I'm sure the astronauts currently living on the station are quite thankful for this as the United States does not have another vehicle and they would all be dead if Russia could not reach them now that the shuttle has been grounded for a year.
One of the requirements for ISS is that they have to have enough crew return vehicles on hand at all times to get all the people staying on the station back to earth.
The crew currently on the station have a Soyuz capsule to return in.
The reason the GC hasn't been hacked is not its CPU, it's the disc media, which uses a format completely incompatible with anything else.
Unoftunately for Nintendo, this is also why fewer third-party developers want to develop for the Gamecube: it locks them into Nintendo's manufacturing and distribution system.
At least where I lived in the Philly suburbs, Comcast digital cable had an abysmal signal. It was constantly breaking up, dropping frames, etc. I worked for a while at a video equipment manufacturer, and the techs used to use the local cable signal as a demo for their signal metering equipment, because it was really obvious something was wrong, and the equipment would show it. It really was the suxxor.
When I had Dish Network, on the other hand, the signal was great.
Now I have RCN cable, and the signal is good there too.
Which will replace Hubble anyway, is more capable, and doesn't need a shuttle launch.
If you're going to go to the expense of a space launch, why not launch a nice new telescope instead of trying to fix up the Hubble, which at this point is a beater anyway.
And yes, I have to agree that he pretty much ran the show into the ground. Mainly because the quality of the scripts dropped off immediately, and continued to sink lower as time went on. If he had done three years and left, things might have gotten better, but he remained the producer until the show's cancellation.
A really nice person, though: I met him once at a Doctor Who convention and he was quite pleasant to talk to.
Terry Nation was a writer, and a brilliant one. He created the Daleks, and also created the show Blake's 7.
They did a movie, and as far as I can tell it and the accompanying toy line probably didn't do that well. (I can't find actual figures for box office, though.)
That's probably what's responsible for the losses. I know I kept looking at the Bionicle displays in stores and thinking "this looks bad, please don't go out of business!"
There were "electronic toys" involved in Bionicle too, in the form of Lego computer games and video games. Maybe they're laying off their software division? That would seem to make more sense.
I found The Praxis to be decent and enjoyable. It's not as much of a brilliant revelation as Metropolitan, say, or Voice of the Whirlwind, but then it is covering much more familiar ground.
It's a solid book in a familiar genre, with fairly well-fleshed out characters. And even then, it manages to be fairly fresh and inventive.
CrankyFool seems to think it's an Ensign Mary Jane story, where the heroes are swell people who naturally triumph because they're just that swell, and embody the writer's inflated self-image. That's not how it came across to me. For one thing, the heroes don't really save the day, in fact they struggle just to keep up with what's going on and stay alive. Secondly, most of the time their lives pretty much suck. Ensign Mary Jane never has to spend a month pulling high gees wearing a diaper. Thirdly, the characters are by no means perfect people. The male lead is vain and nearly a 1920's -style drone. The female lead has problems of her own. Frankly, being competant and somewhat good-looking are nearly the only things either of them has going for them.
Finally, the one thing I really liked about this book was the way that for most of the book, nobody knows what to do. The characters are slowly discovering what is going on, and when it all hits the fan, we see the characters basically just trying to cope, and that's interesting. I particularly liked the ruling council, who could have been just another boring ruling council like in Matrix Revolutions, but wound up being a lot of fun.
In closing, I suspect that after a bunch of big, heavy thriller-type novels, WJW decided to relax and have some fun with this series. I'm having fun too.
Before you can build a space elevator, you have to have cheap enough launch to get the building materials for the space elevator into orbit. It's inherently a follow-on to routine and cheap space launch, not a replacement.
The realistic, incremental approach had nothing to do with either Shuttle or ISS. Both are primarily the products of politics.
An incremental approach would have been to build a Saturn 6 booster that was more powerful/cheaper to operate/reusable, and keep upgrading the parts to make it better. Instead, Shuttle dropped all of that and restarted with an almost completely different appproach.
The real problem with NASA is that, like any bureaucracy, it's a political organization first. Its organization is built for maximum political gain (jobs in districts), and its operation rewards political gamesmanship much more than technical merit or economic feasibility.
I dearly hope that if Bush does make a speech on the 17th, he announces that he's taking NASA out of the space launch business permanently.
DNA acts as a template mechanism, which lets you build certain types of molecules using a specific set of operations.
The whole point of nanotech is that it doesn't work like that: you can supposedly add one atom at a time anywhere on a molecule, or pluck an atom out of the middle of something. Which makes the problems much more difficult.
Drexler should get credit for being a populizer of the concept of nanotech, but it's good to see an expert in the field giving him some peer review.
While you might not expect to find radar on a horse cart, you would certainly expect to find it on a spaceship or a space station. Especially a space station run by a wealthy person like Niska.
In space 1000 km is right on top of you. I mean, good grief, Apollo 13 did the alignment for a return burn of 350,000 km by eyeballing it through the command capsule window. And, any chunk of random debris headed your way is alarming, much less a chunk of debris the size of a cargo plane. I mean, hello, 9/11?
Also, gunpowder contains its own oxidizer, and therefore needs no additional oxygen to burn. That's why a glock can fire underwater (though probably not well). The soviets had a 20mm autocannon mounted on one of their cold war era space stations.
But that's been done before, most notably in 2001: a Space Odyssey and 2010.
And, most of the space science in Firefly was really really bad. They confused solar systems with galaxies, for crying out loud! Or "We snuck up on the space station by coasting in from a whole thousand kilometers away." There were other examples.
Although the Transmeta processor is significantly more reliable than a conventional mobile processor, its Achilles' heel is its floating-point performance. Consequently, we modified the CMS to create a "high-performance CMS" that improves floating-point performance by nearly 50 percent and ultimately matches the performance of the conventional mobile processor on a clock-cycle-by-clock-cycle basis.
That's not exactly trivial. Does anyone know wnything more about this? What are the trade-offs? And, will this code will be made available to the general public? I imagine there are Transmeta owners that would also like to double their floating point performance.
My guess is, they aren't so much using the data to see who is popular, as to see what marketing is working.
They spend mad money on marketing, it would be nice for them to be able to see "Okay, ad campaign A created a bump right here, but ad campaign B didn't do anything. Fire Ad Agency B."
Sales data gives them all the information on popularity that matters.
Lastly, I hope that when the P2P networks sell that data, they are properly aggregating it so as to remove individual identification (and give a better statistical sample).
Slashdot Mirror
I was talking consoles, not handhelds. Asshole.
I'm sure the astronauts currently living on the station are quite thankful for this as the United States does not have another vehicle and they would all be dead if Russia could not reach them now that the shuttle has been grounded for a year.
One of the requirements for ISS is that they have to have enough crew return vehicles on hand at all times to get all the people staying on the station back to earth.
The crew currently on the station have a Soyuz capsule to return in.
Jon Acheson
Now that Nintendo is using disc-based games, maybe their next console will be backwards compatible.
I doubt it. Nintendo's version of backwards compatibility seems to be to release updated versions of the best of the old games for the new platform.
Jon Acheson
The reason the GC hasn't been hacked is not its CPU, it's the disc media, which uses a format completely incompatible with anything else.
Unoftunately for Nintendo, this is also why fewer third-party developers want to develop for the Gamecube: it locks them into Nintendo's manufacturing and distribution system.
Jon Acheson
At least where I lived in the Philly suburbs, Comcast digital cable had an abysmal signal. It was constantly breaking up, dropping frames, etc. I worked for a while at a video equipment manufacturer, and the techs used to use the local cable signal as a demo for their signal metering equipment, because it was really obvious something was wrong, and the equipment would show it. It really was the suxxor.
When I had Dish Network, on the other hand, the signal was great.
Now I have RCN cable, and the signal is good there too.
So, in summary, Comcast makes the Baby Jesus cry.
Jon Acheson
Which will replace Hubble anyway, is more capable, and doesn't need a shuttle launch.
If you're going to go to the expense of a space launch, why not launch a nice new telescope instead of trying to fix up the Hubble, which at this point is a beater anyway.
Jon Acheson
Sorry, somehow my link didn't come through.e _000313.html
http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/saturn_fiv
Jon Acheson
Skies of Arcadia is a good port of one of the best console RPGs ever.
If I ever get a gamecube, I'll probably buy it again.
Jon Acheson
This is an urban legend.
see here for details.
Jon Acheson
After all, the Galaxy Quest movie cost 20 million less than Nemesis, made 30 million more in box office, looked better and had a better script.
Or, maybe not.
Jon Acheson
You mean John Nathan-Turner.
And yes, I have to agree that he pretty much ran the show into the ground. Mainly because the quality of the scripts dropped off immediately, and continued to sink lower as time went on. If he had done three years and left, things might have gotten better, but he remained the producer until the show's cancellation.
A really nice person, though: I met him once at a Doctor Who convention and he was quite pleasant to talk to.
Terry Nation was a writer, and a brilliant one. He created the Daleks, and also created the show Blake's 7.
Jon Acheson
So how's it working out for her?
Jon Acheson
They did a movie, and as far as I can tell it and the accompanying toy line probably didn't do that well. (I can't find actual figures for box office, though.)
That's probably what's responsible for the losses. I know I kept looking at the Bionicle displays in stores and thinking "this looks bad, please don't go out of business!"
There were "electronic toys" involved in Bionicle too, in the form of Lego computer games and video games. Maybe they're laying off their software division? That would seem to make more sense.
Jon Acheson
First: today the only heavy lift system we have is the Delta Heavy, and it's not that potent.
Second: The space elevator plans I have read call for thousands of tons of material to be lifted into orbit. That's dozens to hundreds of launches.
Jon Acheson
I found The Praxis to be decent and enjoyable. It's not as much of a brilliant revelation as Metropolitan, say, or Voice of the Whirlwind, but then it is covering much more familiar ground.
It's a solid book in a familiar genre, with fairly well-fleshed out characters. And even then, it manages to be fairly fresh and inventive.
CrankyFool seems to think it's an Ensign Mary Jane story, where the heroes are swell people who naturally triumph because they're just that swell, and embody the writer's inflated self-image. That's not how it came across to me. For one thing, the heroes don't really save the day, in fact they struggle just to keep up with what's going on and stay alive. Secondly, most of the time their lives pretty much suck. Ensign Mary Jane never has to spend a month pulling high gees wearing a diaper. Thirdly, the characters are by no means perfect people. The male lead is vain and nearly a 1920's -style drone. The female lead has problems of her own. Frankly, being competant and somewhat good-looking are nearly the only things either of them has going for them.
Finally, the one thing I really liked about this book was the way that for most of the book, nobody knows what to do. The characters are slowly discovering what is going on, and when it all hits the fan, we see the characters basically just trying to cope, and that's interesting. I particularly liked the ruling council, who could have been just another boring ruling council like in Matrix Revolutions, but wound up being a lot of fun.
In closing, I suspect that after a bunch of big, heavy thriller-type novels, WJW decided to relax and have some fun with this series. I'm having fun too.
Jon Acheson
Before you can build a space elevator, you have to have cheap enough launch to get the building materials for the space elevator into orbit. It's inherently a follow-on to routine and cheap space launch, not a replacement.
Jon Acheson
The realistic, incremental approach had nothing to do with either Shuttle or ISS. Both are primarily the products of politics.
An incremental approach would have been to build a Saturn 6 booster that was more powerful/cheaper to operate/reusable, and keep upgrading the parts to make it better. Instead, Shuttle dropped all of that and restarted with an almost completely different appproach.
The real problem with NASA is that, like any bureaucracy, it's a political organization first. Its organization is built for maximum political gain (jobs in districts), and its operation rewards political gamesmanship much more than technical merit or economic feasibility.
I dearly hope that if Bush does make a speech on the 17th, he announces that he's taking NASA out of the space launch business permanently.
Jon Acheson
DNA acts as a template mechanism, which lets you build certain types of molecules using a specific set of operations.
The whole point of nanotech is that it doesn't work like that: you can supposedly add one atom at a time anywhere on a molecule, or pluck an atom out of the middle of something. Which makes the problems much more difficult.
Drexler should get credit for being a populizer of the concept of nanotech, but it's good to see an expert in the field giving him some peer review.
Jon Acheson
While you might not expect to find radar on a horse cart, you would certainly expect to find it on a spaceship or a space station. Especially a space station run by a wealthy person like Niska.
Jon Acheson
Radar.
Jon Acheson
The real moral here is that if you're depending on your placement in a search engine for free advertising, you'd better have a backup plan.
Jon Acheson
In space 1000 km is right on top of you. I mean, good grief, Apollo 13 did the alignment for a return burn of 350,000 km by eyeballing it through the command capsule window. And, any chunk of random debris headed your way is alarming, much less a chunk of debris the size of a cargo plane. I mean, hello, 9/11?
Also, gunpowder contains its own oxidizer, and therefore needs no additional oxygen to burn. That's why a glock can fire underwater (though probably not well). The soviets had a 20mm autocannon mounted on one of their cold war era space stations.
Jon Acheson
But that's been done before, most notably in 2001: a Space Odyssey and 2010.
And, most of the space science in Firefly was really really bad. They confused solar systems with galaxies, for crying out loud! Or "We snuck up on the space station by coasting in from a whole thousand kilometers away." There were other examples.
Jon Acheson
That's not exactly trivial. Does anyone know wnything more about this? What are the trade-offs?
And, will this code will be made available to the general public? I imagine there are Transmeta owners that would also like to double their floating point performance.
Jon Acheson
My guess is, they aren't so much using the data to see who is popular, as to see what marketing is working.
They spend mad money on marketing, it would be nice for them to be able to see "Okay, ad campaign A created a bump right here, but ad campaign B didn't do anything. Fire Ad Agency B."
Sales data gives them all the information on popularity that matters.
Lastly, I hope that when the P2P networks sell that data, they are properly aggregating it so as to remove individual identification (and give a better statistical sample).
Jon Acheson