But that's part of the problem. If you want to use an ion engine to get you out of orbit, it's going to take a very long time. On the order of years. Ion engines make sense for trips that are long distance, like going to Mars, or even further out in the solar system, and beyond, but to actually escape Earth's gravity, while possible, would increase the trip length to the point of significantly slowing down the mission.
Personally, I don't think Android is all that great. The only great thing about it is that it's popular and therefore there's lots of apps out there. But from a technical standpoint, it's nothing to write home about. Maybe it's just because I have an older device, but I find it like getting sent back to the old days. I have to reboot my phone on a regular basis, because it gets bogged down if I don't. Applications constant take over all the resources of my phone, which requires me to take out the battery to restart it, and the phone for some reason or another refuses to go into low power states (must be some process running in the background) causing the battery to run down at an alarming rate. There's no upgrades to my phone, and any third party ROMs I've tried to install have just failed to boot. I guess it's different depending on the handset you get, which is another problem with Android, It can be a really terrible experience if you end up with the wrong handset. There's lots of improvement to be made. If Blackberry can release an OS that's stable and has enough apps that I can do the stuff I need to do, I really don't care if it plays the latest games, or connects to every social network under the sun.
Either that, or it also ends up having a lot of false positives. Basically, if you flag almost everything as malware, you're going to be able to catch most of the malware. The great thing about MS Security Essentials is that it doesn't try to find reasons to justify it's existence.
Yeah, but that only works once you're already in space, and from what I'm aware, doesn't even help if you are in orbit around earth. It's only useful once you've reached a certain distance away from the earth/moon. Ion drives work by putting out a small force continuously over a long period of time, in space, where there is very little force acting on you. As soon as there's a strong force to contend with, like in the earth's atmosphere, or even outside the earth's atmosphere, but still under strong influence from earth's gravity, they fail to be able to produce enough force to power a space craft.
Or those who can't take simple algorithm descriptions (fizz-buzz), and convert it into a working program, should be counted as not-really-a-programmer. I don't want to use the word "hobbyist" in this case, or in yours, because there's plenty of people I know who only program in their spare time, but have great programming skills, while people who are actually employed as software developers or programmers who can not tell you what the complexity of an algorithm is, nor can they make a simple algorithm base on a description of what it should do.
The problem with mining the moon, and space travel in general, is a pure physics problem. One that isn't easily solved. The reason that we haven't advanced space travel much in the past 30 years is because it's actually not really solvable without some huge leap in technology, such as anti-gravity drives or space elevators, which are all science fiction at the moment.
The problem is this. Since there's little-to-no air for spacecraft to put against as we leave the atmosphere, the only way we can accelerate (or resists accelerating back towards the earth), as we reach the upper atmosphere is to eject mass out the back of the spacecraft at high speed. Due to Newton's third law, pushing mass out the back of a spacecraft creates a reactive force propelling the spacecraft forward. You can't have an electric spacecraft like you can an electric car because there's no road for the spacecraft to push against. For every gram of cargo you want to put into space, you have to have enough fuel to propel that mass into space, also, remembering that the fuel itself has mass, which itself must be propelled a certain distance until it is expelled.
Yeah, but it would probably be fine is people stuck to chat and sending a few pictures back and forth. People were probably trying to shared all kinds of files including videos over a system that wasn't really designed for that kind of traffic.
This is what they should really be spending their money and effort on. Printing 3D objects that can't be made in traditional methods. 3D Printing will never be better than traditional methods for items that can be done using traditional methods. And that's not just because we haven't given 3D printing enough time to catch up. It would be like a laser printer catching up with an offset printing press. Impossible. We should instead focus on getting 3D printers to print up objects that can't be produced by other methods.
I've often wondered about this. Let's say you want a fake gold bar. You could start off with something that's the same density as gold (a cheaper metal alloy of the correct density), and then just coat it in a thin layer of actual gold. Sure there is going to be some real gold there, so it's not completely fake, but it has to be cheaper than making an entire gold brick. Sure they would find out if they every cut the brick in half, or melted it down, but you could be way out of town by the time that happened.
In which case, looking at the specs, it's pretty future proof. My brother just had his first Mac Mini die, and it was one of the original Core2Duo machines. It worked just fine for many years. The newest one will probably work as a simple desktop for the next 5 years, no problem. With Thunderbolt, USB3, SDXC, and Gigabit Ethernet, it's probably about as futureproof as you can get at this point, while still maintaining such a small form factor. I'm Still using the same Windows Desktop I bought 8 years ago. Nothing (apart from gaming) has changed enough in the past 8 years to warrant an upgrade for desktops. They've been fast enough for quite a long time.
Are they still selling it? because they also released a new one at the same time as iPad Air, with increase resolution, and the new Motion Coprocessor. Basically, exact same specs as iPad Air, but in a smaller form factor.
One (slightly obtuse) solution for this is to run Visual Studio on a remote machine, and connect to is with Remote Desktop. You can even install Visual Studio on an Azure instance if you're so inclined, and connect to that. Not the best of solutions, but certainly a somewhat decent work around. Personally, I still do all my development on a real desktop, but for portable computing, the Surface fits me just fine.
The Surface 2 Pro has a USB 3 port and a DisplayPort connector, so It can be used with a decent monitor, keyboard and Mouse. Even the Surface 2 (not Pro) supports USB 3, and Mini HDMI, so it also supports keyboard, mouse, and a decent monitor. You'll need a USB hub to plug in both a USB mouse and keyboard, but that should work just fine. Since it's USB3, you could probably plug in a mouse, keyboard, and large hard disk and completely replace your desktop with either Surface 2 Pro, or Surface 2, depending on whether or not you want legacy app support.
Let's look at actual dates. iPad 2 was released in March 2011, So any iPad bought up until February 2011 would have been iPad 1. iOS 7 was released September 2013. So that gives roughly 2 years, 7 months between the iPad 1 being the current device, and iOS making the iPad 1 obsolete. So it's definitely more than 2 years, but less than 3. Which is a short period of time compare to other iOS devices. Although I really can't fault them. The original iPad only has 256 MB of RAM. The iPad Air (and even 3rd and 4th gen) has 1 GB of RAM. They just aren't comparable at all in terms of performance. Also, let's remember that iOS isn't just an operating system, but a bunch of included applications (Maps, Siri), It's going to be hard to get all that to run on such a low end device.
Exactly my problem. I won't choose Apple because there's no expandable storage (and base upgrades cost way too much). I won't choose Android because the software will never get upgraded. In the end, all that was left was Windows. I had to choose between Surface2 and Asus T100. While T100 did have some very nice advantages, such as full X86 Windows, and included keyboard, they seemed to really skimp on the build and component quality, which is the reason I decided on the Surface. Plus, as far as tablets go, I think getting rid of all the legacy stuff that's in X86 Windows is an advantage.
Maybe that's part of the resounding success of Apple. The fact that they sell quality hardware that will last more than a year, and that they support the hardware with software updates for more than a year probably has a lot to do with the reason people choose to pay for their products. They're still selling the iPad 2 as the lower end option, which means they'll probably support at least that device for the next 2 or 3 years, so anybody who bought it originally got quite a bit of lifetime out of it. And even though they put out a new model every year (which they should to ensure they don't fall behind the competition, and to justify keeping prices high), they still continue to support the old models.
Regardless, Apple seems to be better than everyone else in this regard. With Android tablets it's a mystery as to whether or not you'll get upgrades at all. Sure you have more luck with Nexus tablets over other Android models, but they don't really have that long of a track record with tablets, so it's really hard to tell. For Christmas this year I spent a lot of time researching tablets, and settled on the Surface2. Sure, mock me or call me an MS shill if you want, but it's the only tablet out there that's 10 inch, has expandable storage, and I can be reasonably assured that I'll get software updates on a regular basis. Oh, and you can run 2 apps at the same time with both on screen. The only downside is the lack of apps, but the selection is growing, and as far as I can tell, I can do all the tasks I need to do. Sure it's missing some specific applications, and specific games, but it has enough of both to get the job done. And for many tasks. It also appears to be well built, with quality hardware, something missing from many Android tablets.
With a 5 mbit connection, it should only take 1600 seconds (ignoring protocol overhead) to download a gigabyte. That's less than 1/2 an hour. Even assuming protocol overhead is really high, it should still take less than 1 hour. A reasonable quality 2 hour movie can fit in about 1 gigabyte. So you should technically be able to stream a movie (or two) easily on a 5 mbit connection. I think it depends on the source where you're doing the streaming from though. I have a 28 mbit connection, and Netflix obviously plays fine. But stuff on Youtube is almost always unwatchable, as it refuses to buffer more than 3 seconds in advance, and often freezes. And it won't start playing again until you refresh the whole page.
when you turned it off, the clock stopped, so it never had the slightest idea of what the time was unless you set it every time you turned it on.
So does the Raspberry Pi, but those seem to be selling quite well, and people are quite pleased with them. I have enough devices that can tell me the time. Sure it would be nice if it kept proper time, but I don't see how that's essential to many of the things you may want to use a tablet for. The GameBoy doesn't have a clock either. Didn't stop us from having tons of fun playing games on it. If it can do games, reading, and play videos, none of which require a clock, or even network connectivity, it would be a great device to have for many situations. Not to replace the iPad, but to have in conjunction with an iPad.
Personally, I would buy a $38 tablet provided it actually worked for a reasonable amount of time (1-2 years), and could do some basic tasks. I don't want to tote around my $500 tablet everywhere I go, but it would be nice to have a cheap device that I didn't care so much if I dropped it, or it got too cold and ceased to function. It doesn't have to be a replacement for the iPad or any other tablet at that price. People will buy an iPad (or similarly high priced tablet, like Galaxy Tab/Note or Surface2), as well as a cheap $40 tablet to take with them when they don't want to have something expensive on them. Same reason why many people who own a DSLR also have a cheap point and shoot. And same reason why I would buy that $15 Nokia phone if it ever sees the light of day. There are certain things people do where they don't want to be carrying around thousands of dollars of electronics.
Similar to this, I'd gladly trade 2/3 of my current speed to get unlimited (or very high) throughput. Currently with my provider you can't get higher throughput without upgrading the speed, which increases the price quite a bit.
Yeah, most people don't really need internet that's that fast. 5-10 Mbps should really be more than enough for most home users. This gives you enough bandwidth to stream a couple videos at the same time. The big problem that I have is that with my current ISP (and all others in my area) is that the pricing structure is set up all wrong. You can either pay a low price for 5 Mbps, but be limited to 15 GB of transfer, or you can pay more for higher transfer speeds (up to 150 mbps), and then be given more higher transfer limits, but it still tops out around 150 GB. I would love to be able to purchase extra throughput, without having to pay for higher speeds at the same time, but such a plan doesn't exist.
The fines have to be quite high to offset the fact that it's impossible to catch every incidence of an infraction. If you could fine people $10 every single time they were speeding with 100% accuracy, then people would speed a lot less. But since you can only catch (and process through the courts) a very small percentage of people breaking the law, the fines have to be quite high to offset the low probability that they will actually be caught. If you combine the low probability of being caught, with low fines, then most people will just choose to break the law, and pay the small fine for the small number of times they are caught.
The interesting thing is that in French, they stopped making new numbers after sixty. Seventy is "soixante dix" which is sixty ten, which is followed by "soixante onze", "sixty eleven", and so on. Eight, like you said is quatre vingts, and ninety is "quatre vingts dix".
Slashdot Mirror
But that's part of the problem. If you want to use an ion engine to get you out of orbit, it's going to take a very long time. On the order of years. Ion engines make sense for trips that are long distance, like going to Mars, or even further out in the solar system, and beyond, but to actually escape Earth's gravity, while possible, would increase the trip length to the point of significantly slowing down the mission.
Personally, I don't think Android is all that great. The only great thing about it is that it's popular and therefore there's lots of apps out there. But from a technical standpoint, it's nothing to write home about. Maybe it's just because I have an older device, but I find it like getting sent back to the old days. I have to reboot my phone on a regular basis, because it gets bogged down if I don't. Applications constant take over all the resources of my phone, which requires me to take out the battery to restart it, and the phone for some reason or another refuses to go into low power states (must be some process running in the background) causing the battery to run down at an alarming rate. There's no upgrades to my phone, and any third party ROMs I've tried to install have just failed to boot. I guess it's different depending on the handset you get, which is another problem with Android, It can be a really terrible experience if you end up with the wrong handset. There's lots of improvement to be made. If Blackberry can release an OS that's stable and has enough apps that I can do the stuff I need to do, I really don't care if it plays the latest games, or connects to every social network under the sun.
Either that, or it also ends up having a lot of false positives. Basically, if you flag almost everything as malware, you're going to be able to catch most of the malware. The great thing about MS Security Essentials is that it doesn't try to find reasons to justify it's existence.
Yeah, but that only works once you're already in space, and from what I'm aware, doesn't even help if you are in orbit around earth. It's only useful once you've reached a certain distance away from the earth/moon. Ion drives work by putting out a small force continuously over a long period of time, in space, where there is very little force acting on you. As soon as there's a strong force to contend with, like in the earth's atmosphere, or even outside the earth's atmosphere, but still under strong influence from earth's gravity, they fail to be able to produce enough force to power a space craft.
Or those who can't take simple algorithm descriptions (fizz-buzz), and convert it into a working program, should be counted as not-really-a-programmer. I don't want to use the word "hobbyist" in this case, or in yours, because there's plenty of people I know who only program in their spare time, but have great programming skills, while people who are actually employed as software developers or programmers who can not tell you what the complexity of an algorithm is, nor can they make a simple algorithm base on a description of what it should do.
The problem with mining the moon, and space travel in general, is a pure physics problem. One that isn't easily solved. The reason that we haven't advanced space travel much in the past 30 years is because it's actually not really solvable without some huge leap in technology, such as anti-gravity drives or space elevators, which are all science fiction at the moment.
The problem is this. Since there's little-to-no air for spacecraft to put against as we leave the atmosphere, the only way we can accelerate (or resists accelerating back towards the earth), as we reach the upper atmosphere is to eject mass out the back of the spacecraft at high speed. Due to Newton's third law, pushing mass out the back of a spacecraft creates a reactive force propelling the spacecraft forward. You can't have an electric spacecraft like you can an electric car because there's no road for the spacecraft to push against. For every gram of cargo you want to put into space, you have to have enough fuel to propel that mass into space, also, remembering that the fuel itself has mass, which itself must be propelled a certain distance until it is expelled.
Yeah, but it would probably be fine is people stuck to chat and sending a few pictures back and forth. People were probably trying to shared all kinds of files including videos over a system that wasn't really designed for that kind of traffic.
This is what they should really be spending their money and effort on. Printing 3D objects that can't be made in traditional methods. 3D Printing will never be better than traditional methods for items that can be done using traditional methods. And that's not just because we haven't given 3D printing enough time to catch up. It would be like a laser printer catching up with an offset printing press. Impossible. We should instead focus on getting 3D printers to print up objects that can't be produced by other methods.
Or, you know, you could just use a regular bullet, and engrave the message on it. No need for a 3D printer.
I've often wondered about this. Let's say you want a fake gold bar. You could start off with something that's the same density as gold (a cheaper metal alloy of the correct density), and then just coat it in a thin layer of actual gold. Sure there is going to be some real gold there, so it's not completely fake, but it has to be cheaper than making an entire gold brick. Sure they would find out if they every cut the brick in half, or melted it down, but you could be way out of town by the time that happened.
In which case, looking at the specs, it's pretty future proof. My brother just had his first Mac Mini die, and it was one of the original Core2Duo machines. It worked just fine for many years. The newest one will probably work as a simple desktop for the next 5 years, no problem. With Thunderbolt, USB3, SDXC, and Gigabit Ethernet, it's probably about as futureproof as you can get at this point, while still maintaining such a small form factor. I'm Still using the same Windows Desktop I bought 8 years ago. Nothing (apart from gaming) has changed enough in the past 8 years to warrant an upgrade for desktops. They've been fast enough for quite a long time.
Are they still selling it? because they also released a new one at the same time as iPad Air, with increase resolution, and the new Motion Coprocessor. Basically, exact same specs as iPad Air, but in a smaller form factor.
One (slightly obtuse) solution for this is to run Visual Studio on a remote machine, and connect to is with Remote Desktop. You can even install Visual Studio on an Azure instance if you're so inclined, and connect to that. Not the best of solutions, but certainly a somewhat decent work around. Personally, I still do all my development on a real desktop, but for portable computing, the Surface fits me just fine.
The Surface 2 Pro has a USB 3 port and a DisplayPort connector, so It can be used with a decent monitor, keyboard and Mouse. Even the Surface 2 (not Pro) supports USB 3, and Mini HDMI, so it also supports keyboard, mouse, and a decent monitor. You'll need a USB hub to plug in both a USB mouse and keyboard, but that should work just fine. Since it's USB3, you could probably plug in a mouse, keyboard, and large hard disk and completely replace your desktop with either Surface 2 Pro, or Surface 2, depending on whether or not you want legacy app support.
Let's look at actual dates. iPad 2 was released in March 2011, So any iPad bought up until February 2011 would have been iPad 1. iOS 7 was released September 2013. So that gives roughly 2 years, 7 months between the iPad 1 being the current device, and iOS making the iPad 1 obsolete. So it's definitely more than 2 years, but less than 3. Which is a short period of time compare to other iOS devices. Although I really can't fault them. The original iPad only has 256 MB of RAM. The iPad Air (and even 3rd and 4th gen) has 1 GB of RAM. They just aren't comparable at all in terms of performance. Also, let's remember that iOS isn't just an operating system, but a bunch of included applications (Maps, Siri), It's going to be hard to get all that to run on such a low end device.
Exactly my problem. I won't choose Apple because there's no expandable storage (and base upgrades cost way too much). I won't choose Android because the software will never get upgraded. In the end, all that was left was Windows. I had to choose between Surface2 and Asus T100. While T100 did have some very nice advantages, such as full X86 Windows, and included keyboard, they seemed to really skimp on the build and component quality, which is the reason I decided on the Surface. Plus, as far as tablets go, I think getting rid of all the legacy stuff that's in X86 Windows is an advantage.
Maybe that's part of the resounding success of Apple. The fact that they sell quality hardware that will last more than a year, and that they support the hardware with software updates for more than a year probably has a lot to do with the reason people choose to pay for their products. They're still selling the iPad 2 as the lower end option, which means they'll probably support at least that device for the next 2 or 3 years, so anybody who bought it originally got quite a bit of lifetime out of it. And even though they put out a new model every year (which they should to ensure they don't fall behind the competition, and to justify keeping prices high), they still continue to support the old models.
Regardless, Apple seems to be better than everyone else in this regard. With Android tablets it's a mystery as to whether or not you'll get upgrades at all. Sure you have more luck with Nexus tablets over other Android models, but they don't really have that long of a track record with tablets, so it's really hard to tell. For Christmas this year I spent a lot of time researching tablets, and settled on the Surface2. Sure, mock me or call me an MS shill if you want, but it's the only tablet out there that's 10 inch, has expandable storage, and I can be reasonably assured that I'll get software updates on a regular basis. Oh, and you can run 2 apps at the same time with both on screen. The only downside is the lack of apps, but the selection is growing, and as far as I can tell, I can do all the tasks I need to do. Sure it's missing some specific applications, and specific games, but it has enough of both to get the job done. And for many tasks. It also appears to be well built, with quality hardware, something missing from many Android tablets.
With a 5 mbit connection, it should only take 1600 seconds (ignoring protocol overhead) to download a gigabyte. That's less than 1/2 an hour. Even assuming protocol overhead is really high, it should still take less than 1 hour. A reasonable quality 2 hour movie can fit in about 1 gigabyte. So you should technically be able to stream a movie (or two) easily on a 5 mbit connection. I think it depends on the source where you're doing the streaming from though. I have a 28 mbit connection, and Netflix obviously plays fine. But stuff on Youtube is almost always unwatchable, as it refuses to buffer more than 3 seconds in advance, and often freezes. And it won't start playing again until you refresh the whole page.
So does the Raspberry Pi, but those seem to be selling quite well, and people are quite pleased with them. I have enough devices that can tell me the time. Sure it would be nice if it kept proper time, but I don't see how that's essential to many of the things you may want to use a tablet for. The GameBoy doesn't have a clock either. Didn't stop us from having tons of fun playing games on it. If it can do games, reading, and play videos, none of which require a clock, or even network connectivity, it would be a great device to have for many situations. Not to replace the iPad, but to have in conjunction with an iPad.
Personally, I would buy a $38 tablet provided it actually worked for a reasonable amount of time (1-2 years), and could do some basic tasks. I don't want to tote around my $500 tablet everywhere I go, but it would be nice to have a cheap device that I didn't care so much if I dropped it, or it got too cold and ceased to function. It doesn't have to be a replacement for the iPad or any other tablet at that price. People will buy an iPad (or similarly high priced tablet, like Galaxy Tab/Note or Surface2), as well as a cheap $40 tablet to take with them when they don't want to have something expensive on them. Same reason why many people who own a DSLR also have a cheap point and shoot. And same reason why I would buy that $15 Nokia phone if it ever sees the light of day. There are certain things people do where they don't want to be carrying around thousands of dollars of electronics.
Similar to this, I'd gladly trade 2/3 of my current speed to get unlimited (or very high) throughput. Currently with my provider you can't get higher throughput without upgrading the speed, which increases the price quite a bit.
Yeah, most people don't really need internet that's that fast. 5-10 Mbps should really be more than enough for most home users. This gives you enough bandwidth to stream a couple videos at the same time. The big problem that I have is that with my current ISP (and all others in my area) is that the pricing structure is set up all wrong. You can either pay a low price for 5 Mbps, but be limited to 15 GB of transfer, or you can pay more for higher transfer speeds (up to 150 mbps), and then be given more higher transfer limits, but it still tops out around 150 GB. I would love to be able to purchase extra throughput, without having to pay for higher speeds at the same time, but such a plan doesn't exist.
The fines have to be quite high to offset the fact that it's impossible to catch every incidence of an infraction. If you could fine people $10 every single time they were speeding with 100% accuracy, then people would speed a lot less. But since you can only catch (and process through the courts) a very small percentage of people breaking the law, the fines have to be quite high to offset the low probability that they will actually be caught. If you combine the low probability of being caught, with low fines, then most people will just choose to break the law, and pay the small fine for the small number of times they are caught.
The interesting thing is that in French, they stopped making new numbers after sixty. Seventy is "soixante dix" which is sixty ten, which is followed by "soixante onze", "sixty eleven", and so on. Eight, like you said is quatre vingts, and ninety is "quatre vingts dix".