The story I heard is that the Stick comes out of the astronaut office with the idea of taking Shuttle components and turning them into something to get astronauts into low-Earth orbit without the hazards of the Shuttle. You take the SRB, the good old reliable SRB, yes it did in the Challenger, but you put it by itself instead of next to a liquid fuel tank, and if the O-rings leak hot gases, no one cares. Then you mate it with an LH2-LO2 upper stage, and stack on top of that an Apollo-style blunt-body reentry vehicle, only make it larger to carry more people and more stuff. This setup has no chance of the SRB torching the ET (external tank), no chance that the foam or ice falling from the upper stage would hit the heat shield of the reentry vehicle part of the spacecraft -- life is good.
So the booster stage is an SRB and the upper stage uses an SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine). Trouble is that an SSME has never been started in flight -- they are started on the ground before the big SRB's are lit. Inflight engine starts have to be engineered into the design. Saturn V used solid rocket motors on the "inter-stages" to provide small amounts of acceleration to settle the fuel in the tanks to get upper stage starts. Centaur uses something called an expander cycle -- the vaporization of LH2 runs the turbopump, and has someway to bootstrap itself from tank pressure. Agena had some kind of metal mesh in the fuel tank to trap globs of liquid fuel in front of the pump inlets to get its multiple-restart-in-0-G capability.
So they revert to a J2s -- a reworked J2 engine from the Saturn upper stages. This has less efficiency than the ultra-high-pressure SSME, which uses a regenerative cycle to run the pumps, so the upper stage needs to get much bigger. And to lift this heavier upper stage, you now need a 5-segment instead of a 4-segment SRB, so the development cost goes up to 4-5 billion from 1 billion, just for the uprated SRB alone (different propellant grain, different casing, extra joint).
Then the story is that the Stick is, well, a stick -- this very tall bean pole like thing that has some interesting flight dynamics. It is not clear whether you can guide the thing by swivelling the SRB nozzle, and there definitely is an issue about controlling the vehicle in roll, so some vernier rocket engines have to be added somewhere. Think of one of these software projects where the enhancement to an existing design seem like a piece of cake and turn out to have a cascade of unintended consequences.
So where does this thing have problems? You are boosting on an SRB -- yes, reliable, but it is said to be terribly rough riding, and you can't get loose from it for the 2 minutes it is operating. Then you have, again, a Stick -- it is much taller than the Shuttle stack, so you need all kinds of new facilities to service it and get the crew up into it. And then you have the flight dynamic problems from this tall spindly thing.
So I guess it is back to the EELV, but those are kind of interesting. The Delta IV EELV has a LH2-LO2 first stage -- they start the engines so H2 rich that the insulation on the first stage catches fire and chars in flight -- maybe not a problem but looks kind of scary to stick people on that. The Delta IV Heavy runs 3 core stages in parallel. The Saturn V ran 5 engines but had a certain degree of engine-out capability. It is not certain that an engine could go out on a Delta IV Heavy without having to use the abort rocket for rescue from an out-of-control vehicle.
Then there is this whole business about the NASA engineers knowing best and the webonauts being ignorant second-guessers. It turns out NASA sent the whole new Moon landing thing "out for bids" and got tons of interesting proposals from the usual suspects -- Boeing, LockMart, etc. Yes, these proposals relied on the EELV, which has its own set of problems for human launch, but they had some insights, like following the Soyuz plan of separate reentry and cruise habitation modules along with the cool i
I talked to one of our plasma fusion people about MHD -- it just didn't pan out in terms of electrodes: resistance at electrode-plasma boundary, erosion, and so on.
Well, the thing is written Java and it JNI's down to a C++ module for the numerical computation. I try to maintain as much locality of data for each task as possible by allocating and passing objects for the threads to work on. JNI has a lot of overhead, but the JNI call to the C++ module is done on the parallel threads.
I could test and profile and figure out the bottlenecks but I don't have the time to play with it right now and not having a 4-core computer, I won't see much benefit. Part of the problem may be figuring out what are expensive operations and bottlenecks in Java, but the point of all this multi-core stuff in my mind is that you can run Java and waste cycles.
Something as simple as taking a number-crunching task and making it parallel over threads on multiple cores is not enough. There obviously is some bottleneck, but finding it will take work.
I have a number-crunching program which I rewrote multi-threaded. It is simple enough -- I need 100,000 calculations of the same thing only with different parameters each time, so run them in parallel, two at a time for two threads, four at a time for four threads. I still have the bookkeeping of saving the results of each calculation, and I have streamlined the calculation enough that the bookkeeping part is a significant piece of the overall time.
I am about 50 percent faster on two cores -- I am guessing I will be maybe another 20 percent faster on 4 cores. If we get the Che Gueverra number (1, 2, many cores), I am not sure how this helps without a radical rethinking of how we write programs.
I guess one thought is that garbage collection is for the intellectually lazy; another thought is that it is just part of the modern world.
The original post was on the goodness of Mono, the.NET clone, now that it supports WinForms.
The point I was trying to make was to agree with a parent post that if one is going with a GC'ed byte-coded language, why not go with the original, Java, instead of with Mono/.NET/whaterver, the imitation. If someone wants to lay into GC languages, the same complaint can be leveled at Mono.
The half million-dollar question was about the theraputic effect claimed for Bayer Heroin in the 1890's. This question was a switch from some lame pop culture question about which Beatle didn't help out with Jerry's Kids (George Harrison), and he 50/50'd the heroin question down to "treat stuffy head" and "suppress cough."
So Ogi-dude does not know the answer, and he is trying to Zen this one while his wife, the medical doctor who must have known the answer, is squirming like crazy.
Geez, isn't it "knowledge in the world" that the opiates drugs all have pretty much the same theraputic effects ranging from making you constipated (learned that in high-school drug resistance class - the phy-ed teacher told us "dope will plug you up but good -- same effect as paragoric) to cough suppression (codeine is the real deal if your doctor will write you a prescription for it), and that codeine used to be used by dope fiends to tide them over.
Anyway, he guesses "D, cough suppressent, final answer" and he gets the.5 million.
After that episode, his wife is about to bust that he was about to answer "D, William", the correct answer but one that he was not certain. Ogi is going to beat himself up over that one, but Ogi-wife looked like she was perfectly happy with the half million.
My requirements for leaving Win32 and GDI are 1) hardware-assisted scrolling, 2) fast blit of memory frame buffer where I can set the pixels, and 3) vertical sync-locked screen updates. Java Swing can do 1) with Graphics.copyArea(), 2) with BufferedImage, VolatileImage, and while Swing only offers BufferStrategy on full-screen Windows, I have written a Linux-X11-OpenGLX vertical sync checker and access it with JNI. Furthermore, the heretofore pokey horizontal scrolls and partial screen updates in X11 are now hardware accelerated using OpenGL in Linux Java 1.5.
These Win32 capabilities (ScrollWindowEx(), CreateDIBSection(), IDirectDraw::WaitforVerticalRetrace()) that got removed, crippled, or marked as "unsafe code" in WinForms are available in Java and portable between Windows and Linux.
Now that Sun is claiming to be open-sourcing the Java VM, and WinForms is supposed to get replaced by who-knows-what-Aero-in-Vista, and Netbeans has a GUI form designer indistinguishable from VB, I say why not Java indeed!
I have written some numeric-intensive data animation applications in Swing, and I have no complaints about the speed or responsiveness of the Swing GUI or of numerical algorithms in Java.
My only complaint is JVM/Java app load times. You launch an app and you wait.
A simple app has a load time comparable to starting MS Word, and starting a Java equivalent to MS Word (Eclipse, for a broad comparison of a big, comprehensive app) takes an eternity.
SUN's take on this is security. Everytime you construct an object from a class for the first time, you are invoking a class loader which does verification of the byte code.
Sometimes it isn't just application startup -- launching a JFileChooser for an initial time can sometimes take forever to come up, but then it is responsive with subsequent invocations.
But if they solved the startup time, perhaps making a JVM part of the OS startup, that would go a long way. Anyone here use Matlab in recent versions? You are using a Java Swing app, or at least for the GUI part. Matlab is the state-sponsored religion in engineering at the U, and when I demonstrate to a class bringing up an editor window in Matlab and we wait for that edit window to pop up, I tell them they are looking at Java Swing in action.
True, it is possible to write bad Swing apps (what was that example, populating a GUI widget with 10,000 entries?), but by an large I am impressed with Swing -- not as snappy as a native app, but fully comparable to a VB, wxPython, Matlab, whatever GUI. But oh those long load times.
Somehow the notion of catalogues of software IC's and assembling applications from such hasn't quite materialized. Much or most of software reuse is in the form of using features built into OS's, computer languages, or compilers.
Program in Perl and pattern matching comes built-in. Program in Python and you get dictionaries -- key-value pairs. Delphi gives you its VCL. Program in Java and you get instant memory management.
Making a robust module that people are going to want to reuse is hard, and the people developing OS's and computer languages and associated frameworks are willing to do that hard work. Letting a thousand flowers bloom of a miriad of 3rd party suppliers hasn't developed to the same extent, although there was some hope that component frameworks like ActiveX,.NET, or Java would make that possible.
The idea was that the right framework would facilitate reuse -- in practice, the right framework is in itself the reuse because it has the features you need built in.
I have a DLL that I use in waveform synthesis for a DSP class that compiled just fine on MS VS 6 on up through the.NET upgrades until we upgraded to VS 8.
It compiles but now burps up a bunch of warning messages about strcpy() being deprecated. Microsoft famously has used C-style unchecked string handling in Windows, making Windows the security bug patch-o-rama that it is today, so now Microsoft is on the wagon and insists that everyone, everywhere not use those unsafe C-style string routines.
So strcpy() is now "deprecated" -- like, says who? Has the standards body said that strcpy() is getting pulled out of C++, or is MS like the guy who is scolding all of the people they see with a drink?
I am migrating my ActiveX stuff to Java Swing and using Star Office for more of my docs. I may end up having a Vista machine on my desk someday, but I don't plan to target Vista as such. If the world is going to GC'd JIT'ed code, why not go Java instead of being locked down.
Yeah, yeah, Mono, this that, RMS-says-Java-is-as-evil, but I am leaving -- no more targeting the lastest and greatest features on an MS OS.
The one incentive I can think of to play the Powerball lottery is that a person could win enough money to pay for a private venture to put Gilbert Levin's chiral labeled-release experiment package on the surface of Mars. The script goes something like
1. Win Powerball
2. Phone Dr. Gilbert Levin
. . .
3. Fame and glory!
Of course I wouldn't get the Nobel Prize -- I would go down in history as the chump who spent his Powerball winnings on a Mars probe when he could have had a powerboat and a whirlpool bath. My likelihood of winning Powerball is very remote, but if I can publicize this concept and perhaps someone who actually buys tickets and wins Powerball might do the same thing and discover life on Mars and I would be happy as well.
Gilbert Levin hasn't given up on his Viking LR results as detecting life, and he has badly wanted to fly a follow-up experiment where he gives the bugs preferred levo or dextro broth because a peroxide reaction wouldn't have that preference.
The fix is in I say. Someone finds organic molecules in the Mars meteorite and of course it isn't life because there are tons of non-biological processes for making organics. Someone claims that petroleum comes from inorganic processes as does all of the hydrocarbons in the outer Solar System and the C-type meteorites and of course everyone knows the only way to make hydrocarbons is from dead dinosaurs.
The Wright Brothers were first in flight excepting some spurious claims. They were for a long time number one in controlled flight -- when a left turn would send competitors augering in, they were not only flying but doing figure-eights and impressive maneuvers up in the air. But they were also wedded to a control-surfaces-in-front and other features that perhaps they could fly maneuvers but could they train anyone else? All I know is that after flight training in low-wing Pipers with asymmetric ailerons that you don't even have to know what the rudders are for, the thought of getting checked out in a Wright Flyer is something I don't want to contemplate -- probably something beyond helicopter training in developing a new set of reflexes and balances.
Given their lead, they had visions that they owned aviation through patents. They had the idea that flight was going to be bigger than anyone could imagine, but their idea was of themselves being a Microsoft rather than the aviation industry being Open Source. They made some money from it, but they didn't realize their dream of becoming personally rich beyond imagining. An engine maker called Curtis-Wright had their swan song in the form of the TurboCompound radial engine that powered the DC-7, Lockheed Constellation, P-2 Neptune (did they have one in the Skyraider?). But in the age of Boeing and Airbus, they are a historical footnote.
I couldn't get to TFA on account of the SlashJamup, but it seems that the gist of Vista is that it has so much cool transparency of animation of the desktop that a user will view it with the bug-eyed astonishment of Keir Dullea entering the star gate in orbit around Jupiter.
What does Vista do for the application developer? What are the methods of a Vista graphics context object? If it has vector graphics (grr, all graphics context objects have a DrawLine() method where you can specify line thickness and anti-aliasing even -- did you think we were going to roll our own Bresenham algorithm and flip pixels in a frame buffer?), how does rendering to a screen/meta file/printer GC differ or stay the same? Can you render to the screen using SVG/Display PDF/Display Postscript primitives or is everything Vista-specific? What does it take to render to EPS/PDF/SVG file formats or is that still a third-party add-on?
Does the application developer have access to cool effects, or is that hard to do and it will be a long way before we see them in applications?
What ever became of "Developers, developers, developers, developers!" Back in the day, Windows was regarded as too clunky by the DOS/VGA frame buffer game developer crowd, and Microsoft responded with WinG (enhancements such as ScrollWindowEx() and CreateDIBSection() to get hardware accelerated scrolling and fast pixel access to a framebuffer, all rolled into the regular Windows API) followed by DirectX. Criticize these efforts if you will, but they put capability of very interesting effects in the hands of the application developer. What is Vista offering in terms of application graphics?
That is the gist of the Peak Oil argument. It isn't so much that we will run out of oil and transition to something else, it is that (is is alleged) there are no good alternatives to oil (especially for transportation fuel) and that the transition will be painful ($10/gallon gas) and possibly catastrophic (food shortages from lack of fertilizer, tractor fuel).
That has been the implied argument -- that there is "market failure" and some kind of government action (high gas taxes, crash program on alternate fuels, electric cars) is required. Of course government action was tried in the 70's -- the CAFE program with mixed success, the synthetic fuels program proving to be a boondogle and research funds on nuclear fusion drying up in the face of falling oil prices.
I have surfed the Oil Drum, and they make some interesting arguments, and they also have their trolls over there who like to stir things up by claiming that Peak Oil (as in right now) is a fiction, and they like to get all self-righteous and pouty about how they are right and we are heading over a cliff.
As for the Oil Drum people, they seem to be predicting the peak of World oil to be now -- not 2008, not 2020, not 2040, but now. I guess history will take its course and we will find out soon enough if we are at peak oil and bad things happen. But will the Peak Oil team be granted a first down and allowed to move the chains down the field, or will this kind of thinking lose credibility if the Great Oil Shortage doesn't materialize?
My guess is that you do indeed write programs at some level. Do you use a stats package? A graphing package? Matlab? If you are using a graphics package with anything other than default settings and saving the results to a template file to recreate that type of plot, you are doing some type of programming. The same goes for writing scripts in Matlab.
One solutions is to have a divide between "applications programs" and "systems programs". Back in the day applications were written in Fortran while system programs were all in assembler -- today the application program could be in Matlab or any of a number of things while the systems program is most likely in C or perhaps C++. That way the scientist/engineer/accountant could get into the programming just deeply enough to solve problems in a particular domain, but the low-level high-performance library modules would be written in C and walled off.
Again, enabling the writing of applications programs through some application-specific language -- Matlab, PHP, Visual Basic -- often gets programmer types all agitated because it enables non-programmers to write programs badly. On the other hand, anything but the most non-trivial use of a software package is a kind of programming, and there is a trend to make such tools more Turing complete.
Back in the day, if you wanted a chart of some data for a publication manuscript, you wrote a Fortran program and called the Plot10 library to drive a pen plotter. Later on, you had the numbers in a text file, and you used a plot package to generate the figure. These days a lot of people are using the plot library and figure window UI in Matlab to generate figures and save them in EPS files. While a plot package may seem to not involve programming, it can sometimes take a lot of banging one's head against the wall to get a plot package to generate the figure the way you want, while it may be more direct to write a Matlab script.
I think for a while there was a kind of view in the Unix community -- not the same as the Open Source community, but a lot of overlayp-- that you had C and you had Shell, one compiled and the other interpreted with a command executive, and between the two you had everything you needed. Since systems were programmed in a high-level language (i.e. C), you didn't need to have a separate applications program language -- applications programming was a matter of having the right libraries. I think that with Perl, Python, Ruby and others -- the scripting languages -- there is a reemergence of the concept of an application programming language and the recognition that C may not be the one tool for every job.
I also see that with scripting languages we may see a return to the Fortran/Plot10 model instead of the plot package model -- you have the power and flexibility of a more Turing-complete programming language to specify what you want rather than relying on a particular software package having the features you need. I am starting to see Open Source Python-based packages coming out the national laboratories to do a lot of what Matlab does.
Ford is bragging how they boosted the EPA gas mileage of the Ford Focus by 10 percent (actually the highway rating of the manual transmission model -- the mileage improvement on other models and for the city rating was less) by updating the software in the ECM. Not only does the 2007 Focus have this improvement, but they are flashing the memories of 2006 models to get the same effect.
Now try making mods to your ECM for any purpose -- to boost gas mileage, to tweak performance. There are people who do this (mainly for performance), but it probably involves some hacking and reverse engineering.
Maybe some slob of a European/Chinese/Russian spacecraft came alongside and swung its solar panels really wide and did this. We tried to return the Shuttle without mentioning this incident, but we got a letter in the mail saying we had the cost of the hole repair charged to our credit card.
6000C past temp limit of combustion gases
on
Two Tiny Gas Turbines
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The National Aerospaceplane (NASP) was supposed to burn hydrogen in a "scramjet" to propel and airplane-like vehicle to Mach 20 and into orbit. The funding got pulled on it, and there was some speculation that it was cover for "black" programs.
Anyway, the scramjet is the ultimate exercize in drinking from the firehose. A normal turbo or ram jet engine has a diffuser to slow the incoming airstream to some managable subsonic value, burn fuel, and drive the turbines. Trouble is that if you are going fast enough, the diffuser gives you so much compression and inlet temperature that nothing burns -- if you go much above the flame temperature of your fuel, your combustion gases (mainly water vapor for the hydrogen-powered NASP) disassociate back into hydrogen and oxygen.
The trick to the scramjet is to only slow the incoming airstream a little bit, somehow burn fuel in a supersonic airstream, and expand the burnt gases to get more thrust than the drag created by this arrangement.
I am not a physical chemist, but I would bet that 6000 C is past the disassociation temperature of combustion of whatever fuel and air, and you are not going to operate a gas turbine at 6000 C inlet temperature regardless of what miracle materials.
Furthermore, efficient use of a 6000 C turbine inlet temperature requires very high pressure ratios -- doubt you get that in miniature.
100 watts of output power sounds goofy -- that is of the same range of my gas engine weedwacker that generates a lot of heat and burns through a good amount of fuel.
VBS is a Microsoft Windows Scripting Host (WSH) language, while VBA is the Microsoft extension language for writing macros in Word or Excel. While they have similar syntax, the application is a little different. A scripting language is a glue language for building new applications that use objects, system resource, GUI widgets, and even entire applications such as MS Word or a Web browser as a piece-part of the application. An extension language is something for writing a plug-in or extension of a particular application like Word or IE.
Is this a distinction without a difference? I suppose you could extend Word if you had a way to script Word, but there is a difference in emphasis between a stand-alone script that does something with Word and a plug-in that is run from Word.
I suppose for Scheme as a plug-in language, it is probably like AutoCad and Emacs using Lisp dialects as extension languages. But is this the same as using Scheme/Guile for scripting? Or if Python is widely available on Linux for scripting, does this mean Gimp exposes a scriptable interface to Python (Word exposes a scriptable interface to Python under Windows, and many COM/ActiveX objects are usable from Python, but largely because of Windows-specific libraries that can be called from Python)? Does this also mean that Gimp can call back into Python to implement plug-ins in Python? So in this sense, I get the feeling that Scheme/Guile is limited to plug-ins and not much used for scripting?
I would give the casinos their rule and the Nevada law that you can't have a calculator or a computer to count cards. Think of cheating on an exam -- if the ground rules of the exam say no calculator and you have a calculator hidden in your shorts, you are just plain cheating. On the other hand, if you are gifted or practiced at mental arithmetic, there is no way you can make a ground rule for an exam that you cannot use your gift to do the math.
If you are caught with some kind of device, I would say you are just plain cheating. But do the casinos have a rule/law against counting cards if you are smart enough to do it in your head (heck, a halfway-good bridge player counts cards to figure what the other side has)? Can they arrest anyone for mental card counting? Do they kick people out/ban them for mental card counting?
According to TFA, if you get cut by the safety saw, it really hurts and bleeds alot -- its just that it doesn't cut through. I think that is a good thing in discouraging complacency,
Slashdot Mirror
So the booster stage is an SRB and the upper stage uses an SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine). Trouble is that an SSME has never been started in flight -- they are started on the ground before the big SRB's are lit. Inflight engine starts have to be engineered into the design. Saturn V used solid rocket motors on the "inter-stages" to provide small amounts of acceleration to settle the fuel in the tanks to get upper stage starts. Centaur uses something called an expander cycle -- the vaporization of LH2 runs the turbopump, and has someway to bootstrap itself from tank pressure. Agena had some kind of metal mesh in the fuel tank to trap globs of liquid fuel in front of the pump inlets to get its multiple-restart-in-0-G capability.
So they revert to a J2s -- a reworked J2 engine from the Saturn upper stages. This has less efficiency than the ultra-high-pressure SSME, which uses a regenerative cycle to run the pumps, so the upper stage needs to get much bigger. And to lift this heavier upper stage, you now need a 5-segment instead of a 4-segment SRB, so the development cost goes up to 4-5 billion from 1 billion, just for the uprated SRB alone (different propellant grain, different casing, extra joint).
Then the story is that the Stick is, well, a stick -- this very tall bean pole like thing that has some interesting flight dynamics. It is not clear whether you can guide the thing by swivelling the SRB nozzle, and there definitely is an issue about controlling the vehicle in roll, so some vernier rocket engines have to be added somewhere. Think of one of these software projects where the enhancement to an existing design seem like a piece of cake and turn out to have a cascade of unintended consequences.
So where does this thing have problems? You are boosting on an SRB -- yes, reliable, but it is said to be terribly rough riding, and you can't get loose from it for the 2 minutes it is operating. Then you have, again, a Stick -- it is much taller than the Shuttle stack, so you need all kinds of new facilities to service it and get the crew up into it. And then you have the flight dynamic problems from this tall spindly thing.
So I guess it is back to the EELV, but those are kind of interesting. The Delta IV EELV has a LH2-LO2 first stage -- they start the engines so H2 rich that the insulation on the first stage catches fire and chars in flight -- maybe not a problem but looks kind of scary to stick people on that. The Delta IV Heavy runs 3 core stages in parallel. The Saturn V ran 5 engines but had a certain degree of engine-out capability. It is not certain that an engine could go out on a Delta IV Heavy without having to use the abort rocket for rescue from an out-of-control vehicle.
Then there is this whole business about the NASA engineers knowing best and the webonauts being ignorant second-guessers. It turns out NASA sent the whole new Moon landing thing "out for bids" and got tons of interesting proposals from the usual suspects -- Boeing, LockMart, etc. Yes, these proposals relied on the EELV, which has its own set of problems for human launch, but they had some insights, like following the Soyuz plan of separate reentry and cruise habitation modules along with the cool i
I talked to one of our plasma fusion people about MHD -- it just didn't pan out in terms of electrodes: resistance at electrode-plasma boundary, erosion, and so on.
I could test and profile and figure out the bottlenecks but I don't have the time to play with it right now and not having a 4-core computer, I won't see much benefit. Part of the problem may be figuring out what are expensive operations and bottlenecks in Java, but the point of all this multi-core stuff in my mind is that you can run Java and waste cycles.
Something as simple as taking a number-crunching task and making it parallel over threads on multiple cores is not enough. There obviously is some bottleneck, but finding it will take work.
I am about 50 percent faster on two cores -- I am guessing I will be maybe another 20 percent faster on 4 cores. If we get the Che Gueverra number (1, 2, many cores), I am not sure how this helps without a radical rethinking of how we write programs.
The original post was on the goodness of Mono, the .NET clone, now that it supports WinForms.
The point I was trying to make was to agree with a parent post that if one is going with a GC'ed byte-coded language, why not go with the original, Java, instead of with Mono/.NET/whaterver, the imitation. If someone wants to lay into GC languages, the same complaint can be leveled at Mono.
So Ogi-dude does not know the answer, and he is trying to Zen this one while his wife, the medical doctor who must have known the answer, is squirming like crazy.
Geez, isn't it "knowledge in the world" that the opiates drugs all have pretty much the same theraputic effects ranging from making you constipated (learned that in high-school drug resistance class - the phy-ed teacher told us "dope will plug you up but good -- same effect as paragoric) to cough suppression (codeine is the real deal if your doctor will write you a prescription for it), and that codeine used to be used by dope fiends to tide them over.
Anyway, he guesses "D, cough suppressent, final answer" and he gets the .5 million.
After that episode, his wife is about to bust that he was about to answer "D, William", the correct answer but one that he was not certain. Ogi is going to beat himself up over that one, but Ogi-wife looked like she was perfectly happy with the half million.
My requirements for leaving Win32 and GDI are 1) hardware-assisted scrolling, 2) fast blit of memory frame buffer where I can set the pixels, and 3) vertical sync-locked screen updates. Java Swing can do 1) with Graphics.copyArea(), 2) with BufferedImage, VolatileImage, and while Swing only offers BufferStrategy on full-screen Windows, I have written a Linux-X11-OpenGLX vertical sync checker and access it with JNI. Furthermore, the heretofore pokey horizontal scrolls and partial screen updates in X11 are now hardware accelerated using OpenGL in Linux Java 1.5. These Win32 capabilities (ScrollWindowEx(), CreateDIBSection(), IDirectDraw::WaitforVerticalRetrace()) that got removed, crippled, or marked as "unsafe code" in WinForms are available in Java and portable between Windows and Linux. Now that Sun is claiming to be open-sourcing the Java VM, and WinForms is supposed to get replaced by who-knows-what-Aero-in-Vista, and Netbeans has a GUI form designer indistinguishable from VB, I say why not Java indeed!
My only complaint is JVM/Java app load times. You launch an app and you wait. A simple app has a load time comparable to starting MS Word, and starting a Java equivalent to MS Word (Eclipse, for a broad comparison of a big, comprehensive app) takes an eternity.
SUN's take on this is security. Everytime you construct an object from a class for the first time, you are invoking a class loader which does verification of the byte code.
Sometimes it isn't just application startup -- launching a JFileChooser for an initial time can sometimes take forever to come up, but then it is responsive with subsequent invocations.
But if they solved the startup time, perhaps making a JVM part of the OS startup, that would go a long way. Anyone here use Matlab in recent versions? You are using a Java Swing app, or at least for the GUI part. Matlab is the state-sponsored religion in engineering at the U, and when I demonstrate to a class bringing up an editor window in Matlab and we wait for that edit window to pop up, I tell them they are looking at Java Swing in action.
True, it is possible to write bad Swing apps (what was that example, populating a GUI widget with 10,000 entries?), but by an large I am impressed with Swing -- not as snappy as a native app, but fully comparable to a VB, wxPython, Matlab, whatever GUI. But oh those long load times.
Program in Perl and pattern matching comes built-in. Program in Python and you get dictionaries -- key-value pairs. Delphi gives you its VCL. Program in Java and you get instant memory management.
Making a robust module that people are going to want to reuse is hard, and the people developing OS's and computer languages and associated frameworks are willing to do that hard work. Letting a thousand flowers bloom of a miriad of 3rd party suppliers hasn't developed to the same extent, although there was some hope that component frameworks like ActiveX, .NET, or Java would make that possible.
The idea was that the right framework would facilitate reuse -- in practice, the right framework is in itself the reuse because it has the features you need built in.
It compiles but now burps up a bunch of warning messages about strcpy() being deprecated. Microsoft famously has used C-style unchecked string handling in Windows, making Windows the security bug patch-o-rama that it is today, so now Microsoft is on the wagon and insists that everyone, everywhere not use those unsafe C-style string routines.
So strcpy() is now "deprecated" -- like, says who? Has the standards body said that strcpy() is getting pulled out of C++, or is MS like the guy who is scolding all of the people they see with a drink?
Yeah, yeah, Mono, this that, RMS-says-Java-is-as-evil, but I am leaving -- no more targeting the lastest and greatest features on an MS OS.
Brazil? Doesn't everyone know that programming languages come from Denmark?
1. Win Powerball
2. Phone Dr. Gilbert Levin
. . .
3. Fame and glory!
Of course I wouldn't get the Nobel Prize -- I would go down in history as the chump who spent his Powerball winnings on a Mars probe when he could have had a powerboat and a whirlpool bath. My likelihood of winning Powerball is very remote, but if I can publicize this concept and perhaps someone who actually buys tickets and wins Powerball might do the same thing and discover life on Mars and I would be happy as well.
Gilbert Levin hasn't given up on his Viking LR results as detecting life, and he has badly wanted to fly a follow-up experiment where he gives the bugs preferred levo or dextro broth because a peroxide reaction wouldn't have that preference.
The fix is in I say. Someone finds organic molecules in the Mars meteorite and of course it isn't life because there are tons of non-biological processes for making organics. Someone claims that petroleum comes from inorganic processes as does all of the hydrocarbons in the outer Solar System and the C-type meteorites and of course everyone knows the only way to make hydrocarbons is from dead dinosaurs.
Given their lead, they had visions that they owned aviation through patents. They had the idea that flight was going to be bigger than anyone could imagine, but their idea was of themselves being a Microsoft rather than the aviation industry being Open Source. They made some money from it, but they didn't realize their dream of becoming personally rich beyond imagining. An engine maker called Curtis-Wright had their swan song in the form of the TurboCompound radial engine that powered the DC-7, Lockheed Constellation, P-2 Neptune (did they have one in the Skyraider?). But in the age of Boeing and Airbus, they are a historical footnote.
What does Vista do for the application developer? What are the methods of a Vista graphics context object? If it has vector graphics (grr, all graphics context objects have a DrawLine() method where you can specify line thickness and anti-aliasing even -- did you think we were going to roll our own Bresenham algorithm and flip pixels in a frame buffer?), how does rendering to a screen/meta file/printer GC differ or stay the same? Can you render to the screen using SVG/Display PDF/Display Postscript primitives or is everything Vista-specific? What does it take to render to EPS/PDF/SVG file formats or is that still a third-party add-on?
Does the application developer have access to cool effects, or is that hard to do and it will be a long way before we see them in applications?
What ever became of "Developers, developers, developers, developers!" Back in the day, Windows was regarded as too clunky by the DOS/VGA frame buffer game developer crowd, and Microsoft responded with WinG (enhancements such as ScrollWindowEx() and CreateDIBSection() to get hardware accelerated scrolling and fast pixel access to a framebuffer, all rolled into the regular Windows API) followed by DirectX. Criticize these efforts if you will, but they put capability of very interesting effects in the hands of the application developer. What is Vista offering in terms of application graphics?
That has been the implied argument -- that there is "market failure" and some kind of government action (high gas taxes, crash program on alternate fuels, electric cars) is required. Of course government action was tried in the 70's -- the CAFE program with mixed success, the synthetic fuels program proving to be a boondogle and research funds on nuclear fusion drying up in the face of falling oil prices.
I have surfed the Oil Drum, and they make some interesting arguments, and they also have their trolls over there who like to stir things up by claiming that Peak Oil (as in right now) is a fiction, and they like to get all self-righteous and pouty about how they are right and we are heading over a cliff.
As for the Oil Drum people, they seem to be predicting the peak of World oil to be now -- not 2008, not 2020, not 2040, but now. I guess history will take its course and we will find out soon enough if we are at peak oil and bad things happen. But will the Peak Oil team be granted a first down and allowed to move the chains down the field, or will this kind of thinking lose credibility if the Great Oil Shortage doesn't materialize?
One solutions is to have a divide between "applications programs" and "systems programs". Back in the day applications were written in Fortran while system programs were all in assembler -- today the application program could be in Matlab or any of a number of things while the systems program is most likely in C or perhaps C++. That way the scientist/engineer/accountant could get into the programming just deeply enough to solve problems in a particular domain, but the low-level high-performance library modules would be written in C and walled off.
Again, enabling the writing of applications programs through some application-specific language -- Matlab, PHP, Visual Basic -- often gets programmer types all agitated because it enables non-programmers to write programs badly. On the other hand, anything but the most non-trivial use of a software package is a kind of programming, and there is a trend to make such tools more Turing complete.
Back in the day, if you wanted a chart of some data for a publication manuscript, you wrote a Fortran program and called the Plot10 library to drive a pen plotter. Later on, you had the numbers in a text file, and you used a plot package to generate the figure. These days a lot of people are using the plot library and figure window UI in Matlab to generate figures and save them in EPS files. While a plot package may seem to not involve programming, it can sometimes take a lot of banging one's head against the wall to get a plot package to generate the figure the way you want, while it may be more direct to write a Matlab script.
I think for a while there was a kind of view in the Unix community -- not the same as the Open Source community, but a lot of overlayp-- that you had C and you had Shell, one compiled and the other interpreted with a command executive, and between the two you had everything you needed. Since systems were programmed in a high-level language (i.e. C), you didn't need to have a separate applications program language -- applications programming was a matter of having the right libraries. I think that with Perl, Python, Ruby and others -- the scripting languages -- there is a reemergence of the concept of an application programming language and the recognition that C may not be the one tool for every job.
I also see that with scripting languages we may see a return to the Fortran/Plot10 model instead of the plot package model -- you have the power and flexibility of a more Turing-complete programming language to specify what you want rather than relying on a particular software package having the features you need. I am starting to see Open Source Python-based packages coming out the national laboratories to do a lot of what Matlab does.
Ford is bragging how they boosted the EPA gas mileage of the Ford Focus by 10 percent (actually the highway rating of the manual transmission model -- the mileage improvement on other models and for the city rating was less) by updating the software in the ECM. Not only does the 2007 Focus have this improvement, but they are flashing the memories of 2006 models to get the same effect.
Now try making mods to your ECM for any purpose -- to boost gas mileage, to tweak performance. There are people who do this (mainly for performance), but it probably involves some hacking and reverse engineering.
Maybe some slob of a European/Chinese/Russian spacecraft came alongside and swung its solar panels really wide and did this. We tried to return the Shuttle without mentioning this incident, but we got a letter in the mail saying we had the cost of the hole repair charged to our credit card.
Anyway, the scramjet is the ultimate exercize in drinking from the firehose. A normal turbo or ram jet engine has a diffuser to slow the incoming airstream to some managable subsonic value, burn fuel, and drive the turbines. Trouble is that if you are going fast enough, the diffuser gives you so much compression and inlet temperature that nothing burns -- if you go much above the flame temperature of your fuel, your combustion gases (mainly water vapor for the hydrogen-powered NASP) disassociate back into hydrogen and oxygen.
The trick to the scramjet is to only slow the incoming airstream a little bit, somehow burn fuel in a supersonic airstream, and expand the burnt gases to get more thrust than the drag created by this arrangement.
I am not a physical chemist, but I would bet that 6000 C is past the disassociation temperature of combustion of whatever fuel and air, and you are not going to operate a gas turbine at 6000 C inlet temperature regardless of what miracle materials.
Furthermore, efficient use of a 6000 C turbine inlet temperature requires very high pressure ratios -- doubt you get that in miniature.
100 watts of output power sounds goofy -- that is of the same range of my gas engine weedwacker that generates a lot of heat and burns through a good amount of fuel.
VBS is a Microsoft Windows Scripting Host (WSH) language, while VBA is the Microsoft extension language for writing macros in Word or Excel. While they have similar syntax, the application is a little different. A scripting language is a glue language for building new applications that use objects, system resource, GUI widgets, and even entire applications such as MS Word or a Web browser as a piece-part of the application. An extension language is something for writing a plug-in or extension of a particular application like Word or IE.
Is this a distinction without a difference? I suppose you could extend Word if you had a way to script Word, but there is a difference in emphasis between a stand-alone script that does something with Word and a plug-in that is run from Word.
I suppose for Scheme as a plug-in language, it is probably like AutoCad and Emacs using Lisp dialects as extension languages. But is this the same as using Scheme/Guile for scripting? Or if Python is widely available on Linux for scripting, does this mean Gimp exposes a scriptable interface to Python (Word exposes a scriptable interface to Python under Windows, and many COM/ActiveX objects are usable from Python, but largely because of Windows-specific libraries that can be called from Python)? Does this also mean that Gimp can call back into Python to implement plug-ins in Python? So in this sense, I get the feeling that Scheme/Guile is limited to plug-ins and not much used for scripting?
I would give the casinos their rule and the Nevada law that you can't have a calculator or a computer to count cards. Think of cheating on an exam -- if the ground rules of the exam say no calculator and you have a calculator hidden in your shorts, you are just plain cheating. On the other hand, if you are gifted or practiced at mental arithmetic, there is no way you can make a ground rule for an exam that you cannot use your gift to do the math. If you are caught with some kind of device, I would say you are just plain cheating. But do the casinos have a rule/law against counting cards if you are smart enough to do it in your head (heck, a halfway-good bridge player counts cards to figure what the other side has)? Can they arrest anyone for mental card counting? Do they kick people out/ban them for mental card counting?
Robert Lansing and Terri Garr had some potential for a spinoff series taken in a completely different direction, but I guess it was not to be.
I operate my saws with lots of chain bar lube -- don't know if I want to mix it with my hamburger.
According to TFA, if you get cut by the safety saw, it really hurts and bleeds alot -- its just that it doesn't cut through. I think that is a good thing in discouraging complacency,