It's not like we've done this before. This is the first time we've assembled something this complex in orbit. Even if building space stations was routine, there would be technical glitches that turn up and need to be dealt with. What you are seeing is all part of the learning experience.
To each his own. That's why there are dozens of distros. I've actually never (knowingly) run Mandriva. Every few years I poke around and then settle on a *nix for a while, based on both objective "it works" and subjective "I like it" criteria. Back in the mid '90's I tried Slackware and RedHat... and settled on RedHat on my desktop. (with Solaris on production machines) In '02 I played with a few distros, Rock, Gentoo, LFS, Suse, RedHat, to name a few... and settled on Suse. This year I played with Solaris, FreeBSD, Knoppix, Gentoo, Ubuntu... and settled on Ubuntu. For right now Ubuntu does what I need it to and I find it comfortable to work in. I like that my laptop, my test machine, and my main box all worked (except for some tweaking required on a wireless card). I like the way in which they implemented some things. That may change in a few years. We'll have to wait and see...
I think he's referring to the Williamsburg in Brooklyn, NY Oops, my bad.
On the other hand, if they built it in Virginia (a much more sensible idea because it's closer to the equator), they wouldn't be able to send any more than 3 astronauts up in the capsule at a time. Williamsburg is one of the few cities in the US to have retained its "Brothel Laws", Another good reason to build in adjacent Newport News! Apparently, we don't care:P
I'm sure the Williamsburg heat and humidity would be hell on the tether No worse than as if they built it where they PLAN to build it... on the equator. Most likely on the equator on a floating platform in the Pacific.
why the colonial settlers chose to land in Jamestown, and then move to Williamsburg (essentially a swamp) absolutely boggles the mind Most of Hampton Roads fits that description, being low lying sedimentary land. Old Williamsburg is inland (slightly) of Jamestown.
I don't knock the shuttle generally. It's a fantastic machine. Everything you say about it is true. BTW, that includes the negatives about the tiles and mounting the thing on the side of a tank that you can't escape from. The problem is that it's such a marvelously complicated machine, that it's MTBF is unacceptably low. It's OVERcomplicated, being a system full of compromises designed in by multiple committees with differing goals. Don't misunderstand me, I love the things. BTW, FWIW I work for a NASA contractor adjacent to the Langley facility. It bothers me that about 1 in 100 have not returned in one piece. As an engineer, it also bothers me that the system is running wayyyy beyond it's design life.
The Soyuz system is remarkable in that it's been reliable. They're not perfect. Yes, they had fatal accidents, however, the last one occured in 1971. They learned from those failures and implemented design changes in the later modules. Yes, it's also true that Soyuz has only flown around 100 manned flights; but, even when it fails, as the NAV system did today, the people return alive. That's a reputation that's hard to argue with.
I think what we've learned from operating the shuttle and looking at the Russian program, is that simple makes for a better MTBF and does it at a lower cost. It may not be gee-wiz. It may appear to be a step backward. If this means the people come home alive, it's the right move. Use the big boosters, in parallel, to put the equipment in space and then have the people meet it there.
It's like we tried to run, when we didn't know how to walk yet. We stumbled a few times, scrapped our knees. Now we're being a little more cautious as we learn to walk with confidence. We'll run again, when the times right, that is, when the technology catches up and the infrastructure is in place.
Nimby. I say we build it in neighboring Newport News. Then we'll get the tax revenue and your mornings will still be subject to the "impossibly long, cold, and very narrow shadow over [your] homes!"
I know you're looking for ways to teach yourself math, but I'm surprised no one suggested auditing classes at your nearest public university. Many will let you sit in on the class(es) at no cost (or very low cost). You're not required to complete the assignments or tests. Of course, you don't get any official credit for the course either.
Actually, if he did patent it, then he's going to limit it's application in his intended markets (3rd world). However, even if he did, I can help him subsidize this. I know of an application in remote sensing that this would probably power; and we sell a LOT of these remote sensors...
Not too dumb. He was designing it for use in Haiti. While I suspect there are places where nothing is tenable, a thin ribbon under tension is a whole lot simpler and cheaper to manufacture and maintain than a rotating wind turbine. It doesn't have to be mylar, you could use scrap cloth, although mylar may last longer and be easier to keep under tension. LED's were for the demo. You could use the thing to run any light; or better yet charge a small battery so you have power on demand.
He made another good point in the article: If you break this you have something that a local can fix. If you break a solar panel, your stuck with a broken panel (which is trash). What he didn't mention is that this would run at night too, as opposed to a solar panel that only works during the day.
while I agree with another poster's comment that the 30x improvement in efficiency over a microturbine is probably not real, I think it's fairly interesting. Enough so that, since IAAAP (I am an applied physicist), I'm thinking about building one myself to get some numbers and see how well it scales. I know some people in Africa who might be interested in something like this...
Maybe in a handful of latte sipping enclaves of North America. In the real world, most universities and research labs have never been able to afford either Macs or UNIX workstations; they are upgrading their aging Windows NT PCs to Linux and really happy with it. well, in the math department of my particular latte sipping liberal arts university we use Macs. In the physics department of the same latte sipping liberal arts university we use a mix of Solaris, Macs and PCs. All of the PC's are old (800MHz). Newer machines are Solaris or Mac, but I'm seeing fewer solaris boxes and more Macs being purchased. By the way, I like my coffee black.
If you want some data, look at Google Trend data Funny that, I did exactly that with the search terms "linux, mac" and it came back with Mac passing linux Q2 2006.
Interesting. Thanks for the demographic. Now I know how to put some numbers together to try to refute my management who turn a blind eye and claim "No one is running linux"
I'll grant you, there are a lot of linux installs; and, it's difficult to generate demographic data on them because they're often generic boxes bought from Dell, HP, etc., many of which count as Windows sales.
You're forgetting that a lot of research labs and universities buy Apple iMacs or PowerMacs/Mac Pros because it's a preconfigured Unix machine. That was one of the not so talked about big wins of OS X -- It was rapidly adopted by research labs and universities who had been buying more traditional Unix machines because a Mac was easier to set up and considerably cheaper than a brandX workstation with a user license for brandX Unix.
My point is that there are a lot of universities or labs who might be using linux or bsd on the servers but have OS X on the desktop.
OK, as others have pointed out, the machine in the show didn't even POST.
Having said that, I've had a machine that would generate a few random corruptions in the form of bit flips. This happened sporadically. Files would become corrupt. The machine would hang or become erratic. It would show up once a week or so. It passed single memtest cycles. Only after running memtest continuously for 12 hours did any problem appear (reports random memory failures in the upper 128MB); and, it didn't repeat.
by the way, it was the memory controller in the northbridge chip -- bad mb
Nic's fail all the time, even good ones. You must live/work in an awful clean environment. Me, I work in a commercial/industrial environment and we kill like one nic's every 1-2 months in our ~100 PC environment.
You're getting carried away listing all that old stuff. Come on, if the computer has DIPs in it, it's probably not worth fixing; or, they will be willing to wait a day for you to order the parts with overnight shipping for that super critical legacy app machine that they must keep running.
Carry some common stuff. In common speeds. What will kill you is the picky machines that require very specific memory timing (like my compaq laptop). Notwithstanding those, you can carry memory that will work in > 50% of the cases, in your car.
However, in oral arguments before the Supreme Court in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., Don Verrilli, representing MGM stated:
"And let me clarify something I think is unclear from the amicus briefs. The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it's been on their Website for some time now, that it's perfectly lawful to take a CD that you've purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod. There is a very, very significant lawful commercial use for that device, going forward."[2]
Actually (from the blog author's bio):
Among his many roles at Intel, he was applications manager for the ASCI teraFLOPS project, helped create OpenMP, founded the Open Cluster Group... You might notice, he helped create OpenMP.
Slashdot Mirror
For keelhauling to be properly effective (as it was intended), you'd have to find an old ship with a barnacle encrusted hull.
It's not like we've done this before. This is the first time we've assembled something this complex in orbit. Even if building space stations was routine, there would be technical glitches that turn up and need to be dealt with. What you are seeing is all part of the learning experience.
http://www.newegg.com/
I got a rt2500 based ASUS card for $25. Meets their "works 100% out of the box" claim. Did have minor problems with it, which were easy to fix.
To each his own. That's why there are dozens of distros. I've actually never (knowingly) run Mandriva. Every few years I poke around and then settle on a *nix for a while, based on both objective "it works" and subjective "I like it" criteria. Back in the mid '90's I tried Slackware and RedHat... and settled on RedHat on my desktop. (with Solaris on production machines) In '02 I played with a few distros, Rock, Gentoo, LFS, Suse, RedHat, to name a few... and settled on Suse. This year I played with Solaris, FreeBSD, Knoppix, Gentoo, Ubuntu... and settled on Ubuntu. For right now Ubuntu does what I need it to and I find it comfortable to work in. I like that my laptop, my test machine, and my main box all worked (except for some tweaking required on a wireless card). I like the way in which they implemented some things. That may change in a few years. We'll have to wait and see...
I don't knock the shuttle generally. It's a fantastic machine. Everything you say about it is true. BTW, that includes the negatives about the tiles and mounting the thing on the side of a tank that you can't escape from. The problem is that it's such a marvelously complicated machine, that it's MTBF is unacceptably low. It's OVERcomplicated, being a system full of compromises designed in by multiple committees with differing goals. Don't misunderstand me, I love the things. BTW, FWIW I work for a NASA contractor adjacent to the Langley facility. It bothers me that about 1 in 100 have not returned in one piece. As an engineer, it also bothers me that the system is running wayyyy beyond it's design life.
The Soyuz system is remarkable in that it's been reliable. They're not perfect. Yes, they had fatal accidents, however, the last one occured in 1971. They learned from those failures and implemented design changes in the later modules. Yes, it's also true that Soyuz has only flown around 100 manned flights; but, even when it fails, as the NAV system did today, the people return alive. That's a reputation that's hard to argue with.
I think what we've learned from operating the shuttle and looking at the Russian program, is that simple makes for a better MTBF and does it at a lower cost. It may not be gee-wiz. It may appear to be a step backward. If this means the people come home alive, it's the right move. Use the big boosters, in parallel, to put the equipment in space and then have the people meet it there.
It's like we tried to run, when we didn't know how to walk yet. We stumbled a few times, scrapped our knees. Now we're being a little more cautious as we learn to walk with confidence. We'll run again, when the times right, that is, when the technology catches up and the infrastructure is in place.
Nimby. I say we build it in neighboring Newport News. Then we'll get the tax revenue and your mornings will still be subject to the "impossibly long, cold, and very narrow shadow over [your] homes!"
Bwahahaha ---evil laugh
the blue screen of death.
Ummmm, No. No, they can't have my brain.
I know you're looking for ways to teach yourself math, but I'm surprised no one suggested auditing classes at your nearest public university. Many will let you sit in on the class(es) at no cost (or very low cost). You're not required to complete the assignments or tests. Of course, you don't get any official credit for the course either.
Actually, if he did patent it, then he's going to limit it's application in his intended markets (3rd world). However, even if he did, I can help him subsidize this. I know of an application in remote sensing that this would probably power; and we sell a LOT of these remote sensors...
Yeah, it's called research and peer review.
Not too dumb. He was designing it for use in Haiti. While I suspect there are places where nothing is tenable, a thin ribbon under tension is a whole lot simpler and cheaper to manufacture and maintain than a rotating wind turbine. It doesn't have to be mylar, you could use scrap cloth, although mylar may last longer and be easier to keep under tension. LED's were for the demo. You could use the thing to run any light; or better yet charge a small battery so you have power on demand.
He made another good point in the article: If you break this you have something that a local can fix. If you break a solar panel, your stuck with a broken panel (which is trash). What he didn't mention is that this would run at night too, as opposed to a solar panel that only works during the day.
while I agree with another poster's comment that the 30x improvement in efficiency over a microturbine is probably not real, I think it's fairly interesting. Enough so that, since IAAAP (I am an applied physicist), I'm thinking about building one myself to get some numbers and see how well it scales. I know some people in Africa who might be interested in something like this...
Mac: 3.74%
linux: 1.38%
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
Mac: 6.61%
linux: 0.81%
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2
Maybe in a handful of latte sipping enclaves of North America. In the real world, most universities and research labs have never been able to afford either Macs or UNIX workstations; they are upgrading their aging Windows NT PCs to Linux and really happy with it. well, in the math department of my particular latte sipping liberal arts university we use Macs. In the physics department of the same latte sipping liberal arts university we use a mix of Solaris, Macs and PCs. All of the PC's are old (800MHz). Newer machines are Solaris or Mac, but I'm seeing fewer solaris boxes and more Macs being purchased. By the way, I like my coffee black. If you want some data, look at Google Trend data Funny that, I did exactly that with the search terms "linux, mac" and it came back with Mac passing linux Q2 2006.
Interesting. Thanks for the demographic. Now I know how to put some numbers together to try to refute my management who turn a blind eye and claim "No one is running linux"
I'll grant you, there are a lot of linux installs; and, it's difficult to generate demographic data on them because they're often generic boxes bought from Dell, HP, etc., many of which count as Windows sales.
You're forgetting that a lot of research labs and universities buy Apple iMacs or PowerMacs/Mac Pros because it's a preconfigured Unix machine. That was one of the not so talked about big wins of OS X -- It was rapidly adopted by research labs and universities who had been buying more traditional Unix machines because a Mac was easier to set up and considerably cheaper than a brandX workstation with a user license for brandX Unix.
My point is that there are a lot of universities or labs who might be using linux or bsd on the servers but have OS X on the desktop.
But, can they replace the clay with carbon buckey tubes, draw a long filament, and make a space elevator out of it?
I'd kind of prefer to avoid the whole extinction thing, if you don't mind.
OK, as others have pointed out, the machine in the show didn't even POST.
Having said that, I've had a machine that would generate a few random corruptions in the form of bit flips. This happened sporadically. Files would become corrupt. The machine would hang or become erratic. It would show up once a week or so. It passed single memtest cycles. Only after running memtest continuously for 12 hours did any problem appear (reports random memory failures in the upper 128MB); and, it didn't repeat.
by the way, it was the memory controller in the northbridge chip -- bad mb
Nic's fail all the time, even good ones. You must live/work in an awful clean environment. Me, I work in a commercial/industrial environment and we kill like one nic's every 1-2 months in our ~100 PC environment.
You're getting carried away listing all that old stuff. Come on, if the computer has DIPs in it, it's probably not worth fixing; or, they will be willing to wait a day for you to order the parts with overnight shipping for that super critical legacy app machine that they must keep running. Carry some common stuff. In common speeds. What will kill you is the picky machines that require very specific memory timing (like my compaq laptop). Notwithstanding those, you can carry memory that will work in > 50% of the cases, in your car.
Dave, is that you?
Unfortunately, that sounds like where I work... Even though I can make a (very good) case that it's NOT the best language to use for our application