So basically scramjets can't replace rockets for space work. You's still need a scramjet + rocket.... and you'd still need a rocket to get going fast enough for the scramjet to work properly.
So you'd have a sequence something like: use rocket for take-off, switch to scramjet when fast enough, switch to rocket (likely a different one) when the O2 runs out. Is this really an improvement over, say, the space shuttle which only needs two rocket "stages".
I guess scramjets are potentially useful for high altitude aircraft, though they'd probably need rocket assisted take-off. If NASA is designing, I don't think I'm flying.
The scram jet is air breathing. One wonders how much air is available to breath at 110,000 foot. Is there something majic about 110k feet? Is there too little air above this? Is this the altitude limit of jet technology?
Considering that GPS satellites are something over 20000 km up, 110k feet is only a fraction of a percent of getting there.
IBM did a study on this some while back. One thing they did was look at numbers of bugs fixed per module. One might expect a random distribution of bugs per thousand lines of code or whatever, but what they fond was that some modules had far more bugs than others (by a factor of 20 or more).
I found this quite a strange result until I started doing some similar analysis on my own code and pretty much found the same thing. At the time I was doing an HPGL engine for a plotter. Each time a bug was found with one particular part (the part that gave the most problems) I'd go fix it. Generally the bug would be some corner case. Each time I fixed something the code would get more "fragile" and messy and of course the bugs didn't stop. All this happened because the base design was wrong. Eventually the code became unfixable. It could take two weeks to fix a bug, so I just rewrote the code from scratch, properly designed this time, and no more bugs were ever seen.
Natural languages are often not the best way to express problems/concepts concisely. The use of specialised languages is not something that is specific to programming. We (humans) have special languages for all branches of mathematics, chemistry (H2O...), physics (E=Mc2), music, drawing house plans.... These specialised languages came about because natural languages do not provide an effective means for communicating these ideas. For an example, consider some music written in a natural language: "Big drum beat followed by a bit of silence then a soft....." Imagine trying to read and play that.
Programming is also something that is easier to express in a specialised language. Sure we can make some things more human readable but does that make it easier to understand? The hard part of programming isn't reading/writing the code so much as knowing what structures and concepts to use. Making programming more natural language like will not really make programming easier, you still need skill and practice. Using the music analogy again: I don't play music and can't read music score (the language of music). If Beethoven's fifth (if he ever had a fifth) was rewritten in a natural language it would not make it easier for me to play; I'd still need a whole lot of practice with a piano or whatever to play effectively. Relative to aquiring the piano skills, I expect learning to read sheet music would be relatively simple.
Where natural languaages might help is in system design and requirement capture. Still, however, I think that most often things go wrong because when people are expressing their thoughts in a natural language they use very woolly thinking and use vague terms.
The thing that really strikes me as absurd here is the claim that "Atlantis" fell to a point 1500m below the water surface. Not only that, but it fell in place with very minor disturbance. Geological upheavals that move ground 1500m would surely have done more damage than this.
It is far easier to come up with some geological theories that explain the shape. For instance, the side of the hill appears to have slipped which would account for material falling to form the "wall" at the base of the hill.
When a submersible brings back bricks and man-hewn stones I'll belive.
Billy-boy has more money than makes sense any more. Give him a few more billion and his life won't change. Now he wants other things:
Power: domination, beyond what is required for a healthy business, is what Bill wants. He does not care for profits. He no longer cares about making a good business and cool software (I think perhaps many years ago he did). Now it is all about power and dominance and seeing the Microsoft wedge of the pie get bigger.
Being thought of as a nice guy: All the feel-good that comes from the Gates Foundation with spending $20M on upgrading a university building or xxx M on AIDS research etc.
You've got to feel sad for someone that gets into a position like this.
" I can only assume the difference is coming back here"
You would probably have seen that a cup of coffee also cost 1.5 times as much. I doubt very much that the difference goes back to Coca Cola Corporation. Instead it will be swallowed up by the retailer, middlemen etc. Apparently a significant portion of Coke's expenses are advertising. This spending (relating to that Coke you bought in Italy) is not undertaken by Coke Corporation but by Coke Italy.
Depending on the tax structures and relationships, it is not in Coke's interests to show large offshore profits.
If you're defining "biggest" in terms of dollars, then I don't see what IP US is exporting..... apart from trade marks and brands (Coke, Big Mac,...). Very few of these have any physical manufactured component which significantly reduces the margins. Let's say a Coke costs $1 in Europe. What % of that goes back to the US as royalties for the use of the Coke brand? I doubt it is more than a cent or two.
Does anyone else get the feeling we're on a slippery slope here in terms of tech business ethics etc?
We seem to have "progressed" from companies that competed on product (ie free market choice), to those that competed on lock-in (eg. MS anti-trust stuff) to those that compete by making IP roadblocks.
Perhaps soon the minimum start-up "capital" for a tech organisation will be measured in patents and not dollars. The patents would be like nuclear weapons: sufficient threat to prevent other people suing you and shutting you down. The small organisation with no IP capital would be shut out.
For the most part I agree with the parent. We don't need more idiots writing code. A few good programmers always outdoes a hundred bad ones. That might be the truth, but the truth does not matter: perception does.
That quality is important is not very apparent to most managers (thought they might give lip service to quality). Quality is a very intangible and can't be crunched through a spreadsheet like quantity can. CEO or whatever thinks: "Hey I can get 15 Ukranians for one US programmer. Cool"
There are however some/many programming tasks that are not very challenging and can be done by any dope.
NB I'm not at all saying here that Ukranians are dopes. What reason is there to believe that they're any worse than programmers in any other country? It is only a perception (not a truth) that US programmers are better than others (ie. the argument that you pay more for Americans because they're better).
The IP threat is just FUD. By feeding SCO money they have helped build the FUD that open source/Linux is an IP nightmare. Now they get to use that FUD to their advantage.
Perhaps this is the best current hypothesis, but that does not make it right.
What is so special about dinosaurs thgat they **all** died, yet other creatures lived?
In the 1960's tectonic plate movement was poo-pooed as rubbish, the theory being that the land rose up and eroded "in place".Yet now tectonics is the prefered model. Just because there is no better theory does not make it right.
This is a bit like calling "battlebots" robots. They are not robots, they're just oversized remote controlled toys. A robot is supposed to act autonomously.
The article seems to suggest that the Da Vinci device would have been controlled by ropes and pulleys with automated drum sounds. So, apart from the drumming, the device would be a battlebot rather than a robot.
The automated drimming would be equivalent to an old-fashioned music box.
Dinosaurs inhabited many different environments (swamps, savanha,...) were different sizes and shapes (ie different tolerance to temperature extremes) and ate a variety of different foods (plants of various types, prey of various sizes from insects to large animals [running and carrion].... Thus, they inhabited various niches etc. It is hard to believe that a single event completely destroyed the habitat for all these animals, yet left crocodiles and various insects etc liveable.
As to honey bees, well they seem tomake it through regular winters pretty well. They don't have to get nectar from flowers, but can also use sugars from other sources too. Some plants flower in winter so it is not impossible to think that some plants could have still flowered in a "nuclear winter".
Bush and his family are up to their eyeballs in the oil industry. Anything that negatively impacts the profitability of the oil industry will not get his support.
War in Iraq drives up the price of oil and makes Bush money.
Gas guzzling SUVs are exempt from many emmission control legislation. Expect no changes there.
Kyoto would impact on oil consumption, directly as well as indirectly through raising environmental awareness.
Hypothesis: mars is red. Send probe, take snaps. Yup it's red.
Hypothesis: maybe Mas has water. Send probe, probe gets rusty. Yup Mars has water.
So we learn a bunch of things about Mars, but what do they help? Most space exploration is just a form of "infotainment" with very little use to anyone. There are a gazzillion unexplored issues on planet earth that are surely more important for us to be investigating.
Feeding stock is really wasteful. ie. 20 food units in --> about 1 food unit out. I doubt that the corn disks will be usable as stock food (ie. I expect that they're some cellulose/plastic stuff with little food value), but if they are then they could be reprocessed as stock food.
I wonder if this is a neat way of siphoning dollars into the Darl Family Trust? It has been obvious for a while that Darl has no interest in making money from selling software, so what angle are they playing?
Developers don't like to be told what to do, but more importantly the freedom allows problems to be fixed more effectively and efficiently than closed source.
As an example (one of zillions), there are two widely used programming tools for the Philips LPC21xx microcontrollers. One is written by Philips (closed) and the other by a guy called Martin (open). In approx January tried to use both and neither worked with the hardware combination I have. The code needed to do a retry if comms failed at start up. With Martin's tool I was able to find the problem, fix it and send the patch to Martin. The patch became mainstream within a few days. I also told Philips of the problem and how to fix it, but AFAIK this has not yet been done in Philips' code.
Ballmer's target audience does not really cares whether people tell the truth, they're members of the "Nobody got fired for buying IBM-->Microsoft" brigade. All they want is reassurance and a stream of soundbites to keep them warm and fuzzy. If the repots are doctored, they don't care.
The last thing an IT manager really wants to do is switch from Windows to Linux just because of TCO. In any switch, shit happens and the IT manager gets heat which (s)he does not want. The CFO might get on his case periodically to reduce IT spending and Ballmer provides ammo to go back to the CFO to show it won't save. That this is all based on lies doesn't really matter.
Corporations are primarily political entities where people prefer to hide from problems than address them.
The reality is that in the 60's technology wasn't up to it. Had to send a man to do a robot's job.
Interesting that the Soviets were able to land probes and get rocks and film back to earth without needing people.
Maybe their automated technology was more reliable. But there definitely was a political motive at NASA. Sending people to the moon and making national heros out of the astronouts was a great way of keeping the focus off Vietnam.
There is absolutely no gadget activity that comes anywhere near flyfishing in the amount of gadgetry involved. Yet, flyfishermen are able to pack everything into a fishing vest. I reckon a fishing vest would be a fine way to organise all those PDAs, MP3s etc. Suggest washing before use on the subway though.
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So you'd have a sequence something like: use rocket for take-off, switch to scramjet when fast enough, switch to rocket (likely a different one) when the O2 runs out. Is this really an improvement over, say, the space shuttle which only needs two rocket "stages".
I guess scramjets are potentially useful for high altitude aircraft, though they'd probably need rocket assisted take-off. If NASA is designing, I don't think I'm flying.
Considering that GPS satellites are something over 20000 km up, 110k feet is only a fraction of a percent of getting there.
I found this quite a strange result until I started doing some similar analysis on my own code and pretty much found the same thing. At the time I was doing an HPGL engine for a plotter. Each time a bug was found with one particular part (the part that gave the most problems) I'd go fix it. Generally the bug would be some corner case. Each time I fixed something the code would get more "fragile" and messy and of course the bugs didn't stop. All this happened because the base design was wrong. Eventually the code became unfixable. It could take two weeks to fix a bug, so I just rewrote the code from scratch, properly designed this time, and no more bugs were ever seen.
Programming is also something that is easier to express in a specialised language. Sure we can make some things more human readable but does that make it easier to understand? The hard part of programming isn't reading/writing the code so much as knowing what structures and concepts to use. Making programming more natural language like will not really make programming easier, you still need skill and practice. Using the music analogy again: I don't play music and can't read music score (the language of music). If Beethoven's fifth (if he ever had a fifth) was rewritten in a natural language it would not make it easier for me to play; I'd still need a whole lot of practice with a piano or whatever to play effectively. Relative to aquiring the piano skills, I expect learning to read sheet music would be relatively simple.
Where natural languaages might help is in system design and requirement capture. Still, however, I think that most often things go wrong because when people are expressing their thoughts in a natural language they use very woolly thinking and use vague terms.
It is far easier to come up with some geological theories that explain the shape. For instance, the side of the hill appears to have slipped which would account for material falling to form the "wall" at the base of the hill.
When a submersible brings back bricks and man-hewn stones I'll belive.
Power: domination, beyond what is required for a healthy business, is what Bill wants. He does not care for profits. He no longer cares about making a good business and cool software (I think perhaps many years ago he did). Now it is all about power and dominance and seeing the Microsoft wedge of the pie get bigger.
Being thought of as a nice guy: All the feel-good that comes from the Gates Foundation with spending $20M on upgrading a university building or xxx M on AIDS research etc.
You've got to feel sad for someone that gets into a position like this.
You would probably have seen that a cup of coffee also cost 1.5 times as much. I doubt very much that the difference goes back to Coca Cola Corporation. Instead it will be swallowed up by the retailer, middlemen etc. Apparently a significant portion of Coke's expenses are advertising. This spending (relating to that Coke you bought in Italy) is not undertaken by Coke Corporation but by Coke Italy.
Depending on the tax structures and relationships, it is not in Coke's interests to show large offshore profits.
If you're defining "biggest" in terms of dollars, then I don't see what IP US is exporting..... apart from trade marks and brands (Coke, Big Mac,...). Very few of these have any physical manufactured component which significantly reduces the margins. Let's say a Coke costs $1 in Europe. What % of that goes back to the US as royalties for the use of the Coke brand? I doubt it is more than a cent or two.
We seem to have "progressed" from companies that competed on product (ie free market choice), to those that competed on lock-in (eg. MS anti-trust stuff) to those that compete by making IP roadblocks.
Perhaps soon the minimum start-up "capital" for a tech organisation will be measured in patents and not dollars. The patents would be like nuclear weapons: sufficient threat to prevent other people suing you and shutting you down. The small organisation with no IP capital would be shut out.
Nobody is going to benefit if this happens.
That quality is important is not very apparent to most managers (thought they might give lip service to quality). Quality is a very intangible and can't be crunched through a spreadsheet like quantity can. CEO or whatever thinks: "Hey I can get 15 Ukranians for one US programmer. Cool"
There are however some/many programming tasks that are not very challenging and can be done by any dope.
NB I'm not at all saying here that Ukranians are dopes. What reason is there to believe that they're any worse than programmers in any other country? It is only a perception (not a truth) that US programmers are better than others (ie. the argument that you pay more for Americans because they're better).
Mainfarme talk:"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".Music player talk:"I won't go wrong if it has a Microsoft label on it."
The IP threat is just FUD. By feeding SCO money they have helped build the FUD that open source/Linux is an IP nightmare. Now they get to use that FUD to their advantage.
What is so special about dinosaurs thgat they **all** died, yet other creatures lived?
In the 1960's tectonic plate movement was poo-pooed as rubbish, the theory being that the land rose up and eroded "in place".Yet now tectonics is the prefered model. Just because there is no better theory does not make it right.
The article seems to suggest that the Da Vinci device would have been controlled by ropes and pulleys with automated drum sounds. So, apart from the drumming, the device would be a battlebot rather than a robot.
The automated drimming would be equivalent to an old-fashioned music box.
As to honey bees, well they seem tomake it through regular winters pretty well. They don't have to get nectar from flowers, but can also use sugars from other sources too. Some plants flower in winter so it is not impossible to think that some plants could have still flowered in a "nuclear winter".
War in Iraq drives up the price of oil and makes Bush money.
Gas guzzling SUVs are exempt from many emmission control legislation. Expect no changes there.
Kyoto would impact on oil consumption, directly as well as indirectly through raising environmental awareness.
Hypothesis: mars is red. Send probe, take snaps. Yup it's red.
Hypothesis: maybe Mas has water. Send probe, probe gets rusty. Yup Mars has water.
So we learn a bunch of things about Mars, but what do they help? Most space exploration is just a form of "infotainment" with very little use to anyone. There are a gazzillion unexplored issues on planet earth that are surely more important for us to be investigating.
Feeding stock is really wasteful. ie. 20 food units in --> about 1 food unit out. I doubt that the corn disks will be usable as stock food (ie. I expect that they're some cellulose/plastic stuff with little food value), but if they are then they could be reprocessed as stock food.
I wonder if this is a neat way of siphoning dollars into the Darl Family Trust? It has been obvious for a while that Darl has no interest in making money from selling software, so what angle are they playing?
Developers don't like to be told what to do, but more importantly the freedom allows problems to be fixed more effectively and efficiently than closed source.
As an example (one of zillions), there are two widely used programming tools for the Philips LPC21xx microcontrollers. One is written by Philips (closed) and the other by a guy called Martin (open). In approx January tried to use both and neither worked with the hardware combination I have. The code needed to do a retry if comms failed at start up. With Martin's tool I was able to find the problem, fix it and send the patch to Martin. The patch became mainstream within a few days. I also told Philips of the problem and how to fix it, but AFAIK this has not yet been done in Philips' code.
Without open source, progress is very difficult.
Ballmer's target audience does not really cares whether people tell the truth, they're members of the "Nobody got fired for buying IBM-->Microsoft" brigade. All they want is reassurance and a stream of soundbites to keep them warm and fuzzy. If the repots are doctored, they don't care.
The last thing an IT manager really wants to do is switch from Windows to Linux just because of TCO. In any switch, shit happens and the IT manager gets heat which (s)he does not want. The CFO might get on his case periodically to reduce IT spending and Ballmer provides ammo to go back to the CFO to show it won't save. That this is all based on lies doesn't really matter.
Corporations are primarily political entities where people prefer to hide from problems than address them.
Now I carry a spare CompactFlash and my driving and fishing licenses.
Unless the cellphone has a handy place to put these things I can't see it replacing a wallet any time soon.
Been seeing a lot of this recently. Why not just have a redirect to The Reg.
Interesting that the Soviets were able to land probes and get rocks and film back to earth without needing people.
Maybe their automated technology was more reliable. But there definitely was a political motive at NASA. Sending people to the moon and making national heros out of the astronouts was a great way of keeping the focus off Vietnam.
There is absolutely no gadget activity that comes anywhere near flyfishing in the amount of gadgetry involved. Yet, flyfishermen are able to pack everything into a fishing vest. I reckon a fishing vest would be a fine way to organise all those PDAs, MP3s etc. Suggest washing before use on the subway though.