design sensibilities?
Granted, it isn't a radical departure from XP. It almost looks like Luna running a different theme.
But I like it.
It's about time someone had the gumption to put forth a clean and understated UI. Lord knows we have more than enough in-your-face real-estate-hogging themes floating around out there to satisfy even the most testoterone-laden adolescent.
I haven't been truly satisfied with any minimal UI appearance since the early-nineties heyday of NeXTstep and IRIX. I never thought I'd say it, but thank god for Microsoft. I hope, in spite of the underwhelming public feedback, that they continue down this more mature and elegant route.
I remember back when I bought my Wallstreet Powerbook it was positioned as one of the first true desktop replacements - it had pretty much everything one could expect in a top-of-the-line desktop system circa 1998 save PCI expansion slots. Unfortunately, Powerbook PC card and expansion bay options have never quite matched the market for their desktop brethren, so it's lying more and more fallow these days (and mired in its Oldworld architecture).
Regardless, it was significantly heavier than most laptops on the market at the time - it clocked in at nearly ten pounds with twin batteries. It really drove home the desktop-replacement concept, though, with a 14" screen and DVD playback unheard of on portable systems at the time. I wasn't alone in thinking that the extra weight was an equitable tradeoff for its capabilities, and it's served me as well as could be expected in the years since.
Now, having lived with it for six years, I'd've gladly taken another six pounds for complete upgradability. Heck, if it had a swappable video card and a Newworld motherboard, I'd still content using it as my primary machine for another four years.
Don't be so quick to write off behemoth laptops - they definitely have their place.
We've got to start training twelve-year-old schoolgirls to pilot advanced military weaponry at some point. Otherwise, who's going to defend us against giant killer robots?!
Oh, Yoshimi, they don't believe me.
But you won't let those robots eat me.
Watching the video, I was about to comment that shouldn't they consider including a dummy pilot in their half-sized flight model?
Then I saw the end of the film.
THAT THING'S FREAKING HUGE!
Seriously, there *is* a dummy pilot on their test model, but she's about the size of a 12-inch Star Wars doll. What's that going to put the full-sized mehve at, like a thirty-foot wingspan?!
It's waycool work and all, I don't deny that, but Nausicaa's mehve was a personal aircraft she could drag about tossed over her shoulder, and it was mostly steered by shifting her body weight, non unlike a hangglider. The big difference was that its jet propulsion gave it enough speed that it didn't need to be so large as a hangglider in order to generate sufficient lift.
That's what made it so amazing, and that's what made too fantastic to replicate in real life. These designers' trick? Make the thing so UNGODLY HUGE that the pilot has a minimal impact upon its aerodynamics and center of gravity.
So, waycool that they built it and all, but not nearly as cool as the tiny personal aircraft in the original manga.
I don't know if DirecTV is still like this everywhere, but I can tell you about my own experiences living in Clear Lake, Texas (the home of Johnson Space Center).
My family used to subscribe to whatever increasingly-large umbrella-corporation-of-the-month had most recently bought out our local cable television monopoly. In the eighties, when it was basically a local mom-and-pop provider, it was pretty darned cool. In the early-to-mid nineties, when the string of buyouts really got underway, its quality of service declined while its pricing increased significantly. In the mid-to-late nineties, when DBS began heating up real competition, its quality of service dramatically improved while pricing remained more or less static. And all through those times we received NASA TV, which was great!
Cut to the twenty-first century, and my family switched over to DirecTV DBS. It's been amazingly cool, albeit just as expensive as overpriced cable.
We regularly get nice big wrath-of-god thunderstorms blowing in off the Gulf, and yes, in a *really* bad storm the signal might occasionaly break up for a few minutes at a time, but it's not significantly more frequent than cable television - remember, they're getting their signal from a local satellite downlink, too. I'd rate the reliability as just slightly below cable - it *is* a smaller dish, after all - but not enough to be any sort of a nuisance.
DBS receivers kick digital cable receivers' @sses, hands down, though. The user interface is entirely dependent upon your box, and I've sampled a great many of both sorts of boxes amongst many friends, having lived in five cities in the past four years. Not a single digital cable box has been anything but a heavily-sedated slug by comparison to the DBS boxen. If you enjoy scrolling through hundreds of channels you don't subscribe to in order to find the one that you're looking for, digital cable's all for you, since DBS custom channel lists spoil that sort of fun. DBS receivers are faster, more user-friendly, more programmable, more configurable, more extendable, and not a bloody-closed-platform. You can buy a DBS receiver from any of a half-dozen manufacturers, while digital cable receivers are often vendor-locked-in, and it *really* shows.
DirecTV channel selection is superior to any digital cable system I've since tried as well, and I go for geeky esoteric stuff like NASA TV Worldlink. Bear in mind, though, that that's from the perspective of a global sampling of culture. There's a lot of fringe quirky stuff to be found on DirecTV if you dig for it, but local public-access and community channels are only available through your cable provider, as those aren't even broadcast on open airwaves. That's really the only negative point for DBS - NASA TV used to be a Clear Lake public access station in the eighties!
Local broadcast channels have never been an issue, though. Most major markets now have a decent selection of their own local broadcast stations available through regional DBS programming packages, all the national broadcast networks get DBS feeds from two or three different big cities (which often nets some interesting other-regional programming as a bonus), and a good antenna can pick up most stray channels left out of the mix. I don't know for certain, but I've heard that some of the newer DBS receivers even include built-in tuners so you never have to switch your television and audio source when you want to watch antenna broadcasts. Local broadcast channels just aren't an issue.
Right, the heaving-naked-breasts part. Well, I had great fun browsing DirectTV channel lists upon my first experience in the fall of 2002. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it carried NASA TV of all things, so I dialed straight in only to see two women and a man having what must've been quite a pleasant experience. It didn't look like the usual NASA programming, so I figured something was crossed up in the feed and let it go. Oddly, when I checked back a couple of nigh
> HP still makes some good products (plotters, high end LJ)
Qualify that as *high-end* plotters, as well.
Working at a tiny architectural firm (2-3 people, depending on the workload), we finally bought a low-end HP plotter so that I could control CAD output in-house. It was a very substantial purchase for such a small firm, but critical to moving our productivity out of the nineteen-eighties. We even paid a bit more for the low-end HP compared to other companies' higher-end but less expensive offerings, because my technophobe boss was unwilling to try anything unproven and the HP plotters I'd used in previous offices had been reliable workhorses.
Well, the other plotters I'd used weren't HP's *low-end* models. It went from adequate to spotty to unreliable to completely dead within a week. HP had on-site technicians in the office for over a month wrestling with the machine before they finally gave up and shipped us a high-end replacement model to compensate for our troubles.
Of course, that higher-end model wasn't designed to run off of our six-year-old plot server, but it took me about a week to diagnose the undocumented buffer underruns. I ended up bringing in my own laptop to use as our full-time plot server: ten-year IT life cycles can be obnoxious.
In a two-person office which bills clients hourly, every hour I had to sacrifice to troubleshooting and negotiating my way through HP's support labyrinth was a significant hit on productivity. The month and a half that our full years' IT expenditure sat dead on the floor did not make the boss a happy man. In the end, he swore off HP and CAD for good.
Oh yeah, and me too. Anyone in northern California need an architect?;)
I studied this concept as part of a commercial space development group back when I was in college. It's quite compelling.
There're two significant challenges in implementation, though.
The fundamental flaw in the concept lies in conservation of rotational inertia. Think about a spinning ice skater - as she draws her arms in, she spins much faster. The opposite is also true - as a rotating mass extends from its center, its rate of rotation decreases.
The space elevator rotates at a constant geosynchronous rate, but as its payload is raised along that axis, the difference between its linear inertia at the surface of the earth and its linear inertia around the circumference at geosynch altitude (or any significant altitude along that axis) is absorbed by the elevator's structure.
Unless the payload applies some sort of thrust perpendicular to the axis of the elevator, that difference in inertia only works to pull the whole system back down to earth. Effectively, the amount of energy you'd have to put into the system to keep it up would equal the thrust expended to send the payload into orbit by conventional means.
Then there's the whole issue of vibrational harmonics. Accumulated shocks from winds, payloads, and even space dust would propagate up and down the string (any human structure of that incredible length would effectively be a string in tension) and create severe vibration problems. That'd take some *seriously* epic engineering to dampen.
NASA has done some experiments with tethered satellites which address the vibration issues (as well as accumulated electric charge from atmospheric drag), but they were intended more for spinning-wheel satellite applications than for space elevators.
It's a really cool idea that unfortunately is a something-for-nothing scheme. If there were some kind of cool electric thruster system which didn't rely on reaction mass, it'd be feasable, but then we're straying into Area-51 technology.;)
[This is my first post to/. - I may have messed up initially and buried this as a reply deeper down the treads.]
I studied this concept as part of a commercial space development group back when I was in college. It's quite compelling.
There're two significant challenges in implementation, though.
The fundamental flaw in the concept lies in conservation of rotational inertia. Think about a spinning ice skater - as she draws her arms in, she spins much faster. The opposite is also true - as a rotating mass extends from its center, its rate of rotation decreases.
The space elevator rotates at a constant geosynchronous rate, but as its payload is raised along that axis, the difference between its linear inertia at the surface of the earth and its linear inertia around the circumference at geosynch altitude (or any significant altitude along that axis) is absorbed by the elevator's structure.
Unless the payload applies some sort of thrust perpendicular to the axis of the elevator, that difference in inertia only works to pull the whole system back down to earth. Effectively, the amount of energy you'd have to put into the system to keep it up would equal the thrust expended to send the payload into orbit by conventional means.
Then there's the whole issue of vibrational harmonics. Accumulated shocks from winds, payloads, and even space dust would propagate up and down the string (any human structure of that incredible length would effectively be a string in tension) and create severe vibration problems. That'd take some *seriously* epic engineering to dampen.
NASA has done some experiments with tethered satellites which address the vibration issues (as well as accumulated electric charge from atmospheric drag), but they were intended more for spinning-wheel satellite applications than for space elevators.
It's a really cool idea that unfortunately is a something-for-nothing scheme. If there were some kind of cool electric thruster system which didn't rely on reaction mass, it'd be feasable, but then we're straying into Area-51 technology.;)
Slashdot Mirror
...i claim mare imbrium!..
Hrm. I'd been seriously considering subscribing to WoW, but reading this interview - naaah.
My friends and I have better things to do with our time and money than be harvested as corporate chattel.
That's exactly it. These days, choice of OS and choice of hardware platform is largely an aesthetic decision. Yes, upfront and life-cycle costs weigh in on that, but compared to the value of one's own time and enjoyment, they're practically rendered a petty afterthought. For me, it's all about the architecture. Same thing as folks caring about the engines in their cars. I can take any machine and put it in the box of my choice or throw in in a rack in the closet, play with multiple evolving OSes, but what's the one constant that I can't change without a major reinvestment? The hardware. So I go for what best appeals to my personal design and performance preferences as well my own judgement of long-term platform viability, mitigated by costs. And honestly, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a machine with as well-developed a longterm aftermarket as the Macintosh. I expect they'll keep producting PPC Powermacs for at least a couple more years, and wouldn't be surprised if Apple's 'Intel-only' move doesn't prove quite so cut-and-dry as they've pubicly stated at this point. Plus, Apple's nascent HPC market won't be quite so processor-agnostic, and if nothing else that might give a nice boost to economies of scale in IBM's future offerings.
I'm a geek. ;)
;)
No, really, without getting into all the greeblies of X86 vs. PPC CPU design, at a primal level I can probably best characterise my preference that I'm drawn to purposeful design over attrition. That's not to knock X86 performance, and that's not to say that PPC is by any means perfect, but they're driven by different design philosophies (and different strengths) and I find the Power architecture to be a much more elegant expression of deliberate intent than X86's design-by-attrition: for example, regardless of how clean things may be at the microcode level, X86's ducttaped front end strikes me as a redundant kludge.
Putting all that aside, I really favor diversity in the desktop ecosphere, and let's face it - PPC is the last truly viable alternative to X86. Apple's machines have been great desktop PPC implementations (well, at least the Newworld G3s and the new G5 towers) in much the same spirit of clean and purposeful design, and a heck of a lot more affordable than IBM's Power offerings. PPC is well-supported by GNU/Linux and I expect to get at least a good decade out of my G5. Heck, the only reason I had to let my G3 go after eight years was that I foolishly bought into an Oldworld system and found myself painted into a corner.
Now if only the HURD were to reach that same degree of maturity and platform viability...okay, off to traipse blindly through my field of idealistic daisies!
I only use an Apple because of its hardware architecture. Newworld machines are great, but I'm by no means married to the OS.
Unless the transition takes long enough for the last of Apple's PPC boxes to linger in the marketplace, my next machine will likely be an IBM PPC workstation.
Erm. That's "hoopy".
Yeah, I'm a dork. It runs in the family, I'm good at it.
You mean "froopy".
Clearly you do not know where your towel is.
Very much so. But that's a trend in graphic design carried over to website design carried over to UI design. Heck, look at contemporary Macintosh hardware - it followed this minimalist trend almost as soon as it began taking root amongst the avant-garde. What's a shame is that this UI direction, as much an improvement as it may be, is only that way because it's trendy, not because it's good design.
Remember when HIG were major OS and application selling points? Back when screens were 640x480 and grew through 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024, until they eventually hit 1600x1200, UI designers recognised the value of maximising usable real estate and providing a consistent and neutral interface which disappeared into the background and let those precious pixels be dedicated to the user's *data*. And every major release strove to improve these metrics.
Then something completely unexpected happened around the time 1600x1200 monitors became commonplace. Maybe it was CRT technology hitting its bandwidth limits, maybe it was the advent of 3D gaming accelleration superceding 2D graphics card development, but for whatever reason the desktop resolution race stalled out for the better part of a decade. Some folks moved on to multiple-head systems to compensate, but to most people resolution, no longer a distinguishing factor between systems, became a commodity. And as a commodity, quality became meaningless and the general public ceased to care.
So all the OS and application developers started looking for something else to pander to the herds' attentions - something cheap, flashy, and effective, and something to which HIG were no longer relevant. Elements became inconsistent, blobby, shiny, animated - competing with each other in the same domain as tacky Vegas billboards.
It's only in the past couple of years that desktop resolutions have really started improving once again, and suddenly the public (and consequently designers) are recognising once more that a minimal real-estate maximising UI is a good thing. HIGs are a major selling point once more.
Thank goodness for that. But *man* did the past decade suck on the usability front! Is it any wonder that, in the interim, vintage machines became such prized works for their UI design sensibilities?
Very much so. But that's a trend in graphic design carried over to website design carried over to UI design. Heck, look at contemporary Macintosh hardware - it followed this minimalist trend almost as soon as it began taking root amongst the avant-garde. What's a shame is that this UI direction, as much an improvement as it may be, is only that way because it's trendy, not because it's good design. Remember when HIG were major OS and application selling points? Back when screens were 640x480 and grew through 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024, until they eventually hit 1600x1200, UI designers recognised the value of maximising usable real estate and providing a consistent and neutral interface which disappeared into the background and let those precious pixels be dedicated to the user's *data*. And every major release strove to improve these metrics. Then something completely unexpected happened around the time 1600x1200 monitors became commonplace. Maybe it was CRT technology hitting its bandwidth limits, maybe it was the advent of 3D gaming accelleration superceding 2D graphics card development, but for whatever reason the desktop resolution race stalled out for the better part of a decade. Some folks moved on to multiple-head systems to compensate, but to most people resolution, no longer a distinguishing factor between systems, became a commodity. And as a commodity, quality became meaningless and the general public ceased to care. So all the OS and application developers started looking for something else to pander to the herds' attentions - something cheap, flashy, and effective, and something to which HIG were no longer relevant. Elements became inconsistent, blobby, shiny, animated - competing with each other in the same domain as tacky Vegas billboards. It's only in the past couple of years that desktop resolutions have really started improving once again, and suddenly the public (and consequently designers) are recognising once more that a minimal real-estate maximising UI is a good thing. HIGs are a major selling point once more. Thank goodness for that. But *man* did the past decade suck on the usability front! Is it any wonder that, in the interim, vintage machines became such prized works for their UI design sensibilities?
Granted, it isn't a radical departure from XP. It almost looks like Luna running a different theme.
But I like it.
It's about time someone had the gumption to put forth a clean and understated UI. Lord knows we have more than enough in-your-face real-estate-hogging themes floating around out there to satisfy even the most testoterone-laden adolescent.
I haven't been truly satisfied with any minimal UI appearance since the early-nineties heyday of NeXTstep and IRIX. I never thought I'd say it, but thank god for Microsoft. I hope, in spite of the underwhelming public feedback, that they continue down this more mature and elegant route.
I remember back when I bought my Wallstreet Powerbook it was positioned as one of the first true desktop replacements - it had pretty much everything one could expect in a top-of-the-line desktop system circa 1998 save PCI expansion slots. Unfortunately, Powerbook PC card and expansion bay options have never quite matched the market for their desktop brethren, so it's lying more and more fallow these days (and mired in its Oldworld architecture).
Regardless, it was significantly heavier than most laptops on the market at the time - it clocked in at nearly ten pounds with twin batteries. It really drove home the desktop-replacement concept, though, with a 14" screen and DVD playback unheard of on portable systems at the time. I wasn't alone in thinking that the extra weight was an equitable tradeoff for its capabilities, and it's served me as well as could be expected in the years since.
Now, having lived with it for six years, I'd've gladly taken another six pounds for complete upgradability. Heck, if it had a swappable video card and a Newworld motherboard, I'd still content using it as my primary machine for another four years.
Don't be so quick to write off behemoth laptops - they definitely have their place.
You just don't get it, do you?
We've got to start training twelve-year-old schoolgirls to pilot advanced military weaponry at some point. Otherwise, who's going to defend us against giant killer robots?!
Oh, Yoshimi, they don't believe me. But you won't let those robots eat me.
Watching the video, I was about to comment that shouldn't they consider including a dummy pilot in their half-sized flight model?
Then I saw the end of the film.
THAT THING'S FREAKING HUGE!
Seriously, there *is* a dummy pilot on their test model, but she's about the size of a 12-inch Star Wars doll. What's that going to put the full-sized mehve at, like a thirty-foot wingspan?!
It's waycool work and all, I don't deny that, but Nausicaa's mehve was a personal aircraft she could drag about tossed over her shoulder, and it was mostly steered by shifting her body weight, non unlike a hangglider. The big difference was that its jet propulsion gave it enough speed that it didn't need to be so large as a hangglider in order to generate sufficient lift.
That's what made it so amazing, and that's what made too fantastic to replicate in real life. These designers' trick? Make the thing so UNGODLY HUGE that the pilot has a minimal impact upon its aerodynamics and center of gravity.
So, waycool that they built it and all, but not nearly as cool as the tiny personal aircraft in the original manga.
I don't know if DirecTV is still like this everywhere, but I can tell you about my own experiences living in Clear Lake, Texas (the home of Johnson Space Center).
My family used to subscribe to whatever increasingly-large umbrella-corporation-of-the-month had most recently bought out our local cable television monopoly. In the eighties, when it was basically a local mom-and-pop provider, it was pretty darned cool. In the early-to-mid nineties, when the string of buyouts really got underway, its quality of service declined while its pricing increased significantly. In the mid-to-late nineties, when DBS began heating up real competition, its quality of service dramatically improved while pricing remained more or less static. And all through those times we received NASA TV, which was great!
Cut to the twenty-first century, and my family switched over to DirecTV DBS. It's been amazingly cool, albeit just as expensive as overpriced cable.
We regularly get nice big wrath-of-god thunderstorms blowing in off the Gulf, and yes, in a *really* bad storm the signal might occasionaly break up for a few minutes at a time, but it's not significantly more frequent than cable television - remember, they're getting their signal from a local satellite downlink, too. I'd rate the reliability as just slightly below cable - it *is* a smaller dish, after all - but not enough to be any sort of a nuisance.
DBS receivers kick digital cable receivers' @sses, hands down, though. The user interface is entirely dependent upon your box, and I've sampled a great many of both sorts of boxes amongst many friends, having lived in five cities in the past four years. Not a single digital cable box has been anything but a heavily-sedated slug by comparison to the DBS boxen. If you enjoy scrolling through hundreds of channels you don't subscribe to in order to find the one that you're looking for, digital cable's all for you, since DBS custom channel lists spoil that sort of fun. DBS receivers are faster, more user-friendly, more programmable, more configurable, more extendable, and not a bloody-closed-platform. You can buy a DBS receiver from any of a half-dozen manufacturers, while digital cable receivers are often vendor-locked-in, and it *really* shows.
DirecTV channel selection is superior to any digital cable system I've since tried as well, and I go for geeky esoteric stuff like NASA TV Worldlink. Bear in mind, though, that that's from the perspective of a global sampling of culture. There's a lot of fringe quirky stuff to be found on DirecTV if you dig for it, but local public-access and community channels are only available through your cable provider, as those aren't even broadcast on open airwaves. That's really the only negative point for DBS - NASA TV used to be a Clear Lake public access station in the eighties!
Local broadcast channels have never been an issue, though. Most major markets now have a decent selection of their own local broadcast stations available through regional DBS programming packages, all the national broadcast networks get DBS feeds from two or three different big cities (which often nets some interesting other-regional programming as a bonus), and a good antenna can pick up most stray channels left out of the mix. I don't know for certain, but I've heard that some of the newer DBS receivers even include built-in tuners so you never have to switch your television and audio source when you want to watch antenna broadcasts. Local broadcast channels just aren't an issue.
Right, the heaving-naked-breasts part. Well, I had great fun browsing DirectTV channel lists upon my first experience in the fall of 2002. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it carried NASA TV of all things, so I dialed straight in only to see two women and a man having what must've been quite a pleasant experience. It didn't look like the usual NASA programming, so I figured something was crossed up in the feed and let it go. Oddly, when I checked back a couple of nigh
> HP still makes some good products (plotters, high end LJ)
;)
Qualify that as *high-end* plotters, as well.
Working at a tiny architectural firm (2-3 people, depending on the workload), we finally bought a low-end HP plotter so that I could control CAD output in-house. It was a very substantial purchase for such a small firm, but critical to moving our productivity out of the nineteen-eighties. We even paid a bit more for the low-end HP compared to other companies' higher-end but less expensive offerings, because my technophobe boss was unwilling to try anything unproven and the HP plotters I'd used in previous offices had been reliable workhorses.
Well, the other plotters I'd used weren't HP's *low-end* models. It went from adequate to spotty to unreliable to completely dead within a week. HP had on-site technicians in the office for over a month wrestling with the machine before they finally gave up and shipped us a high-end replacement model to compensate for our troubles.
Of course, that higher-end model wasn't designed to run off of our six-year-old plot server, but it took me about a week to diagnose the undocumented buffer underruns. I ended up bringing in my own laptop to use as our full-time plot server: ten-year IT life cycles can be obnoxious.
In a two-person office which bills clients hourly, every hour I had to sacrifice to troubleshooting and negotiating my way through HP's support labyrinth was a significant hit on productivity. The month and a half that our full years' IT expenditure sat dead on the floor did not make the boss a happy man. In the end, he swore off HP and CAD for good.
Oh yeah, and me too. Anyone in northern California need an architect?
So, UK rating boards have enough of an issue with headbutting to bump Episode II up to a 12 rating.
Didn't Darth Maul headbutt Qui-Gon, though, just before he gored him in The Phantom Menace?
Was Episode I rated PG? If so, why was the headbutt okay then but not now?
I studied this concept as part of a commercial space development group back when I was in college. It's quite compelling.
;)
/. - I may have messed up initially and buried this as a reply deeper down the treads.]
There're two significant challenges in implementation, though.
The fundamental flaw in the concept lies in conservation of rotational inertia. Think about a spinning ice skater - as she draws her arms in, she spins much faster. The opposite is also true - as a rotating mass extends from its center, its rate of rotation decreases.
The space elevator rotates at a constant geosynchronous rate, but as its payload is raised along that axis, the difference between its linear inertia at the surface of the earth and its linear inertia around the circumference at geosynch altitude (or any significant altitude along that axis) is absorbed by the elevator's structure.
Unless the payload applies some sort of thrust perpendicular to the axis of the elevator, that difference in inertia only works to pull the whole system back down to earth. Effectively, the amount of energy you'd have to put into the system to keep it up would equal the thrust expended to send the payload into orbit by conventional means.
Then there's the whole issue of vibrational harmonics. Accumulated shocks from winds, payloads, and even space dust would propagate up and down the string (any human structure of that incredible length would effectively be a string in tension) and create severe vibration problems. That'd take some *seriously* epic engineering to dampen.
NASA has done some experiments with tethered satellites which address the vibration issues (as well as accumulated electric charge from atmospheric drag), but they were intended more for spinning-wheel satellite applications than for space elevators.
It's a really cool idea that unfortunately is a something-for-nothing scheme. If there were some kind of cool electric thruster system which didn't rely on reaction mass, it'd be feasable, but then we're straying into Area-51 technology.
[This is my first post to
I studied this concept as part of a commercial space development group back when I was in college. It's quite compelling.
;)
There're two significant challenges in implementation, though.
The fundamental flaw in the concept lies in conservation of rotational inertia. Think about a spinning ice skater - as she draws her arms in, she spins much faster. The opposite is also true - as a rotating mass extends from its center, its rate of rotation decreases.
The space elevator rotates at a constant geosynchronous rate, but as its payload is raised along that axis, the difference between its linear inertia at the surface of the earth and its linear inertia around the circumference at geosynch altitude (or any significant altitude along that axis) is absorbed by the elevator's structure.
Unless the payload applies some sort of thrust perpendicular to the axis of the elevator, that difference in inertia only works to pull the whole system back down to earth. Effectively, the amount of energy you'd have to put into the system to keep it up would equal the thrust expended to send the payload into orbit by conventional means.
Then there's the whole issue of vibrational harmonics. Accumulated shocks from winds, payloads, and even space dust would propagate up and down the string (any human structure of that incredible length would effectively be a string in tension) and create severe vibration problems. That'd take some *seriously* epic engineering to dampen.
NASA has done some experiments with tethered satellites which address the vibration issues (as well as accumulated electric charge from atmospheric drag), but they were intended more for spinning-wheel satellite applications than for space elevators.
It's a really cool idea that unfortunately is a something-for-nothing scheme. If there were some kind of cool electric thruster system which didn't rely on reaction mass, it'd be feasable, but then we're straying into Area-51 technology.