You can build an i5 system that idles around 30W and peaks around 100W if you don't need discrete graphics. I doubt you can do the same with anything comparable from AMD.
Discrete GPUs have been the space-heaters in high-end Intel computers for some time now, not the CPU.
Both shuttle losses were fundamentally caused by the wings falling off. A capsule could have handled the g-forces imposed on Columbia or Challenger without breaking up, whereas a relatlvely small force was enough to break the wings off of the fuselage (not to mention separate the crew compartment from the payload bay), at which point the crew were doomed. A significant portion of the shuttle ascent trajectory design was based around making sure the wings didn't fall off even in nominal flight.
The X37B has none of those problems. it sits atop of the main fuel tank, and only has maneuvering thrusters, no main engines that need to be repaired.
And the wings will probably still fall off if it separates under a high dynamic pressure due to an abort or a booster malfunction, and if that happens the crew will still die unless they have ejection seats. I've never seen a non-insane launch escape system proposed for a winged booster other than ejection seats.
The problem is that Linux will not settle on a stable ABI.
The great thing about the Linux kernel is that it's not tied to a crusty old ABI which it has to support to stop people complaining when their old drivers no longer work. Instead it can throw out old crap when someone comes up with a better design.
I rather doubt claymores are being attached to satellites.
They will be if the USAF is sending astronauts up to grab them. Almaz had a 23mm cannon and I believe the USSR at least looked at arming their spy satellites when the USAF was talking about using the shuttle to capture them.
Physical access to satellites in low orbit which don't have any kind of defence system and can't be moved out of the way when the other guy sees you heading toward them.
A couple of claymores on the outside of the satellite would probably be enough to kill any approaching astronaut and do enough damage that the spacecraft could no longer re-enter.
Instead of discarding current platforms before there are viable replacements, lets try to actually use what we have while we have it, instead of throwing it away so we can "afford" a better one.
A spacecraft you can't afford to fly is useless. You might as well tow it straight to the museum.
According to an article I read yesterday, this may be more to do with attempting to find a justification for keeping the X-37 program going when no-one seems to know what it's meant to be for. Certainly using it to go to ISS doesn't seem to make sense when you can just fly a SpaceX Dragon there instead and the X-37 suffers from many of the same safety problems as the shuttle; it still has wings that have a marked tendency to fall off in an emergency, and it still needs a precision runway landing if you don't want to die at the end of the flight.
Microsoft has collected data that shows people are using the start menu less and less.
The Start Menu in Windows 7 sucks. So people use it less. So Microsoft say 'people aren't using the start menu as much, so we're going to get rid of it'.
Screw things up then blame the users. It's the Microsoft way.
The masses are embracing Win 7 because it brought some really cool new features and it's rock-solid-stable. I don't recall reading any bad reviews of it.
The masses are embracing Win 7 because it came on their PC and doesn't suck as bad as Vista did. I have Windows 7 on my laptop and while I only boot into it every few weeks to play a game that doesn't run in Wine, I've yet to see a 'really cool new feature' that wasn't in XP.
I agree with you about Windows 8 though, it seems to be Vista++. Maybe Windows 9 will actually separate the desktop and tablet versions and be worth using again.
You can expect the final product to be better then the preview for both touch and mouse users.
Why? Metro sucks by design for desktop users and desktop apps suck by design for tablet users. Pushing Metro on the desktop and desktop apps on tablets shows that Microsoft is in total retard mode.
So you think it costs Amazon zero dollars to lease its data centers, stock them with high end servers, keep them cool and supplied with power, develop application software and/or buy commercial software licenses to run them, get IT and hardware people to keep them running 24x7x365, apply security patches, do backup/restore and other crisis management, and also do the marketing, accounting, and management for the line of business?
When you divide that by the number of ebooks they sell, yes, as near to nothing as makes no odds. The biggest costs on a $0.99 ebook are probably the credit card fees and the cost of distribution over the 3G network if you use it.
Replying again because I forgot to address this point. I think you're failing to note that this only applies to already-successful authors.
No, I was specifically talking about already-successful writers; they're the publishing industry's cash cows, and without them all those New York offices will be rather hard to pay for.
Until recently those writers had nowhere else to go, now they can self-publish their laundry lists on Amazon and make 70% royalties instead of 15%. The smarter ones are already comparing how much money they can make in the two markets, the dumber ones will take a while to realise how much trade publishing is costing them.
This is too bad, because what major publishers bring to the table is the expertise to help an author refine their work and market it effectively.
So why do I continually see trade-published writers complaining that their publisher released their book with minimal editing and no publicity? Editing largely seems to be performed by agents these days, or agents telling the writer to pay an editor to edit it before it's submitted. Marketing money mostly seems to go toward getting the book in bookstores, not selling it to readers.
They also have reputations to protect, so what they print will not totally suck, and consumers know that.
I've been having a hard time finding anything I want to read in a bookstore recently. The writing may not be as bad as fanfiction.net, but they're mostly just ripoffs of whatever the latest 'big thing' is.
Nobody said it should cost three times what the paperback costs. I said it made sense for it to cost a bit more.
It makes no sense, since an ebook offers the reader less than a print book; for example, you can't sell the ebook and you can't lend it to your grandmother.
No successful self-publisher sells ebooks for more than print books. Only trade publishers think it makes any kind of sense, and that's because they're protecting their print market.
Here is where you get statistics wrong. The minority of books for you are readable. However, for the crowd the majority of books are readable. But because of word of mouth and pin holing information flow the crowd has determined a minority of books are readable or even accessible.
No, the majority of $0.99 ebooks are somewhere between unreadable and barely readable. The vast majority of free ebooks really are unreadable; probably worse than what you'd find on fanfiction.net, since at least the fan fiction starts with a competent setting and characters.
Yeah, and? Do you really think his family -- and, indeed, the reading public -- would be happier if he'd forgotten about that writing nonsense and stuck to his day job?
If there's double the authors but not double the spending on books, authors receive half the money they used to.
An author selling through a trade publisher would typically get around 15% of the sale price of the book. An author selling a $2.99 ebook through Amazon gets 70%. So if readers are spending half as much money on their books, the authors are making twice as much money after cutting out the middlemen at the publisher.
Admittedly, most authors don't lease an office, but an author still has to pay for much of that himself or herself, which means that an author would need to gross well over $150,000 to make as much money as a Silicon Valley programmer.
But authors don't have to _LIVE_ in Silicon Valley. They can live in a much cheaper place where they don't need to make $150,000 a year to have a half-decent life.
In reality, the average author grosses almost nothing
That's because the 'average author' 'sells' a short story to a magazine every other year and the magazine only gives them a few free copies as payment. By that standard, the 'average programmer' grossed almost nothing after the dot-com crash when they were unemployed.
Never having sold through amazon, do they demand that you never sell it elsewhere? Could you put your work in the kindle store at a higher cost to offset Amazon's cut and then self-host and undercut amazon?
They don't care where you sell it. The only proviso is that you don't sell it cheaper elsewhere or they'll reduce the Amazon price to match.
Most people sell through Amazon because people are far more likely to find your book on Amazon than they are to find your web site and trust you with their credit card number.
Publishers charge more for the electronic versions under the assumption that they are more likely to be pirated (in spite of any DRM), and thus reduce sales.
So they're going to discourage piracy by increasing the price so that free pirate download looks much, much better than paying $20 for an ebook of a novel you could buy in paperback for $6.99?
Back in the real world, publishers hate ebooks because once successful authors realise they can make more money by self-publishing an ebook for $4.99 than they do from selling a hardback through a publisher, they'll abandon publishing in droves.
The average author (even through major publishers) makes only single-digit thousands of dollars per title. Most titles are lucky to sell a few thousand copies.
The mid-list authors I've met seem to make $30-50k as a typical advance. Write two novels a year and you're able to live quite well.
Of course you need to write something that people want to read and find a publisher who doesn't decide they're no longer going to sell your genre and dump you overnight.
Finally, there's the rather fundamental problem that an eBook that dramatically undercuts the price of the printed page will tend to cut the knees out from under your print sales. No publisher will be willing to do this, and no author who has any intention of ever releasing a print edition will do this, either.
Weird, because plenty of self-published ebook authors also sell print versions of their books. They don't care whether you buy a $15 print book or a $5 ebook because they make about the same amount of money either way.
Publishers hate ebooks because control of print distribution into bookstores is about all they have to keep successful authors tied to them.
A number of people have said that ebooks seem very popular among the older generation because they can't read standard book fonts very well and with an e-reader they can just increase the font size on the screen until it's comfortable for them.
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Future systems are 10W or less, not 300W or less.
You can build an i5 system that idles around 30W and peaks around 100W if you don't need discrete graphics. I doubt you can do the same with anything comparable from AMD.
Discrete GPUs have been the space-heaters in high-end Intel computers for some time now, not the CPU.
The wings weren't a problem for the shuttle.
Both shuttle losses were fundamentally caused by the wings falling off. A capsule could have handled the g-forces imposed on Columbia or Challenger without breaking up, whereas a relatlvely small force was enough to break the wings off of the fuselage (not to mention separate the crew compartment from the payload bay), at which point the crew were doomed. A significant portion of the shuttle ascent trajectory design was based around making sure the wings didn't fall off even in nominal flight.
The X37B has none of those problems. it sits atop of the main fuel tank, and only has maneuvering thrusters, no main engines that need to be repaired.
And the wings will probably still fall off if it separates under a high dynamic pressure due to an abort or a booster malfunction, and if that happens the crew will still die unless they have ejection seats. I've never seen a non-insane launch escape system proposed for a winged booster other than ejection seats.
The problem is that Linux will not settle on a stable ABI.
The great thing about the Linux kernel is that it's not tied to a crusty old ABI which it has to support to stop people complaining when their old drivers no longer work. Instead it can throw out old crap when someone comes up with a better design.
I rather doubt claymores are being attached to satellites.
They will be if the USAF is sending astronauts up to grab them. Almaz had a 23mm cannon and I believe the USSR at least looked at arming their spy satellites when the USAF was talking about using the shuttle to capture them.
Physical access to satellites.
Physical access to satellites in low orbit which don't have any kind of defence system and can't be moved out of the way when the other guy sees you heading toward them.
A couple of claymores on the outside of the satellite would probably be enough to kill any approaching astronaut and do enough damage that the spacecraft could no longer re-enter.
I know SpaceX is on the path, but they're a long way from completion.
Is the shuttle man-rated? Because I don't see why SpaceX would have a hard time making the Dragon/Falcon 9 kill the crew less than one time in sixty.
Instead of discarding current platforms before there are viable replacements, lets try to actually use what we have while we have it, instead of throwing it away so we can "afford" a better one.
A spacecraft you can't afford to fly is useless. You might as well tow it straight to the museum.
According to an article I read yesterday, this may be more to do with attempting to find a justification for keeping the X-37 program going when no-one seems to know what it's meant to be for. Certainly using it to go to ISS doesn't seem to make sense when you can just fly a SpaceX Dragon there instead and the X-37 suffers from many of the same safety problems as the shuttle; it still has wings that have a marked tendency to fall off in an emergency, and it still needs a precision runway landing if you don't want to die at the end of the flight.
Microsoft has collected data that shows people are using the start menu less and less.
The Start Menu in Windows 7 sucks. So people use it less. So Microsoft say 'people aren't using the start menu as much, so we're going to get rid of it'.
Screw things up then blame the users. It's the Microsoft way.
The masses are embracing Win 7 because it brought some really cool new features and it's rock-solid-stable. I don't recall reading any bad reviews of it.
The masses are embracing Win 7 because it came on their PC and doesn't suck as bad as Vista did. I have Windows 7 on my laptop and while I only boot into it every few weeks to play a game that doesn't run in Wine, I've yet to see a 'really cool new feature' that wasn't in XP.
I agree with you about Windows 8 though, it seems to be Vista++. Maybe Windows 9 will actually separate the desktop and tablet versions and be worth using again.
You can expect the final product to be better then the preview for both touch and mouse users.
Why? Metro sucks by design for desktop users and desktop apps suck by design for tablet users. Pushing Metro on the desktop and desktop apps on tablets shows that Microsoft is in total retard mode.
So you think it costs Amazon zero dollars to lease its data centers, stock them with high end servers, keep them cool and supplied with power, develop application software and/or buy commercial software licenses to run them, get IT and hardware people to keep them running 24x7x365, apply security patches, do backup/restore and other crisis management, and also do the marketing, accounting, and management for the line of business?
When you divide that by the number of ebooks they sell, yes, as near to nothing as makes no odds. The biggest costs on a $0.99 ebook are probably the credit card fees and the cost of distribution over the 3G network if you use it.
Amazon may be nice for the author but then the customer gets DRM and is limited on where they can view the file.
Most $0.99 ebooks don't have DRM. It's kind of silly when you're practically giving the book away in the first place.
If you sell a million copies of a book, chances are very good that you can get a much higher percentage of the profits on the *next* book.
Not if you're selling them on Amazon for $0.99. You get $0.35 per sale, take it or leave it.
Replying again because I forgot to address this point. I think you're failing to note that this only applies to already-successful authors.
No, I was specifically talking about already-successful writers; they're the publishing industry's cash cows, and without them all those New York offices will be rather hard to pay for.
Until recently those writers had nowhere else to go, now they can self-publish their laundry lists on Amazon and make 70% royalties instead of 15%. The smarter ones are already comparing how much money they can make in the two markets, the dumber ones will take a while to realise how much trade publishing is costing them.
This is too bad, because what major publishers bring to the table is the expertise to help an author refine their work and market it effectively.
So why do I continually see trade-published writers complaining that their publisher released their book with minimal editing and no publicity? Editing largely seems to be performed by agents these days, or agents telling the writer to pay an editor to edit it before it's submitted. Marketing money mostly seems to go toward getting the book in bookstores, not selling it to readers.
They also have reputations to protect, so what they print will not totally suck, and consumers know that.
I've been having a hard time finding anything I want to read in a bookstore recently. The writing may not be as bad as fanfiction.net, but they're mostly just ripoffs of whatever the latest 'big thing' is.
Nobody said it should cost three times what the paperback costs. I said it made sense for it to cost a bit more.
It makes no sense, since an ebook offers the reader less than a print book; for example, you can't sell the ebook and you can't lend it to your grandmother.
No successful self-publisher sells ebooks for more than print books. Only trade publishers think it makes any kind of sense, and that's because they're protecting their print market.
Here is where you get statistics wrong. The minority of books for you are readable. However, for the crowd the majority of books are readable. But because of word of mouth and pin holing information flow the crowd has determined a minority of books are readable or even accessible.
No, the majority of $0.99 ebooks are somewhere between unreadable and barely readable. The vast majority of free ebooks really are unreadable; probably worse than what you'd find on fanfiction.net, since at least the fan fiction starts with a competent setting and characters.
Tolkien had a day job.
Yeah, and? Do you really think his family -- and, indeed, the reading public -- would be happier if he'd forgotten about that writing nonsense and stuck to his day job?
If authors could make 60K a year that would be amazing... but sadly even that is not easily possible...
There are plenty of authors making $60k a year.
If there's double the authors but not double the spending on books, authors receive half the money they used to.
An author selling through a trade publisher would typically get around 15% of the sale price of the book. An author selling a $2.99 ebook through Amazon gets 70%. So if readers are spending half as much money on their books, the authors are making twice as much money after cutting out the middlemen at the publisher.
Admittedly, most authors don't lease an office, but an author still has to pay for much of that himself or herself, which means that an author would need to gross well over $150,000 to make as much money as a Silicon Valley programmer.
But authors don't have to _LIVE_ in Silicon Valley. They can live in a much cheaper place where they don't need to make $150,000 a year to have a half-decent life.
In reality, the average author grosses almost nothing
That's because the 'average author' 'sells' a short story to a magazine every other year and the magazine only gives them a few free copies as payment. By that standard, the 'average programmer' grossed almost nothing after the dot-com crash when they were unemployed.
Never having sold through amazon, do they demand that you never sell it elsewhere? Could you put your work in the kindle store at a higher cost to offset Amazon's cut and then self-host and undercut amazon?
They don't care where you sell it. The only proviso is that you don't sell it cheaper elsewhere or they'll reduce the Amazon price to match.
Most people sell through Amazon because people are far more likely to find your book on Amazon than they are to find your web site and trust you with their credit card number.
Publishers charge more for the electronic versions under the assumption that they are more likely to be pirated (in spite of any DRM), and thus reduce sales.
So they're going to discourage piracy by increasing the price so that free pirate download looks much, much better than paying $20 for an ebook of a novel you could buy in paperback for $6.99?
Back in the real world, publishers hate ebooks because once successful authors realise they can make more money by self-publishing an ebook for $4.99 than they do from selling a hardback through a publisher, they'll abandon publishing in droves.
The average author (even through major publishers) makes only single-digit thousands of dollars per title. Most titles are lucky to sell a few thousand copies.
The mid-list authors I've met seem to make $30-50k as a typical advance. Write two novels a year and you're able to live quite well.
Of course you need to write something that people want to read and find a publisher who doesn't decide they're no longer going to sell your genre and dump you overnight.
Finally, there's the rather fundamental problem that an eBook that dramatically undercuts the price of the printed page will tend to cut the knees out from under your print sales. No publisher will be willing to do this, and no author who has any intention of ever releasing a print edition will do this, either.
Weird, because plenty of self-published ebook authors also sell print versions of their books. They don't care whether you buy a $15 print book or a $5 ebook because they make about the same amount of money either way.
Publishers hate ebooks because control of print distribution into bookstores is about all they have to keep successful authors tied to them.
EBooks are beyond my grandmother's capabilities.
A number of people have said that ebooks seem very popular among the older generation because they can't read standard book fonts very well and with an e-reader they can just increase the font size on the screen until it's comfortable for them.