This seems to be entirely for the benefit of Microsoft - their wanting to secure a regular income, with the benefits to the customer a distant second.
After all, why go to all the trouble of pushing Vista or its (likely even less popular) successors on an uninterested public, when you can just bill them monthly?
What do we as customers get out of it? The ability to access our data remotely? I can largely already do that - the things I'm most likely to want access to, such as mail, are well catered for by multiple webmail operations, and it's notable that MS has managed to so badly screw up Hotmail if this is where they're aiming.
As for other apps, I suspect that network bandwidth is going to put a stop to many of those plans.
Not to mention the issue of trust - would *you* trust MS with all your data. Again, judging by the success of their Passport scheme, it looks like a resounding NO!
I find it rather ironic that MS came to prominence precisely because they gave us control over our own computers, rather than being beholden to a single central controller, and now they want to be that controller.
Good point. I don't know if corrective optics be used to eliminate the coma distortion incurred by viewing off-axis with a parabolic primary. But given that spherical aberration can be corrected (as with Hubble), I'd be a bit surprised if coma can't.
You move the (much smaller) secondary mirror around in front of the primary mirror. Think off-axis satellite dishes, or the giant Arecibo radio dish, where they winch the receiver array around above it.
Ah, no. The key is to move the (much smaller) secondary mirror around in front of the primary. Think off-axis satellite dishes, or the receiver above the Arecibo radio telescope that gets winched around above the dish, as the main dish itself is obviously fixed.
You try using some imagery from the latest Spiderman film then, and see how far you get...
I hope the church really sticks it to Sony on this one. Sony, along with all the other movie studios, has made such a huge fuss about "image rights" and the like, that they really deserve to have the book thrown at them when they decide they shouldn't be bound by the same rules.
I suggest that it is you who should look again at the details of the Kyoto protocol. Specifically, at the definitions of "Annex I" countries. The Kyoto protocol would actually benefit under-developed countries, by giving them carbon credits to sell.
The "documentary" you refer to was, as others have pointed out, not from the BBC, and has been comprehensively debunked since. It was certainly very well made, but misleading in the extreme.
If you were to check what the BBC actually has to say about Kyoto, you'd get a much more accurate picture - the US pulled out, at least in part because poor countries weren't being restricted enough - they thought it was unfair competition. Now who's holding back international development?
Incidentally, as for wars in Africa, I don't recall Rwanda being about food. Or Darfur. And Zimbabwe, funnily enough, started off with an excess of food before descending into its current state.
Not quite sure what you mean about modulating a laser beam. Presumably you can switch it on and off in whatever fancy scheme you like, but it's going to remain the same wavelength. As others have mentioned, wouldn't you need different lasers to get different wavelengths? I seem to recall that dye lasers shift the output from one frequency to another, but not sure how practical this would be in a battlefield.
Also, as regards communications between planes and ground troops - presumably planes want to minimise their transmissions, to prevent becoming targets themselves, especially if they're trying to be stealthy. How long does a bomb take to fall from 20,000 feet? I wouldn't want to broadcast my location for that long. Ditto for the ground troops.
Finally, mightn't 3 seconds be long enough to save the target's life? If they just switched it on at the last second, and then dodged?
If MS themselves refuse to use.NET for their own programs, what does that say about the viability of it for the rest of us? It doesn't inspire confidence.
Even if there aren't any hurricanes, it seems crazy to leave it parked outside, right beside the sea for a couple of months. Salty sea air is a corrosion nightmare.
Plus simple rain of course, and cold nights, etc...
I can't for the life of me imagine why they wheeled it out now, rather than keeping it safe and warm in the vehicle assembly building until the last possible moment - say, the day before launch.
Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction
on
An Alternate Human
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I wonder if heat dissipation is a better reason. IIRC, the brain represents about 2% of your mass, but radiates about 20% of your body heat.
Whether that's a good thing (brain needs cooling because of all the circuitry in there), or a bad thing (unneccessary heat loss), I'll leave to the biologists. Also, the question of whether it might actually be more efficient to cool the brain in the chest due to liquid cooling.
They refuse to change to their environment and instead force the environment to change to them--a fatalistic attitude that hinders innovation and growth among other things.
George Bernard Shaw might disagree with you:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Besides, what on earth are you talking about? Internet TV is shit at the moment compared to traditional broadcast methods, at least for live TV. The old BUFFERING...99% line is a standard joke on/. and has been for a long time.
If anything, you're the one spreading FUD. It may well be that we all end up watching TV via the net, but the barrier to that happening is some very serious technical issues, not "archaic dinosaurs".
Why stop at optical? The higher the frequency of the carrier, the more data can be packed in, so you really want to go as high up the EM spectrum as possible - ie: x-rays or gamma waves.
Since these waves are propagating through the vacuum of space, you won't have to worry about any frequency-dependant attenuation issues you might get when trying to squirt them through a medium.
Additionally, if you go to really high-frequencies, there's probably less background noise from stars and stuff.
How about something like the Revolution's controller? Remote control through gestures, rather than button presses. Gesture control seems to work well for web browsing, why not TV?
I don't know about others, but one reason I'm buying less music than I used to, is because I absolutely refuse to buy a "CD" with copy protection on it.
Given that more and more CDs are being crippled by this, I find myself putting more and more of them back on the shop shelf.
As far as I'm concerned, the music industry is cutting off its nose to spite its face.
I did find out shortly after I posted my original comment that this challenge only applied to Earth-bound planes, but in that case, what's the point? Even if someone won the contest, their plane would be useless on another planet.
Apart from all the mechanical aspects, it's doubtful that even any software would be useable, due to the fact that other planets look very different from Earth. For eaxmple, in terms of visual navigation - Mars is well, red - much less contrast. And Venus, well, good luck even seeing the ground from the air.
Building a plane that can fly on another planet is so insanely difficult that NASA themselves gave up - they had wanted to fly a plane on Mars for the centenary of the Wright brothers' first flight.
Assuming the target planet is Mars; let's look at some of the challenges involved:
1) The atmosphere is *much* thinner. That's a fairly huge problem for starters. Maybe you could make the wings bigger, but how much? And if you do, they may respond in a completely different way to "normal" sized wings. What about control surfaces? Make them bigger too? Then they have more mass, and you need bigger actuators to turn them.
The atmosphere also affects propulsion. If the air's thinner, you need to either spin the prop faster, or have a bigger prop. There are limits to how fast you can spin a prop before all sorts of nasty things start to happen - such as the tips going supersonic. Again, making things bigger isn't necessarily the solution. And in case you're wondering, the same problems apply to jet engines - they need to achieve compression to work.
2) Gravity is significantly lower. Maybe that's a good thing, but it's also going to throw most earth-based flight models out. So you have to develop your own model from scratch. Not easy, or cheap.
3) This plane has to get to another planet in the first place. So you've got to pack your specially enlarged wings and engine into the nosecone of a spacecraft. Which means all sorts of size and weight restrictions. You know what you are saying about it being easy to throw together an airframe? Try doing it in under 1kg say. Good luck with that. And don't forget that fancy folding propellor...
4) Power? Not like you can just set 'er down and fill 'er up. In fact, you can probably forget landing at all. Not only do you need power for the engine, but also for all those scanners and radars, remember? If we're talking about "flight" as opposed to a "glide", then you're going to need significant amounts of power to keep it up there for any sensible length of time.
Granted, many of these problems would be alleviated somewhere like Venus - that's probably the most sensible place to try and fly a plane, but that still doesn't mean it's going to be easy.
And finally, have you noticed how even Earth-bound UAVs like the Predator tend to cost significant amounts of cash? It's not just because they were developed by greedy contractors.
I really doubt that Windows is a "consumer product" in that sense - ie: selling a lot more at Christmas.
For starters, a large chunk of Windows sales are from the business sector, and they certainly won't be rushing to get new PCs for Christmas.
As for home users, I don't think that they'll buy so many more PCs at Christmas either. A PC is rather an expensive Christmas gift - some people may get one, but for most it's likely to be an Xbox. And for all the people who buy PCs for their own use (rather than as gifts) then they'll buy them when they need them.
I may be wrong, but I'd be surprised if there's that much of a boost in sales of Windows towards Christmas.
Re:Doesn't it strike you as a bit odd
on
Xbox 360 Very Unstable
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe it's because the development/testing boxes were quite different to the production boxes?
For instance, if the development kits arrived in desktop-PC-style cases, then they may have had much better airflow than the production boxes - maybe the production boxes are overheating? (which sounds like a reasonable explanation for the problems experienced)
I wouldn't even bother mentioning the term "DRM". Once you start with acronyms, most people just switch off.
I've had some success with the following:
"Sony assumes that anyone who plays CDs on their computer is doing so to pirate them, so they've rigged their latest CDs such that, if you put them in a computer, they'll break it."
This version of events is essentially accurate (certainly no less accurate than the spin the music companies try to put on DRM), and no-one fails to "get it".
Slashdot Mirror
This seems to be entirely for the benefit of Microsoft - their wanting to secure a regular income, with the benefits to the customer a distant second.
After all, why go to all the trouble of pushing Vista or its (likely even less popular) successors on an uninterested public, when you can just bill them monthly?
What do we as customers get out of it? The ability to access our data remotely? I can largely already do that - the things I'm most likely to want access to, such as mail, are well catered for by multiple webmail operations, and it's notable that MS has managed to so badly screw up Hotmail if this is where they're aiming.
As for other apps, I suspect that network bandwidth is going to put a stop to many of those plans.
Not to mention the issue of trust - would *you* trust MS with all your data. Again, judging by the success of their Passport scheme, it looks like a resounding NO!
I find it rather ironic that MS came to prominence precisely because they gave us control over our own computers, rather than being beholden to a single central controller, and now they want to be that controller.
Good point. I don't know if corrective optics be used to eliminate the coma distortion incurred by viewing off-axis with a parabolic primary. But given that spherical aberration can be corrected (as with Hubble), I'd be a bit surprised if coma can't.
You move the (much smaller) secondary mirror around in front of the primary mirror. Think off-axis satellite dishes, or the giant Arecibo radio dish, where they winch the receiver array around above it.
Ah, no. The key is to move the (much smaller) secondary mirror around in front of the primary. Think off-axis satellite dishes, or the receiver above the Arecibo radio telescope that gets winched around above the dish, as the main dish itself is obviously fixed.
You try using some imagery from the latest Spiderman film then, and see how far you get...
I hope the church really sticks it to Sony on this one. Sony, along with all the other movie studios, has made such a huge fuss about "image rights" and the like, that they really deserve to have the book thrown at them when they decide they shouldn't be bound by the same rules.
The hypocrisy stinks.
I suggest that it is you who should look again at the details of the Kyoto protocol. Specifically, at the definitions of "Annex I" countries. The Kyoto protocol would actually benefit under-developed countries, by giving them carbon credits to sell.
The "documentary" you refer to was, as others have pointed out, not from the BBC, and has been comprehensively debunked since. It was certainly very well made, but misleading in the extreme.
If you were to check what the BBC actually has to say about Kyoto, you'd get a much more accurate picture - the US pulled out, at least in part because poor countries weren't being restricted enough - they thought it was unfair competition. Now who's holding back international development?
Incidentally, as for wars in Africa, I don't recall Rwanda being about food. Or Darfur. And Zimbabwe, funnily enough, started off with an excess of food before descending into its current state.
Not quite sure what you mean about modulating a laser beam. Presumably you can switch it on and off in whatever fancy scheme you like, but it's going to remain the same wavelength. As others have mentioned, wouldn't you need different lasers to get different wavelengths? I seem to recall that dye lasers shift the output from one frequency to another, but not sure how practical this would be in a battlefield.
Also, as regards communications between planes and ground troops - presumably planes want to minimise their transmissions, to prevent becoming targets themselves, especially if they're trying to be stealthy. How long does a bomb take to fall from 20,000 feet? I wouldn't want to broadcast my location for that long. Ditto for the ground troops.
Finally, mightn't 3 seconds be long enough to save the target's life? If they just switched it on at the last second, and then dodged?
One strategy might be to only turn on the device after the bomb or whatever is on its way.
If you just switched it on at the last moment and then moved your tank, that might work.
You'd be given advance notice that something was inbound by the fact that you were being illuminated in the first place.
I wasn't expecting the spanish inquisition...
How can you restrict gambling and yet have a stock market?
What's the current price of ears then?
Or do they just want an earlobe? Sounds about in keeping with the way the RIAA works...
"...I don't know much about MP3 players, but I do know that first impressions count."
You're kidding, right?
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
Ring any bells?
If MS themselves refuse to use .NET for their own programs, what does that say about the viability of it for the rest of us? It doesn't inspire confidence.
Even if there aren't any hurricanes, it seems crazy to leave it parked outside, right beside the sea for a couple of months. Salty sea air is a corrosion nightmare.
Plus simple rain of course, and cold nights, etc...
I can't for the life of me imagine why they wheeled it out now, rather than keeping it safe and warm in the vehicle assembly building until the last possible moment - say, the day before launch.
I wonder if heat dissipation is a better reason. IIRC, the brain represents about 2% of your mass, but radiates about 20% of your body heat.
Whether that's a good thing (brain needs cooling because of all the circuitry in there), or a bad thing (unneccessary heat loss), I'll leave to the biologists. Also, the question of whether it might actually be more efficient to cool the brain in the chest due to liquid cooling.
They refuse to change to their environment and instead force the environment to change to them--a fatalistic attitude that hinders innovation and growth among other things.
/. and has been for a long time.
George Bernard Shaw might disagree with you:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Besides, what on earth are you talking about? Internet TV is shit at the moment compared to traditional broadcast methods, at least for live TV. The old BUFFERING...99% line is a standard joke on
If anything, you're the one spreading FUD. It may well be that we all end up watching TV via the net, but the barrier to that happening is some very serious technical issues, not "archaic dinosaurs".
Won't that end up costing more for the electricity to run the iMac than you save in paper?
Why stop at optical? The higher the frequency of the carrier, the more data can be packed in, so you really want to go as high up the EM spectrum as possible - ie: x-rays or gamma waves.
Since these waves are propagating through the vacuum of space, you won't have to worry about any frequency-dependant attenuation issues you might get when trying to squirt them through a medium.
Additionally, if you go to really high-frequencies, there's probably less background noise from stars and stuff.
How about something like the Revolution's controller? Remote control through gestures, rather than button presses. Gesture control seems to work well for web browsing, why not TV?
I don't know about others, but one reason I'm buying less music than I used to, is because I absolutely refuse to buy a "CD" with copy protection on it.
Given that more and more CDs are being crippled by this, I find myself putting more and more of them back on the shop shelf.
As far as I'm concerned, the music industry is cutting off its nose to spite its face.
I did find out shortly after I posted my original comment that this challenge only applied to Earth-bound planes, but in that case, what's the point? Even if someone won the contest, their plane would be useless on another planet.
Apart from all the mechanical aspects, it's doubtful that even any software would be useable, due to the fact that other planets look very different from Earth. For eaxmple, in terms of visual navigation - Mars is well, red - much less contrast. And Venus, well, good luck even seeing the ground from the air.
You're kidding, right?
Building a plane that can fly on another planet is so insanely difficult that NASA themselves gave up - they had wanted to fly a plane on Mars for the centenary of the Wright brothers' first flight.
Assuming the target planet is Mars; let's look at some of the challenges involved:
1) The atmosphere is *much* thinner. That's a fairly huge problem for starters. Maybe you could make the wings bigger, but how much? And if you do, they may respond in a completely different way to "normal" sized wings. What about control surfaces? Make them bigger too? Then they have more mass, and you need bigger actuators to turn them.
The atmosphere also affects propulsion. If the air's thinner, you need to either spin the prop faster, or have a bigger prop. There are limits to how fast you can spin a prop before all sorts of nasty things start to happen - such as the tips going supersonic. Again, making things bigger isn't necessarily the solution. And in case you're wondering, the same problems apply to jet engines - they need to achieve compression to work.
2) Gravity is significantly lower. Maybe that's a good thing, but it's also going to throw most earth-based flight models out. So you have to develop your own model from scratch. Not easy, or cheap.
3) This plane has to get to another planet in the first place. So you've got to pack your specially enlarged wings and engine into the nosecone of a spacecraft. Which means all sorts of size and weight restrictions. You know what you are saying about it being easy to throw together an airframe? Try doing it in under 1kg say. Good luck with that. And don't forget that fancy folding propellor...
4) Power? Not like you can just set 'er down and fill 'er up. In fact, you can probably forget landing at all. Not only do you need power for the engine, but also for all those scanners and radars, remember? If we're talking about "flight" as opposed to a "glide", then you're going to need significant amounts of power to keep it up there for any sensible length of time.
Granted, many of these problems would be alleviated somewhere like Venus - that's probably the most sensible place to try and fly a plane, but that still doesn't mean it's going to be easy.
And finally, have you noticed how even Earth-bound UAVs like the Predator tend to cost significant amounts of cash? It's not just because they were developed by greedy contractors.
I really doubt that Windows is a "consumer product" in that sense - ie: selling a lot more at Christmas.
For starters, a large chunk of Windows sales are from the business sector, and they certainly won't be rushing to get new PCs for Christmas.
As for home users, I don't think that they'll buy so many more PCs at Christmas either. A PC is rather an expensive Christmas gift - some people may get one, but for most it's likely to be an Xbox. And for all the people who buy PCs for their own use (rather than as gifts) then they'll buy them when they need them.
I may be wrong, but I'd be surprised if there's that much of a boost in sales of Windows towards Christmas.
Maybe it's because the development/testing boxes were quite different to the production boxes?
For instance, if the development kits arrived in desktop-PC-style cases, then they may have had much better airflow than the production boxes - maybe the production boxes are overheating? (which sounds like a reasonable explanation for the problems experienced)
I wouldn't even bother mentioning the term "DRM". Once you start with acronyms, most people just switch off.
I've had some success with the following:
"Sony assumes that anyone who plays CDs on their computer is doing so to pirate them, so they've rigged their latest CDs such that, if you put them in a computer, they'll break it."
This version of events is essentially accurate (certainly no less accurate than the spin the music companies try to put on DRM), and no-one fails to "get it".