I think Neutron stars are around 20km diameter (size of a small city), quite a bit smaller than Belgium. Plus, they often spin very quickly due to the conservation of angular momentum (think of the ice skaters spinning with arms stretched compared to closed thing).
From what I can read of it, the facility appears to do both suborbital and orbital launches, but only for science/research. There's no corporate sub orbital launches, and that's because NASA pays a large amount of the operation of the centre. If NASA were to do commercial sub-orbital launches, then they would cost a LOT more than any sub-orbital research mission. Plus, the sub-orbital launches are only for objects, not people, which adds more to the cost. It's putting people into space that has always caused costs to spiral .
So really I should have put "any equivalent" in my phrase that you quoted. However, NASA has done a lot of research into getting cheaper space access, but has always been too stuck in its ways to find something new. The X-Prize was always going to create a lot of new real working designs for getting to space, even if they are all ultimately flawed by only being capable of sub-orbital launches.
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/StaverieBoundo uris.shtml states the SRBs providing about 71% of the thrust during take off and first stage ascent. The first stage burns the most amount of fuel as it has to do more work than subsequent stages.
And the whole point of using SRBs is because H2/O2 isn't a cheaper alternative. H2/O2 may be more efficient in terms of raw energy released per unit mass, but that doesn't actually translate to a more efficient rocket. You have to take into account extra things such as the mass from the engines, storage (cryogenics adds a lot of weight), pipes, nozzles, valves, computers (redundancy on these), etc. Whereas the SRBs have a lot less extra mass and therefore provide a better punch. It's a bit like comparing a cheap firework and a model plane,the firework trades control for power, and when a typical launch costs $300 million, the firework model looks like a big bonus for a CEO.
I think what they mean is that it is cheaper than an equivalent NASA attempt. NASA doesn't do sub-orbital launches, and therefore any similar launch by NASA would cost a lot more in terms of $ and safety. To get to orbit you can't use the hybrid engines that SpaceShipOne has, there's just not enough kick per unit mass. And the Shuttle only manages to crawl into space because of its solid rocket boosters, that massive tank in between the SRBs (liquid H2/O2 mix) contributes a small % to the overall thrust.
The technology for sub-orbital flights obviously has been around for a long time. Yet the costs involved for even sub-orbital launches have always been high due them being entirely governmental companies. The X-Prize was setup to find out the cheapest way to get the ordinary person into space, whereas the state space programs have always been about pushing the boundaries of human exploration. The cheapest way is to only go as far as the edge of space to save massively on the thrust and energy requirements. The savings that this makes can then be offset by using a less effective fuel (hybrid), but that has the advantage of being a lot safer. The hybrid engines use fuels that generally are easy to store safely (non of this cryogenic nonsense like the shuttle) and also can be switched off in the event of a malfunction (SRBs once lit burn all the way to the tip).
People will still have to pay $20 million to the russians to go into space for a few days, so there is still going to be a large gap between those that go sub-orbital and the few that can afford to pay for orbital space access.
A good client will update to work with new features of mainstream clients?
Or is this a typical slashdot case of "screw the lock in software"?
I ask this because almost everyone in the UK uses MSN Messenger to chat with online. Of course everyone upgrades when Microsoft tells them to, leading to an ever more bloated client with a few more "features". Some features are useful, but alternative clients don't appear to handle them well or at all.
I agree with most of what you say apart from the winmodem price comment. In the UK, sofware modems were generally 40-50 pounds cheaper than a good hardware modem. So that's around 60-70$ cheaper (inc tax). Winmodems were also awful for generating ping spikes and dropped packets, which I found mostly due to playing Quake online. The difference between hardware and software modem pings were about 200ms. So obviously 500ms to a server was unplayable and therefore (for me) the modem was useless.
Standards are all good as long as they are "open". I don't think anyone wants a.Net based standard to take over application development as that will hurt OSS. And I don't think Java is the way to go either, as Sun make it difficult to use Java on free OS's like Ubuntu...
I have had similar problems in the past. The only thing that works is Ubuntu on my laptop, although I haven't bothered tring to install the nvidia gfx drivers for it:/
Distro's that I've had serious problems with detecting and using hardware: Mandrake, Redhat 8.0, Debian sarge, Ubuntu 5.10.
My current problem is getting Ubuntu to use my TV card. There is some sort of conflict between it and my sound card whereby Ubuntu thinks my TV card is a sound card. This then prevents any tvtime software from working, and of course sound doesn't work due to fact it's trying to use the TV card. Everything in my system has simple well known chipsets. I've done what most people do and spent 50+ hours trying to fix this problem without success. I posted on forums and tried many things. The only result that I can tell you is that trying to get things to "just work" tends to mess up the OS. I have installed/removed so many different files that I have no idea what's on my machine (nor what's meant to be on)!
The people on Ubuntu forums are very helpful, but they couldn't actually help. The only solutions were:
1. Remove TV Card, or
2. Run alsaconf after every boot in order to unload all sound drivers followed by loading the correct one, and then modprobe bttv
Obviously #1 is a no brainer and #2 is just a pain to do.
I see myself as the bridge between the PC guru's and the average person. I know a reasonable amount of techy stuff, but I don't know things like compiling kernels/source code. I can setup basic networks, install programs, troubleshoot things, build PCs etc. For me, linux is just too difficult to get to work. Linux is ok for the average person and for the techy types as they don't try to do things they can do in windows but will ultimately fail in Linux. Things like setting up a printer over a network (standard parallel port type) I have yet to do in Linux, but in windows it's fairly straight forward... share printer, check firewall settings, ok done. These two things in Linux I imagine require a lot more time and expertise to learn how to do and to actually do.
Personally I think Linux needs to be able to win over people like me inorder to become mainstream. Generally speaking, it's people like me that help their friends fix their computers or install new things. Without us being "on board" I don't see why the average person will want a linux pc, as they won't have that "easy friendly help" that most people have at the moment with windows.
I always wonder why we don't put our efforts into looking for entangled photons. If we could trap them, then surely we could communicate instantly with whatever civilisation sent them. Of course they might not exist by the time the photons get here...
I still have my 9 year old floppy drive in my current desktop. I've upgraded over the years from a cyrix 200 MHz to a p4 3.2 GHz via a p3 700 MHz and a Athlon 1700+.
It works like new! Best thing I ever got!!
So what's the future like in IT without any IT qualifications and minimal experience? I ask, because, I'm in that sort of situation. I have a degree in a retard science (s p a c e sciences), which had some elements of IT, but not much. Graduated this year at the ripe old age of 25. Should I just consign myself as an office administrator?
I've worked as a programmer (VB6/SQL) for a few months in the past before i went to uni, but didn't like it. I know the usual general stuff about computers. Oh forgot one thing, I also dropped out of a Computer Science degree before I was a programmer!
Please be brutally honest:]
(I'm also 20K GBP in debt, do you think it's worth it?)
For the first time in the UK, money made from breaking the law (in this case speeding) was used by local police to buy resources to fine more people breaking the law. So they basically fine people and then use the fines to get more fines. They brought out speed cameras, mobile (gun sized) speed cameras, clock based speed cameras.
Obviously you can see where this has lead, so what's next? Issuing fines for accelerating too fast, breaking too harshly, etc.
So it occured to me that this kind of thing is like a pyramid scheme, that we've all been opted into and there's only one winner. And I'm sure that pyramid schemes are illegal in the UK...
Interferometry and adaptive optics would decrease the cost by breaking the telescope into many smaller telescopes to acheive the same collecting power. The OWL is a proposed 100m telescope, but 390m is probably not even on the drawing board yet...
AS far as I know, there is no "explanation" for entanglement and the inherent instantaneous communication. I'm sure Einstein said it was "spooky action at a distance" or something along those lines. So i guess the ball is still in the court...somewhere:]
Surely, any alien civilisation would be sending out 1 out of each pair of entangled photons. They would keep one and keeping changing its spin. This would allow for instantaneous communication. Obviously we would need to technology to capture one or more of these photons. How far off is this technology and is it possible theoretically? (i.e. doesn't break any laws)
Slashdot Mirror
What's ingress and egress mean to a non techie?
3) Leave the french-hatred to countries that have a reason to hate the french. Like New Zealand or just about anywhere in the South Pacific
The English hate the french the most, we've fought loads of wars, including one that lasted 100 years. So if anyone hates them its us :]
I think Neutron stars are around 20km diameter (size of a small city), quite a bit smaller than Belgium. Plus, they often spin very quickly due to the conservation of angular momentum (think of the ice skaters spinning with arms stretched compared to closed thing).
From what I can read of it, the facility appears to do both suborbital and orbital launches, but only for science/research. There's no corporate sub orbital launches, and that's because NASA pays a large amount of the operation of the centre. If NASA were to do commercial sub-orbital launches, then they would cost a LOT more than any sub-orbital research mission. Plus, the sub-orbital launches are only for objects, not people, which adds more to the cost. It's putting people into space that has always caused costs to spiral .
So really I should have put "any equivalent" in my phrase that you quoted. However, NASA has done a lot of research into getting cheaper space access, but has always been too stuck in its ways to find something new. The X-Prize was always going to create a lot of new real working designs for getting to space, even if they are all ultimately flawed by only being capable of sub-orbital launches.
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/StaverieBoundo uris.shtml states the SRBs providing about 71% of the thrust during take off and first stage ascent. The first stage burns the most amount of fuel as it has to do more work than subsequent stages.
And the whole point of using SRBs is because H2/O2 isn't a cheaper alternative. H2/O2 may be more efficient in terms of raw energy released per unit mass, but that doesn't actually translate to a more efficient rocket. You have to take into account extra things such as the mass from the engines, storage (cryogenics adds a lot of weight), pipes, nozzles, valves, computers (redundancy on these), etc. Whereas the SRBs have a lot less extra mass and therefore provide a better punch. It's a bit like comparing a cheap firework and a model plane,the firework trades control for power, and when a typical launch costs $300 million, the firework model looks like a big bonus for a CEO.
I think what they mean is that it is cheaper than an equivalent NASA attempt. NASA doesn't do sub-orbital launches, and therefore any similar launch by NASA would cost a lot more in terms of $ and safety. To get to orbit you can't use the hybrid engines that SpaceShipOne has, there's just not enough kick per unit mass. And the Shuttle only manages to crawl into space because of its solid rocket boosters, that massive tank in between the SRBs (liquid H2/O2 mix) contributes a small % to the overall thrust.
The technology for sub-orbital flights obviously has been around for a long time. Yet the costs involved for even sub-orbital launches have always been high due them being entirely governmental companies. The X-Prize was setup to find out the cheapest way to get the ordinary person into space, whereas the state space programs have always been about pushing the boundaries of human exploration. The cheapest way is to only go as far as the edge of space to save massively on the thrust and energy requirements. The savings that this makes can then be offset by using a less effective fuel (hybrid), but that has the advantage of being a lot safer. The hybrid engines use fuels that generally are easy to store safely (non of this cryogenic nonsense like the shuttle) and also can be switched off in the event of a malfunction (SRBs once lit burn all the way to the tip).
People will still have to pay $20 million to the russians to go into space for a few days, so there is still going to be a large gap between those that go sub-orbital and the few that can afford to pay for orbital space access.
The celeron 300A was also probably the best cpu for overclocking.
A good client will update to work with new features of mainstream clients?
Or is this a typical slashdot case of "screw the lock in software"?
I ask this because almost everyone in the UK uses MSN Messenger to chat with online. Of course everyone upgrades when Microsoft tells them to, leading to an ever more bloated client with a few more "features". Some features are useful, but alternative clients don't appear to handle them well or at all.
I agree with most of what you say apart from the winmodem price comment. In the UK, sofware modems were generally 40-50 pounds cheaper than a good hardware modem. So that's around 60-70$ cheaper (inc tax). Winmodems were also awful for generating ping spikes and dropped packets, which I found mostly due to playing Quake online. The difference between hardware and software modem pings were about 200ms. So obviously 500ms to a server was unplayable and therefore (for me) the modem was useless.
.Net based standard to take over application development as that will hurt OSS. And I don't think Java is the way to go either, as Sun make it difficult to use Java on free OS's like Ubuntu...
Standards are all good as long as they are "open". I don't think anyone wants a
For some strange reason, I lost all my "return" formatting so that all that was posted was one large block! sigh
I have had similar problems in the past. The only thing that works is Ubuntu on my laptop, although I haven't bothered tring to install the nvidia gfx drivers for it :/
Distro's that I've had serious problems with detecting and using hardware: Mandrake, Redhat 8.0, Debian sarge, Ubuntu 5.10.
My current problem is getting Ubuntu to use my TV card. There is some sort of conflict between it and my sound card whereby Ubuntu thinks my TV card is a sound card. This then prevents any tvtime software from working, and of course sound doesn't work due to fact it's trying to use the TV card. Everything in my system has simple well known chipsets. I've done what most people do and spent 50+ hours trying to fix this problem without success. I posted on forums and tried many things. The only result that I can tell you is that trying to get things to "just work" tends to mess up the OS. I have installed/removed so many different files that I have no idea what's on my machine (nor what's meant to be on)!
The people on Ubuntu forums are very helpful, but they couldn't actually help. The only solutions were:
1. Remove TV Card, or
2. Run alsaconf after every boot in order to unload all sound drivers followed by loading the correct one, and then modprobe bttv
Obviously #1 is a no brainer and #2 is just a pain to do.
I see myself as the bridge between the PC guru's and the average person. I know a reasonable amount of techy stuff, but I don't know things like compiling kernels/source code. I can setup basic networks, install programs, troubleshoot things, build PCs etc. For me, linux is just too difficult to get to work. Linux is ok for the average person and for the techy types as they don't try to do things they can do in windows but will ultimately fail in Linux. Things like setting up a printer over a network (standard parallel port type) I have yet to do in Linux, but in windows it's fairly straight forward... share printer, check firewall settings, ok done. These two things in Linux I imagine require a lot more time and expertise to learn how to do and to actually do.
Personally I think Linux needs to be able to win over people like me inorder to become mainstream. Generally speaking, it's people like me that help their friends fix their computers or install new things. Without us being "on board" I don't see why the average person will want a linux pc, as they won't have that "easy friendly help" that most people have at the moment with windows.
actually, the dust got in through their boots aswell. Apparently the dust is so fine it can get through "air tight" spaces.
I always wonder why we don't put our efforts into looking for entangled photons. If we could trap them, then surely we could communicate instantly with whatever civilisation sent them. Of course they might not exist by the time the photons get here...
according to slyck.com , kazaa (fastrack network) still has the most users of any network, shortly followed by edonkey/emule.
I still have my 9 year old floppy drive in my current desktop. I've upgraded over the years from a cyrix 200 MHz to a p4 3.2 GHz via a p3 700 MHz and a Athlon 1700+. It works like new! Best thing I ever got!!
So what's the future like in IT without any IT qualifications and minimal experience? I ask, because, I'm in that sort of situation. I have a degree in a retard science (s p a c e sciences), which had some elements of IT, but not much. Graduated this year at the ripe old age of 25. Should I just consign myself as an office administrator?
:]
I've worked as a programmer (VB6/SQL) for a few months in the past before i went to uni, but didn't like it. I know the usual general stuff about computers. Oh forgot one thing, I also dropped out of a Computer Science degree before I was a programmer!
Please be brutally honest
(I'm also 20K GBP in debt, do you think it's worth it?)
For the first time in the UK, money made from breaking the law (in this case speeding) was used by local police to buy resources to fine more people breaking the law. So they basically fine people and then use the fines to get more fines. They brought out speed cameras, mobile (gun sized) speed cameras, clock based speed cameras. Obviously you can see where this has lead, so what's next? Issuing fines for accelerating too fast, breaking too harshly, etc. So it occured to me that this kind of thing is like a pyramid scheme, that we've all been opted into and there's only one winner. And I'm sure that pyramid schemes are illegal in the UK...
Interferometry and adaptive optics would decrease the cost by breaking the telescope into many smaller telescopes to acheive the same collecting power. The OWL is a proposed 100m telescope, but 390m is probably not even on the drawing board yet...
Most of my professors and lecturers during University did not know what I meant when I used ^ instead of superscript.
AS far as I know, there is no "explanation" for entanglement and the inherent instantaneous communication. I'm sure Einstein said it was "spooky action at a distance" or something along those lines. So i guess the ball is still in the court...somewhere :]
Surely, any alien civilisation would be sending out 1 out of each pair of entangled photons. They would keep one and keeping changing its spin. This would allow for instantaneous communication. Obviously we would need to technology to capture one or more of these photons. How far off is this technology and is it possible theoretically? (i.e. doesn't break any laws)