There'd be quite a few oscillations: there'd be a natural oscillatory mode depending on the actual length of the elevator cable. These could be damped, however, so no, there doesn't NEED to be oscillations
I've seen a proposal for an elevator on Mars that was carefully oscillated to avoid the regular passage of an inconvenient moon.
Note that the anchor point (the place it's built above) has to be on the equator as well.
Not true, but the further from the equator you get, the more, er, interesting the engineering problems get. You could have, for example, a spiral-shaped elevator tethered in London, but it would be much longer and subject to larger forces (read, orders of magnitude harder to build) than an equatorial one.
What you'd need to worry about more is anyone who saw it as a symbol of the US/Western Civilization/Whatever group some terrorists have a grudge again. I don't think the 9/11 terrorists thought that the WTC was inherently bad for being a very tall building or something like that.
If you have a space elevator [...] and the ground point of the elevator becomes un-teathered (e.g. no longer attached to earth) what happens?
Not much, unless the design deliberately called for it to be under tension. The things are in orbit, after all. Some designs call for the `tower' base to be mobile (a ship). It's not really a tower, it's really a bridge anchored on nothing (from the middle out).
Breaking it in the middle would be a bit more disastrous. The bottom half would whiplash around the planet (or maybe the bottom tenth, quite a lot would burn up and/or shatter as it re-entered), and what happened to the other half would be highly dependednt on stuff like where the Moon was at the time.
Terrorist attacks would not be easy to carry off; the elevator would be a very thin low-visibility target to hit, and air defense would be relatively simple. Some quite small computer-co-ordinated guns on the travellers would prove quite lethal to aircraft and missiles alike, and I imagine that provision would be made for directing and focussing the lift laser against larger and/or slower targets. The designs that I've seen would be immune to meteor strikes up to quite sizeable impacts (they're curved - like a tape measure - so even a side-on strike would get at most half of the fibres).
Terrorist attacks against space colonies would be much more of a problem. From orbit, a rocket the size of two soft-drink cans could loft a couple of kilos of small ball-bearings into a widely dispersed cloud on a collision course with a colony. This would be very difficult to even detect, let alone parry or dodge.
Terrorist attacks on ground targets from orbit would also be a worry. `We have many rocks, Man.'
Spaceship really not large enough. You might save the population of Christmas Island, and of course politics will rear its ugly head at this point.
Also, they're pushing security and escape. One idiot on the wrong trajectory, perhaps assisted by a bucketful of gravel, would put paid to their marvellous toy - hereinafter referred to as `the basket'. Better to build space elevators and have many baskets.
Better still, of course, to not bugger up our planet in the first place.
There are many grand schemes for bringing that about, but all of the make the same basic mistake (one way or another). They either assume that they're working with altruists (in which case any system would work and these idealists are already redundant), or that their subjects are all idiots (so they build idiot-compatible one-size-fits-all systems, which of course fail).
The only way that this can work is by changing basic human nature. And of course, we just left the sphere of materialism, welcome to religion, we hope you enjoy the life.
The only thing unique about MS doing this is that it's more successful than most.
You completely missed the point, and you're wrong as well.
The unique thing about Microsoft is that its monopoly in the OS and Office spaces allow it to grossly overcharge for these products, which they would be unable to do in a free market. Every company does not do this.
They are using the fruits of this overcharging to enter and dominate other markets, so that by the time Linux and OOo blow away the OS and Office markets, Microsoft will have other monopolies to exploit after the same pattern, and with which to maintain their existing monopoly (e.g. if they wipe out most competing PDAs and 'phones, then your PDA and phone will only interoperate with Windows, just like only Outlook interoperates with Hotmail unless you pay money).
Fortunately for the consumer, I think a number of their little loss leaders are going to stay belly-up no matter how much artificial resuscitation they endure.
The profit per job for my brother-in-law the steel fabricator was roughly 6%, but since the jobs were typically in his yard for less than a month that probably worked out at 60-70% of his capital investment returned per annum. Or would if BHP (effectively has a monopoly on steel here in Oz) didn't make and fail to warrant crappy steel (e.g. beams with huge lesions in them). A lot depends on your PoV.
About 10 years ago, the typical workstation cost $20,000. About 5 years ago, the first PC based workstations were introduced. Now the average workstation costs less than $7,000
Less than USD$700. And Moore's Law did the price crunching, not Microsoft. There were plenty of other relatively low-cost OSes around, like CP/M and AppleDOS. Economist, schmonomist: technology wielded that axe.
However, loss leaders will be products that some day (maybe 5 years) will bear the fruit grown in the soil rich with competitor's blood.
I notice that the Lynx console isn't as common as it once was. When people hear `evolution' they tend to think of successful species, the apex of the pyramid, but evolution is all about death and destruction. There are far more species fossilised than extant.
Perhaps when OOo and Linux barbeque their cash cows, Microsoft and all of these loss leaders will be a set of bones and footprints.
The thing which astounds me about Microsoft making such a loss is that I can buy a full-power no-screen PC (thrice the clock, thrice the disk space, fourfold the RAM) for about the same (all-in-1-mobo AUD$110, CPU 80, RAM 90, case/kbd/mouse 60, HDD 120 == $460) as Microsoft's cut-down XboX (AUD$400 plus extras, no kbd or mouse).
Why are mighty Microsoft making a loss on something that Joe `Beanhead' Local Wholesaler can make a profit on?
Do you have any idea how hard it is to find Linux sysadmins?
Yes, I am one.
The rider is that you have to find roughly 3-4x as many Windows admins, and that in itself demands more managing than 1/3-1/4 as many Linux admins.
Let's put it this way: shop with 25 assorted servers has a choice of six Windows admins at (say) AUD$80,000 PA apiece or two Linux admins at (say) AUD$120,000 PA apiece. Quick! AUD$480,000 or AUD$240,000 PA for the same services, you choose!
Now let's turn to databases and email. Say that this shop has 5 of each and fifty seats on each, that's 250 licences for each, at a combined total of roughly AUD$300 a seat for MS-SQL plus Exchange, or AUD$750,000 (or a free Linux admin for six years riding PostgreSQL plus PostFix). It's enough to make an accountant go, er, postal.
Maybe you're not a Microsoft plant, maybe you're a Microsoft animal? (-:
A lot hangs on this point. If you mean `it pounds perfectly good server hardware into the sand' then I agree, although I'm not sure why this would be an advantage.
If you want to do that, just use the latest version of LookOut and point it at your LDAP server. It'll send no end of insane LDAP queries and keep the poor server shuddering and smoking up the tyres almost as if it were running Exchange.
If by `it works' you mean `it reliably delivers email', I'd have to violently disagree. I've just received a bounce from an Exchange server... a week after I sent it the original email. Sometimes it delivers OK, sometimes it mangles attachments, sometimes it just toys with a message for a few hours for no reason that I can detect.
PostFix does all of the _useful_ email things that Exchange does and requires only a fraction of the horsepower. Do we need to discuss security? The few obscure/bizarre things the SendMail will do that PostFix won't are rarely worth the bother of a crash-dump configuration file.
The only nearly-unique feature of Exchange is the collaboration aspect, and even that is much better done with SamsungContact nee hp-OpenMail.
And as another poster asked, why meet so often? And do people need to tinker with each others' calendars to achieve this? You may be looking at a procedural bug here.
fans that silently die and expensive fans doing the same
Really sad thing is: we could get by without those fans at all. Run the CPUs a few percent slower and use non-power-hog architectures, put a real heatsink on the PSU instead of toys and a blower, put multiple heads in the drives instead of spinning them faster (or better still, install more RAM so the disk gets hit less often).
And seal the case up completely. No corrosion problems - with optical connections and batteries (machine consuming a fraction of the power that your desktop P4 does) you could in theory take your computer swimming. What would you call a mouse that operates in water? An eel?
And how about `level 5' cache: buckets of slower, low-power, low-cost RAM for swapping, temp files, disk cache etc?
Haven't had one of those for aaaaages (and always on dodgy hardware). But you've got to admit, it is a lot more exciting (and informative, even the dumbest user knows the system has a problem!) than a nicely centered F0AD:4C696C6C message.
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`Highly eclectic' would be more accurate. Pratchett, O'Niell, Dawkins and Baumgardner all on the same day. Not counting my Larsen deck calendar. (-:
I wonder why anyone would bother to mod you down at all, let alone two points?
I've seen a proposal for an elevator on Mars that was carefully oscillated to avoid the regular passage of an inconvenient moon.
Not true, but the further from the equator you get, the more, er, interesting the engineering problems get. You could have, for example, a spiral-shaped elevator tethered in London, but it would be much longer and subject to larger forces (read, orders of magnitude harder to build) than an equatorial one.
Not much, unless the design deliberately called for it to be under tension. The things are in orbit, after all. Some designs call for the `tower' base to be mobile (a ship). It's not really a tower, it's really a bridge anchored on nothing (from the middle out).
Breaking it in the middle would be a bit more disastrous. The bottom half would whiplash around the planet (or maybe the bottom tenth, quite a lot would burn up and/or shatter as it re-entered), and what happened to the other half would be highly dependednt on stuff like where the Moon was at the time.
Terrorist attacks would not be easy to carry off; the elevator would be a very thin low-visibility target to hit, and air defense would be relatively simple. Some quite small computer-co-ordinated guns on the travellers would prove quite lethal to aircraft and missiles alike, and I imagine that provision would be made for directing and focussing the lift laser against larger and/or slower targets. The designs that I've seen would be immune to meteor strikes up to quite sizeable impacts (they're curved - like a tape measure - so even a side-on strike would get at most half of the fibres).
Terrorist attacks against space colonies would be much more of a problem. From orbit, a rocket the size of two soft-drink cans could loft a couple of kilos of small ball-bearings into a widely dispersed cloud on a collision course with a colony. This would be very difficult to even detect, let alone parry or dodge.
Terrorist attacks on ground targets from orbit would also be a worry. `We have many rocks, Man.'
Scores of chicken-and-egg problems remain. The best they could hope for is modifying an existing lifeform, and that's boring.
Spaceship really not large enough. You might save the population of Christmas Island, and of course politics will rear its ugly head at this point.
Also, they're pushing security and escape. One idiot on the wrong trajectory, perhaps assisted by a bucketful of gravel, would put paid to their marvellous toy - hereinafter referred to as `the basket'. Better to build space elevators and have many baskets.
Better still, of course, to not bugger up our planet in the first place.
There are many grand schemes for bringing that about, but all of the make the same basic mistake (one way or another). They either assume that they're working with altruists (in which case any system would work and these idealists are already redundant), or that their subjects are all idiots (so they build idiot-compatible one-size-fits-all systems, which of course fail).
The only way that this can work is by changing basic human nature. And of course, we just left the sphere of materialism, welcome to religion, we hope you enjoy the life.
Yes, but a GeForce2 is included. And a GeForce3 will be soon, for about the same price.
True. Add AUD$70 as required, and it's a faster DVD drive.
You do get 4 bonus USB ports, 2 PS/2 ports, a printer port and an ethernet port thrown in. And PCI slots, infra-red ports, yadda yadda...
`-1, Muggle' (can't spell to save their ass)
You completely missed the point, and you're wrong as well.
The unique thing about Microsoft is that its monopoly in the OS and Office spaces allow it to grossly overcharge for these products, which they would be unable to do in a free market. Every company does not do this.
They are using the fruits of this overcharging to enter and dominate other markets, so that by the time Linux and OOo blow away the OS and Office markets, Microsoft will have other monopolies to exploit after the same pattern, and with which to maintain their existing monopoly (e.g. if they wipe out most competing PDAs and 'phones, then your PDA and phone will only interoperate with Windows, just like only Outlook interoperates with Hotmail unless you pay money).
Fortunately for the consumer, I think a number of their little loss leaders are going to stay belly-up no matter how much artificial resuscitation they endure.
The profit per job for my brother-in-law the steel fabricator was roughly 6%, but since the jobs were typically in his yard for less than a month that probably worked out at 60-70% of his capital investment returned per annum. Or would if BHP (effectively has a monopoly on steel here in Oz) didn't make and fail to warrant crappy steel (e.g. beams with huge lesions in them). A lot depends on your PoV.
Less than USD$700. And Moore's Law did the price crunching, not Microsoft. There were plenty of other relatively low-cost OSes around, like CP/M and AppleDOS. Economist, schmonomist: technology wielded that axe.
Why bother converting?
What kind of R&D? `How to keep Linux out of India'?
I notice that the Lynx console isn't as common as it once was. When people hear `evolution' they tend to think of successful species, the apex of the pyramid, but evolution is all about death and destruction. There are far more species fossilised than extant.
Perhaps when OOo and Linux barbeque their cash cows, Microsoft and all of these loss leaders will be a set of bones and footprints.
The thing which astounds me about Microsoft making such a loss is that I can buy a full-power no-screen PC (thrice the clock, thrice the disk space, fourfold the RAM) for about the same (all-in-1-mobo AUD$110, CPU 80, RAM 90, case/kbd/mouse 60, HDD 120 == $460) as Microsoft's cut-down XboX (AUD$400 plus extras, no kbd or mouse).
Why are mighty Microsoft making a loss on something that Joe `Beanhead' Local Wholesaler can make a profit on?
Crap == high TCO.
`there are probably enough MCSE paper tigers to get some affordable, albeit dubious, maintenance and support'
Yes, I am one.
The rider is that you have to find roughly 3-4x as many Windows admins, and that in itself demands more managing than 1/3-1/4 as many Linux admins.
Let's put it this way: shop with 25 assorted servers has a choice of six Windows admins at (say) AUD$80,000 PA apiece or two Linux admins at (say) AUD$120,000 PA apiece. Quick! AUD$480,000 or AUD$240,000 PA for the same services, you choose!
Now let's turn to databases and email. Say that this shop has 5 of each and fifty seats on each, that's 250 licences for each, at a combined total of roughly AUD$300 a seat for MS-SQL plus Exchange, or AUD$750,000 (or a free Linux admin for six years riding PostgreSQL plus PostFix). It's enough to make an accountant go, er, postal.
Maybe you're not a Microsoft plant, maybe you're a Microsoft animal? (-:
A lot hangs on this point. If you mean `it pounds perfectly good server hardware into the sand' then I agree, although I'm not sure why this would be an advantage.
If you want to do that, just use the latest version of LookOut and point it at your LDAP server. It'll send no end of insane LDAP queries and keep the poor server shuddering and smoking up the tyres almost as if it were running Exchange.
If by `it works' you mean `it reliably delivers email', I'd have to violently disagree. I've just received a bounce from an Exchange server... a week after I sent it the original email. Sometimes it delivers OK, sometimes it mangles attachments, sometimes it just toys with a message for a few hours for no reason that I can detect.
PostFix does all of the _useful_ email things that Exchange does and requires only a fraction of the horsepower. Do we need to discuss security? The few obscure/bizarre things the SendMail will do that PostFix won't are rarely worth the bother of a crash-dump configuration file.
The only nearly-unique feature of Exchange is the collaboration aspect, and even that is much better done with SamsungContact nee hp-OpenMail.
And as another poster asked, why meet so often? And do people need to tinker with each others' calendars to achieve this? You may be looking at a procedural bug here.
Really sad thing is: we could get by without those fans at all. Run the CPUs a few percent slower and use non-power-hog architectures, put a real heatsink on the PSU instead of toys and a blower, put multiple heads in the drives instead of spinning them faster (or better still, install more RAM so the disk gets hit less often).
And seal the case up completely. No corrosion problems - with optical connections and batteries (machine consuming a fraction of the power that your desktop P4 does) you could in theory take your computer swimming. What would you call a mouse that operates in water? An eel?
And how about `level 5' cache: buckets of slower, low-power, low-cost RAM for swapping, temp files, disk cache etc?
False for not-pretend 64-bit architectures (e.g. UltraSparc) and has been for years.
Sorry, couldn't resist that pun.
Perhaps a Windows install might have succeeded. Is that damaging enough for you? (-:
Add its path to the plugins search list, click refresh, done.
Haven't had one of those for aaaaages (and always on dodgy hardware). But you've got to admit, it is a lot more exciting (and informative, even the dumbest user knows the system has a problem!) than a nicely centered F0AD:4C696C6C message.