I call BS. 100 PSI is nearly 7 atmospheres, and there is no way you are getting a pressure ratio of 7 out of a single-stage radial compressor. I could see a pressure ratio of 3, maybe, (45 PSI), but 100 PSI is blowing that much pressure out your butt.
There were Jupiter IRBMs in Turkey and England serving the same purpose. As a kid my parents gave me "1001 Questions Answered About Space" that was filled with 1960's innocence. Like it was only recently revealed that Project Discoverer was a spy satellite (gee, as if one couldn't see through the "cover" story about putting mice and wheat plants in orbit as they were trying to do air-grab recoveries of film capsules from the thing). The book talks about the Jupiter IRBMs being "obsolete" as of 1963 and that is why they are being dismanteled. Yeah, right.
The plain truth is that America had the Jupiters, and Russia thought they would get their own Jupiters and put them in Cuba. Americans being Americans put Jupiters in Turkey because America could, while Russians being Russians, thought they should have their own missiles in Cuba, only not only did the Russians not tell anyone about this, they denied the missiles being there until shown the recon photos, and even then they weren't too cool about that either. If they had said, "damned straight we have missiles in Cuba; you Americanskis have missiles in Turkey, if you have a problem with that we are ready to negotiate an arms control agreement" things may have worked out differently, but a lot had to do with the Russian penchant for secrecy and the American penchant not to redo Pearl Harbor.
How it had to play out was for Russia to back down in a very public way because they were secret about their missiles and for America to back down in a secret way because, lets face it, America had been public about its missiles, but there was a reciprocal deal on the Cuban missiles and the Turkish Jupiters, and that is the truth regardless of whatever anyone had told you about it.
I have two widgets on the screen that give two different "views" of the result of a mathematical calculation on a model. Each widget runs the same mathematical calculation on the model.
Refactoring by moving the mathematical calculation into the model would require adding a large amount of storage to hold the calculation result. Benchmarks indicate the saving in time for a screen refresh would be from 2 seconds down to 1.5 seconds (P-III 1.2 GHz). The screen refresh is broken down into steps so the UI is not frozen during the 2 seconds, allowing the user to interrup the refresh to do anything else.
My read of the article is that there are three criticisms: 1) GIMP has a different command structure than Photoship, 2) GIMP mangles lines and fonts, and 3) GIMP is slow.
A lot is said that the F/OSS propeller heads don't get the Zen of GUI and that their attempts at GUIdom are as rough as a corncob. But while you would expect the propeller heads to be weak in the human-factors area, you would think they would be geniuses at algorithms and at coding.
OK, lets blow off the GUI tuning because that is the realm of people who talk in buzzwords. How about making lines straight and fonts accurate? OK, so GIMP is a little rough around the edges, give it time and all of that. OK, how about the slow algorithms?
I am thinking along the line of some sports cars -- Spartan appointments, hard seats, stiff ride, but boy can that thing corner! The F/OSS alternative has a rough GUI and a few quirks, but does it does it have the performance? Well, no.
Now BeOS was not F/OSS, but it was an alternative to Windows, MacOS, and everything else and there was some hobbyist interest in it. BeOS may have had its quirks, and it kind of melted away before I ever had a chance to look into it, and there was very little in the way of applications for it, but the story is that it could perform, although at the cost of figuring out how to write multi-threaded apps.
If the reviewer could have said, "the GUI is quirky, but boy is this thing fast!", I think that would have gotten a lot of people's attention because a lot of us would put up with novelty in exchange for speed, because not having to sit around waiting for something to happen is a big UI feature. But the reviewer said it was quirky, buggy, and slow, and people are slamming the reviewer for not giving the UI a chance. So to the extent that Photoshop is more geometrically accurate and faster, yeah, it is not like Photoshop.
There is this story I heard attributed to IBM Watson that some wag has concocted a detailed list of password restrictions (no all numbers, no all characters, and so on) where the joke was that if you rigorously applied all of the rules, there was only one legal password.
Are you subscribing to Velikovsky's "No Dark Age" theory?
Apart from his notoriety about his "Venus was ejected from Jupiter, whirled around the inner solar system, caused all of the plagues of Exodus and of other cultures with similar legends, and I predicted that Venus should be at a high temperature when no one else did" which gave Carl Sagan fits, that same Velikovsky has a theory that the Greek Dark Ages never happened.
Conventional wisdom places the Trojan War and the events of Homer's Iliad around 1200-1100 BCE, Homer at perhaps around 800 BCE, and the "reemergence" of Greek civilization (the beginnings of the Classical era) around 700 BCE. There is this 300-500 year gap in Greek history in which there is seemingly nothing going on, a big gap. There is evidence that the Greeks had writing (Linear B), they forgot how to write (Homer's narrative recounts "baleful" signs, suggesting that the oral poet was telling an account of writing without knowing about such a thing himself).
Jerry Pournelle has a section of his Web site talking about the Greek Dark Age, and the notion that there was a thriving Mycenean civilization, that civilization collapsed, the people reverted to a much more primitive condition, and it took 300-500 years to get it back in a different form is rather compelling. It makes for a good yarn, it is a cautionary, Atlantis-like tale about the resource-consumption excesses of our own tech culture (part of the speculation was that the Bronze age required tin -- that tin was mined as far as the current British isles and there was a European-wide and Mediteranean-wide system of trade which collapsed with the exhaustion of the tin and other factors), and it provides material for science fiction, science fantasy writings which is Pournelle's interest and livelyhood.
Apparently Velikovsky, whose flight of fantasy spun the yarn "Worlds in Collision" wants to rain on the parade of the people who like to spin yarns about the Greek Dark Age because he claimed it never happened. His claim is that the Egyptian chronology used to synchronize dates in Mediteranean archeology is out of kilter (bragging about the lengths of dynasties stretches some of the dates out) and that the collapse of Mycenae was perhaps in 900 BCE, Homer in 800 BCE, settlement of Sparta in 700 BCE, and there is no big gap where Greeks reverted to grunts and animal skins.
GC has the problem of non-deterministic finalization -- with reference counting, every time you give up a lock on an object (decrement the reference count), you check to see if the reference went to zero so not only can you release the object, you can invoke the object destructor to close file handles and stuff like that.
You must be doing the same drugs as that Atriedes fellow. Since the drugs give you visions, you can see stuff whether or not your eyes have been burnt down to eye sockets.
There are two kinds of telescope sun filters. An objective filter fits over the front end of the telescope. It filters light out before the light enters the telescopy. It is more expensive but the only safe kind.
The other kind of sun filter fits over your eyepiece or inside your eyepiece. I once had a 2.4 inch refracting telescope that came with this piece of welder's glass that fit over the eyepiece. I never used it because I was warned not to.
The advantage of the objective sun filter (the ones I have seen advertised are aluminized mylar) is that 1) it blocks out intense sunlight before it even gets to your telescope, and 2) it is exposed to no more than normal sun intensity because it hasn't been concentrated by the telescope.
The wee bit of welder's glass at the telescope eyepiece is unsafe because it is getting the full focus of sunlight from the telescope and the thing and crack from the heat and then your eyeball is in peril.
The other safe method is projection through the telescope on to a piece of paper. Safe for one's eyes -- I ruined my beginner's refractor doing that because the heat cooked a cheap plastic element in the one eyepiece it came with.
I read the label and I remember that PEG was the main ingredient in that gallon of citrus-flavored slime you are supposed to drink for a colon scoping. I haven't had to do this quite yet, but as you approach 50, gee, I guess I may have to look forward to all of that.
Ethylene glycol is not only animal toxic, it also did a number on an evergreen tree. I have these wood timber front steps that are starting to rot, and a landscaping dude wanted 7K to replace them in stone, and I read that a mixture of ethylene glycol (anti-freeze) and boric acid makes a good wood preservative, and the steps are holding up OK but this tree really took a hit. The tree is not quite dead yet and I am hoping it still comes around.
The range and endurance of the Rocketbelt are pretty pathetic, and the only good use I have seen this thing put to is landing on the lawn outside the kitchen of some young woman and instructing her on the use of polyethelyne film to wrap food leftovers.
The Russians had the N-1 moon rocket, which they did not brag about because they blew it up 3 or 4 times and never could get it to work.
One of the beauties of "capitalism" was once the government came up with a Moon program (Apollo, Saturn, lunar-orbit rendezvous), they stuck with it and threw money at it until it happened. One of the ironies of centrally-planned "communism" is that weren't sure if they were even in a race to the Moon, and when it was decided they were in such a race, they scrapped all their earlier plans and decided to follow the plan of the "capitalists" (L-1/LK, N-1, lunar-orbit rendezvous), only their head rocket airframe guy was in some kind of snit with their head rocket engine guy, so he had to get a jet engine guy to build him a rocket engine that was so underpowered that he needed 30 of them on the first stage, and the original rocket engine guy went over to the rival rocket airframe guy who was running steady political interference to get the whole program scrapped and start over with the second rocket airframe guy and the original rocket engine guy.
While the Russian Moon program was underfunded and supposedly got a lot less money than the American one, and would have worked if their rocket didn't blow up, I wonder how may guys they had working on L-1/LK/N-1 and if it was really fewer guys than Apollo/Saturn?
And how is it that the Russians who couldn't get a successful N-1 launch were able to get (I believe) 2 successful Energia launches without any failures. And how many guys did they have working over what period of time to pull that one off? And even given the starvation wages a person makes in Russian aerospace these days, does the small-n billion dollars for a Russian Mars program make sense?
Even if they throw safety out the window, they are going to need to bring back the Energia, which I understand that exists only as an enormous doorstop right now, and the level of effort of the Energia is a minimum requirement for just getting off the ground.
You are talking about a kind of reverse cogeneration -- using the waste heat of a thermal process to produce mechanical work as a byproduct rather than use the low-temperature side of a heat engine (generates mechanical work) to run a thermal process as a byproduct.
I see two potential problems. You need to generate a lot of electrical power compared to the distilled water you seek to generate in order to get a meaningful recovery of the 1000 BTU/lb back as mechancial work. The second problem is that to get the best possible fraction of mechanical work back out of the otherwise wasted 1000 BTU/lb, you are going to have to feed a high pressure/high temperature boiler with salt water. Usually you want to feed the boiler with treated water, perhaps reverse-osmosis purified water, to avoid scale build up.
What about a multi-effect still - don't you feed that with brine and get scale build up? Anytime you are evaporating salt water you are going to get scale formation, but I imagine that at lower temperatures and pressure it is easier to control scale by frequent back flushing operations.
To get the maximum thermodynamic usage out of burning a pound of fuel, you want to burn that fuel at as high a temperature as you can and then perform a series of near-reversible thermodynamic processes on it down to your heat-rejection temperature. In a no-cogeneration system, you would burn fuel to take water to the critical point temperature and pressure and then cascade it down effects until it is a vacuum pressure and the temperature of cold ocean water, and the temperature differential across each effect would be just barely enough to get practical levels of heat transfer.
I am suggesting that it may not be practical to run effects at very high temperatures and pressures on account of the need for scale control, in which case you would run a steam power plant on a closed-loop cycle fed with distilled water and use that temperature drop to generate electricity until you are at a temperature at which it is practical to run a multi-effect still, and at that point use the remaining temperature drop in several effects to generate distilled water from brine. I am suggesting that such a cogeneration scheme would get the maximum amount of distilled water per pound of fuel as is practical and generate the maximum amount of electricity as a byproduct.
Desalination requires energy, but it is not quite as energy intensive as you think.
Boiling a pound of water at atmospheric pressure takes roughly 1000 BTU's, and there are 140,000 BTU's in a gallon of fuel oil. So a gallon of oil can boil 140 pounds of water or about 18 gallons. That is a lot of oil.
But if you boil a pound of water to remove the salt, condense it, you are throwing away all of that heat released when it condenses, almost as much as required to boil it. How can you recover that heat since you are going to boil at a slightly higher temp and condense at a lower temp and heat cannot move uphill?
One technique is multi-effect distillation. You boil and then condense at atmospheric pressure. The condensing at atmospheric pressure is hot enough to boil at some pressure below atmospheric. You condense and then use that heat to boil at an even lower pressure. You keep going until you are what ever vacuum pressure boils water at room temperature. The same 1000 BTU's to boil a pound of water is used several times to boil several pounds of water in several "effects" (stages of the still).
The other method is mechanical vapor compression. If you take the vapor from boiling and compress it in an centrifugal compressor, it can condense at a somewhat higher temperature, and you use that heat to boil the water feeding the compressor. While it seems like pulling yourself up from your bootstraps and violating a thermodynamic law, it is not that much different than a heat pump.
There is some minimum energy required to desalinate water, it is much less than 1000 BTU per pound, and if you know the osmotic pressure for that salt concentration, you take that pressure and the volume of water you want and use work = pressure times volume. That energy is not without consequence, and that is why you probably want to desalinate brackish (slightly salty -- often available from wells when pure water is not available) than going for sea water.
Also, there is some effort in approaching the thermodynamic "reversible" minimum energy of desalination. The multi-effect stills and the vapor compression still have to move large amounts of heat through heat exchangers at small temperature differentials. With reverse osmosis, you probably are pumping harder than the bare minimum to oppose the osmotic pressure so you get enough fluid through the membrane to make it worthwhile.
Multi-effect distillation is probably the way to go for big plants, vapor compression for mid-sized, and reverse osmosis is really probably only effective for small-scale stuff because the membranes are expensive and need replacement. Even with what I said, the energy needs are not trivial -- perhaps you want some kind of cogeneration where you run a multi-effect still from the waste heat stream of a gas turbine.
Why don't you ask your candidates to take an examination? It would even be take-home -- here is a simple problem, how would you code it?
I know a lot of people hate job interview exams, but those are perfectly legal, ethical, reasonable assessments of fitness for a job. But asking to see already-written code is just asking for trouble -- how do you know they even wrote it?
The point about the transistor (or the bolt, or the lock washer) is that yes, the transistor is patented. But generally, I don't make my own transistors, I buy transistors from Digi-Key. And once I buy a bunch of transistors, I can do pretty much what I want with them, and Digi-Key doesn't collect a yearly subscription fee from me for every transistor out there in a product I have sold.
Part of this is that the transistor is a physical thing, not easily made without a large investment in equipment. If I am a little guy, I just buy transistors and I am free and clear. If I am a big enough guy to make my own transistors, I pay whatever tribute money to the transistor patent holder to set up my transistor fabrication plant.
You could say that a compiler, while not a physical thing is not an easy to make thing, so if compilers were patented, I would just pay the license holder for the use of compiler just as I do now. But a linked list is not a tangible thing -- I don't buy a supply of linked lists to incorporate into customer products. A linked list simply comes into being when I order instructions in a special way.
The hardware store sells an apple picker that is a basket with prongs on the end of a stick. I suppose that device is patented -- if I want to build my own stick with a basket on the end, I suppose I could and just not tell anyone about it, or I could buy the patented gadget from the hardware store and pick without recrimination.
Suppose the patent wasn't for "basket with prongs on end of stick that proves useful for harvesting fruit" but on the "process of removing apples from high branches by using a mechanical device to make contact with the apples" and someone went around sending cease and desist orders to people picking fruit.
Or how about if someone discovered that digging holes in your lawn on a three foot grid prevented weeds. I wouldn't have any problem with someone patenting a "lawn rejuvenator device" for sale at the hardware store, but suppose I heard of this idea and started digging those holes with an ordinary shovel (which I had already paid for) and someone sent me a letter that I couldn't do that without paying a fee?
I say that there is a difference in kind between hardware and software patents and that software patents stink.
Cocoa, IMHO, has the best buzzwords -- check out Apple's Web site.
Guess you are not a John Kerry voter
on
No EZ Fix For The IRS
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I guess you are in favor for more "tax breaks for the rich" because all of those AMT's, phaseouts, double taxations, and the like are the result of Congress worrying that somewhere, someone, is hanging on to their money without spending it all.
There seems to be a big bias in our political culture against people of modest means accumulating any kind of money through control over personal spending and saving. There is a concern about wealthy people controlling all of the resources of the society by making it easy for those fortunate enough to even have a small surplus over their spending to accumulate wealth -- the kind of Huey Long concern. People at the top have access to financial advise, tax planning, and investment opportunities that one can only dream of, but people in the middle get hosed.
Exhibit A is the advice for people of modest means to put savings into the stock market. Traditionally the stock market was a high risk undertaking for the very wealthy with money to burn. In the 1920's, mass ownership of stock caught on and then people got burned in a bubble collapse. A cornerstone of Depression era economics policy was Federal savings deposit insurance -- the idea was for people of modest means to have a low earnings but secure place to save money, and it wasn't in the stock market.
Well, combine the 1970's and early 1980's inflation with regulated interest rates and taxation of savings interest and you had a negative rate of return -- your savings just kind of evaporated for being there. So first there was the money market mutual fund and then the stock market mutual funds as the answer to middle class savings.
And then there was tax sheltered savings in IRA's, only they put in a phaseout on the IRA contribution, followed with the Roth IRA, which inverted the role of principal and earnings in terms of what was taxed, only that had a steep phaseout (actually an income cap), oh, and we are allowed to have tax-sheltered savings in 401K plans, only a good part of your earnings are paying an insurance premium to some pirate, and some 401K's have proven to be scams (can you say Enron? I knew you could!).
Oh, and the answer to health insurance for the self-employed is the Medical Savings Account, which is another scam^H^H^H^H where you are allowed to save money if it is for some sanctioned purpose and is done in some restricted way.
I guess we are really afraid of giving people the liberty to save money. People who have any kind of surplus over what they earn are suspect because apparently everyone from SSI recipients to Michael Jackson are spending every penny they receive and then more on top of it. From the principal of compound interest, even modest levels of saving in a minority of people can create great disparities in wealth, hence the need for inflation, low savings interest rates, and taxation of interest earnings to keep such people in line. And apparently our economy is one big Keynsian bubble -- if people stopped living beyond their means and buying on credit apparently the whole economy would crater.
With savings there comes moral principles of self-reliance and disciplined appetites. One can save enough money for your eventual nursing home stay without having to go on Medicaid. One can have that fancy car but one has to plan ahead for it. With the war on savings, one can have one's fancy car, but one has to be on a credit treadmill, one can have that college education, but one must be a financial assistance supplicant, one can be treated in a nursing home, but one must receive Medicaid assistance. One can "save" money too, but only if for sanctioned purposes and by participating in the correct program.
I say the problem is not the taxing of earned income but all the restrictions on what one can do with that earned income that follow from this great fear of income inequality is the heart of the problem.
We like to think of people in government as building empires and all of that. But given that the tax code is not really the work of the bureaucrats but really the work of the "special interests", the people who lobby Congress for this and other consideration, do you suppose the tax code is job security for accountants?
If the tax code got simple, there would be a lot of people outside of government looking for jobs.
Cocoa seems to have some neat ideas. The whole ActiveX deal (as well as the.NET deal on Windows Forms) is the GoF Mediator pattern: control fires event, main form handles event and figures out what controls to update in response, and it is all very simple until you start developing a real program and then your main form is a rats' nest of responses to to events and figuring out what to do with them.
Cocoa on the other hand seems to be more Observer pattern based -- you can link controls directly to each other with some kind of Controller object. And it also seems that you can define objects that express the "connections" that objects can have. I have looked at the docs and tried to make sense of it, but I guess I need to try it some time to really get the concept.
On the other hand, Cocoa is based on Objective C, and I guess I am kinda of lazy about learning yet another language (is Java Cocoa as good?). Is Cocoa reference counted (like ActiveX)? Does this mean Cocoa is not keeping up with the GC'd Java and.NET Joneses? Or does Cocoa work just fine without GC the way it is?
Can you create your own Cocoa controls (easily) (as with create your own ActiveX control -- not so easy, but not as difficult as you think these days with VS ATL, Delphi, and other tools, pretty easy with.NET)? If there is such a thing as a Cocoa control that you can develop yourself, drag and drop in a form, use with a scripting language, or place in a Web browser, does it have funky data types like with ActiveX (BSTR, VARIANT, SAFEARRAY), or can you pass arrays and object references at will like your can with Java or.NET?
To use the Perl example, suppose one created a tool to create Report Style A, and then reused some of the modules to create Report Style B, and so on.
The idea of having a lot of little tools (Report A tool, Report B tool) seems attractive, but then one has the support burden of modifying all of those little tools. It seems easier to either 1) consolidate them into a general purpose report tool (the typical Swiss Army knife app) or 2) bundle the supporting modules into a library and passing off the responsibility of what kind of report tool to generate to another group of developers (the Perl approach).
The idea of developing (and maintaining) a large number of special purpose programs without migrating in direction 1) or direction 2) is well-intentioned, but it doesn't seem to last.
I like it when the dude celebrates "processing an impossible amount of data" using Excel and other Microsoft products and the two fat chicks come out and dump the whole water cooler tank of water on him.
I am with you on being skeptical of those cruise-missile-engined 3-6 passenger jet "taxis" (Eclipse Aviation and others).
On the other hand, those regional jets have been a big hit. Apparently they are heavily automated, both from the standpoint of flight and maintenance diagnostics. And while they look small, they manage to cram 40-70 people into those things -- they are carrying what the first generation DC-9's held -- when I see them flying in and out of our local airport, they look a lot like DC-9's from a distance.
On the other hand, the RJ's lack an underbelly baggage compartment -- the baggage compartment is either front or back in the main tube. The consequence of this is that before each flight, the flight attendant often asks for some "particularly heavy" passengers from the back to move to the front for CG reasons.
This is bad from a marketing standpoint all around. Rearranging passengers so the plane isn't tail heavy creates a kind of crop duster image. And asking passengers to designate themselves on the basis of weight doesn't always go over (though men don't seem to be bothered as much).
"if I vote for Nader and Bush wins, my position does not get a corresponding share in governance."
Well, that is the whole point of a 2-party structure, that if you vote for a 3rd or 4th party (Green Party, Pat Buchanan Party), your vote isn't going to count for nothin' and you might get "the other guy" elected.
What you want is the multi-party system, your Greens would get their 3 percent of House seats, which might mean the Democrats could get the House back, but they would have to form a coalition with the Greens and anytime the Greens didn't like it that Tom Daschle voted for some logging deal because a union in his home state wanted the jobs, they would be in a snit and threaten to fracture the coalition.
Under the 2-party system, everytime some member of the coalition under the tent of a major party feels a minor slight, they tend to suck it up because they consider the opposition party to be far worse.
Under your multi-party system, think of what Jim Jeffords did to the Republicans by switching to "Independent" -- yeah, your Greens would get their 3 percent, but they would be pulling a Jeffords on the Democrats all the time instead of just sticking flyers on people's front doors.
The 2-party system is not meant to afford equal representation -- it is meant to provide stable government without being too stable in the manner of a 1-party system.
Slashdot Mirror
I call BS. 100 PSI is nearly 7 atmospheres, and there is no way you are getting a pressure ratio of 7 out of a single-stage radial compressor. I could see a pressure ratio of 3, maybe, (45 PSI), but 100 PSI is blowing that much pressure out your butt.
The plain truth is that America had the Jupiters, and Russia thought they would get their own Jupiters and put them in Cuba. Americans being Americans put Jupiters in Turkey because America could, while Russians being Russians, thought they should have their own missiles in Cuba, only not only did the Russians not tell anyone about this, they denied the missiles being there until shown the recon photos, and even then they weren't too cool about that either. If they had said, "damned straight we have missiles in Cuba; you Americanskis have missiles in Turkey, if you have a problem with that we are ready to negotiate an arms control agreement" things may have worked out differently, but a lot had to do with the Russian penchant for secrecy and the American penchant not to redo Pearl Harbor.
How it had to play out was for Russia to back down in a very public way because they were secret about their missiles and for America to back down in a secret way because, lets face it, America had been public about its missiles, but there was a reciprocal deal on the Cuban missiles and the Turkish Jupiters, and that is the truth regardless of whatever anyone had told you about it.
I have two widgets on the screen that give two different "views" of the result of a mathematical calculation on a model. Each widget runs the same mathematical calculation on the model.
Refactoring by moving the mathematical calculation into the model would require adding a large amount of storage to hold the calculation result. Benchmarks indicate the saving in time for a screen refresh would be from 2 seconds down to 1.5 seconds (P-III 1.2 GHz). The screen refresh is broken down into steps so the UI is not frozen during the 2 seconds, allowing the user to interrup the refresh to do anything else.
Do I bother with this optimization.
A lot is said that the F/OSS propeller heads don't get the Zen of GUI and that their attempts at GUIdom are as rough as a corncob. But while you would expect the propeller heads to be weak in the human-factors area, you would think they would be geniuses at algorithms and at coding.
OK, lets blow off the GUI tuning because that is the realm of people who talk in buzzwords. How about making lines straight and fonts accurate? OK, so GIMP is a little rough around the edges, give it time and all of that. OK, how about the slow algorithms?
I am thinking along the line of some sports cars -- Spartan appointments, hard seats, stiff ride, but boy can that thing corner! The F/OSS alternative has a rough GUI and a few quirks, but does it does it have the performance? Well, no.
Now BeOS was not F/OSS, but it was an alternative to Windows, MacOS, and everything else and there was some hobbyist interest in it. BeOS may have had its quirks, and it kind of melted away before I ever had a chance to look into it, and there was very little in the way of applications for it, but the story is that it could perform, although at the cost of figuring out how to write multi-threaded apps.
If the reviewer could have said, "the GUI is quirky, but boy is this thing fast!", I think that would have gotten a lot of people's attention because a lot of us would put up with novelty in exchange for speed, because not having to sit around waiting for something to happen is a big UI feature. But the reviewer said it was quirky, buggy, and slow, and people are slamming the reviewer for not giving the UI a chance. So to the extent that Photoshop is more geometrically accurate and faster, yeah, it is not like Photoshop.
There is this story I heard attributed to IBM Watson that some wag has concocted a detailed list of password restrictions (no all numbers, no all characters, and so on) where the joke was that if you rigorously applied all of the rules, there was only one legal password.
Apart from his notoriety about his "Venus was ejected from Jupiter, whirled around the inner solar system, caused all of the plagues of Exodus and of other cultures with similar legends, and I predicted that Venus should be at a high temperature when no one else did" which gave Carl Sagan fits, that same Velikovsky has a theory that the Greek Dark Ages never happened.
Conventional wisdom places the Trojan War and the events of Homer's Iliad around 1200-1100 BCE, Homer at perhaps around 800 BCE, and the "reemergence" of Greek civilization (the beginnings of the Classical era) around 700 BCE. There is this 300-500 year gap in Greek history in which there is seemingly nothing going on, a big gap. There is evidence that the Greeks had writing (Linear B), they forgot how to write (Homer's narrative recounts "baleful" signs, suggesting that the oral poet was telling an account of writing without knowing about such a thing himself).
Jerry Pournelle has a section of his Web site talking about the Greek Dark Age, and the notion that there was a thriving Mycenean civilization, that civilization collapsed, the people reverted to a much more primitive condition, and it took 300-500 years to get it back in a different form is rather compelling. It makes for a good yarn, it is a cautionary, Atlantis-like tale about the resource-consumption excesses of our own tech culture (part of the speculation was that the Bronze age required tin -- that tin was mined as far as the current British isles and there was a European-wide and Mediteranean-wide system of trade which collapsed with the exhaustion of the tin and other factors), and it provides material for science fiction, science fantasy writings which is Pournelle's interest and livelyhood.
Apparently Velikovsky, whose flight of fantasy spun the yarn "Worlds in Collision" wants to rain on the parade of the people who like to spin yarns about the Greek Dark Age because he claimed it never happened. His claim is that the Egyptian chronology used to synchronize dates in Mediteranean archeology is out of kilter (bragging about the lengths of dynasties stretches some of the dates out) and that the collapse of Mycenae was perhaps in 900 BCE, Homer in 800 BCE, settlement of Sparta in 700 BCE, and there is no big gap where Greeks reverted to grunts and animal skins.
GC has the problem of non-deterministic finalization -- with reference counting, every time you give up a lock on an object (decrement the reference count), you check to see if the reference went to zero so not only can you release the object, you can invoke the object destructor to close file handles and stuff like that.
You must be doing the same drugs as that Atriedes fellow. Since the drugs give you visions, you can see stuff whether or not your eyes have been burnt down to eye sockets.
The other kind of sun filter fits over your eyepiece or inside your eyepiece. I once had a 2.4 inch refracting telescope that came with this piece of welder's glass that fit over the eyepiece. I never used it because I was warned not to.
The advantage of the objective sun filter (the ones I have seen advertised are aluminized mylar) is that 1) it blocks out intense sunlight before it even gets to your telescope, and 2) it is exposed to no more than normal sun intensity because it hasn't been concentrated by the telescope.
The wee bit of welder's glass at the telescope eyepiece is unsafe because it is getting the full focus of sunlight from the telescope and the thing and crack from the heat and then your eyeball is in peril.
The other safe method is projection through the telescope on to a piece of paper. Safe for one's eyes -- I ruined my beginner's refractor doing that because the heat cooked a cheap plastic element in the one eyepiece it came with.
Ethylene glycol is not only animal toxic, it also did a number on an evergreen tree. I have these wood timber front steps that are starting to rot, and a landscaping dude wanted 7K to replace them in stone, and I read that a mixture of ethylene glycol (anti-freeze) and boric acid makes a good wood preservative, and the steps are holding up OK but this tree really took a hit. The tree is not quite dead yet and I am hoping it still comes around.
The range and endurance of the Rocketbelt are pretty pathetic, and the only good use I have seen this thing put to is landing on the lawn outside the kitchen of some young woman and instructing her on the use of polyethelyne film to wrap food leftovers.
The Russians had the N-1 moon rocket, which they did not brag about because they blew it up 3 or 4 times and never could get it to work.
One of the beauties of "capitalism" was once the government came up with a Moon program (Apollo, Saturn, lunar-orbit rendezvous), they stuck with it and threw money at it until it happened. One of the ironies of centrally-planned "communism" is that weren't sure if they were even in a race to the Moon, and when it was decided they were in such a race, they scrapped all their earlier plans and decided to follow the plan of the "capitalists" (L-1/LK, N-1, lunar-orbit rendezvous), only their head rocket airframe guy was in some kind of snit with their head rocket engine guy, so he had to get a jet engine guy to build him a rocket engine that was so underpowered that he needed 30 of them on the first stage, and the original rocket engine guy went over to the rival rocket airframe guy who was running steady political interference to get the whole program scrapped and start over with the second rocket airframe guy and the original rocket engine guy.
While the Russian Moon program was underfunded and supposedly got a lot less money than the American one, and would have worked if their rocket didn't blow up, I wonder how may guys they had working on L-1/LK/N-1 and if it was really fewer guys than Apollo/Saturn?
And how is it that the Russians who couldn't get a successful N-1 launch were able to get (I believe) 2 successful Energia launches without any failures. And how many guys did they have working over what period of time to pull that one off? And even given the starvation wages a person makes in Russian aerospace these days, does the small-n billion dollars for a Russian Mars program make sense?
Even if they throw safety out the window, they are going to need to bring back the Energia, which I understand that exists only as an enormous doorstop right now, and the level of effort of the Energia is a minimum requirement for just getting off the ground.
I see two potential problems. You need to generate a lot of electrical power compared to the distilled water you seek to generate in order to get a meaningful recovery of the 1000 BTU/lb back as mechancial work. The second problem is that to get the best possible fraction of mechanical work back out of the otherwise wasted 1000 BTU/lb, you are going to have to feed a high pressure/high temperature boiler with salt water. Usually you want to feed the boiler with treated water, perhaps reverse-osmosis purified water, to avoid scale build up.
What about a multi-effect still - don't you feed that with brine and get scale build up? Anytime you are evaporating salt water you are going to get scale formation, but I imagine that at lower temperatures and pressure it is easier to control scale by frequent back flushing operations.
To get the maximum thermodynamic usage out of burning a pound of fuel, you want to burn that fuel at as high a temperature as you can and then perform a series of near-reversible thermodynamic processes on it down to your heat-rejection temperature. In a no-cogeneration system, you would burn fuel to take water to the critical point temperature and pressure and then cascade it down effects until it is a vacuum pressure and the temperature of cold ocean water, and the temperature differential across each effect would be just barely enough to get practical levels of heat transfer.
I am suggesting that it may not be practical to run effects at very high temperatures and pressures on account of the need for scale control, in which case you would run a steam power plant on a closed-loop cycle fed with distilled water and use that temperature drop to generate electricity until you are at a temperature at which it is practical to run a multi-effect still, and at that point use the remaining temperature drop in several effects to generate distilled water from brine. I am suggesting that such a cogeneration scheme would get the maximum amount of distilled water per pound of fuel as is practical and generate the maximum amount of electricity as a byproduct.
Boiling a pound of water at atmospheric pressure takes roughly 1000 BTU's, and there are 140,000 BTU's in a gallon of fuel oil. So a gallon of oil can boil 140 pounds of water or about 18 gallons. That is a lot of oil.
But if you boil a pound of water to remove the salt, condense it, you are throwing away all of that heat released when it condenses, almost as much as required to boil it. How can you recover that heat since you are going to boil at a slightly higher temp and condense at a lower temp and heat cannot move uphill?
One technique is multi-effect distillation. You boil and then condense at atmospheric pressure. The condensing at atmospheric pressure is hot enough to boil at some pressure below atmospheric. You condense and then use that heat to boil at an even lower pressure. You keep going until you are what ever vacuum pressure boils water at room temperature. The same 1000 BTU's to boil a pound of water is used several times to boil several pounds of water in several "effects" (stages of the still).
The other method is mechanical vapor compression. If you take the vapor from boiling and compress it in an centrifugal compressor, it can condense at a somewhat higher temperature, and you use that heat to boil the water feeding the compressor. While it seems like pulling yourself up from your bootstraps and violating a thermodynamic law, it is not that much different than a heat pump.
There is some minimum energy required to desalinate water, it is much less than 1000 BTU per pound, and if you know the osmotic pressure for that salt concentration, you take that pressure and the volume of water you want and use work = pressure times volume. That energy is not without consequence, and that is why you probably want to desalinate brackish (slightly salty -- often available from wells when pure water is not available) than going for sea water.
Also, there is some effort in approaching the thermodynamic "reversible" minimum energy of desalination. The multi-effect stills and the vapor compression still have to move large amounts of heat through heat exchangers at small temperature differentials. With reverse osmosis, you probably are pumping harder than the bare minimum to oppose the osmotic pressure so you get enough fluid through the membrane to make it worthwhile.
Multi-effect distillation is probably the way to go for big plants, vapor compression for mid-sized, and reverse osmosis is really probably only effective for small-scale stuff because the membranes are expensive and need replacement. Even with what I said, the energy needs are not trivial -- perhaps you want some kind of cogeneration where you run a multi-effect still from the waste heat stream of a gas turbine.
I know a lot of people hate job interview exams, but those are perfectly legal, ethical, reasonable assessments of fitness for a job. But asking to see already-written code is just asking for trouble -- how do you know they even wrote it?
Part of this is that the transistor is a physical thing, not easily made without a large investment in equipment. If I am a little guy, I just buy transistors and I am free and clear. If I am a big enough guy to make my own transistors, I pay whatever tribute money to the transistor patent holder to set up my transistor fabrication plant.
You could say that a compiler, while not a physical thing is not an easy to make thing, so if compilers were patented, I would just pay the license holder for the use of compiler just as I do now. But a linked list is not a tangible thing -- I don't buy a supply of linked lists to incorporate into customer products. A linked list simply comes into being when I order instructions in a special way.
The hardware store sells an apple picker that is a basket with prongs on the end of a stick. I suppose that device is patented -- if I want to build my own stick with a basket on the end, I suppose I could and just not tell anyone about it, or I could buy the patented gadget from the hardware store and pick without recrimination.
Suppose the patent wasn't for "basket with prongs on end of stick that proves useful for harvesting fruit" but on the "process of removing apples from high branches by using a mechanical device to make contact with the apples" and someone went around sending cease and desist orders to people picking fruit.
Or how about if someone discovered that digging holes in your lawn on a three foot grid prevented weeds. I wouldn't have any problem with someone patenting a "lawn rejuvenator device" for sale at the hardware store, but suppose I heard of this idea and started digging those holes with an ordinary shovel (which I had already paid for) and someone sent me a letter that I couldn't do that without paying a fee?
I say that there is a difference in kind between hardware and software patents and that software patents stink.
Cocoa, IMHO, has the best buzzwords -- check out Apple's Web site.
There seems to be a big bias in our political culture against people of modest means accumulating any kind of money through control over personal spending and saving. There is a concern about wealthy people controlling all of the resources of the society by making it easy for those fortunate enough to even have a small surplus over their spending to accumulate wealth -- the kind of Huey Long concern. People at the top have access to financial advise, tax planning, and investment opportunities that one can only dream of, but people in the middle get hosed.
Exhibit A is the advice for people of modest means to put savings into the stock market. Traditionally the stock market was a high risk undertaking for the very wealthy with money to burn. In the 1920's, mass ownership of stock caught on and then people got burned in a bubble collapse. A cornerstone of Depression era economics policy was Federal savings deposit insurance -- the idea was for people of modest means to have a low earnings but secure place to save money, and it wasn't in the stock market.
Well, combine the 1970's and early 1980's inflation with regulated interest rates and taxation of savings interest and you had a negative rate of return -- your savings just kind of evaporated for being there. So first there was the money market mutual fund and then the stock market mutual funds as the answer to middle class savings.
And then there was tax sheltered savings in IRA's, only they put in a phaseout on the IRA contribution, followed with the Roth IRA, which inverted the role of principal and earnings in terms of what was taxed, only that had a steep phaseout (actually an income cap), oh, and we are allowed to have tax-sheltered savings in 401K plans, only a good part of your earnings are paying an insurance premium to some pirate, and some 401K's have proven to be scams (can you say Enron? I knew you could!).
Oh, and the answer to health insurance for the self-employed is the Medical Savings Account, which is another scam^H^H^H^H where you are allowed to save money if it is for some sanctioned purpose and is done in some restricted way.
I guess we are really afraid of giving people the liberty to save money. People who have any kind of surplus over what they earn are suspect because apparently everyone from SSI recipients to Michael Jackson are spending every penny they receive and then more on top of it. From the principal of compound interest, even modest levels of saving in a minority of people can create great disparities in wealth, hence the need for inflation, low savings interest rates, and taxation of interest earnings to keep such people in line. And apparently our economy is one big Keynsian bubble -- if people stopped living beyond their means and buying on credit apparently the whole economy would crater.
With savings there comes moral principles of self-reliance and disciplined appetites. One can save enough money for your eventual nursing home stay without having to go on Medicaid. One can have that fancy car but one has to plan ahead for it. With the war on savings, one can have one's fancy car, but one has to be on a credit treadmill, one can have that college education, but one must be a financial assistance supplicant, one can be treated in a nursing home, but one must receive Medicaid assistance. One can "save" money too, but only if for sanctioned purposes and by participating in the correct program.
I say the problem is not the taxing of earned income but all the restrictions on what one can do with that earned income that follow from this great fear of income inequality is the heart of the problem.
If the tax code got simple, there would be a lot of people outside of government looking for jobs.
Cocoa on the other hand seems to be more Observer pattern based -- you can link controls directly to each other with some kind of Controller object. And it also seems that you can define objects that express the "connections" that objects can have. I have looked at the docs and tried to make sense of it, but I guess I need to try it some time to really get the concept.
On the other hand, Cocoa is based on Objective C, and I guess I am kinda of lazy about learning yet another language (is Java Cocoa as good?). Is Cocoa reference counted (like ActiveX)? Does this mean Cocoa is not keeping up with the GC'd Java and .NET Joneses? Or does Cocoa work just fine without GC the way it is?
Can you create your own Cocoa controls (easily) (as with create your own ActiveX control -- not so easy, but not as difficult as you think these days with VS ATL, Delphi, and other tools, pretty easy with .NET)? If there is such a thing as a Cocoa control that you can develop yourself, drag and drop in a form, use with a scripting language, or place in a Web browser, does it have funky data types like with ActiveX (BSTR, VARIANT, SAFEARRAY), or can you pass arrays and object references at will like your can with Java or .NET?
Um, you need to train people to do this? From a lot of code I have read, this seems to come naturally.
The idea of having a lot of little tools (Report A tool, Report B tool) seems attractive, but then one has the support burden of modifying all of those little tools. It seems easier to either 1) consolidate them into a general purpose report tool (the typical Swiss Army knife app) or 2) bundle the supporting modules into a library and passing off the responsibility of what kind of report tool to generate to another group of developers (the Perl approach).
The idea of developing (and maintaining) a large number of special purpose programs without migrating in direction 1) or direction 2) is well-intentioned, but it doesn't seem to last.
I like it when the dude celebrates "processing an impossible amount of data" using Excel and other Microsoft products and the two fat chicks come out and dump the whole water cooler tank of water on him.
On the other hand, those regional jets have been a big hit. Apparently they are heavily automated, both from the standpoint of flight and maintenance diagnostics. And while they look small, they manage to cram 40-70 people into those things -- they are carrying what the first generation DC-9's held -- when I see them flying in and out of our local airport, they look a lot like DC-9's from a distance.
On the other hand, the RJ's lack an underbelly baggage compartment -- the baggage compartment is either front or back in the main tube. The consequence of this is that before each flight, the flight attendant often asks for some "particularly heavy" passengers from the back to move to the front for CG reasons.
This is bad from a marketing standpoint all around. Rearranging passengers so the plane isn't tail heavy creates a kind of crop duster image. And asking passengers to designate themselves on the basis of weight doesn't always go over (though men don't seem to be bothered as much).
Well, that is the whole point of a 2-party structure, that if you vote for a 3rd or 4th party (Green Party, Pat Buchanan Party), your vote isn't going to count for nothin' and you might get "the other guy" elected.
What you want is the multi-party system, your Greens would get their 3 percent of House seats, which might mean the Democrats could get the House back, but they would have to form a coalition with the Greens and anytime the Greens didn't like it that Tom Daschle voted for some logging deal because a union in his home state wanted the jobs, they would be in a snit and threaten to fracture the coalition.
Under the 2-party system, everytime some member of the coalition under the tent of a major party feels a minor slight, they tend to suck it up because they consider the opposition party to be far worse.
Under your multi-party system, think of what Jim Jeffords did to the Republicans by switching to "Independent" -- yeah, your Greens would get their 3 percent, but they would be pulling a Jeffords on the Democrats all the time instead of just sticking flyers on people's front doors.
The 2-party system is not meant to afford equal representation -- it is meant to provide stable government without being too stable in the manner of a 1-party system.