Hell, yes. Even if whatever technique the mice use is only applicable to skin, this is still awesome: skin replacement is a serious problem on humans. Just ask any burn victim. But skin's a pretty complex organ --- it is, basically, an insulated sac containing the universe --- and if that can be successfully regenerated then there's a good chance the technique might work on other soft tissue.
What would be really awesome is if the regenerated skin hooks up to the nervous system. If so, that means it's regenerating nerves too.
Well, sure, except that when writing Android NDK apps, making them run on x86 is as simple as changing:
APP_ABI:= armeabi
...to:
APP_ABI:= armeabi x86
...in your Application.mk file. Then you end up with an APK which installs and runs fine on both. And if you want MIPS as well?
APP_ABI:= armeabi x86 mips
Of course, this won't help existing apps that haven't been cross-compiled, but the Intel San Diego we have here does seem to have a ARM emulator. But I haven't looked at that in much detail because TBH it doesn't interest me much.
I agree, the video's really impressive, but the sound effects are just... fake. I actually turned them off after a few seconds because they were so fake and watched the rest in silence, which I think much improved the video.
Any severed remnant of the cable will enter an orbit based on the tangential velocity of its centre of gravity. Assuming the mass of the cable is insignificant with respect to the counterweight, then the centre of gravity will be at the upper counterweight, which is 135000km from Earth and goes round the Earth once a month, so that's a tangential velocity of... (does sums...) 330 metres per second.
Plugging the figures into the a crude orbital simulator because I can't be bothered to do the maths properly, I see that this orbit will have a periapsis of approximately 2500km, which is well within the Earth's surface. So, yes, the upper counterweight will impact the Earth.
In real life the mass of the cable won't be significant, so the centre of gravity will be much closer to the moon than the upper counterweight, so the periapsis will be higher. I see that in order to clear the Earth's surface at periapsis you'll need a tangential velocity of about 600 metres per second. (Of course, since the cable is really long, just because the centre of gravity clears the Earth's surface doesn't mean that the trailing cable will.)
As for damage? I'd reckon that any space elevator cable will be built as lightly as possible, and so will most likely instantly burn into vapour in the upper atmosphere.
Having read TFA, this seems to be precisely what they're doing; it looks like they deploy at the L1 point and extend the tether in both directions. Of course, this does mean the tether needs to be an extraordinary 250000km long.
Despite being totally awesome (which is reason enough to do it!) and also good practice for Earth (ditto) I am slightly at a loss as to how useful this would be. Space elevators are slow, and a lunar elevator would be really long and therefore really slow. And it's not as if the moon's hard to land or take off from.
I'm wondering if there's something useful to do with the other end. The high end of the tether is only 135000km from Earth. Is that far enough into the ionosphere to use for power generation?
I've been using Chromium for years, and have been very happy with it. The final straw that made me give up on Firefox was the way it handles self-signed certificates: it gave the me choice of either not viewing the site (and therefore not getting any work done), or else going through a long and fiddly process that would add the certificate to my list of ultimately trusted root certificates. There was no option for 'as I am not doing anything which requires security right now the status of the certificate is irrelevant to me so go ahead'. As at the time I was doing a lot of research on mailing list archives, and one very common mailing list setup would redirect http to https and would install a self-signed certificate, this was actually preventing me getting work done.
You will only take my Kindle from the cold, dead hands. (Although, TBH, I'd rather you didn't.) It has made such a difference for me. I travel a lot, and having the Kindle has reduced the amount of luggage I have to take by half.
That said, it's not perfect by a long shot: the main menu is rubbish, the rendering has some weird glitches (full justification doesn't always work), and the book UI has some very rough areas. Paging backwards is slow. But the store integration is *superb* --- you buy a book on the PC, the web site prompts you to pick up the Kindle, I do, and the book's already there --- and its core competence of paging through long tracts of text can't be beat. With wireless turned off I to charge it every couple of weeks. (But it's not good at PDFs. Rendering is slow and the screen isn't high enough resolution to see a complete page at a time, and the refresh rate is too slow to scroll tolerably.)
And Amazon's technical support is superb. Not just good comparatively. Actually, genuinely, good. I got mine wet, and the keyboard started misbehaving. Talked to them on the online chat thing. "Yeah," the said, "your device is out of warranty, sorry. We'll have to charge you for a new one." They charged me 1/3 of the retail price, the new one arrived within three days, it had already been keyed to my account and my books were available, I sent the old one off in the same packaging, and they paid all shipping. I really have no complaints with that.
There is one already. It's called RISCOS. Sure, it needs some work (like pre-emptive multitasking and SMP, okay a *lot* of work), but it's small (the OS uses 6Mb of RAM) and it's very fast. And there's already a reasonable amount of software available for it, plus a working GCC implementation, so more can be ported.
RISC OS needs throwing away. I'm sorry, but it does. It was good at the time but these days we know so much more about writing operating systems that you simply cannot get to a real OS from there.
Examples? Memory is protected except when it's not, giving you the worst of both worlds. No threads. No preemption. User code runs in supervisor mode (and supervisor mode code on ARM isn't guaranteed to be portable). The GUI is great --- if you have a mouse; it can't be driven from the keyboard, at all. There is a single byte of public workspace at 0x00000108 which means that the bottom page of memory has to be mapped. Yes, this means that null pointer dereferences don't trap! There are about fifteen different APIs for doing anything, with slightly different semantics, some of which pass flags in the top eight bits of addresses. There are roughly five different system heaps, none of which overlap, all of which suffer from fragmentation.
The real jewel of the crown, though, the point at which I went from being a fan to wanting to kill it with fire, was when I discovered the code in the system memory allocator which looks up through the caller's stack trying to figure out whether it's being called reentrantly. If it is, it allocates the memory from a special small heap. Why? So that it could do memory allocations from inside interrupt handlers.
That said, if you want a 1980s grade utterly non-Posix OS, RISC OS is a good one, and if you have a Raspberry Pi do check out the bootable RISC OS image. It's interesting and works well.
But Haiku is a real, modern operating system, and RISC OS isn't.
Haiku is Posix! If you fire it up and start a terminal window, you get bash. All the standard fileutils and coreutils are there (although I don't know whether they're the GNU versions or not), and command-line programs usually just compile with the supplied versions of gcc. autoconf works. And, yes, there's vim and emacs. GUI-wise, there's a Qt port, and KDE runs.
It's well worth booting the live CD just to remind yourself what a good single-user can be really like. It's very pleasant to use and it flies.
I do disagree with some of their design decisions --- keeping binary compatibility with BeOS means that Haiku can't lose the heritage of gcc 2's C++ ABI, which is painful. But gcc 4 subsystem is there as well and all it needs is for someone to finally throw the switch and stop building the gcc 2 cruft into the system. And I do think they need to push Qt more; the native Haiku GUI is absolutely fine, but Qt is so much better.
In my view, the three things Haiku really, really needs are: (a) better wireless; (b) a proper package manager with a centralised repository; (c) an improved web browser. And apparently all these are being worked on and are almost ready.
An ARM port would be awesome. It's so perfectly suited to that kind of device.
I get nostalgic for Open Look, to be honest. I think it's spare clarity holds up very well today, bitmap fonts notwithstanding, and then a true vector version would work nicely on a modern high-res display.
The thing I really regret, though, is NeWS: platform-independent display postscript with true client side processing. Your UI runs on the display server and the application backend on the app server! Alas, it was always too proprietary to succeed. Had the opened it up, it could well have displaced X11...
In fact, I'm left wondering if you'd even heard of CDE before this article. I hate to say it, but you're reading Slashdot - we expect you not to RTFA most of the time but to be blind to something like CDE is fairly unforgivable.
To be honest, it was pretty easy to miss. Yes, it was big in certain environments, but outside those environments it didn't make much impact. Sun shops, for example, tended not to use it. And it was very quickly eclipsed in workstation farms by Windows PCs. So if you weren't in just the right environment in just the right window of history I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't see it.
My university was almost entirely a Sun shop, and the only machines that had CDE were a handful of god-awful DEC Alphas running OSF/1 and an occasional VAX in a back office. I'd been promoted to the Alphas from the SunOS 4.1.3 farm and I played with CDE a bit and was distinctly underwhelmed.
(We did eventually get some modern Suns with CDE, but by then desktop use on Suns was already on its way out. The Linux boxes that replaced them didn't use CDE, of course.)
I looked at those. Unlocking them apparently costs silly money --- like, about $80, and the keyboard's only a four row, so no number keys. (Makes using a shell really hard.) But they were on my backup list had I not found the Flipout.
I just spent ages scouring the net looking for a smartphone small enough to fit in my pocket. I eventually went for a Motorola Flipout, which runs Android Eclair and has a 320x240 screen, and is about 6x6x1cm. (And has an excellent 5-row flipout keyboard, BTW.)
Why the hell do I have to buy an Eclair phone in this day and age? But everything that runs any more recent version of Android --- even Gingerbread, which is now several years old --- is at least twice the size, and is both too big to comfortably fit in my pocket, and is too fragile. At work we have a bunch of modern glass slab smartphones and if I carried one around with me I'd be terrified of breaking it in half by sitting on it funny. I would love to have an equivalent sized phone with a high-res screen running ICS or Jellybean. I'd be willing to pay for it, too, but they're just not available.
The Flipout is an excellent phone, by the way, once I managed to strip out all the Motorola branding crap. Not supported by Cyanogen, alas.
Yes --- but what if you don't want to get seven tonnes to LEO?
These launchers are specifically designed for the case when you have a small satellite which you want to launch into a funny orbit, which means you're not going to find anyone else to split the launch costs with. In this situation it's worth paying more per kilogram so that you end up paying less total.
Remember, the big launchers won't scale down any more than the small ones will scale up...
The old JANET acedemic not-quite-internet in the UK used to do exactly this. JANET was bridged to the public internet, so our domain at university was st-and.ac.uk on the public internet or uk.ac.st-and on JANET.
Unfortunately we had a subdomain for comp sci, cs.st-and.ac.uk. The heuristics that tried to decide whether a given domain was JANET or internet used to get horribly confused by this, and would frequently try to resolve against the Czechoslovakian DNS servers.
At work we use Skype. The features we use include: IM, IM chat rooms, direct file sending, audio calls, audio callout to real phones, audio conference calls, audio conference calls with real phones, screen remoting, video calls (occasionally). This all has to run on Linux, Windows, OSX, and Android.
I've been unable to find any competing product that does all of this at the same time. So we use Skype, which I loathe.
(Skype's notifications on Linux are so terrible that people have got into the habit of talking to me by IM and then sending me a text message to remind me to look at the Skype window. That's poor...)
I use WindowMaker. No desktop environment, just X and a window manager. WindowMaker gives me a GUI that works more or less out of the box, a nice GUI config tool to let me change the things that I want to change, and then it gets the hell out of my way and lets me get the job done. My machine now starts up in ten seconds flat and after booting it uses so little memory that the duck is practically walking.
I actually originally installed it so I could get something working while I restored my carefully-tuned notion setup, but it works well enough that I haven't bothered.
The one caveat is that I have wired ethernet, so don't need NetworkManager. It may be vile, but as far as I've found out it's the only game in town if you want wireless. (wicd is okay, but the UI is from suck, and it doesn't do OpenVPN.) Unfortunately NetworkManager has major dependencies on stuff like policykit and consolekit, and they're riddled with bugs. (consolekit has deep integration with your display manager. Want to use a display manager that doesn't have the consolekit magic in it? Forget it. And the gods help you if want to use startx.) I'd love to find an alternative... but so far I haven't.
The website lies by omission: the only reference I can find to the fact that it's a commercial product is one mention of a 'free trial version'. Very sleazy.
AFAICT this is just an AmigaOS clone, anyway. Is it just a rebranded AROS?
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, yes. Even if whatever technique the mice use is only applicable to skin, this is still awesome: skin replacement is a serious problem on humans. Just ask any burn victim. But skin's a pretty complex organ --- it is, basically, an insulated sac containing the universe --- and if that can be successfully regenerated then there's a good chance the technique might work on other soft tissue.
What would be really awesome is if the regenerated skin hooks up to the nervous system. If so, that means it's regenerating nerves too.
Well, sure, except that when writing Android NDK apps, making them run on x86 is as simple as changing:
APP_ABI := armeabi
...to:
APP_ABI := armeabi x86
...in your Application.mk file. Then you end up with an APK which installs and runs fine on both. And if you want MIPS as well?
APP_ABI := armeabi x86 mips
Of course, this won't help existing apps that haven't been cross-compiled, but the Intel San Diego we have here does seem to have a ARM emulator. But I haven't looked at that in much detail because TBH it doesn't interest me much.
I agree, the video's really impressive, but the sound effects are just... fake. I actually turned them off after a few seconds because they were so fake and watched the rest in silence, which I think much improved the video.
Any severed remnant of the cable will enter an orbit based on the tangential velocity of its centre of gravity. Assuming the mass of the cable is insignificant with respect to the counterweight, then the centre of gravity will be at the upper counterweight, which is 135000km from Earth and goes round the Earth once a month, so that's a tangential velocity of... (does sums...) 330 metres per second.
Plugging the figures into the a crude orbital simulator because I can't be bothered to do the maths properly, I see that this orbit will have a periapsis of approximately 2500km, which is well within the Earth's surface. So, yes, the upper counterweight will impact the Earth.
In real life the mass of the cable won't be significant, so the centre of gravity will be much closer to the moon than the upper counterweight, so the periapsis will be higher. I see that in order to clear the Earth's surface at periapsis you'll need a tangential velocity of about 600 metres per second. (Of course, since the cable is really long, just because the centre of gravity clears the Earth's surface doesn't mean that the trailing cable will.)
As for damage? I'd reckon that any space elevator cable will be built as lightly as possible, and so will most likely instantly burn into vapour in the upper atmosphere.
I'm sorry, I don't follow you. Sever the elevator where? What are you expecting to happen/not happen?
Having read TFA, this seems to be precisely what they're doing; it looks like they deploy at the L1 point and extend the tether in both directions. Of course, this does mean the tether needs to be an extraordinary 250000km long.
Despite being totally awesome (which is reason enough to do it!) and also good practice for Earth (ditto) I am slightly at a loss as to how useful this would be. Space elevators are slow, and a lunar elevator would be really long and therefore really slow. And it's not as if the moon's hard to land or take off from.
I'm wondering if there's something useful to do with the other end. The high end of the tether is only 135000km from Earth. Is that far enough into the ionosphere to use for power generation?
I've been using Chromium for years, and have been very happy with it. The final straw that made me give up on Firefox was the way it handles self-signed certificates: it gave the me choice of either not viewing the site (and therefore not getting any work done), or else going through a long and fiddly process that would add the certificate to my list of ultimately trusted root certificates. There was no option for 'as I am not doing anything which requires security right now the status of the certificate is irrelevant to me so go ahead'. As at the time I was doing a lot of research on mailing list archives, and one very common mailing list setup would redirect http to https and would install a self-signed certificate, this was actually preventing me getting work done.
Has this behaviour improved any recently?
You will only take my Kindle from the cold, dead hands. (Although, TBH, I'd rather you didn't.) It has made such a difference for me. I travel a lot, and having the Kindle has reduced the amount of luggage I have to take by half.
That said, it's not perfect by a long shot: the main menu is rubbish, the rendering has some weird glitches (full justification doesn't always work), and the book UI has some very rough areas. Paging backwards is slow. But the store integration is *superb* --- you buy a book on the PC, the web site prompts you to pick up the Kindle, I do, and the book's already there --- and its core competence of paging through long tracts of text can't be beat. With wireless turned off I to charge it every couple of weeks. (But it's not good at PDFs. Rendering is slow and the screen isn't high enough resolution to see a complete page at a time, and the refresh rate is too slow to scroll tolerably.)
And Amazon's technical support is superb. Not just good comparatively. Actually, genuinely, good. I got mine wet, and the keyboard started misbehaving. Talked to them on the online chat thing. "Yeah," the said, "your device is out of warranty, sorry. We'll have to charge you for a new one." They charged me 1/3 of the retail price, the new one arrived within three days, it had already been keyed to my account and my books were available, I sent the old one off in the same packaging, and they paid all shipping. I really have no complaints with that.
There is one already. It's called RISCOS. Sure, it needs some work (like pre-emptive multitasking and SMP, okay a *lot* of work), but it's small (the OS uses 6Mb of RAM) and it's very fast. And there's already a reasonable amount of software available for it, plus a working GCC implementation, so more can be ported.
RISC OS needs throwing away. I'm sorry, but it does. It was good at the time but these days we know so much more about writing operating systems that you simply cannot get to a real OS from there.
Examples? Memory is protected except when it's not, giving you the worst of both worlds. No threads. No preemption. User code runs in supervisor mode (and supervisor mode code on ARM isn't guaranteed to be portable). The GUI is great --- if you have a mouse; it can't be driven from the keyboard, at all. There is a single byte of public workspace at 0x00000108 which means that the bottom page of memory has to be mapped. Yes, this means that null pointer dereferences don't trap! There are about fifteen different APIs for doing anything, with slightly different semantics, some of which pass flags in the top eight bits of addresses. There are roughly five different system heaps, none of which overlap, all of which suffer from fragmentation.
The real jewel of the crown, though, the point at which I went from being a fan to wanting to kill it with fire, was when I discovered the code in the system memory allocator which looks up through the caller's stack trying to figure out whether it's being called reentrantly. If it is, it allocates the memory from a special small heap. Why? So that it could do memory allocations from inside interrupt handlers.
(Just to show my credentials: I discovered all this while working on a RISC OS kernel reimplementation.)
That said, if you want a 1980s grade utterly non-Posix OS, RISC OS is a good one, and if you have a Raspberry Pi do check out the bootable RISC OS image. It's interesting and works well.
But Haiku is a real, modern operating system, and RISC OS isn't.
Haiku is Posix! If you fire it up and start a terminal window, you get bash. All the standard fileutils and coreutils are there (although I don't know whether they're the GNU versions or not), and command-line programs usually just compile with the supplied versions of gcc. autoconf works. And, yes, there's vim and emacs. GUI-wise, there's a Qt port, and KDE runs.
It's well worth booting the live CD just to remind yourself what a good single-user can be really like. It's very pleasant to use and it flies.
I do disagree with some of their design decisions --- keeping binary compatibility with BeOS means that Haiku can't lose the heritage of gcc 2's C++ ABI, which is painful. But gcc 4 subsystem is there as well and all it needs is for someone to finally throw the switch and stop building the gcc 2 cruft into the system. And I do think they need to push Qt more; the native Haiku GUI is absolutely fine, but Qt is so much better.
In my view, the three things Haiku really, really needs are: (a) better wireless; (b) a proper package manager with a centralised repository; (c) an improved web browser. And apparently all these are being worked on and are almost ready.
An ARM port would be awesome. It's so perfectly suited to that kind of device.
I get nostalgic for Open Look, to be honest. I think it's spare clarity holds up very well today, bitmap fonts notwithstanding, and then a true vector version would work nicely on a modern high-res display.
The thing I really regret, though, is NeWS: platform-independent display postscript with true client side processing. Your UI runs on the display server and the application backend on the app server! Alas, it was always too proprietary to succeed. Had the opened it up, it could well have displaced X11...
In fact, I'm left wondering if you'd even heard of CDE before this article. I hate to say it, but you're reading Slashdot - we expect you not to RTFA most of the time but to be blind to something like CDE is fairly unforgivable.
To be honest, it was pretty easy to miss. Yes, it was big in certain environments, but outside those environments it didn't make much impact. Sun shops, for example, tended not to use it. And it was very quickly eclipsed in workstation farms by Windows PCs. So if you weren't in just the right environment in just the right window of history I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't see it.
My university was almost entirely a Sun shop, and the only machines that had CDE were a handful of god-awful DEC Alphas running OSF/1 and an occasional VAX in a back office. I'd been promoted to the Alphas from the SunOS 4.1.3 farm and I played with CDE a bit and was distinctly underwhelmed.
(We did eventually get some modern Suns with CDE, but by then desktop use on Suns was already on its way out. The Linux boxes that replaced them didn't use CDE, of course.)
Should that be '...between major revisions' at the end there?
It is a front pocket.
I looked at those. Unlocking them apparently costs silly money --- like, about $80, and the keyboard's only a four row, so no number keys. (Makes using a shell really hard.) But they were on my backup list had I not found the Flipout.
I just spent ages scouring the net looking for a smartphone small enough to fit in my pocket. I eventually went for a Motorola Flipout, which runs Android Eclair and has a 320x240 screen, and is about 6x6x1cm. (And has an excellent 5-row flipout keyboard, BTW.)
Why the hell do I have to buy an Eclair phone in this day and age? But everything that runs any more recent version of Android --- even Gingerbread, which is now several years old --- is at least twice the size, and is both too big to comfortably fit in my pocket, and is too fragile. At work we have a bunch of modern glass slab smartphones and if I carried one around with me I'd be terrified of breaking it in half by sitting on it funny. I would love to have an equivalent sized phone with a high-res screen running ICS or Jellybean. I'd be willing to pay for it, too, but they're just not available.
The Flipout is an excellent phone, by the way, once I managed to strip out all the Motorola branding crap. Not supported by Cyanogen, alas.
Take a look at the wikipedia page I linked to; it has a launch history.
Yes --- but what if you don't want to get seven tonnes to LEO?
These launchers are specifically designed for the case when you have a small satellite which you want to launch into a funny orbit, which means you're not going to find anyone else to split the launch costs with. In this situation it's worth paying more per kilogram so that you end up paying less total.
Remember, the big launchers won't scale down any more than the small ones will scale up...
Reality scales very nicely, thank you very much --- the one I live in looks as if it's at least 90 billion light years across!
More seriously, Branson's design is very similar to Orbital Science's Pegasus air-launched vehicle, and they're doing very nicely with it.
The old JANET acedemic not-quite-internet in the UK used to do exactly this. JANET was bridged to the public internet, so our domain at university was st-and.ac.uk on the public internet or uk.ac.st-and on JANET.
Unfortunately we had a subdomain for comp sci, cs.st-and.ac.uk. The heuristics that tried to decide whether a given domain was JANET or internet used to get horribly confused by this, and would frequently try to resolve against the Czechoslovakian DNS servers.
Don't tell everyone! Then I won't have an excuse for ignoring people any more!
(Thanks.)
At work we use Skype. The features we use include: IM, IM chat rooms, direct file sending, audio calls, audio callout to real phones, audio conference calls, audio conference calls with real phones, screen remoting, video calls (occasionally). This all has to run on Linux, Windows, OSX, and Android.
I've been unable to find any competing product that does all of this at the same time. So we use Skype, which I loathe.
(Skype's notifications on Linux are so terrible that people have got into the habit of talking to me by IM and then sending me a text message to remind me to look at the Skype window. That's poor...)
Nah, they're different. Well, technically.
Donuts, the American spelling, are toruses and are frequently iced. They're okay but they're frequently too dry and sweet for me.
Doughnuts, the British spelling, are oblate spheroids with jam injected into the middle. I've never seen an iced doughnut.They're frequently called 'jam doughnuts' to disambiguate them from the American version. To my mind they're loads nicer as the sharp jam offsets the sugar, and the dough stays moist. Pictures here: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=jam+doughnut&num=30&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvnse&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=ZWjWT7XRJYjE0QX78KGIBA&ved=0CNQBELAE&biw=1051&bih=780
I'm just glad that nobody in the GP's class had seen a jam doughnut, otherwise they'd have been really confused.
(It's not true that I'm a card-carrying member of the pedant's society. It's actually made out of plastic.)
I use WindowMaker. No desktop environment, just X and a window manager. WindowMaker gives me a GUI that works more or less out of the box, a nice GUI config tool to let me change the things that I want to change, and then it gets the hell out of my way and lets me get the job done. My machine now starts up in ten seconds flat and after booting it uses so little memory that the duck is practically walking.
I actually originally installed it so I could get something working while I restored my carefully-tuned notion setup, but it works well enough that I haven't bothered.
The one caveat is that I have wired ethernet, so don't need NetworkManager. It may be vile, but as far as I've found out it's the only game in town if you want wireless. (wicd is okay, but the UI is from suck, and it doesn't do OpenVPN.) Unfortunately NetworkManager has major dependencies on stuff like policykit and consolekit, and they're riddled with bugs. (consolekit has deep integration with your display manager. Want to use a display manager that doesn't have the consolekit magic in it? Forget it. And the gods help you if want to use startx.) I'd love to find an alternative... but so far I haven't.
The website lies by omission: the only reference I can find to the fact that it's a commercial product is one mention of a 'free trial version'. Very sleazy.
AFAICT this is just an AmigaOS clone, anyway. Is it just a rebranded AROS?