Keep in mind that a space elevator the moon can not be a single stage due to the earth's rotation relative to the moon (whereas the moon always faces the earth with the same side). One end could be attached to the moon, but the other end would have to be left with a mass "hanging" in the earth's gravity to provide tension. From there, you would need some method to make up the difference in kinetic energy between cargo on the moon-anchored elevator and either orbiting harbors or an elevator anchored to the earth, which would whip around once every 24 hours.
It depends on quality/demand, too. I'll pay $15 for a copy of Casablanca, but if I think I want my own DVD of Hang 'Em High or Short Circuit, the first place I would look is the $5 bin at Walmart or Target. There's no way I'm paying paying $8 (plus the marketer's share) for a mediocre movie that I only sort of want if I can buy it in another medium with equivalent or better viewing flexibility for lower cost.
You're going to need a lot more than a hand crank-powered laptop to serve 1,000,000 page views over the time this article is sitting at the top of Slashdot.
Right now I have a funny image of Iago from Aladdin spinning on that bicycle with Jafar screaming "faster" at him while frantically trying to check his server logs.
True that. Motorola and Samsung also have developers website...not that you can find much in the way of useful resources on them. Some of the carriers are a little better. Nextel seems to be the best so far about releasing API's, but their phones are definitely more oriented towards business customers (plus the 3 day max battery life is a bit of a drag). Sprint has a nice looking developer's site, but doesn't release API's. If anything, they've tightened up since the merge with Nextel. Cingular's site is all but useless and only ranks ahead of Verizon based on the fact that Verizon uses Brew, which requires a ridiculously expensive license to certify apps to use on the devices.
Just a few things you learn when you get a crazy idea for doing something cool like playing with the GPS chips and internet access most of these phones have.
Sorry ladies, it turns out flushing it down the toilet actually is a worse solution than processing it into a chemically stable glass, encasing it in steel and reinforced concrete and burying it 1000 feet underground in a guarded mine shaft. No, neither Febreeze nor Lysol will take care of it and simply feeding it to your Eureka Bravo vacuum cleaner only deters kittens and lap dogs from stealing it. The in-sink disposal isn't designed to handle heavy metals, and if you try to sneak it into the weekly garbage collection your rates will go through the roof due to the extra weight, although your local "sanitation engineer" might appreciate the increased productivity an extra arm would offer. Don't just give it to your husband because he'll either make some cool glow-in-the-dark toy for the kids out of it or set it on the shelf in the garage and forget about it.
Having listened to your input, I'm forced to concede that it might be a good idea after all to let people who actually understand the difference between radioactive decay and germs take care of it. If your bridge club...err...women's institute is interested in further projects, I understand NASA is interested in going to the moon and could use some input on healthy snacks for the trip and roomy colors for the interior of their space capsule.
Then again, they said they want serious feedback like they might get from a real consumer. That's $30,000 over an assumed 5 year service life (hopefully production models last longer than that, but I think 5 years is the allowable depreciation time for the IRS). That's the cost of a nice sedan.
Along the same lines, I'd love to see a comparison of the overall efficiency of fuel cells versus batteries. What I mean is, when you consider generating electricity, transmitting it to a charger, charging it to a battery and retrieving it from the battery, how does that compare to generating electricity, using it to generate hydrogen, and extracting electricity from a fuel cell?
Essentially, that's the same thing as solar power, but without the need to build solar panels and with a production rate that scales at approximate p*e^x.
Thanks for putting it in more comprehensible terms, but that only helps us Americans. Do you think you can convert that to even more intuitive units like Rolex watches or pirated CD values?
As fast as Google is diversifying itself, I'm starting to occasionally wonder if they might be setting themselves up for a massive collapse, sort of like a one-company repeat of the original internet boom and bust. Can they really support all of these new endeavors they're investing money into (maps, earth, mail, picasso, blogger, and now potentially online marketing as well as the rumors of an AJAX word processor), or will problems like google-bombing, fake clicks, and spam weblogs continuously erode the margins on their revenues the bigger they get? To be honest, I don't see any real signs that the end is imminent, but how many other companies have built up this fast?
Beyond just considering the cost of building an array as big as he's talking about, you only touched lightly on scalability issues. While it possibly would take a 10 gigabit connection to serve that much data (how regularly it's accessed would come into play there), I would expect you'd come out ahead with a distributed system, with all requests going first through an index server, which forwards you to the node with the data you're looking for.
As important or more so than the connection, is going to be finding and serving the data. You've got to have a pretty good index of where things are or searching will be even worse than grandma trying to find a long lost word document using the Windows search feature. I don't know what your 1.7 TB array does for file management, but how well do you think it will scale to 15 times the data, much less a petabyte, and still provide reasonable response times on querries? I'm definitely no expert on this sort of thing, but my gut again tells me an index server is critical.
In the "what cave have you been living in for the last 25 years?" category, we now direct your attention to Mir and Freedom, two of the most famous space stations ever. Astronauts have shown a remarkable ability to walk while experiencing gravitational accelerations of up 9.8 m/s*s after spending over 6 months on board these station. Most astronauts credit this amazing feat to a recent technological development known as "exercise." NASA scientists are investigating whether this "exercise" can allow similar accomplishments in a 3.7 m/s*s gravity environment like that found on Mars.
A more insightful comment for you to make would've been "Holy duped story batman, didn't we see 3-4 articles on this last month?"
As the grandparent said, he wasn't trying to divide things cleanly along political lines. The term conservative does not apply strictly to how a person votes. It's kind of hard to define in this case, but I think you're basically following what his saying with your point on ideologies. While I think the issue as whole is slightly more complex than that, I don't disagree with his interpretation. I'll bet he's either read and enjoyed Atlas Shrugged, or would enjoy it if he did read it. I did.
The Seahawk dipping sonars and the sonobuoys are both much lower powered than the systems on submarines and surface ships. On the LA class subs, for example, the sonar dome is 15 feet in diameter and the active array generates a pulse with something like 75,000 watts of power. Tom Clancy, who tends to be pretty good at getting fascinating details, claims that water vapor bubbles actually form on the hull when they do a full power ping. Also, if I'm understanding the details correctly, the sonobuoys use a lower frequency sonar that the whales don't seem to mind, but doesn't work as well as the medium frequency sonars in shallow waters. Nations like North Korea, who have an entirely diesal-electric sub fleet and are thereby restricted in range, would likely tend to operate more defensively in coastal areas. Had we ever had to face the Russians directly, on the other hand, we likely would've been dealing with their 100+ nuclear powered attack subs in middle of the major oceans preying on merchant ships and potentially attacking our carrier groups.
Except with these, Neo won't be fighting Smiths, he'll have to face armies of T1000's, and the big rainy fight scene at the end will be even more spectacular since they like water!
I got to the 3rd page of the article, and it turned out the whole thing was a scam by an underpaid editor to trick me into registering for the LA Times.
Anyone care to reveal the end or is there a "slashdot@slashdot.org" or similar user registered with them?
Development Cycle...shameless Valve bashing
on
Sid Meier Responds
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· Score: 1
My whole approach to making games revolves around first creating a solid prototype and then playing and improving the game over the course of the 2-3 year development cycle...until we think it's ready for prime time. ~Sid
2-3 years after you have a prototype? You mean you don't get an idea for a game, tell all the fans of your products it will be out in 6 months, then push back the release date by another 6 months right before each major gaming convention? What kind of company is this? Where's the suspense? Don't tell me it's included in the game itself. I suppose there's no gravity gun in this Civ IV game that you're releasing either?
"Liquid Crystal" refers to the LCD display. As a programmer who probably sits in front of a monitor for 8+ hours a day, I'm sure you've heard of them. Watches don't have nearly as fancy of LCD as monitors, but the basic principle is the same. The cheap watch that I'm currently wearing while scratches fairly easily, but not deeply and it polishes really easily. It says it's made out of acrylic, which is softer and less durable than polycarbonate. The Nalgene bottles everyone is carrying are made out of polycarbonate. They scratch, but it's hard to do. When they do though, the scratches don't polish away easily.
I made it through and the banner and menu loaded, but not the article. Looks like a good chance for someone to troll about the limitations of MySQL or whatever DB Ars Technica uses or to "vivisect" their content management.
Personal, I would hope it could stand up to a little abuse. The things are designed to be carried running, stuffed in pockets, etc. For people like me, who don't always empty their pockets before spontaneously wrestling a peer, working in the shop, doing something stupid on my mountain bike, or climbing a tree, it has to be durable. My LED keychain lasted less than a year, and those things are supposed to be pretty though. With no moving parts, it should be theoretically possible to make an Ipod Nano nearly as durable as a digital watch, and those things are tough.
A couple quick comments: As far as I understand the current plans, there is no need to have the heavy launch vehicle man-rated. It is intended to lift cargo and rendezvous, if necessary, with CEV's, the space station, or whatever. Still, reliability is pretty important for it given the monetary value of the cargo it will be lifting. Also, the SRB is already used on a man-rated vehicle, which should reduce somewhat the work needed to get a new configuration man-rated. Finally, if I remember correctly, the standard complement planned for the ISS is 6 people, not 7-12.
Personally, I think the overall plan is a good one. Like always, I expect it to overrun it's budget, but it seems like the most easily feasible approach NASA's kicked around in the last decade and I hope not only that the politicians don't drop the ball on this one, but also that they keep carrying it beyond 2020 and directly apply the lessons learned to a series of Mars mission.
Who know, maybe that will be Cingular's next move in court. From my experience in telecommunications, bringing up 911 access can be a pretty powerful bargaining chip.
On the other hand, doesn't Freedom Wireless rely entirely on roaming contracts with carriers who own towers to provide their service? Wouldn't it be funny if they all dropped those contracts when renewal time comes up? Anyone who's ever watched a dog nipping at a cow's heels only to take foot to the face with 1000 pounds of muscle behind it would have an idea what that scenario would look like.
In the future, when making jokes that refer to old movie plots, please avoid using sequals that nobody cared to watch. The movie you are looking for is The Absent Minded Professor.
As a bit of fun though, in the trivia section down at the bottom of the IMDB entry is the "recipe" for this amazing substance. I guess these resilin scientists are getting a little extravagent with their protein synthesis and genetically modified bacteria.
I guess we should all become corporations. That way we could just disincorporate and reincorporate under a different name.
Beats going to jail.
For what it's worth, Ken Lay is going to prison for a minimum of 10 years. The sentence could be up to 175 years if all the charges hold against him.
Unfortunately, it sounds like these weasels at Samsung are based in Korea, so we can't directly touch them. The CNN article said they had no word on the identity of those being charged with perpetrating the price fixing or whether they still worked at Samsung. That second part bothers me. I had thought Samsung was a decent company, but if I were in a position to do anything about it, I'd be telling my customers and investors we kicked the sleezes out the door in the underwear and pawned off their business suits to help recover some small portion of the fiscal damage they caused. Of course, maybe everyone in such a position was in on it...
This latest Google mind grab catches my attention more than some of the previously noted one. I never worried about people leaving Microsoft or SCO or whoever else they've been leaving to head to Google. Those companies have huge recruiting power, regardless of their reputation. I don't know how vital any one person is to the GAIM team, but could this actually slow things down significantly for them? Or will the example of contributing to a well-established OSS project like this and subsequently getting hired by Google be a major motivation to young developers?
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that a space elevator the moon can not be a single stage due to the earth's rotation relative to the moon (whereas the moon always faces the earth with the same side). One end could be attached to the moon, but the other end would have to be left with a mass "hanging" in the earth's gravity to provide tension. From there, you would need some method to make up the difference in kinetic energy between cargo on the moon-anchored elevator and either orbiting harbors or an elevator anchored to the earth, which would whip around once every 24 hours.
It depends on quality/demand, too. I'll pay $15 for a copy of Casablanca, but if I think I want my own DVD of Hang 'Em High or Short Circuit, the first place I would look is the $5 bin at Walmart or Target. There's no way I'm paying paying $8 (plus the marketer's share) for a mediocre movie that I only sort of want if I can buy it in another medium with equivalent or better viewing flexibility for lower cost.
You're going to need a lot more than a hand crank-powered laptop to serve 1,000,000 page views over the time this article is sitting at the top of Slashdot.
Right now I have a funny image of Iago from Aladdin spinning on that bicycle with Jafar screaming "faster" at him while frantically trying to check his server logs.
True that. Motorola and Samsung also have developers website...not that you can find much in the way of useful resources on them. Some of the carriers are a little better. Nextel seems to be the best so far about releasing API's, but their phones are definitely more oriented towards business customers (plus the 3 day max battery life is a bit of a drag). Sprint has a nice looking developer's site, but doesn't release API's. If anything, they've tightened up since the merge with Nextel. Cingular's site is all but useless and only ranks ahead of Verizon based on the fact that Verizon uses Brew, which requires a ridiculously expensive license to certify apps to use on the devices.
Just a few things you learn when you get a crazy idea for doing something cool like playing with the GPS chips and internet access most of these phones have.
Sorry ladies, it turns out flushing it down the toilet actually is a worse solution than processing it into a chemically stable glass, encasing it in steel and reinforced concrete and burying it 1000 feet underground in a guarded mine shaft. No, neither Febreeze nor Lysol will take care of it and simply feeding it to your Eureka Bravo vacuum cleaner only deters kittens and lap dogs from stealing it. The in-sink disposal isn't designed to handle heavy metals, and if you try to sneak it into the weekly garbage collection your rates will go through the roof due to the extra weight, although your local "sanitation engineer" might appreciate the increased productivity an extra arm would offer. Don't just give it to your husband because he'll either make some cool glow-in-the-dark toy for the kids out of it or set it on the shelf in the garage and forget about it.
Having listened to your input, I'm forced to concede that it might be a good idea after all to let people who actually understand the difference between radioactive decay and germs take care of it. If your bridge club...err...women's institute is interested in further projects, I understand NASA is interested in going to the moon and could use some input on healthy snacks for the trip and roomy colors for the interior of their space capsule.
...Impressed
"There's a sucker born every minute."
Then again, they said they want serious feedback like they might get from a real consumer. That's $30,000 over an assumed 5 year service life (hopefully production models last longer than that, but I think 5 years is the allowable depreciation time for the IRS). That's the cost of a nice sedan.
Along the same lines, I'd love to see a comparison of the overall efficiency of fuel cells versus batteries. What I mean is, when you consider generating electricity, transmitting it to a charger, charging it to a battery and retrieving it from the battery, how does that compare to generating electricity, using it to generate hydrogen, and extracting electricity from a fuel cell?
Essentially, that's the same thing as solar power, but without the need to build solar panels and with a production rate that scales at approximate p*e^x.
Thanks for putting it in more comprehensible terms, but that only helps us Americans. Do you think you can convert that to even more intuitive units like Rolex watches or pirated CD values?
As fast as Google is diversifying itself, I'm starting to occasionally wonder if they might be setting themselves up for a massive collapse, sort of like a one-company repeat of the original internet boom and bust. Can they really support all of these new endeavors they're investing money into (maps, earth, mail, picasso, blogger, and now potentially online marketing as well as the rumors of an AJAX word processor), or will problems like google-bombing, fake clicks, and spam weblogs continuously erode the margins on their revenues the bigger they get? To be honest, I don't see any real signs that the end is imminent, but how many other companies have built up this fast?
Beyond just considering the cost of building an array as big as he's talking about, you only touched lightly on scalability issues. While it possibly would take a 10 gigabit connection to serve that much data (how regularly it's accessed would come into play there), I would expect you'd come out ahead with a distributed system, with all requests going first through an index server, which forwards you to the node with the data you're looking for.
As important or more so than the connection, is going to be finding and serving the data. You've got to have a pretty good index of where things are or searching will be even worse than grandma trying to find a long lost word document using the Windows search feature. I don't know what your 1.7 TB array does for file management, but how well do you think it will scale to 15 times the data, much less a petabyte, and still provide reasonable response times on querries? I'm definitely no expert on this sort of thing, but my gut again tells me an index server is critical.
In the "what cave have you been living in for the last 25 years?" category, we now direct your attention to Mir and Freedom, two of the most famous space stations ever. Astronauts have shown a remarkable ability to walk while experiencing gravitational accelerations of up 9.8 m/s*s after spending over 6 months on board these station. Most astronauts credit this amazing feat to a recent technological development known as "exercise." NASA scientists are investigating whether this "exercise" can allow similar accomplishments in a 3.7 m/s*s gravity environment like that found on Mars.
A more insightful comment for you to make would've been "Holy duped story batman, didn't we see 3-4 articles on this last month?"
As the grandparent said, he wasn't trying to divide things cleanly along political lines. The term conservative does not apply strictly to how a person votes. It's kind of hard to define in this case, but I think you're basically following what his saying with your point on ideologies. While I think the issue as whole is slightly more complex than that, I don't disagree with his interpretation. I'll bet he's either read and enjoyed Atlas Shrugged, or would enjoy it if he did read it. I did.
The Seahawk dipping sonars and the sonobuoys are both much lower powered than the systems on submarines and surface ships. On the LA class subs, for example, the sonar dome is 15 feet in diameter and the active array generates a pulse with something like 75,000 watts of power. Tom Clancy, who tends to be pretty good at getting fascinating details, claims that water vapor bubbles actually form on the hull when they do a full power ping. Also, if I'm understanding the details correctly, the sonobuoys use a lower frequency sonar that the whales don't seem to mind, but doesn't work as well as the medium frequency sonars in shallow waters. Nations like North Korea, who have an entirely diesal-electric sub fleet and are thereby restricted in range, would likely tend to operate more defensively in coastal areas. Had we ever had to face the Russians directly, on the other hand, we likely would've been dealing with their 100+ nuclear powered attack subs in middle of the major oceans preying on merchant ships and potentially attacking our carrier groups.
Except with these, Neo won't be fighting Smiths, he'll have to face armies of T1000's, and the big rainy fight scene at the end will be even more spectacular since they like water!
I got to the 3rd page of the article, and it turned out the whole thing was a scam by an underpaid editor to trick me into registering for the LA Times.
Anyone care to reveal the end or is there a "slashdot@slashdot.org" or similar user registered with them?
"Liquid Crystal" refers to the LCD display. As a programmer who probably sits in front of a monitor for 8+ hours a day, I'm sure you've heard of them. Watches don't have nearly as fancy of LCD as monitors, but the basic principle is the same. The cheap watch that I'm currently wearing while scratches fairly easily, but not deeply and it polishes really easily. It says it's made out of acrylic, which is softer and less durable than polycarbonate. The Nalgene bottles everyone is carrying are made out of polycarbonate. They scratch, but it's hard to do. When they do though, the scratches don't polish away easily.
I made it through and the banner and menu loaded, but not the article. Looks like a good chance for someone to troll about the limitations of MySQL or whatever DB Ars Technica uses or to "vivisect" their content management.
Personal, I would hope it could stand up to a little abuse. The things are designed to be carried running, stuffed in pockets, etc. For people like me, who don't always empty their pockets before spontaneously wrestling a peer, working in the shop, doing something stupid on my mountain bike, or climbing a tree, it has to be durable. My LED keychain lasted less than a year, and those things are supposed to be pretty though. With no moving parts, it should be theoretically possible to make an Ipod Nano nearly as durable as a digital watch, and those things are tough.
A couple quick comments: As far as I understand the current plans, there is no need to have the heavy launch vehicle man-rated. It is intended to lift cargo and rendezvous, if necessary, with CEV's, the space station, or whatever. Still, reliability is pretty important for it given the monetary value of the cargo it will be lifting. Also, the SRB is already used on a man-rated vehicle, which should reduce somewhat the work needed to get a new configuration man-rated. Finally, if I remember correctly, the standard complement planned for the ISS is 6 people, not 7-12.
Personally, I think the overall plan is a good one. Like always, I expect it to overrun it's budget, but it seems like the most easily feasible approach NASA's kicked around in the last decade and I hope not only that the politicians don't drop the ball on this one, but also that they keep carrying it beyond 2020 and directly apply the lessons learned to a series of Mars mission.
Who know, maybe that will be Cingular's next move in court. From my experience in telecommunications, bringing up 911 access can be a pretty powerful bargaining chip.
On the other hand, doesn't Freedom Wireless rely entirely on roaming contracts with carriers who own towers to provide their service? Wouldn't it be funny if they all dropped those contracts when renewal time comes up? Anyone who's ever watched a dog nipping at a cow's heels only to take foot to the face with 1000 pounds of muscle behind it would have an idea what that scenario would look like.
In the future, when making jokes that refer to old movie plots, please avoid using sequals that nobody cared to watch. The movie you are looking for is The Absent Minded Professor.
As a bit of fun though, in the trivia section down at the bottom of the IMDB entry is the "recipe" for this amazing substance. I guess these resilin scientists are getting a little extravagent with their protein synthesis and genetically modified bacteria.
Unfortunately, it sounds like these weasels at Samsung are based in Korea, so we can't directly touch them. The CNN article said they had no word on the identity of those being charged with perpetrating the price fixing or whether they still worked at Samsung. That second part bothers me. I had thought Samsung was a decent company, but if I were in a position to do anything about it, I'd be telling my customers and investors we kicked the sleezes out the door in the underwear and pawned off their business suits to help recover some small portion of the fiscal damage they caused. Of course, maybe everyone in such a position was in on it...
This latest Google mind grab catches my attention more than some of the previously noted one. I never worried about people leaving Microsoft or SCO or whoever else they've been leaving to head to Google. Those companies have huge recruiting power, regardless of their reputation. I don't know how vital any one person is to the GAIM team, but could this actually slow things down significantly for them? Or will the example of contributing to a well-established OSS project like this and subsequently getting hired by Google be a major motivation to young developers?