A point to remember, what made cheap computers possible was not cheap microprocessors, but cheap memory. In the early 1970's, 64K of memory would set you back on the order of 10 to 20 grand (at a time when you could buy a brand new Cessna 172 for 15 grand).
You're largely correct in saying that Heinlein got it right - see "The Door into Summer", where he predicts drafting being done with relatively inexpensive electronics.
Heinlein also did a much better job than most SF writers in predicting the future - the timing of the first moon landing was almost nailed in "The Man Who Sold the Moon". His description of a Nuclear power plant in "Blowups Happen" covers a surprising number of details of an actual N-plant - the biggest omission was delayed neutrons.
The only reason we ever made it into space was competition with the Russians.
More like preparing for war with the Russians. Two big drivers of the space program were getting the ICBM program going and spy satellites to see what the Russians were up to and locate targets for the ICBM's. The two major ELV's in US inventory are the Atlas and Delta (which has evolved a l-o-n-g way from the Thor IRBM).
As for health care - the US already spends at least an order of magnitude more on health care than space. In addition, some of the biggest advances in medicine have some from research that had nothing to do with medicine (e.g. the investigations into nuclear magnetic moment going on in the mid to late 40's - see the Blombergen, Pound and Purcell paper).
I wouldn't mind the Astro III - mid-engine show car from 1967 with the hopped up Corvair engine (a Weber per cylinder). Do remember lusting after the mid-engine Corvette that was shown in the early 1970 issues of R&T and Motor Trend.
I tried Firefox and was mostly impressed. There was one irksome detail that tipped the matter in favor of straight Moz - downlaoding files. Not sure if was a lame-ass way of setting up Firefox, but I didn't like how it downloaded "to the desktop" - especially when there wasn't a "desktop" defined for my environment.
Anyway, the whole point of having a standards adherent browser(s) is it shouldn't matter which browser you use. With luck, we may see the OASIS file format become widely accepted for similar reasons.
Maybe he should have tried AcetOzone (see Retro Aerospace) with some FlOx for a kicker...
Then again, one of the solid fuels investigated in the 1960's was ammonium nitrate and nitromethane - turned out to be nicely energetic but the combustion rate was a wee bit higher than desired.
Not to mention that their hardware isn't properly configured (both the obvious physical changes to the external hardware and the ones you obviously have no concept of in the ol wetware) until fairly close to the modern legal adult line.
There is some neurological and psychological evidence that suggests the brain doesn't fully settle down until about the age of 30.
On the first computer I used, a TRS-80 Model 100, the Control key is next to the A button, and the caps lock is a tiny button to the bottom right of the keyboard.
Buy a keyboard with the "Unix" layout (e.g. Sun type 6). The Caps Lock next to the "A" key is an IBM PC thing - just one of many stupid design decisions left over from the original 5150. Maybe it was someone who wanted to kill WordStar (which used the ctrl keys for moving around)...
My first computer keyboard (Televideo 925) had the control key next to the "A" key.
I tend to agree with their sentiments, most modern keyboards are way to mushy and too light. My best keyboard was the one that came with the Compaq Deskpro's in the mid 1980's, although the Sun type 5C was a somewhat close second.
OTOH, modern keyboards sure beat the feel of a model 33 (used a few of those in school many moons ago).
I don't think you comprehend what it means to be part of a very large organization. It would probably be cheaper to spring for the GPS unit than to go through the process of trying to convince corporate IT to open a hole in the firewall.
As far as SarbOx and $500 for a GPS NTP server - the IT guys may very well say that is small potatoes compared to the cost of a network breach - and they would most likely be right (probability > 99.9%). Even if that probability is small, it still may be cheaper to spring for the GPS solution.
Note that, since I have space to use up for the spam filter, there are several ironically named swimming pools named after former Prime Minister Harold Holt, as well as an American Frigate.
The gather of ne of my sister's friends was the first skipper of the Holt. It was later involved in the Mayaguez incident.
Who is playing the political games? IT does what the boss tells them to.
W-e-l-l, IT's ultimate boss is 4 to 5 levels up in management (I'm part of a very large organization, IT is largely in India). My boss is well aware of the problem and his boss is well aware of the problem but isn't in the position to do anything about it.:-(
I'm almost in excatly the same boat as "dvdsmith" - the most likely solution for our situation is a GPS stabilized NTP appliance. We've also been taking a hit with the lack of FTP access and a couple of other protocols - we have a clear need for access, but that doesn't seem to make any difference to the IT guys.
One basic problem is that the IT folks are being graded on keeping their costs down - but not graded on whether they keep the overall costs down.
Can you imagine the cost of paying every private property owner in the country for the "right" to deliver power to their neighbor? That would have raised rates to the point where many people would not have been able to afford to use electricity.
That's the whole reason for Eminent Domain, and easements. This first came up in dealing with roads and canals, and has been applied for railroads, telegraph, telephone, electricity, gas and other utilities. Part of the bargain is that the company that is granted the easement is expected to make use of the easement in a manner that meets the public interest, convenience of necessity. If the public in the form of government decides that it is in the public interest for cable companies to share their broadband connections, then the public has the right to require the cable companies to do so.
A historical note: With a very few exceptions, most passenger trains in the US were losing money after about 1950 or so. The only reason that many of these trains were being run was due to franchise clauses that required passenger service.
Cable companies hang their wires on poles which are located on public land.
Not to mention private land. The pole line at my old house was over my property - the phone company and power company (no cable service there) had the right to trim any trees under the pole line - and I didn't get any payment for the use of the land. Not having to buy the right-of-way is a huge subsidy, and the government does have a right to have a say in how the facilities are used.
Hydraulic motors for flaps: Not necessarily. Hydraulics in space are problematic because of temperature regulation (in the tanks, in the cylinders, in the lines, etc). However, it is possible to use electric actuators to replace them for most, if not all, tasks. Electric actuators are increasingly being used in high force tasks.
I knew one of the chief engineers for the hydraulic system on the shuttle (he also worked on the Atlas and Saturn programs) and this is what he said about electric actuators: "The problem with electric actuators is that in order to get the same force/mass ratio of hydraulics, the rotor has to be turning so fast (i.e. a high gear reduction ratio) that rotational inertia results in slower response than possible with hydraulics."
The XFree86 project was a popular project to implement the X11 protocol on 8086 machines.
8086???
I could believe x86 machines (possibly including the 80286), but don't think 8086 boxes would have had enough memory. Not to mention the old VGA cards that would support only 4 bits of color in 640 by 480 mode - don't even talk about EGA or (barf!) CGA.
Solid fuel is typically aluminum powder, polybutadene and ammonium perchlorate for the bigger motors. Nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin for some of the smaller motors. Sugar and potassium nitrate for model rockets.
Liquids fuels include gasolene (Goddard), ethanol (V2), kerosene/RP1 (Atlas, Thor, Saturn first stages), Hydrazine (Agena, Titan II, III, IV, Apollo service module and lunar excursion module), Hydrogen (Centaur, Saturn upper stages, Space Shuttle main engines, newest Delta). Oxidizers are LOX and N2O4 - note that N2O4 and Hydrazine are hypergolic (ignites on contact).
Perchlorate is found in large solid rocket motors, e.g. ballistic missiles, strap-on boosters for launch vehicles (Titan III & IV, Space Shuttle, some versions of the Delta launcher, Pegasus). Small tactical missiles often use a double base propellant, similar to "smokeless powder" used for small arms, to reduce smoke.
Liquid fuel rockets do not use perchlorate. The most common oxidizer is liquid oxygen (LOX), second most common oxidizer is N2O4. One of the selling points of the Delta "Heavy" booster is that the strap-ons are liquid fuel (LH2-LOX) and avoid the environmental problems with solid fuel.
It goes beyond that - in the Solaris 8 days, Sun had a program where you could get a source code license for a nominal fee + NDA. What they appear to be doing is taking that idea a couple of steps further.
A good question is what code won't be opened up - Solaris does contain a fair amount of third party code. One of the potentially more critical pieces is the Adobe PostScript code in xsun - the native PostScript code is more robust than the code used in ghostview (I've got a couple of files that will render under Solaris x86, but not Linux).
I just wanted to point out that you are talking about Sun's own hardware. Call me when Sun Solaris 10 will run without glich on poor's man Pentium IV or AMD Athlon XP server.
That's not the market Sun is aiming for. The threat facing Sun is the availability of Opteron boxes that can do the work of their low end SPARC boxes. By selling Opterons with Solaris Sun gains two ways:
Revenue from selling the Opteron systems
Holding on to, or preferably expanding Solaris market share
The latter is important as Sun knows that it is the availability of applications that drives hardware sales.
One strong selling point of Solaris is that the file system layout and libraries are standardized, something the Linux vendors are starting to comprehend (i.e. LSB) - though it should be pointed out that the *BSD's hae been way ahead of Linux in this regard.
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You're largely correct in saying that Heinlein got it right - see "The Door into Summer", where he predicts drafting being done with relatively inexpensive electronics.
Heinlein also did a much better job than most SF writers in predicting the future - the timing of the first moon landing was almost nailed in "The Man Who Sold the Moon". His description of a Nuclear power plant in "Blowups Happen" covers a surprising number of details of an actual N-plant - the biggest omission was delayed neutrons.
More like preparing for war with the Russians. Two big drivers of the space program were getting the ICBM program going and spy satellites to see what the Russians were up to and locate targets for the ICBM's. The two major ELV's in US inventory are the Atlas and Delta (which has evolved a l-o-n-g way from the Thor IRBM).
As for health care - the US already spends at least an order of magnitude more on health care than space. In addition, some of the biggest advances in medicine have some from research that had nothing to do with medicine (e.g. the investigations into nuclear magnetic moment going on in the mid to late 40's - see the Blombergen, Pound and Purcell paper).
I wouldn't mind the Astro III - mid-engine show car from 1967 with the hopped up Corvair engine (a Weber per cylinder). Do remember lusting after the mid-engine Corvette that was shown in the early 1970 issues of R&T and Motor Trend.
Anyway, the whole point of having a standards adherent browser(s) is it shouldn't matter which browser you use. With luck, we may see the OASIS file format become widely accepted for similar reasons.
Then again, one of the solid fuels investigated in the 1960's was ammonium nitrate and nitromethane - turned out to be nicely energetic but the combustion rate was a wee bit higher than desired.
There is some neurological and psychological evidence that suggests the brain doesn't fully settle down until about the age of 30.
Having been a Cal grad from the time that BSD was getting started.
Buy a keyboard with the "Unix" layout (e.g. Sun type 6). The Caps Lock next to the "A" key is an IBM PC thing - just one of many stupid design decisions left over from the original 5150. Maybe it was someone who wanted to kill WordStar (which used the ctrl keys for moving around)...
My first computer keyboard (Televideo 925) had the control key next to the "A" key.
OTOH, modern keyboards sure beat the feel of a model 33 (used a few of those in school many moons ago).
Or better yet, use eV. THAT would make life a lot simpler for doing calculations.
As far as SarbOx and $500 for a GPS NTP server - the IT guys may very well say that is small potatoes compared to the cost of a network breach - and they would most likely be right (probability > 99.9%). Even if that probability is small, it still may be cheaper to spring for the GPS solution.
The gather of ne of my sister's friends was the first skipper of the Holt. It was later involved in the Mayaguez incident.
Remember reading about when Holt disappeared.
W-e-l-l, IT's ultimate boss is 4 to 5 levels up in management (I'm part of a very large organization, IT is largely in India). My boss is well aware of the problem and his boss is well aware of the problem but isn't in the position to do anything about it. :-(
One basic problem is that the IT folks are being graded on keeping their costs down - but not graded on whether they keep the overall costs down.
A Slashdot posting that is accurate, concise and on topic - what's this world coming to???
That's the whole reason for Eminent Domain, and easements. This first came up in dealing with roads and canals, and has been applied for railroads, telegraph, telephone, electricity, gas and other utilities. Part of the bargain is that the company that is granted the easement is expected to make use of the easement in a manner that meets the public interest, convenience of necessity. If the public in the form of government decides that it is in the public interest for cable companies to share their broadband connections, then the public has the right to require the cable companies to do so.
A historical note: With a very few exceptions, most passenger trains in the US were losing money after about 1950 or so. The only reason that many of these trains were being run was due to franchise clauses that required passenger service.
Not to mention private land. The pole line at my old house was over my property - the phone company and power company (no cable service there) had the right to trim any trees under the pole line - and I didn't get any payment for the use of the land. Not having to buy the right-of-way is a huge subsidy, and the government does have a right to have a say in how the facilities are used.
I knew one of the chief engineers for the hydraulic system on the shuttle (he also worked on the Atlas and Saturn programs) and this is what he said about electric actuators: "The problem with electric actuators is that in order to get the same force/mass ratio of hydraulics, the rotor has to be turning so fast (i.e. a high gear reduction ratio) that rotational inertia results in slower response than possible with hydraulics."
8086???
I could believe x86 machines (possibly including the 80286), but don't think 8086 boxes would have had enough memory. Not to mention the old VGA cards that would support only 4 bits of color in 640 by 480 mode - don't even talk about EGA or (barf!) CGA.
John Malashock of Twyla Tharp and then his own dance company started off studying physics and got into dancing as an application of physics.
Solid fuel is typically aluminum powder, polybutadene and ammonium perchlorate for the bigger motors. Nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin for some of the smaller motors. Sugar and potassium nitrate for model rockets.
Liquids fuels include gasolene (Goddard), ethanol (V2), kerosene/RP1 (Atlas, Thor, Saturn first stages), Hydrazine (Agena, Titan II, III, IV, Apollo service module and lunar excursion module), Hydrogen (Centaur, Saturn upper stages, Space Shuttle main engines, newest Delta). Oxidizers are LOX and N2O4 - note that N2O4 and Hydrazine are hypergolic (ignites on contact).
Liquid fuel rockets do not use perchlorate. The most common oxidizer is liquid oxygen (LOX), second most common oxidizer is N2O4. One of the selling points of the Delta "Heavy" booster is that the strap-ons are liquid fuel (LH2-LOX) and avoid the environmental problems with solid fuel.
From a 4-track I presume?? I actually did know someone with a 4-track in their car (1974) and have a friend with a few 8-track's in his collection.
It goes beyond that - in the Solaris 8 days, Sun had a program where you could get a source code license for a nominal fee + NDA. What they appear to be doing is taking that idea a couple of steps further.
A good question is what code won't be opened up - Solaris does contain a fair amount of third party code. One of the potentially more critical pieces is the Adobe PostScript code in xsun - the native PostScript code is more robust than the code used in ghostview (I've got a couple of files that will render under Solaris x86, but not Linux).
That's not the market Sun is aiming for. The threat facing Sun is the availability of Opteron boxes that can do the work of their low end SPARC boxes. By selling Opterons with Solaris Sun gains two ways:
Revenue from selling the Opteron systems
Holding on to, or preferably expanding Solaris market share
The latter is important as Sun knows that it is the availability of applications that drives hardware sales.
One strong selling point of Solaris is that the file system layout and libraries are standardized, something the Linux vendors are starting to comprehend (i.e. LSB) - though it should be pointed out that the *BSD's hae been way ahead of Linux in this regard.