:::extends hand in friendship::::::reminds self to wash hands just in case I remembered wrong:::
(snicker)
Don't bother, as I'm sure the finer points of sociable type interaction would be lost on me anyhow... but I must admit I appreciate the thought. Should you have need of a 5.25" inch drive, or even an old C64 1541, I'm sure I can pull one out of somewhere. Perhaps the same place you extract your ideas.
This is absolutely zany. First of all, I was kidding about almost everything except generic good will. Secondly, I believe I have a dusty 1541 in a basement closet at my parents' house.::::::shaking head::::: Thirdly, the place I extract my ideas: Yeah. Right. Smartass!:-)
Anywho - I had best get back to work (that thing they pay me to do) - I'm sure I'll see a lot of you on/. since... well... this is my social life.
Typical. Even in perfectly platonic things, it's feast and famine. I just returned to college. Shockingly, I'm fairly well adjusted among people who define "computer literacy" as the indoctrination into MS-Office. I'm going for liberal arts degrees. Now how about this: I'm sans computer for about two weeks. I've been talking about art, politics, economics, sex (of course), history, military culture--you name it, and everyone is ok. When I was trying to make a point about conservatism in microcosm, I said, "Well, take the example of C versus Java. See, in my old school view, C and assembler is disciplined work to make the computer behave more efficiently. The 'easier' kinds of things like scripting languages have gotten even more bloated and more decadent with processor cycles..."
Then I pretty much interrupted myself. Oh shit. I forgot. I'm starting to get a life. These people have been having lives. Weird. I can't use C and Java as an example. I have to be explained why jokes that recite lines from "Everybody Loves Raymond" are funny, but I'm learning.
That's what education is for, no? Go figgur.
So every silver lining has its cloud. Now I'm neglecting some neat online people (esoteric "high tech" Luddites, etc. and people who treat string theory as headline stuff), but hey. We threw a killer dinner party with curried chicken et all last night. Cute girls (oops) college women and even, what, bottled water and chatter about the virtues of Western Civilization were there. Methinks I could get used to this. That's what's odd. It's like getting kicked out of Lamda Lamda Lamda by some default supervising de facto deity, but that doesn't mean anything disparaging about the folks.
Getting a life is almost what the label says it is. Strange, normalities, eh? Oh well, I'll still occasionally code some 16-bit assembly language in my sleep every once in a blue moon, but I hope never to feel truly comfortable when Microsoft hooks every interrupt and when "computer literacy" professors have no idea what that gripe means. In my punk/metal days, we had a sort of moral code to stay on slow burn, never losing the (out)rage and axe grinding process. It's like that all over again. It's like selling out or tempting myself to sell out. I'm supposed to be too old for this shit (like I would let such suppositions hold any sway in deciding what to do). I feel bad though. I know I won't get back on/. often. Take 'er easy.:-) Nice geekin' out with ya.
Even if it could be done, the high-order bandpass filter required to seperate out the higher frequencies to a point where it would be legal to transmit would get you.
The "passive" electronics wouldn't fit in a truck. When I say "capacitor", I mean each plate weighing in at several kilograms, and when I say "inductor", buy stock in copper companies, eh.;-) But seriously, I mean the old fashioned not-such-critical-specifications stuff (which is what inspired my digression on expensive persnickety engineering specs and the biased geeks who write them). The unwanted frequencies couldn't sneak through. The out-of-band signals would just heat up really huge components that could easily dissipate the heat. I'm thinking on the order of 30% energy efficiency overall. Put 300,000 watts in, and shoot 100,000 watts to the air.
Your idea of using a class D amplifier works very well for audio frequencies, with a low-pass filter (a Chebyshev for audio, or a Bessel for something where the time domain is important) cutting off the higher harmonics.
It's not outrageous for an IGBT to switch in 5 nanoseconds. I can imagine the "widest" pulse to be ~50 ns and the "narrowest" pulse to be ~5 ns (with a little pulse shaping assistance at the IGBT's gate in the tradition of MOSFETs). (BTW, the very fact that we are bending over backwards for the narrower pulses connotes an inherent filtration of the higher frequency signals, harmonics/ringing included.) The master clock's period would be ~50 ns. That's near 20 MHz. I don't buy that IGBT's only work below a MHz or two because that presumes their most ordinary applications (energy efficiency oriented stuff like three phase motor control). Per kilowatt, they are dirt cheap to begin with, so work 'em hard, and boil some water with 'em if necessary, operating at ~40% efficiency or whatever with a higher-than-typical fraction of the time spent "between the rails". (The alternative is squirting electrons through a huge distance in a partial vacuum with a glowing heater below.) (Then again by the scheme I am proposing here, we would have to downwardly revise the overall energy efficiency and "budget" ~800,000 watts input instead.) I suppose we should have at least 3 pulses to shape a half cycle, connoting ~3MHz carrier signal from ~20MHz master clock. You insisted on 50 MHz. It seems to me by this guesstimation that it's close but no cigar--darned close but no cigar.
Of course, Murphy's Law indicates that if my "radical idea" is good, then it won't make me a dime while it makes someone else rich, and if it is no good, then, well, I have already "embarrassed" myself anyway (not claiming to be a breathtaking electrical engineer to begin with).
Anything you can do I can do cheaper. I can do anything cheaper than you.:::::snort:::: (That doesn't mean it will get done right, but it's sure fun to try sometimes, eh.) Anyway, nice to see you again, eh.:-)
Read parent first, okay? I think the parent comment's author (adeyadey) meant that people should post their intellectual property to stake a claim of prior art. Why would that author think that? To keep things practical and to let the open source and closed source "worlds" coexist. It appears that the intent in his or her suggestion was to sort out a mess. That got me thinking about the nature of the mess.
I think beneath adeyadey's analysis are questions that run parallel to the somewhat settled controversies about privacy policies at websites pertaining to email addresses and such. Are we talking about "opt in" or "opt out"? Jealous owners of intellectual property, in a perfect world, would subscribe to the kernel mailing list and would cry foul to Linus whenever someone inserts property into a kernel. That would be "opt out" I suppose? "Opt in" would be expensive, expensive to whom? I can't imagine Linus Torvalds would want to hire a team of legal experts and computer science historians to track down each and every line for prior art like an overworked assistant to a college professor, checking for plagiarism (the expediting of which seems the aim of the parent comment's interesting ideas).
Now when we ask ourselves questions about the high overhead of maintaining property rights, it begs innumerable questions. Among them is this: Why do I not have to pay for the right to use the redness of a stopsign? Answer: because nobody sees it in his own interest to extort the money from me. To borrow a structural variant in logic from Nietzsche, I rhetorically ask about our hypothetical stop-sign-I.P.-defense sarcasm, has anyone found the courage in realism to answer this way?
The wear and tear on the turnstyle cannot even be compensated by the value of the metal in the token used to liberate its motion one quarter of a turn! I cannot sell you the license to breathe because of the economic fact that I cannot get away with economically advantageous suffocation (protecting that gas which I would claim to have appropriated with the right to exclude usage). Never mind the abundance of the resource! How much scarcity is there in the capability to coerce! In all of this, the logic is offensive. Why! Because common sense is offended, and I think common sense counts. However, common sense (at any given time) lags behind the most legitimate thinking of the day, much of which is forward looking, much in a subset of which is bunk and much in yet another nested subset of which is evil and/or misguided overall.
I think it is beyond obvious that SCO is out of line, but I don't know the wisest course of action to prevent future nuisances of the same frivolous sort. I for one do not propose the compulsion of Linus Torvalds or of any IEEE-like group to be forced to pay big legal fees indefinitely into the future, which means that I wish everyone who owns software I.P. would subscribe to the kernel mailing list? What if I chose to opine neither way? Then I implicitly invite yet more mosquito stings from yet more SCO's in the future. Would the database of the parent comment do the trick? If it is economical and practical, great. In that case, I suppose my enthusiasm for it would imply that I favor "opt out". Posting your own code to the parent-comment-idea's database is the same as posting it to an anti-Linux... Anti-Linux what? Anti-operating system? I don't know. It's like the listing of patents I suppose. The etymology of "patent" is connected to "publication". "It's mine, not yours, and this is what I mean by it... Specification, specification, specification."
Even though I have not even begun to clarify the merits of "opt in" or "opt out", I have identified that the hostility is probably here to stay. It's like the increasingly crowded namespace in trademarks and three-letter acronyms. When it gets crowded, tempers get shorter.
of the sco ranting and raving. who cares? its only a bleeding operating system! cmon/. - give us stuff that REALLY matters!
Isn't that complaint a little too much like the person who won't bother to twitch his thumb on the TV remote, complaining that he doesn't like the show on TV? The last I heard there were more than a billion web pages.
Sorry to be so harsh, but I just found myself less than enthusiastic in reaction to the story about the 64-bit chips on the way. In my highly subjective opinion, there is more than enough horsepower in a 1 GHz beige beast of most x86 flavors, regardless of the bus speed and all that mumbo jumbo. What did I do? I scoured TFA (as in "RTFA") about 64-bit stuff, discovered (as expected) nothing exciting to me, and moved along, convinced throughout that there are probably thousands of valid reasons for many kinds of enthusiasts to get excited about 64-bit processors and their affordability in the foreseeable future.
Now let's presume that your complaint is about misallocation of excitement. There is too much rage against SCO? Well, perhaps as measured in kilobytes of text you might have a point, but I tend to disagree with that point for the simple reason that SCO aimed straight at the heart of the GPL. In the same way that Microsoft's internal and external propagandists attach the word, "cancer" to GPL (connoting conservative shock/horror/anxiety inside the philosophical camp), the phenomenon of exclusive licence fees for popular Linux kernels as a form of extortion and leverage of the GPL domain arouses conservative shock, horror and anxiety. It could be an overstatement to say that SCO is attacking our way of life, but the overstatement would be inaccurate only in magnitude.
On the soul topic of relevance of the SCO issue, I further argue that connotations are immense. If SCO gets away with this prank, that would set a precedent, and that is truly frightening. That is not only about kernel 2.4; it is about behavior in the capital markets worldwide and about "mindshare" and consequent trajectories of literally billions of I.T. decisions in literally hundreds of countries. Look. I'm using MS Windows and typing this into Opera right this moment. Both are slammed-shut closed-source products, but (using the example where it falls) if it were not for the 1998 decision in Netscape to open the source code of Netscape Navigator, Communicator, and so on, then the offensive language of the introduction in the Windows NT Resource Kit book would ring true--"de facto" true as opposed to truth "du jour", i.e., the functional equivalent of truth: that sort of assertion which, regardless of its objective veracity, is treated as if true. Internet Explorer would set the de facto standard, and the W3C would be a debating society ("du jour") whose members might as well be playing Dungeons and Dragons. Linus Torvalds, if SCO were to prevail, might as well pull up a chair and bring along a 20-sided die to toss and see what turns up.
After this many years and all that effort--all of which has economic value and intense moral value for humanists the world over--would be spit upon, defiled, ridiculed and ultimately destroyed. Make no mistake. In view of/. culture, this is a conservative matter, and it is of vital importance.
IANAHHG (I am not a hardcore hardware geek.) but I recall the geeky excitement I felt when I encountered the page in the Digikey catalog wherein the fundamentals of IGBT's were summarized. It would seem to me that a person could build a large but still cheap tank circuit with an inductor and capacitor operating at the high power level and then feed that ("antenna stage") with the signal amplified by an IGBT-based class-D amplifier. At significant power levels, the old fashioned bandpass filter would offer little noise to the world outside.
If my idea has merit (and I wouldn't bet the farm), then I am suspicious of the experts. I mean that in a highly constrained way.
When Ross Perot looked in spiteful hindsight at the old days when his company was part of General Motors, he reflected on the culture of GM by saying something like, if someone at GM finds a snake, they do something really complicated instead of getting the snake. Half the time, in fields wherein I consciously know enough to make myself dangerous, I wonder if my semi-ignorant status might let out a little secret among the real experts: they cannot necessarily sneak a Rube Goldberg and/or expensive machine past the Pointy Hairs. I mean a situation in a market where the person who is most expert to offer the criterion for decision is not the person who must pay and also in a circumstance wherein the "advisor" stands to gain by some choices more than others. Bearing in mind that my intent is not as flamebait, I guess economists would consider this a subset of moral hazard--specifically in the expenditure of the most exquisitely skilled kinds of skills/time. Just as the time it takes to do a task always expands to the time
allotted, is it occasionally true that the magnitude of technological exotica is a function of supply (geeks) not demand? (Even if that is so, it really only muddles my "point", which is actually more of an unsharpened meander.) I guess IGBT's are considered mundane and cheap--rather, passe? If I am wrong in my hunch about the economical merits of IGBT-to-huge-physical-tank-circuit broadcasting, then please don't get angry. If my hunch is right, well, you're busted!:-p:-)
Shooting and gun safety was on the things my education was seriously lacking in until I joined the Army.
Strange.:-| When I was a kid, the NRA literally taught us that stuff. We could get hunting licenses at 12 years of age but only on the condition that we got official safety instruction. (It was every night for about a week IIRC, and for example, with absolute humorlessness, we heard stuff like,
"Before climbing over the fence, don't just rely on the safety. All mechanisms fail, and the safety is just a little helper not to be relied upon--certainly not while taking the chance that a barb could click the safety off.
Open the action, be it pulling back the bolt or pump or breaking a single shot or double barrel. Keep the action open!"
all right funny guy, if that's the way you want to be, you just made it on to my friend list 8-)
Oh great. Now I have to dig out my old 720K floppy disks to check my notes on how to be sociable with actual human beings, and I can't find the way to change the CMOS settings for the old FDD controller.
My
grilf just broke the F10 key while we were doing NGMWT--Nerdy Giggly Man/Woman Thing--in the client room (immediately adjacent to the server room, which is actually a garage converted from holding actual cars to holding underpowered motor scooters, solar arrays (during rainstorms), and firmware development stations for chips nobody cares about anymore)).
What's next? You gonna ruin the exquisitely calibrated pitch of the blades of the propeller on my beanie?::::::sigh::::::-p
But all right. You win.;-) Pleased to meet you.:-):::::extending hand::::::::::wondering if you remembered which hand most recently absorbed my proboscal mucous:::::
BTW- can you explain your.sig? followed the link and I have to admit, I'm kinda lost.
Google whacking only permits two terms, and it's so indistinguishible from impossibility that, with odds like that, I believe it would be wiser to arrange a date with Pamela Anderson.
Thus, in my quest to find the perfectly mediocre challenge, I "invented" Google befuddling. I guess its rules are as follows:
Use more than 6 words in a Google search.
Make the query appear perfectly valid in human logic.
Show off the results to people in that Google, as if by a "miracle", failed to do its usual magical coherence in its answers.
Old fashioned "pre-Google" search engine rubbish is "victory".
I'm not quite sure. I just extract these ideas from a spatially sequent malodorous orifice (near a wild hair), and the consequently necessary cleaning and disinfecting runs up a lot of temporal overhead. I think you can about imagine, huh?
I say it's about time and what about hydrogen powered vehicles? Two things that annoy me are filling the gas tank and changing light bulbs. It's time we did alot less of both."
Now if I could just code a portable networkable class library to RTFA-ing robot on my behalf, that would be a triple crown.
Yeah. And let's automate interactivity too. And impressing the neighbors. We could make a waste-o-mataton to make this obsolete. Yeah. Start with a stoker furnace, and put piles of cash on the feed conveyer with a web cam catching it all, and subvert google with an army of hired bloggers to link to it. Sound like a winner?
Hmm. That's too labor intensive. I think I have a better idea: Create a virus that uses a DDoT (distributed denial of thriftiness) strategy. Anyway, whatever you do, just make sure to consider if Homer Simpson could afford to do it and if so, then never do it where people can see you.
Otherwise they're stuck paying for the enormous bandwidth and storage costs associated with running hotmail.com and msn.com. (Yes, I know there's ad money involved, but I would wager it doesn't come close to paying for operations.)
::::dumb look:::: Wait. Ohhhhhhh. I know what you mean. Somebody's gotta pay the people who stand in line to step up onto the porch where the guy is standing there with his lever to let people fall through the trapdoor when the customer lady conspicuously mouths but does not audibly utter, "No!" with shoulder gesticulations after 200 focus groups have worked on tuning the ad content toward the demographic of people who are in the market to choose their first ISP. You mean like that?:-)
Jeez. I just thought of another vexing thing. Surely John Ashcroft would look the other way if everyone did a DoS/slashdot to the genuinely vile links from ratware distributors.
You got me thinking about that, taking the question literally, not figuratively. Since we are constraining ourselves to the U.S.A., this is like asking John Postel, circa 1985, "Who the hell do you think you are, exercising so much influence on who gets IP addresses and domain names? You call yourself and your de facto appointees the 'Internet Assigned Numbers Authority'? Says who?"
Mr. Postel--may his soul rest in peace--would have just looked at the "accuser" as if the person were having a bad brain day.
My point is this: What you are asking, Alpha_Traveller, is who is official. That's like asking who certifies Microsoft when someone crawls around a server room on all fours with a MCSE certificate proudly sticking out of his banana-filled backpack. The official cop would be the person whose authority stems from attitudes among the masses. Another "example" would be Linus Torvalds. Who put him in charge? Of Linux? He did. It's his. He is the authority.
Help me out here folks--I'm "channeling"...;-)
If someone were to register, say, iknowwhichspammerstrulysuck.com, and if Google would point to it due to popular linking opinion, what would happen? It would be something like democracy, something like cosmically fair meritocracy, something like authoritarianism.
In a way this reminds me of a curiosity of mine. What if I were in Dubya's fraternity while he was scheduling all of these activities and asserting his "leadership" as if a busybody/ChurchLady/agendaSeeker type? "No, George, I do not want to volunteer at the car wash to fund the local bloated charity, and my family has given that charity more money than my volunteered time is worth, and no, I do not want to play Ultimate Frisbee on the schedule you proposed, and no, I can't stand playing poker with you as long as you always shove your rules down our throats with your winning smile. Your smile doesn't win me. I resent people like you. I'm a geek, for cryin' out loud. I am waiting twenty five years for Rob Malda to get off his geekass to establish/., so I'll put up with you at this Ivy League school fraternity as a facsimile of sophisticated communication. So just back the hell off, do your own homework, and leave me alone until you follow through with the promises for free beer and hot and cold running female frat-sycophants. I have things to study."
See? Sometimes people just step out front. After a while, everyone treats them as leaders--even if they are dim coke-snorting fools. After the Alpha (fe)male dynamics kick into gear, your question won't matter.
Ok. Someone juxtapose that with the question about whether or not it matters what was the basis of the authority of John Postel in the assignment of RFC's and other such stuff.
Are you balding? Have you already spent too much on name-brand Viagra? Have you missed your last opportunity for vacation time shares? Has it been too long since you have seen fisting teen nypho sluts on web cams? Need a home equity loan? Looking for yet more little icons with nifty seldomly used features to cram into your Task Tray to slow down rebooting and bring about yet more opportunities for security problems?
Well this is your lucky microsecond because/. is now the place where everything tends asymptotically toward perfection for you. Yes. You. You have been selected. For no money down, you can have all of this!
Not only that! If you order today, you can gamble online and lose all the money you haven't yet spent on previously mentioned commercial items.:-D:-D:-D:-D:-D:-D:-D:-D
...that he did that in public, a swarm of black helicopters arrived immediately in front of the laboratory. He was promptly hauled to jail for violating the DMCA.
At the courthouse, all people who use Google and who got caught were also standing in a queue to await indictment proceedings before a federal grand jury...
Microsoft blames the slowup on commodity protocols and recommends MS-Jailer 2.0 (just released) to speed up the whole process "with only one degree of separation".
Scott McNealy's face turned red, and he proclaimed, "Look. Those people are standing out there in the heat, which is about all you should expect with the power efficiency levels of throwback 32-bit CISC technology throwing the book at them and with Microsoft's jailing software countercompetitively tied to the kernel, which is in C++, not C, not Java, not standard, not open like..."
There are several rules that a site like Friendsters has to follow to allow value to emerge and be protected:
1. No democracy: status depends on time spent in the system and behaviour, and high status gives more power. (Basically like Karma).
2. Reputation: aliases, so if you troll, people know who you are.
3. Tools for promoting good and punishing bad behaviour (like moderation).
4. Design around the social aspects of the groups, i.e. if people want to use the system a certain way, let them.
The last is a bummer when people don't do what you expect them to. But if ten million fakesters create a happy community, why not?
Prodigy Classic followed all those rules, and parental controls were absolute, and there was a separate namespace aptly called pseudochat. It became, ahem, "obsolete". Go figgur.
1. Put flock on a transducer (microphone). 2. Play with it to discover what will turn out to be a normal distribution curve of frequency response. 3. Connect an A/D/RS-232 converter to it. 4. Blow at it, recording the white noise. 5. Employ compensation for the resonance, shuffling and compression at will--all in software. 6. Call it good.
The hedonic value should be high enough to leverage OSS on sourceforge more quickly than pr0n (even). Neglecting software development costs and software "mass production costs" (smirk), the project should cost $30 in quantities of one.
Hey, should we skip step one? (shrug) If we do, then I'm sorry I said this was too cushy. I lied.;-)
Darn, that would be spiffy. Wordperfect, back when it was the king of the PC, used to have a "function key reference" card, that neatly spelled out all of the commands; same thing, but eaiser on the hardware budget.
:-D
Yay! A fellow nostalic high tech Luddite is out there! I loved those cards. Sometimes I look down at the F3 key or whatever and "see" the shift of its use written in tiny green letters. Lessee... Blue letters were the Ctrl key stuff, right? (Sigh.) I still have a luxuriously packaged WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS in a box. (Gotta love Grammatik, which was way ahead of its time, doing the whole thing right at 10 MHz in the 8086 instruction set.) The manual is about an inch and a half thick of this bulletproof super-smooth paper... (Digression alert! Digression alert! Bail out fast!)
GUIs are good, but they could be done a LOT better--and CLIs tend to be limitd by their "ask a question, get an answer" model.
GUI's room for improvement: You really think so? I could be accused of too much limitation on my imagination, but it appears to me that the userfriendliness on the y axis with time on the x axis is starting to look like a logarithmic curve. It's been--what?--6 years since mainstream users have whined seriously about feature bloat and silly crowded dropdown menus. Less is more? Hmm. That's a bad sign for the marketroids in their evil plots, etc. etc.
CLI's limitd room for improvement: Hmm...
limitd(8)
NAME limitd - Apache lugubrious insolence mitigation initiation transfer protocol server
DESCRIPTIONlimitd is the Apache lugubrious indexing mitigation initiation transfer (LIMIT) server program. It is designed to be run as a standalone daemon process. When used like this is will create a pool of child processes to handle requests. To stop it, send a TERM signal to the initial (parent) process. The PID of this process is written to a file as given in the configu- ration file. Alternatively limitd may be invoked by the Internet daemon inetd(8) each time a connection to the LIMIT service is made. This manual page only lists the command line arguments. For details of the directives necessary to configure limitd see...
Just funnin'. I didn't mean this (joke) in a mean way.:-)
another reason to buy/read
on
Absolute OpenBSD
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've used OpenBSD in the past, and benefitted from its extensive online documentation. Sometimes an off-line reference is useful (i.e. required), and Absolute OpenBSD fills this void.
This reminds me very much of the things I did before my first Linux installation in '96. I bought the book, "Red Hat Linux Unleashed", which just happened to have a RH 3.0.3 distro on one CD in a little envelope inside the cover. Skipping very few details, I read all 1100ish pages before even trying. I ran into enough troubles that I didn't regret the investment in time. As someone who hadn't taken any open systems courses in college, this was the way to go. It seems that a "paranoid operating system" would have all the same incentives in place for quite a few folks that were the situation was for me as a 100% Un*x newbie with DOS skills. YMMV of course.
I'm going way out on a limb here, but I like the huge old input devices from circa 1980. You see similar things rarely in legacy CAD I suppose???
Anyway, I think a huge 2-D array of real or almost real pushbuttons outside the keyboard is neat. Dropdown menu hierarchies have their (self-storing) place, obviously enough, and I have no significant complaints about any of the GUI's I have used (WFW 3.1 included). All This And More! That's the "philosophy". Why? For one reason... let me shove off from shore with an example. A campaign office gets a flood of untrained volunteers. The trainer says, "Hit the Answer button to answer the phone. Hit the Call Next button to call the next person in the list. Hit the Social Policy button to get the message for today on social policy and the URL for details if the voter has specific questions. Hit the pizza button when you're hungry. Hit..." Meanwhile, another "trainer" hands out hardcopies of a cheat sheet, and everything works. (Never_mind *= 0.5)
I don't know. Sometimes I get into these Luddite K.I.S.S. moods. Complications bad, primative good. Anyway, at the API, this should be cushy, cheapening app software. Mumble mumble...
There are ways to overcome this problem. Between using an aerodynamic shape for the gasbag and larger fans, a miniblimp is quite capable of outdoor operation.
The one that I really like is the internal-rotor helicopter-style design. I actually helped someone test some ideas for one of these. We took a plastic toy propeller (from those pull-string toys), and attached it to a Dremel rotary tool. Fire the thing up to 15,000 RPM, and it rapidly lifted the tool, which was being held down by the AC cord.
Wow! That must have been something to see!
If we had used a cordless version, it probably would have been capable of independant flight.
The real problem came from the fact that these little flimsy plastic rotors aren't meant for any more than, say, 1000RPM. After 20 or 30 seconds of flight, it promptly exploded.
Were you wearing your safety goggles? ((((Glare))))
:::::swoon, BTW:::
Cayn't help it. Moving right along...
When I bought my clip-on AC ammeter, I measured everything in sight, and that included a Dremel. I forgot the exact numbers, but I presumed that it would be about 88% thermodynamically efficient (a reasonable number for a universal brush motor with no subsequent gearing). It worked out to about 1/12 horsepower. The cordless jobbies are substantially weaker, but I'll grant that they are not very heavy. My guess for a better power/weight ratio would be a the motor from a cordless drill. My guess would also be that a Li-based camcorder battery would be good too. Then you could opt for a larger propeller, like the one on my beanie. 8d:-D
Then you wouldn't get hurt by exploding propellor flotsam. =-O
It sure would be tempting to use counterrotating blades. That might sound "expensive" in weight, but the torque borne by the chassis, mounts, etc. would be near zero, which could free up some weight. Of course, then there would be the hassle with the mechanism, given that the rotors should be concentric.
Hmm. Ok... How about this: Put a pulley on a 1/8" shank that gets stuck in the collet of the Dremel or somesuch motor. Use a flat belt drive to drive a propeller about 1/3 as fast. (Direct link at http://www.sdp-si.com is basically impossible, but you can snoop for flat belts about 1/4" wide and about 6" long.) Concentric to that prop, have an oppositely pitched prop also driven by a belt but this (slightly longer) belt would have a twist. The belts in question could happily run at 20,000 ft/min. if need be. I suppose a pulley of about 1.3" could drive the outside of a "disk-reinforced" fan "blade" of ~4" diameter. If the drive pulley is going at 15,000 RPM, then the blades would spin at about 5000 RPM. Golly, that would make an obnoxious noise, I bet! Anyway, I saw a real-world development-stage military drone on one of the Discovery channels, hovering, and it had counterrotating blades to keep it up (like two "stacked" helicopters if you want to consider it that way).
In lighter than/as air machines, counterrotation might enjoy energy efficiency, which often redounds to weight efficiency too.
As Mahatma Gandhi said, too little and too much wealth are not good for well-being of the society.
That may or may not be (I tend to concur), but there is something about all that that seems much more certain to me: If the folks in India behave themselves in the near future as have the Taiwanese since ~1980's (which is clearly the case), then wealth disparity will be a side issue as the middle classes flourish there. I just hope that folks in other countries (including mine) can also flourish at the same time. Zero-sum games suck.
The Cowboys chase after their occheerleaders and just don't seem to win the OSSuperbowl.
In other news, it's not like the folks in India are just along for the ride. I remember maybe two years ago when I was struck by how generous those generally poorer folks could be when they came up with Everyone's Linux. It apparently costs US$65 ordered directly. It might make a great birthday gift for your relative if your relative is Bill Gates. With all the extra money you save, maybe add a zero gun and some caffeinated soap as a nice touch.
Slashdot Mirror
(snicker)
This is absolutely zany. First of all, I was kidding about almost everything except generic good will. Secondly, I believe I have a dusty 1541 in a basement closet at my parents' house. ::::::shaking head::::: Thirdly, the place I extract my ideas: Yeah. Right. Smartass! :-)
Typical. Even in perfectly platonic things, it's feast and famine. I just returned to college. Shockingly, I'm fairly well adjusted among people who define "computer literacy" as the indoctrination into MS-Office. I'm going for liberal arts degrees. Now how about this: I'm
sans computer for about two weeks. I've been talking about art, politics, economics, sex (of course), history, military culture--you name it, and everyone is ok. When I was trying to make a point about conservatism in microcosm, I said, "Well, take the example of C versus Java. See, in my old school view, C and assembler is disciplined work to make the computer behave more efficiently. The 'easier' kinds of things like scripting languages have gotten even more bloated and more decadent with processor cycles..."
Then I pretty much interrupted myself. Oh shit. I forgot. I'm starting to get a life. These people have been having lives. Weird. I can't use C and Java as an example. I have to be explained why jokes that recite lines from "Everybody Loves Raymond" are funny, but I'm learning.
That's what education is for, no? Go figgur.
So every silver lining has its cloud. Now I'm neglecting some neat online people (esoteric "high tech" Luddites, etc. and people who treat string theory as headline stuff), but hey. We threw a killer dinner party with curried chicken et all last night. Cute girls (oops) college women and even, what, bottled water and chatter about the virtues of Western Civilization were there. Methinks I could get used to this. That's what's odd. It's like getting kicked out of Lamda Lamda Lamda by some default supervising de facto deity, but that doesn't mean anything disparaging about the folks.
Getting a life is almost what the label says it is. Strange, normalities, eh? Oh well, I'll still occasionally code some 16-bit assembly language in my sleep every once in a blue moon, but I hope never to feel truly comfortable when Microsoft hooks every interrupt and when "computer literacy" professors have no idea what that gripe means. In my punk/metal days, we had a sort of moral code to stay on slow burn, never losing the (out)rage and axe grinding process. It's like that all over again. It's like selling out or tempting myself to sell out. I'm supposed to be too old for this shit (like I would let such suppositions hold any sway in deciding what to do). I feel bad though. I know I won't get back on /. often. Take 'er easy. :-) Nice geekin' out with ya.
It's not outrageous for an IGBT to switch in 5 nanoseconds. I can imagine the "widest" pulse to be ~50 ns and the "narrowest" pulse to be ~5 ns (with a little pulse shaping assistance at the IGBT's gate in the tradition of MOSFETs). (BTW, the very fact that we are bending over backwards for the narrower pulses connotes an inherent filtration of the higher frequency signals, harmonics/ringing included.) The master clock's period would be ~50 ns. That's near 20 MHz. I don't buy that IGBT's only work below a MHz or two because that presumes their most ordinary applications (energy efficiency oriented stuff like three phase motor control). Per kilowatt, they are dirt cheap to begin with, so work 'em hard, and boil some water with 'em if necessary, operating at ~40% efficiency or whatever with a higher-than-typical fraction of the time spent "between the rails". (The alternative is squirting electrons through a huge distance in a partial vacuum with a glowing heater below.) (Then again by the scheme I am proposing here, we would have to downwardly revise the overall energy efficiency and "budget" ~800,000 watts input instead.) I suppose we should have at least 3 pulses to shape a half cycle, connoting ~3MHz carrier signal from ~20MHz master clock. You insisted on 50 MHz. It seems to me by this guesstimation that it's close but no cigar--darned close but no cigar.
Of course, Murphy's Law indicates that if my "radical idea" is good, then it won't make me a dime while it makes someone else rich, and if it is no good, then, well, I have already "embarrassed" myself anyway (not claiming to be a breathtaking electrical engineer to begin with).
Anything you can do I can do cheaper. I can do anything cheaper than you. :::::snort:::: (That doesn't mean it will get done right, but it's sure fun to try sometimes, eh.) Anyway, nice to see you again, eh. :-)
I think beneath adeyadey's analysis are questions that run parallel to the somewhat settled controversies about privacy policies at websites pertaining to email addresses and such. Are we talking about "opt in" or "opt out"? Jealous owners of intellectual property, in a perfect world, would subscribe to the kernel mailing list and would cry foul to Linus whenever someone inserts property into a kernel. That would be "opt out" I suppose? "Opt in" would be expensive, expensive to whom? I can't imagine Linus Torvalds would want to hire a team of legal experts and computer science historians to track down each and every line for prior art like an overworked assistant to a college professor, checking for plagiarism (the expediting of which seems the aim of the parent comment's interesting ideas).
Now when we ask ourselves questions about the high overhead of maintaining property rights, it begs innumerable questions. Among them is this: Why do I not have to pay for the right to use the redness of a stopsign? Answer: because nobody sees it in his own interest to extort the money from me. To borrow a structural variant in logic from Nietzsche, I rhetorically ask about our hypothetical stop-sign-I.P.-defense sarcasm, has anyone found the courage in realism to answer this way?
The wear and tear on the turnstyle cannot even be compensated by the value of the metal in the token used to liberate its motion one quarter of a turn! I cannot sell you the license to breathe because of the economic fact that I cannot get away with economically advantageous suffocation (protecting that gas which I would claim to have appropriated with the right to exclude usage). Never mind the abundance of the resource! How much scarcity is there in the capability to coerce! In all of this, the logic is offensive. Why! Because common sense is offended, and I think common sense counts. However, common sense (at any given time) lags behind the most legitimate thinking of the day, much of which is forward looking, much in a subset of which is bunk and much in yet another nested subset of which is evil and/or misguided overall.
I think it is beyond obvious that SCO is out of line, but I don't know the wisest course of action to prevent future nuisances of the same frivolous sort. I for one do not propose the compulsion of Linus Torvalds or of any IEEE-like group to be forced to pay big legal fees indefinitely into the future, which means that I wish everyone who owns software I.P. would subscribe to the kernel mailing list? What if I chose to opine neither way? Then I implicitly invite yet more mosquito stings from yet more SCO's in the future. Would the database of the parent comment do the trick? If it is economical and practical, great. In that case, I suppose my enthusiasm for it would imply that I favor "opt out". Posting your own code to the parent-comment-idea's database is the same as posting it to an anti-Linux... Anti-Linux what? Anti-operating system? I don't know. It's like the listing of patents I suppose. The etymology of "patent" is connected to "publication". "It's mine, not yours, and this is what I mean by it... Specification, specification, specification."
Even though I have not even begun to clarify the merits of "opt in" or "opt out", I have identified that the hostility is probably here to stay. It's like the increasingly crowded namespace in trademarks and three-letter acronyms. When it gets crowded, tempers get shorter.
Isn't that complaint a little too much like the person who won't bother to twitch his thumb on the TV remote, complaining that he doesn't like the show on TV? The last I heard there were more than a billion web pages.
Sorry to be so harsh, but I just found myself less than enthusiastic in reaction to the story about the 64-bit chips on the way. In my highly subjective opinion, there is more than enough horsepower in a 1 GHz beige beast of most x86 flavors, regardless of the bus speed and all that mumbo jumbo. What did I do? I scoured TFA (as in "RTFA") about 64-bit stuff, discovered (as expected) nothing exciting to me, and moved along, convinced throughout that there are probably thousands of valid reasons for many kinds of enthusiasts to get excited about 64-bit processors and their affordability in the foreseeable future.
Now let's presume that your complaint is about misallocation of excitement. There is too much rage against SCO? Well, perhaps as measured in kilobytes of text you might have a point, but I tend to disagree with that point for the simple reason that SCO aimed straight at the heart of the GPL. In the same way that Microsoft's internal and external propagandists attach the word, "cancer" to GPL (connoting conservative shock/horror/anxiety inside the philosophical camp), the phenomenon of exclusive licence fees for popular Linux kernels as a form of extortion and leverage of the GPL domain arouses conservative shock, horror and anxiety. It could be an overstatement to say that SCO is attacking our way of life, but the overstatement would be inaccurate only in magnitude.
On the soul topic of relevance of the SCO issue, I further argue that connotations are immense. If SCO gets away with this prank, that would set a precedent, and that is truly frightening. That is not only about kernel 2.4; it is about behavior in the capital markets worldwide and about "mindshare" and consequent trajectories of literally billions of I.T. decisions in literally hundreds of countries. Look. I'm using MS Windows and typing this into Opera right this moment. Both are slammed-shut closed-source products, but (using the example where it falls) if it were not for the 1998 decision in Netscape to open the source code of Netscape Navigator, Communicator, and so on, then the offensive language of the introduction in the Windows NT Resource Kit book would ring true--"de facto" true as opposed to truth "du jour", i.e., the functional equivalent of truth: that sort of assertion which, regardless of its objective veracity, is treated as if true. Internet Explorer would set the de facto standard, and the W3C would be a debating society ("du jour") whose members might as well be playing Dungeons and Dragons. Linus Torvalds, if SCO were to prevail, might as well pull up a chair and bring along a 20-sided die to toss and see what turns up.
After this many years and all that effort--all of which has economic value and intense moral value for humanists the world over--would be spit upon, defiled, ridiculed and ultimately destroyed. Make no mistake. In view of /. culture, this is a conservative matter, and it is of vital importance.
If my idea has merit (and I wouldn't bet the farm), then I am suspicious of the experts. I mean that in a highly constrained way.
When Ross Perot looked in spiteful hindsight at the old days when his company was part of General Motors, he reflected on the culture of GM by saying something like, if someone at GM finds a snake, they do something really complicated instead of getting the snake. Half the time, in fields wherein I consciously know enough to make myself dangerous, I wonder if my semi-ignorant status might let out a little secret among the real experts: they cannot necessarily sneak a Rube Goldberg and/or expensive machine past the Pointy Hairs. I mean a situation in a market where the person who is most expert to offer the criterion for decision is not the person who must pay and also in a circumstance wherein the "advisor" stands to gain by some choices more than others. Bearing in mind that my intent is not as flamebait, I guess economists would consider this a subset of moral hazard--specifically in the expenditure of the most exquisitely skilled kinds of skills/time. Just as the time it takes to do a task always expands to the time allotted, is it occasionally true that the magnitude of technological exotica is a function of supply (geeks) not demand? (Even if that is so, it really only muddles my "point", which is actually more of an unsharpened meander.) I guess IGBT's are considered mundane and cheap--rather, passe? If I am wrong in my hunch about the economical merits of IGBT-to-huge-physical-tank-circuit broadcasting, then please don't get angry. If my hunch is right, well, you're busted! :-p :-)
Strange. :-| When I was a kid, the NRA literally taught us that stuff. We could get hunting licenses at 12 years of age but only on the condition that we got official safety instruction. (It was every night for about a week IIRC, and for example, with absolute humorlessness, we heard stuff like,
As far as I knew (and basically everyone else IIRC), that's what the NRA was for back then. Anyway, this might be a halfway interesting link.Oh great. Now I have to dig out my old 720K floppy disks to check my notes on how to be sociable with actual human beings, and I can't find the way to change the CMOS settings for the old FDD controller.
NOT!
::::snort:::: ::::::nosewipe:::::
What's next? You gonna ruin the exquisitely calibrated pitch of the blades of the propeller on my beanie? ::::::sigh::::: :-p
But all right. You win. ;-) Pleased to meet you. :-) :::::extending hand::::: :::::wondering if you remembered which hand most recently absorbed my proboscal mucous:::::
Google whacking only permits two terms, and it's so indistinguishible from impossibility that, with odds like that, I believe it would be wiser to arrange a date with Pamela Anderson.
Thus, in my quest to find the perfectly mediocre challenge, I "invented" Google befuddling. I guess its rules are as follows:
I guess it is not inherently competitive any more than figure skating is. It might very well be an artform. For example, due to the question generated by Google, this link has some merit, IMHO.
I'm not quite sure. I just extract these ideas from a spatially sequent malodorous orifice (near a wild hair), and the consequently necessary cleaning and disinfecting runs up a lot of temporal overhead. I think you can about imagine, huh?
Anyway, hope that helps. (snicker) :-)
Now as you were saying about who should ascend to the throne after Governor Schwarzenegger...
Now if I could just code a portable networkable class library to RTFA-ing robot on my behalf, that would be a triple crown.
Yeah. And let's automate interactivity too. And impressing the neighbors. We could make a waste-o-mataton to make this obsolete. Yeah. Start with a stoker furnace, and put piles of cash on the feed conveyer with a web cam catching it all, and subvert google with an army of hired bloggers to link to it. Sound like a winner?
Hmm. That's too labor intensive. I think I have a better idea: Create a virus that uses a DDoT (distributed denial of thriftiness) strategy. Anyway, whatever you do, just make sure to consider if Homer Simpson could afford to do it and if so, then never do it where people can see you.
For this I thank thynk... I think. :-)
::::dumb look:::: Wait. Ohhhhhhh. I know what you mean. Somebody's gotta pay the people who stand in line to step up onto the porch where the guy is standing there with his lever to let people fall through the trapdoor when the customer lady conspicuously mouths but does not audibly utter, "No!" with shoulder gesticulations after 200 focus groups have worked on tuning the ad content toward the demographic of people who are in the market to choose their first ISP. You mean like that? :-)
Jeez. I just thought of another vexing thing. Surely John Ashcroft would look the other way if everyone did a DoS/slashdot to the genuinely vile links from ratware distributors.
Pfffft! :-p Silly! Imagine what it would do to NATALIE PORTMAN. Jeez. Get with the program. You nerd. ;-)
You got me thinking about that, taking the question literally, not figuratively. Since we are constraining ourselves to the U.S.A., this is like asking John Postel, circa 1985, "Who the hell do you think you are, exercising so much influence on who gets IP addresses and domain names? You call yourself and your de facto appointees the 'Internet Assigned Numbers Authority'? Says who?"
Mr. Postel--may his soul rest in peace--would have just looked at the "accuser" as if the person were having a bad brain day.
My point is this: What you are asking, Alpha_Traveller, is who is official. That's like asking who certifies Microsoft when someone crawls around a server room on all fours with a MCSE certificate proudly sticking out of his banana-filled backpack. The official cop would be the person whose authority stems from attitudes among the masses. Another "example" would be Linus Torvalds. Who put him in charge? Of Linux? He did. It's his. He is the authority.
Help me out here folks--I'm "channeling"... ;-)
If someone were to register, say, iknowwhichspammerstrulysuck.com, and if Google would point to it due to popular linking opinion, what would happen? It would be something like democracy, something like cosmically fair meritocracy, something like authoritarianism.
In a way this reminds me of a curiosity of mine. What if I were in Dubya's fraternity while he was scheduling all of these activities and asserting his "leadership" as if a busybody/ChurchLady/agendaSeeker type? "No, George, I do not want to volunteer at the car wash to fund the local bloated charity, and my family has given that charity more money than my volunteered time is worth, and no, I do not want to play Ultimate Frisbee on the schedule you proposed, and no, I can't stand playing poker with you as long as you always shove your rules down our throats with your winning smile. Your smile doesn't win me. I resent people like you. I'm a geek, for cryin' out loud. I am waiting twenty five years for Rob Malda to get off his geekass to establish /., so I'll put up with you at this Ivy League school fraternity as a facsimile of sophisticated communication. So just back the hell off, do your own homework, and leave me alone until you follow through with the promises for free beer and hot and cold running female frat-sycophants. I have things to study."
See? Sometimes people just step out front. After a while, everyone treats them as leaders--even if they are dim coke-snorting fools. After the Alpha (fe)male dynamics kick into gear, your question won't matter.
Ok. Someone juxtapose that with the question about whether or not it matters what was the basis of the authority of John Postel in the assignment of RFC's and other such stuff.
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Not only that! If you order today, you can gamble online and lose all the money you haven't yet spent on previously mentioned commercial items.
At the courthouse, all people who use Google and who got caught were also standing in a queue to await indictment proceedings before a federal grand jury...
Microsoft blames the slowup on commodity protocols and recommends MS-Jailer 2.0 (just released) to speed up the whole process "with only one degree of separation".
Scott McNealy's face turned red, and he proclaimed, "Look. Those people are standing out there in the heat, which is about all you should expect with the power efficiency levels of throwback 32-bit CISC technology throwing the book at them and with Microsoft's jailing software countercompetitively tied to the kernel, which is in C++, not C, not Java, not standard, not open like..."
2. Play with it to discover what will turn out to be a normal distribution curve of frequency response.
3. Connect an A/D/RS-232 converter to it.
4. Blow at it, recording the white noise.
5. Employ compensation for the resonance, shuffling and compression at will--all in software.
6. Call it good.
The hedonic value should be high enough to leverage OSS on sourceforge more quickly than pr0n (even). Neglecting software development costs and software "mass production costs" (smirk), the project should cost $30 in quantities of one.
Hey, should we skip step one? (shrug) If we do, then I'm sorry I said this was too cushy. I lied. ;-)
Yay! A fellow nostalic high tech Luddite is out there! I loved those cards. Sometimes I look down at the F3 key or whatever and "see" the shift of its use written in tiny green letters. Lessee... Blue letters were the Ctrl key stuff, right? (Sigh.) I still have a luxuriously packaged WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS in a box. (Gotta love Grammatik, which was way ahead of its time, doing the whole thing right at 10 MHz in the 8086 instruction set.) The manual is about an inch and a half thick of this bulletproof super-smooth paper... (Digression alert! Digression alert! Bail out fast!)
GUI's room for improvement: You really think so? I could be accused of too much limitation on my imagination, but it appears to me that the userfriendliness on the y axis with time on the x axis is starting to look like a logarithmic curve. It's been--what?--6 years since mainstream users have whined seriously about feature bloat and silly crowded dropdown menus. Less is more? Hmm. That's a bad sign for the marketroids in their evil plots, etc. etc.
CLI's limitd room for improvement: Hmm...
limitd(8)
NAME limitd - Apache lugubrious insolence mitigation initiation transfer protocol server
SYNOPSIS limitd [ -X ] [ -R libexecdir ] [ -d serverroot ] [ -f con- fig ][ -C directive ] [ -c directive ] [ -D parameter ]
limitd [ -h ] [ -l ] [ -L ] [ -v ] [ -V ] [ -S ]
DESCRIPTION limitd is the Apache lugubrious indexing mitigation initiation transfer (LIMIT) server program. It is designed to be run as a standalone daemon process. When used like this is will create a pool of child processes to handle requests. To stop it, send a TERM signal to the initial (parent) process. The PID of this process is written to a file as given in the configu- ration file. Alternatively limitd may be invoked by the Internet daemon inetd(8) each time a connection to the LIMIT service is made. This manual page only lists the command line arguments. For details of the directives necessary to configure limitd see...
Just funnin'. I didn't mean this (joke) in a mean way. :-)
This reminds me very much of the things I did before my first Linux installation in '96. I bought the book, "Red Hat Linux Unleashed", which just happened to have a RH 3.0.3 distro on one CD in a little envelope inside the cover. Skipping very few details, I read all 1100ish pages before even trying. I ran into enough troubles that I didn't regret the investment in time. As someone who hadn't taken any open systems courses in college, this was the way to go. It seems that a "paranoid operating system" would have all the same incentives in place for quite a few folks that were the situation was for me as a 100% Un*x newbie with DOS skills. YMMV of course.
Anyway, I think a huge 2-D array of real or almost real pushbuttons outside the keyboard is neat. Dropdown menu hierarchies have their (self-storing) place, obviously enough, and I have no significant complaints about any of the GUI's I have used (WFW 3.1 included). All This And More! That's the "philosophy". Why? For one reason... let me shove off from shore with an example. A campaign office gets a flood of untrained volunteers. The trainer says, "Hit the Answer button to answer the phone. Hit the Call Next button to call the next person in the list. Hit the Social Policy button to get the message for today on social policy and the URL for details if the voter has specific questions. Hit the pizza button when you're hungry. Hit..." Meanwhile, another "trainer" hands out hardcopies of a cheat sheet, and everything works. (Never_mind *= 0.5)
I don't know. Sometimes I get into these Luddite K.I.S.S. moods. Complications bad, primative good. Anyway, at the API, this should be cushy, cheapening app software. Mumble mumble...
Were you wearing your safety goggles? ((((Glare))))
:::::swoon, BTW::: Cayn't help it. Moving right along...
When I bought my clip-on AC ammeter, I measured everything in sight, and that included a Dremel. I forgot the exact numbers, but I presumed that it would be about 88% thermodynamically efficient (a reasonable number for a universal brush motor with no subsequent gearing). It worked out to about 1/12 horsepower. The cordless jobbies are substantially weaker, but I'll grant that they are not very heavy. My guess for a better power/weight ratio would be a the motor from a cordless drill. My guess would also be that a Li-based camcorder battery would be good too. Then you could opt for a larger propeller, like the one on my beanie. 8d:-D
Then you wouldn't get hurt by exploding propellor flotsam. =-O
It sure would be tempting to use counterrotating blades. That might sound "expensive" in weight, but the torque borne by the chassis, mounts, etc. would be near zero, which could free up some weight. Of course, then there would be the hassle with the mechanism, given that the rotors should be concentric.
Hmm. Ok... How about this: Put a pulley on a 1/8" shank that gets stuck in the collet of the Dremel or somesuch motor. Use a flat belt drive to drive a propeller about 1/3 as fast. (Direct link at http://www.sdp-si.com is basically impossible, but you can snoop for flat belts about 1/4" wide and about 6" long.) Concentric to that prop, have an oppositely pitched prop also driven by a belt but this (slightly longer) belt would have a twist. The belts in question could happily run at 20,000 ft/min. if need be. I suppose a pulley of about 1.3" could drive the outside of a "disk-reinforced" fan "blade" of ~4" diameter. If the drive pulley is going at 15,000 RPM, then the blades would spin at about 5000 RPM. Golly, that would make an obnoxious noise, I bet! Anyway, I saw a real-world development-stage military drone on one of the Discovery channels, hovering, and it had counterrotating blades to keep it up (like two "stacked" helicopters if you want to consider it that way).
In lighter than/as air machines, counterrotation might enjoy energy efficiency, which often redounds to weight efficiency too.
That may or may not be (I tend to concur), but there is something about all that that seems much more certain to me: If the folks in India behave themselves in the near future as have the Taiwanese since ~1980's (which is clearly the case), then wealth disparity will be a side issue as the middle classes flourish there. I just hope that folks in other countries (including mine) can also flourish at the same time. Zero-sum games suck.
Elx, a.k.a. "Everyone's Linux"
I posted another blurb about it in here somewhere.
In other news, it's not like the folks in India are just along for the ride. I remember maybe two years ago when I was struck by how generous those generally poorer folks could be when they came up with Everyone's Linux. It apparently costs US$65 ordered directly. It might make a great birthday gift for your relative if your relative is Bill Gates. With all the extra money you save, maybe add a zero gun and some caffeinated soap as a nice touch.
(snicker)
Well, you told me to think big red horns on her head.