Quotulatiousness

September 25, 2012

SpaceX Grasshopper completes first (tiny) hop

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:06

At The Register, Lewis Page discusses the first successful launch-and-hover by SpaceX’s Grasshopper:

SpaceX, the upstart space startup founded and bankrolled by famous internet nerdwealth kingpin Elon Musk, says it has carried out the first test of a new rocket craft which could lead to development of fully reusable spacecraft.

[. . .]

Grasshopper uses the fuel tank of the Falcon 9 first stage, but has only one Merlin rocket engine (as opposed to 9 on the real deal), so it is only a test vehicle. It is evidently intended to prove the technology needed to let a rocket descend to a vertical hovering landing. Such kit has already been proven in Moon and Mars lander missions, but is seldom employed for setdowns on Earth — and the job of putting down a towering 100-foot tall booster as opposed to a relatively handy capsule could be particularly challenging.

The idea would be that in future a Falcon 9 rocket stack would lift off as normal: but rather than waiting until the first stage had run out of fuel to separate and fire up the second stage, the lower booster would break away while it still had fuel left — enough to come down to a hovering pad landing. This would rob the whole stack of some lifting power, but on the other hand it would avoid the need to crash the pricey first stage into the sea and destroy it every time. This could potentially slash the costs of space launch: which is the avowed mission of SpaceX.

September 24, 2012

Flying cars are still (mostly) future-tech, but amphibious cars are almost here

Filed under: Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Except for the WW2-era Schwimmwagen, no other amphibious car has gone into mass production. That might change soon, if Gibbs Technologies can square the circle between US highway regulations and US Coast Guard regulations:

Gibbs Technologies, based in Nuneaton, England, is the only major company now making a serious push into the amphibious car. Its Gibbs Amphibians Inc. division, in Auburn Hills, Mich., has developed the Aquada, a sports car that can hit speeds of more than 100 miles per hour on the road and then, with a press of a button, turn into a boat that can do more than 30 mph.

[. . .]

The reason it is still in dry dock, he says, is a conflict between U.S. government regulations for vehicles on land and on water.

For example, air-bag sensors must be set according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration standards for the car to be approved for the open road. But on the water, the settings are too sensitive. Waves that crash on the vehicle deploy the air bags. Another problem: An Environmental Protection Agency rule requires a catalyst to control emissions which can heat up several hundred degrees. The Coast Guard bars anything even half that hot operating in the engine compartment.

The Aquada is on the sidelines for now, but Gibbs is moving ahead with a drivable jet ski it calls the Quadski that will be on the market by year-end. With wheels that fold out horizontally when it is afloat, the Quadski can travel as fast as 45 mph on water and on land. And it has fewer regulations to meet because it is classified as a personal watercraft.

Flying cars have shown up closer to the showroom in recent years, but they’re still not available to the general public.

September 22, 2012

The “joy” of data-capped, throttled internet access

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

Welcome to Canada:

Blogger Stephanie Morrow has complained about data caps in Canada for a while now. The details of her situation show just how hard it can be to get faster internet even if you are willing to pay for it:

    My monthly data cap at the moment is 80 gigs. I pay just over $100 CA for 80 gigs a month, and $2 CA per gig over my cap. Understandably, 80 gigs is not that much, especially if you play multiple games or download a lot of games on Steam, watch Netflix, have a PlayStation 3, Xbox, 3DS, iPad or iPhone like we do. Sadly, there are not a lot of other options. We have two major ISP companies in the city that work this way (there’s no such thing as unlimited here in Canada from these two ISPs), and then there are a handful of smaller ISPs that do offer unlimited but at a greatly reduced speed.

    So, I had to make the sacrifice. Did I want an unlimited cap when I’d barely able to download anything because it would take weeks and weeks, or did I want a cap and be able to download at the speed of light? The cap is a harsh mistress, not to mention that everything peer-to-peer gets throttled. That means no free-to-play games for me because they typically download via a peer-to-peer method that gets throttled. I was unable to do my job while using internet from Rogers, one of the major companies here. I had no choice but to switch to a smaller company or give up my job. I wrote to the companies about this situation but didn’t hear anything back.

That’s a pretty amazing story. I remember the speeds I got when I used another cable company, and I remember just how bad it felt to have to set a game to download overnight. Stephanie goes on to update the situation on her Google + blog, noting that the company she is with is one of the worst throttlers in the country. She quotes TechVibes:

    In 2010, Shaw throttled 14% of users and Bell throttled 16% of users. Rogers? The Toronto-based telco throttled a startling 78% of users, and this number has surpassed 90% during some quarters since 2008.

Again, it can be hard for many of us to imagine having such a limited connection, but I hear from players all the time who have such issues. Is internet access a human right, as declared by the United Nations? Do players have a right to the internet, even if they are using the connection mainly for gaming? I’d have to say yes simply because there are so many common advantages that come with internet access, access that provides information not only about one’s social network but local weather problems, health issues… the list goes on and on. The internet is now so much a part of our lives that we forget just how much we need it.

It’s a very rare month that I don’t get a bandwidth warning from Rogers…

September 20, 2012

Fixing Windows Update

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:37

For the last several weeks, I’ve been having issues with Windows Update on my laptop. I’d been keeping the machine pretty much up-to-date with the latest patches up until late August, when one (or more) of the updates failed to install correctly. The symptom was that the machine would show that it was updating X% where “X” never changed from “0”. I even left it overnight a couple of times, just in case it actually did need more than 12 hours to install.

Fortunately, it is possible to roll back Windows Update changes to the last restore point, but it’s a huge pain — and not how you should plan to spend the beginning of every working day (unless that’s your job, I guess). I’d tried installing individual updates, but each one I tried gave me the same results.

Today, I noticed a link to a PC World article titled “A quick fix for problems with Windows Update”.

Unfortunately, these kinds of problems aren’t uncommon. And they aren’t limited to Windows repeatedly offering the same update; I’ve also had letters from readers who get error messages after Windows tries to update itself.

This can be a tricky issue to solve, but here’s a good place to start: Microsoft’s Windows Update Fix-it. This automated tool will scan your Windows Update configuration and repair any problems it finds, resolve any incorrect data locations, and re-register required services.

To my pleasant surprise, the utility seems to have done exactly what it says on the label: it’s fixed my nagging Windows Update problem.

September 19, 2012

Just who does join the early queue for a new iPhone?

Filed under: Britain, Business, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:09

The Register‘s Anna Leach asks the folks in line at the Apple store in London:

The iPhone 5 doesn’t go on sale until 8am on Friday, 21 September – yet lines of fanbois, socio-averse hipsters, campaigners and self-promoting twits awaiting the new mobe are already clogging the pavements outside Apple Stores.

Yesterday on the steps of London’s flagship Regent Street pomaceous-product outlet, punters queueing to seize the slightly updated phone include an unemployed bloke, a very keen Apple enthusiast and his carer and some very recalcitrant bods who insisted that El Reg bring them coffees. No such luck, Popeye.

The fact that four of the first seven queuers were making films about why people queue for iPhones speaks volumes about pre-launch iPhone hype. Given the media circus surrounding those who shun more practical methods of shopping and instead queue in the British September air, it’s not surprising that all of the first six were representing interest groups on the lookout for publicity.

September 18, 2012

Don’t give up hope for warp engines just yet

Filed under: Science, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:28

As we all know, Star Trek‘s faster-than-light warp engines were mere plot devices, not actual ones. There’s no way to travel faster than light, so even our great-grandkids won’t be tripping off to distant (or even nearby) star systems. But wait … NASA’s Harold White looks poised to become the latest hero of the “we wanna go faster than light” brigade:

A top NASA boffin has outlined ongoing lab experiments at the space agency aimed at first steps towards the building of a warp-drive spacecraft theoretically capable of travelling at 10 times the speed of light.

The latest developments at the “Eagleworks” super-advanced space drive lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center were outlined by NASA physicist Harold White at a conference on Friday. The Eagleworks lab was set up at the end of last year to look into such concepts as the Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster and also so-called “warp drives” along the lines proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in the 1990s.

[. . .]

Unfortunately, subsequent investigation appeared to show that while the warp drive might work it would be unfeasibly power hungry: it would require a minimum amount of energy equivalent to completely annihilating the mass of the planet Jupiter.

However White and his NASA Eagleworks colleagues say that’s not necessarily so: it’s all down to the shape of the ring. An improved doughnut design, as opposed to a flat ring, would get the requirement down to something more like just annihilating the Voyager One probe craft.

Voyager masses in the region of 800kg, so by our calculations one would still need a lump of antimatter (or other reasonably compact super power source) which — if it were mishandled — would explode with a force of some 17,000 megatons, equivalent to several global nuclear wars all in one (or 600-odd Tunguska meteor strikes etc). This would inconveniently take humanity’s current atom labs billions of years to make, and there would be other practical issues (see our previous antimatter-bomb analysis here, and then there’d be the exoto-doughnut to fabricate etc).

Publishers hit libraries with big ebook price hike

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:49

Techdirt has the details:

Publishers are at it again, levying what amount to economic sanctions against that infamous freeloader hangout, The Library. In a move that will endear it to exactly no one, Hachette is increasing its back catalog prices 220% for ebooks, sticking it to the cherished public institutions whose shelves (including the digital ones) are lined with nothing but Lost Sales (apparently).

Hachette has been hard at work dragging its reputation through the mud. You may remember it from a few weeks ago, when it greeted Tor’s announcement that it was going DRM-free with “HAHAHA but no, seriously, there will be DRM.” This move seems ill-advised at best, what with some authors banding together to offer their titles to libraries for $dirt cheap, a price that falls more in line with the economic realities of the average library.

Hachette isn’t the only publishing fish in the sea (and not even the only fish to jack up its prices — Random House dialed its prices up 300% in March). Hachette is one of several publishers, many of whom haven’t increased prices (or at least, not as severely). Of course, other publishers have gone other routes, including limiting the number of lends on their ebooks, making their digital offerings the equivalent of poorly manufactured physical books (Falls Apart After 26 Uses!). As a whole, the Big Six treat libraries like an intrusive vagrant.

September 13, 2012

iPhone fans are going through this progression right now

Filed under: Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:06

From Pedro Dias on Google+:

September 11, 2012

Manufacturers may follow the music industry pattern

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

An interesting article in The Economist:

As an expert on intellectual property, Mr Weinberg has produced a white paper that documents the likely course of 3D-printing’s development — and how the technology could be affected by patent and copyright law. He is far from sanguine about its prospects. His main fear is that the fledgling technology could have its wings clipped by traditional manufacturers, who will doubtless view it as a threat to their livelihoods, and do all in their powers to nobble it. Because of a 3D printer’s ability to make perfect replicas, they will probably try to brand it a piracy machine.

[. . .]

As with any disruptive technology — from the printing press to the photocopier and the personal computer — 3D printing is going to upset existing manufacturers, who are bound to see it as a threat to their traditional way of doing business. And as 3D printing proliferates, the incumbents will almost certainly demand protection from upstarts with low cost of entry to their markets.

Manufacturers are likely to behave much like the record industry did when its own business model — based on selling pricey CD albums that few music fans wanted instead of cheap single tracks they craved — came under attack from file-swapping technology and MP3 software. The manufacturers’ most likely recourse will be to embrace copyright, rather than patent, law, because many of their patents will have expired. Patents apply for only 20 years while copyright continues for 70 years after the creator’s death.

[. . .]

In that, the record industry was remarkably successful. Today, websites and ISPs have to block or remove infringing material whenever they receive a DMCA takedown notice from a copyright holder — something that happens more often than actually justified. Google reckons that more than a third of the DMCA notices it has received over the years have turned out to be bogus copyright claims. Over a half were from companies trying to restrict competing businesses rather than law-breakers.

Rallying under the banner of piracy and theft, established manufacturers could likewise seek to get the doctrine of “contributory infringement” included in some expanded object-copyright law as a way of crippling the personal-manufacturing movement before it eats their lunch. Being free to sue websites that host 3D design files as “havens of piracy” would save them the time and money of having to prosecute thousands of individuals with a 3D printer churning out copies at home.

September 10, 2012

Warren Ellis on the near-future of 3D printing

Filed under: Food, Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:03

Warning: Warren Ellis is not one to mince his words (especially early in the morning). This is his first of a weekly column for Vice UK:

3D printing’s been around for a little while now, and it’s improving in leaps and bounds. On one end of the scale, I was talking to someone from a very famous special effects studio the other week, who was telling me they now have the facility to print cars. One of their wizards took a current-day standard 3D printer (which tend to look like dodgy breadmakers), took it apart to see how it worked, and then used it to print the parts to make a massively larger 3D printer, which he then used to print off a car. Street-furniture set-dressing for movies.

On the other end of the scale, home 3D printers like the Makerbot Replicator now cost twelve hundred quid and can crank out several thousand different objects. It’s a start. (A cheaper machine, the Stratasys, was recently used to print off a gun, after all.)

A start that led to a lot of other people thinking about what else could be printed. NASA have been developing something they call a “bioreactor” since the 1980s, wanting to supply long-haul astronauts with the onboard ability to perform skin and bone grafts by cloning and growing tissue. This has been developed into the idea of printing meat. Printed meat would be ethical meat, as nothing has to die in order to make it. The one drawback being that cultured meats of any kind tend to have textural issues: they’ve not been stuck to anything alive that can flex and secrete into it, so they’re kind of limp and nasty and may have to be artificially “exercised” by mechanical systems or electroshock therapy. A fine printed steak would have convulsed under electrical torture many hundreds of times before it reached your plate.

I don’t actually have a problem with that, but I am a full-on omnivore who is looking forward to being able to print off dolphin-and-mastodon sandwiches. You can, however, understand the reticence of those who gave up meat for ethical reasons being served a pork chop that’s been worked on a rack and then electrocuted for your pleasure.

Guaranteed headline in Canadian papers: mention the Avro Arrow

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:29

Today it’s the National Post (actually, it’s just a Canadian Press wire piece) chumming the waters with a report on an “Avro Arrow redesign pitched as alternative to controversial F-35”:

A Canadian company is seeking to go back in time to help fly Canada’s air force into the future.

Documents obtained by the Global News program “The West Block” indicate an update to the storied CF-105 Avro Arrow was put forward as an alternative to the purchase of F-35 stealth fighter jets.

And among the project’s champions is one of Canada’s top soldiers, retired Maj.Gen. Lewis MacKenzie.

The Arrow was an advanced, all-weather supersonic interceptor jet that was developed in the 1950s. Several prototypes were built and flight tests were conducted, but the project was abruptly shut down in 1959 and the aircraft never went into production.

Even people who care less than nothing about aircraft or military technology seem to have opinions about the Avro Arrow (usually allowing them to take free shots at former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker for the decision to scrap the plane). It’s far enough in the past that the facts are more than obscured by the myths of the cottage conspiracy theory industry (artisanal Canadian myth-making, hand-woven, fair-trade, and 100% organic).

The Avro Arrow is the story that never dies in Canadian papers.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/statuses/245128243458478080
https://twitter.com/InklessPW/statuses/245128551479791616
https://twitter.com/InklessPW/statuses/245130995072897024

September 7, 2012

Jesse Kline: Consumers the biggest losers in Apple-Samsung battle

Filed under: Business, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

In the National Post, Jesse Kline points out that the grubby legal dispute between Apple and Samsung may end up hurting the consumer much more than either of the combatants:

Software is unique because it is covered under both copyright and patent law. Computer software is written in a human-readable language, called source code, that is then translated by the computer into something the machine can understand. Much like writing a book, or newspaper article, source code is automatically covered under copyright law.

But no one is alleging that Samsung copied Apple’s code. What Samsung was sued for was achieving the same outcome as Apple, even though it was done in a different way. In this literary world, this would be akin to someone being sued for violating the copyright on Harry Potter, just because they wrote their own story about a boy wizard.

Intellectual property laws are supposed to encourage innovation by allowing companies and individuals to profit off works that may have cost a significant amount of money to develop. Apple says it was undercut in price because its competitor simply copied its design. In actual fact, Android was cheaper to produce because it is based on the open source Linux operating system, which saved money compared to Apple proprietary system.

For its part, Samsung accuses Apple of resorting “to litigation over market competition in an effort to limit consumer choice.” It’s one thing for the legal system to protect new inventions and original works, but this is quite clearly a case of a company engaging in anti-competitive behaviour.

The debut of energy weapons in the real military world

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

The Economist looks at the long-anticipated introduction of energy weapons. They’re still a long way from matching the fictional capabilities of phasers, blasters, disruptors, or photon torpedoes:

In the late 1970s and early 1980s the idea was revived when American strategists began thinking in earnest about the technologies they would need to shoot down nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. Among the more fanciful ideas taken up by Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (more commonly known as Star Wars) was the X-ray laser, which aimed to harness the energy of an atomic explosion to generate powerful laser beams. The hassle of having to explode a nuclear bomb every time a beam was needed meant the idea never went anywhere, though it did spur research into high-powered chemical lasers and the sophisticated optics needed to aim and control them.

The main appeal of using an energy beam to shoot things is that it travels at the speed of light, which means, in practice, that it will hit whatever it is aimed at. Trying to shoot down an incoming missile or warhead with a physical projectile, by contrast, is much more difficult. The guidance challenges of trying to “hit a bullet with a bullet” are enormous and are only gradually being solved using complex radars and missiles equipped with expensive sensors. A second attraction of lasers and other energy weapons is that in most cases they cannot run out of ammunition, and can keep firing for as long as they are plugged into a power source. The initial costs may be quite high, but each shot may then cost only a few dollars, compared with a price-tag of $3m or more for the latest missiles used to shoot down aircraft or other missiles.

[. . .]

The big trend now is to try to scale up three other sorts of laser that are far more compact than chemical lasers and can fire away merrily as long as they have power and don’t get too hot. The first sort is the fibre laser, in which the beam is generated within an optical fibre. Because this is already used in industry for welding and cutting, prices are falling, power output is increasing and reliability has been steadily improving. Industrial lasers can be turned into weapons pretty easily, simply by strapping them to a weapons mount.

But they are not very powerful. The Tactical Laser System being developed for the American navy by BAE Systems, a British firm, has an output of just 10kW, enough to run a few household kettles. Even so, it might be useful for frightening off (or burning holes in) small boats that look threatening but wouldn’t warrant a hail of machinegun fire. A slightly bigger version puts out about 33kW of power and fits neatly on existing turrets that house the rotary cannons used to shoot down incoming anti-ship missiles. It could blind optical or heat-seeking sensors on enemy missiles, or puncture small boats.

September 6, 2012

Switzerland to buy Swedish warplanes

Filed under: Europe, Military, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

Switzerland is planning to replace their aging fleet of F-5 fighter jets with a smaller number of modern Swedish aircraft:

Switzerland has decided to buy 22 Swedish JAS-39E Gripen fighters to replace their elderly F-5s. The 16 ton JAS-39E is roughly comparable with the latest versions of the F-16 and is a substantial upgrade of the current JAS-39C model. The Gripen is also used by Sweden, Thailand, South Africa, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The 39E is still in development and will eventually replace the 14 ton JAS-39C.

[. . .]

Often regarded as an also-ran in the current crop of “modern jet fighters,” the Swedish Gripen is proving to be more competition than the major players (the F-16, F-18, F-35, Eurofighter, Rafale, MiG-29, and Su-27) expected. Put simply, Gripen does a lot of little but important things right and costs about half as much (at about $35 million each) as its major competitors. In effect, Gripen provides the ruggedness and low cost of Russian aircraft with the high quality and reliability of Western aircraft. For many nations this is an appealing combination. The Gripen is easy to use (both for pilots and ground crews) and capable of doing all jet fighter jobs (air defense, ground support, and reconnaissance) well enough.

The Gripen is small but can carry up to 3.6 tons of weapons. With the increasing use of smart bombs, this is adequate. The aircraft entered active service in 1997 and has had an uphill battle getting export sales. Sweden does not have the diplomatic clout of its major competitors, so they have to push quality and service. Swedish warplanes and products in general have an excellent reputation in both categories. Nevertheless, the Gripen is still expected to lose out on a lot of sales simply because politics took precedence over performance.

Update: Yes, I caught the mis-attribution in the headline about a minute after I posted this. Sorry for the error, etc., etc., etc.

September 4, 2012

US Army’s JTRS program a poster child for development failure

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

Strategy Page has the details:

It’s been eleven months now since the U.S. Army cancelled its 15 year effort to develop the JTRS (Joint Tactical Radio System). This program cost over $6 billion and has been a major embarrassment for the U.S. Department of Defense. Actually, JTRS still exists, on paper, but its goal, to provide better combat radios, has been accomplished by adopting civilian radios that do what the troops needed done and calling it JTRS. In the time the army spent working on JTRS some $11 billion was spent on buying more radios using existing designs, and a lot of off-the-shelf equipment incorporating stuff JTRS was supposed to do.

JTRS was yet another example of a military development project that got distracted, and bloated, trying to please everyone. There was, in a word, no focus. There’s been a lot of this in the last decade. That’s what killed the Comanche light attack helicopter, the Crusader self-propelled howitzer, FCS (Future Combat System), the Seawolf SSN, the DDG-1000 destroyer, B-2 bomber, F-22 fighters and several military space satellite projects. In all cases some of the technology developed was put to use in cheaper systems and sometimes a few of the cancelled systems were built (three Seawolfs, three DDG-1000s, 21 B-2s and 187 F-22s). These cancellations and cutbacks saved over half a trillion dollars. That goes a long way towards paying for projects that were not cancelled and are nearly half a trillion dollars over budget. But overall these failures were expensive and embarrassing.

JTRS, however, was the poster child of what usually goes wrong and how it impacts the combat troops. After all, radios are something personnel in all services use a lot. The main problem with JTRS was that the troops needed digital (for computer stuff) and analog (traditional radio) communications in one box and it had to be programmable, in order to handle new applications and the need to communicate with other radio types. That’s what JTRS was supposed to do but it never happened. The procurement bureaucracy and government contractors consumed over six billion dollars but never quite got anything useful out the door.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress