Picture of Mini Mac's back shows a power plug that is clearly not a regular AC plug. I'm pretty sure it's got an external AC to DC adapter like laptops.
Although your dream loses its point when you stop and consider that you could just get an iBook for that kind of money...
On the other hand, if the entire world switches to a hydrogen economy in which some new technology (like practical hot fusion) is used to generate hydrogen from water, eventually Earth's cloud cover will increase due to so much water vapor emission..... increasing the planetary albedo, which in turn will lead to new ice age. Iceland will be the first to freeze over!
I like USB 2 external devices over internal PCI cards, like my 802.11g thumbdrive. The only drawback is that USB thumbdrives stick out in an ungainly manner so they suck for long-term deployment.
This new thing sounds like it will work like USB2 except it will reside in a small chassis like PCMCIA. Just what I need.
Couple weeks ago there was a slashdot article about an interview with Microsoft CIO, and he said his job was easy with regards to which vendor to choose from... they just use everything by Microsoft.
Makes me wonder, does Apple use all Mac stuff themselves? WebOjects for their website? What about database, do they even have a DB product?
I pay $30 a month for SBC Yahoo! DSL that gives me 320 kb/s both ways. That means I get 40 kbytes/sec max on downloads. It's kind of a stretch to call that BROADband.
For about the same price, in Korea they give you 10mb/s both ways. Orders of magnitudes faster.
As far as NAZ stock prices, at least the companies going up in price nowadays (Google, Apple etc) are making solid PROFITS, not selling dog food online at a loss.
"This height is amazing in such a small moon; it rivals Olympus Mons on Mars which is a body 5 times its size."
Article submitter didn't take Astronomy 101 apparently. Small planetoids tend to have more prominent geological features than larger planets because stronger gravity pulls everything together harder and flattens things out. For instance, Olympus Mons on Mars is much higher than any mountain on Earth precisely because Earth has stronger gravity.
I dunno... I remember buying one of those pre-standard 56k modems way back when, and didn't have problems later when the standard was finalized.
If I recall correctly, there were two choices: US Robotics 56k or Hayes? Gosh it's been so long I fogot... I think the industry standard became v.32bis (?)
But anyways I bought a Diamond Supra which I think was Hayes standard. It turns out that most ISPs like AOL eventually just ran modems that support BOTH pre-standards, so nobody ended being orphaned with an obsolete product.
My IE refuses to run the vulnerability test... says "Your current security settings prohibit running ActiveX controls on this page." Apparently Spybot S&D did something good when I had it immunize my system?
FYI I pretty much never use IE so everything is on default setting.
I watch a lot of Cartoon Network. And History Channel (last week there was a GREAT GREAT show on Hannibal vs. Romans). And some Discovery Channel... if I had HD (I don't) then I'd probably watch HD Disc a lot.
Look at the picture again, but now imagine it's a huge cylinder in space, rotating slowly like Rama for artificial gravity. Like an interstellar colony ship or something. Wouldn't that be cool...
honestly, I can't imagine anybody actually doing it on SS2. I'll bet all carnal desire just completely disappears when the rocket motor lights up and the passengers are crying death screams resulting from 5 G's of acceleration.
Zero G is no picnic either, they don't call it the Vomit Comet for nothing. It would feel like you're falling off a cliff, just continually falling.
Now people do get used to zero G and can have fun, but it will probably take days or weeks of being in space, like shuttle astronauts.
"I still wonder if they could ever pack enough fuel to go into orbit then have enough to deorbit so they don't have to use the heat-shield method of returning."
If you're talking about a tail-first reentry that relies on rocket thrust slowing down the craft to avoid overheating, I wouldn't think so... at least not with a hybrid engine. Maybe with cryogenic fuel.
Does the shuttlecock feather design work at high speeds? When it comes down from orbit and hits the atmosphere it'll be going like 17,000 mph. I wonder if the feather can slow it down fast enough to avoid sustained high temperatures.
In any event the orbiter will have to be made out of something more heat tolerant than epoxy composite.
On the other hand, the Discovery Channel program showed a brief glimpse of a Tier Two mockup on Burt's computer screen (a Mac)... it looked like a SS1 on a big stick, feather and all. I guess Burt's got it all figured out already.
Yesterday I saw the Brit tourist videos posted on Slashdot and thought it didn't look that bad.... they looked similar to footage from the big Mississipi flood of '95 (or was that 94)
But apparently that video was shot in a place where the tsunami wave wasn't that severe. According to this MSNBC article, entire towns were completely wiped out in some parts of Indonesia. An Indonesian ambassador says that the death toll in just one Indonesian province could exceed 400,000.
That's just.... unbelievable. This is probably going to be the biggest natural disaster in human history.
Human death is always unfortunate, and tens of thousands dying is a major tragedy indeed. But there are so many people now, living on just about every habitable patch of ground on earth, that any kind of a natural disaster happening anywhere in the world kills massive numbers.
The thing is, vast majority of humans today still live in impoverished, technologically backward societies. 6 billion is too many people for a primitve infrastructure to handle.
Actually Earth can easily handle hundreds of billions, but we would need advanced technology like the Puppeteers. And not just advanced technology, but also advanced cultural and societal organization far ahead of what we have today... plus a fundamental change in how people think and behave. Now we can't just suddenly become a herbivorous herd society like the Puppeteers, but we can be nicer to others and try not to be such assholes.
Solution to earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters lie in advanced technolgy. Fleet of Worlds!
Memory Stick is Sony's proprietary format and they're a lot more expensive per meg than CompactFlash.
If you have a Sony digital camera, you *have* to buy Memory Stick. But with a battery powered HD, you can just use the 16meg stick that came with the camera and dump pictures to the HDD.
With Paul's big pockets, the SS2 sale to Virgin, and the $10 mil Xprize money, Burt probably has more than enough funds for whatever he's working on now.
Also it's likely that he learned all he needed to know from the SS1 project, and with time being of essense, he's going forward at full speed on SS2 and Tier Two projects. No time to waste fooling around with more SS1 launches.
I dunno what the Bezos VTOL rocket is like, but I've read some interesting articles on Jerry Pournelle's website and saw this idea:
You could use the exaust plume of a rocket as heat shielding! Nobody's tried it yet and it's just a concept for now, but if it works it could be awesome. The DC-X program was on its way to finding out stuff like this, but then NASA took over the program from the Air Force and ran it into the ground. (literally)
How it works: you have a throttleable rocket launching vertically. You don't use up all your fuel on launch, you save a little bit. Then when coming down, you come down tail-first and fire the rocket at low throttle. The exaust plume theoretically would act as a heat shield and most of the superhot gases formed at reentry speeds would be deflected away from the rocket by the plume. So you will not need much heat shielding for reentry. The weight savings from not needing Space Shuttle-type heat tiles could even be greater than the weight of fuel you carry for reentry (!)
Then when you're safely in the lower atmosphere, you could pop a parachute for landing or something. (this is my notion, the link doesn't mention this) All depends on how much fuel you need to build a sufficient plume, what percentage of gross takeoffweight is fuel, etc. X-programs is where you find out stuff like this, but they don't run X programs any more.
I don't think there will be "dual-format" drives that play both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD due to the technical differences between them. (for instance the large disparity in storage size)
In comparison, DVD-R and +R are nearly identical formats... there is almost no difference distinguishing the two. Basically the +R format is a slightly hacked version of the official -R specification to circumvent licensing fees. Note that +R discs do not display the official DVD logo with the circle image.
S. Korea has government-subsidized, 20mbps up and down DSL for about $40 a month.
I have analyzed the traffic that goes through these super-fast connections.... and found that 99% of it consists of pr0n, music/video downloads and multiplayer gaming.
It also appears that 72% of young men there never leave the house, 56% never leave their bedrooms except to eat and poop, and 33% never leave their bedrooms period.
On the other hand, we have seen some amazing productive output from American geeks with just a 2400 baud modem and a shell account.:o
Slashdot Mirror
Although your dream loses its point when you stop and consider that you could just get an iBook for that kind of money...
On the other hand, if the entire world switches to a hydrogen economy in which some new technology (like practical hot fusion) is used to generate hydrogen from water, eventually Earth's cloud cover will increase due to so much water vapor emission..... increasing the planetary albedo, which in turn will lead to new ice age. Iceland will be the first to freeze over!
This new thing sounds like it will work like USB2 except it will reside in a small chassis like PCMCIA. Just what I need.
Makes me wonder, does Apple use all Mac stuff themselves? WebOjects for their website? What about database, do they even have a DB product?
For about the same price, in Korea they give you 10mb/s both ways. Orders of magnitudes faster.
I read somewhere that NT 4.0 was certified Dept of Defense Secure Platform.... but only if you didn't connect it to a network.
As far as NAZ stock prices, at least the companies going up in price nowadays (Google, Apple etc) are making solid PROFITS, not selling dog food online at a loss.
Article submitter didn't take Astronomy 101 apparently. Small planetoids tend to have more prominent geological features than larger planets because stronger gravity pulls everything together harder and flattens things out. For instance, Olympus Mons on Mars is much higher than any mountain on Earth precisely because Earth has stronger gravity.
If I recall correctly, there were two choices: US Robotics 56k or Hayes? Gosh it's been so long I fogot... I think the industry standard became v.32bis (?)
But anyways I bought a Diamond Supra which I think was Hayes standard. It turns out that most ISPs like AOL eventually just ran modems that support BOTH pre-standards, so nobody ended being orphaned with an obsolete product.
FYI I pretty much never use IE so everything is on default setting.
Wells Fargo online banking has been working flawlessly for me, I run Firefox 0.9 (just recently upgraded to 1.0 and that runs fine too)
I watch a lot of Cartoon Network. And History Channel (last week there was a GREAT GREAT show on Hannibal vs. Romans). And some Discovery Channel... if I had HD (I don't) then I'd probably watch HD Disc a lot.
Look at the picture again, but now imagine it's a huge cylinder in space, rotating slowly like Rama for artificial gravity. Like an interstellar colony ship or something. Wouldn't that be cool...
the Canadian Brian Feeney and the da Vinci guys? Last I heard they were going ahead with their October launch even after Burt&crew won the X-prize.
Zero G is no picnic either, they don't call it the Vomit Comet for nothing. It would feel like you're falling off a cliff, just continually falling.
Now people do get used to zero G and can have fun, but it will probably take days or weeks of being in space, like shuttle astronauts.
If you're talking about a tail-first reentry that relies on rocket thrust slowing down the craft to avoid overheating, I wouldn't think so... at least not with a hybrid engine. Maybe with cryogenic fuel.
Does the shuttlecock feather design work at high speeds? When it comes down from orbit and hits the atmosphere it'll be going like 17,000 mph. I wonder if the feather can slow it down fast enough to avoid sustained high temperatures.
In any event the orbiter will have to be made out of something more heat tolerant than epoxy composite.
On the other hand, the Discovery Channel program showed a brief glimpse of a Tier Two mockup on Burt's computer screen (a Mac)... it looked like a SS1 on a big stick, feather and all. I guess Burt's got it all figured out already.
If Xvid plays properly on this thing (not clear from the product description) then Xvid should win hands down, at least for us.
I'm also wondering if this player displays the annoying "DIVX" logo at the beginning of each Divx file, like it does on my PC.
But apparently that video was shot in a place where the tsunami wave wasn't that severe. According to this MSNBC article, entire towns were completely wiped out in some parts of Indonesia. An Indonesian ambassador says that the death toll in just one Indonesian province could exceed 400,000.
That's just.... unbelievable. This is probably going to be the biggest natural disaster in human history.
Human death is always unfortunate, and tens of thousands dying is a major tragedy indeed. But there are so many people now, living on just about every habitable patch of ground on earth, that any kind of a natural disaster happening anywhere in the world kills massive numbers.
The thing is, vast majority of humans today still live in impoverished, technologically backward societies. 6 billion is too many people for a primitve infrastructure to handle.
Actually Earth can easily handle hundreds of billions, but we would need advanced technology like the Puppeteers. And not just advanced technology, but also advanced cultural and societal organization far ahead of what we have today... plus a fundamental change in how people think and behave. Now we can't just suddenly become a herbivorous herd society like the Puppeteers, but we can be nicer to others and try not to be such assholes.
Solution to earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters lie in advanced technolgy. Fleet of Worlds!
If you have a Sony digital camera, you *have* to buy Memory Stick. But with a battery powered HD, you can just use the 16meg stick that came with the camera and dump pictures to the HDD.
Also it's likely that he learned all he needed to know from the SS1 project, and with time being of essense, he's going forward at full speed on SS2 and Tier Two projects. No time to waste fooling around with more SS1 launches.
You could use the exaust plume of a rocket as heat shielding! Nobody's tried it yet and it's just a concept for now, but if it works it could be awesome. The DC-X program was on its way to finding out stuff like this, but then NASA took over the program from the Air Force and ran it into the ground. (literally)
How it works: you have a throttleable rocket launching vertically. You don't use up all your fuel on launch, you save a little bit. Then when coming down, you come down tail-first and fire the rocket at low throttle. The exaust plume theoretically would act as a heat shield and most of the superhot gases formed at reentry speeds would be deflected away from the rocket by the plume. So you will not need much heat shielding for reentry. The weight savings from not needing Space Shuttle-type heat tiles could even be greater than the weight of fuel you carry for reentry (!)
Then when you're safely in the lower atmosphere, you could pop a parachute for landing or something. (this is my notion, the link doesn't mention this) All depends on how much fuel you need to build a sufficient plume, what percentage of gross takeoffweight is fuel, etc. X-programs is where you find out stuff like this, but they don't run X programs any more.
In comparison, DVD-R and +R are nearly identical formats... there is almost no difference distinguishing the two. Basically the +R format is a slightly hacked version of the official -R specification to circumvent licensing fees. Note that +R discs do not display the official DVD logo with the circle image.
Why is Amazon publishing my male information?
I have analyzed the traffic that goes through these super-fast connections.... and found that 99% of it consists of pr0n, music/video downloads and multiplayer gaming.
It also appears that 72% of young men there never leave the house, 56% never leave their bedrooms except to eat and poop, and 33% never leave their bedrooms period.
On the other hand, we have seen some amazing productive output from American geeks with just a 2400 baud modem and a shell account. :o