consider taking 1 unit of kinetic energy away from the car due to the load of the crank shaft on the wheel. Now use this energy any way you want whatsoever. you can put it into a propeller. you can turn it into kerosene at 100% efficiency and use it in a jet engine. YOu can power some magnetohydrodynamic electromagnetic drive. I don't care. Your job is to use that 1 unit of kinetic energy to cause the car's speed to increase by more than 1 unit of kinetic energy. if you can only get it to increase by 1 unit then were right back to where we started before I slowed it by 1 unit.
Since the car is going at windspeed there is no power input to the car. indeed there is no wind at all. you could just imagine the earth is moving under the car and the air and car are at rest.
So any momentum you impart to the air with the propeller is pushing on non-moving air in this frame of reference.
you can't make the car go faster this way.
Note: everything I'm talking about here is considering going directly downwind. there is no tacking of a sail here. that's a different argument. Also note that I'm considering the point when the car is at windspeed. When the car is below windspeed you can store energy into the spinning pro that can be tapped later. This is why I keep saying look at as a closed system. Yes you could produce a sudden burst of acceleration by tapping the stroed energy in the prop. But that will be transient and the total energy (kinetic+stored) has not changed.
Okay, fine let's talk about forces instead. To be able to push air the crank shaft puts a force on the wheels that in trun is applied against the road slowing down the vehicle. If you do everything right the force*time =momentum push gained from the air exactly offsets the momentum loss from the wheels-- when you are moving at wind speed. Below windspeed you can get a net gain because there is a net force of the wind on the car helping to accelerate the wheels. At wind speed there is no force on the car from the wind (not counting the propeller).
The air bouncing off the back of the prop has to put momentum somewhere, and that somewhere is into the FORWARD motion of the cart.
The force hits the blades. Part of that force is in a direction that would slow the blades. Part of that force is pushing the mast forward, which would speed the car and thus speed the blades. The ratio depends on the blade pitch, which is adjustable. >
By your logic the faster the car goes the faster the blade turns. the more the blade turns the more it pushes the car and.....(to quote you)....Rinse, repeat.
Explain this energetically. How is the system getting input energy when it is going as fast as or faster than the wind?
Pick your reference point. With respect to the ground, the wind is moving. With respect to the wind, the ground is moving. If you consider the car at the point it is moving at the same speed as the wind, the ground is moving with respect to the car. Where you have relative movement, you have an energy source.
I see. So when I'm going in my own gas powered car at 30 miles per hour it's moving 30 miles per hour wrt to the ground. there for according to this logic this is an energy source that I can use to propel my car to even faster speeds. And to think I've been paying for gasoline when I had this free energy all the time.
I think we are going in circles here. where is the energy input to a closed system?
put this another way, if you are moving with the wind at the windspeed then the propeller blade cannot know which way the wind is blowing. all directions are equal to it, regardless of the pitch of the blade. So this blade pitch argument is a red herring.
First your missing the key statement that this is down wind. it's well known you can drive a boat upwind.
So yes you can break windspeed. I'm just saying you can't sustain that indefinitely. You can however sustain an average that is above windseed which is good.
but you can't build a vehicle that just goes downwind and is indefinitely faster than wind speed instantaneously.
After pondering my own argument for a while I realized that the fourth case I described could be escaped. (as I noted, I was not sure of that fourth argument)
That is you can create a vehicle which can sustain an average speed above windspeed even though you cannot sustain a continuous speed above wind speed.
here's how. You have an arbitrarily large sail or kite such that when you are below windspeed by any infinitesimal amount you can gather an arbitrarily large amount of energy in a fixed time using the dynamo wheels.
you then collapse the sail or kite and use the dynamo to propel you faster than the wind. This can last a long time and only depends on the drag.
When you finally fall back to below wind speed the sail is re-deployed.
thus the sail is up only for a tiny fraction of the time compared to the above wind speed time. the amount below wind speed you need to tap the energy can be aribtratily small and the time to gather it can be arbitrarily small for a big enough sail.
thus you can travel on average above wind speed in theory. But I assert you still cannot sustain an continuous instantaeous speed above windspeed for the reasons I noted above.
What is claimed is impossible: sustained faster than wind speed. You could have transient bursts of faster than wind speed using energy that was stored when you were going slower than the wind. What I'm not perfectly sure of is if you could sustain an average (not continuous) speed greater than the wind. But I don't think so.
first why it can't be sustained: consider that you are traveling at wind speed. At this point there is no energy input to the car as a closed system. It can have stored energy but it can't be getting new energy. If you were to start going faster than wind speed then there is a head wind and it will now be draining energy from the car's stored energy.
You could oscillate about wind speed however. wehn you go slower the wind is inputting energy. Let's ignore the friction losses. If the net force * time of the wind on the car is greater than change in momentum of the car then there energy input to the car can be greater than the kinetic energy of the car. THat is the car could store energy.
You already know this intuitively. A windmill always has a force*time greater than it's momentum since is does not move and it generates energy.
Third above wind speed is possible transiently using this stored energy. Here's a trivial device to prove it. tie a rubber band between a kite and an anchor on the ground. the kite stretched the band. Now release the anchor and it is flung forward. By adjusting the masses you can find a place where the arbitrariily light but forceful kite will fling the anchor such that their center of mass is higher than the wind. QED
Fourth is it possible to sustain an average not instantaneous speed above the wind? I don't think so
imagine the following car. it has an enourmous kite pulling it. the wheels are hooked to dynamos that soak up energy and store it in a battery. you can make the kite as large as you like so you can inject an arbitratily large amount of energy in a given time into the battery. You then use this to drive the car faster than the wind. during this time you are using stored energy. Also during this time the kite is falling behind at a rate equal to the car-windspeed.
In order for the kit to catch up the car needs to go slower than wind speed such delta speed times time equals that distance lost by the kite.
I think those two cancel to give an average speed equal to the wind. I could be wrong.
Y'know sharp like the edges of a Archos MP3 brick when the ipod came out. Holding one of these huge things to your head to talk will have everyone laughing like it was an episode of Bean. This will get the brown Zune prize for 2010.
Some sheer speculation: perhaps if you have an App that changes the apparent user interface it will be purged?
For example I would expect that an app 1) create it's own desktop 2) place functionality of other apps on this desktop
could be used for example to make it a work-alike to a google phone or could be used to fool the user into entering passwords by looking like the real desktop.
tunes4 is supposedly going to crank up the sandboxing of apps, with encrypted memory partions. Perhaps these apps that merge data from other apps are going to get purged?
I really have to wonder if there is more than meets the sound-bite here. It sounds absurd yes. But then again it would be absurd to be so capricious. Maybe were not getting the full story? Apple is if anything not illogical in their choices. You may vehemently disagree with their choices but the choices all have an internal logic. I can't see any logic here. I suspect this may be a BS story.
It's under continuous development and refinement. The project its self is divided into two logical compartments. Half the team is studying how best to implement the algorithm and the other half is studying how users interact and how to improve that.
it means that they will have to collect your Taxpayer ID number and then validate it.
so no illegal alliens can use E-bay.
Since they will be reporting SSNs to the IRS it will also be interesting if the law enforcement agencies sniff this for fugitives. Supposedly SSNs are not supposed to get used for law enforcement but they are.
I wonder how they will deal with people who claim not to be US citizens.
The reason microsoft succeeded was because they wrote a great application called Word. In it's time it was truly great compared to the competition (word perfect for example). Other than being comprehensive and less clunky than open office it's not such a remarkable product anymore. But if you are bussiness or Govt you have to have a copy of it. It's the standard and you always get some document that the emulators don't open correctly, so you have to use it no matter what processor you prefer.
Windows I think rode on the coat-tails of this. Windows mac was a superior product up through version 5 but it was not fully compatible with the Windows version. As a result, windows OS became the preferred operating system for providing compatibility of word documents. This choice was cemented by the fact that windows ran on cheaper computers. But I think it was Word that was pulling the buggy, not the OS.
Ironically, Word 6 made the Mac and PC versions more interoperable by removing the advanced features from the mac product. But by then the product offered an integrated environment on the PC with outlook and server systems. So it still was better to use the PC than the Mac version for business.
If you were starting over today, the huge standardization on word probably would not happen.
This is the boat MS is in now with mobile computing. Word is behind the curve on being a first rate mobile product. If they don't get something better out there people may start to standardize on something else once the reasons become compelling enough.
I think that microsoft is fully capable of producing a first class mobile computing set of tools. Why they haven't is mysterious to me.
Objective C is what C++ should have been. It is true that the unconventional syntax drove people away. If you look at the concept of java and compare it to the implemention of java you can conclude that a lot of the late binding ideas of java were fantastic but something went wrong (I am reminded of this every time I look a my process list and see all the big real-memory apps are java, and they take ten times longer to start than they should.)
Objective C has the finest elements of java, but lacks the overwrought clumsiness of C++. objective C is very lean. But it leverages a lot of late binding and messaging ideas to allow the language to grow sophisticated idioms (e.g. why should I have to write the get-set methods for attributes by hand?) Those "@" you ridicule are saving you a lot of possible syntax errors and make the code a lot shorter.
Objective C is also had the benefit of maturing in isolation where it can avoid having as many crufty libraries and 5000 different idioms for the same thing.
Wow, the last time When bill gates was there to invest a chunk of change in apple development it was partly motivated by MS trying to avoid the Antitrust abyss by making sure MS was not a monopoly (at least on the commercial side).
Now it's a role reversal. MS is at this point in time a Fscked company (Win7 blow on touch devices, WinCE is on life support on phones, xbox360 has lost it's pricepoint sweet spot and is now squeezed by nintendo and Playstation, the big payday product, Office, is seriously threatened by cloud savvy products better for mobile communications, the latest office is not better than the old one so why buy it, and Win7 hasn't exactly got anyone excited.) Basically MS cannot execute. It would probably actually be good for them to downsize and re-grow.
Now the apple lesson has two parts to it. 1) It does not matter how great your company once was, your company can die faster than you think 2) A once great but sick company can comeback if it can find it's mojo again.
The sick part here is that development and office environments that microsoft created for the original mac was what lead to it losing market share. I personally suspect that Windows did not succeed as an OS until Office succeed and made Windows the preferred platform for running this killer app. Here we go again!
Drug leads are cheap compared to developing a drug. A friend worked at a drug lead company. They got bought by a big pharma. Within 2 years they had produced more drug leads than the pharma could validate in the next decade. So the pharma sold off the company.
Glaxco is no doubt saturated with drug leads too. According to Merk is takes about 400 million dollars to walk one drug all the way through clinical trials. So there's a perpetual winnowing process at every stage with plenty of candidates to step in when an advanced compound is eliminated from further study.
If you sell your drug lead company who do you think buys it? the competition. SO it's not like open sourcing something gives your competition something they could not get otherwise.
Instead it just makes everything more efficient. The only reason for them to sit on those compounds would be if they simply wanted to prevent other from making them out of fear they might compete with their own,but having no intention of perusing them. Which would be pretty shitty business. It does happen of course (Monsanto is often accused of this.).
So Glaxo is being brave and doing the right thing. But it's not costing them anything except possibly competition if one of those abandoned leads turns out to be the one.
Now here' the twist: Ironically, by opening it up they maybe doing more to supress this compound than if they had kept quiet. The reason is, it's now unpatentable. What other company would invest in it?
Thus short of government development of these. opening it up kills it's further development more effectively than saying nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
consider taking 1 unit of kinetic energy away from the car due to the load of the crank shaft on the wheel. Now use this energy any way you want whatsoever. you can put it into a propeller. you can turn it into kerosene at 100% efficiency and use it in a jet engine. YOu can power some magnetohydrodynamic electromagnetic drive. I don't care. Your job is to use that 1 unit of kinetic energy to cause the car's speed to increase by more than 1 unit of kinetic energy. if you can only get it to increase by 1 unit then were right back to where we started before I slowed it by 1 unit.
Since the car is going at windspeed there is no power input to the car. indeed there is no wind at all. you could just imagine the earth is moving under the car and the air and car are at rest.
So any momentum you impart to the air with the propeller is pushing on non-moving air in this frame of reference.
you can't make the car go faster this way.
Note: everything I'm talking about here is considering going directly downwind. there is no tacking of a sail here. that's a different argument. Also note that I'm considering the point when the car is at windspeed. When the car is below windspeed you can store energy into the spinning pro that can be tapped later. This is why I keep saying look at as a closed system. Yes you could produce a sudden burst of acceleration by tapping the stroed energy in the prop. But that will be transient and the total energy (kinetic+stored) has not changed.
Okay, fine let's talk about forces instead. To be able to push air the crank shaft puts a force on the wheels that in trun is applied against the road slowing down the vehicle. If you do everything right the force*time =momentum push gained from the air exactly offsets the momentum loss from the wheels-- when you are moving at wind speed. Below windspeed you can get a net gain because there is a net force of the wind on the car helping to accelerate the wheels. At wind speed there is no force on the car from the wind (not counting the propeller).
The air bouncing off the back of the prop has to put momentum somewhere, and that somewhere is into the FORWARD motion of the cart.
The force hits the blades. Part of that force is in a direction that would slow the blades. Part of that force is pushing the mast forward, which would speed the car and thus speed the blades. The ratio depends on the blade pitch, which is adjustable. >
By your logic the faster the car goes the faster the blade turns. the more the blade turns the more it pushes the car and .....(to quote you) ....Rinse, repeat.
And just when does this virtuous cycle stop?
I have a wind powered bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.
Pick your reference point. With respect to the ground, the wind is moving. With respect to the wind, the ground is moving. If you consider the car at the point it is moving at the same speed as the wind, the ground is moving with respect to the car. Where you have relative movement, you have an energy source.
I see. So when I'm going in my own gas powered car at 30 miles per hour it's moving 30 miles per hour wrt to the ground. there for according to this logic this is an energy source that I can use to propel my car to even faster speeds. And to think I've been paying for gasoline when I had this free energy all the time.
I think we are going in circles here. where is the energy input to a closed system?
put this another way, if you are moving with the wind at the windspeed then the propeller blade cannot know which way the wind is blowing. all directions are equal to it, regardless of the pitch of the blade. So this blade pitch argument is a red herring.
Right, not a single word about downwind faster than wind. All words about upwind or transverse to the wind faster than the wind.
Explain this energetically. How is the system getting input energy when it is going as fast as or faster than the wind?
First your missing the key statement that this is down wind. it's well known you can drive a boat upwind.
So yes you can break windspeed. I'm just saying you can't sustain that indefinitely. You can however sustain an average that is above windseed which is good.
but you can't build a vehicle that just goes downwind and is indefinitely faster than wind speed instantaneously.
After pondering my own argument for a while I realized that the fourth case I described could be escaped. (as I noted, I was not sure of that fourth argument)
That is you can create a vehicle which can sustain an average speed above windspeed even though you cannot sustain a continuous speed above wind speed.
here's how. You have an arbitrarily large sail or kite such that when you are below windspeed by any infinitesimal amount you can gather an arbitrarily large amount of energy in a fixed time using the dynamo wheels.
you then collapse the sail or kite and use the dynamo to propel you faster than the wind. This can last a long time and only depends on the drag.
When you finally fall back to below wind speed the sail is re-deployed.
thus the sail is up only for a tiny fraction of the time compared to the above wind speed time. the amount below wind speed you need to tap the energy can be aribtratily small and the time to gather it can be arbitrarily small for a big enough sail.
thus you can travel on average above wind speed in theory. But I assert you still cannot sustain an continuous instantaeous speed above windspeed for the reasons I noted above.
It's a demo of Safari's HTML 5 capability. Of Course you need safari to use it.
What is claimed is impossible: sustained faster than wind speed. You could have transient bursts of faster than wind speed using energy that was stored when you were going slower than the wind. What I'm not perfectly sure of is if you could sustain an average (not continuous) speed greater than the wind. But I don't think so.
first why it can't be sustained: consider that you are traveling at wind speed. At this point there is no energy input to the car as a closed system. It can have stored energy but it can't be getting new energy. If you were to start going faster than wind speed then there is a head wind and it will now be draining energy from the car's stored energy.
You could oscillate about wind speed however. wehn you go slower the wind is inputting energy. Let's ignore the friction losses. If the net force * time of the wind on the car is greater than change in momentum of the car then there energy input to the car can be greater than the kinetic energy of the car. THat is the car could store energy.
You already know this intuitively. A windmill always has a force*time greater than it's momentum since is does not move and it generates energy.
Third above wind speed is possible transiently using this stored energy. Here's a trivial device to prove it. tie a rubber band between a kite and an anchor on the ground. the kite stretched the band. Now release the anchor and it is flung forward. By adjusting the masses you can find a place where the arbitrariily light but forceful kite will fling the anchor such that their center of mass is higher than the wind. QED
Fourth is it possible to sustain an average not instantaneous speed above the wind? I don't think so
imagine the following car. it has an enourmous kite pulling it. the wheels are hooked to dynamos that soak up energy and store it in a battery. you can make the kite as large as you like so you can inject an arbitratily large amount of energy in a given time into the battery. You then use this to drive the car faster than the wind. during this time you are using stored energy. Also during this time the kite is falling behind at a rate equal to the car-windspeed.
In order for the kit to catch up the car needs to go slower than wind speed such delta speed times time equals that distance lost by the kite.
I think those two cancel to give an average speed equal to the wind. I could be wrong.
Y'know sharp like the edges of a Archos MP3 brick when the ipod came out. Holding one of these huge things to your head to talk will have everyone laughing like it was an episode of Bean. This will get the brown Zune prize for 2010.
the app is still in the store. Perhaps this story is not true?
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-frame-alarm-clock-displays/id364532249?mt=8
Some sheer speculation: perhaps if you have an App that changes the apparent user interface it will be purged?
For example I would expect that an app
1) create it's own desktop
2) place functionality of other apps on this desktop
could be used for example to make it a work-alike to a google phone or could be used to fool the user into entering passwords by looking like the real desktop.
tunes4 is supposedly going to crank up the sandboxing of apps, with encrypted memory partions. Perhaps these apps that merge data from other apps are going to get purged?
I really have to wonder if there is more than meets the sound-bite here. It sounds absurd yes. But then again it would be absurd to be so capricious. Maybe were not getting the full story? Apple is if anything not illogical in their choices. You may vehemently disagree with their choices but the choices all have an internal logic. I can't see any logic here. I suspect this may be a BS story.
It's under continuous development and refinement. The project its self is divided into two logical compartments. Half the team is studying how best to implement the algorithm and the other half is studying how users interact and how to improve that.
Fold proteins to cure disease and outscore your opponent.
it means that they will have to collect your Taxpayer ID number and then validate it.
so no illegal alliens can use E-bay.
Since they will be reporting SSNs to the IRS it will also be interesting if the law enforcement agencies sniff this for fugitives. Supposedly SSNs are not supposed to get used for law enforcement but they are.
I wonder how they will deal with people who claim not to be US citizens.
Why would anyone need to be "in the closet" about anything?
I was surprised so many are. Is there a list so we can hunt them down?
The reason microsoft succeeded was because they wrote a great application called Word. In it's time it was truly great compared to the competition (word perfect for example). Other than being comprehensive and less clunky than open office it's not such a remarkable product anymore. But if you are bussiness or Govt you have to have a copy of it. It's the standard and you always get some document that the emulators don't open correctly, so you have to use it no matter what processor you prefer.
Windows I think rode on the coat-tails of this. Windows mac was a superior product up through version 5 but it was not fully compatible with the Windows version. As a result, windows OS became the preferred operating system for providing compatibility of word documents. This choice was cemented by the fact that windows ran on cheaper computers. But I think it was Word that was pulling the buggy, not the OS.
Ironically, Word 6 made the Mac and PC versions more interoperable by removing the advanced features from the mac product. But by then the product offered an integrated environment on the PC with outlook and server systems. So it still was better to use the PC than the Mac version for business.
If you were starting over today, the huge standardization on word probably would not happen.
This is the boat MS is in now with mobile computing. Word is behind the curve on being a first rate mobile product. If they don't get something better out there people may start to standardize on something else once the reasons become compelling enough.
I think that microsoft is fully capable of producing a first class mobile computing set of tools. Why they haven't is mysterious to me.
Objective C is what C++ should have been. It is true that the unconventional syntax drove people away. If you look at the concept of java and compare it to the implemention of java you can conclude that a lot of the late binding ideas of java were fantastic but something went wrong (I am reminded of this every time I look a my process list and see all the big real-memory apps are java, and they take ten times longer to start than they should.)
Objective C has the finest elements of java, but lacks the overwrought clumsiness of C++. objective C is very lean. But it leverages a lot of late binding and messaging ideas to allow the language to grow sophisticated idioms (e.g. why should I have to write the get-set methods for attributes by hand?) Those "@" you ridicule are saving you a lot of possible syntax errors and make the code a lot shorter.
Objective C is also had the benefit of maturing in isolation where it can avoid having as many crufty libraries and 5000 different idioms for the same thing.
Look for the upcoming merger/acquisition.
Wow, the last time When bill gates was there to invest a chunk of change in apple development it was partly motivated by MS trying to avoid the Antitrust abyss by making sure MS was not a monopoly (at least on the commercial side).
Now it's a role reversal. MS is at this point in time a Fscked company (Win7 blow on touch devices, WinCE is on life support on phones, xbox360 has lost it's pricepoint sweet spot and is now squeezed by nintendo and Playstation, the big payday product, Office, is seriously threatened by cloud savvy products better for mobile communications, the latest office is not better than the old one so why buy it, and Win7 hasn't exactly got anyone excited.) Basically MS cannot execute. It would probably actually be good for them to downsize and re-grow.
Now the apple lesson has two parts to it. 1) It does not matter how great your company once was, your company can die faster than you think 2) A once great but sick company can comeback if it can find it's mojo again.
The sick part here is that development and office environments that microsoft created for the original mac was what lead to it losing market share. I personally suspect that Windows did not succeed as an OS until Office succeed and made Windows the preferred platform for running this killer app. Here we go again!
Drug leads are cheap compared to developing a drug. A friend worked at a drug lead company. They got bought by a big pharma. Within 2 years they had produced more drug leads than the pharma could validate in the next decade. So the pharma sold off the company.
Glaxco is no doubt saturated with drug leads too. According to Merk is takes about 400 million dollars to walk one drug all the way through clinical trials. So there's a perpetual winnowing process at every stage with plenty of candidates to step in when an advanced compound is eliminated from further study.
If you sell your drug lead company who do you think buys it? the competition. SO it's not like open sourcing something gives your competition something they could not get otherwise.
Instead it just makes everything more efficient. The only reason for them to sit on those compounds would be if they simply wanted to prevent other from making them out of fear they might compete with their own,but having no intention of perusing them. Which would be pretty shitty business. It does happen of course (Monsanto is often accused of this.).
So Glaxo is being brave and doing the right thing. But it's not costing them anything except possibly competition if one of those abandoned leads turns out to be the one.
Now here' the twist:
Ironically, by opening it up they maybe doing more to supress this compound than if they had kept quiet. The reason is, it's now unpatentable. What other company would invest in it?
Thus short of government development of these. opening it up kills it's further development more effectively than saying nothing.
His sci-am columns and books affected my life made me love math.
I don't want to start a flame war, but can someone tell me when windows is going to support a one button mouse?