Atlas, etc. are good rockets, but they can't beat the sheer power and relatively low G forces of the Saturn V. Since they'll (mostly) be going to LEO, as well as building a capsule that is 5-8% larger to accomodate a 4th passenger, why not take another look at the Saturn series of rockets?
I'd imagine the fact that the Atlas is still in use, still being enhanced, etc. is a huge benefit. It is always easier to use a current production unit rather than take something out of mothballs.
I whole-heartedly agree that work should start right now on a new Saturn, however, so in a few years it will be ready. It could be used as the heavy lift vehicle to deliver the major components of the ISS. The cheap reliable Atlas flights could be used to move personnel and provions there.
Re:Only fools don't learn from failure
on
The Return of Apollo?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think anyones going to mars in one of those little tin cans.
Those tin cans are great for the few hours it takes to ride out of and back into the planet's gravity well. Any reasonable Mars mission profile would entail assembling an inter-planetary ship in earth orbit and then flying that ship to martian orbit.
Imagine, if you would, a few dozen Saturn V launches of equipment and supplies. The space station crew would assemble the pieces. Then a few capsules would bring the mars crew to their ship from earth.
Panel 1: Milo and the Major (a retired army major living in the boarding house) are standing in the meadow, dressed in hunting gear. The major is carrying a gun.
Milo: What big game are we stalking today, Major?
Major: Liberals. Check and see what the wildlife guide says about 'em.
Panel 2:
Milo: (reading form the guide) "The Vanishing Liberal: A beast which once thundered across the American Scene in mighty herds. Recently hunted to near extinction."
Major: Gotta be one left around here somewheres... Try the Liberal Call, boy.
Panel 3:
Milo: (shouting) Welfare, Solar Power, No Nukes! ( a nearby bush rustles)
Panel 4: A liberal with bushy hair and mustache, looking much like Reiner on "All in the Family", stands up from behind the bush.
Liberal: No Nukes! No Nukes!
Panel 5: The Major fires his gun at the liberal.
Major: Gotcha!
Liberal: Gun Control! Gun Control!
Panel 6: Liberal can't be seen in tall grass.
Milo: (to the reader) It's a shame.They're more fun than buffalo.
Major: I think I wounded him!
Liberal: Ow! Socialized Medicine! Socialized Medicine!
And he was responsible for vi. For this I cannot decide whether he should be praised as a computer great or be disgraced as the author of the greatest horrible-excuse-for-an-editor known to man.
I'm a pro-vi (vim, actually) bigot, but I don't want to start a religious war. At least not today.
Remember to place vi exactly in its context. Vi placed a useful set of extensions on ed/ex, and so enhanced an established tool. Enhancing an established tool has advantages and brings baggage.
Pro-vi points...
Leverages well known line editor commands (ed/ex/sed)
CPU/memory efficient - I've heard it said that a machine that comfortably handles 20 vi users can only handle 4 emacs users
Only requires a very simple qwerty keyboard - doesn't need special function keys or meta keys
A touch typist will find most frequently used commands right under their fingers
Command structure is fairly logical
Anti-vi points...
I know there are some but, like I said, I use vim and vim solved alot of the glaring deficiencies of vi. I think multiple buffer support is a biggie.
Plus vi represents the "Unix-way" of small efficient single purpose tools. A text editor should try to be a text editor, not an email reader, a web browser, a shell...
The assertion that the code is owned by SCO is made only by Mr. McBride...
McBride is technically correct, although misleading. According to Perens (via the second link in the slashdot blurb) "It is included in code copyrighed by AT&T and released as Open Source under the BSD license by Caldera, the company that now calls itself SCO."
To sum up, the code in question is owned by SCO, but using said code in Linux is permissable under the license terms by which the code was released. The "crime" here was that the SGI developer stripped the copyright notice.
Remember that under virtually all open source license agreements, the code continues to be owned by the copyright holder, but a nearly unlimited license to use, distribute, and create derivative works is granted to the public.
Wind is 5-12, Solar is 8-20 [cents per kilowatt-hour]
IIRC, the solar and wind numbers you quoted are after large government subsidies of their own. I just googled for examples and found a site offering on-grid solar systems in California with 50% of the costs offset by state government rebates and tax credits.
Taking this into account, solar might be costed at 16 to 40 cents per kwh. Nuclear's 13-18 cents looks like it might be competative. And that is not taking into account how stupidly inefficient the US power companies have been by building custom reactors every time.
Please try to quantify the environmental impact of having lots and lots of nasty waste and workers exposed to high levels of radiation. The nuclear power industry has been very benign to the environment and the population, when one considers the incredible polution due to coal mining and coal burning, and the tens of thousands of coal miners suffering from black lung disease. Radiation is a bogeyman, but coal has probably caused orders of magnitude more damage and suffering.
It's certainly not cheap energy as it was touted to be in the 50s...
Very true, but I suggest because the industry was poorly managed.
...and it's certainly not safe as has been shown in past incidents.
Please provide evidence. How many people have died as a result of western commercial nuclear power accidents? (Yes, some military oriented operations were done wihtout much regard to public safety.) Chernobyl doesn't count, because our power reactor designs are different, and no less authority than the laws of physics say that such an accident is impossible. Furthermore, western reacotrs have a containment building that prevent the public form being exposed in such a situation.
It serves only to continue nuclear research that benefits weapons development.
I don't know that there is any aspect of nuclear power generation that has any impact on a weapons program today. The technologies have diverged that far.
I shudder to say this, but we (USA) would do well to emulate the French (Oh god - maybe I'll post this as an AC) in this area.
The countries that have used nuclear power effectively have set up a program where they designed and certified a one, two, or a small handful of reactors. Then the built from those same reactors over and over and over again. Given that the amount of engineering man-hours in a nuclear reactor is staggeringly huge, this is a far more cost efficient than the US model where every nuclear power plant is a custom job.
Incidents are bound to occur in any sufficiently complex system. Due to safety conscious design, incidents in western commercial nuclear power plants are virtually never hazardous to the public. But it would be far better for a pump to fail prematurely at one plant, and have a message go out to 50 other plants to check that pump, rather than have every plant discover problems on their own.
Spent fuel reprocessing is probably a good idea too. It will reduce the amount of waste and also limit the amount of uranium mining. I recall that I once read that mine accidents dwarf every other cause of "commercial nuclear power" related deaths combined. If the remaining waste is glass-encapsulated and stored, it should be very stable and be cause for very little concern.
Finally, Americans must understand that every power generation technique has some impact. Fossil fuel plants likely contribute to tens of thousands of deaths each year - from mining/drilling operations, accidents transporting the product, people breathing the waste. Solar manufacturing exposes workers to fair numbers of toxic and hazardous chemicals. Hydroelectric plants have substantial envrinmental impact. Wind power is unsteady and kills birds. When these factors are all taken into account nuclear power looks fairly good on balance.
In the long run, I believe that a system of a large number of modern nuclear power plants built form a small number of designs should be operated as our "baseline" electrical energy source. The reactors will be supllemented with a system of solar, wind, and gas-turbine plants to accomodate peak demand. This system will minimize the impact on our environment, provide a high level of safety, and provid ethe power we need to grow.
I actually did something similar when I was a student at RPI - circa 1991-92.
A previous student had found a old organ that a church was throwing out. He had collected the assorted bits, repaired it, and put it in the back of the RPI playhouse. I had taken over maintenance of the organ. The job came with the right to tell others that you had the largest organ on campus.
As a side note, a succession of VERY talented people treated the RPI playhouse as their own personal stereo system. What appeared onstage may not have been great, but we could pump fabulous sound into that room.
One day we were running some new lines in order be able to patch the organ into our mixing board. We decided to try a test to see how hard we could drive the system. Our subwoofers were a pair of EV 20 inch speakers. Each was driven from its own Crown DC300 amplifier, located next to the speaker for minimum cable losses. The DC300s were crossed over so that both channels drove the same speaker, which has the effect of quadrupling the power output.
I played the lowest note on the foot peddles. It was around 20 Hz. We brought the power up to max and it was pretty impressive. Then I added in the second lowest note. That set up an approx. 2.5 Hz beat frequency. The curtains were up, exposing the cinder block wall behind the stage. Due to the insistance of some architects, the house was plaster, with no sound dampening. The beat frequency corresponded exactly with the length of the space, plaster wall at back of house to the cinder block wall behind the stage. At this point the house was quite uncomfortable.
We stopped the experiment, rigged the organ so that the two lowest notes would play continuously, then retired to the glass enclosed sound booth. We added an extra pre-amplifier to boost the signal a little more. Then we drove the systam as hard as we could. The technical director at the playhouse was in a classroom half a mile away. He later reported that he felt the vibration and said to himself, "What are those guys up to now." After running this for about 5 minutes we called the geology department. The seismograph did indeed capture our experiment from several miles away.
The governements of Japan, Korea, and China are collaborating on this? Then MS has nothing to worry about. This project will get so bogged down in politics and administrative infighting that progress will be glacial.
Look, as an example, at the *BSD world. They have lots of talented people, many of the finest minds in the *nix world, and started with a good product. Yet a "college kid" in Finland started a product that kicked their collective arses in market penetration. Why? Linux mostly avoided the bueracracy and political infighting that has plagued *BSD. (neither an opinion of the technical merits of *BSD, nor a "BSD is dying troll)
What the nations should be doing is sponsering programmers, giving them a mandate to 1) contribute to open source, 2) spend a significant fraction of that contribution making open source more available to asians. Then let those programmers participlate wherever they want. I could imagine an army of programmers working with OpenOffice.org, for instance, improving the word processing software overall, and its ability to deal with asian character sets. Others would contribute to Debian and Gentoo, creating asian language documentation and binary versions of those distributions.
WHY is Ethernet a bad choice?... I don't know enough about the nuts & bolts.
One of the major problems in networking is to they mannage the case when two (or more) nodes try to talk at the same time. There are two primary methods of dealing with this issue, tokens and CDCA (collision detection collision avoidance).
Ethernet relies on CDCA. When a node want to transmit on the network, it listens for a moment of silence, then starts transmitting. If another node chose the same moment to start transmitting, they detect the "collision", and both of them wait a period of time before trying again.
TokenBus and TokenRing rely on a scheduling mechanism. They pass around an electronic token, and whoever has the token is allowed to transmit for a short period of time, then must pass the token to the next node. If a node has nothing to say, it passes the token along immediately.
Ethernet is simple to implement, and performs well until a network gets very congested. Once a network is too congested, nodes are almost always colliding and the consequently nodes spend the bulk of their time retransmitting data that collided.
Token networks are more complex, but perform well under load. Even when the network is completely congested, each node still gets to send out useful data.
In short, if you have a token network that operates at 10 megabit speeds, and you put 100 nodes on it, you can guarantee that each node will get at least 100 kilobits of bandwidth. Ethernet does not provide that guaruntee.
I heard about that. I think it comes on right after "When Animals Attack Buildings Collapsing on Police Chases."
Every time I see that Simpson's episode from the future, I wait for Marge to say "Fox moved to soft core porn so gradually, no one even noticed." That always cracks me up.
Thanks, I knew about Soyuz 11/Salyut 1, but I didn't know about Soyuz 1.
BTW, the cosmonauts in Soyuz 11 were Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev.
Regards,
Mike
As for non-reusable -- so what! For now, that might be the way to go. Perhaps in the near future the system can be modified with next-generation technology, but again, simplicity is where it's at. Let's not make another overly complex mostrosity with tens of thousands of pseudo-redundant interconnected systems.
There is no reason a simple time tested capsule system couldn't be mostly reusable. A bigger point is that a "plane" vehicle is needlessly complex, expensive, and dangerous. The problem is that most NASA people are pilots, so the want planes.
Fire all the pilots at NASA and replace them with men and women from the Navy's submarine service! (ha ha, only serious)
Name one thing that they would need to bring up as cargo, that NASA could not replace....?
If they sent up DVDs so the astronauts could watch movies, they could not replace them since the MPAA wouldn't let them rip a backup copy before the mission left.
Separate the cargo from the crew?... The cargo is expensive, and may be impossible to replace. The crew CAN be replaced. It's just like corporations, in how they manage their infrastructure and employees. The employees are unfortunately expendable in many respects.
I don't think this is really what they intend. I think their fundamental premise is that the shuttle is needlessly complex - and therefore expensive and possibly dangerous - because it has to do too many missions at once. Operating a simple/cheap/reliable crew vehicle and a separate lift capability, which need not be as reliable, might be more effective.
This is the model that the Soviet space program followed: Soyuz (sp?) for crew and Progress for cargo. It has been effective. The Russian crew vehicle, I believe, only failed once in history.
I don't think the issue is cargo cost, either. The cargo is usually not very expensive compared to the cost of the launch. The issue is that an accident with a crewed vehicle puts us out of the manned space flight game for at least close to a year. When an Atlas rocket is lost, everyone says "oh well" and they launch again in a few weeks. Not so with a manned craft.
While legacy control systems are often UNIX-based... and thus immune to MS worms and virii, their 10-megabit networking technologies can easily be overwhelmed.
...corporate firewalls tend to focus on protecting data integrity and are not suitable for protecting control systems. Control systems operate in real time, where processes, availability, and reliability are paramount.
I'm assuming whenthey say 10 megabit they mean 10 megabit ethernet.
Repeat after me: "Ethernet is not an appropriate networking technology for industrial control systems!"
This is exactly the type of environment that tokenbus (IEEE 802.4) was designed to handle. Tokenbus can guarantee QoS and does not require a "master" node, so it is immune to that kind of single point of failure. Tokenbus was designed with factory automation in mind - IIRC the major auto manufacturers in the US were big players in the committee - so it is optimized for the industrial environment.
FYI, tokenring is similar, but not identical. Tokenring is a simpler standard that requires a master node. A ring can be locked up if the master node goes into a strange state. Rings are fit for applications where a network failure would be inconvenient, not tragic.
Ok, IBM wants to capitalize on Linux, IBM is a company, in the past IBM has been a corrupt monopoly trying to stranglehold their clients with the proprietary ties after fscking them in the first place.
IBM lost its monopoly because the market no longer neeed what they were selling. They could use servers like Sun's and PCs instead of IBM's big iron. IBM couldn't compete in the PC hardware realm. IBM was just another player in the server realm. Linux gives IBM the ability to knock Sun on its ass and make money selling high margin services that go along with the low margin PCs.
I have a TiVo (Sony T-60 model in fact) which I upgraded with two 80 Gb drives for a capacity of approximately 140 hours.
When you have that much space available, you tend to leave certain recordings for easy access. I have a number of movies - Office Space, LotR-FotR - on my box for almost a year now. Whenever the mood strikes, I can fire them up.
TiVo has the advantage over other video recorders in that it will take advantage of unused capacity to capture programs it thinks you might like. It will frequently stumble upon things I like but didn't know were on since they appear on a channel I don't usually watch. Most recently I rediscovered "Family Guy" on cartoon network thanks to TiVo. TiVo probably predicted that, since I watch "The Simpsons" religiously, I would probably like "The Family Guy".
High capacity DVRs have the advantage that one can leave the programming they like on the machine until they feel like watching it. There is little impulse to watch something now because it will be over-written tomorrow. TNT ran a best of "Law and Order" marathon last weekend. Now I have a resovoir of 10 hours of high quality programming that I can watch when I want.
Disk space is cheap. There is no reason a DVR should have less than 100 hours of capacity. The expense part of the DVR is the mpeg encoder.
Speaking very broadly, the recent PowerPC chips are very good at vector calculations, where the x86 chips tend to be better at integer calculations. Many scientific applications - for instance weather models - perform very well in vector models.
I wonder why the inaccuracy of this system wasn't well known before it was put up in a public place. Did it perform much better under the controlled environment of the lab? The article states that it works well in a one-to-one test, but they knew that this isn't how how it would be used in this case. It seems likely that if this failed so miserably in real life it couldn't have been that great when they were developing it. Does this speak of a certain desperation on the part of law enforcement to 'do something' or at least to appear to be doing something. Or maybe a hopefullness on the part of the company developing it that they might just get lucky. In fact, if they were payed by the government to deploy this test even though it seems likely they knew it would fail, maybe they did get lucky.
There is nothing inherently wrong with throwing it out there to see what works and what doesn't. The real world can offer a far better lab than a controlled environment sometimes. I don't know how this was marketed and funded, but as long as the "buyer" understood that this was an immature technology that very well might fail, there is nothing wrong here.
So it doesn't work, won't help, and might even end up hurting more that a few people, but it's going to enhance passport security?
The article pointed out that the software was very effective at validating things like passport photos. One would imagine that a traveller would step up to the desk at customs/immigration and had over his passport. The immigration agent would insert the passport into a scanner. A camera would shoot a similar shot of the person standing at the counter. The software would then compare the two images and determine with a fairly high degree of reliability that the person at the counter is or is not the person in the passport photo. This determination could occur regardless of whether the person had gained or lost weight, lost hair, dyed hair, grew facial hair or shaved, or simply aged.
People make mistakes in this situation all the time. there is nothing wrong with having a computer try it.
I thought that the NY water hill pumps were over 80% efficent at storage. Am I misremembering that?
I remember the same thing. The problem is that the environmentalists don't like the massive work needed to build these systems on an effective scale.
Storm King Mountain overlooks the Hudson River near West Point. NY planned to build a massive resovoir at the top of the mountain. During the low demand night hours excess electricity would be used to pump water to the resovoir. During peak demand hours, the water would flow back down driving hydorelectric turbines. The net result would be fewer power plants and less polution.
After a 30 year legal battle, the environmentalists won. The outcome of the conflict established the right of citizen groups to sue a government agency to protect natural resources and scenic beauty.
Storm King Mountain eventually became a State Park with lots of hiking trails. In 1999 a forest fire at the mountain began detontating unexploded ordinance. Apparently the mountain was used by the US Army for target practice as early as the 1840s. The park is now closed to hikers.
So, we have no power station and no hiking trails. Great!
There are approximately 6 billion people on Earth. The odds of this asteroid striking are 1 in 909,000. By my calculations 6,601 people will be struck by this asteroid!
Slashdot Mirror
I'd imagine the fact that the Atlas is still in use, still being enhanced, etc. is a huge benefit. It is always easier to use a current production unit rather than take something out of mothballs.
I whole-heartedly agree that work should start right now on a new Saturn, however, so in a few years it will be ready. It could be used as the heavy lift vehicle to deliver the major components of the ISS. The cheap reliable Atlas flights could be used to move personnel and provions there.
Those tin cans are great for the few hours it takes to ride out of and back into the planet's gravity well. Any reasonable Mars mission profile would entail assembling an inter-planetary ship in earth orbit and then flying that ship to martian orbit.
Imagine, if you would, a few dozen Saturn V launches of equipment and supplies. The space station crew would assemble the pieces. Then a few capsules would bring the mars crew to their ship from earth.
Milo: What big game are we stalking today, Major?
Major: Liberals. Check and see what the wildlife guide says about 'em.
Panel 2:
Milo: (reading form the guide) "The Vanishing Liberal: A beast which once thundered across the American Scene in mighty herds. Recently hunted to near extinction."
Major: Gotta be one left around here somewheres... Try the Liberal Call, boy.
Panel 3:
Milo: (shouting) Welfare, Solar Power, No Nukes! ( a nearby bush rustles)
Panel 4: A liberal with bushy hair and mustache, looking much like Reiner on "All in the Family", stands up from behind the bush.
Liberal: No Nukes! No Nukes!
Panel 5: The Major fires his gun at the liberal.
Major: Gotcha!
Liberal: Gun Control! Gun Control!
Panel 6: Liberal can't be seen in tall grass.
Milo: (to the reader) It's a shame.They're more fun than buffalo.
Major: I think I wounded him!
Liberal: Ow! Socialized Medicine! Socialized Medicine!
I'm a pro-vi (vim, actually) bigot, but I don't want to start a religious war. At least not today.
Remember to place vi exactly in its context. Vi placed a useful set of extensions on ed/ex, and so enhanced an established tool. Enhancing an established tool has advantages and brings baggage.
Pro-vi points...
- Leverages well known line editor commands (ed/ex/sed)
- CPU/memory efficient - I've heard it said that a machine that comfortably handles 20 vi users can only handle 4 emacs users
- Only requires a very simple qwerty keyboard - doesn't need special function keys or meta keys
- A touch typist will find most frequently used commands right under their fingers
- Command structure is fairly logical
Anti-vi points... I know there are some but, like I said, I use vim and vim solved alot of the glaring deficiencies of vi. I think multiple buffer support is a biggie.Plus vi represents the "Unix-way" of small efficient single purpose tools. A text editor should try to be a text editor, not an email reader, a web browser, a shell...
McBride is technically correct, although misleading. According to Perens (via the second link in the slashdot blurb) "It is included in code copyrighed by AT&T and released as Open Source under the BSD license by Caldera, the company that now calls itself SCO."
To sum up, the code in question is owned by SCO, but using said code in Linux is permissable under the license terms by which the code was released. The "crime" here was that the SGI developer stripped the copyright notice.
Remember that under virtually all open source license agreements, the code continues to be owned by the copyright holder, but a nearly unlimited license to use, distribute, and create derivative works is granted to the public.
IIRC, the solar and wind numbers you quoted are after large government subsidies of their own. I just googled for examples and found a site offering on-grid solar systems in California with 50% of the costs offset by state government rebates and tax credits.
Taking this into account, solar might be costed at 16 to 40 cents per kwh. Nuclear's 13-18 cents looks like it might be competative. And that is not taking into account how stupidly inefficient the US power companies have been by building custom reactors every time.
Please try to quantify the environmental impact of having lots and lots of nasty waste and workers exposed to high levels of radiation. The nuclear power industry has been very benign to the environment and the population, when one considers the incredible polution due to coal mining and coal burning, and the tens of thousands of coal miners suffering from black lung disease. Radiation is a bogeyman, but coal has probably caused orders of magnitude more damage and suffering.
It's certainly not cheap energy as it was touted to be in the 50s...
Very true, but I suggest because the industry was poorly managed.
Please provide evidence. How many people have died as a result of western commercial nuclear power accidents? (Yes, some military oriented operations were done wihtout much regard to public safety.) Chernobyl doesn't count, because our power reactor designs are different, and no less authority than the laws of physics say that such an accident is impossible. Furthermore, western reacotrs have a containment building that prevent the public form being exposed in such a situation.
It serves only to continue nuclear research that benefits weapons development.
I don't know that there is any aspect of nuclear power generation that has any impact on a weapons program today. The technologies have diverged that far.
The countries that have used nuclear power effectively have set up a program where they designed and certified a one, two, or a small handful of reactors. Then the built from those same reactors over and over and over again. Given that the amount of engineering man-hours in a nuclear reactor is staggeringly huge, this is a far more cost efficient than the US model where every nuclear power plant is a custom job.
Incidents are bound to occur in any sufficiently complex system. Due to safety conscious design, incidents in western commercial nuclear power plants are virtually never hazardous to the public. But it would be far better for a pump to fail prematurely at one plant, and have a message go out to 50 other plants to check that pump, rather than have every plant discover problems on their own.
Spent fuel reprocessing is probably a good idea too. It will reduce the amount of waste and also limit the amount of uranium mining. I recall that I once read that mine accidents dwarf every other cause of "commercial nuclear power" related deaths combined. If the remaining waste is glass-encapsulated and stored, it should be very stable and be cause for very little concern.
Finally, Americans must understand that every power generation technique has some impact. Fossil fuel plants likely contribute to tens of thousands of deaths each year - from mining/drilling operations, accidents transporting the product, people breathing the waste. Solar manufacturing exposes workers to fair numbers of toxic and hazardous chemicals. Hydroelectric plants have substantial envrinmental impact. Wind power is unsteady and kills birds. When these factors are all taken into account nuclear power looks fairly good on balance.
In the long run, I believe that a system of a large number of modern nuclear power plants built form a small number of designs should be operated as our "baseline" electrical energy source. The reactors will be supllemented with a system of solar, wind, and gas-turbine plants to accomodate peak demand. This system will minimize the impact on our environment, provide a high level of safety, and provid ethe power we need to grow.
A previous student had found a old organ that a church was throwing out. He had collected the assorted bits, repaired it, and put it in the back of the RPI playhouse. I had taken over maintenance of the organ. The job came with the right to tell others that you had the largest organ on campus.
As a side note, a succession of VERY talented people treated the RPI playhouse as their own personal stereo system. What appeared onstage may not have been great, but we could pump fabulous sound into that room.
One day we were running some new lines in order be able to patch the organ into our mixing board. We decided to try a test to see how hard we could drive the system. Our subwoofers were a pair of EV 20 inch speakers. Each was driven from its own Crown DC300 amplifier, located next to the speaker for minimum cable losses. The DC300s were crossed over so that both channels drove the same speaker, which has the effect of quadrupling the power output.
I played the lowest note on the foot peddles. It was around 20 Hz. We brought the power up to max and it was pretty impressive. Then I added in the second lowest note. That set up an approx. 2.5 Hz beat frequency. The curtains were up, exposing the cinder block wall behind the stage. Due to the insistance of some architects, the house was plaster, with no sound dampening. The beat frequency corresponded exactly with the length of the space, plaster wall at back of house to the cinder block wall behind the stage. At this point the house was quite uncomfortable.
We stopped the experiment, rigged the organ so that the two lowest notes would play continuously, then retired to the glass enclosed sound booth. We added an extra pre-amplifier to boost the signal a little more. Then we drove the systam as hard as we could. The technical director at the playhouse was in a classroom half a mile away. He later reported that he felt the vibration and said to himself, "What are those guys up to now." After running this for about 5 minutes we called the geology department. The seismograph did indeed capture our experiment from several miles away.
Look, as an example, at the *BSD world. They have lots of talented people, many of the finest minds in the *nix world, and started with a good product. Yet a "college kid" in Finland started a product that kicked their collective arses in market penetration. Why? Linux mostly avoided the bueracracy and political infighting that has plagued *BSD. (neither an opinion of the technical merits of *BSD, nor a "BSD is dying troll)
What the nations should be doing is sponsering programmers, giving them a mandate to 1) contribute to open source, 2) spend a significant fraction of that contribution making open source more available to asians. Then let those programmers participlate wherever they want. I could imagine an army of programmers working with OpenOffice.org, for instance, improving the word processing software overall, and its ability to deal with asian character sets. Others would contribute to Debian and Gentoo, creating asian language documentation and binary versions of those distributions.
One of the major problems in networking is to they mannage the case when two (or more) nodes try to talk at the same time. There are two primary methods of dealing with this issue, tokens and CDCA (collision detection collision avoidance).
Ethernet relies on CDCA. When a node want to transmit on the network, it listens for a moment of silence, then starts transmitting. If another node chose the same moment to start transmitting, they detect the "collision", and both of them wait a period of time before trying again.
TokenBus and TokenRing rely on a scheduling mechanism. They pass around an electronic token, and whoever has the token is allowed to transmit for a short period of time, then must pass the token to the next node. If a node has nothing to say, it passes the token along immediately.
Ethernet is simple to implement, and performs well until a network gets very congested. Once a network is too congested, nodes are almost always colliding and the consequently nodes spend the bulk of their time retransmitting data that collided.
Token networks are more complex, but perform well under load. Even when the network is completely congested, each node still gets to send out useful data.
In short, if you have a token network that operates at 10 megabit speeds, and you put 100 nodes on it, you can guarantee that each node will get at least 100 kilobits of bandwidth. Ethernet does not provide that guaruntee.
Every time I see that Simpson's episode from the future, I wait for Marge to say "Fox moved to soft core porn so gradually, no one even noticed." That always cracks me up.
Thanks, I knew about Soyuz 11/Salyut 1, but I didn't know about Soyuz 1. BTW, the cosmonauts in Soyuz 11 were Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev. Regards, Mike
We agree with the measures taken.
There is no reason a simple time tested capsule system couldn't be mostly reusable. A bigger point is that a "plane" vehicle is needlessly complex, expensive, and dangerous. The problem is that most NASA people are pilots, so the want planes.
Fire all the pilots at NASA and replace them with men and women from the Navy's submarine service! (ha ha, only serious)
If they sent up DVDs so the astronauts could watch movies, they could not replace them since the MPAA wouldn't let them rip a backup copy before the mission left.
I don't think this is really what they intend. I think their fundamental premise is that the shuttle is needlessly complex - and therefore expensive and possibly dangerous - because it has to do too many missions at once. Operating a simple/cheap/reliable crew vehicle and a separate lift capability, which need not be as reliable, might be more effective.
This is the model that the Soviet space program followed: Soyuz (sp?) for crew and Progress for cargo. It has been effective. The Russian crew vehicle, I believe, only failed once in history.
I don't think the issue is cargo cost, either. The cargo is usually not very expensive compared to the cost of the launch. The issue is that an accident with a crewed vehicle puts us out of the manned space flight game for at least close to a year. When an Atlas rocket is lost, everyone says "oh well" and they launch again in a few weeks. Not so with a manned craft.
I'm assuming whenthey say 10 megabit they mean 10 megabit ethernet.
Repeat after me: "Ethernet is not an appropriate networking technology for industrial control systems!"
This is exactly the type of environment that tokenbus (IEEE 802.4) was designed to handle. Tokenbus can guarantee QoS and does not require a "master" node, so it is immune to that kind of single point of failure. Tokenbus was designed with factory automation in mind - IIRC the major auto manufacturers in the US were big players in the committee - so it is optimized for the industrial environment.
FYI, tokenring is similar, but not identical. Tokenring is a simpler standard that requires a master node. A ring can be locked up if the master node goes into a strange state. Rings are fit for applications where a network failure would be inconvenient, not tragic.
IBM lost its monopoly because the market no longer neeed what they were selling. They could use servers like Sun's and PCs instead of IBM's big iron. IBM couldn't compete in the PC hardware realm. IBM was just another player in the server realm. Linux gives IBM the ability to knock Sun on its ass and make money selling high margin services that go along with the low margin PCs.
When you have that much space available, you tend to leave certain recordings for easy access. I have a number of movies - Office Space, LotR-FotR - on my box for almost a year now. Whenever the mood strikes, I can fire them up.
TiVo has the advantage over other video recorders in that it will take advantage of unused capacity to capture programs it thinks you might like. It will frequently stumble upon things I like but didn't know were on since they appear on a channel I don't usually watch. Most recently I rediscovered "Family Guy" on cartoon network thanks to TiVo. TiVo probably predicted that, since I watch "The Simpsons" religiously, I would probably like "The Family Guy".
High capacity DVRs have the advantage that one can leave the programming they like on the machine until they feel like watching it. There is little impulse to watch something now because it will be over-written tomorrow. TNT ran a best of "Law and Order" marathon last weekend. Now I have a resovoir of 10 hours of high quality programming that I can watch when I want.
Disk space is cheap. There is no reason a DVR should have less than 100 hours of capacity. The expense part of the DVR is the mpeg encoder.
Speaking very broadly, the recent PowerPC chips are very good at vector calculations, where the x86 chips tend to be better at integer calculations. Many scientific applications - for instance weather models - perform very well in vector models.
There is nothing inherently wrong with throwing it out there to see what works and what doesn't. The real world can offer a far better lab than a controlled environment sometimes. I don't know how this was marketed and funded, but as long as the "buyer" understood that this was an immature technology that very well might fail, there is nothing wrong here.
The article pointed out that the software was very effective at validating things like passport photos. One would imagine that a traveller would step up to the desk at customs/immigration and had over his passport. The immigration agent would insert the passport into a scanner. A camera would shoot a similar shot of the person standing at the counter. The software would then compare the two images and determine with a fairly high degree of reliability that the person at the counter is or is not the person in the passport photo. This determination could occur regardless of whether the person had gained or lost weight, lost hair, dyed hair, grew facial hair or shaved, or simply aged.
People make mistakes in this situation all the time. there is nothing wrong with having a computer try it.
I remember the same thing. The problem is that the environmentalists don't like the massive work needed to build these systems on an effective scale.
Storm King Mountain overlooks the Hudson River near West Point. NY planned to build a massive resovoir at the top of the mountain. During the low demand night hours excess electricity would be used to pump water to the resovoir. During peak demand hours, the water would flow back down driving hydorelectric turbines. The net result would be fewer power plants and less polution.
After a 30 year legal battle, the environmentalists won. The outcome of the conflict established the right of citizen groups to sue a government agency to protect natural resources and scenic beauty.
Storm King Mountain eventually became a State Park with lots of hiking trails. In 1999 a forest fire at the mountain began detontating unexploded ordinance. Apparently the mountain was used by the US Army for target practice as early as the 1840s. The park is now closed to hikers.
So, we have no power station and no hiking trails. Great!
Why isn't anyone doing anything!!
Did he license it properly from the owner of the original MSBlaster? I see another SCO type case!