A space elevator, even if the cable could be made, has a ridiculous design flaw. Literally, a single failure anywhere in the cable, and there goes billions and billions worth of hardware. It is always teetering on the verge of catastrophic failure. (imagine what will happen to the station at the top of the cable)
Lowering more cable would be impractical if the cable is tapered, smaller in diameter closer to the ground. If the diameter is the same the whole length how will it hang down without snapping because of the weight it has to hold? Remember the end of the cable at the dock or platform has to bare the weight of 23,000 miles of cable.
Not dumb questions.
It's retarded that they want to beam power to it when they can literally run a wire up the structure itself.
And how heavy will this wire be? Can a wire 50 miles long, forget the 23,000 miles to geostationary orbit, be able to hang without breaking? A few solar panels under the crawler will weigh a lot less than a cable. Of course that changes if carbon nanotubes are used. But you still have problem with stuff like static electricity.
LaserMotive, the company that made the laser isn't even into space travel. They are working on a method to transmit energy wirelessly for those areas where it is impractical to lay cables. If they can transmit energy for a space elevator their technology should be able to be used elsewhere.
There's that, weight, but there's also the amount, volume, needed. I asked in another post how many Mount Everests will it take. One of the things a space elevator may be good for is asteroid mining, but it may take mining asteroids to get the material.
Celine Dion I can listen to singing though not for days on end. On the other hand though Britany Spears, I don't think so. However maybe she can give lessons in semiconductor physics.
Ten Thousand? Isn't the internationally recognized boundary for space 100km (about 62 Miles)? A modern airplane has over 60 miles of wire on it.
International law has nothing to do with how far a space elevator would have to travel. As it is the dock or platform has to be in Geostationary orbit which is 35,786 km (22,236 mi) above the equator. Then a counter balance has to go a lot further.
The space elevator design calls for the elevator to stretch from the surface, to a large space station in GEO, to a point the same distance the other side of GEO.
Do you mean the elevator would require the cable, or ribbon, to stretch past geostationary orbit? And if what I've read the cable would have to go more than the same distance past geostationary orbit. Whether it's right or not I don't know but the wiki article on space elevators says the counterweight would have to be 144,000 KM past geostationary orbit which is 35,786 km up. I may be wrong but I think the distance past geostationary orbit the counterweight would have to be would depend on the mass, the larger the mass the closer it could be. Another Slashdotter should know if either of these are correct.
A 18,000 miles long cable isn't nearly long enough for a space elevator as far as I know. The platform or dock would be in geostationatry orbit which is 35,786 km or 22,236 mi above the equator. Then the counterweight would have to be further out.
What I wonder about is how much material would be needed to make a cable, or ribbon, that long. Just think of the volume of material needed for even a cable a foot in diameter. How many Mount Everests would it take?
That's it? The LCD on my MacBook Pro is 1680 x 1050 but graphics will drive a 1920 x 1200 external monitor.
You do realize I'm talking about before graphics drivers are installed, right? With the drivers, my card can support HD resolutions.
Duh, that's why I said "I updated hardware drivers for Windows but both Windows 95 and NT4 used my 1024 × 768 monitor out of the box." I did phrase it wrong though, I said my monitor was 1024 × 768 but it's 1600 x 1280. The graphics card drove the monitor at 1024 x 768 without updating the driver.
That said, I would kind of expect Apple software to support Apple hardware straight out of the box, that's kind of the point of running an OS only a handful of hardware combinations.
I can use a monitor from someone else. One of the monitors I was thinking of getting is the HP LP2475W which is 1920 x 1200 and has gotten some good reviews on Photo.net. If I could afford it I'd get a higher resolution monitor than that.
For Linux their might be a binary driver, if you are lucky, but if not you are stuck with a working system but with no extras and your system working unaccelerated...
And here I was looking for and thinking of getting an external high resolution graphics card. Something like the ViDock 2.
What I find weird about the ViDocks are that they are compatible with Macbook Pro revisions 1, 2, and 4 but not 3 which is what I have.
You stopped reading a bit too soon. Allow me to repost for you.
How do I know I am virus free? Because I know how to scan my system without installing AV. I know how my system should perform, and I know how to see what's running. I periodically check the health of my system by checking what's currently being accessed compared to what's running. I haven't found something out of place in years. Since about 2003 to be exact. Since that time I've had at least 2 machines that I haven't run any sort of protection on. There has yet to be a difference between the machines WITH AV, and the machines WIHTOUT AV.
And you can detect all malware including rootkits? There are none that can evade what you do?
"The fundamental problem with rootkit detection is that if the operating system currently running has been subverted, it cannot be trusted, including to find unauthorized modifications to itself or its components. In other words, actions such as requesting a list of all running processes, or a list of all files in a directory, cannot be trusted to behave as intended by the original designers. Rootkit detectors running on live systems currently only work, because the rootkits they can detect have not yet been developed to hide themselves fully against these detectors. A reasonable analogy would be asking a brainwashed person if they had been brainwashed; obviously their answer could not be trusted."
I didn't even _imply_ it. In fact, I said the complete opposite.
Yea, you're right. However...
However, mid-range desktops aren't relevant to my point. I explicitly said a *high-end* PC dating to 6-7 years old.
...you also said it was "pretty typical of Windows releases stretching back to, well, basically forever." Typical means typical to me. And forever means forever. A high end configuration is not typical. And good luck finding anything approaching even a low end configuration from 10 years ago 30 years ago. Have you seen any PCs with a Zilog Z80 CPU reently? Or one with a MOS Technology 6502 CPU? I've used microcomputers with both, Trash er TRS 80s and Apples.
one of the first things I do when installing a fresh copy of Windows on a computer is go straight to the video card manufacturer so I don't have to deal with a crappy 800x600 resolution.
I updated hardware drivers for Windows but both Windows 95 and NT4 used my 1024 × 768 monitor out of the box. A driver from Nokia had to be installed to drive the monitor at 1600 x 1280 if I recall right.
Win7 was better in that it could actually support 1280x1024
That's it? The LCD on my MacBook Pro is 1680 x 1050 but graphics will drive a 1920 x 1200 external monitor.
This should give some insight into the problems with Linux and how it could be addressed: for all it's strengths, it's not something people want. They want Windows, despite it's weaknesses. Make Linux wantable, watch market share change dramatically.
The problem with Linux's market share is that few PCs sold in stores come with Linux installed. And not many people have heard of Linux. Sure geeks and hackers on Slashdot have but they are not the typical computer user. Also most people do not necessarily want Window but think they need it. Talking with others about computers I've heard a lot of complaints about their PCs, and almost every tyme the problem is Windows. When I ask them if they thought of trying Linux or a Mac I'm asked if they can run MS Office, they say they have to have Office. When asked why they can not give an example of what only Office can do except Office macros, while Open Office can use Excel macros macros for Word have to be rewritten. There is also WordPerfect Office, Lotus SmartSuite, and other office suites.
Simply many people have the perception they need Windows because they need MS Office.
Make Linux wantable, watch market share change dramatically.
Fact is is no one knows what Linux's market share is. Estimates are Linux has a market share in the single digits on desktops with Linux, and Apache, having large shares of servers. Even with internal servers though it's hard to know how many MS Windows servers there are because IT departments of businesses and other users of servers switch from Windows and IIS to Linux and Apache without telling others. There have been articles linked to on Slashdot about how the London and New York Stock Exchanges have moved from MS Windows and.net to Linux and other open source platforms. The London Stock Exchange not only switched to Linux but actually bought the company that developed the trading system the exchange will use.
Was the PC top of the line and maxed out when it came out?
For a home PC, pretty close to it - 933Mhz CPU, 1GB RAM, GeForce 256.
Which is pretty typical of Windows releases stretching back to, well, basically forever.
Typical of Windows releases forever? AHAH! The last Windows PC I bought I got in 2000. It came with a 766MHz Pentium, 128MB RAM, and the graphics was built into the motherboard. Do not tell me your configuration was typical. In 2006 I bought a PC with Linux preinstalled. The CPU was a Celeron D, the graphics was built in, and it came with 128 MB RAM and a 40GB HDD. At the same tyme I got it I also bought another gigabyte of RAM and a 300GB disk, which because it was not compatible with Linux I replaced with a 750GB disk. For the same price.
While my PCs were budget models mid range desktops didn't come with much more standard, a faster CPU, more RAM, larger HDD, and a dedicated graphics card.
Slashdot likes to say that anecdotal evidence is meaningless (which of course it is), but when a sufficiently large collection of anecdotes all say the same thing, we call that consensus. The general consensus is (I believe) that Macs are a lot less likely to be infected than Windows boxes, so your 'Anyone who uses any computer (including Mac AND Linux) without anti-virus is asking for what they get' statement is in fact news to me.
While Linux and Macs are more secure and less likely to become infected it's better to be safe than sorry. Even new AV software doesn't put much if any strain on current Macs.
I don't know about you, but I have lovely process explorer app from sysinternals. Nice program. When watching TV/etc, I keep it up and I watch my IO/Network/Memory/CPU usage. Because I know every program that loads with windows and I know what to expect from every executable/service running. I know when/why they use a resource. If a service/whatever is reading the HD or using CPU time or network, if it doesn't have a reason, it's a dead process.
Can't rootkits hide from things like scanners and Windows?
Ooh, don't get the idea I'm a shill, for MS, Linux, or anybody else and don't like Macs. I'm typing this on my MacBook Pro and of the 7 new computers I've owned it's the best.
Thanks, you made me think of something. I use a host file to block ads but looking at the page linked to I thought of adding the IP the pings that keep on coming from to the host file as well.
Anyway, I certainly wouldn't disagree with the claim that 'Linux has much better support for seven year old hardware'. My objection is that the hardware support is presented as being both infinitely better than Windows *and* so bad you need special Linux hardware....at the same time.
OK, this I can understand. Because Linux developers have had a while to work on drivers for old hardware the drivers are available not new hardware won't have drivers available for some tyme, unless the manufacturers release drivers themselves or release the info on how it works so others can develop drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
A space elevator, even if the cable could be made, has a ridiculous design flaw. Literally, a single failure anywhere in the cable, and there goes billions and billions worth of hardware. It is always teetering on the verge of catastrophic failure. (imagine what will happen to the station at the top of the cable)
Like catastrophes have never happened with a Space Shuttle. Oops, it has twice, with the Space Shuttle Challenger and the Space Shuttle Columbia.
Falcon
You lower more cable down from above.
Lowering more cable would be impractical if the cable is tapered, smaller in diameter closer to the ground. If the diameter is the same the whole length how will it hang down without snapping because of the weight it has to hold? Remember the end of the cable at the dock or platform has to bare the weight of 23,000 miles of cable.
Falcon
Not dumb questions.
It's retarded that they want to beam power to it when they can literally run a wire up the structure itself.
And how heavy will this wire be? Can a wire 50 miles long, forget the 23,000 miles to geostationary orbit, be able to hang without breaking? A few solar panels under the crawler will weigh a lot less than a cable. Of course that changes if carbon nanotubes are used. But you still have problem with stuff like static electricity.
LaserMotive, the company that made the laser isn't even into space travel. They are working on a method to transmit energy wirelessly for those areas where it is impractical to lay cables. If they can transmit energy for a space elevator their technology should be able to be used elsewhere.
Falcon
half way between the Earth and the Moon!? ha I'm wondering what would happen if the cable somehow snapped when the elavator was in space?
The same thing that happens when you're kicked in the balls while on the asteroid.
Falcon
Heavy, heavy, heavy.
There's that, weight, but there's also the amount, volume, needed. I asked in another post how many Mount Everests will it take. One of the things a space elevator may be good for is asteroid mining, but it may take mining asteroids to get the material.
Falcon
At 5m/s, that's a lot of Celine Dion
Celine Dion I can listen to singing though not for days on end. On the other hand though Britany Spears, I don't think so. However maybe she can give lessons in semiconductor physics.
Falcon
Ten Thousand? Isn't the internationally recognized boundary for space 100km (about 62 Miles)? A modern airplane has over 60 miles of wire on it.
International law has nothing to do with how far a space elevator would have to travel. As it is the dock or platform has to be in Geostationary orbit which is 35,786 km (22,236 mi) above the equator. Then a counter balance has to go a lot further.
Falcon
The space elevator design calls for the elevator to stretch from the surface, to a large space station in GEO, to a point the same distance the other side of GEO.
Do you mean the elevator would require the cable, or ribbon, to stretch past geostationary orbit? And if what I've read the cable would have to go more than the same distance past geostationary orbit. Whether it's right or not I don't know but the wiki article on space elevators says the counterweight would have to be 144,000 KM past geostationary orbit which is 35,786 km up. I may be wrong but I think the distance past geostationary orbit the counterweight would have to be would depend on the mass, the larger the mass the closer it could be. Another Slashdotter should know if either of these are correct.
Falcon
as long as we have an 18000 mile long cable
A 18,000 miles long cable isn't nearly long enough for a space elevator as far as I know. The platform or dock would be in geostationatry orbit which is 35,786 km or 22,236 mi above the equator. Then the counterweight would have to be further out.
What I wonder about is how much material would be needed to make a cable, or ribbon, that long. Just think of the volume of material needed for even a cable a foot in diameter. How many Mount Everests would it take?
Falcon
That's it? The LCD on my MacBook Pro is 1680 x 1050 but graphics will drive a 1920 x 1200 external monitor.
You do realize I'm talking about before graphics drivers are installed, right? With the drivers, my card can support HD resolutions.
Duh, that's why I said "I updated hardware drivers for Windows but both Windows 95 and NT4 used my 1024 × 768 monitor out of the box." I did phrase it wrong though, I said my monitor was 1024 × 768 but it's 1600 x 1280. The graphics card drove the monitor at 1024 x 768 without updating the driver.
That said, I would kind of expect Apple software to support Apple hardware straight out of the box, that's kind of the point of running an OS only a handful of hardware combinations.
I can use a monitor from someone else. One of the monitors I was thinking of getting is the HP LP2475W which is 1920 x 1200 and has gotten some good reviews on Photo.net. If I could afford it I'd get a higher resolution monitor than that.
Falcon
For Linux their might be a binary driver, if you are lucky, but if not you are stuck with a working system but with no extras and your system working unaccelerated ...
And here I was looking for and thinking of getting an external high resolution graphics card. Something like the ViDock 2.
What I find weird about the ViDocks are that they are compatible with Macbook Pro revisions 1, 2, and 4 but not 3 which is what I have.
Falcon
Not as hard as trolls.
Falcon
You stopped reading a bit too soon. Allow me to repost for you.
How do I know I am virus free? Because I know how to scan my system without installing AV. I know how my system should perform, and I know how to see what's running. I periodically check the health of my system by checking what's currently being accessed compared to what's running. I haven't found something out of place in years. Since about 2003 to be exact. Since that time I've had at least 2 machines that I haven't run any sort of protection on. There has yet to be a difference between the machines WITH AV, and the machines WIHTOUT AV.
And you can detect all malware including rootkits? There are none that can evade what you do?
"The fundamental problem with rootkit detection is that if the operating system currently running has been subverted, it cannot be trusted, including to find unauthorized modifications to itself or its components. In other words, actions such as requesting a list of all running processes, or a list of all files in a directory, cannot be trusted to behave as intended by the original designers. Rootkit detectors running on live systems currently only work, because the rootkits they can detect have not yet been developed to hide themselves fully against these detectors. A reasonable analogy would be asking a brainwashed person if they had been brainwashed; obviously their answer could not be trusted."
Falcon
Do not tell me your configuration was typical.
I didn't even _imply_ it. In fact, I said the complete opposite.
Yea, you're right. However...
However, mid-range desktops aren't relevant to my point. I explicitly said a *high-end* PC dating to 6-7 years old.
...you also said it was "pretty typical of Windows releases stretching back to, well, basically forever." Typical means typical to me. And forever means forever. A high end configuration is not typical. And good luck finding anything approaching even a low end configuration from 10 years ago 30 years ago. Have you seen any PCs with a Zilog Z80 CPU reently? Or one with a MOS Technology 6502 CPU? I've used microcomputers with both, Trash er TRS 80s and Apples.
Falcon
one of the first things I do when installing a fresh copy of Windows on a computer is go straight to the video card manufacturer so I don't have to deal with a crappy 800x600 resolution.
I updated hardware drivers for Windows but both Windows 95 and NT4 used my 1024 × 768 monitor out of the box. A driver from Nokia had to be installed to drive the monitor at 1600 x 1280 if I recall right.
Win7 was better in that it could actually support 1280x1024
That's it? The LCD on my MacBook Pro is 1680 x 1050 but graphics will drive a 1920 x 1200 external monitor.
Falcon
This should give some insight into the problems with Linux and how it could be addressed: for all it's strengths, it's not something people want. They want Windows, despite it's weaknesses. Make Linux wantable, watch market share change dramatically.
The problem with Linux's market share is that few PCs sold in stores come with Linux installed. And not many people have heard of Linux. Sure geeks and hackers on Slashdot have but they are not the typical computer user. Also most people do not necessarily want Window but think they need it. Talking with others about computers I've heard a lot of complaints about their PCs, and almost every tyme the problem is Windows. When I ask them if they thought of trying Linux or a Mac I'm asked if they can run MS Office, they say they have to have Office. When asked why they can not give an example of what only Office can do except Office macros, while Open Office can use Excel macros macros for Word have to be rewritten. There is also WordPerfect Office, Lotus SmartSuite, and other office suites.
Simply many people have the perception they need Windows because they need MS Office.
Make Linux wantable, watch market share change dramatically.
Fact is is no one knows what Linux's market share is. Estimates are Linux has a market share in the single digits on desktops with Linux, and Apache, having large shares of servers. Even with internal servers though it's hard to know how many MS Windows servers there are because IT departments of businesses and other users of servers switch from Windows and IIS to Linux and Apache without telling others. There have been articles linked to on Slashdot about how the London and New York Stock Exchanges have moved from MS Windows and .net to Linux and other open source platforms. The London Stock Exchange not only switched to Linux but actually bought the company that developed the trading system the exchange will use.
Falcon
Windows 7 had 1.9% market share before launch?
Sure, there were a lot of beta testers.
Falcon
Was the PC top of the line and maxed out when it came out?
For a home PC, pretty close to it - 933Mhz CPU, 1GB RAM, GeForce 256.
Which is pretty typical of Windows releases stretching back to, well, basically forever.
Typical of Windows releases forever? AHAH! The last Windows PC I bought I got in 2000. It came with a 766MHz Pentium, 128MB RAM, and the graphics was built into the motherboard. Do not tell me your configuration was typical. In 2006 I bought a PC with Linux preinstalled. The CPU was a Celeron D, the graphics was built in, and it came with 128 MB RAM and a 40GB HDD. At the same tyme I got it I also bought another gigabyte of RAM and a 300GB disk, which because it was not compatible with Linux I replaced with a 750GB disk. For the same price.
While my PCs were budget models mid range desktops didn't come with much more standard, a faster CPU, more RAM, larger HDD, and a dedicated graphics card.
Falcon
Slashdot likes to say that anecdotal evidence is meaningless (which of course it is), but when a sufficiently large collection of anecdotes all say the same thing, we call that consensus. The general consensus is (I believe) that Macs are a lot less likely to be infected than Windows boxes, so your 'Anyone who uses any computer (including Mac AND Linux) without anti-virus is asking for what they get' statement is in fact news to me.
While Linux and Macs are more secure and less likely to become infected it's better to be safe than sorry. Even new AV software doesn't put much if any strain on current Macs.
Falcon
I don't know about you, but I have lovely process explorer app from sysinternals. Nice program. When watching TV/etc, I keep it up and I watch my IO/Network/Memory/CPU usage. Because I know every program that loads with windows and I know what to expect from every executable/service running. I know when/why they use a resource. If a service/whatever is reading the HD or using CPU time or network, if it doesn't have a reason, it's a dead process.
Can't rootkits hide from things like scanners and Windows?
Falcon
I guess you did not bother to actually check the search results, right?
Because I can't find any report about a real virus in the wild.
I wonder if you didn't do the same you accuse GP of not doing. The second result for http://images.google.nl/search?q=osx+virus+in+the+wild is Mac users face first OS X virus in the wild. Now anyone who knows what they're doing shouldn't get infected. As New MacOS X trojan/virus alert, mostly a non-event says it takes some clicking and seems to be a "proof of concept". Now Tech Q and A: Are Macs Vulnerable to Virus Attacks? is an interesting read.
Falcon
Ooh, don't get the idea I'm a shill, for MS, Linux, or anybody else and don't like Macs. I'm typing this on my MacBook Pro and of the 7 new computers I've owned it's the best.
Thanks, you made me think of something. I use a host file to block ads but looking at the page linked to I thought of adding the IP the pings that keep on coming from to the host file as well.
Falcon
Oldest PC I've personally installed Vista on dated from early 2000. Worked fine (albeit a bit slow - though a $30 video card fixed that).
Was the PC top of the line and maxed out when it came out?
Falcon
Anyway, I certainly wouldn't disagree with the claim that 'Linux has much better support for seven year old hardware'. My objection is that the hardware support is presented as being both infinitely better than Windows *and* so bad you need special Linux hardware....at the same time.
OK, this I can understand. Because Linux developers have had a while to work on drivers for old hardware the drivers are available not new hardware won't have drivers available for some tyme, unless the manufacturers release drivers themselves or release the info on how it works so others can develop drivers.
Falcon
You keep repeating the same old same old. All I can conclude is you're trolling.
Falcon