The benchmark for drivers and device compatibility is Windows, and compared to Windows Linux does not have lots of drivers. Linux supports only a very small percentage of the devices Windows supports.
Windows does not support devices. Device manufacturers support devices. The reason why fewer devices work out of the box in Linux, frankly, is not Linux's fault. I would argue that Linux has much better driver support than Windows because the Linux community reverse engineers buggy, proprietary hardware and creates drivers that are sometimes more stable than the manufacturers' own provided Windows drivers. Let me know when Microsoft starts providing that service for their customers.
Eventually someone is going to say.. Hey, this stuff costs a bajazillion dollars to build and $14,000 an ounce to get into orbit, maybe we should keep it in orbit and see if it can be reused?*
Not really, considering that it would cost 4 bajazillion dollars to get all the equipment needed to repurpose it designed, tested, built, and launched (at $14,000 an ounce), and then another 6 bajazillion dollars to make the modifications in space. It's always cheaper to design, build and launch purpose-built hardware than it is to bastardize some other purpose built hardware to do something outside the scope of its original purpose.
"Space" is not a single environment. There are very few requirements that are common across all hardware--things like max gee loading, radiation hardening, useful life, propellant types, servicability, and power requirements are all different for different orbits and missions. It is as diverse as the environments on Earth (if not moreso) and since getting heavy stuff up there is really hard we tend to design things to do one thing, and do that one thing well. As a consequence, they don't do anything else very well, if at all.
You might as well say you could repurpose your Prius to enter the Indy 500. After all, the only things required would be a new engine, chassis, body, electronics package, drivetrain, and driver, and the shipping costs for getting the new parts are $10,000 a pound. Oh, and you're paying the mechanics $1000 an hour because they have to do the modification in a desert in August at noon in a sandstorm with oven mitts on. But hey, that's gotta be cheaper than buying a whole Indycar, right?
Professor Farnsworth: Good Lord! That's over 5000 atmospheres of pressure! Fry: How many atmospheres can the ship withstand? Professor Farnsworth: Well, it was built for space travel, so anywhere between zero and one.
I'm not too knowledgeable about this sort of stuff but wouldn't the reaction of the new container being tugged cause the ISS to change it's direction?
unless that is only the effect on earth due to friction
Yes it would, if the container was not traveling at the same speed and direction as the ISS, but it happens at the moment of capture, not during the reeling-in period.
If the container is moving slower than the ISS (which it would be, I'll get to the speeds in a second), then at the moment of capture the wire would impart an impulse force on the ISS, due solely to the inertia of the container. This would slow the ISS down, and would require a reboost burn to get it back up to transfer speed. Once the container and the ISS have reached equal speeds (some speed less than the original ISS speed and greater than the original container speed, proportional to the ratio of masses), then the ISS-container combination are now in orbit as a single object. The line of the orbit is technically at the barycenter of the two object system, and that barycenter will shift slightly as the container is reeled in, but we can safely assume that since the ISS is many orders of magnitude more massive than the container, the barycenter will be very close to the center of the ISS and will not shift an appreciable amount during reel-in.
Now, speeds. The apogee speed of a lunar transfer orbit is approximately 11 km/s (24,600 mph). This is the speed the ISS would be traveling at close approach to the Earth, and also the maximum speed and minimum altitude of the orbit. The shuttle is capable of launching to an altitude of 217 nautical miles, which in a circular orbit is a speed of about 7.7 km/s (17,160 mph). The ISS would have to catch a wire traveling at a relative speed of 3.3 km/s (7,440 mph), and the rebound in the cable alone would doom the ISS, not to mention the tremendous stresses placed on both objects to essentially accelerate the container to that speed in the space of a second or so. Capture from two different orbits is simply not feasible; it's much safer to have both objects traveling at the same speed in the same direction for capture, and if you have to boost the container to a lunar transfer orbit speed, you have just used the same amount of energy as simply sending it to the moon.
The stuff I saw about boeing's CF wings suggests that the reason they didn't test them to failure was probably because the failure point would be so far outside normal operating parameters for such wings that it wasn't worth it.
You are correct, sir. Who cares what load your wings break at if you know the fuselage will snap in half first? Wings are pretty useless when you have no fuselage.
I have a cousin who actually LOVES to get telemarketing calls, though. He has found all kinds of creative ways to screw with them. He will try to keep them on the line as long as possible, encouraging them with lots of questions and feigned interest, only to tell them "No" at the end (time is money for telemarketers). He will ask them "Hey could you hang on just a minute?" then put the phone down and go watch TV. My personal favorite is when he responds to them with "EXCUSE ME, but I'm trying to masturbate here!"
And all over the world, poor schmucks who are paying their way through graduate school by working as telemarketers get great stories to tell their buddies at the pub.
Non-techies are in general scared of downloading programs from the internet.
As they should be. Haven't we techies been screaming at them for years to not download and run anything they find on the internet?
In my evangelizing of Ubuntu, I have even stopped handing out burned CDs for that reason, and I order the printed ones from Ubuntu instead. The slick packaging reinforces the idea that this is a legitimate product and not some shady pirated copy of something else. Best Buy is simply doing the same thing for those people who also can't wrap their heads around the idea of anything being quality if it is also free.
But to be fair to them, my CFO asked a little while ago if the power problems we had were a result of her sending an email to Iceland. After all, it must take a lot more power to push the message that far than to push it across the street.
That's just because she used Microsoft's Direct Push Technology. It's much easier to use packet switching like everyone else.
Spielberg has said in an interview (I don't have a link to the original interview, which was several years ago, but there is an interview in Entertainment Weekly from April that says the same thing) that he purposely did not want to include the Nazis in the new movie. After his experience making Schindler's List, and all the emotional baggage the film brought along for him, he simply could not portray the Nazis as campy cartoonish bad guys anymore. During the making of that movie, he interviewed a lot of holocaust survivors and faced his own demons about the war, the holocaust, and the systematic extermination of an entire culture.
Once you've stared real evil in the face, I suspect that a caricature just doesn't seem appealing anymore.
I'd like to take the opportunity to thank Carl for his well thought-out response. It's not every day that busy entrepreneurial CEOs take time out of their schedules to address the unwashed internet masses.
I think this project has a lot of potential. I'm always surprised at the attitude people have that "well, I wouldn't buy it, therefore it's not a good product." News flash, folks: there are market segments you are not a part of. Just because not everyone would buy something doesn't mean no one will. Judging from the number of preorders this has gotten (and knowing many general aviation pilots who would leap at an opportunity to own something like this), I would say it has been very well received.
And he's right about the timing. While carbon fiber technology has existed for a long time now, it is just now gaining traction in general-purpose manufacturing, and the economies of scale are bringing the price down to the point where products can be built with it for roughly the same cost as some other materials. The convergence of affordable composite manufacturing and a new type of sport-plane license have finally made this type of vehicle possible.
The licensing programs for general aviation are much more strict than they are for automobiles. If this vehicle inspires regular car drivers to get their VFR licenses, I suspect the training will also make them better drivers.
However, I don't envy the cost of Terrafugia's product certification program. This vehicle needs to be certified to both FAA and NHTSA standards, which aircraft and automobile companies spend many millions on separately, just for the paperwork alone. Godspeed to the certification team!
In short: yes, in one sense Blender is intuitive. However, at another level it is just a impenetrable jumble of buttons and dials that is more complicated to use than an airplane. Any highly complex, powerful, sophisticated tool is going to have a learning curve in order to use it effectively. Pilots don't go to Driver's Ed to get their licenses, and 3D artists don't start cranking out complex characters in a week.
If you want something to be easy, you buy a commercial ticket and let someone else fly. If you want power and control, you go to school for six months and log hundreds of hours of flight to get your own license.
Tools like this are so powerful, they're difficult to dumb down. Get over your "I'm smart enough to just figure it out without the manual!" elitism and learn to use the tool effectively. Yes, it's work. Once you know the interface, Blender lets you model, rig, and animate faster than anything any other 3D program can offer. But only once you've put in a sufficient amount of time learning to use the tool effectively.
If you want hand-holding, go use something else. I hear Google SketchUp even lets you texture your meshes.
This is a legitimate gripe, and one I had similar frustrations with when learning Blender. However, this has been largely fixed in the more recent versions of the software, which is updated and expanded and made better faster than any other piece of software I've seen.
The Blender devs add more features, bugfixes, consistency, and general coolness in six months than most programs get to in several years. The problem is that the codebase they're working from was mostly just an internal tool for one company, and they are overcoming that specificity as they grow and improve the software, a bit at a time. It literally gets better every single day.
Print a giant face over your storefront/building just to see what happens. The face-finding algorithm might have a maximum size of the face in the picture, so if the face covers the whole building, it would get ignored. (How many people walk right up to the Google van and stick their face in front of the camera? Prank idea!)
However, you might be able to get around this by covering the front of your building with hundreds of life-size photos of people's faces.
1) Distributed cluster on military-owned hardware. 2) Civilian recruitment scheme. 3) Violation of the 3rd Amendment.
Option 1) would be viable, considering all the various systems in military bases around the world. However, it would not have the same power as the botnets it's fighting against, which have the full power of millions of broadband connections at their disposal.
Option 2) is like hiding bombs in schools and churches. While voluntary, it invites civilian attacks from the enemy.
Option 3), releasing it "into the wild," and allowing it to compromise unwitting people's computers: No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Slashdot Mirror
The benchmark for drivers and device compatibility is Windows, and compared to Windows Linux does not have lots of drivers. Linux supports only a very small percentage of the devices Windows supports.
Windows does not support devices. Device manufacturers support devices. The reason why fewer devices work out of the box in Linux, frankly, is not Linux's fault. I would argue that Linux has much better driver support than Windows because the Linux community reverse engineers buggy, proprietary hardware and creates drivers that are sometimes more stable than the manufacturers' own provided Windows drivers. Let me know when Microsoft starts providing that service for their customers.
Eventually someone is going to say.. Hey, this stuff costs a bajazillion dollars to build and $14,000 an ounce to get into orbit, maybe we should keep it in orbit and see if it can be reused?*
Not really, considering that it would cost 4 bajazillion dollars to get all the equipment needed to repurpose it designed, tested, built, and launched (at $14,000 an ounce), and then another 6 bajazillion dollars to make the modifications in space. It's always cheaper to design, build and launch purpose-built hardware than it is to bastardize some other purpose built hardware to do something outside the scope of its original purpose.
"Space" is not a single environment. There are very few requirements that are common across all hardware--things like max gee loading, radiation hardening, useful life, propellant types, servicability, and power requirements are all different for different orbits and missions. It is as diverse as the environments on Earth (if not moreso) and since getting heavy stuff up there is really hard we tend to design things to do one thing, and do that one thing well. As a consequence, they don't do anything else very well, if at all.
You might as well say you could repurpose your Prius to enter the Indy 500. After all, the only things required would be a new engine, chassis, body, electronics package, drivetrain, and driver, and the shipping costs for getting the new parts are $10,000 a pound. Oh, and you're paying the mechanics $1000 an hour because they have to do the modification in a desert in August at noon in a sandstorm with oven mitts on. But hey, that's gotta be cheaper than buying a whole Indycar, right?
Obligatory Futurama:
Professor Farnsworth: Good Lord! That's over 5000 atmospheres of pressure!
Fry: How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?
Professor Farnsworth: Well, it was built for space travel, so anywhere between zero and one.
Are we sure he isn't also this guy?
Ahh, the world would be a much more boring place without a few raving lunatics about.
I'm not too knowledgeable about this sort of stuff but wouldn't the reaction of the new container being tugged cause the ISS to change it's direction?
unless that is only the effect on earth due to friction
Yes it would, if the container was not traveling at the same speed and direction as the ISS, but it happens at the moment of capture, not during the reeling-in period.
If the container is moving slower than the ISS (which it would be, I'll get to the speeds in a second), then at the moment of capture the wire would impart an impulse force on the ISS, due solely to the inertia of the container. This would slow the ISS down, and would require a reboost burn to get it back up to transfer speed. Once the container and the ISS have reached equal speeds (some speed less than the original ISS speed and greater than the original container speed, proportional to the ratio of masses), then the ISS-container combination are now in orbit as a single object. The line of the orbit is technically at the barycenter of the two object system, and that barycenter will shift slightly as the container is reeled in, but we can safely assume that since the ISS is many orders of magnitude more massive than the container, the barycenter will be very close to the center of the ISS and will not shift an appreciable amount during reel-in.
Now, speeds. The apogee speed of a lunar transfer orbit is approximately 11 km/s (24,600 mph). This is the speed the ISS would be traveling at close approach to the Earth, and also the maximum speed and minimum altitude of the orbit. The shuttle is capable of launching to an altitude of 217 nautical miles, which in a circular orbit is a speed of about 7.7 km/s (17,160 mph). The ISS would have to catch a wire traveling at a relative speed of 3.3 km/s (7,440 mph), and the rebound in the cable alone would doom the ISS, not to mention the tremendous stresses placed on both objects to essentially accelerate the container to that speed in the space of a second or so. Capture from two different orbits is simply not feasible; it's much safer to have both objects traveling at the same speed in the same direction for capture, and if you have to boost the container to a lunar transfer orbit speed, you have just used the same amount of energy as simply sending it to the moon.
IAARS (I Am A Rocket Scientist)
The stuff I saw about boeing's CF wings suggests that the reason they didn't test them to failure was probably because the failure point would be so far outside normal operating parameters for such wings that it wasn't worth it.
You are correct, sir. Who cares what load your wings break at if you know the fuselage will snap in half first? Wings are pretty useless when you have no fuselage.
For the record, I am a Boeing engineer.
I have a cousin who actually LOVES to get telemarketing calls, though. He has found all kinds of creative ways to screw with them. He will try to keep them on the line as long as possible, encouraging them with lots of questions and feigned interest, only to tell them "No" at the end (time is money for telemarketers). He will ask them "Hey could you hang on just a minute?" then put the phone down and go watch TV. My personal favorite is when he responds to them with "EXCUSE ME, but I'm trying to masturbate here!"
And all over the world, poor schmucks who are paying their way through graduate school by working as telemarketers get great stories to tell their buddies at the pub.
He's doing them a service!
It's the same reason Microsoft prefixes everything with "My". Because it's not your computer, it's Bill's.
Right, all they have to do is show a note from their mother telling the courts that following orders is not a crime.
I feel much better, thank you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Principles#Principle_IV
http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/militarylaw1/a/obeyingorders.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Calley
Time to give him a Gentoo CD.
Non-techies are in general scared of downloading programs from the internet.
As they should be. Haven't we techies been screaming at them for years to not download and run anything they find on the internet?
In my evangelizing of Ubuntu, I have even stopped handing out burned CDs for that reason, and I order the printed ones from Ubuntu instead. The slick packaging reinforces the idea that this is a legitimate product and not some shady pirated copy of something else. Best Buy is simply doing the same thing for those people who also can't wrap their heads around the idea of anything being quality if it is also free.
But to be fair to them, my CFO asked a little while ago if the power problems we had were a result of her sending an email to Iceland. After all, it must take a lot more power to push the message that far than to push it across the street.
That's just because she used Microsoft's Direct Push Technology. It's much easier to use packet switching like everyone else.
I just had a fleeting image of round, inflated cows rolling lazily around a field.
Thank you for making my day.
That's true for the GPL, yes. Other OSS licenses, like BSD, allow the developer to use open source code in closed source commercial products.
Aren't AJAX applications changing the DOM and hiding/unhiding elements fairly frequently?
The HTML renderer still seems important for fast operation of Google Docs.
Spielberg has said in an interview (I don't have a link to the original interview, which was several years ago, but there is an interview in Entertainment Weekly from April that says the same thing) that he purposely did not want to include the Nazis in the new movie. After his experience making Schindler's List, and all the emotional baggage the film brought along for him, he simply could not portray the Nazis as campy cartoonish bad guys anymore. During the making of that movie, he interviewed a lot of holocaust survivors and faced his own demons about the war, the holocaust, and the systematic extermination of an entire culture.
Once you've stared real evil in the face, I suspect that a caricature just doesn't seem appealing anymore.
That's just a user interface problem...
That's it!
I'm naming my band "Cyclopean Starfish Jesus."
Depends on whether or not that fruit fly has been taking some pills he ordered from a spam email.
I'd like to take the opportunity to thank Carl for his well thought-out response. It's not every day that busy entrepreneurial CEOs take time out of their schedules to address the unwashed internet masses.
I think this project has a lot of potential. I'm always surprised at the attitude people have that "well, I wouldn't buy it, therefore it's not a good product." News flash, folks: there are market segments you are not a part of. Just because not everyone would buy something doesn't mean no one will. Judging from the number of preorders this has gotten (and knowing many general aviation pilots who would leap at an opportunity to own something like this), I would say it has been very well received.
And he's right about the timing. While carbon fiber technology has existed for a long time now, it is just now gaining traction in general-purpose manufacturing, and the economies of scale are bringing the price down to the point where products can be built with it for roughly the same cost as some other materials. The convergence of affordable composite manufacturing and a new type of sport-plane license have finally made this type of vehicle possible.
The licensing programs for general aviation are much more strict than they are for automobiles. If this vehicle inspires regular car drivers to get their VFR licenses, I suspect the training will also make them better drivers.
However, I don't envy the cost of Terrafugia's product certification program. This vehicle needs to be certified to both FAA and NHTSA standards, which aircraft and automobile companies spend many millions on separately, just for the paperwork alone. Godspeed to the certification team!
If you want something to be easy, you buy a commercial ticket and let someone else fly. If you want power and control, you go to school for six months and log hundreds of hours of flight to get your own license.
Tools like this are so powerful, they're difficult to dumb down. Get over your "I'm smart enough to just figure it out without the manual!" elitism and learn to use the tool effectively. Yes, it's work. Once you know the interface, Blender lets you model, rig, and animate faster than anything any other 3D program can offer. But only once you've put in a sufficient amount of time learning to use the tool effectively.
If you want hand-holding, go use something else. I hear Google SketchUp even lets you texture your meshes.
This is a legitimate gripe, and one I had similar frustrations with when learning Blender. However, this has been largely fixed in the more recent versions of the software, which is updated and expanded and made better faster than any other piece of software I've seen.
The Blender devs add more features, bugfixes, consistency, and general coolness in six months than most programs get to in several years. The problem is that the codebase they're working from was mostly just an internal tool for one company, and they are overcoming that specificity as they grow and improve the software, a bit at a time. It literally gets better every single day.
However, you might be able to get around this by covering the front of your building with hundreds of life-size photos of people's faces.
Boy that would be creepy.
Does anyone have a link to this awesome new trailer for an HD special that's in... well... HD?
Watching a tiny little YouTube quality video on the OrlandoSentinel website sure is mighty impressive.
This has three possible forms it could take:
1) Distributed cluster on military-owned hardware.
2) Civilian recruitment scheme.
3) Violation of the 3rd Amendment.
Option 1) would be viable, considering all the various systems in military bases around the world. However, it would not have the same power as the botnets it's fighting against, which have the full power of millions of broadband connections at their disposal.
Option 2) is like hiding bombs in schools and churches. While voluntary, it invites civilian attacks from the enemy.
Option 3), releasing it "into the wild," and allowing it to compromise unwitting people's computers: No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.