Never ceases to amaze me how folks get all uptight about something like this, but never step back to look at the big picture. In a case like this, the city itself will be the biggest benefactor from having wireless everywhere. the wireless network is an infrastructure that all the city departments will be able to make use off. The real issue is, departments like the sewage maintanence etc, are not going to start deploying an infrastructure in service vehicles based on wifi until the wifi is ubiquitous. In the interim, until coverage is ubiquitous, and various departments have had time to migrate systems, it's very difficult to justify the cost of the infrastructure deployment.
That's where somebody in city planning came up with a brilliant idea. If this infrastructure can provide so much functionality for the city services departments, it can surely be just as functional for the rest of the residents (residential and commercial) of that city, so rent it out at the same time they are using it, get some immediate return on the investment.
Its a win/win situation all over once deployed. City services gets more efficient, and it's all due to a wireless infrastructure that is self sustaining financially. Can you ask for a more optimum solution ? the city itself and all it's service departments is the only comercial customer that would have need for a network that covers the entire city, and once it's in place, there are a lot of businesses that could benefit from access to portions of the network (handheld card swipers for pizza delivery folks is a great example).
The reality is, verizon is opposing this not because they dont want cheap broadband in the areas they wont cover, it's because they want to prevent the city from building it's own ubiquitous network. They want to sell the network to the city, and would prefer it's based on the cellular technologies, where they can charge useage fees based on the amount of data carried on the network. If the city builds it's own infrastructure based on wifi, that's one very large long term wireless networking client they will never get hooked, and a whole lot of smaller clients that will 'go elsewhere'.
Why is this modded funny, are americans in denial about this subject ? The government already DOES outsource it's manned launches, and it's going to continue to do so for a considerable timeframe.
The beaurocrats at nasa love this setup. They keep thier multi billion dollar budget on the guise of 'return to flight' for the shuttle,a nd in the meantime, they have zero risk of vehicle failures. You can bet your last dollar, every manager at nasa will be kicking and screaming to keep the shuttle grounded till they cant kick and scream anymore. It's the bearocrats dream come true, a billion dollar budget to manage, thousands of underlings, and the whole organization doesn't have to actually do anything except produce reports on why they cant actually do anything. The Nasa shuttle program is the most fertile ground for grooming PHB types in the world.
This just illustrates why/. folks are typically not actually involved in spacecraft design and deployment. If you were, you would know the real reason for this, and wouldn't ask the question (which is not a dumb question btw).
In the real world, once you get up in the vicinity of the Van Allen belt, you get into hard radiation. If you use typical modern high density chips, with 0.15 micron die spacing, a single particle will short/damage half a dozen traces on the chip on a single impact. If you use really old stuff, with 5 micron die spacing (and higher), a particle will be to small to get multiple traces in a single impact. you may still get a single bit flip, but, ecc will catch that, and you can deal with it. In the former case of a high density die, the failure would end up being catastrophic when a particle impacts the chip. There are practical limits to the size of die that can be mounted on a carrier, and the trace density defines the capacity of that die. Yes, it's possible to cram 32 meg of ram into that space, but, it wont last but a few minutes in a hard radiation environment. Take that same silicon wafer, using 5 micron traces, and it'll last years exposed to the same environment, but, it'll only have 1 meg of useable ram locations due to the decrease in density. you cant just throw more of them on, because then power consumption becomes the issue, in overly simplified terms, the chip is going to use power relative to it's surface area, matters not if it's got 1 or 32 meg of addressable locations in that area. Clock frequency is the other major contributor to power consumption, hence its not uncommon at all to see space hardware measured in KHZ rather than MHZ and GHZ like most folks are used to, and there are damn good reasons to leave it that way.
An all up spacecraft platform has hard limits on physical size (constrained by the physical limits of the launcher), and hard limits on total mass, determined by the launch vehicle capability to the final trajectory required. The final design will budget a portion of it's mass allowance to power generation, and that power is in turn budgeted to various systems. the folks doing the controllers will have a hard limit on power consumption, another on volume, and a third on mass. working within those limits, they have to design and deploy a system that is expected to have 99.999999% reliability, operating in conditions more extreme than it's possible to actually simulate on earth.
Its a shame, but there is one thing they dont seem to teach in computer science courses anymore. Out here in the real world, reality gets in the way of all the theory. Moore's law may well say chips will get faster, and density higher as time goes on, but it becomes irrelavent when other limiting factors get in the way. until gamma particles start to shrink, or we come up with an effective way of making sure they dont hit the electronics, 10 year old and older stuff is going to remain 'state of the art' for use in space. Die density and ability to shield are hard limitations, cant get past them, and you wont see more modern equipment going into the reaches of space till those limitations are overcome. That's not likely to happen in the forseeable future, the research in that area is all 'nuclear research' and that's all out of vouge these days, gonna take a couple more generations or a severely critical power shortage to change that.
if you look back, they almost did lose a rover to the _reliability_ of wind river. It was something about having to many files in a directory or some such silliness, took the rover offline and almost lost it. Hmmmmmmm.
Re:Still can't see how Sun will survive
on
Sun-isms Debunked
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· Score: 1
If I have a huge company, running critical tasks, I will go for a company that I can sue if needed.
And this is precisely why usa is not the 'leader' in just about any area anymore. High tech has gone to Asia, industrial manufacturing to China, space flight to Russia.
As long as the mentality is 'who can I blame' instead of 'how can I produce a quality product', the american economy will continue to run down the drainpipe it's been running thru for the last few years, and your attitude is leading the plunge.
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Host www.liftportfinance.com has address 66.33.204.16
Looks like they lost interest in the main concept, but the website up there begging for money is still going strong. Tells a lot about the company... I wonder how many folks are actually falling for thier 'investment club' scheme...
Actually, the concorde only went supersonic over the ocean for political reasons. When the boeing sst project failed, they quickly used the sonic booms as the excuse to legislate it such that concorde could not be used for transcontinental over the usa. Interestingly enough, all the while it was 'to much sonic boom' for a concorde to do it, the military was doing it daily with the blackbird, and nobody noticed. The blackbird has a larger sonic footprint than the concorde.
Concorde was legislated out of the north american skies for political reasons, and 'sonic booms' were a convenient excuse they could use that would affect only concorde, and not any domestically produced commercial aircraft.
Sound as humans percieve it, is basically the propogation of pressure waves thru a fluid medium (air). The reason it's so important to us, is because the human body is designed with a pair of very sensative pressure sensors that can detect very small changes in ambient pressure, along with a processing unit that integrates those changes in real time to produce a spectral output which can be further processed for encoded data (ears and a brain). The human body also contains a set of pressure transducers that are designed to emit carefully modulated pressure waves with data encoded (vocal chords). In general, most of the intelligence encoded on these pressure waves is frequency modulated, but the transducer system is quite capable of encodeing in both the frequency and amplitude domains. In essence, sound is one of the primary sensor systems the human body is designed to work with, and it is considered by most to be very important, because it's the primary bi-directional sensor system, where we are equipped with both transducers and receptors. Everybody is an expert at processing sound in real time, but when it gets right down to it, very very few people actually understand what it truely is composed of.
In almost every/. discussion where the subject of mach no. vs altitude rears its head, folks ask about the speed of sound in space, and there's plenty of answers, but rarely does one see the _correct_ answer. Sound is the propogation of modulated pressure waves in a fluid medium (travels better in water than air, but our sensor system is not well designed for use in a medium as dense and viscous as water, we've developed technology for that, commonly refferred to as sonar). When you reach the vaccuum of space, there is no ambient fluid medium in which sound waves can propogate. the concept of the speed of sound in a vaccuum is irrelavent, because sound does not exist in vaccum, there is no medium to carry the pressure waves. It is a concept that is understandably foreign to most people, because we have spent our entire lives immersed in the fluid environment of the atmosphere, so it takes quite a stretch of the imagination to actually connect the dots scientifically, and come to the conclusion that the speed of sound in vaccum = NaN because it doesn't exist.
If you want to get really technical, and do the proof mathematically, it can get 'interesting'. If you start with all the equations that define the 'standard atmosphere', the first level proof is interesting, when figuring out velocity of mach 1, you quickly come to the conclusion that most factors do cancel algebraically, and mach 1 is actually a direct function of temperature. At one step along the way, you will find ambient pressure in both the numerator and denominator of the equations. this is the point where you simplify and say 'pressure is not really a factor' for the standard atmosphere derivations, and conclude that mach is a function of temperature, but, the equations become undefined if you have zero as the input value for ambient pressure, because pressure is indeed a divisor in the overall general case equation.
When you are doing complex computer simulation models of the aerodynamics, and those models are actually based on first principles, this is a very important detail that dramatically affects the model. The case of 'ambient pressure = 0' indeed makes most of the equations involved undefined, and a simulation must take this into account, and not branch down those calculation paths in that case. When done this way, every model does indeed come up with it's own definition of the 'edge of space', and thats based on the calculation precision of the model in question. When the values for ambient pressure become so small, that they are no longer able to be encoded within the precision of the numerical storage unit being used, the model spits out 'ambient pressure = 0', and for that model, the point in question is the 'edge of space'. Back in the bad old days of slide rules and imperial units, a number
Any system that will leave a person to die simply because they dont have money, is barbaric. You can wrap it any fancy rhetoric you want, but it's utterly barbaric.
Start a war, choke off the supply, keep it choked off, market forces will do the rest. It only takes a 2% reduction in world supply to have a dramatic effect on prices. GW may not have the power to directly set the prices, but he did use his power to invade an oil producer, and effectively cut off a good chunk of world supply. the markets did the rest.
There is no conspiracy theory here, just simple supply/demand market economics, cause/effect relationships.
To be expected, this is/. the folks who think binary, 'you are either with us, or against us', and have no comprehension that intelligent folks may actually have differing opinions that fall outside the binary classifications.
Fyi, if you want to get modded troll even faster, just mention this. GW comes from oil country, sponsored by oil money. Crude was 28 dollars a barrel when he took office, it's 54 dollars a barrel today. Amazes me how many folks just cant see the cause/effect relationship there. GW's backers are laughing all the way to the bank, and Dicks backers are all over there making sure it stays that way.
Nitpick, but Apollo 13 wasn't a launch accident, it was enroute. since the greenies are all concerned about getting an RTG splattered over the launch corridor, this is not an insignificant nitpick.
As for the russian rtg burnup, they did us canucks a huge favour. We had folks flying over the high north with all sorts of detection equipment for a year, never found it. BUT, we found lots of uranium deposits that nobody was aware of. When nuclear power comes back in vogue, we've got lots of raw material mapped out, ready to go when it's needed.
Bush et al. or whoever happens to be in power at the time are not likely to be dethroned by a sudden widespread and detailed comprehension of nuclear fusion for instance.
If a tv channel were actually responsible for the widespread comprehension of nuclear fusion, it would immediately be labelled 'unpatriotic' because it's passing this information on to 'the terrorists'. It would then be immediately replaced with something 'patriotic and american', like a show about some folks so stupid they can hardly spell thier own name, building motorcyles.
typical american attitude, you made the mess, you clean it up. There's no point in having our younger generation maimed and killed when you still have lots left to send over there. It's your mess, you clean it up. If you guys run outa young folks to send over before you clean up the cia created mess (yes, the cia did sponsor saddam into power), well then I guess we know who won....
The reality is, the instrument has resolution defined in metric units (meters), but that would be far to confusing for the american public. A suitable proxy was chosen to publicize it, the kitchen table (approximately 2 meters). This is a measurement that would be understood by at least a simple majority of the population.
Is this an indication of the intelligence of congress critters? Or is is an indication of the intelligence of the folks that voted for them ? or is it more likely, all of the above...
I dont understand why everybody is so concerned about this. Publish, or perish, as the old motto goes. An open source project, can easily demonstrate (via public cvs) when a given concept was made public thru the project. Patents issued prior to that day could be an infringement problem. Any concept where the patent application is AFTER the date it shows in the cvs, this is a 'no brainer' case of prior art. If the open source project is truely innovative, it is the first one to show a concept, and once it's committed to cvs, patent is no longer an issue, its been published.
There is no need to patent anything in open source. A concept is only patentable when it's not 'widely known'. This is one of the reasons some parts of academia insist on publishing in tech journals. The publication of a concept, poisons any future patents. Committing to a public cvs is just another form of publication.
ofc, for this perfectly valid concept to work, you folks in that Uncivilized Southern Area are going to have to beat the patent office up the side of the head, and teach them how patent law actually works. Something already published is by definition ineligible for patent. They seem to have forgotten that idea there the last few years, and are willing to issue patents on anything, including ideas covered by patents that were granted, and subsequently expired.
As for the FAA spec, the latency validation is only run once per year, and we get 150ms on both level C and level D.
FAA is somewhat more lax than Transport Canada in this regard. I haven't check recently, but I was looking at specs about 9 months ago as defined in the CARs. One of the requirements that really stuck in my mind, was that they require daily logs (hard copy) of the latency checks. there were a few other requirements in there that made is start to rethink the whole concept. We were comparing the costs of owning/operating our own, vs the current practise of sending folks out to somebody else for simulator sessions.
A couple of our guys are engineers, and a few of us have been running a software development operation as well as flying for the last 10 years. We work almost exclusively in process control, so it's been a pet idea around the office for a long time to just start from scratch, build a sim, and certify it. At least once a year, normally right after 4 of us get back from a few days simming, we dig up the regs, and spend an evening over beers debating how much work it'll actually be.
hehe, 'not tolerated' is actually a considerable understatement. A Level D sim actually has to be run thru a validation sequence on a daily basis. That sequence must validate that the skew between display motion and platform motion is 100ms or less (its 200 ms for a Level C device). I cant remember offhand the skew allowed between control input and start of motion, but I belive it's also on the order of 'within 200ms of the response of the aircraft being simulated', with the aircraft values taken from in flight measurements. I've been in them a couple of times when the display/motion is out of wack, and it's really quite an awful experience, really the only time I've ever suffered from 'airsick'. 29 years of flying, an airpane has never made me sick, but the simulator has done it 3 times.
I've flown a lot of sims over the years (annual recurrency for multiple types adds up to a lot of simulator time). I'm really curious now who's building them on linux, wondering if I've actually flown one of those.
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oh, you dont have the money to do it? Hmm, i wonder if that has anything with your 'drop the financial responsibility' attitude?
Never ceases to amaze me how folks are so eager to spend a billion dollars of somebody else's money, but dont have 2 nickels of thier own to spare.
That's where somebody in city planning came up with a brilliant idea. If this infrastructure can provide so much functionality for the city services departments, it can surely be just as functional for the rest of the residents (residential and commercial) of that city, so rent it out at the same time they are using it, get some immediate return on the investment.
Its a win/win situation all over once deployed. City services gets more efficient, and it's all due to a wireless infrastructure that is self sustaining financially. Can you ask for a more optimum solution ? the city itself and all it's service departments is the only comercial customer that would have need for a network that covers the entire city, and once it's in place, there are a lot of businesses that could benefit from access to portions of the network (handheld card swipers for pizza delivery folks is a great example).
The reality is, verizon is opposing this not because they dont want cheap broadband in the areas they wont cover, it's because they want to prevent the city from building it's own ubiquitous network. They want to sell the network to the city, and would prefer it's based on the cellular technologies, where they can charge useage fees based on the amount of data carried on the network. If the city builds it's own infrastructure based on wifi, that's one very large long term wireless networking client they will never get hooked, and a whole lot of smaller clients that will 'go elsewhere'.
The beaurocrats at nasa love this setup. They keep thier multi billion dollar budget on the guise of 'return to flight' for the shuttle,a nd in the meantime, they have zero risk of vehicle failures. You can bet your last dollar, every manager at nasa will be kicking and screaming to keep the shuttle grounded till they cant kick and scream anymore. It's the bearocrats dream come true, a billion dollar budget to manage, thousands of underlings, and the whole organization doesn't have to actually do anything except produce reports on why they cant actually do anything. The Nasa shuttle program is the most fertile ground for grooming PHB types in the world.
In the real world, once you get up in the vicinity of the Van Allen belt, you get into hard radiation. If you use typical modern high density chips, with 0.15 micron die spacing, a single particle will short/damage half a dozen traces on the chip on a single impact. If you use really old stuff, with 5 micron die spacing (and higher), a particle will be to small to get multiple traces in a single impact. you may still get a single bit flip, but, ecc will catch that, and you can deal with it. In the former case of a high density die, the failure would end up being catastrophic when a particle impacts the chip. There are practical limits to the size of die that can be mounted on a carrier, and the trace density defines the capacity of that die. Yes, it's possible to cram 32 meg of ram into that space, but, it wont last but a few minutes in a hard radiation environment. Take that same silicon wafer, using 5 micron traces, and it'll last years exposed to the same environment, but, it'll only have 1 meg of useable ram locations due to the decrease in density. you cant just throw more of them on, because then power consumption becomes the issue, in overly simplified terms, the chip is going to use power relative to it's surface area, matters not if it's got 1 or 32 meg of addressable locations in that area. Clock frequency is the other major contributor to power consumption, hence its not uncommon at all to see space hardware measured in KHZ rather than MHZ and GHZ like most folks are used to, and there are damn good reasons to leave it that way.
An all up spacecraft platform has hard limits on physical size (constrained by the physical limits of the launcher), and hard limits on total mass, determined by the launch vehicle capability to the final trajectory required. The final design will budget a portion of it's mass allowance to power generation, and that power is in turn budgeted to various systems. the folks doing the controllers will have a hard limit on power consumption, another on volume, and a third on mass. working within those limits, they have to design and deploy a system that is expected to have 99.999999% reliability, operating in conditions more extreme than it's possible to actually simulate on earth.
Its a shame, but there is one thing they dont seem to teach in computer science courses anymore. Out here in the real world, reality gets in the way of all the theory. Moore's law may well say chips will get faster, and density higher as time goes on, but it becomes irrelavent when other limiting factors get in the way. until gamma particles start to shrink, or we come up with an effective way of making sure they dont hit the electronics, 10 year old and older stuff is going to remain 'state of the art' for use in space. Die density and ability to shield are hard limitations, cant get past them, and you wont see more modern equipment going into the reaches of space till those limitations are overcome. That's not likely to happen in the forseeable future, the research in that area is all 'nuclear research' and that's all out of vouge these days, gonna take a couple more generations or a severely critical power shortage to change that.
if you look back, they almost did lose a rover to the _reliability_ of wind river. It was something about having to many files in a directory or some such silliness, took the rover offline and almost lost it. Hmmmmmmm.
And this is precisely why usa is not the 'leader' in just about any area anymore. High tech has gone to Asia, industrial manufacturing to China, space flight to Russia.
As long as the mentality is 'who can I blame' instead of 'how can I produce a quality product', the american economy will continue to run down the drainpipe it's been running thru for the last few years, and your attitude is leading the plunge.
Host www.liftportfinance.com has address 66.33.204.16
Looks like they lost interest in the main concept, but the website up there begging for money is still going strong. Tells a lot about the company... I wonder how many folks are actually falling for thier 'investment club' scheme...
I dunno, you guys are just starting to think you may know about aurora, we've been flying it for 30 years. Now who is the quick one ?
Concorde was legislated out of the north american skies for political reasons, and 'sonic booms' were a convenient excuse they could use that would affect only concorde, and not any domestically produced commercial aircraft.
Here's a photo of an aurora in flight. Kind of hard to visualize this at mach 5 :)
In almost every /. discussion where the subject of mach no. vs altitude rears its head, folks ask about the speed of sound in space, and there's plenty of answers, but rarely does one see the _correct_ answer. Sound is the propogation of modulated pressure waves in a fluid medium (travels better in water than air, but our sensor system is not well designed for use in a medium as dense and viscous as water, we've developed technology for that, commonly refferred to as sonar). When you reach the vaccuum of space, there is no ambient fluid medium in which sound waves can propogate. the concept of the speed of sound in a vaccuum is irrelavent, because sound does not exist in vaccum, there is no medium to carry the pressure waves. It is a concept that is understandably foreign to most people, because we have spent our entire lives immersed in the fluid environment of the atmosphere, so it takes quite a stretch of the imagination to actually connect the dots scientifically, and come to the conclusion that the speed of sound in vaccum = NaN because it doesn't exist.
If you want to get really technical, and do the proof mathematically, it can get 'interesting'. If you start with all the equations that define the 'standard atmosphere', the first level proof is interesting, when figuring out velocity of mach 1, you quickly come to the conclusion that most factors do cancel algebraically, and mach 1 is actually a direct function of temperature. At one step along the way, you will find ambient pressure in both the numerator and denominator of the equations. this is the point where you simplify and say 'pressure is not really a factor' for the standard atmosphere derivations, and conclude that mach is a function of temperature, but, the equations become undefined if you have zero as the input value for ambient pressure, because pressure is indeed a divisor in the overall general case equation.
When you are doing complex computer simulation models of the aerodynamics, and those models are actually based on first principles, this is a very important detail that dramatically affects the model. The case of 'ambient pressure = 0' indeed makes most of the equations involved undefined, and a simulation must take this into account, and not branch down those calculation paths in that case. When done this way, every model does indeed come up with it's own definition of the 'edge of space', and thats based on the calculation precision of the model in question. When the values for ambient pressure become so small, that they are no longer able to be encoded within the precision of the numerical storage unit being used, the model spits out 'ambient pressure = 0', and for that model, the point in question is the 'edge of space'. Back in the bad old days of slide rules and imperial units, a number
Take a good look, the buck isn't worth the paper it's printed on anymore....
Any system that will leave a person to die simply because they dont have money, is barbaric. You can wrap it any fancy rhetoric you want, but it's utterly barbaric.
There is no conspiracy theory here, just simple supply/demand market economics, cause/effect relationships.
Fyi, if you want to get modded troll even faster, just mention this. GW comes from oil country, sponsored by oil money. Crude was 28 dollars a barrel when he took office, it's 54 dollars a barrel today. Amazes me how many folks just cant see the cause/effect relationship there. GW's backers are laughing all the way to the bank, and Dicks backers are all over there making sure it stays that way.
only on /. would folks actually have to draw the diagrams to grasp this concept.
Do you really believe that makes them better suited for the job, or does it just make them fit in better with the incumbents?
As for the russian rtg burnup, they did us canucks a huge favour. We had folks flying over the high north with all sorts of detection equipment for a year, never found it. BUT, we found lots of uranium deposits that nobody was aware of. When nuclear power comes back in vogue, we've got lots of raw material mapped out, ready to go when it's needed.
If a tv channel were actually responsible for the widespread comprehension of nuclear fusion, it would immediately be labelled 'unpatriotic' because it's passing this information on to 'the terrorists'. It would then be immediately replaced with something 'patriotic and american', like a show about some folks so stupid they can hardly spell thier own name, building motorcyles.
umm, wait....
typical american attitude, you made the mess, you clean it up. There's no point in having our younger generation maimed and killed when you still have lots left to send over there. It's your mess, you clean it up. If you guys run outa young folks to send over before you clean up the cia created mess (yes, the cia did sponsor saddam into power), well then I guess we know who won....
The reality is, the instrument has resolution defined in metric units (meters), but that would be far to confusing for the american public. A suitable proxy was chosen to publicize it, the kitchen table (approximately 2 meters). This is a measurement that would be understood by at least a simple majority of the population.
Is this an indication of the intelligence of congress critters? Or is is an indication of the intelligence of the folks that voted for them ? or is it more likely, all of the above...
There is no need to patent anything in open source. A concept is only patentable when it's not 'widely known'. This is one of the reasons some parts of academia insist on publishing in tech journals. The publication of a concept, poisons any future patents. Committing to a public cvs is just another form of publication.
ofc, for this perfectly valid concept to work, you folks in that Uncivilized Southern Area are going to have to beat the patent office up the side of the head, and teach them how patent law actually works. Something already published is by definition ineligible for patent. They seem to have forgotten that idea there the last few years, and are willing to issue patents on anything, including ideas covered by patents that were granted, and subsequently expired.
FAA is somewhat more lax than Transport Canada in this regard. I haven't check recently, but I was looking at specs about 9 months ago as defined in the CARs. One of the requirements that really stuck in my mind, was that they require daily logs (hard copy) of the latency checks. there were a few other requirements in there that made is start to rethink the whole concept. We were comparing the costs of owning/operating our own, vs the current practise of sending folks out to somebody else for simulator sessions.
A couple of our guys are engineers, and a few of us have been running a software development operation as well as flying for the last 10 years. We work almost exclusively in process control, so it's been a pet idea around the office for a long time to just start from scratch, build a sim, and certify it. At least once a year, normally right after 4 of us get back from a few days simming, we dig up the regs, and spend an evening over beers debating how much work it'll actually be.
I've flown a lot of sims over the years (annual recurrency for multiple types adds up to a lot of simulator time). I'm really curious now who's building them on linux, wondering if I've actually flown one of those.