Actually, per the article, the point would be to have a no-propultion way to get materials off the lunar surface and into an earth orbit where we can use them for construction.
Suggestion: If you're trying to sell a product, don't put your graphics-rich website on a slow uplink line, particularly if the product you're trying to sell is web software.
If you look at the Oregon campuses of Intel, they're all named things like "Jones Farm" and "Ronler Acres" because they used to be farmland, and not so many years ago. It wasn't too long ago that Jones Farm (the furthest out) was almost entirely surrounded by agriculture. Now it's surrounded by housing developments. And Intel's not the only one with campuses out there; several high-tech companies make their homes there.
And about the commute, it sucked six years ago when I was working out there, and I hear it's worse now. A fifteen mile trip took the better part of an hour most days, and three hours coming home on holiday weekends. Our light rail system went in and alleviated some of the problem temporarily, but the glut rebounded. Now I work in the heart of downtown Portland and live in a close-in neighborhood. The commute by bus is about fifteen minutes, by carpool about ten. I can leave the building to go get lunch at any number of restaurants, wander by the bookstore, maybe stop and visit with the gal at the flower stand, all on my lunch hour. When I was out at The Farm, it took ten minutes to get to your car and another ten minutes to drive to wherever you might want to have lunch. The lines were always long for crappy suburban food that you gobbled down as quickly as you could, and the return commute was the same as the outbound leg. Lunchtime became a review of last night's leftovers in the breakroom microwave and eating at your desk while surfing the net.
I'll take the downtown experience any day of the week.
I don't think they're trying to be Microsoft, as they offer hardware, too. And they're not trying to be Apple, either, because they're small potatoes on the home user front and have hardly anything in the corporate environment. No, I think Sun is trying to be the Sun that someone envisioned many years ago; the provider of stem-to-stern computing environments for an enterprise, from the server hardware to the IM client and everything in between. They won't succeed, though, without addressing the home user. You can't get mindshare without it.
Well, right. That's been the big attraction of Linux the whole time. The nut, though, is that the base operating system (including window manager) just isn't as well polished as Windows, nor as well integrated with the apps. This fact isn't lost on distro companies, and they're working furiously to resolve the problem, but they're not there yet. Simple things like a consistent look and feel for control panels, consistent button placement or an easy-to-navigate file system (okay, that last isn't so simple, and isn't something Windows has either) are the pieces that create roadblocks to widespread adoption.
Take all that and add in that software in general, and OpenOffice in particular, takes a long time to launch, and you have a system that's rough around the edges and feels slow whether or not it actually is. You can cry all you want about how Microsoft has deep hooks into their operating system that allows "bloated" applications like Word (mind you, I use a lot of Word's features regularly, so I don't consider it bloated) to launch quickly, but the fact of the matter is, that's the sort of integration that makes their solution (stem to stern) so popular. You would think that, with all the vaunted power of the open source movement, and the example set by Microsoft's success, that similar and better functionality could be created in the free world.
But it's just not there yet. I will continue to hold my breath.
Kudos for that. I'm a definite proponent of Linux implementation, particularly in enterprise systems, but it's not ready for the desktop yet. Say what you will about them, but Microsoft has a fairly polished desktop product, even if the polish hides significant flaws.
One thing that bothered me about the article is that many of the complaints the author had about Linux in general seem to be solved in SUSE 9.1 (KDE 3.2) that I'm using at home. I seriously doubt that the likes of Mandrake and RedHat have much that's different, as I haven't heard any news flashes that SUSE had some hot technology that no one else does. I don't know about other wireless cards, but the Atheros-based built-in card on my ThinkPad works like a charm, and was autodetected on OS install. Printing seems to work well enough through the KDE control panel applet, and the driver for my Canon S500 was in the very long list that came with the system. Autodetection works there, too.
Wandering between wireless networks is definitely a pain, though. I'm sure there are better options than what I have (the depths of YaST) for ad hoc network switching, but they didn't come with the system, and I have to say that the Wireless Networks applet on my wife's XP laptop would be excellent if only it were about 10% more configurable and actually remembered what you told it. In general, its detection of networks is reliable, if not its ability to get connected to them. That's a little spotty.
Regardless, the article's author is generally correct, inasmuch as Linux needs polish to be accepted in the enterprise as a replacement for Windows on the desktop. Furthermore, it (or a distro) needs to address a slow migration path instead of a wholesale replacement strategy. That means interoperability with almost everything Windows uses now, plus all the added benefits of using Linux today, such as attachment to NFS shares on Unix systems.
You know, I figure those ads keep Slashdot going, so I let them through. If it was widely known that 95% of ads on Slashdot didn't make it to the screens of their intended audience, then advertisers wouldn't send their dollars here, ultimately making it really, really difficult for you to RTFA.
Well, I can't say (unfortunately) that I'm a parent. Were I a parent, I wouldn't let a 13-year old read it. OTOH, I read it when I was 17. One of my high-school teachers recommended it, loaned it to me even. He did qualify it by saying that it had some mature content and wanted to know up front if I would be bothered by that. I read the whole series straight through (Titan, Wizard, Demon) and loved them. I don't remember the violence being any worse than a lot of other things teens read, including Tolkien. There was definitely a lot of sex, including a lesbian love affair between two main characters.
But it's been twenty years since I read it, and the fog of time may cloud my memory.
This is totally OT, but IMHO, Stephen Baxter should stick to short stories. He's a wizard with them. I tried reading a couple of his longer novels and just felt bogged down. And, in one, I found two of his short stories that I had previously read right in the middle.
Of course, maybe I've just chosen the wrong novels. Any suggestions for a good one, one that will keep you reading?
I would hope it would be good for surf-zone kayaking, too. Generally, people out kayaking don't want to be bothered with music, but communication is a huge issue. Those "waterproof" FRS radios don't work past your first wet exit, which is when you need them most.
Well, if flying the plane is the only input it gets, then the act of flying would be the reward. Imagine if you had all your senses stripped away, as well as all the memories of senses past, and the only input your brain had was sensors on the waste water management system for greater Los Angeles. You'd suddenly become excited when someone in East L.A. flushed the toilet.
Okay, I am of course assuming that you don't do so now.
Very true, but even if such material only reflected half the light that struck it, it might make for a good solar sail because of the dramatically reduced mass. Also, if, for instance, a one-atom thick sheet reflected only 10% of the light, and a sixty-atom thick (an arbitrarily selected number for illustration purposes) sheet reflected 100% of the light, you'd be far better off to make a sheet ten times the size of your original to capture as much light as something six times more massive.
Lastly, what of the electrostatic properties of this material? If you put a surface charge on it, you might be able to sail the ion-rich solar wind and not worry about the photonic reflection.
Well, at that, you only need a good strong barrier on your leading face; more or less an umbrella shield out in front of you. Also, an electric field will guide charged particles around you, or at least that's what I read. And, no matter your speed relative to your target, the real question is the speed of the particle hitting you relative to your momentary position.
I always say, the faster you go, the less chance of being around when an accident happens.
Actually, I remember reading an interview with one of the first moon-landing astronauts (Armstrong??) wherein he said that the hull thickness on the capsule was thin enough that you could easily put your fist through it. I think he's the one that said it was "basically tinfoil."
I think they only used about 8 or 10 psi for their atmosphere, rather than the 14.7 that is sea-level standard. They achieved this by increasing the ratio of oxygen, by the way. Also, remember that very thin materials can hold pressure very well. Try to explode a mylar baloon sometime. It will be the seams that fail, not the fabric.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone should send a link to the CSI producers and try to get a mention of this some "airtime" on the show.
Actually, per the article, the point would be to have a no-propultion way to get materials off the lunar surface and into an earth orbit where we can use them for construction.
Suggestion: If you're trying to sell a product, don't put your graphics-rich website on a slow uplink line, particularly if the product you're trying to sell is web software.
Sounds like a Microsoft-based "open" license.
"All your base are belong to us."
If you look at the Oregon campuses of Intel, they're all named things like "Jones Farm" and "Ronler Acres" because they used to be farmland, and not so many years ago. It wasn't too long ago that Jones Farm (the furthest out) was almost entirely surrounded by agriculture. Now it's surrounded by housing developments. And Intel's not the only one with campuses out there; several high-tech companies make their homes there.
And about the commute, it sucked six years ago when I was working out there, and I hear it's worse now. A fifteen mile trip took the better part of an hour most days, and three hours coming home on holiday weekends. Our light rail system went in and alleviated some of the problem temporarily, but the glut rebounded. Now I work in the heart of downtown Portland and live in a close-in neighborhood. The commute by bus is about fifteen minutes, by carpool about ten. I can leave the building to go get lunch at any number of restaurants, wander by the bookstore, maybe stop and visit with the gal at the flower stand, all on my lunch hour. When I was out at The Farm, it took ten minutes to get to your car and another ten minutes to drive to wherever you might want to have lunch. The lines were always long for crappy suburban food that you gobbled down as quickly as you could, and the return commute was the same as the outbound leg. Lunchtime became a review of last night's leftovers in the breakroom microwave and eating at your desk while surfing the net.
I'll take the downtown experience any day of the week.
I don't think they're trying to be Microsoft, as they offer hardware, too. And they're not trying to be Apple, either, because they're small potatoes on the home user front and have hardly anything in the corporate environment. No, I think Sun is trying to be the Sun that someone envisioned many years ago; the provider of stem-to-stern computing environments for an enterprise, from the server hardware to the IM client and everything in between. They won't succeed, though, without addressing the home user. You can't get mindshare without it.
Doesn't it involve cavitation in flowing liquids? I mean, that's where you get the sonic boom anyhow, right? From the cavity closing up?
You mean like this? I suspect that's probably more than you were after...
Well, right. That's been the big attraction of Linux the whole time. The nut, though, is that the base operating system (including window manager) just isn't as well polished as Windows, nor as well integrated with the apps. This fact isn't lost on distro companies, and they're working furiously to resolve the problem, but they're not there yet. Simple things like a consistent look and feel for control panels, consistent button placement or an easy-to-navigate file system (okay, that last isn't so simple, and isn't something Windows has either) are the pieces that create roadblocks to widespread adoption.
Take all that and add in that software in general, and OpenOffice in particular, takes a long time to launch, and you have a system that's rough around the edges and feels slow whether or not it actually is. You can cry all you want about how Microsoft has deep hooks into their operating system that allows "bloated" applications like Word (mind you, I use a lot of Word's features regularly, so I don't consider it bloated) to launch quickly, but the fact of the matter is, that's the sort of integration that makes their solution (stem to stern) so popular. You would think that, with all the vaunted power of the open source movement, and the example set by Microsoft's success, that similar and better functionality could be created in the free world.
But it's just not there yet. I will continue to hold my breath.
Kudos for that. I'm a definite proponent of Linux implementation, particularly in enterprise systems, but it's not ready for the desktop yet. Say what you will about them, but Microsoft has a fairly polished desktop product, even if the polish hides significant flaws.
One thing that bothered me about the article is that many of the complaints the author had about Linux in general seem to be solved in SUSE 9.1 (KDE 3.2) that I'm using at home. I seriously doubt that the likes of Mandrake and RedHat have much that's different, as I haven't heard any news flashes that SUSE had some hot technology that no one else does. I don't know about other wireless cards, but the Atheros-based built-in card on my ThinkPad works like a charm, and was autodetected on OS install. Printing seems to work well enough through the KDE control panel applet, and the driver for my Canon S500 was in the very long list that came with the system. Autodetection works there, too.
Wandering between wireless networks is definitely a pain, though. I'm sure there are better options than what I have (the depths of YaST) for ad hoc network switching, but they didn't come with the system, and I have to say that the Wireless Networks applet on my wife's XP laptop would be excellent if only it were about 10% more configurable and actually remembered what you told it. In general, its detection of networks is reliable, if not its ability to get connected to them. That's a little spotty.
Regardless, the article's author is generally correct, inasmuch as Linux needs polish to be accepted in the enterprise as a replacement for Windows on the desktop. Furthermore, it (or a distro) needs to address a slow migration path instead of a wholesale replacement strategy. That means interoperability with almost everything Windows uses now, plus all the added benefits of using Linux today, such as attachment to NFS shares on Unix systems.
You know, I figure those ads keep Slashdot going, so I let them through. If it was widely known that 95% of ads on Slashdot didn't make it to the screens of their intended audience, then advertisers wouldn't send their dollars here, ultimately making it really, really difficult for you to RTFA.
Well, I can't say (unfortunately) that I'm a parent. Were I a parent, I wouldn't let a 13-year old read it. OTOH, I read it when I was 17. One of my high-school teachers recommended it, loaned it to me even. He did qualify it by saying that it had some mature content and wanted to know up front if I would be bothered by that. I read the whole series straight through (Titan, Wizard, Demon) and loved them. I don't remember the violence being any worse than a lot of other things teens read, including Tolkien. There was definitely a lot of sex, including a lesbian love affair between two main characters.
But it's been twenty years since I read it, and the fog of time may cloud my memory.
This is totally OT, but IMHO, Stephen Baxter should stick to short stories. He's a wizard with them. I tried reading a couple of his longer novels and just felt bogged down. And, in one, I found two of his short stories that I had previously read right in the middle.
Of course, maybe I've just chosen the wrong novels. Any suggestions for a good one, one that will keep you reading?
I was about to deride you for not getting the reference, but checked the link. Nice.
Someone should check with John Varley and see if he knows anything...
I would hope it would be good for surf-zone kayaking, too. Generally, people out kayaking don't want to be bothered with music, but communication is a huge issue. Those "waterproof" FRS radios don't work past your first wet exit, which is when you need them most.
Plenty of storage space available, I'm guessing? :^)
[/troll]
Here you go.
Well, if flying the plane is the only input it gets, then the act of flying would be the reward. Imagine if you had all your senses stripped away, as well as all the memories of senses past, and the only input your brain had was sensors on the waste water management system for greater Los Angeles. You'd suddenly become excited when someone in East L.A. flushed the toilet.
Okay, I am of course assuming that you don't do so now.
So I can play Tempest, maybe?
Very true, but even if such material only reflected half the light that struck it, it might make for a good solar sail because of the dramatically reduced mass. Also, if, for instance, a one-atom thick sheet reflected only 10% of the light, and a sixty-atom thick (an arbitrarily selected number for illustration purposes) sheet reflected 100% of the light, you'd be far better off to make a sheet ten times the size of your original to capture as much light as something six times more massive.
Lastly, what of the electrostatic properties of this material? If you put a surface charge on it, you might be able to sail the ion-rich solar wind and not worry about the photonic reflection.
What makes you say that? Not that I'm arguing, but I just wonder what brings you to that conclusion.
I always say, the faster you go, the less chance of being around when an accident happens.
I think they only used about 8 or 10 psi for their atmosphere, rather than the 14.7 that is sea-level standard. They achieved this by increasing the ratio of oxygen, by the way. Also, remember that very thin materials can hold pressure very well. Try to explode a mylar baloon sometime. It will be the seams that fail, not the fabric.
I'm not really clear on #2, but the use of this fabric as a solar sail was my first thought.