The Spruce Goose, even regarded as a WIGE vehicle (which I agree was its intended purpose), still had one major problem: it was grossly underpowered, and needed a huge stretch of calm water to haul itself airborne. With WW2-era aeroengines, it just wasn't going to be viable.
[nitpick] For most definitions of "largest", the Spruce Goose is NOT the largest aircraft ever built. I think it's still the largest wing-span (97.5m) vehicle to ever get airborne, but the Antonov An-225 Mriya is longer (84m v 67m), and WAY heavier (600 vs 180 Tonnes)
low-level flight over water? What's the trouble with good old boats?
Speed. A fast ship does about 30-40 knots, a big Wing In Ground Effect vehicle can do 300+. While carrying a coupla hundred tons of cargo. It's kind of a mid-way point between a cargo ship and air freight. Whether such things are commercially viable given the incredible conservatism of the world's aviation industry is another matter entirely.
The Worlds Fastest Ground Effect Vehicle
At the 85 knots quoted in the article, it's still a loooong way short of the old soviet Ekranoplans (the 550 ton KM model did 500 km/h - about 300 mph )
I still don't see any real advantage of this design since I first heard about it.
The soviet military wanted to use them as landing craft. Think about it. One vehicle, that can carry two main battle tanks and a few dozen troops, at 300 mph, across a few hundred miles of water. A few dozen of them, and presto! instant amphibious assault force.
The "Ground Effect" seriously kicks in at about 1/2 the aircraft's wingspan above the water. So small WIG vehicles have to fly close to the surface and therefore require a pretty flat surface (unless you want to feel like a stone being skipped across a pond, anyhow). Bigger vehicles can fly higher, and are less fazed by things like waves.
[snip] our concerns should be focused on standard vs. proprietary tag/feature/etc support, HTML interpretation "correctness" and other metamatters.
Exactly. AOL swapping to a mozilla/gecko based browser isn't just "AOL swapping to !IE", but "AOL swapping to a [much more] Standards-compliant browser"
[I'm not sure] that compuserve is relevant anymore.
Compuserve is relevant because AOL is using it/them as an advance guard/guinea pig [delete as applicable]
How so? INCLUDING mail/news, the IRC client, the javascript debugger and the DOM inspector, Mozilla is just over 10 MB on win32. IE (excluding all that juicy functionality) is about 17MB (according to microsoft, anyhow, though you may have half of it already, whether you want it or not)
Also, I find it very difficult to believe that 95% of their customers are on a browser that was released about 7 months ago. You could say that this is a statistical improbability!
Possibly the reason 95% of the users of the site are on IE6 is it's the only browser that works with the site, and all the people using other browsers got pissed off and went somewhere else.
Yet another reason to treat web statistics with caution.
point your browsers at: http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm They're the best free stats I've found, together with a quick rundown of some reasons why stats aren't the be-all and end-all of everything.
Regarding the statmarket stuff, here's a few things to think about: All they've said is "netscape's market share down, IE6's market share up". (shock!) Given the current marketing firepower behind netscape (approximately nil) and IE (handed on a plate to virtually every PC buyer, installed with numerous third party ISPs and applications, dubious double life as service packs for win9x, cover headlines on computing mags for new releases), this is hardly news.
This "market" is not static in size: it's actually growing quite rapidly. I suspect that much of the "swing from NS to IE" during the "browser war" 2-5 years ago was actually just new users going straight to IE (hence the lawsuits), though there were no doubt a quite a few running from the appalling stability of NS4.x. Nowadays, however, some of the old NS diehards are getting fed up with 4.x (no meaningful patches for at least 2 years now) and migrating elsewhere. The arrival of some decent competition (icab, mozilla & co, konquerer) in the Mac/unix markets is probably contributing there, as is the continuing rise of Opera in the low-cpu-horsepower arena.
> Is there much difference between the Mozilla 1.0 build and the Netscape 6.11?
IIRC, Netscape 6.11 is based on mozilla 0.9.2, which was released about 9 months ago. There have been some improvements since then, notably: - substantial performance tuning - tabbed browsing - the javascript debugger - DOM inspector (I think) - a complete re-jig of the menus and context menus (though the latter is driving some people nuts)
Slashdot Mirror
The Spruce Goose, even regarded as a WIGE vehicle (which I agree was its intended purpose), still had one major problem: it was grossly underpowered, and needed a huge stretch of calm water to haul itself airborne. With WW2-era aeroengines, it just wasn't going to be viable.
[nitpick] For most definitions of "largest", the Spruce Goose is NOT the largest aircraft ever built. I think it's still the largest wing-span (97.5m) vehicle to ever get airborne, but the Antonov An-225 Mriya is longer (84m v 67m), and WAY heavier (600 vs 180 Tonnes)
(yes, Opera beats the pair of them hands down)
Yet another reason to treat web statistics with caution.
For totally excessive levels of detail, see mozilla's (formerly netscape's) ultimate browser sniffer
point your browsers at:
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
They're the best free stats I've found, together with a quick rundown of some reasons why stats aren't the be-all and end-all of everything.
Regarding the statmarket stuff, here's a few things to think about:
All they've said is "netscape's market share down, IE6's market share up". (shock!) Given the current marketing firepower behind netscape (approximately nil) and IE (handed on a plate to virtually every PC buyer, installed with numerous third party ISPs and applications, dubious double life as service packs for win9x, cover headlines on computing mags for new releases), this is hardly news.
This "market" is not static in size: it's actually growing quite rapidly. I suspect that much of the "swing from NS to IE" during the "browser war" 2-5 years ago was actually just new users going straight to IE (hence the lawsuits), though there were no doubt a quite a few running from the appalling stability of NS4.x. Nowadays, however, some of the old NS diehards are getting fed up with 4.x (no meaningful patches for at least 2 years now) and migrating elsewhere. The arrival of some decent competition (icab, mozilla & co, konquerer) in the Mac/unix markets is probably contributing there, as is the continuing rise of Opera in the low-cpu-horsepower arena.
> Is there much difference between the Mozilla 1.0 build and the Netscape 6.11?
IIRC, Netscape 6.11 is based on mozilla 0.9.2, which was released about 9 months ago. There have been some improvements since then, notably:
- substantial performance tuning
- tabbed browsing
- the javascript debugger
- DOM inspector (I think)
- a complete re-jig of the menus and context menus (though the latter is driving some people nuts)