500 A.U. is more than 10 times the orbital radius of Pluto.
Brings to mind the time when I was about 12 or so and I got my hands on a 40 power telescope. With Alpha Centauri in the field changing to the higher magnification resolved the binary pair for the first time, and they are only 80 AU apart, IIRC. Doing that gives a fantastic feeling of depth. You can feel how far away it is.
The best (personal) example I have is those laser-projected keyboards for Palm-Pilots. It looks like a dock for the Palm, and projects a full keyboard onto the surface in front of it, which you then type on as normal. I hate the thing. I tried one for 2 weeks and my typing skills never got better than they were in 9th grade (not pretty). Plus to add to it, striking your finger tips on a desktop several hundred times a minute hurts. It's hard to appreciate the fact that the depression of a key on your keyboard actually acts as a cushion/shock absorber until you lose that.
I expected that people would come up with a mouse pad type of thing for that. Of course you can get soft roll-up keyboards now, so the projection thing just saves you a cable.
Back in the 1970s (yeah, I know) I was working for the automotive group of $BIG_SEMICONDUCTOR_COMPANY and some genius had the idea of replacing the speedometer dial with a digital readouty is.
I remember around the same time this was promoted in the media as a road safety thing because apparently people who speed just want to see what the needle looks like all the way over on the right side of the gauge.
I was cycling home a couple of days ago, through the city centre. I stopped behind a car in heavy traffic. Lights went green, traffic started to move but the car stayed exactly where it was. I gave it 10 seconds or so then started to go past on the right (we drive on the left here) but he took off suddenly which put me in a dangerous position.
The lights had gone red so he had to stop. I stopped beside him in the lane to the left and sure enough he has a stylus out and is working away on a PDA of some kind. It was night but I could see the illuminated screen.
Its getting there, anyway. I agree totally about tactile feedback. At night, in my car, I want to know the wiper settings by feel. Is too dangerous to look.
it is of interest to the military and initiatives such as the Army's Future Combat Systems which uses a variety of advanced systems to achieve battleground superiority. A wireless robot such as this could play a part in the communications of those systems, experts say.
Hard to imagine the military going for a cheap hack like Wifi when they have the resources for a proper satellite comms system. And this roving relay thing just looks like a cheap toy to me. Maybe OK for shopping centres but not the sort of thing you want to waste your time digging out of sand dunes in Iraq.
Take out the wifi bit and you are left with an autonomous rover/UAV which is interesting but not really ciscos job. Looks like a bad fit to me.
Perhaps by introducing the genes into cells in the affected area using a retrovirus?
If you could do that then you could do lots of other useful things. How about engineering neurons to emit photons in the presence of an electric field and using the resulting stream of photons to model thought processes?
Considering certain patterns of light, as found in some video games, for example, have the ability to bring about seizures and people the suffer from Epilepsy, it makes sanse that certain patterns of light would also be able to reverse that effect.
No, thats what happens when pulses of light generate signals in the brain via the optic nerve which interfere with existing signals in the brain. Incidently, back when people used to build strobe lights for discos, etc there used to be warnings about pulsing lights at certain frequencies.
Now we seem to regard bicycle tail lights which pulse at 12Hz as a good thing. I am not sure that I agree.
I would buy these in an instant! I commute on a motorcycle and often times I leave in the morning. Unless it's cloudy i have to put on my sunglasses before the sun is even up. Then I ride north with darkened vision. But I have no choice because later I have to ride into the sun as it's rising. Impossible to safely do without the shades.
I am a bicycle commuter and I have similar issues. I wish I had a good suggestion to make but I did have one thought.
A digital still camera, with a monitor on the back might make a good, compact image processing platform. It aready is, I suppose. Maybe there is a role for a monitor which you can glance at when you are riding/driving directly into the sun and you have absolutely no idea of what is ahead of you.
A couple of years ago I was driving along an urban road in the foothills of mount dandenong here in Victoria. It was 10 minutes before sundown or so and as I came to a small hill I noticed that everybody on the road had stopped as if there was some kind of disaster. The sun was shining directly down the hill and after I stopped I couldn't see the road ahead at all. It was like trying to spot the moon when it is about to eclipse the sun. Dangerous and practically impossible.
I think the hill made it worse because the sun wasn't attenuated by the thick atmosphere close to the horizon.
There was a low-tech solution for allowing SCUBA divers to drink fresh water/juice while diving to avoid dehydration that ba/sically involved a sealed bag and a straw (though those seem to be frowned upon by serious divers).
Apollo suits for the long duration EVAs had a drink bag and straw which worked most of the time. All the suits had a one way valve in the helmet which you could use to squirt water into the mouth from a water gun. Air would leak out while the gun was in the valve, but you would be less dehydrated.
The apollo suits used two tanks of gaseous oxygen. The main tank at just over 1000 psi and the OPS backup tank at 6000 psi. The main tank was filled from a hose inside the LM. The OPS tank was filled once only on the ground.
EVA time was limited first by the quantity of water for the sublimators and second by oxygen quantity. The battery life was also a limiting factor, but I think it came third by a long margin.
Its not hard to carry more water for cooling. The reason it was in short supply on the moon was that the original designs for the PLSS didn't allow enough space.
But those high pressure oxygen tanks are a real pain. The structure contributes to the overall mass. The volume pushes the mass up because it takes space. Temperature is a problem anyway because it increases gas pressure and reduces density.
So if we are designing new suits I think we should find ways of stocking them with LOX. Probably in something like a vacuum flask. Maybe that is the next big step.
I can already hear them say "... but the website asked me for it... was that wrong?" *sigh*
Several swimming pools near my home will give out locker keys but require your car keys as security. Whenever I go along I have this huge argument about it. I will happily give them a fifty dollar note as security. The car is worth a lot more than that to me and a replacement locker key is perhaps 10 dollars. They should be happy with the 50.
But everbody else hands over their keys. Pool staff could be out on the road kidnapping children for sex and running over little old ladies for all anybody knows. My car keys stay in my pocket. I am such a paranoid idiot.
There is no way of telling if the password used is provided to a third party without consent or if the site is hacked. Be careful with your personal data, and keep your login to yourself as much as possible.
Anybody who gets an account on service X will be asked for a password and a contact email address. Chances are that the password will get you right into their email account, because people don't like having 100s of low security passwords.
Of course, I trust slashdot not to take my password and try to get into all my other accounts. Am I justified?
open class sailplanes like nimbus 4 are a different story. they look quite funny at takeoff. the wings are hanging through and wobbling until the airflow is enough to produce lift, then they bend and the planes takes off. quite a nice view.
I once had a chance to fly in one of two aircraft on a dual tow in Benalla, Australia. We did it just after dawn, using the flight which does a temperature trace. The glider on short tow pulled first and I had a fantastic view of it climbing and turning right.
If you get a chance, I can recommend doing that type of flight. They look okay on the ground, but much better in clear air. And you don't normally get close enough to see it really well.
Just wait until the first air disaster, with numbers like "six hundred dead...".
You are getting flamed for it but I think you have a point. Each aircraft has two people flying it regardless of whether it is carrying 100 or 600 people. Pilots do occasionally fuck up and when there are so many lives at stake it makes sense to dedicate more people to the job of flying the plane.
Should the flight deck be required to have three or four positions? ATC controllers often operate with a planner and a controller in parallel. Maybe there is a role for strategic and tactical control on the flight deck of the A380.
Well nothing really. It was a good, early attempt. Its mistake was in surviving too long.
From the sound of things, it's like the guy committed a crime or something
Yeah I have been one of the worst offenders in this article. Sorry about that. He was obviously an accomplished guy and I am sorry he is gone.
...if it was so 'destructive' or whatever then how come it got so popular?
Hard to explain. It attracted a certain, lets say, blue collar group of programmers. People who like all their identifiers to be called MODSTR and ARGSET. Lisp was the gay, lower case language. FORTRAN was for REAL MEN who type REAL CHARACTERS. These were scientists who wanted to knock out quick, fast and dirty code. It was the perl of its day, and like perl, got used for things it should have not been used for.
Or did it? Why did so many choose to use it?
Something about the compilers which were built for it got it entrenched in the performance computing field. To this day people will claim that fortran code runs faster than anything else for pure numerical applications. I would be surprised if it was still true, though.
FORTRAN was pretty damned good for the first high-level language. If you look at some of the alternatives that evolved shortly after FORTRAN, such as BCPL, they were much more limited.
Well, Lisp came out the next year, and has about the most versatile architecture of any language invented since.
The history of Fortran reads like the history of Ada, Basic and Perl. Continually being retrofitted with good ideas from other languages, but not very well and late in the game.
Slashdot Mirror
Brings to mind the time when I was about 12 or so and I got my hands on a 40 power telescope. With Alpha Centauri in the field changing to the higher magnification resolved the binary pair for the first time, and they are only 80 AU apart, IIRC. Doing that gives a fantastic feeling of depth. You can feel how far away it is.
I expected that people would come up with a mouse pad type of thing for that. Of course you can get soft roll-up keyboards now, so the projection thing just saves you a cable.
I remember around the same time this was promoted in the media as a road safety thing because apparently people who speed just want to see what the needle looks like all the way over on the right side of the gauge.
I was cycling home a couple of days ago, through the city centre. I stopped behind a car in heavy traffic. Lights went green, traffic started to move but the car stayed exactly where it was. I gave it 10 seconds or so then started to go past on the right (we drive on the left here) but he took off suddenly which put me in a dangerous position.
The lights had gone red so he had to stop. I stopped beside him in the lane to the left and sure enough he has a stylus out and is working away on a PDA of some kind. It was night but I could see the illuminated screen.
Something like this?
Its getting there, anyway. I agree totally about tactile feedback. At night, in my car, I want to know the wiper settings by feel. Is too dangerous to look.
I am sure it already does
Hard to imagine the military going for a cheap hack like Wifi when they have the resources for a proper satellite comms system. And this roving relay thing just looks like a cheap toy to me. Maybe OK for shopping centres but not the sort of thing you want to waste your time digging out of sand dunes in Iraq.
Take out the wifi bit and you are left with an autonomous rover/UAV which is interesting but not really ciscos job. Looks like a bad fit to me.
If you could do that then you could do lots of other useful things. How about engineering neurons to emit photons in the presence of an electric field and using the resulting stream of photons to model thought processes?
No, thats what happens when pulses of light generate signals in the brain via the optic nerve which interfere with existing signals in the brain. Incidently, back when people used to build strobe lights for discos, etc there used to be warnings about pulsing lights at certain frequencies.
Now we seem to regard bicycle tail lights which pulse at 12Hz as a good thing. I am not sure that I agree.
I am a bicycle commuter and I have similar issues. I wish I had a good suggestion to make but I did have one thought.
A digital still camera, with a monitor on the back might make a good, compact image processing platform. It aready is, I suppose. Maybe there is a role for a monitor which you can glance at when you are riding/driving directly into the sun and you have absolutely no idea of what is ahead of you.
A couple of years ago I was driving along an urban road in the foothills of mount dandenong here in Victoria. It was 10 minutes before sundown or so and as I came to a small hill I noticed that everybody on the road had stopped as if there was some kind of disaster. The sun was shining directly down the hill and after I stopped I couldn't see the road ahead at all. It was like trying to spot the moon when it is about to eclipse the sun. Dangerous and practically impossible.
I think the hill made it worse because the sun wasn't attenuated by the thick atmosphere close to the horizon.
You are right. Its not bizarre at all.
I hate to think
Apollo suits for the long duration EVAs had a drink bag and straw which worked most of the time. All the suits had a one way valve in the helmet which you could use to squirt water into the mouth from a water gun. Air would leak out while the gun was in the valve, but you would be less dehydrated.
The apollo suits used two tanks of gaseous oxygen. The main tank at just over 1000 psi and the OPS backup tank at 6000 psi. The main tank was filled from a hose inside the LM. The OPS tank was filled once only on the ground.
EVA time was limited first by the quantity of water for the sublimators and second by oxygen quantity. The battery life was also a limiting factor, but I think it came third by a long margin.
Its not hard to carry more water for cooling. The reason it was in short supply on the moon was that the original designs for the PLSS didn't allow enough space.
But those high pressure oxygen tanks are a real pain. The structure contributes to the overall mass. The volume pushes the mass up because it takes space. Temperature is a problem anyway because it increases gas pressure and reduces density.
So if we are designing new suits I think we should find ways of stocking them with LOX. Probably in something like a vacuum flask. Maybe that is the next big step.
Several swimming pools near my home will give out locker keys but require your car keys as security. Whenever I go along I have this huge argument about it. I will happily give them a fifty dollar note as security. The car is worth a lot more than that to me and a replacement locker key is perhaps 10 dollars. They should be happy with the 50.
But everbody else hands over their keys. Pool staff could be out on the road kidnapping children for sex and running over little old ladies for all anybody knows. My car keys stay in my pocket. I am such a paranoid idiot.
Anybody who gets an account on service X will be asked for a password and a contact email address. Chances are that the password will get you right into their email account, because people don't like having 100s of low security passwords.
Of course, I trust slashdot not to take my password and try to get into all my other accounts. Am I justified?
I think the USA will execute an adult for an offence they comitted as a child.
Well quite a lot of people also subscribe to slashdot. Why? Ask them.
I once had a chance to fly in one of two aircraft on a dual tow in Benalla, Australia. We did it just after dawn, using the flight which does a temperature trace. The glider on short tow pulled first and I had a fantastic view of it climbing and turning right.
If you get a chance, I can recommend doing that type of flight. They look okay on the ground, but much better in clear air. And you don't normally get close enough to see it really well.
You are getting flamed for it but I think you have a point. Each aircraft has two people flying it regardless of whether it is carrying 100 or 600 people. Pilots do occasionally fuck up and when there are so many lives at stake it makes sense to dedicate more people to the job of flying the plane.
Should the flight deck be required to have three or four positions? ATC controllers often operate with a planner and a controller in parallel. Maybe there is a role for strategic and tactical control on the flight deck of the A380.
This is a very old Troll. It gets all the feeding it needs.
Well nothing really. It was a good, early attempt. Its mistake was in surviving too long.
Yeah I have been one of the worst offenders in this article. Sorry about that. He was obviously an accomplished guy and I am sorry he is gone.
Hard to explain. It attracted a certain, lets say, blue collar group of programmers. People who like all their identifiers to be called MODSTR and ARGSET. Lisp was the gay, lower case language. FORTRAN was for REAL MEN who type REAL CHARACTERS. These were scientists who wanted to knock out quick, fast and dirty code. It was the perl of its day, and like perl, got used for things it should have not been used for.
Something about the compilers which were built for it got it entrenched in the performance computing field. To this day people will claim that fortran code runs faster than anything else for pure numerical applications. I would be surprised if it was still true, though.
Well, Lisp came out the next year, and has about the most versatile architecture of any language invented since.
The history of Fortran reads like the history of Ada, Basic and Perl. Continually being retrofitted with good ideas from other languages, but not very well and late in the game.
Many times I have edited lex and yacc code, but never have I understood what the hell I was doing.