I know the theory of nano tube material but 7.5 per klick seems too light even for that but lets go with it for S&G's.
35,787km * 7.5kg = 268,402.5kg worth of ribbon.
Missing ingredient: you're not taking the whole ribbon up in that launch, you're taking up a single strand.
Once your orbit gets to high it begins having to spend too much time in the sun and it develops heat rejection problems.
Good point. I suspect that since the ribbon is an excellent conductor and at least as good a radiator as it is an acceptor, the technique will be to operate it more-or-less side-on to the sunlight.
Hell they can't even make a strong enough varient in very controled lab conditions yet
Also true, but the improvements now remaining to be made are incremental rather than revolutionary. In short, we can't do it yet, but we know that there are ways to do it. And if we sit on our collective backsides until absolutely everything we need in in place before starting to set up, that might add another decade of waiting before we can retire most of our rockets.
Turning the ribbon into a pipe is one thing, turning it into a whacking great optical fibre is much more difficult. For one thing, your optical fibre is very slim and doesn't need to do tens of thousands of km in one run. For another, it's not carrying megawatts.
That doesn't stop the idea from being terribly attractive, though. (-:
I for one would think one would use the elevator for more than deep space exploration, e.g. setting satellites onto a geostationary orbit.
No problem. It takes weeks to crawl up there, I shouldn't think braking would be much of an issue.
tensile cable rules OK
A lot of engineering is built around the principle `you can't push on a rope'. In this case, very little tension is neded, and that's easily provided by just extending the cable, with a very small (few hundred tonnes, OTToMH) counterweight at the end of it.
To build something of this magnitude you would need cash in the trillions
No, less than a twentieth of a trillion. Read their FAQ before posting here.
Also, imagine the very bottom section bombed via terrorism. I'm sure it would be guarded well, but in reality someone with enough will and resources (Mr. Bin Laden, anyone?) would find a way. And in that case, would the whole thing just collapse unto itself?
No, not very much will happen. If they blew off ten km of elevator, the remaining 99.99% of it would still be orbiting stably. Read their FAQ before posting here.
Just imagine a plane getting off course and colliding into it.
Took a while to happen to the WTC, and this time they'd be ready for it, and anyone with half a hemisphere left in their heads would put a whacking great no-fly zone around it, and it's being built in a remote (from 'planes) location, and could mount its own antiaircraft defenses anyway, and... RTFFAQP, dammit!
These are just a handful of the thousands of questions which plague this kind of project.
Many of which have been answered by people with a great deal of technical skill. RTFFAQP.
Not much of a counterweight is needed (certainly no asteroid), and who would brake? Why waste precious momentum? Just time your ascent so you slingshot off the end of the cable aimed the right way (a `tramline' orbit), and you're in business.
...and yes, we will work in your browser and be navigable by blind users and probably even make validator.w3.org happy. These are all definite design goals for the new website. Small technical details are important to these people.
If you arranged the final shape as a constant-diameter tube surrounded by a variable-thickness wall, that would be quite a bright idea.
The only fly in the ointment I can think of WRT that configuration against the current plans is that they plan to power the climbers with a laser from the ground. To do that down the guts of a tube would require an absolutely straight tube, and she ain't gunna happen. But there are other ways of powering a climber.
Think of it as a static strap for an entire planet. They've designed it with electric potentials in mind, too.
HighLiftSystems/LiftPort have already thought of a heck of a lot of stuff, the odds of something truly unique arising here is basically zero. However, if it does, they'll know because they're reading this.
Having your site flattened by SlashDot is something you tend to notice.
But don't underestimate the huge scale of the civil engineering project needed to build this, dwarfing the Panama canal and the chunnel. You'd need that next-gen shuttle thing just to haul into orbit the huge amount of stuff. That's geostationary orbit remember, a whole lot higher than the shuttle can go - everything out there boosted itself out with a sizeable motor of its own. Lifting hundreds or thousands of tons of construction material, workers, habitats, air, water, food, etc., is itself a space programme unparalleled in history.
That's why they're building this space elevator thingy, see. They send the first strand up in one or two shuttles. Part of the shuttle payload is enough extra fuel to get to GEO. They unroll the strand. They send lightweight climbers up with the next strand. Now they have two strands, the climbers can carry twice as much, and iterate until you have a satisfactory number of strands emplaced.
No habitats, and the ribbon weighs startlingly little per km (something like 7.5kg, OTToMH).
...he want to use thin Linux desktops to run M$ software.
In which case he wants rdesktop. You can run it on thin boxes in about 16MB OK, more if you want to cache fonts and stuff, down to about 8 if you take the time to optimise the living daylights out of everything.
If the place is so pro Microsoft, (s)he should fetch a copy of the GNUwin2 ISO and install stuff from it everywhere he's allowed to. And tell the nice workers about it. When the next unheralded MS virus invasion happens, they'll still have tools they can use. When they want to do something like run text from frame to frame, they won't need to buy Publisher, just use OOo. When they want a graphics program, GIMP will do a lot of stuff without a $1500 outlay. And so on. After a while, they'll be sufficiently reliant on random FOSS tools for day-to-day work that to deny its integrity would be self-evidently foolish.
Mind you, Windows does install stuff without even asking. I guess - for a while - that's easier than typing a one-liner or clicking on items in a long list. (-:
(1) that it's open source and (2) that it's more secure than Windows
Actually (and unfortunately) the answer that most often wins decision-makers' hearts is (0) it's cheaper than Windows. I say `unfortunately' because raw cost overlooks many other benefits of Linux, and looking at the problem in such simple terms allows Microsoft to easily confuse and mislead the same decision-makers.
IRL, (3) it's more reliable than Windows and (4) it's more manageable than Windows (both of which, in the end, relate to costs) are also good business answers, but the best answers still; haven't been touched.
How about: (5) It frees you from control of a corporation which will one day compete with and destroy you?
How about: (6) You can do literally anything legal with it? Your average PHB literally will never get this unless perhaps years down the track after it's been well demonstrated and the savings costed out. But see below.
There's a host of other reasonably well-defined advantages like (7) it's more portable, possibly freeing you from a hardware-supplier tyranny as well; (8) it's more efficient, allowing use of cheaper hardware, or a slower replacement cycle, or greater capacity from the same hardware; (9) it's more modular and boundaries are better defined, meaning that things like thin clients work better, and changing the proxy settings on your web browser don't automatically break a Python script using OS calls to export data to a webserver (/ME waves to ShaunP).
Now, an illustration.
A bloke called out for help from the Linux community in Australia because his boss had, out of the blue, come to him and asked him to undo the extensive integration of FOSS components into their network, `because we have always been a Microsoft shop' and stating that he'd only acceded to the changes because said bloke has asked for them.
Now the ludicrous thing about this when one started to look into it was that the FOSS changes were already saving this company immense amounts of money and downtime, and the FOSS invasion had only just begun.
FOSS had already demonstrated its worth. One factor which is helping to stave off this disaster is costing out the replacement software (e.g., he was spitting out PDFs on demand from one of his servers, to replace this functionality alone would cost a copy of Distiller for practically every workstation in the company), but a lot of what he was doing with one-liner scripts would have taken some very expensive packages and a lot of work to replicate using Windows technology; e.g. a certain amount of CMS happened to some of those PDF files when they were printed. One of their main servers had been dying almost daily, but since the switch to (untuned) FOSS had never fallen over, was responding faster, coping with higher loads, and doing more complicated things. All of this and more from a very recent convert to FOSS. He had reliably automated so many things, and had the IT department doing so much more for so little effort, that replacing him and his FOSS with Windows would involve two or three people and sharply reduced service.
But the thing which really upset our bloke was that going back to Windows would mean occasionally having to leave social events or wake up at stupid o'clock in the morning to go and fix a downed server. He had become used to actually sleeping soundly again at night. (-:
This is a cut-down version of the summary, but see if you can spot how many of the GNU/Linux (happy birthday, Richard) advantages are involved even so.
What are you on about? Right-clicking on practically anything in KDE gives me a translucent, drop-shadowed menu of context actions. Drag and drop works fine, I printed a file with it this morning.
As to the rest of your comments, they also puzzle me. I have a dozen tiny icons in my taskbar for my most-used functions, anything which doesn't fit in there quickly and automatically makes it way into the most-used-apps section of the K menu, and there's a few icons on my desktop (things like bzflag) for me to toy with for a few minutes before I finish up for the day. My icons are nicely lined up, and labelled with my choice of font. None of my buttons have labels because I don't need them but the option to add labels to everything is about 3 or 4 clicks away. I've left tooltip-on-hover enabled for when others use my desktop, but I very seldom use it myself. Both of my favourite browsers support tabbing, which combined with multiple instances makes all of my open web pages both readable and easy to manage.
If you want simple, this desktop will do simple. But there's ample widgetry within easy reach for when I want it, and if you want complex, this desktop will blow your mind.
Nothing quite matches the power of a direct, pithy answer to whip the carpet out from under a troll's feet... but WineX is only part of the answer. Win4Lin is also only part of the answer. Whole-of-machine emulators like Bochs and VMWare are not the answer. WINE seems to be close to the right the answer, and WineX is an intgeresting side-branch of it.
The real right answer, however, is World Domination for Linux - even if you're a BSD fan.
Why?
Because once your favourite app is ported to Linux, it's ported to anywhere. Linux is a damn sight easier for another Unix (thinking specifically of *BSD here) to emulate even in binary than Windows is.The difference between Linux and, say, NetBSD for most applications is completely buried in automake or any similar portability tool. Of course, wrapping it in something like SDL or Qt wipes out a lot of the interface differences as well. Once an application is portable (OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, Konqueror, The GIMP, KOffice), it can compete on its merits rather than its application burden.
As Bill and his buddies well know, that means `Goodbye, Microsoft'. Which is why they're working their little asses off trying to meld all of their apps into one inscrutible, indivisible, Palladium-wrapped, Microsoft-certified unmanageable blob while they still have the market share to force it down their users' throats.
Rapid World Domination by Libre software is the only way available to us to stop this.
Slashdot Mirror
Missing ingredient: you're not taking the whole ribbon up in that launch, you're taking up a single strand.
Good point. I suspect that since the ribbon is an excellent conductor and at least as good a radiator as it is an acceptor, the technique will be to operate it more-or-less side-on to the sunlight.
Also true, but the improvements now remaining to be made are incremental rather than revolutionary. In short, we can't do it yet, but we know that there are ways to do it. And if we sit on our collective backsides until absolutely everything we need in in place before starting to set up, that might add another decade of waiting before we can retire most of our rockets.
Turning the ribbon into a pipe is one thing, turning it into a whacking great optical fibre is much more difficult. For one thing, your optical fibre is very slim and doesn't need to do tens of thousands of km in one run. For another, it's not carrying megawatts.
That doesn't stop the idea from being terribly attractive, though. (-:
No problem. It takes weeks to crawl up there, I shouldn't think braking would be much of an issue.
A lot of engineering is built around the principle `you can't push on a rope'. In this case, very little tension is neded, and that's easily provided by just extending the cable, with a very small (few hundred tonnes, OTToMH) counterweight at the end of it.
No, less than a twentieth of a trillion. Read their FAQ before posting here.
No, not very much will happen. If they blew off ten km of elevator, the remaining 99.99% of it would still be orbiting stably. Read their FAQ before posting here.
Took a while to happen to the WTC, and this time they'd be ready for it, and anyone with half a hemisphere left in their heads would put a whacking great no-fly zone around it, and it's being built in a remote (from 'planes) location, and could mount its own antiaircraft defenses anyway, and... RTFFAQP, dammit!
Many of which have been answered by people with a great deal of technical skill. RTFFAQP.
Not much of a counterweight is needed (certainly no asteroid), and who would brake? Why waste precious momentum? Just time your ascent so you slingshot off the end of the cable aimed the right way (a `tramline' orbit), and you're in business.
Bungeeeeeeeeeee...!
Simple? They're not competitors, they have different purposes, so different structures.
...and push him out just after you get above the last cloud. No repeat offenders. Plenty of time to think about what he's just done.
BTW, at (say) 15m per floor, you'd have to fit about six or seven million buttons into the elevator design.
...and yes, we will work in your browser and be navigable by blind users and probably even make validator.w3.org happy. These are all definite design goals for the new website. Small technical details are important to these people.
If you arranged the final shape as a constant-diameter tube surrounded by a variable-thickness wall, that would be quite a bright idea.
The only fly in the ointment I can think of WRT that configuration against the current plans is that they plan to power the climbers with a laser from the ground. To do that down the guts of a tube would require an absolutely straight tube, and she ain't gunna happen. But there are other ways of powering a climber.
Think of it as a static strap for an entire planet. They've designed it with electric potentials in mind, too.
HighLiftSystems/LiftPort have already thought of a heck of a lot of stuff, the odds of something truly unique arising here is basically zero. However, if it does, they'll know because they're reading this.
Having your site flattened by SlashDot is something you tend to notice.
That's why they're building this space elevator thingy, see. They send the first strand up in one or two shuttles. Part of the shuttle payload is enough extra fuel to get to GEO. They unroll the strand. They send lightweight climbers up with the next strand. Now they have two strands, the climbers can carry twice as much, and iterate until you have a satisfactory number of strands emplaced.
No habitats, and the ribbon weighs startlingly little per km (something like 7.5kg, OTToMH).
4. Keep everything out of reach and bolted down (passwords on screensavers, short timeout) until they're about 8yo
5. They're a lot of effort, but if you put that effort in wholeheartedly, they're a fantastic reward
`April fool!'
Half of them will surrender on the spot. No telling what these crazy American bastards might do next.
To see whether you're a geek or not.
'Nuff said? (-:
...he want to use thin Linux desktops to run M$ software.
In which case he wants rdesktop. You can run it on thin boxes in about 16MB OK, more if you want to cache fonts and stuff, down to about 8 if you take the time to optimise the living daylights out of everything.
If the place is so pro Microsoft, (s)he should fetch a copy of the GNUwin2 ISO and install stuff from it everywhere he's allowed to. And tell the nice workers about it. When the next unheralded MS virus invasion happens, they'll still have tools they can use. When they want to do something like run text from frame to frame, they won't need to buy Publisher, just use OOo. When they want a graphics program, GIMP will do a lot of stuff without a $1500 outlay. And so on. After a while, they'll be sufficiently reliant on random FOSS tools for day-to-day work that to deny its integrity would be self-evidently foolish.
I've used it often. It's useable on 28.8, a bit gross on 14.4. LBX gives much better results than X over a compressed SSH pipe.
Mind you, Windows does install stuff without even asking. I guess - for a while - that's easier than typing a one-liner or clicking on items in a long list. (-:
And before you go on about lock-in to a single supplier (compared with Microsoft? Ahuk, ahuk...), you can add as many alternate package sources as you wish (GUI here, complete URPMI insructions here), some people have begun to notice how easy it is and even the putative lockers-in endorse it.
Actually (and unfortunately) the answer that most often wins decision-makers' hearts is (0) it's cheaper than Windows. I say `unfortunately' because raw cost overlooks many other benefits of Linux, and looking at the problem in such simple terms allows Microsoft to easily confuse and mislead the same decision-makers.
IRL, (3) it's more reliable than Windows and (4) it's more manageable than Windows (both of which, in the end, relate to costs) are also good business answers, but the best answers still; haven't been touched.
How about: (5) It frees you from control of a corporation which will one day compete with and destroy you?
How about: (6) You can do literally anything legal with it? Your average PHB literally will never get this unless perhaps years down the track after it's been well demonstrated and the savings costed out. But see below.
There's a host of other reasonably well-defined advantages like (7) it's more portable, possibly freeing you from a hardware-supplier tyranny as well; (8) it's more efficient, allowing use of cheaper hardware, or a slower replacement cycle, or greater capacity from the same hardware; (9) it's more modular and boundaries are better defined, meaning that things like thin clients work better, and changing the proxy settings on your web browser don't automatically break a Python script using OS calls to export data to a webserver (/ME waves to ShaunP).
Now, an illustration.
A bloke called out for help from the Linux community in Australia because his boss had, out of the blue, come to him and asked him to undo the extensive integration of FOSS components into their network, `because we have always been a Microsoft shop' and stating that he'd only acceded to the changes because said bloke has asked for them.
Now the ludicrous thing about this when one started to look into it was that the FOSS changes were already saving this company immense amounts of money and downtime, and the FOSS invasion had only just begun.
FOSS had already demonstrated its worth. One factor which is helping to stave off this disaster is costing out the replacement software (e.g., he was spitting out PDFs on demand from one of his servers, to replace this functionality alone would cost a copy of Distiller for practically every workstation in the company), but a lot of what he was doing with one-liner scripts would have taken some very expensive packages and a lot of work to replicate using Windows technology; e.g. a certain amount of CMS happened to some of those PDF files when they were printed. One of their main servers had been dying almost daily, but since the switch to (untuned) FOSS had never fallen over, was responding faster, coping with higher loads, and doing more complicated things. All of this and more from a very recent convert to FOSS. He had reliably automated so many things, and had the IT department doing so much more for so little effort, that replacing him and his FOSS with Windows would involve two or three people and sharply reduced service.
But the thing which really upset our bloke was that going back to Windows would mean occasionally having to leave social events or wake up at stupid o'clock in the morning to go and fix a downed server. He had become used to actually sleeping soundly again at night. (-:
This is a cut-down version of the summary, but see if you can spot how many of the GNU/Linux (happy birthday, Richard) advantages are involved even so.
What are you on about? Right-clicking on practically anything in KDE gives me a translucent, drop-shadowed menu of context actions. Drag and drop works fine, I printed a file with it this morning.
As to the rest of your comments, they also puzzle me. I have a dozen tiny icons in my taskbar for my most-used functions, anything which doesn't fit in there quickly and automatically makes it way into the most-used-apps section of the K menu, and there's a few icons on my desktop (things like bzflag) for me to toy with for a few minutes before I finish up for the day. My icons are nicely lined up, and labelled with my choice of font. None of my buttons have labels because I don't need them but the option to add labels to everything is about 3 or 4 clicks away. I've left tooltip-on-hover enabled for when others use my desktop, but I very seldom use it myself. Both of my favourite browsers support tabbing, which combined with multiple instances makes all of my open web pages both readable and easy to manage.
If you want simple, this desktop will do simple. But there's ample widgetry within easy reach for when I want it, and if you want complex, this desktop will blow your mind.
Nothing quite matches the power of a direct, pithy answer to whip the carpet out from under a troll's feet... but WineX is only part of the answer. Win4Lin is also only part of the answer. Whole-of-machine emulators like Bochs and VMWare are not the answer. WINE seems to be close to the right the answer, and WineX is an intgeresting side-branch of it.
The real right answer, however, is World Domination for Linux - even if you're a BSD fan.
Why?
Because once your favourite app is ported to Linux, it's ported to anywhere. Linux is a damn sight easier for another Unix (thinking specifically of *BSD here) to emulate even in binary than Windows is.The difference between Linux and, say, NetBSD for most applications is completely buried in automake or any similar portability tool. Of course, wrapping it in something like SDL or Qt wipes out a lot of the interface differences as well. Once an application is portable (OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, Konqueror, The GIMP, KOffice), it can compete on its merits rather than its application burden.
As Bill and his buddies well know, that means `Goodbye, Microsoft'. Which is why they're working their little asses off trying to meld all of their apps into one inscrutible, indivisible, Palladium-wrapped, Microsoft-certified unmanageable blob while they still have the market share to force it down their users' throats.
Rapid World Domination by Libre software is the only way available to us to stop this.
http://www.xfork86.org/?
There are at least 3 different modes for AA under X, which ones have you tried? It makes a huge performance difference on this nForce2 chipset.
Wha-haay! Something on-topic!
IIRC, slow driver updates was one of the reasons for XFork86.