actually due to earth-side gravitaional variations there are very few truely geostationary spots (that's why Athur C Clarke claims he's living in Ceylon - thats where all the old geo-sats will end up at the end of their lives:-)
I think the main point I wanted to make is that the system will have to be dynamic rather than static - you can't just toss the thing up and expect it to stay in exactly the same place - it will need some station-keeping ability in order for it to stay there forever
the problem with this idea is that the bottom of the elevator has to be connected to something - otherwise it doesn't stay put (thing of it this way - the top of the elevator is in geostationary orbit - it goes around the planet once per day - if the bottom isn't attached to the surface of the planet (which also goes around once per day) then it will want to orbit at the speed approriate to it's height and that would result in it not staying in orbit.
A better answer might be a sky hook - basicly set the whole thing rotating, and as it comes down to the floating station at the edge of the atmosphere and have it grab or release a waiting shuttle which then slides up/down the cable to the station - better yet - have 2 or more cables and grab more often...
Of course there are other problems - like the effect of the moon on the orbit of the terminus (it wouldn't be circular so it would have to slide on the cable).
Forget open source, forget the DoJ - MS does have a real problem.... they're a public company in the new sense (ie they provide investors with a payback in the form of an ever increasing stock price) rather than the old sense (they pay a dividend). THIS is not a sustainable business model - just like many of the dotcom models - there's a point beyond which they can't grow - even with a monopoly there are only so many people to sell windows to.
They have to think of ways to increase revenues - charge more for software, make sure people pay every 3 years rather than copy their old software onto their new machine, tie OS software to particular pieces of haredware so you have to pay them again when you replace a machine, produce incompatable versions of office documents so everyone has to upgrade etc etc. They're stuck on this treadmill - just to keep still they have to do all these things or the tower of cards (aka the stock price) will collapse - AND they have to do more - in order for them to be a GOOD investment they need to keep growing - and for them to do that they have to continually find new ways to suck money out of someone's pocket - this is reality in corporate america
I think MS is worried about Linux for a lot of reasons - we're stopping them taking over the server marketplace from Sun - we're eroding mindshare - and we (in their eyes) compete unfairly - we give it away for free (let's forget that little explorer/netscape incident for the moment) - but worst of all we're not even competing in the same ballpark - it's kinda like we're playing across town in the football stadium - they have to worry about the quarterly bottom line - we care if people think our code is cool - they worry about dollars - we get paid in kudos
80% less heat and 80% less power (do the two really translate so directly like that?)
Sure - unless you're pumping lots of power out the pins to drive some high current load then all the power that goes into the chip via its power pins has to come out as something (conservation of energy an all that)
(And to the wales' credit, beaches don't have warning labels from the Surgeon General.)
wHales on the other hand get warnings from the Sturgeon General and stay away from the things (that and the difficulty of getting a light at 30 fathoms)
I have a number of patents to my name and have been through the drafting process a number of times - it's always amazed me that patent-legalese - the language that patents are drafted in is almost a specialized language unto itself - almost a programming language - with variabkes (instanced using the 'the' operator), operators, even the possibility of recursion (though I'm told you have to pay the USPTO more if you invoke it). Even little things like 'or' meanings from common usage and are confusing to even us regular mortals who use logic in their day to day work.
Yet the patent law requires inventions to be described in a way that one who "is of ordinary skill in the subject" (ie of the invention, not the wired patent law language) has to be able to read the patent and be able to understand it.... arguably this would invalidate the bulk of the patents written today.... but I doubt one could actually get such a ruling in the current climate.... many houses of cards would come tumbling down.
So my question.... has the concept of publishing patents in order to share the idea so that society as a whole can progress faster really just become something that we pay lip service to? or is maybe Open Source a return to that more idealistic age when people did read others patents and learned form them? or maybe to something more like the middle ages when things like the making of stained glass was kept under trade secret status, while music was freely available to anyone who could whistle?
That's funny because most of the major threads on any Dell-Linux board are how nobody can seem to get the APM to work properly. I own an Inspiron 7500 - which I'm very happy with, and which has never hinted at catching on fire - but I can't for the life of me get the damn AMP stuff to work properly. Perhaps you could elaborate on what you did to get it to work.
You know I don't think I did anything special - I may have turned off ACPI in the Bios - and I'm running a 2.2.'something early' kernel. There is an obvious Bios bug in save-to-disk which means that it doesn't restore the video context correctly - you can get around this by flipping to a virual terminal (ctrl-alt-f3 etc) and back to force X to do it - also it WILL lock up if you dock/undock it without suspending first.
I write the KDE laptop support - my APM usage is really pretty simple - KDE polls/proc/apm for current battery state and exec's/usr/bin/apm to cause suspend/standby transitions. I almost never power off/reboot my laptop - it lives in the dock and I carry it around suspended (lasts a couple of days at least) so I get virtually instant-on - I only ever use save-to-disk when I get on/off an airplane.
Oh, and I do know what a taniwha is: only a kiwi would right?
I love my 7000 laptop - keeps me toasty warm on those long nights:-) Seriosly though I've had no problems - it's one of the best Linux laptops I've used - has a great APM implementation (unlike the brand new IBM I have at work whicxh despite it's lovely display freezes whenever I try and suspend it)
quite a few commercial products are based on lisp/scheme and provide the ability to load/run your own code within them (as proof of concept I offer the scan insertion tool I wrote a few years back that - gack - ran something like perl to scheme (run in router) to perl) - like all real hacks written under tapeout pressure as a stopgap and used for the following 5 years because it still worked as well or better than the vendor's:-)
and of course C++... it came out of MIT in the early 60s and is a great example of what gets designed when people have no preconceptions of what they should be doing (or in this case what a programming language should be or should look like).
LISP is a great medium for learning abstract thinking/programming - I've always thought of it as being a bit like 'programming backwards' (not necessarily a bad thing - just a different mindset) - but that's just my C-centric world-view
how sensible - as a recreational HPR flier it's great to see a really incremental approach - too many people seem to want to go the all-or-nothing route base their dreams on a single design and never get there or even close (JPA is IMHO another group who are doing this stuff in a wonderfully incremental way - lots of small steps rather than one biggy).
On the other hand 3 years? maybe a little optimistic.... but them maybe we'll see you at BlackRock for a manned launch one year:-)
It's very simple - a constitutional ammendment barring discrimination on the contents of one's genetic code. There's already an ammendment barring discrimination because you carry the geness for a particular skin color - I think it's time to extent that protection to the rest of the genome
got that annoying song stuck in your head?
on
Calling Out TiVo
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· Score: 1
don't worry the RIAA will be along for thier cut
and don't forget that mute button ....
on
Calling Out TiVo
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· Score: 1
ncf
Think about you're C compiler .....
on
A Map to Nowhere?
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it's maybe 10Mb (libraries and all) yet given enough RAM to work with the number of different C programs it can compile successfully almost certainly cannot be counted....
Recently I was out walking down town with my kids - we passed a young woman who appeared to be talking to herself.... my kids asked about this.... she was fairly well dressed and I realized I couldn't tell whether whe really was talking to herself - or had one of those new hands-free phones.... since we have a lot of street people downtown who are truelly talking to themselves (or others I can't see) I realized that she fit right in, perhaps not in the way she intended.... eventually I suspect we'll see all the really crazy people move to the business districts of cities so that they'll fit in:-)
the one's who've joined the M$ world and the rest of us.... their goal of course is that you can't be part of the mainstream technical society unless you're part of M$'s
you'll have to buy a Microsoft Car.... you can have any color you like provided it's black and has Windows.... eventually you wont be allowed on the freeway with out one (and your Passport....)
Well Archie was a loveable patsy compared with Alf - but in some sense that may have a lot to do with "All in the family's" acceptance and success in the US
I suspect that it's not universally available - certainly KTEH in San Jose runs it.... but they also run Dr Who, Red Dwarf,.... etc things that are also not covered on the bulk of the PBS network... and I suspect that now someone's presumeably paying big bucks for the series your local PBS station may not be able to afford to buy it
why bother cracking it? - you're running in windows, you have access to the raw ext2 root partition, just install that login trojan that phones home with the ip/password:-(
Slashdot Mirror
I think the main point I wanted to make is that the system will have to be dynamic rather than static - you can't just toss the thing up and expect it to stay in exactly the same place - it will need some station-keeping ability in order for it to stay there forever
makes sure that the upper terminus can't have a circular orbit - it will have to slide on the cable like a bead on a string
A better answer might be a sky hook - basicly set the whole thing rotating, and as it comes down to the floating station at the edge of the atmosphere and have it grab or release a waiting shuttle which then slides up/down the cable to the station - better yet - have 2 or more cables and grab more often ...
Of course there are other problems - like the effect of the moon on the orbit of the terminus (it wouldn't be circular so it would have to slide on the cable).
They have to think of ways to increase revenues - charge more for software, make sure people pay every 3 years rather than copy their old software onto their new machine, tie OS software to particular pieces of haredware so you have to pay them again when you replace a machine, produce incompatable versions of office documents so everyone has to upgrade etc etc. They're stuck on this treadmill - just to keep still they have to do all these things or the tower of cards (aka the stock price) will collapse - AND they have to do more - in order for them to be a GOOD investment they need to keep growing - and for them to do that they have to continually find new ways to suck money out of someone's pocket - this is reality in corporate america
I think MS is worried about Linux for a lot of reasons - we're stopping them taking over the server marketplace from Sun - we're eroding mindshare - and we (in their eyes) compete unfairly - we give it away for free (let's forget that little explorer/netscape incident for the moment) - but worst of all we're not even competing in the same ballpark - it's kinda like we're playing across town in the football stadium - they have to worry about the quarterly bottom line - we care if people think our code is cool - they worry about dollars - we get paid in kudos
Sure - unless you're pumping lots of power out the pins to drive some high current load then all the power that goes into the chip via its power pins has to come out as something (conservation of energy an all that)
(And to the wales' credit, beaches don't have warning labels from the Surgeon General.) wHales on the other hand get warnings from the Sturgeon General and stay away from the things (that and the difficulty of getting a light at 30 fathoms)
Yet the patent law requires inventions to be described in a way that one who "is of ordinary skill in the subject" (ie of the invention, not the wired patent law language) has to be able to read the patent and be able to understand it .... arguably this would invalidate the bulk of the patents written today .... but I doubt one could actually get such a ruling in the current climate .... many houses of cards would come tumbling down.
So my question .... has the concept of publishing patents in order to share the idea so that society as a whole can progress faster really just become something that we pay lip service to? or is maybe Open Source a return to that more idealistic age when people did read others patents and learned form them? or maybe to something more like the middle ages when things like the making of stained glass was kept under trade secret status, while music was freely available to anyone who could whistle?
You know I don't think I did anything special - I may have turned off ACPI in the Bios - and I'm running a 2.2.'something early' kernel. There is an obvious Bios bug in save-to-disk which means that it doesn't restore the video context correctly - you can get around this by flipping to a virual terminal (ctrl-alt-f3 etc) and back to force X to do it - also it WILL lock up if you dock/undock it without suspending first.
I write the KDE laptop support - my APM usage is really pretty simple - KDE polls /proc/apm for current battery state and exec's /usr/bin/apm to cause suspend/standby transitions. I almost never power off/reboot my laptop - it lives in the dock and I carry it around suspended (lasts a couple of days at least) so I get virtually instant-on - I only ever use save-to-disk when I get on/off an airplane.
Oh, and I do know what a taniwha is: only a kiwi would right?
Yup - that would be right ....
I love my 7000 laptop - keeps me toasty warm on those long nights :-) Seriosly though I've had no problems - it's one of the best Linux laptops I've used - has a great APM implementation (unlike the brand new IBM I have at work whicxh despite it's lovely display freezes whenever I try and suspend it)
quite a few commercial products are based on lisp/scheme and provide the ability to load/run your own code within them (as proof of concept I offer the scan insertion tool I wrote a few years back that - gack - ran something like perl to scheme (run in router) to perl) - like all real hacks written under tapeout pressure as a stopgap and used for the following 5 years because it still worked as well or better than the vendor's :-)
LISP is a great medium for learning abstract thinking/programming - I've always thought of it as being a bit like 'programming backwards' (not necessarily a bad thing - just a different mindset) - but that's just my C-centric world-view
On the other hand 3 years? maybe a little optimistic .... but them maybe we'll see you at BlackRock for a manned launch one year :-)
Umm --- a sniffer will give you these pretty easily .....
It's very simple - a constitutional ammendment barring discrimination on the contents of one's genetic code. There's already an ammendment barring discrimination because you carry the geness for a particular skin color - I think it's time to extent that protection to the rest of the genome
don't worry the RIAA will be along for thier cut
ncf
it's maybe 10Mb (libraries and all) yet given enough RAM to work with the number of different C programs it can compile successfully almost certainly cannot be counted ....
Recently I was out walking down town with my kids - we passed a young woman who appeared to be talking to herself .... my kids asked about this .... she was fairly well dressed and I realized I couldn't tell whether whe really was talking to herself - or had one of those new hands-free phones .... since we have a lot of street people downtown who are truelly talking to themselves (or others I can't see) I realized that she fit right in, perhaps not in the way she intended .... eventually I suspect we'll see all the really crazy people move to the business districts of cities so that they'll fit in :-)
the one's who've joined the M$ world and the rest of us .... their goal of course is that you can't be part of the mainstream technical society unless you're part of M$'s
you'll have to buy a Microsoft Car .... you can have any color you like provided it's black and has Windows .... eventually you wont be allowed on the freeway with out one (and your Passport ....)
Well Archie was a loveable patsy compared with Alf - but in some sense that may have a lot to do with "All in the family's" acceptance and success in the US
Archie Bunker
I suspect that it's not universally available - certainly KTEH in San Jose runs it .... but they also run Dr Who, Red Dwarf, .... etc things that are also not covered on the bulk of the PBS network ... and I suspect that now someone's presumeably paying big bucks for the series your local PBS station may not be able to afford to buy it
why bother cracking it? - you're running in windows, you have access to the raw ext2 root partition, just install that login trojan that phones home with the ip/password :-(
I see KDE 1.2 screenshots ..... obviously they're not exactly cutting edge