On this day, we learn from IBM's attorney, David Marriott that the "mountain of code" SCO's CEO Darl McBride told the world about from 2003 onward ends up being a measly 326 lines of noncopyrightable code that IBM didn't put in Linux anyway. Emphasis added. So even though they came up with lines of code they claim infringe, those line are not copyrightable.
I'm sure no one will see this as it's much too late. But most of the modded-up posts I see aren't looking at the primary heat loss you'll experience in space, or in a vacuum of any kind. Water evaporation. If you take a jar of water and put it into a vacuum it will freeze over very quickly, because of the heat of evaporation, the same way sweat evaporation cools the body. Since our bodies are basically bags of water, if you put us in space unprotected, that water will promptly be sucked out of us by the near-zero pressure, and the evaporation will leave us frozen solid. The same thing applies to any fluid leaking from a spacecraft. It will probably rapidly form small ice spheres, which will then rapidly sublimate into vapor, depending on its characteristics.
#1 is true, #2 is not. Hall thrusters (which is what the article is talking about) can be run in a high-thrust, low-efficiency mode, or a low-thrust, high-efficiency mode. The problem to date has been that the design is locked in to one or the other. What they've done is make a tuneable Hall thruster with a variable thrust and efficiency. This is actually pretty impressive considering how difficult it is just to tune a magnetic field for one operating point, let alone a few. And then to be able to shift the field on the fly to get better performance is an excellent result indeed.
The article was pretty crappy. There is absolutely nothing going on here for launch propulsion. Just in-space spacecraft propulsion only. That's usually station-keeping, but it can also be main propulsion for space probes.
The actual point of the article, which is pretty hard to see, is that this particular thruster design reduces the amount of propellant the satellite needs to take along. They already take propellant, so this does make the spacecraft lighter.
And it has nothing to do with launch or rockets, which is why the article and summary are both incredibly stupid.
I just watched "Who killed the electric car" tonight and saw this post and thought two things: 1) Why do they need concept cars when every single auto manufacturer had production electric cars? 2) Only 40 miles on a single charge, when the EV1 did better than that with older battery technology, and probably could be upgraded to 300 miles? Ridiculous. Not to mention the fact that every single car company repossessed almost every single electric car- there's a coincidence for you.
Definitely. I just recently bought a Creative Zen Vision:M 30MB and it's pretty nice. It plays tons of video formats, no DRM restrictions, FM receiver, voice recorder, etc. I'm not totally happy with the music organization, but it works well enough.
"So, now we see charged particle interaction halfway between the Sun and the Earth?"
Uhh, no. 40,000 miles is practically nothing in space. The distance to the Sun from the earth is about 1.5e11 meters, or about 2300 times more than 40,000 miles. The 40,000 mile mark is probably the front of the earth's bow shock into the solar wind. So the planets really are pretty much disconnected.
You're right. We should immediately stop wasting time and money on anything that does not directly and immediately improve the condition of the human race. Unfortunately, your proposal fails this test. As does most art and science and entertainment.
The first definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Main Entry: carp
Pronunciation: 'kärp
Function: intransitive verb
Etymology: Middle English, of Scandinavian origin; akin to Icelandic karpa to dispute
: to find fault or complain querulously
- carper noun
The entire post except for ONE line was about media self-censoring on the Mehlman thing. And that one line was about WP self-censorship (albeit on another subject). I really have no idea how the post can be construed as being party-specific, unless you consider any post about censorship to be left-wing. Heck, even the linked article about the WP censorship was about the censorship itself rather than the lie involved, regardless of what the other content was on the site. The only ideology I see here from/. is that censorship is bad. And I don't think most of the people reading this site have a problem with that particular point of view.
This is a technology site. And if someone is being elected that is anti-technology, I think it is completely reasonable to make the readers aware of that fact. It's not being on a soapbox- it's a piece of information that most readers of the site will be interested in.
People camped out for the opening of the Ikea store in Michigan recently. The actual store itself- not something in particular to buy inside. And yes, the store is still there, it wasn't blown up five hours after opening or something.
Quick! Someone call Google and tell them they don't have to censor their search results anymore! After all, if this guys says it, it must be true, right?
I've been thinking about getting an mp3 player for a while now. All I want is to play music, and have enough storage for my collection, plus room to grow. Say about 20GB. So, if I don't want to pay for a fancy screen and get a hard drive based player, what player should I be looking at? Does one exist at this point? All the hard-drive based ones seem to be video players too now.
Right, that's what I mean when I say it's fuzzy. Can the US court tell a UK court to shutdown Spamhaus operation? Can they tell a UK ISP to disconnect them? Could they restrict any US company from using their spam list? What exactly does the US court have jurisdiction to do here?
I would ask the same question in the RIM case- I don't remember what exactly the details were there that allowed the US court to threaten a shutdown of the system, but I would assume it entailed some physical presence on US soil, or violation of an international patent of some sort.
The #1 reason they didn't defend themselves is because they are a UK company and not under US jurisdiction. The #2 reason is that if they were to spend the money to defend themselves, they would open a precedent for any other spammer to sue them the same way.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for a foreign company to ignore a US court order in this case. A US court can't order a spammer in Russia to stop spamming, so why should they be able to order a spam-blocker to stop blocking spam?
The whole internation commerce thing is pretty fuzzy to me, so I don't really understand what a US court CAN do to a foreign company that sells its services to a US company.
Maybe it's just me, but you sound like you're just resisting going to a different technology where you have to learn a new set of skills. Grid/multi-processor computing is definitely not simple, but depending on how many spare CPU cycles you have, you'll get a much faster and larger speedup in your runs than if you tinker with the code to make it run faster single-threaded. Also, won't you need to do some multi-threaded on a multi-core machine as well? (I'm not particularly familiar with multi-cores, so I could be wrong).
I recommend learning how to use grid computing and convert the program. Not only will your code run faster at the end of the day, you'll gain a valuable set of skills that will look great on a resume.
This was a point brought up at the presentation. One of the linear accelerator guys was pretty sure that the struts holding the tracks in place would be transmitting huge amounts of energy, thereby heating the super-conducting magnets and possibly causing the struts to fail. The Launchpoint guy was sure that they had looked at the problem thoroughly though and that there wouldn't be an issue. Time will tell on that one...
Well, linear accelerators have some problems that are hard to overcome. One is actually getting the performance you want- you're trying to put a lot of energy into a small space all at once, and it tends not to do what you want it to. Also, because there's so much energy, reliability is a serious issue- the launcher can be seriously damaged every time you launch. Methods are in place to mitigate this, but they involve things like ablative inserts that have to be replaced after every launch. Not to mention, linear accelerators are limited in direction and velocity of the object, whereas the circular one seems like you could have some variations in both.
There are a couple linear accelerators competing with this circular one, and those actually have working models because they're a bit simpler (in principle) and people have been working on them for years now. Obviously, all of this stuff is years away from being built (if it ever is) but it's really cool!
Another talk I saw on a linear launcher does that. Since this one is enclosed in a sabot, it would be more difficult, although not impossible, and certainly desirable.
Yeah, and it's actually 10,000 G as someone else pointed out. The magnetic field can handle it though, and the guys mentioned other hardware that is already designed to withstand those forces (stuff launched from railguns on tanks).
Your math is correct. I have an abstract from a presentation these guys gave last week and it lists the radial force at 20 MN (that's mega-Newtons) for a 200 kg projectile = 10,000 G. They don't list the acceleration in G anywhere so it's probably a New Scientist math error.
I was at a presentation last week by the guys in this article.
The track design is based on particle colliders, so the entire thing is evacuated. Part of it is a rough vacuum and part is a hard vaccum (the actual track). The rough vacuum is because they have to limit thermal transfer to their super-cooled superconducting magnets.
The acceleration is actually not linear- it's radial. Going around a 2km track at 10km/s has some hefty acceleration associated with it. When ejected into the atmosphere, the projectile shouldn't immediately slow a great deal, although it will lose a lot of momentum before leaving the atmosphere. The design is a very long and skinny cone, to reduce thermal heating and drag force.
The best thing about this design for a launcher is that it doesn't require a lot of instantaneous power, unlike a linear accelerator. You can accelerate slowly.
Also, did anyone else immediately think of Xenogears when they saw this?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure no one will see this as it's much too late. But most of the modded-up posts I see aren't looking at the primary heat loss you'll experience in space, or in a vacuum of any kind. Water evaporation. If you take a jar of water and put it into a vacuum it will freeze over very quickly, because of the heat of evaporation, the same way sweat evaporation cools the body. Since our bodies are basically bags of water, if you put us in space unprotected, that water will promptly be sucked out of us by the near-zero pressure, and the evaporation will leave us frozen solid. The same thing applies to any fluid leaking from a spacecraft. It will probably rapidly form small ice spheres, which will then rapidly sublimate into vapor, depending on its characteristics.
#1 is true, #2 is not. Hall thrusters (which is what the article is talking about) can be run in a high-thrust, low-efficiency mode, or a low-thrust, high-efficiency mode. The problem to date has been that the design is locked in to one or the other. What they've done is make a tuneable Hall thruster with a variable thrust and efficiency. This is actually pretty impressive considering how difficult it is just to tune a magnetic field for one operating point, let alone a few. And then to be able to shift the field on the fly to get better performance is an excellent result indeed. The article was pretty crappy. There is absolutely nothing going on here for launch propulsion. Just in-space spacecraft propulsion only. That's usually station-keeping, but it can also be main propulsion for space probes.
The actual point of the article, which is pretty hard to see, is that this particular thruster design reduces the amount of propellant the satellite needs to take along. They already take propellant, so this does make the spacecraft lighter. And it has nothing to do with launch or rockets, which is why the article and summary are both incredibly stupid.
I just watched "Who killed the electric car" tonight and saw this post and thought two things: 1) Why do they need concept cars when every single auto manufacturer had production electric cars? 2) Only 40 miles on a single charge, when the EV1 did better than that with older battery technology, and probably could be upgraded to 300 miles? Ridiculous. Not to mention the fact that every single car company repossessed almost every single electric car- there's a coincidence for you.
It sounds like the incredibly restrictive DRM it wraps around everything you put on it is the primary issue. It is for me anyway.
Definitely. I just recently bought a Creative Zen Vision:M 30MB and it's pretty nice. It plays tons of video formats, no DRM restrictions, FM receiver, voice recorder, etc. I'm not totally happy with the music organization, but it works well enough.
"So, now we see charged particle interaction halfway between the Sun and the Earth?" Uhh, no. 40,000 miles is practically nothing in space. The distance to the Sun from the earth is about 1.5e11 meters, or about 2300 times more than 40,000 miles. The 40,000 mile mark is probably the front of the earth's bow shock into the solar wind. So the planets really are pretty much disconnected.
You're right. We should immediately stop wasting time and money on anything that does not directly and immediately improve the condition of the human race. Unfortunately, your proposal fails this test. As does most art and science and entertainment.
The first definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary: Main Entry: carp Pronunciation: 'kärp Function: intransitive verb Etymology: Middle English, of Scandinavian origin; akin to Icelandic karpa to dispute : to find fault or complain querulously - carper noun
The entire post except for ONE line was about media self-censoring on the Mehlman thing. And that one line was about WP self-censorship (albeit on another subject). I really have no idea how the post can be construed as being party-specific, unless you consider any post about censorship to be left-wing. Heck, even the linked article about the WP censorship was about the censorship itself rather than the lie involved, regardless of what the other content was on the site. The only ideology I see here from /. is that censorship is bad. And I don't think most of the people reading this site have a problem with that particular point of view.
This is a technology site. And if someone is being elected that is anti-technology, I think it is completely reasonable to make the readers aware of that fact. It's not being on a soapbox- it's a piece of information that most readers of the site will be interested in.
People camped out for the opening of the Ikea store in Michigan recently. The actual store itself- not something in particular to buy inside. And yes, the store is still there, it wasn't blown up five hours after opening or something.
Quick! Someone call Google and tell them they don't have to censor their search results anymore! After all, if this guys says it, it must be true, right?
I've been thinking about getting an mp3 player for a while now. All I want is to play music, and have enough storage for my collection, plus room to grow. Say about 20GB. So, if I don't want to pay for a fancy screen and get a hard drive based player, what player should I be looking at? Does one exist at this point? All the hard-drive based ones seem to be video players too now.
Countdown to DVD Jon hack 3..2..1..
Right, that's what I mean when I say it's fuzzy. Can the US court tell a UK court to shutdown Spamhaus operation? Can they tell a UK ISP to disconnect them? Could they restrict any US company from using their spam list? What exactly does the US court have jurisdiction to do here?
I would ask the same question in the RIM case- I don't remember what exactly the details were there that allowed the US court to threaten a shutdown of the system, but I would assume it entailed some physical presence on US soil, or violation of an international patent of some sort.
The #1 reason they didn't defend themselves is because they are a UK company and not under US jurisdiction. The #2 reason is that if they were to spend the money to defend themselves, they would open a precedent for any other spammer to sue them the same way. I think it's perfectly reasonable for a foreign company to ignore a US court order in this case. A US court can't order a spammer in Russia to stop spamming, so why should they be able to order a spam-blocker to stop blocking spam? The whole internation commerce thing is pretty fuzzy to me, so I don't really understand what a US court CAN do to a foreign company that sells its services to a US company.
Maybe it's just me, but you sound like you're just resisting going to a different technology where you have to learn a new set of skills. Grid/multi-processor computing is definitely not simple, but depending on how many spare CPU cycles you have, you'll get a much faster and larger speedup in your runs than if you tinker with the code to make it run faster single-threaded. Also, won't you need to do some multi-threaded on a multi-core machine as well? (I'm not particularly familiar with multi-cores, so I could be wrong).
I recommend learning how to use grid computing and convert the program. Not only will your code run faster at the end of the day, you'll gain a valuable set of skills that will look great on a resume.
This was a point brought up at the presentation. One of the linear accelerator guys was pretty sure that the struts holding the tracks in place would be transmitting huge amounts of energy, thereby heating the super-conducting magnets and possibly causing the struts to fail. The Launchpoint guy was sure that they had looked at the problem thoroughly though and that there wouldn't be an issue. Time will tell on that one...
Well, linear accelerators have some problems that are hard to overcome. One is actually getting the performance you want- you're trying to put a lot of energy into a small space all at once, and it tends not to do what you want it to. Also, because there's so much energy, reliability is a serious issue- the launcher can be seriously damaged every time you launch. Methods are in place to mitigate this, but they involve things like ablative inserts that have to be replaced after every launch. Not to mention, linear accelerators are limited in direction and velocity of the object, whereas the circular one seems like you could have some variations in both. There are a couple linear accelerators competing with this circular one, and those actually have working models because they're a bit simpler (in principle) and people have been working on them for years now. Obviously, all of this stuff is years away from being built (if it ever is) but it's really cool!
Another talk I saw on a linear launcher does that. Since this one is enclosed in a sabot, it would be more difficult, although not impossible, and certainly desirable.
Yeah, and it's actually 10,000 G as someone else pointed out. The magnetic field can handle it though, and the guys mentioned other hardware that is already designed to withstand those forces (stuff launched from railguns on tanks).
Your math is correct. I have an abstract from a presentation these guys gave last week and it lists the radial force at 20 MN (that's mega-Newtons) for a 200 kg projectile = 10,000 G. They don't list the acceleration in G anywhere so it's probably a New Scientist math error.
I was at a presentation last week by the guys in this article.
The track design is based on particle colliders, so the entire thing is evacuated. Part of it is a rough vacuum and part is a hard vaccum (the actual track). The rough vacuum is because they have to limit thermal transfer to their super-cooled superconducting magnets.
The acceleration is actually not linear- it's radial. Going around a 2km track at 10km/s has some hefty acceleration associated with it. When ejected into the atmosphere, the projectile shouldn't immediately slow a great deal, although it will lose a lot of momentum before leaving the atmosphere. The design is a very long and skinny cone, to reduce thermal heating and drag force.
The best thing about this design for a launcher is that it doesn't require a lot of instantaneous power, unlike a linear accelerator. You can accelerate slowly.
Also, did anyone else immediately think of Xenogears when they saw this?