One big problem with this chart, and all the Visibone products: reflective (printed) color is *never* gonna match up well to screen color. Big show stopper there.
To make matters worse, they overlay text, in white or black, over the color samples, which alters the perception of the colors.
What I'd *love* to see them produce is an on-screen version of their charts, sans labels. See a color you like, roll your cursor over it, and up pops the HTML color value. You could do this with a big GIF on a Web page, with a big honkin' image map over it to supply the pop-up values. Even better, make it so if you click a color, it'll take you to another page that gives you useful options such as viewing text in the chosen color against backgrounds of another color, or v/v. Now THAT I could use.
My point exactly. There *should* always be someone innovating, but once a technology becomes a commodity, and you have to compete solely on price, the incentive to do so evaporates along with your margins.
Innovation doesn't matter. Most drive are sold to OEMs, and all they really care about is price. If an OEM drive goes bad, the OEM pulls it and sends it back to the manufacturer, and the manuf. eats most of the loss.
That's the real danger of a commodity market: that price pressure makes innovation, and even quality, irrelevant.
I very seriously doubt the deskstar caused IBM to give up... At what point do you say "we're making...$.50 per drive we sell. Let's give up." ?
If, as you say, they were only making $0.50 per drive, that's an awful narrow profit margin. It doesn't take too many returns to wipe that slim profit out completely.
I think the DeathStar debacle had a *lot* to do with this development.
Hmmm.... I dunno why you're so focused on the problem of paper records, but that wasn't even mentioned in the article. The robot was designed to transport *meds* and otherbulky stuff that TCP/IP can't handle.
Beside, one could make the argument that a robot like TOBOR would be just as reliable, even moreso, than an electronic system for transporting test results and reports. It's a lot easier to lose a chunk of bytes in a computer system (especially if it's Windoze-based...;{) than to misplace 400 pounds of robot. With a built-in safe, no less.
Re:what about the human side
on
Hospital Robots
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· Score: 1
Did you read the article? The robot doesn't interract with patients, other than to avoid bumping into them in the corridors and elevators. It simply delivers medication and such from the pharmacy to the various nurses' stations. The whole idea is to free up the humans to give the sort of human care you talk about, rather than schlepping meds around and other such menial labor.
The sad truth is that Americans will be lulled into the New Improved! picture quality, and gladly shell out more and more money for the priviledge.
Don't think so? Well, back when cable TV first debuted, the idea that Joe and Jane Sixpack would shell out $50+/mo just to watch TV seemed pretty ludicrous, but it's the norm today.
There was an industry study done recently, covered here in Slashdot I believe, that showed that Americans would probably accept $200 fees for digital cable, movies on demands, and other digital services.
TV has transformed from entertainment to a basic utility; the marketing departments of the nations cable companies have convincced the Sixpacks that they need this sort of bread and circuses. So don't ewxpect the Sixpacks to turn off the TV any time soon.
...this is getting old. Isn't there *any* real news today?
The occasional April Fool's joke is funny, when it's mixed in with real content. But none of the ones posted so far today are funny enough to even stand out from the rest of the lameness.
Basically, the taller they got, the larger their bones had to be to support their weight, the larger their hearts had to be to send blood through their large body, which means they would need larger lungs to support the oxygen into their blood, which would mean their inner cavity would be incredibly massive.. which would mean simple massive bulk. Overall a large weight. While they could walk easily, do the math for how much weight that would be landing on one leg in full stride at 40 mph. (I can't do the math, I just know it's big *grin*)
OK, here's the engineering problem in a nutshell:
Length is, by definition, linear.
Strength, in materials, scales with the second power (square) of length.
Mass scales with the third power (cube) of length.
So going back to that ostrich, if you somehow grew an ostrich to twice normal height, all other things being equal, it would weigh 8 times (2^3) as much, and would require four times (2^2) the muscle and bone cross-sectional area, to stand.
In my opinion, the ostrich is a great example. Compared to a smaller bird, say a turkey, it's mostly legs. Double it's size, it has to be mostly leg; scale it up to T.Rex size, it's almost ALL leg, just as these researchers say.
Well, DUH. I coulda told 'em that, with little more than a pocket calculator.
This isn't to say that I think T.Rex and his ilk couldn't run; perhaps their muscles were more efficient than current reptiles and birds, or they adapted a running motion that used their mass to aid locomotion rather than impede it. There are many creatures in nature who's performance can't be explained easily, this may be another such case.
The coupon book itself wasn't all that expensive -- the deals were promotional and each book only cost the company something like $12.00, so the net was around $52,000 for the week. Not bad for a computer sitting in the corner with a $100 piece of software -- this likely explains why spammers stay at it.
It also explains why SPAM pisses people off. 200 sales out of 80,000 emails/day is a "hit rate" of only 0.25%. The other 99.75% of recipients were inconvenienced for the sake of those handful of sales.
In any other field of marketing, that sort of rate of return wouldn't fly. But because it costs nothing to send email, such an abysmal rate is not only acceptable, but profitable. That's the real reason spammers "stay at it."
Yes, the designers *did* design it well at the time, but it also benefits from the fact that it was designed very simply, and because it was designed so long ago, is somewhat overdesigned. The simplicity makes for high reliability and easy modifications, and the overdesign makes for extra margin to allow it do go waay outside the original design envelope.
Case in point: while originally designed for high-altitude bombing, in recent years it's een adapted to fly nap-of-the-earth low-altitude penetration missions. Instead of cruising at a high altitude in a straight line, now they pull over 4Gs regularly. Bet the designers never pictured *that*.
P.S.: The wings have small wheels at the wingtips to keep them from dragging with a full fuel load. In level flight, the wingtips are about ten feet higher. At 4Gs, the wingtips bend upwards another *22 feet*.
I've seen tail number 8 at Dryden, and I've actually been in the *second* oldest operational BUFF*: Tail number 12. Back when I was working on assorted cruise missle programs, it was our USAF testbed, also at Edwards, but over on the military end.
Both of 'em are major hangar queens. But on the other hand, I hope I'm operational when I'm their age;{)
I often worked on the test missle in the same hangar as #12. The floor under most of it was lined with drip pans, cos it leaked fuel like a sieve. Even with the ridiculously low flight hoursit racked up, it was responsible quite a number of services hours.
On one occasion, the crew chief let my team up into the cockpit for a look-see. Now I'd been in other cockpits before, and always found 'em fascinating; #12 wasn't so much a technological experience as an archeological one. Looking at some chipped spots on the pilot's control column, I counted no less than seven diferent layers of paint. The cockpit in general looked like the interior of a VW Minibus that had been in use since Woodstock. Oh yeah, and it smelled like a gym locker...:{D
So, why are these old warhorses still flying?? Well, it's easy duty. Take off, pull no Gs, drop a test vehicle, and head home. Don't need a new plane for that. Since they're dedicated as testbeds, they can be easily modified to suit the mission without effecting operational readiness of a service aircraft. And with all those powerful engines and those enormous wings, it's got enough lift to haul even heavy payloads to high altitudes.
The B-52 ranks up there amongst history's best weapons systems for a good reason: versatility. Originally designed as a high-altitude nuclear bomber, recent models have been refitted with FLIR and terrain avoidance radar, and can fly many tons of conventional ordnance at nap-of-the-earth altitudes and high subsonic speeds. Or loiter at very high altitude and drop GPS-guided smartbombs at assorted targets over an area the size of New Jersey.
The original designers, if they're still alive, should be damn proud at what their baby is capable of.
* BUFF: colloquial name, or term of endearment, for the B-52. Stands for "Big Ugly Fat Fucker". Or, for the politially correct, "Big Ugly Fat Fellow".
Heat... Noise... Funny, I have four computers running in Mission Control, and I don't have these problems.
Oh, wait... two of 'em are Macs, one's a laptop, and the other's a Pentium 166. No wonder, my hardware's not *modern* enough to cause problems, I guess:{D
Ya know, tho, it's getting chilly in there this time of year, maybe I really *do* need to build me an Athlon box. Kinda expensive as space heaters go, but as long as I turn up the speakers some...;{)
The part of this whole story that galls me most is Microsoft's excuse: "We blocked Mozilla and Opera because they are not sufficiently standards compliant." Opera and Mozilla are both far more compliant with the W3C than anything Redmond has wrought. Heck, IE6 is a step *backwards* in compliance, with it's fscked-up CSS box model.
Oh, wait, it just hit me: Microsoft wasn't talking about W3C standards. They were talking about *Microsoft* standards.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that this was an isolated incident. "Embrace, Extend Extinguish." The era of MSHTML, MSCSS, and the whole Microsoft Internet(TM) has just begun.
Hydrogen as safe alternative fuel... Um... Hindenburg, anyone? =:{o
No, it wouldn't burn for a sustained time, like jet fuel did, but it would burn even more violently, hence causing more initial injuries.
In fact, a more violent explosion mith have collapsed the towers right away, and those 10,000 or so folk wouldn't have had the chance to escape like they did.
Then there's the issue of storage... wouldn't high-pressure crtyogenic fuel tanks be prohibitively heavy for an aircraft?
If you go into the store claiming your CD doesn't work and the seal HAS been broken, the best they will do is provide you with a replacement of the same item.
So?
The CD you returned to the store will still be returned by the store to the distributor. It'll still cost someone some time, money, and hassle. And of course, the replacement CD won't work, either, so you just repeat the process, until the store gives up and just refunds your money.
Heck, the more cycles of this you can pull off before the store folds, the better. Trust me, when the store presents a big stack of "faulty" CDs to the distributor for refund, it'll get the disty's attention. That means that our consumer dissatisfaction registers at yet another level in the food chain.
Pisst off consumers leading to pisst off retailers leading to pisst off distributors leading to MAJOR backlash at the manufacturers. It's all good.:{D
I know watcha mean. I used to live about a mile from NAS Miramar in San Diego (as made famous in that silly "Top Gun" flick).
I amazed me how the Yuppie Scum would move up there, and then b1tch about the jet noise. A local entrepreneur madea tidy sum selling bumper stickers to us locals, reading "That's Not Jet Noise, That's the Sound of FREEDOM!"
As I mention elsewhere, I know the F-15 uses afterburners. My point is, the MiG's afterburners are *huge*, bigger than the rest of the engine. The Soviets only achieved Mach 3 by sheer brute force.
Oh, and thanks for mentioning the YF-23. I worked on that one, and for the record, the YF-22 didn't "beat it", it was chosen on purely political grounds. The YF-23 was lighter, cheaper, and outperformed the YF-22 in most respects. It only had one major design flaw: it wasn't built in Texas.
Yes, I realize that all Mach 2+ aircraft before the F-22 use afterburners. My point is, the afterburners on the MiG-25 are *huge*. When I saw a diagram of that Tumansky engine, the first thing that struck me was that the afterburner section was bigger than the rest of the engine! Sure, if you dump enough fuel into the tailpipe, you can go real real fast, but it's a brute-force solution.
The shock-wave-and-wingtip stuff I got from an aerodynamicist I worked with. Since he knew a lot more abotu aero than me, I took him at his word. As another poster mentioned, the shock wave would hit the inlets at about the same time as the wingtips, which was probably what the aero guy meant.
The biggest problem with a turbojet is that it won't work at supersonic speeds. If the shock wave hits the compressor, things stop working fast.
So how do planes fly faster than sound? Well, their inlets are designed to slow the intake air down to subsonic speeds before it gets to the compressor. Above mach 2 or so, you need complex variable-geometry inlets that allow in very little air, then allow it to expand in volume to slow it down.
Problem is, the faster you go, the harder it gets to slow the air down *and* deliver enough to the engine to generate sufficient thrust to maintain airspeed. The practical limit seems to be between Mach 3.5 to Mach 4.0.
Ramjets don't have compressors, and so they aren't limited to the subsonic regime; in fact, they work very efficiently at supersonic speeds. So theoretically, you could push a ramjet up to Mach 5, Mach 7, who knows? But a ramjet designed for supersonic speed doesn't work at subsonic speed, hence the rocket booster mentioned in the article.
The SR-71 has been clocked at a little over Mach 3. Most folks in the business believe it'll go faster.
Rumor has it that no pilot yet has been brave enough to actually put the pedal all the way to the metal. The airframe itself probably limits it to about Mach 3.5 or 3.6; at that point, the shock cone is swept back to where it hits the wing tips, which is a Very Bad Thing.
If I recall correctly, the F-15C tops out at about Mach 2.8, which is pretty impressive for a conventional turbine engine. The former Soviet Union went to great lengths to beat that, the result of which was the MiG-25, which reached Mach 3, but only by using an enormous afterburner that sucked fuel like crazy, limiting such speeds to short bursts.
Slashdot Mirror
One big problem with this chart, and all the Visibone products: reflective (printed) color is *never* gonna match up well to screen color. Big show stopper there.
To make matters worse, they overlay text, in white or black, over the color samples, which alters the perception of the colors.
What I'd *love* to see them produce is an on-screen version of their charts, sans labels. See a color you like, roll your cursor over it, and up pops the HTML color value. You could do this with a big GIF on a Web page, with a big honkin' image map over it to supply the pop-up values. Even better, make it so if you click a color, it'll take you to another page that gives you useful options such as viewing text in the chosen color against backgrounds of another color, or v/v. Now THAT I could use.
My point exactly. There *should* always be someone innovating, but once a technology becomes a commodity, and you have to compete solely on price, the incentive to do so evaporates along with your margins.
So what?
Innovation doesn't matter. Most drive are sold to OEMs, and all they really care about is price. If an OEM drive goes bad, the OEM pulls it and sends it back to the manufacturer, and the manuf. eats most of the loss.
That's the real danger of a commodity market: that price pressure makes innovation, and even quality, irrelevant.
I very seriously doubt the deskstar caused IBM to give up... At what point do you say "we're making...$.50 per drive we sell. Let's give up." ?
If, as you say, they were only making $0.50 per drive, that's an awful narrow profit margin. It doesn't take too many returns to wipe that slim profit out completely.
I think the DeathStar debacle had a *lot* to do with this development.
Hmmm.... I dunno why you're so focused on the problem of paper records, but that wasn't even mentioned in the article. The robot was designed to transport *meds* and otherbulky stuff that TCP/IP can't handle.
Beside, one could make the argument that a robot like TOBOR would be just as reliable, even moreso, than an electronic system for transporting test results and reports. It's a lot easier to lose a chunk of bytes in a computer system (especially if it's Windoze-based...;{) than to misplace 400 pounds of robot. With a built-in safe, no less.
Did you read the article? The robot doesn't interract with patients, other than to avoid bumping into them in the corridors and elevators. It simply delivers medication and such from the pharmacy to the various nurses' stations. The whole idea is to free up the humans to give the sort of human care you talk about, rather than schlepping meds around and other such menial labor.
Don't we all wish.
The sad truth is that Americans will be lulled into the New Improved! picture quality, and gladly shell out more and more money for the priviledge.
Don't think so? Well, back when cable TV first debuted, the idea that Joe and Jane Sixpack would shell out $50+/mo just to watch TV seemed pretty ludicrous, but it's the norm today.
There was an industry study done recently, covered here in Slashdot I believe, that showed that Americans would probably accept $200 fees for digital cable, movies on demands, and other digital services.
TV has transformed from entertainment to a basic utility; the marketing departments of the nations cable companies have convincced the Sixpacks that they need this sort of bread and circuses. So don't ewxpect the Sixpacks to turn off the TV any time soon.
The occasional April Fool's joke is funny, when it's mixed in with real content. But none of the ones posted so far today are funny enough to even stand out from the rest of the lameness.
Wake me up when it's April 2.
OK, here's the engineering problem in a nutshell:
So going back to that ostrich, if you somehow grew an ostrich to twice normal height, all other things being equal, it would weigh 8 times (2^3) as much, and would require four times (2^2) the muscle and bone cross-sectional area, to stand.
In my opinion, the ostrich is a great example. Compared to a smaller bird, say a turkey, it's mostly legs. Double it's size, it has to be mostly leg; scale it up to T.Rex size, it's almost ALL leg, just as these researchers say.
Well, DUH. I coulda told 'em that, with little more than a pocket calculator.
This isn't to say that I think T.Rex and his ilk couldn't run; perhaps their muscles were more efficient than current reptiles and birds, or they adapted a running motion that used their mass to aid locomotion rather than impede it. There are many creatures in nature who's performance can't be explained easily, this may be another such case.
The coupon book itself wasn't all that expensive -- the deals were promotional and each book only cost the company something like $12.00, so the net was around $52,000 for the week. Not bad for a computer sitting in the corner with a $100 piece of software -- this likely explains why spammers stay at it.
It also explains why SPAM pisses people off. 200 sales out of 80,000 emails/day is a "hit rate" of only 0.25%. The other 99.75% of recipients were inconvenienced for the sake of those handful of sales.
In any other field of marketing, that sort of rate of return wouldn't fly. But because it costs nothing to send email, such an abysmal rate is not only acceptable, but profitable. That's the real reason spammers "stay at it."
Case in point: while originally designed for high-altitude bombing, in recent years it's een adapted to fly nap-of-the-earth low-altitude penetration missions. Instead of cruising at a high altitude in a straight line, now they pull over 4Gs regularly. Bet the designers never pictured *that*.
P.S.: The wings have small wheels at the wingtips to keep them from dragging with a full fuel load. In level flight, the wingtips are about ten feet higher. At 4Gs, the wingtips bend upwards another *22 feet*.
Both of 'em are major hangar queens. But on the other hand, I hope I'm operational when I'm their age ;{)
I often worked on the test missle in the same hangar as #12. The floor under most of it was lined with drip pans, cos it leaked fuel like a sieve. Even with the ridiculously low flight hoursit racked up, it was responsible quite a number of services hours.
On one occasion, the crew chief let my team up into the cockpit for a look-see. Now I'd been in other cockpits before, and always found 'em fascinating; #12 wasn't so much a technological experience as an archeological one. Looking at some chipped spots on the pilot's control column, I counted no less than seven diferent layers of paint. The cockpit in general looked like the interior of a VW Minibus that had been in use since Woodstock. Oh yeah, and it smelled like a gym locker... :{D
So, why are these old warhorses still flying?? Well, it's easy duty. Take off, pull no Gs, drop a test vehicle, and head home. Don't need a new plane for that. Since they're dedicated as testbeds, they can be easily modified to suit the mission without effecting operational readiness of a service aircraft. And with all those powerful engines and those enormous wings, it's got enough lift to haul even heavy payloads to high altitudes.
The B-52 ranks up there amongst history's best weapons systems for a good reason: versatility. Originally designed as a high-altitude nuclear bomber, recent models have been refitted with FLIR and terrain avoidance radar, and can fly many tons of conventional ordnance at nap-of-the-earth altitudes and high subsonic speeds. Or loiter at very high altitude and drop GPS-guided smartbombs at assorted targets over an area the size of New Jersey.
The original designers, if they're still alive, should be damn proud at what their baby is capable of.
* BUFF: colloquial name, or term of endearment, for the B-52. Stands for "Big Ugly Fat Fucker". Or, for the politially correct, "Big Ugly Fat Fellow".
Oh, wait... two of 'em are Macs, one's a laptop, and the other's a Pentium 166. No wonder, my hardware's not *modern* enough to cause problems, I guess :{D
Ya know, tho, it's getting chilly in there this time of year, maybe I really *do* need to build me an Athlon box. Kinda expensive as space heaters go, but as long as I turn up the speakers some... ;{)
The part of this whole story that galls me most is Microsoft's excuse: "We blocked Mozilla and Opera because they are not sufficiently standards compliant." Opera and Mozilla are both far more compliant with the W3C than anything Redmond has wrought. Heck, IE6 is a step *backwards* in compliance, with it's fscked-up CSS box model. Oh, wait, it just hit me: Microsoft wasn't talking about W3C standards. They were talking about *Microsoft* standards. Don't make the mistake of thinking that this was an isolated incident. "Embrace, Extend Extinguish." The era of MSHTML, MSCSS, and the whole Microsoft Internet(TM) has just begun.
Only if each voter included a $100 "campaign contribution" along with their comments.
Heh heh heh... gotta remember THAT word next time I play Scrabble ;{>
Hydrogen as safe alternative fuel... Um... Hindenburg, anyone? =:{o
No, it wouldn't burn for a sustained time, like jet fuel did, but it would burn even more violently, hence causing more initial injuries.
In fact, a more violent explosion mith have collapsed the towers right away, and those 10,000 or so folk wouldn't have had the chance to escape like they did.
Then there's the issue of storage... wouldn't high-pressure crtyogenic fuel tanks be prohibitively heavy for an aircraft?
If you go into the store claiming your CD doesn't work and the seal HAS been broken, the best they will do is provide you with a replacement of the same item.
So?
The CD you returned to the store will still be returned by the store to the distributor. It'll still cost someone some time, money, and hassle. And of course, the replacement CD won't work, either, so you just repeat the process, until the store gives up and just refunds your money.
Heck, the more cycles of this you can pull off before the store folds, the better. Trust me, when the store presents a big stack of "faulty" CDs to the distributor for refund, it'll get the disty's attention. That means that our consumer dissatisfaction registers at yet another level in the food chain.
Pisst off consumers leading to pisst off retailers leading to pisst off distributors leading to MAJOR backlash at the manufacturers. It's all good. :{D
I know watcha mean. I used to live about a mile from NAS Miramar in San Diego (as made famous in that silly "Top Gun" flick).
I amazed me how the Yuppie Scum would move up there, and then b1tch about the jet noise. A local entrepreneur madea tidy sum selling bumper stickers to us locals, reading "That's Not Jet Noise, That's the Sound of FREEDOM!"
What factual error?
As I mention elsewhere, I know the F-15 uses afterburners. My point is, the MiG's afterburners are *huge*, bigger than the rest of the engine. The Soviets only achieved Mach 3 by sheer brute force.
Oh, and thanks for mentioning the YF-23. I worked on that one, and for the record, the YF-22 didn't "beat it", it was chosen on purely political grounds. The YF-23 was lighter, cheaper, and outperformed the YF-22 in most respects. It only had one major design flaw: it wasn't built in Texas.
Hmmm... I didn't say that the Soviets pushed the MiG-25 to beat the *F-15*. I meant that they worked very hard to beat that *speed*.
Yes, I realize that all Mach 2+ aircraft before the F-22 use afterburners. My point is, the afterburners on the MiG-25 are *huge*. When I saw a diagram of that Tumansky engine, the first thing that struck me was that the afterburner section was bigger than the rest of the engine! Sure, if you dump enough fuel into the tailpipe, you can go real real fast, but it's a brute-force solution.
The shock-wave-and-wingtip stuff I got from an aerodynamicist I worked with. Since he knew a lot more abotu aero than me, I took him at his word. As another poster mentioned, the shock wave would hit the inlets at about the same time as the wingtips, which was probably what the aero guy meant.
Nope, it was a conventional turbojet.
The biggest problem with a turbojet is that it won't work at supersonic speeds. If the shock wave hits the compressor, things stop working fast.
So how do planes fly faster than sound? Well, their inlets are designed to slow the intake air down to subsonic speeds before it gets to the compressor. Above mach 2 or so, you need complex variable-geometry inlets that allow in very little air, then allow it to expand in volume to slow it down.
Problem is, the faster you go, the harder it gets to slow the air down *and* deliver enough to the engine to generate sufficient thrust to maintain airspeed. The practical limit seems to be between Mach 3.5 to Mach 4.0.
Ramjets don't have compressors, and so they aren't limited to the subsonic regime; in fact, they work very efficiently at supersonic speeds. So theoretically, you could push a ramjet up to Mach 5, Mach 7, who knows? But a ramjet designed for supersonic speed doesn't work at subsonic speed, hence the rocket booster mentioned in the article.
Whoops, you're right, my mistake... it goes *down with altitude. Guess that shows how long I've been outta the business...
The SR-71 has been clocked at a little over Mach 3. Most folks in the business believe it'll go faster.
Rumor has it that no pilot yet has been brave enough to actually put the pedal all the way to the metal. The airframe itself probably limits it to about Mach 3.5 or 3.6; at that point, the shock cone is swept back to where it hits the wing tips, which is a Very Bad Thing.
If I recall correctly, the F-15C tops out at about Mach 2.8, which is pretty impressive for a conventional turbine engine. The former Soviet Union went to great lengths to beat that, the result of which was the MiG-25, which reached Mach 3, but only by using an enormous afterburner that sucked fuel like crazy, limiting such speeds to short bursts.