If you had a super-duper composite material to build a space elevator, don't you think getting the mass fraction for a single stage to orbit spacecraft would be a piece of cake?
Graphite composite was supposed to be the revolution in mass fraction that was going to make the X-33/Venture Star workable, and the only thing came down like a house of cards when the composite cryo fuel tank was not all it was cracked up to be.
James Harford's "Korolev" talks about how Korolev held out for a kerosene-LOX (cryogenic usually means LH2, but LOX is cryogenic enough) ICBM while everyone else wanted to go with the storable UDMH-N2O4 fueled rocket, which Korolev disliked for the very corrosive and toxic chemicals, and which resulted in a horrific accident in which Nedelin, the military guy in charge of ICBM's and many workers died.
Anyway, how do you keep a kerosene-LOX rocket on the pad on any kind of alert status (i.e. able to launch in some time less than several days of prep)? The idea was to keep it plugged in to a supply of LOX so as LOX boils off, you pump in more. In a test, they had a leak on a LOX feed line to the rocket, so one of the technicians, like, whipped it out and took aim at the leak -- that froze over and plugged the leak. I work with a fellow whose favorite expression is "running around peeing on all of those problems" and here is where someone did it for real.
When I was young, weeee didn't have any fancy BIOS ROMs which allowed you to start a computer by throwing a switch! Weee had to enter boot loader codes in binary by hand until our fingers bled, and we liked it!
Booting does mean "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". You had to enter a short (perhaps 10-line) program by entering binary codes (grouped by 3's into octal) into the switches on the front panel. That program was able to load a program from a Teletype paper tape reader, which itself was a more capable loader that read something in from more paper tape or perhaps a magnetic tape unit if you were fancy.
I think of VB as a scripting language for ActiveX controls -- it is not so much VB as the software components that you can use VB to hook up. An ActiveX control can be written in C++, Delphi, and even VB itself, and it has full access to the Windows API so it can do near anything -- none of this lowest-common denominator across multiple GUI's thing. ActiveX controls are usable in everything from Visual Basic to Delphi to Matlab to IE to all the.NET languages to even SWT (Windows only). Your VEP won't hook up ActiveX controls let alone SWT controls -- it is currently restricted to Swing.
Yeah, you can have Swing controls and JBuilder has been doing the Delphi-like thing with them. While Swing is cross platform and one language (and Delphi VCL is one platform and perhaps two languages: Delphi Pascal and C++ Builder, and perhaps another platform depending on your thoughts on the success of Kylix), ActiveX is one platform but a whole bunch of languages, more so than the.NET world of many skins on the one CLR language. There are big advantages to cross language -- call me a relic, call me what you will, but I like that old-fashioned Object Pascal as a development language, but none of my customers want anything to do with it.
So what is to prevent a VB dude from switching to Eclipse and VEP (besides having suffered neurological damage learning Visual Basic)? That mass collection of 3rd party ActiveX controls that do all kinds of not only cool but essential application-specific stuff for numerous niche requirements. ActiveX may be crufty and a bear to develop for with its IDispatch and variants and BSTR's and all kinds of restrictions on data types depending on your target, but it is the success story of components as a means to reusable software. Java might have the killer library for everything else, but ActiveX is the killer software pool for the GUI.
If you want to see a self-replicating factory-like thing, we have a lot of them here in Wisconsin: cows. A cow will eat grass and produce milk, and it will (with the proper mating) produce a calf which will grow up to eat more grass and produce more milk.
I mean what could be simpler, and what could produce more wealth than owning livestock, only the things need shots from the vet so they don't die from disease, and the calving process can get kind of hairy, and these things produce piles of poop which needs to be shoveled off to some place, and you kind of get the picture. And then everyone's neighbor has a stable of these things so milk gets cheap and it is really hard to make a living at it, but I guess milk is cheap and abundant to consumers.
What I want to know is that when we get self-replicating machines, how will they differ from livestock, especially with regard to the waste-management and keeping them free of disease ends?
Star Trek 4 had Kirk trying to get Spock to blend in with late 20th century San Francisco, and while Kirk made Spock wear a cap to cover his ears, Spock was still french-fried brains from his experience of being reborn and having to relearn everything in Star Treks 2 and 3. When bus passengers started staring at Spock, Kirk responded, "oh, he just took too much LDS."
The one-liner had a number of comic levels. One is the idea that a character like Spock would even stand out in late 20th century San Francisco. A second is a supposed 23rd century malapropism of conflating LSD (a drug) with LDS (a religious denomination). The third is that if anyone would stand out in San Francisco it would be someone who is very visibly Mormon.
It would be too bad if every ride went virtual reality. My favorite Disneyland experience was not on a ride but watching a ride. In Frontierland they had this kind of log flume ride. It was a water course, and the patrons rode in these "cutout logs." While the water kind of flushed the ride logs along just like with real lumber rafts, and I guess a chain hooked the logs to take them up high so the logs could cascade down a flume as a kind of thrill part of the ride, the patrons actually had paddles and provided some of the motive power of the ride, and there was a Disneyland employee guide sitting in the back working a rudder.
Anyway, one of the logs had an entire crew of young men, who looked quite muscular under their t-shirts, and they had military-style haircuts (I don't know enough military to tell Marine from SEAL from other units, but these guys looked quite trained well beyond Basic and they had some kind of military haircut). Anyway, these guys took the paddles and got a rhythm going, and not only did they get their log throwing a wake, the Disneyland "guide" was in the back with this expression of sheer terror and hanging on to the rudder for dear life. That alone was worth the price of the park admission.
On the topic as to whether the solar plane is science or a stunt, some dude had a book on junk science where he included cold fusion and Biosphere 2 as junk science.
Now I am not trying to troll here as some of you may point to evidence for cold fusion. But Fleischmann and Pons certainly didn't help their cause by being sloppy with experimental control and calorimetry, so the way it played out it is fair to lable what happened as junk science.
I was suprised to see Biosphere 2 labled as junk science. Now there were junk science aspects to it in that the leader was said to be a kind of cult leader type, and if the goal was to have a self-sustained ecosystem, they should have worked their way using pilot models where they through animals in with some plants. They just threw the thing together, sealed themselves in, and when it didn't work, they didn't call the experiment off right away to retune, recalibrate, and try again.
But I am not sure if I would call building a Biosphere 2 and attempting to live in it junk science on the face of it -- the junk science dude thought it a development project at best and not real science. The junk science dude admitted that there was a scientific question regarding what it took to have a self-sustaining biosphere, and so far a self-sustaining biosphere has never been set up in a lab while such a think occurs on the surface of our planet. It is an important question: what kind of anthropomorphic or natural stresses on Earth's biosphere could wreck it, could you build a microcosm biosphere for long duration space travel, could you build one on a space colony, could you terraform Mars or Venus? How big does a biosphere have to be to work?
I guess the criticism was that it was junk science to just stick a bunch of plants, people, animals, and soils in a sealed greenhouse and hope for the best. I don't think it was junk science to build a Biosphere 2 as a proof of concept if you knew what you were doing.
So a solar round-the world plane may be just development engineering, but it may lead to solar aerial platforms, but MacReady is already doing robotic long-duration solar plains. Maybe a human payload is proof of concept of large payload capability, or maybe the Piccard guy needs something to do.
Check out this dude here and try and tell me the two aren't related.
Auguste Piccard was a Swiss while J-L Picard is a Scot actor playing a French dude. I am certain the Star Trek NG writers had in the back of their mind that A. Piccard was a famous explorer, and they wanted their J-L Picard to be more the Swiss Explorer than the Captain Cook-like J.T. Kirk. If they knew about A. Piccard, they may have changed the name and nationality to make it simpler for TV viewers.
Cook definitely was the inspiration for Kirk, both as an explorer and as a shoot-from-the-hip military man, while I think that J-L Picard was meant to be more science and less militarism. Remember, STNG was kind of like a Total Quality Management, Fan Focus Group, New and Improved Star Trek, and one of the criticisms of Star Trek was putting the captain in harms way all the time. Captain Cook put himself in harms way and was killed in a skirmish in Hawaii, but some dweeb critics thought the captain of the Enterprise was too important to get into hand-to-hand combat with aliens every other episode, so Picard was supposed to be kept safe by Worf, and Riker was supposed to tangle with the aliens and get beat up. But as episodes went on, we learned from Q that Picard had an artificial heart because he was more hot-headed than he let on, and by the time he has turned into Locutus, he was fighting aliens and proved to be a scrappier fighter than Kirk (or the time he single-handedly thwarted a hijacking of the Enterprise by terrorists when the crew was gone on leave in a thin ripoff of Stephen Segal's "Under Siege" -- while Navy Seal Segal was "only a cook" because he was busted in rank, Captain Picard was "only the barber" because I suppose with his shaved head that was real funny).
I never quite mastered the hyphen rule, but I think the hypens join together a compound adjective, for example, half-assed. The reason half-assed is hypenated is that if I am making a half-assed argument, I am not making a half argument or an assed argument: the adjective only has meaning as an adjective (modifier or describer of a noun) if it is presented as the whole half-assed.
Now the work cluster f*ck is not hyphenated because it is a compound noun: while f*ck is normally a verb, it is used here as a noun.
I thought someone (Spy?, National Lampoon) had a "realistic" Star Trek where Kirk was retiring to his wardroom for periods of months or years and telling Sulu to notify him when they got to anywhere.
One of my big disappointments with the name "Trek" was my initial belief that it would be a trek, that the ship would require long times to reach interesting destinations after the fashion of old West wagon trains, but with the warp drive zooming around to encounter aliens at every corner was kind of a cheat.
Oh, and the episode with the Romulan cloaked ship that was destroying Federation outposts was a direct ripoff of a WW-II film about a German U-boat and an American destroyer in a deadly cat-and-mouse game, and it had pretty much the same dialog about the U-boat captain admiring his destroyer captain enemy about his intuition as to where to lay down depth charges.
Apple OS X offers a compatiblity layer, yes, but 1) OS X is not a managed-code system, and 2) the managed-code offering of Java I hear is actually pretty well integrated into Cocoa, the preferred framework for OS X development. To the extent that Apple wants to do managed code, their offering is Java.
1) I thought the idea of running managed code (Java) as a layer on top of managed code (.NET) had some humor potential. 2) Can you JNI into someone else's managed code? I thought you could only JNI to native, but what happens when native disappears? This may create a situation like where Microsoft tuned Windows 3.x to run on top of MS-DOS but burp when presented with DR-DOS.
SWT is an interesting approach to portability -- use the native stuff as much as you can, but keep the interface to the natives uncluttered and do the wrapping on the Java side.
What happens when the Windows natives all switch to managed code? Can Java JNI into.NET? Will you have to implement the JVM on top of.NET? Or will there always be an unmanaged layer in Windows?
I am not so much worried about the performance hit as the philosophical implications of running SWT or a Java JVM for all that matters on top of.NET -- running a byte-code object environment on top of another byte-code object environment may give comedian Stephen Wright more material. Or it may be a lot simpler than I think because you would reuse a lot of the underlying facilities in some way.
Unstarts and things that go bump in the night
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Son of Concorde
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· Score: 4, Informative
One characteristic of the SR-71 is the susceptability to an "unstart." The SR-71 has those movable inlet spikes to control the shock wave (the inlet shock wave not only slows the air to where the compressor can handle it, it also compresses the air, and the faster the SR-71 goes, the higher the compression ratio and more engine power, a bit like a turbojet-assisted ramjet). Of course airflow is one of those fractal-chaotic physical phenomena, and if the shock front burped, you had major loss of power on one side of the plane that slammed the pilot's head against the canopy (hence the use of crash helmets). They developed a computer control system for the inlet spikes, but I heard it wasn't perfect.
While the XB-70 Valkyrie was not quite as fast as the SR-71, it was nearly as fast (Ben Rich in "Skunk Works" tries to tell us it was only Mach 2.5, but that was only for the number 1 XB-70 because when they took it up to Mach 3, parts melted off (the brazing on the honeycomb steel panels came apart) and got ingested in the engines). They fixed that problem on the number 2 XB-70, but they crumped the number 2 XB-70 in a fatal rear-end collision doing a photo op with a bunch of "chase planes", and the XB-70 parked inside the Dayton, Ohio Air Force museum is the Mach 2.5-capable number 1 plane.
Anyway, the XB-70 also experienced the unstart problem. The XB-70 was used for aero research for the SST, and the honkin' sonic booms from the XB-70 were part of what helped discourage the SST. It was also noted that unstarts were pretty scary and would need to be remedied for the SST.
Concord/Concorde has movable inlet ramps for the shock waves -- I wonder if it ever experienced unstarts?
Also, the XB-70 was supposed to use "compression lift" -- they stuffed the six engines in this big, wide pod under the delta wing to get lift from the shock wave. This was supposed to make it much more aerodynamically efficient than the typical supersonic aircraft, allowing it to have intercontinental supersonic cruise range. I also heard that the compression lift didn't quite work up to the expectations of the wind tunnel model tests.
Is anyone considering whether compression lift (apparently there is better fluid modeling software) can result in a more fuel-efficient/longer-range SST?
It is interesting that you mention the 50's-vintage swing-pop at the time of the rock-n-roll revolution.
Is it safe to say that Lawrence Welk was also a 60's phenomenon? I have a mom in a nursing home, and the PBS showing of Lawrence Welk reruns is the Saturday evening "activity" at that and many other nursing homes. One of my hidden pleasures is actually Lawrence Welk because they did a lot of cool swing-pop.
Heck, what made Lawrence Welk, well Lawrence Welk, was that he was doing swing-pop long after it was gone, he was doing swing-pop during the great swing-pop desert of the 60's and 70's until swing made a comeback in the 80's with the retro-revival of ballroom dance. Lawrence Welk appealed to an audience that had no stake in rock-and-roll (old fogeys, families of recent European immigrants)and it was a 60's phenom because in the 40's it would have not had its counter-revolutionary retro-before-retro-was-cool appeal.
Unless I get creamed by an SUV or drop dead from a cardiac infarct, I guess some day I will spend some time as an inmate^H^H^H^H^Hresident of a nursing home, and I cringe thinking about what music will get played when I am too impaired to work the channel selection controls. It will be a special kind of Hell not to be able to move and to have to listen to, say, 90's vintage pop or country.
Of the Navy rigid airships (helium-filled), I believe only the Los Angeles "died in bed" (a German Zeppelin company product -- could have been WW-I reparation payment).
Not sure they were ripped apart instead of running out of lift. If you are in convective weather (updrafts and downdrafts), you fight the downdraft by dropping ballast, fight the updraft by venting gas, and at some point you run out of ballast and gas.
In fact burning fuel to run the engines requires you to vent gas -- something that is expensive if you are using helium. Late model airships had condensors on the engine exhausts so you could take on ballast water to balance to lost weight of burnt fuel -- don't know if they had some way of saving helium by recompressing it or liquifying it.
Convective weather is a problem for fixed-wing aircraft too. Thunderstorms can have downdrafts in excess of 2000 ft/min -- I believe a passenger jet can climb at 2000 ft/min under optimum conditions so it can barely hang on -- airliners put a lot of effort into thunderstorm avoidance, listening to the ATC channel on the entertainment system we (and everyone else) were taking a detour the width of Ohio to stay out of thunderstorms.
The only thing this will prove is whether or not Kasparov is in the top ranks of computer programmers.
A lot of people are trying to make of this a kind of John Henry against the steam drill contest. Here is my take on it.
Some while ago someone told me that computer programmers "break things", and I never quite understood what they meant. Some while later, a "competitor" was demoing a Windows version of a type of program for which I had put a great deal of effort into a DOS version. The program had a lot of graphical and interactive displays of scientific plots and other data, and I knew enough about Windows and all the stuff you had to do (WM_SIZE, WM_PAINT) to make it look right, and I suspected my acquaintence was "first to market" by taking a lot of short cuts on his UI. He let all the scientists in the room play with his program, but he was very reluctant to let me near the thing -- because the first thing I was going to do was try and break it to find out how much work he had yet to do.
The only way Kasparov is going to beat that chess program is if he uncovers some limitation or shortcoming -- in other words to break it, and once broken I bet he could beat the thing at will. Last time around the cheat was a team of programmers hanging around trying to patch the program as soon as Kasparov latched on to such a weakness.
The chess program will have reached true AI (in a limited problem set) once Kasparov is able to find a weakness, beat if for several games straight and for the program to somehow learn from what is going on and "close the hole", and if the program can withstand other such attacks from other chess grand masters and likewise "close the hole" without going unstable (one of the problems with learning algorithms is that can overadapt and go into limit cycles). That would have far reaching implications in terms of computer security, spam prevention, 24-7 uptime, and automated bug correction -- a program capable of fixing itself would be an advance indeed.
Back in olden times, a VGA display was just a frame buffer, and if you selected one of the 256-color modes, that frame buffers was simply an array of bytes that you wrote to your heart's content. In the days of DOS and VGA and 2-D games, that was the way to go.
These new-fangled object-oriented GUI's have to abstract the heck out of everything and I guess a frame buffer is considered way too low level. In wxWindows the abstractions are wxWindow (the window thingy), wxDC (abstraction of the drawing surface but pointedly not a frame buffer -- you are only allowed to perform highly-abstract graphics ops like draw geometric shapes, text characters, and blt bitmaps, themselves not frame buffers but abstractions), wxBitmap (highly abstracted bitmap), and wxImage (yet another abstraction, but can be created from a frame buffer). Then there are all these rules -- you can blit wxBitmap to wxDC, and you can create a wxImage from image data and then create a wxBitmap from the wxImage to blit to the wxDC.
Ok, ok, pretty much every GUI framework from Swing to SWT to Borland VCL to wxWindows pretty much has this four-layer system. Windows has it as well (HWND, DC, HBITMAP, and DIBITMAP), but ol' Billy-boy wanted to get all of DOS VGA frame buffer hackers to come over to Windows, so he put in two systems: 1) the StretchDIBits() and CreateDIBSection() calls that in effect allow you to create frame buffers that you can hack as you want, and then you can blit them whole or piecemeal to the screen 2) DirectDraw. I prefer the first approach because it works for non-full screen mode.
Everything apart from Windows (wxWindows included) appears to require you to create a new bitmap from a new image every time you want to change something and to require you to blit the thing wholesale to the screen. While the CreateDIBSection() thingy is complicated, once you have it set up, you can poke at a frame buffer and selectively blit portions of that frame buffer to the screen -- you know, the 2-D game programmer "dirty rectangles" algorithm. Delphi introduced the ScanLine property late in the game (i.e. after I had already hacked down to the Windows API -- was it Delphi 4 before it was finally introduced) that uses CreateDIBSection() behind the scenes. Kylix also supports ScanLine, but because QT doesn't have CreateDIBSection(), there these restrictions imposed on how you have to recreate the frame buffer every time you poke at it.
I guess game programming has all gone 3-D and they worry about "triangles" or some such thing. I am not a game developer -- I am a developer of 2-D scientific visualization software that functions much like the old 2-D games.
Why is being able to set up a frame buffer, poke at portions of that frame buffer, and selectively blit modified parts of that frame buffer to a window object considered such an obscure feature in all these systems? I am really locked into Windows -- help!
Pascal was Wirth's heresy from the bloat and complexity of Algol 60 and later Algol 68, and I am sure it was designed with writing a one-pass compiler in mind (const came before type came before function and procedure came before the main program begin-end that used all of the above). It is interesting that Delphi with all of its object-extension bloat is able to maintain that amazing compile speed.
You know, Pascal and its brethren preceded C on the PC, and when C came to the PC it was an ugly thing to combine with segment registers (C-style pointer arithmetic assumes a flat memory model while Pascal didn't allow a lot of monkey business with pointers so the segment-register memory model didn't matter). Hey guys, it was MICROSOFT which pushed C on the PC and into the mind share it got (remember all that Hungarian notation of the MS Windows API's -- Windows was a C-thing).
Pascal was kind of a limited thing (no separately-compile modules and big global namespace) with a clunky syntax (if condition then begin . . . end else begin end vs if condition then . . . else . . . endif was hotly debated in the early 1980's). Wirth went off and did his Modula thingy (remember Modula?) while the US DOD went in the direction of Ada, and I am sure there were many now forgotten improved Pascals in those days.
Turbo Pascal was actually not Pascal but a Pascal follow-on because it really was not very adhering to whatever Pascal standard was extant. True Pascal files are really pointers and file operations are supposed to operate on those pointers -- very similar to the Gang of Four Cursor Pattern and never implemented in Turbo Pascal. Turbo Pascal retained the clumsy begin-end structure (how are you supposed to format and indent that anyway without having a waterfall of indents?) and the case-insensitive syntax (case-sensitive languages from C to Modula to Java area a pox on the land: MyClass myClass = new MyClass(); my foot!). Turbo Pascal also retained the compile speed that everyone else lost (Ada anyone?) and was a good balance between rigid type checking and allowing type casts to cheat (Modula anyone?). Even Wirth conceded that Turbo Pascal became the real-world Pascal instead of the various Pascal standards that were never implemented.
I heard Oberon was a work of art, an even leaner Pascal than Pascal that eschewed the object oriented revolution by promoting a more capable "with" statement together with the use of "case" statements to make polymorphic cases explicit in the code instead of being wrapped up in the layers of OO virtual function overrides. Then I heard of Oberon 2, which added objects, which meant Wirth caved. Oberon 2 morphed into Component Pascal, for which there is a Swiss version and an Australian.NET version, but with the case-sensitive syntax with the keywords in all caps giving these but-ugly source listings together with Wirth's gonzo versions of Object Pascal keywords and even more gonzo design patterns (the thing is such a theoretically pure answer to Delphi that I can't make head or tails of it, but I gave a SUN dude a fright telling him that there was this other thing that purported to do what Java does out there).
I love my Delphi; it is my Golden Hammer and I have so much experience with it that the legacy Pascal begin-end syntax just rolls off my typing fingers, and it compiles much much faster than C# (the SUN dude was annoyed that I pointed out that Delphi compiled much faster than anything on the planet -- he seemed to think an IBM Java was fast too).
The trouble is that I can't get my engineering students to use it -- distributing source code on the Web in Object Pascal is as good as any copy protection. They grudgingly use Java/C++ because "it can get them a job" but their first love is that VB of the numeric-computing world called Matlab. C# is really Object Pascal with C-style syntax, so that is perhaps a middle ground where I can meet my students. Java and C# prove that the C-style curly braces and prefix definitions won
I agree that it is hard to see stuff with a microscope just sifting through stuff. Apparently there are ecological niches on Earth that have very low density of organisms (i.e. a glass of "pure" water, and some of the stuff discovered is hard to culture).
But one would think that if there is life (on the surface) that it would have left its imprint on the environment, and there is little evidence at that. The only hope is if stuff is living underground.
The whole impetus to Mono is to move beyond the world of filters, pipes, and command lines to a workable GUI component-software framework.
If one can say that there are two successful component-software frameworks out there, they would have to be Java and ActiveX. Java is single-language and multi-platform, but multi-platform in that one is running the Java platform under all the different OS's. ActiveX is, unfortunately single platform (Windows), but it is really, truly, multi-language (besides Visual Basic, there is Delphi, C++/MFC, the scripting languages, Matlab, VS.NET hosts ActiveX controls quite well, thank you, and yes, even Java SWT that supports it in one form or another). It is multi-language in a sense that.NET isn't (really syntax skins over CLR-compatible languages).
With ActiveX, you have two things going on: pure COM objects and then ActiveX objects proper. COM is kind of like Mono/.NET without Windows.Forms, and ActiveX is like Windows.Forms. In fact, ActiveX support under.NET is integrated into Windows.Forms. COM is simple enough and clean enough that you could really have COM across platform. ActiveX tries mightily to hide it, but it really has the Windows handle and API behind it, and is the thing that ties you down to Windows.
Now Windows.Forms does have a clean, generic GUI API that could be ported to other systems, but on the other hand, it exposes both Window handle and displace context (DC). Not only that, all of the Longhorn revelations suggests that Microsoft plans to ditch Windows.Forms and move to something else.
Leaving out all the worries about patents and Microsoft behavior and all that, for Mono to succeed, it has to do more than just the COM part to.NET, it has to do an ActiveX-like part as well. As a Windows-constrained person, I see Windows.Forms as a waste of time because 1) ActiveX not only works with.NET quite well but it works with the legacy Windows stuff (VB 6 and all the sundry Web pages and scripting languages), and 2) it looks like Windows.Forms is going to be superceded by something else.
Windows.Forms components are only a little bit easier to use than ActiveX, and they are sure a heck of a lot easier to develop than ActiveX (don't get me started about IDispatch, QueryInterface, Automation data types, IDL, and type-library generation and maintenance). But for all its warts, ActiveX generated a whole lot of buzz. Matlab is cross platform, but the Windows version supports it. Data Translation supplies A/D card controller widgets in it. Eclipse Java-SWT supports it (again, only on Windows). Where's the buzz with Windows.Forms? Is Matlab rushing to come out with a version to host Windows.Forms widgets? Is Data Translation coming out with.NET native widgets for their A/D cards? Eclipse-SWT already supports Windows so it doesn't need to host Windows.Forms.
If I as a Windows developer think Windows.Forms is a waste of time (no future to putting a lot of work porting and polishing a GUI component library into Windows.Forms), perhaps Mono should invent its own GUI framework and try to beat MS to the punch regarding whatever MS has up its sleeve.
Windows.Forms does not have this big mass of reusable component software or people falling over themselves to make containers to host it, and I don't think it ever will -- it looks like a bride until Microsoft makes up its mind. If I could pick a direction, I would suggest cloning the Eclipse SWT API, and teaming up with the Eclipse people to agree on extension.
Verity Stobb got to the Nigerian e-mail scam as parody first in a recent DDJ column -- the parody had SCO trying to scam Microsoft to raise funds to pursue you-know-what -- check it out and tell me you didn't LOL.
Slashdot Mirror
Graphite composite was supposed to be the revolution in mass fraction that was going to make the X-33/Venture Star workable, and the only thing came down like a house of cards when the composite cryo fuel tank was not all it was cracked up to be.
Anyway, how do you keep a kerosene-LOX rocket on the pad on any kind of alert status (i.e. able to launch in some time less than several days of prep)? The idea was to keep it plugged in to a supply of LOX so as LOX boils off, you pump in more. In a test, they had a leak on a LOX feed line to the rocket, so one of the technicians, like, whipped it out and took aim at the leak -- that froze over and plugged the leak. I work with a fellow whose favorite expression is "running around peeing on all of those problems" and here is where someone did it for real.
Booting does mean "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". You had to enter a short (perhaps 10-line) program by entering binary codes (grouped by 3's into octal) into the switches on the front panel. That program was able to load a program from a Teletype paper tape reader, which itself was a more capable loader that read something in from more paper tape or perhaps a magnetic tape unit if you were fancy.
These green chips are mainly for the laptop, and then you have to buy the whole laptop. Where can I get me a green Celeron and an ATX board for it?
Yeah, you can have Swing controls and JBuilder has been doing the Delphi-like thing with them. While Swing is cross platform and one language (and Delphi VCL is one platform and perhaps two languages: Delphi Pascal and C++ Builder, and perhaps another platform depending on your thoughts on the success of Kylix), ActiveX is one platform but a whole bunch of languages, more so than the .NET world of many skins on the one CLR language. There are big advantages to cross language -- call me a relic, call me what you will, but I like that old-fashioned Object Pascal as a development language, but none of my customers want anything to do with it.
So what is to prevent a VB dude from switching to Eclipse and VEP (besides having suffered neurological damage learning Visual Basic)? That mass collection of 3rd party ActiveX controls that do all kinds of not only cool but essential application-specific stuff for numerous niche requirements. ActiveX may be crufty and a bear to develop for with its IDispatch and variants and BSTR's and all kinds of restrictions on data types depending on your target, but it is the success story of components as a means to reusable software. Java might have the killer library for everything else, but ActiveX is the killer software pool for the GUI.
I mean what could be simpler, and what could produce more wealth than owning livestock, only the things need shots from the vet so they don't die from disease, and the calving process can get kind of hairy, and these things produce piles of poop which needs to be shoveled off to some place, and you kind of get the picture. And then everyone's neighbor has a stable of these things so milk gets cheap and it is really hard to make a living at it, but I guess milk is cheap and abundant to consumers.
What I want to know is that when we get self-replicating machines, how will they differ from livestock, especially with regard to the waste-management and keeping them free of disease ends?
The one-liner had a number of comic levels. One is the idea that a character like Spock would even stand out in late 20th century San Francisco. A second is a supposed 23rd century malapropism of conflating LSD (a drug) with LDS (a religious denomination). The third is that if anyone would stand out in San Francisco it would be someone who is very visibly Mormon.
Anyway, one of the logs had an entire crew of young men, who looked quite muscular under their t-shirts, and they had military-style haircuts (I don't know enough military to tell Marine from SEAL from other units, but these guys looked quite trained well beyond Basic and they had some kind of military haircut). Anyway, these guys took the paddles and got a rhythm going, and not only did they get their log throwing a wake, the Disneyland "guide" was in the back with this expression of sheer terror and hanging on to the rudder for dear life. That alone was worth the price of the park admission.
Now I am not trying to troll here as some of you may point to evidence for cold fusion. But Fleischmann and Pons certainly didn't help their cause by being sloppy with experimental control and calorimetry, so the way it played out it is fair to lable what happened as junk science.
I was suprised to see Biosphere 2 labled as junk science. Now there were junk science aspects to it in that the leader was said to be a kind of cult leader type, and if the goal was to have a self-sustained ecosystem, they should have worked their way using pilot models where they through animals in with some plants. They just threw the thing together, sealed themselves in, and when it didn't work, they didn't call the experiment off right away to retune, recalibrate, and try again.
But I am not sure if I would call building a Biosphere 2 and attempting to live in it junk science on the face of it -- the junk science dude thought it a development project at best and not real science. The junk science dude admitted that there was a scientific question regarding what it took to have a self-sustaining biosphere, and so far a self-sustaining biosphere has never been set up in a lab while such a think occurs on the surface of our planet. It is an important question: what kind of anthropomorphic or natural stresses on Earth's biosphere could wreck it, could you build a microcosm biosphere for long duration space travel, could you build one on a space colony, could you terraform Mars or Venus? How big does a biosphere have to be to work?
I guess the criticism was that it was junk science to just stick a bunch of plants, people, animals, and soils in a sealed greenhouse and hope for the best. I don't think it was junk science to build a Biosphere 2 as a proof of concept if you knew what you were doing.
So a solar round-the world plane may be just development engineering, but it may lead to solar aerial platforms, but MacReady is already doing robotic long-duration solar plains. Maybe a human payload is proof of concept of large payload capability, or maybe the Piccard guy needs something to do.
Auguste Piccard was a Swiss while J-L Picard is a Scot actor playing a French dude. I am certain the Star Trek NG writers had in the back of their mind that A. Piccard was a famous explorer, and they wanted their J-L Picard to be more the Swiss Explorer than the Captain Cook-like J.T. Kirk. If they knew about A. Piccard, they may have changed the name and nationality to make it simpler for TV viewers.
Cook definitely was the inspiration for Kirk, both as an explorer and as a shoot-from-the-hip military man, while I think that J-L Picard was meant to be more science and less militarism. Remember, STNG was kind of like a Total Quality Management, Fan Focus Group, New and Improved Star Trek, and one of the criticisms of Star Trek was putting the captain in harms way all the time. Captain Cook put himself in harms way and was killed in a skirmish in Hawaii, but some dweeb critics thought the captain of the Enterprise was too important to get into hand-to-hand combat with aliens every other episode, so Picard was supposed to be kept safe by Worf, and Riker was supposed to tangle with the aliens and get beat up. But as episodes went on, we learned from Q that Picard had an artificial heart because he was more hot-headed than he let on, and by the time he has turned into Locutus, he was fighting aliens and proved to be a scrappier fighter than Kirk (or the time he single-handedly thwarted a hijacking of the Enterprise by terrorists when the crew was gone on leave in a thin ripoff of Stephen Segal's "Under Siege" -- while Navy Seal Segal was "only a cook" because he was busted in rank, Captain Picard was "only the barber" because I suppose with his shaved head that was real funny).
Now the work cluster f*ck is not hyphenated because it is a compound noun: while f*ck is normally a verb, it is used here as a noun.
One of my big disappointments with the name "Trek" was my initial belief that it would be a trek, that the ship would require long times to reach interesting destinations after the fashion of old West wagon trains, but with the warp drive zooming around to encounter aliens at every corner was kind of a cheat.
Oh, and the episode with the Romulan cloaked ship that was destroying Federation outposts was a direct ripoff of a WW-II film about a German U-boat and an American destroyer in a deadly cat-and-mouse game, and it had pretty much the same dialog about the U-boat captain admiring his destroyer captain enemy about his intuition as to where to lay down depth charges.
1) I thought the idea of running managed code (Java) as a layer on top of managed code (.NET) had some humor potential. 2) Can you JNI into someone else's managed code? I thought you could only JNI to native, but what happens when native disappears? This may create a situation like where Microsoft tuned Windows 3.x to run on top of MS-DOS but burp when presented with DR-DOS.
What happens when the Windows natives all switch to managed code? Can Java JNI into .NET? Will you have to implement the JVM on top of .NET? Or will there always be an unmanaged layer in Windows?
I am not so much worried about the performance hit as the philosophical implications of running SWT or a Java JVM for all that matters on top of .NET -- running a byte-code object environment on top of another byte-code object environment may give comedian Stephen Wright more material. Or it may be a lot simpler than I think because you would reuse a lot of the underlying facilities in some way.
While the XB-70 Valkyrie was not quite as fast as the SR-71, it was nearly as fast (Ben Rich in "Skunk Works" tries to tell us it was only Mach 2.5, but that was only for the number 1 XB-70 because when they took it up to Mach 3, parts melted off (the brazing on the honeycomb steel panels came apart) and got ingested in the engines). They fixed that problem on the number 2 XB-70, but they crumped the number 2 XB-70 in a fatal rear-end collision doing a photo op with a bunch of "chase planes", and the XB-70 parked inside the Dayton, Ohio Air Force museum is the Mach 2.5-capable number 1 plane.
Anyway, the XB-70 also experienced the unstart problem. The XB-70 was used for aero research for the SST, and the honkin' sonic booms from the XB-70 were part of what helped discourage the SST. It was also noted that unstarts were pretty scary and would need to be remedied for the SST.
Concord/Concorde has movable inlet ramps for the shock waves -- I wonder if it ever experienced unstarts?
Also, the XB-70 was supposed to use "compression lift" -- they stuffed the six engines in this big, wide pod under the delta wing to get lift from the shock wave. This was supposed to make it much more aerodynamically efficient than the typical supersonic aircraft, allowing it to have intercontinental supersonic cruise range. I also heard that the compression lift didn't quite work up to the expectations of the wind tunnel model tests.
Is anyone considering whether compression lift (apparently there is better fluid modeling software) can result in a more fuel-efficient/longer-range SST?
Is it safe to say that Lawrence Welk was also a 60's phenomenon? I have a mom in a nursing home, and the PBS showing of Lawrence Welk reruns is the Saturday evening "activity" at that and many other nursing homes. One of my hidden pleasures is actually Lawrence Welk because they did a lot of cool swing-pop.
Heck, what made Lawrence Welk, well Lawrence Welk, was that he was doing swing-pop long after it was gone, he was doing swing-pop during the great swing-pop desert of the 60's and 70's until swing made a comeback in the 80's with the retro-revival of ballroom dance. Lawrence Welk appealed to an audience that had no stake in rock-and-roll (old fogeys, families of recent European immigrants)and it was a 60's phenom because in the 40's it would have not had its counter-revolutionary retro-before-retro-was-cool appeal.
Unless I get creamed by an SUV or drop dead from a cardiac infarct, I guess some day I will spend some time as an inmate^H^H^H^H^Hresident of a nursing home, and I cringe thinking about what music will get played when I am too impaired to work the channel selection controls. It will be a special kind of Hell not to be able to move and to have to listen to, say, 90's vintage pop or country.
Not sure they were ripped apart instead of running out of lift. If you are in convective weather (updrafts and downdrafts), you fight the downdraft by dropping ballast, fight the updraft by venting gas, and at some point you run out of ballast and gas.
In fact burning fuel to run the engines requires you to vent gas -- something that is expensive if you are using helium. Late model airships had condensors on the engine exhausts so you could take on ballast water to balance to lost weight of burnt fuel -- don't know if they had some way of saving helium by recompressing it or liquifying it.
Convective weather is a problem for fixed-wing aircraft too. Thunderstorms can have downdrafts in excess of 2000 ft/min -- I believe a passenger jet can climb at 2000 ft/min under optimum conditions so it can barely hang on -- airliners put a lot of effort into thunderstorm avoidance, listening to the ATC channel on the entertainment system we (and everyone else) were taking a detour the width of Ohio to stay out of thunderstorms.
A lot of people are trying to make of this a kind of John Henry against the steam drill contest. Here is my take on it.
Some while ago someone told me that computer programmers "break things", and I never quite understood what they meant. Some while later, a "competitor" was demoing a Windows version of a type of program for which I had put a great deal of effort into a DOS version. The program had a lot of graphical and interactive displays of scientific plots and other data, and I knew enough about Windows and all the stuff you had to do (WM_SIZE, WM_PAINT) to make it look right, and I suspected my acquaintence was "first to market" by taking a lot of short cuts on his UI. He let all the scientists in the room play with his program, but he was very reluctant to let me near the thing -- because the first thing I was going to do was try and break it to find out how much work he had yet to do.
The only way Kasparov is going to beat that chess program is if he uncovers some limitation or shortcoming -- in other words to break it, and once broken I bet he could beat the thing at will. Last time around the cheat was a team of programmers hanging around trying to patch the program as soon as Kasparov latched on to such a weakness.
The chess program will have reached true AI (in a limited problem set) once Kasparov is able to find a weakness, beat if for several games straight and for the program to somehow learn from what is going on and "close the hole", and if the program can withstand other such attacks from other chess grand masters and likewise "close the hole" without going unstable (one of the problems with learning algorithms is that can overadapt and go into limit cycles). That would have far reaching implications in terms of computer security, spam prevention, 24-7 uptime, and automated bug correction -- a program capable of fixing itself would be an advance indeed.
These new-fangled object-oriented GUI's have to abstract the heck out of everything and I guess a frame buffer is considered way too low level. In wxWindows the abstractions are wxWindow (the window thingy), wxDC (abstraction of the drawing surface but pointedly not a frame buffer -- you are only allowed to perform highly-abstract graphics ops like draw geometric shapes, text characters, and blt bitmaps, themselves not frame buffers but abstractions), wxBitmap (highly abstracted bitmap), and wxImage (yet another abstraction, but can be created from a frame buffer). Then there are all these rules -- you can blit wxBitmap to wxDC, and you can create a wxImage from image data and then create a wxBitmap from the wxImage to blit to the wxDC.
Ok, ok, pretty much every GUI framework from Swing to SWT to Borland VCL to wxWindows pretty much has this four-layer system. Windows has it as well (HWND, DC, HBITMAP, and DIBITMAP), but ol' Billy-boy wanted to get all of DOS VGA frame buffer hackers to come over to Windows, so he put in two systems: 1) the StretchDIBits() and CreateDIBSection() calls that in effect allow you to create frame buffers that you can hack as you want, and then you can blit them whole or piecemeal to the screen 2) DirectDraw. I prefer the first approach because it works for non-full screen mode.
Everything apart from Windows (wxWindows included) appears to require you to create a new bitmap from a new image every time you want to change something and to require you to blit the thing wholesale to the screen. While the CreateDIBSection() thingy is complicated, once you have it set up, you can poke at a frame buffer and selectively blit portions of that frame buffer to the screen -- you know, the 2-D game programmer "dirty rectangles" algorithm. Delphi introduced the ScanLine property late in the game (i.e. after I had already hacked down to the Windows API -- was it Delphi 4 before it was finally introduced) that uses CreateDIBSection() behind the scenes. Kylix also supports ScanLine, but because QT doesn't have CreateDIBSection(), there these restrictions imposed on how you have to recreate the frame buffer every time you poke at it.
I guess game programming has all gone 3-D and they worry about "triangles" or some such thing. I am not a game developer -- I am a developer of 2-D scientific visualization software that functions much like the old 2-D games.
Why is being able to set up a frame buffer, poke at portions of that frame buffer, and selectively blit modified parts of that frame buffer to a window object considered such an obscure feature in all these systems? I am really locked into Windows -- help!
You know, Pascal and its brethren preceded C on the PC, and when C came to the PC it was an ugly thing to combine with segment registers (C-style pointer arithmetic assumes a flat memory model while Pascal didn't allow a lot of monkey business with pointers so the segment-register memory model didn't matter). Hey guys, it was MICROSOFT which pushed C on the PC and into the mind share it got (remember all that Hungarian notation of the MS Windows API's -- Windows was a C-thing).
Pascal was kind of a limited thing (no separately-compile modules and big global namespace) with a clunky syntax (if condition then begin . . . end else begin end vs if condition then . . . else . . . endif was hotly debated in the early 1980's). Wirth went off and did his Modula thingy (remember Modula?) while the US DOD went in the direction of Ada, and I am sure there were many now forgotten improved Pascals in those days.
Turbo Pascal was actually not Pascal but a Pascal follow-on because it really was not very adhering to whatever Pascal standard was extant. True Pascal files are really pointers and file operations are supposed to operate on those pointers -- very similar to the Gang of Four Cursor Pattern and never implemented in Turbo Pascal. Turbo Pascal retained the clumsy begin-end structure (how are you supposed to format and indent that anyway without having a waterfall of indents?) and the case-insensitive syntax (case-sensitive languages from C to Modula to Java area a pox on the land: MyClass myClass = new MyClass(); my foot!). Turbo Pascal also retained the compile speed that everyone else lost (Ada anyone?) and was a good balance between rigid type checking and allowing type casts to cheat (Modula anyone?). Even Wirth conceded that Turbo Pascal became the real-world Pascal instead of the various Pascal standards that were never implemented.
I heard Oberon was a work of art, an even leaner Pascal than Pascal that eschewed the object oriented revolution by promoting a more capable "with" statement together with the use of "case" statements to make polymorphic cases explicit in the code instead of being wrapped up in the layers of OO virtual function overrides. Then I heard of Oberon 2, which added objects, which meant Wirth caved. Oberon 2 morphed into Component Pascal, for which there is a Swiss version and an Australian .NET version, but with the case-sensitive syntax with the keywords in all caps giving these but-ugly source listings together with Wirth's gonzo versions of Object Pascal keywords and even more gonzo design patterns (the thing is such a theoretically pure answer to Delphi that I can't make head or tails of it, but I gave a SUN dude a fright telling him that there was this other thing that purported to do what Java does out there).
I love my Delphi; it is my Golden Hammer and I have so much experience with it that the legacy Pascal begin-end syntax just rolls off my typing fingers, and it compiles much much faster than C# (the SUN dude was annoyed that I pointed out that Delphi compiled much faster than anything on the planet -- he seemed to think an IBM Java was fast too).
The trouble is that I can't get my engineering students to use it -- distributing source code on the Web in Object Pascal is as good as any copy protection. They grudgingly use Java/C++ because "it can get them a job" but their first love is that VB of the numeric-computing world called Matlab. C# is really Object Pascal with C-style syntax, so that is perhaps a middle ground where I can meet my students. Java and C# prove that the C-style curly braces and prefix definitions won
Heck yes, howdya think I know how to spell ENVIRONMENT correctly?
But one would think that if there is life (on the surface) that it would have left its imprint on the environment, and there is little evidence at that. The only hope is if stuff is living underground.
If one can say that there are two successful component-software frameworks out there, they would have to be Java and ActiveX. Java is single-language and multi-platform, but multi-platform in that one is running the Java platform under all the different OS's. ActiveX is, unfortunately single platform (Windows), but it is really, truly, multi-language (besides Visual Basic, there is Delphi, C++/MFC, the scripting languages, Matlab, VS.NET hosts ActiveX controls quite well, thank you, and yes, even Java SWT that supports it in one form or another). It is multi-language in a sense that .NET isn't (really syntax skins over CLR-compatible languages).
With ActiveX, you have two things going on: pure COM objects and then ActiveX objects proper. COM is kind of like Mono/.NET without Windows.Forms, and ActiveX is like Windows.Forms. In fact, ActiveX support under .NET is integrated into Windows.Forms. COM is simple enough and clean enough that you could really have COM across platform. ActiveX tries mightily to hide it, but it really has the Windows handle and API behind it, and is the thing that ties you down to Windows.
Now Windows.Forms does have a clean, generic GUI API that could be ported to other systems, but on the other hand, it exposes both Window handle and displace context (DC). Not only that, all of the Longhorn revelations suggests that Microsoft plans to ditch Windows.Forms and move to something else.
Leaving out all the worries about patents and Microsoft behavior and all that, for Mono to succeed, it has to do more than just the COM part to .NET, it has to do an ActiveX-like part as well. As a Windows-constrained person, I see Windows.Forms as a waste of time because 1) ActiveX not only works with .NET quite well but it works with the legacy Windows stuff (VB 6 and all the sundry Web pages and scripting languages), and 2) it looks like Windows.Forms is going to be superceded by something else.
Windows.Forms components are only a little bit easier to use than ActiveX, and they are sure a heck of a lot easier to develop than ActiveX (don't get me started about IDispatch, QueryInterface, Automation data types, IDL, and type-library generation and maintenance). But for all its warts, ActiveX generated a whole lot of buzz. Matlab is cross platform, but the Windows version supports it. Data Translation supplies A/D card controller widgets in it. Eclipse Java-SWT supports it (again, only on Windows). Where's the buzz with Windows.Forms? Is Matlab rushing to come out with a version to host Windows.Forms widgets? Is Data Translation coming out with .NET native widgets for their A/D cards? Eclipse-SWT already supports Windows so it doesn't need to host Windows.Forms.
If I as a Windows developer think Windows.Forms is a waste of time (no future to putting a lot of work porting and polishing a GUI component library into Windows.Forms), perhaps Mono should invent its own GUI framework and try to beat MS to the punch regarding whatever MS has up its sleeve.
Windows.Forms does not have this big mass of reusable component software or people falling over themselves to make containers to host it, and I don't think it ever will -- it looks like a bride until Microsoft makes up its mind. If I could pick a direction, I would suggest cloning the Eclipse SWT API, and teaming up with the Eclipse people to agree on extension.
Verity Stobb got to the Nigerian e-mail scam as parody first in a recent DDJ column -- the parody had SCO trying to scam Microsoft to raise funds to pursue you-know-what -- check it out and tell me you didn't LOL.
No discussion of PowerPoint is complete without checking out http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/