do the dimensional analysis and you'll find that fuel economy goes down as the inverse square of speed. 120mph is 4 times worse than 60mph.
in the limit this is absolutely true, but at lower speeds there are other factors. mileage in my civic hybrid peaks at about 45 mph (~60 mpg), and i still get 50mpg at 65mph.
Along the lines of "LISP with ugly parens" is the Water project at MIT.
I've had my own adventure along these lines (Unigrok really *is* XML) but you sort of run into problems embedding a real language into XML because of function return values.
As in how would your "syntax" indicate returning values from a function or user-defined tag. Try to be too general and pretty soon you've got XSL on your hands (and still haven't solved the problem).
step one in dealing with the speed issue is to jettison the various slow parsers like SAX - you can get competitive with native serialization and retain the text advantages of xml. see frex http://sourceforge.net/projects/javadata/
i like the comments about the binary->xml->binary full circle. reminds me of how the original ethernet evolved from a coax bus to a point to point switched network.. ether in name only.
As was noted before, this story was in Car&Driver a while ago. Turns out they had to push the Prius to 60 or so MPH in order for the batteries to keep working through the measured mile at 130 MPH.
Which brings up another aspect of energy as relates to racing. 20 years ago the premier sports car racing class was called Group C, in which there were *NO* engine rules beyond being given a certain amount of fuel for each race.
At the time, Porsche was the big winner because of its turbocharged/intercooled cars. Now I imagine someone could make some headway with a hybrid approach that avoided throwing so much energy away as heat from braking.
If all you could store was the energy from a single 200-60 MPH deceleration, the advantage would be tremendous.
CVS and the like are as important to revisions of documents as to software.
In this light, the one thing that troubles me about OOo's XML format is that there still appears to be no option for writing an uncompressed XML file.
Doing this would fix one of the worst things about putting documents into CVS (with, say, MS Word docs), that they are usually binary and not diffable.
The FAQ for OOo mentions some sort of "history" behind the decision not to do this. Whatever the arguments are against it, they can't be as important as the need to use proper revision control with documents.
I would further recommend a no-leading-whitespace formatting of said XML so that changing only the embedding of a document piece doesn't generate a diff jackpot.
It's really Ctrl, at least on every computer I touch.
BTW I feel sorry for the Emacs-mavens who don't turn their Caps Locks into Ctrl. I'm sure the failure to do so is a major contributor to the high incidence of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in Emacs users.
open markets are positive feedback and therefore inherently unstable systems.
regulation and policing can change the feedback loop enough to bring quasi-stability, but it's interesting that all it takes is a big goof to set off some sort of spiral.
if you really want stability, there's always communism, but the limit point is zero.
me, i'll take unstable but with regulation and jail time for fraud.
nasdaq is all electronic, right? is rollback possible?
sometimes i would watch taped movies in fast forward - partly because of an impending return deadline, partly because they can drag.
with foreign movies you could still read the subtitles, so even at 3X or 7X or whatever the FF speed is, comprehension was fine.
dvd has brought subtitles to most native language movies.. but the damn players all seem to think you don't need subtitles when you're going fast forward!
Java itself is quite a nice language, and the amazing speed it can be compiled (as opposed to C) is testament to that.
The libraries, however, are huge and often not well-designed, and it's depressing how much baggage you need to carry.
JSP, well, it's quite a pig. Three different ways of writing web pages, huge config, and even more monstrous packages (like Struts) whose config alone dwarfs what you would think your web app size should be.
There are alternatives, enabled by Java even. Wouldn't be right to plug mine here tho.
by necessity, they have to be able to account for and bill for very small charges.
it's been a while since telcos had regulated "profit", so they have of late been motivated to make this function cheaper.
but they're just too slow and stupid to figure out how to do this with internetworking - for which i imagine other companies would OEM if it were cheap enough. sort of like amazon hosting storefronts for businesses all the way up to borders.
Here's another old sci-fi idea that I haven't seen mentioned recently.
Basically, the notion is to build a long Mach N (2 < N < 6) linear motor along the slope of a mountain to give a smallish space plane a running start.
The benefits are twofold: 1) external propulsion to take a couple steps outside the weight-fuel-weight vicious circle, and 2) release at 8000 ft or so to reduce somewhat the energy required to pass through the atmosphere.
I don't know how big a deal (2) is in the grander scheme of getting into LEO. The bigger deal by far is to stop having to build rockets that are so huge because of the small margin chemical reaction energy has over the gravity well we live in.
i was really looking forward to the new module api. i could be wrong or looking in the wrong place, but the 60-plus-element struct apache 2.0 hands you is more than a little daunting.
writing your own http handler seems easier, although granted it would be nice to have all the config goo handled by apache.
i want a simple api, sort of a C equivalent to javax.servlet, and an example that really shows how simple it is.
software is only part of the story. if the shuttle is running on 7400 series TTL, its computers are using up too much space, too much weight, and *way* too much power.
all of these are multiplied in severity by the fuel needed to lift it (and the fuel needed to lift the extra fuel).
the shuttle is only one generation beyond "spam in a can" and is a very inefficient way of taking things to orbit. nasa has to innovate or get out of the way.
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drag goes up as the square of speed.
power required goes up as the cube.
do the dimensional analysis and you'll find that fuel economy goes down as the inverse square of speed. 120mph is 4 times worse than 60mph.
in the limit this is absolutely true, but at lower speeds there are other factors. mileage in my civic hybrid peaks at about 45 mph (~60 mpg), and i still get 50mpg at 65mph.
YMMV
Along the lines of "LISP with ugly parens" is the Water project at MIT.
I've had my own adventure along these lines (Unigrok really *is* XML) but you sort of run into problems embedding a real language into XML because of function return values.
As in how would your "syntax" indicate returning values from a function or user-defined tag. Try to be too general and pretty soon you've got XSL on your hands (and still haven't solved the problem).
synergies!
step one in dealing with the speed issue is to jettison the various slow parsers like SAX - you can get competitive with native serialization and retain the text advantages of xml. see frex http://sourceforge.net/projects/javadata/
i like the comments about the binary->xml->binary full circle. reminds me of how the original ethernet evolved from a coax bus to a point to point switched network.. ether in name only.
What if you just want to crack the case to look at how beautiful it is inside?? Will that void the warranty too?
the tournament of roses parade pre-dates and is independent of the rose bowl football game.
As was noted before, this story was in Car&Driver a while ago. Turns out they had to push the Prius to 60 or so MPH in order for the batteries to keep working through the measured mile at 130 MPH.
Which brings up another aspect of energy as relates to racing. 20 years ago the premier sports car racing class was called Group C, in which there were *NO* engine rules beyond being given a certain amount of fuel for each race.
At the time, Porsche was the big winner because of its turbocharged/intercooled cars. Now I imagine someone could make some headway with a hybrid approach that avoided throwing so much energy away as heat from braking.
If all you could store was the energy from a single 200-60 MPH deceleration, the advantage would be tremendous.
Maybe it should be.. then there would be plenty of prior art to invalide the patent(s).
Smalltalk76 (as in 1976, though it wasn't really running until 1977) used a bytecode interpreter, for example.
CVS and the like are as important to revisions of documents as to software.
In this light, the one thing that troubles me about OOo's XML format is that there still appears to be no option for writing an uncompressed XML file.
Doing this would fix one of the worst things about putting documents into CVS (with, say, MS Word docs), that they are usually binary and not diffable.
The FAQ for OOo mentions some sort of "history" behind the decision not to do this. Whatever the arguments are against it, they can't be as important as the need to use proper revision control with documents.
I would further recommend a no-leading-whitespace formatting of said XML so that changing only the embedding of a document piece doesn't generate a diff jackpot.
It's really Ctrl, at least on every computer I touch.
BTW I feel sorry for the Emacs-mavens who don't turn their Caps Locks into Ctrl. I'm sure the failure to do so is a major contributor to the high incidence of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in Emacs users.
open markets are positive feedback and therefore inherently unstable systems.
regulation and policing can change the feedback loop enough to bring quasi-stability, but it's interesting that all it takes is a big goof to set off some sort of spiral.
if you really want stability, there's always communism, but the limit point is zero.
me, i'll take unstable but with regulation and jail time for fraud.
nasdaq is all electronic, right? is rollback possible?
C'mon, this is the Borg we're talking about. Every new assmilation improves the whole.
Plus I'm sure M$ made it very clear to Google that they can be bought out, or die.
sometimes i would watch taped movies in fast forward - partly because of an impending return deadline, partly because they can drag.
.. but the damn players all seem to think you don't need subtitles when you're going fast forward!
with foreign movies you could still read the subtitles, so even at 3X or 7X or whatever the FF speed is, comprehension was fine.
dvd has brought subtitles to most native language movies
to me this is the biggest problem with dvd.
Being a text format, XML would at least bring documents out of the binary world and allow diffs and things that use diffs, like CVS.
Imagine actually being able to use source control to track documents!
Unfortunately OO defaults to gzipping the XML, which brings us right back to binary.
Java itself is quite a nice language, and the amazing speed it can be compiled (as opposed to C) is testament to that.
The libraries, however, are huge and often not well-designed, and it's depressing how much baggage you need to carry.
JSP, well, it's quite a pig. Three different ways of writing web pages, huge config, and even more monstrous packages (like Struts) whose config alone dwarfs what you would think your web app size should be.
There are alternatives, enabled by Java even. Wouldn't be right to plug mine here tho.
The Clippies, of course!
i don't see what this has to do with my point.
by necessity, they have to be able to account for and bill for very small charges.
it's been a while since telcos had regulated "profit", so they have of late been motivated to make this function cheaper.
but they're just too slow and stupid to figure out how to do this with internetworking - for which i imagine other companies would OEM if it were cheap enough. sort of like amazon hosting storefronts for businesses all the way up to borders.
billing has always been a Big Deal for them, and they have been adapting to customer demand for flat rate in some cases (but not all).
bell labs used to employ economists and psychologists and periodically re-addressed the issues of billing.
TPC managements have been clueless about the internet from the beginning, though. quite a shame.
Do you think there will be a movie of The Mote in God's Eye any time soon?
10+ years ago someone from Pixar told me it was one of his favorite books, but that the technology for making a movie of it wasn't there yet.
I'm hoping that has changed, as Mote is my favoite SF novel.
Has someone purchased movie rights, and if so are they doing anything about it?
Here's another old sci-fi idea that I haven't seen mentioned recently.
Basically, the notion is to build a long Mach N (2 < N < 6) linear motor along the slope of a mountain to give a smallish space plane a running start.
The benefits are twofold: 1) external propulsion to take a couple steps outside the weight-fuel-weight vicious circle, and 2) release at 8000 ft or so to reduce somewhat the energy required to pass through the atmosphere.
I don't know how big a deal (2) is in the grander scheme of getting into LEO. The bigger deal by far is to stop having to build rockets that are so huge because of the small margin chemical reaction energy has over the gravity well we live in.
Fireball XL5 here we come!
i was really looking forward to the new module api. i could be wrong or looking in the wrong place, but the 60-plus-element struct apache 2.0 hands you is more than a little daunting.
writing your own http handler seems easier, although granted it would be nice to have all the config goo handled by apache.
i want a simple api, sort of a C equivalent to javax.servlet, and an example that really shows how simple it is.
you probably don't have 7400S, or 7400LS, or 7400M (military) or whatever technology is actually in there.
today's CMOS stuff probably doesn't cut it. also, who knows what arcane parts like 74LS166 shift registers they used that aren't in your little bag.
speed is also an issue. too fast is as bad as too slow in some cases.
software is only part of the story. if the shuttle is running on 7400 series TTL, its computers are using up too much space, too much weight, and *way* too much power.
all of these are multiplied in severity by the fuel needed to lift it (and the fuel needed to lift the extra fuel).
the shuttle is only one generation beyond "spam in a can" and is a very inefficient way of taking things to orbit. nasa has to innovate or get out of the way.
..and its variations are great construction set games. They just don't teach you about nut/bolt sizes.
all-electric cars are a net lose in terms of energy and environment.
the hybrid 4-door cars are good for 45-50 mpg.
a diesel jetta is rated at 41 mpg, *but* diesel fuel , being roughly kerosene, requires much less effort and energy to refine than gasoline.