I concur with Ron B's description in the article of a truss configuration using an aluminum C rail, with the apex of the truss down and the flat side up. I have previously described the advantages of the apex down/flat up truss.
If the apex is up, that gives two attachment points to the balloon. This allows the truss to roll around the axis of the top rail. If the flat side is up, you could have four attachment points at the corners, giving additional stability along the longitudinal axis of the truss. It would prevent the truss from rolling.
This is NOT the collection of web stars who've helped literally make the internet. Such a venerable institution has existed since the early 1990s, and apparently has now vanished from the web. It is worthy of preservation, but the only copy I could find is on the Internet Wayback Machine. So I submit to you, the "Kook Of The Month" gallery:
Internet nut cases like Archimedes Plutonium, Doctress Neutopia, Terri Tickle, and RIchard Bullis did more to shape the modern Internet than Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, or Linus Torvalds ever did.
Show me a 7 year old workstation-level windows PC that has performance that is still competitive with current models. How many times did you buy new PCs in the last 7 years? Do you even run high-performance apps like Maya that need a high end video card, or do you just run Microsoft Office?
I think this is Apple's implicit recognition that they are deliberately forcing customers to upgrade, to preserve the features they're using now (and paying for now).
I had to buy a new Mac just to preserve my mac.com email address that I've been paying $90/year since MobileMe first shipped, that must be at least 5 years ago. I had no devices that could run iCloud, I have a first generation iPhone and a PowerMac Quad G5 (a really expensive one that cost $4700, with developer discount, due to the insanely expensive Quadro FX4500 video card). Both of these machines serve me perfectly well. But no, Apple is forcing me to upgrade my Mac. If I had kept using my old Mac which runs MacOS X 10.5 maximum, I would have lost my primary email address.
So I've been paying for this lame MobileMe service for years, about the only feature I used (aside from email) was file storage on iDisk. And now that's gone. I feel like I was forced to buy a new computer, and I got a downgrade in services. Well at least I can still get my email on my old iPhone, even though it no longer syncs anything.
>For obvious reasons, the Vulture 2 must have a "V" tail elevon configuration..
No, actually it doesn't. The little tubes that guide the rocket down the rail can go on the bottom of the rocket, so the tail fins are facing away from the rail and truss.
Another note: I would not attach the lines to the truss at only two points, top and bottom. This will allow the truss to rotate or wobble around the axis of the top rail. Make a two point harness at the top, and another at the bottom, like a kite bridle. This will prevent the truss from swinging. I would actually invert the truss and put the apex of the triangle pointing down, next to the launch rail. This will allow you to put the attachment points on the four corners of a flat face of the truss, which is facing up, for more stability.
Some people have commented that the rocket could slip off the rail if it accidentally pointed down. There's an easy solution, you put a stopper on the rod, above the guide tubes, that is sufficient to keep the rocket from slipping off, but not sufficient to resist the force of the engine. That's tricky because if you make it too strong, the rocket will not get off the rail.
I also notice this new method of deploying the launch platform is exactly the same as the standard rockoon system that has been in use for over 50 years. I wondered how long it would take you to figure out that this was the best way to do it.
As I was waking up and drinking my morning cup of coffee, with eyes still trying to focus, I saw that headline and I thought it read "Lenovo primed with keyboard-connectable toilet."
I am disappointed. That would have been quite a story.
Apple really had something that no other computer manufacturer had: a unified retail presence. It went way beyond a demo disk, it was a complete retail system from store fixtures down to the sales pitches. Their //c marketing packet for dealers changed the game completely. I will post one photo I scanned from their marketing materials, look at it and you will understand why I said this was the birth of the Apple Store.
http://i.imgur.com/sGCEz.jpg
There really was nothing like this in the retail computer industry, until Apple produced this campaign in 1984.
Alas, it was an inexpensive "credit card calculator" that fit in your wallet. But It was a nice gadget if you were a salesman like me that lived with a calculator in hand.
I published a few pages my sales newsletter, but some pages are incomplete first drafts. That's all I could find in my old paper records.
http://imgur.com/a/0P6mS
You can tell this document was written by an overworked, snarky salesman. I remember I used to get up in the morning, drink some coffee, drive to the store, then it was so busy all day that I wouldn't have time for lunch. Then I would get home late in the evening, too tired to make dinner, and I'd just flop into bed. A few days before christmas, I suddenly realized I had not eaten a meal for 6 days!
I note that the upgrade for MacOS X only supports Intel CPUs, running the installer says "PowerPC processors are no longer supported." This is stupid since there are millions of PPC Macs and leaving them vulnerable is just going to poison the entire Flash environment.
Ah, I see that someone with practical experience in building aircraft is noting the same problem I spotted and remarked on in previous LOHAN discussions: the thin air in the upper atmosphere is insufficient to provide enough lift, or control.
I think I know a time-tested way to work around this: drogues. Even Mars landers have used drogue chutes during the initial descent through the upper atmosphere, and Mars doesn't have much atmospheric pressure even at ground level. You wouldn't really even need a drogue chute for LOHAN, just something like a long streamer. I thought about it, you could put two drogue streamers, one from each wingtip, this would keep the nose pointed down and also prevent spinning. Then when the aircraft reached lower altitudes with enough air to actually fly, the drogues could be released, and it can level off and fly in a controlled path.
Drogues work pretty well, I used to build light model rockets that used drogues rather than parachutes. That worked perfectly in high winds, when you didn't want a long descent time to allow the winds to blow the rocket into the next county.
It's good that you're going to the Scotland rocket event. You will undoubtedly encounter a niche in the rocketry hobby world, High Power Rocketry. I used to build rockets when I was a kid, back then, E F and G rockets were considered the top end, I recall building a small 2 stage F-D rocket that was designed to break the sound barrier with an audible bang (It worked but it flew so high it was unrecoverable). But now, things are way bigger. Hobbyists are using motors from small military missiles, and reloading them too. I was just blown away by what people are doing when I discovered HPR a few years ago. I just did a quick check of online vendors, now people are looking with disdain at puny F and G class motors, they're up to N and O class and above. And this high power requires a higher build quality too. You're basically building military class missiles.
Now the problem is, this stuff all requires licensing. I think you're going to need a consult from a licensed UK HPR builder. There is a hobbyist organization that could surely find an experienced HPR builder who would jump for joy at a chance to work on LOHAN. Check out the United Kingdom Rocketry Association:
http://www.ukra.org.uk/
Now here's where it gets serious. Or does it? Do you want to do a real rockoon and just skip the glider stuff? Because you could probably just do a regular HPR rocket and get the altitude you want, and descent could just be a regular parachute. These HPR guys are all experts in this stuff, they are good at tracking and recovery too.
I had forgotten all about IBM's dot matrix printer until you showed that pic on the first page. That is an Epson printer, rebranded with an IBM badge. IIRC it had an IBM ROM so it could print the IBM PC extended character set and it responded accurately to commands like Print Screen. Epson sold their own version minus the IBM PC-specific code, it didn't quite work the same, it didn't print the ASCII graphic characters right, and I think the PrtSc didn't do a page feed right. But it was much cheaper than the IBM printer, so it sold like hotcakes. I think I recall selling only a couple of IBM branded dot matrix printers while I sold hundreds of Epsons.
I am appalled at the designs with wings that depend on aerodynamic effects for lift. Remember that PARIS released at 89,000 feet, well into the stratosphere. There is insufficient air density at that altitude for a wing to create lift. That's why they use rockets for flight beyond the stratosphere. Rockets have fins to guide it through the lower atmosphere, but the fins have almost no effect once it hits the stratosphere. At that point, the rocket basically only has two forces acting on it, lift (the engine) and gravity. It takes careful design to get a rocket with an engine at the bottom to fly. You have to keep the center of thrust carefully aligned with the center of gravity.
So the LOHAN rocket stage cannot rely on wings during the boost phase. It's going to have to be basically a Congreve Rocket, the engine way up at the top, well ahead of the center of gravity. You could put a rocket on the end of a stick, like a bottle rocket, and it would perform adequately at stratospheric altitudes. The only force you can rely on at this height is gravity, you'll need it to keep the rocket oriented upwards.
Once the boost phase is over, the aircraft can basically tumble through the stratosphere. There is no air to provide lift and no drag that can orient the plane forward. It will need a wing design that has adequate lift, once it hits the denser lower atmosphere, and a good dihedral angle that can automatically correct a roll, and a good tail fin to correct spin. But none of those wing surfaces will have any effect at launch height.
IMHO the best design provided by readers is suspending an angled launch platform at the end of a 50 meter cable. This is enough distance to clear the balloon. Look at the wikipedia entry for Rockoon. It shows a photo of a Deacon Rockoon, it uses this design. It's been tested by real rocket scientists and it works. The wiki entry has a link to JP Aerospace, their Rockoon page has a similar design, and shows an actual launch photo.
I suggest you first take a look at the flight plan, before designing the aircraft. This might address my criticism of PARIS which landed very close to the release point, indicating it did not really fly, so much as plummet. I noticed Samsung copied the PARIS flight concept as a commercial stunt, they sent up a balloon with hundreds of paper airplanes with memory chips affixed to them. They reported planes recovered hundreds of miles from the release point. This shows these simple fixed wing paper planes had a good glide slope, flying horizontally for a considerable distance. However, this is also a disadvantage in recovery, unless you have an international team to recover LOHAN across Europe (and perhaps the seas).
So I suggest taking some design cues from model rocketry. There is a type of rocket known as a "boost glider" that somewhat resembles my proposed design goals for LOHAN. A boost glider has two flight phases. First, the rocket boosts to a high altitude, and the boost stage burns out and ejects. Then the glider stage deploys, the wing shifts its aerodynamic qualities from vertical flight to glider. The key factor here is that in order to not chase the glider to a distant landing point, the wings are designed to put the glider into a gentle spiral, circling the release point. This is intended to maximize flight duration without flying the thing in a straight line into another country. This also has the advantage that the characteristics of the spiral flight can be fixed into the design without need for autopilots. In some cases, a simple aileron adjustment is all that is necessary to create the gentle turn required for a circular flight path.
The best boost glider kit I ever built will address some of the problems I see in Murray Pearson's proposal. His folding wing design seems to require a mechanism to unfold and fix the wings into flight position. The design I built was a kit from Estes, with a one-piece solid wing that rotated into place around a central pivot. During flight phase, the oval wing as inline with the rocket body. When the boost stage separated, it released the wing, which pivoted 90 degrees, pulled by a rubber band. This is a much simpler design than Pearson's which requires dual wing deployment. Vintage Estes model rocket plans are archived on hobbyist websites, but I was unable to find the rotating wing design. Still, that was perhaps more of a design stunt than would be necessary for LOHAN. Most boost glider designs have fixed wings that merely adjust ailerons during the flight phase. This would be sufficient for LOHAN, since the balloon will lift the glider during the initial lift phase, eliminating the need for aerodynamic characteristics needed for self-powered vertical flight. However, your proposal for a rocket powered initial flight stage would still require a stable flight platform. I might suggest using an example like the SEMROC Swift-BG design.
That car looks like it has a ground clearance of about 4 inches, it would need perfectly flat roads. It wouldn't even make it out of my driveway. Looks like it has a top speed of about 35mph too. If I ran a racing shop and made this, I'd be embarrassed.
I'm having trouble with lag lately. I'm still playing (get this, you won't believe it) Halo 1 for Mac. The main host is still running after all these years. But it seems like the only people that play it are in regions in South America, small "guilds" within a regional subnet but with high pings from any international site on the net. So what happens is the guild and the host are all close together with low latency, and everyone else who joins is a half second to two seconds behind. The guild kicks everybody's ass, especially the host who has home server advantage.
I worked with DG Eclipse machines early in the 80s, my first real pro computer gig. Can you believe I was translating FORTRAN II legacy programs into the new 16 bit environment? Nobody in our office quite got the hang of their fancy Array Processor accessory.
I still remember one thing most vividly from the "Soul of a New Machine" book. He said he liked hiring Comp Sci grads straight out of school, because they didn't know what was impossible yet. Now that I'm an old veteran with 35 years of experience, I've tried to keep that attitude that nothing is impossible. If for no other reason, I really owe Tom West for that one idea.
Guy believes HE IS God, at least where Apple's concerned. Guy has spent many years since his brief time at Apple, spouting his arrogant crap about how his "evangelism" saved Apple. But his turf, developer relations, prospered DESPITE Guy, not because of him.
This use of drones shouldn't be particularly surprising. That's what they were invented for. The first drone attack I heard of was by the Israelis, in the 6 day war IIRC. At that time, drones didn't carry weapons. So the Israelis sent a wave of drones at antiaircraft sites. The drones didn't have a very big radar signature, so they got fairly close, then the Egyptians thought they were an incoming attack wave of fighter-bombers. So like a 1/4 scale or less drone gets about 4x closer than a full size plane to give the same radar return.
So the drones get close, really close, and then the Egyptians turn on the SAM site radars to attack them. The Egyptians think they're shooting at a full attack wave, like 3 or 4x further away than the drones really are. At this point, the REAL attack wave is just popping up over the horizon, now they have fully illuminated radar sites to attack with HARM missiles. Brilliant.
Apple has always had monumental cash reserves. Alas, that was part of the problem that lead to Apple's problems in the 1980s. I remember when I sold Macs in the late 1980s, Apple had a cooperative deal with GMAC (I think it was GMAC) for financing and leasing computers. It added considerably to the cost of Macs (giving Microsoft and IBM an opening) but helped them acquire a huge cash hoard. Even as Apple was supposedly "dying," their cash reserves kept growing. This was one of the reasons behind Michael Dell's remarks about how he'd "liquidate the company and give all the stockholders their money back." There was a LOT of money to give back.
I wonder how these new Hasselblad-branded lenses compare to the old Contax lenses of the classic Hassleblad system. That was what really made the distinctive Hasselblad quality, the Contax lenses. They had unsurpassed sharpness and color saturation, which worked wonders for all sorts of lighting conditions, from artificial & studio flash, to available light. And since the film was 2 1/4, you could use a faster film (and even push B&W) and the graininess was less prominent than in 35mm shots on the same film.
I used to have a 45 degree angle prism viewfinder on my old 500 C/M. I always thought that was the best way to shoot a medium format camera. I'm surprised there isn't a similar product for the new Hassleblad system, this big digital camera looks like it would be hard to use when held up to the eye like a 35mm SLR.
I suspect older drives in working condition could be found. Corvus Systems shipped 10Mb Winchester hard drives for the Apple ][, back around 1979. They were pretty tough, I bet someone has a Corvus drive that still works sitting on a shelf somewhere. I was a Corvus tech back in the day, so if any such drive appears, I would be glad to help get it up and running (such as I am able).
Jeez, now I think back to ~1980 when 10Mb of hard disk seemed like an infinite storage space, compared to Apple ][ 140k floppies. And then I recall backing up a 10Mb Corvus disk to 140k floppies, ouch.
This isn't a "Target Engagement System" as the DoD describes it. This is shoulder artillery. Doesn't the Academy of Law teach heavy weapons handling to cadets anymore? Recoil is nothing. Just be glad you weren't issued a Stub Gun.
Oh Tony, you should have done more research on The Osborne Effect. There is a rather unique article in the archives of El Reg that debunks the so-called Osborne Effect. Incidentally, that article quotes ME extensively, I ran a major Osborne repair site.
I took many sales training courses and read many books back in my days as a salesman at ComputerLand. Then one day my boss and I were talking about a new research finding he just read. It claimed that salesmen have a basic "comfort level," they work at a fixed level of effort and their sales figures hovered around a specific number and did not vary much. You can motivate a salesman or improve results with training and motivational support, but the improved sales results are temporary. The salesman will gradually return to his old level of effort.
My boss figured the only solution to this was to add sales support to the rainmakers, so his immediate response was to hire sales coordinators and secretaries for his top salesmen. If the top sales guys were closers, let the coordinators do the research and come up with quotes and offers for cross-sells, upsells, etc.
I was expecting a much larger leak. But I did read all of it and it does seem to show management orders for illegal record erasing to hide further unknown shenanigans. A lot of it is emails from the leaker who got raided by the police and is under intense pressure from the bank. I think there's more coming, the guy says he's keeping more evidence, but no sense playing your ace in the hole early in the game. There is so much illegal flim flam in the financial industry that goes unpunished, it's hard to believe they would go to the trouble to cover something up unless it was pretty serious. Where there's smoke there's fire?
That headline is going in my collection. Even the cleverest headline writer could go his whole life without writing Surrey Shocked by Shag Sheet Snatch.
This had a lot to do with the exchange rate. Between 1985 and 88, the exchange rate doubled between the Yen and the US Dollar, making the Yen worth twice as much. That was the basis of the "bubble economy." There were a few years where it made sense for Japanese corporations (and individuals) to buy anything that could be purchased with dollars.
We didn't lose Disney, they still bought millions of dollars worth of Macs. But they started shifting slowly towards PCs, and Macs were harder to justify. Still, with the expanding computer market, they never bought fewer Macs than before.
I think the main theme is that I was trying to save Apple from itself. Mac users and sales reps tended to know how to market the Mac better than Apple did. It is hard to realize the impact of the abysmal years just after Jobs was ousted, when the financial type people started running the show. Apple could easily have died off, but once I helped establish it into major accounts, it would never die out. And it did face that risk in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
I've used an Editwriter. It used text markup and it wasn't WYSIWYG. Soft proofing is not interactive and does not show live editing, so it's barely more useful than real proofing. And for that matter, the Editwriter wasn't a desktop, it was bigger than a desk, it took up the whole desk plus a big cabinet that sat on the floor.
You have made a good effort, but failed to show me any evidence of a true DTP system that existed before the 1980 system I described in my article. For many years, I have challenged my typesetting colleagues to show me proof of any DTP system that existed before 1980, and fulfilled the criterion I described. Nobody has ever come forward with anything even close. This is what was revolutionary about DTP in 1980, it was not the quality of output or the technical capabilities, it was the total integration of features that we now take for granted. Many high-end professional typesetting systems had one or more of the DTP-style features, but nobody put them all together as DTP. It was impossible, no suitable microcomputer existed before that time.
I'm not actually convinced the plane actually flew. Since it was found so close to the point where it separated from the balloon, the proper term might be "plummet," "nosedive," or just plain "fall." None of those conditions are really aerodynamic flight.
I use to fly model rockets with glider payloads, the usual idea was to build the glider so it would fly in circles, so it didn't just go on a straight line into the next county. But this has to be tested before the flight, to make sure it has the ability to fly level with a slight bank. Did you actually flight test Vulture 1 before dropping it? Because the project results seem to me, to indicate the plane just dropped from the sky instead of flew. On your next attempt, I would like to see some evidence that the aircraft has aerodynamic flight properties somewhat better than a falling rock.
This is a ridiculous idea. An iPad is so easily lost or stolen, it is the absolute worst possible backup medium. I still remember the first review of the MacBook Air in the New York Times. The reviewer sheepishly admitted that it was accidentally tossed in the trash. He was using it at home on the weekend and left it sitting on a stack of Sunday newspapers. His wife threw away the whole pile without ever realizing there was an ultralight laptop in it.
Another point worth considering is compression. Most current formats for large files are already optimally compressed. If you zip a video file, you will get almost no further compression. Zip a 1.0Gb video file and you will almost always get a 0.99Gb zip. And on a slow processor as used in iPads and other low power consumption CPUs, uncompression is very time consuming.
I'm not convinced the extreme insulation to "keep the cold out" (as you put it) is likely to work. You also need to warm the interior. Other similar amateur balloon lift projects have used little chemical heat pads inside their styrofoam electronics containers, to keep the batteries warm. You can probably buy something useful at any drugstore, they're little chem packs, you break the interior vial so the catalyst mixes into the pack, and it stays warm for a few hours.
This is a logical, rational decision. If a download was considered a performance, it could be equally argued that the mailman delivering a CD by post was also a performance.
Brilliant solution on the powder. But I'm still not clear on the concept. Why is any "ballast" needed in the tube? It seems to only be there to occupy space, to displace part of the air in the tube. It might have been easier to just use the proper length of tube, which would contain just the right amount of air to yield the proper expansion.
Also, it's good that you dealt with these temperature issues, but I still would be concerned that the rubber tube will freeze up in action. Maybe you should test it at lower temps with dry ice, see if it still stays flexible. It would probably be unnecessary to test it at both low temp and low pressure, if it passes the low temp test separately.
Microsoft managed to get more publicity for its dollar with this stunt. It's all over the newspapers. You can't buy publicity like that.
I personally agree with the theme of the conference that more women should be working in IT. Specifically, I want to see more women in gold bikinis working in IT.
Those diagonals look like they're only going to concentrate the stresses. There is no diagonal bracing between the two inmost spars, that's where the torsional stresses will end up.
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63 posts • joined Thursday 2nd July 2009 18:32 GMT
Page:
C Rail - Apex Down
I concur with Ron B's description in the article of a truss configuration using an aluminum C rail, with the apex of the truss down and the flat side up. I have previously described the advantages of the apex down/flat up truss.
If the apex is up, that gives two attachment points to the balloon. This allows the truss to roll around the axis of the top rail. If the flat side is up, you could have four attachment points at the corners, giving additional stability along the longitudinal axis of the truss. It would prevent the truss from rolling.
Internet's First "Hall Of Shame" REVEALED
This is NOT the collection of web stars who've helped literally make the internet. Such a venerable institution has existed since the early 1990s, and apparently has now vanished from the web. It is worthy of preservation, but the only copy I could find is on the Internet Wayback Machine. So I submit to you, the "Kook Of The Month" gallery:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060719233552/http://www.lart.com/auk/whiners.html
Internet nut cases like Archimedes Plutonium, Doctress Neutopia, Terri Tickle, and RIchard Bullis did more to shape the modern Internet than Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, or Linus Torvalds ever did.
Yeah right
Show me a 7 year old workstation-level windows PC that has performance that is still competitive with current models. How many times did you buy new PCs in the last 7 years? Do you even run high-performance apps like Maya that need a high end video card, or do you just run Microsoft Office?
Throw me a bone too.
I think this is Apple's implicit recognition that they are deliberately forcing customers to upgrade, to preserve the features they're using now (and paying for now).
I had to buy a new Mac just to preserve my mac.com email address that I've been paying $90/year since MobileMe first shipped, that must be at least 5 years ago. I had no devices that could run iCloud, I have a first generation iPhone and a PowerMac Quad G5 (a really expensive one that cost $4700, with developer discount, due to the insanely expensive Quadro FX4500 video card). Both of these machines serve me perfectly well. But no, Apple is forcing me to upgrade my Mac. If I had kept using my old Mac which runs MacOS X 10.5 maximum, I would have lost my primary email address.
So I've been paying for this lame MobileMe service for years, about the only feature I used (aside from email) was file storage on iDisk. And now that's gone. I feel like I was forced to buy a new computer, and I got a downgrade in services. Well at least I can still get my email on my old iPhone, even though it no longer syncs anything.
Tail configuration, etc.
I was surprised at this:
>For obvious reasons, the Vulture 2 must have a "V" tail elevon configuration..
No, actually it doesn't. The little tubes that guide the rocket down the rail can go on the bottom of the rocket, so the tail fins are facing away from the rail and truss.
Another note: I would not attach the lines to the truss at only two points, top and bottom. This will allow the truss to rotate or wobble around the axis of the top rail. Make a two point harness at the top, and another at the bottom, like a kite bridle. This will prevent the truss from swinging. I would actually invert the truss and put the apex of the triangle pointing down, next to the launch rail. This will allow you to put the attachment points on the four corners of a flat face of the truss, which is facing up, for more stability.
Some people have commented that the rocket could slip off the rail if it accidentally pointed down. There's an easy solution, you put a stopper on the rod, above the guide tubes, that is sufficient to keep the rocket from slipping off, but not sufficient to resist the force of the engine. That's tricky because if you make it too strong, the rocket will not get off the rail.
I also notice this new method of deploying the launch platform is exactly the same as the standard rockoon system that has been in use for over 50 years. I wondered how long it would take you to figure out that this was the best way to do it.
I am disappointed
As I was waking up and drinking my morning cup of coffee, with eyes still trying to focus, I saw that headline and I thought it read "Lenovo primed with keyboard-connectable toilet."
I am disappointed. That would have been quite a story.
Retail Presence
Apple really had something that no other computer manufacturer had: a unified retail presence. It went way beyond a demo disk, it was a complete retail system from store fixtures down to the sales pitches. Their //c marketing packet for dealers changed the game completely. I will post one photo I scanned from their marketing materials, look at it and you will understand why I said this was the birth of the Apple Store.
http://i.imgur.com/sGCEz.jpg
There really was nothing like this in the retail computer industry, until Apple produced this campaign in 1984.
"The Apple Report"
Alas, it was an inexpensive "credit card calculator" that fit in your wallet. But It was a nice gadget if you were a salesman like me that lived with a calculator in hand.
I published a few pages my sales newsletter, but some pages are incomplete first drafts. That's all I could find in my old paper records.
http://imgur.com/a/0P6mS
You can tell this document was written by an overworked, snarky salesman. I remember I used to get up in the morning, drink some coffee, drive to the store, then it was so busy all day that I wouldn't have time for lunch. Then I would get home late in the evening, too tired to make dinner, and I'd just flop into bed. A few days before christmas, I suddenly realized I had not eaten a meal for 6 days!
Plural.
I wouldn't read too much into the iPhone(s) plural. That is a common enough way to refer to a singluarl item that ships en masse.
Hey, the new phone books are here!
Adobe shafts the Mac again
I note that the upgrade for MacOS X only supports Intel CPUs, running the installer says "PowerPC processors are no longer supported." This is stupid since there are millions of PPC Macs and leaving them vulnerable is just going to poison the entire Flash environment.
I guess Jobs was right, Flash Considered Harmful.
Thin air
Ah, I see that someone with practical experience in building aircraft is noting the same problem I spotted and remarked on in previous LOHAN discussions: the thin air in the upper atmosphere is insufficient to provide enough lift, or control.
I think I know a time-tested way to work around this: drogues. Even Mars landers have used drogue chutes during the initial descent through the upper atmosphere, and Mars doesn't have much atmospheric pressure even at ground level. You wouldn't really even need a drogue chute for LOHAN, just something like a long streamer. I thought about it, you could put two drogue streamers, one from each wingtip, this would keep the nose pointed down and also prevent spinning. Then when the aircraft reached lower altitudes with enough air to actually fly, the drogues could be released, and it can level off and fly in a controlled path.
Drogues work pretty well, I used to build light model rockets that used drogues rather than parachutes. That worked perfectly in high winds, when you didn't want a long descent time to allow the winds to blow the rocket into the next county.
High Power Rocketry
It's good that you're going to the Scotland rocket event. You will undoubtedly encounter a niche in the rocketry hobby world, High Power Rocketry. I used to build rockets when I was a kid, back then, E F and G rockets were considered the top end, I recall building a small 2 stage F-D rocket that was designed to break the sound barrier with an audible bang (It worked but it flew so high it was unrecoverable). But now, things are way bigger. Hobbyists are using motors from small military missiles, and reloading them too. I was just blown away by what people are doing when I discovered HPR a few years ago. I just did a quick check of online vendors, now people are looking with disdain at puny F and G class motors, they're up to N and O class and above. And this high power requires a higher build quality too. You're basically building military class missiles.
Now the problem is, this stuff all requires licensing. I think you're going to need a consult from a licensed UK HPR builder. There is a hobbyist organization that could surely find an experienced HPR builder who would jump for joy at a chance to work on LOHAN. Check out the United Kingdom Rocketry Association:
http://www.ukra.org.uk/
Now here's where it gets serious. Or does it? Do you want to do a real rockoon and just skip the glider stuff? Because you could probably just do a regular HPR rocket and get the altitude you want, and descent could just be a regular parachute. These HPR guys are all experts in this stuff, they are good at tracking and recovery too.
Check out the IBM dot matrix printer
I had forgotten all about IBM's dot matrix printer until you showed that pic on the first page. That is an Epson printer, rebranded with an IBM badge. IIRC it had an IBM ROM so it could print the IBM PC extended character set and it responded accurately to commands like Print Screen. Epson sold their own version minus the IBM PC-specific code, it didn't quite work the same, it didn't print the ASCII graphic characters right, and I think the PrtSc didn't do a page feed right. But it was much cheaper than the IBM printer, so it sold like hotcakes. I think I recall selling only a couple of IBM branded dot matrix printers while I sold hundreds of Epsons.
No atmosphere = no aerodynamics
I am appalled at the designs with wings that depend on aerodynamic effects for lift. Remember that PARIS released at 89,000 feet, well into the stratosphere. There is insufficient air density at that altitude for a wing to create lift. That's why they use rockets for flight beyond the stratosphere. Rockets have fins to guide it through the lower atmosphere, but the fins have almost no effect once it hits the stratosphere. At that point, the rocket basically only has two forces acting on it, lift (the engine) and gravity. It takes careful design to get a rocket with an engine at the bottom to fly. You have to keep the center of thrust carefully aligned with the center of gravity.
So the LOHAN rocket stage cannot rely on wings during the boost phase. It's going to have to be basically a Congreve Rocket, the engine way up at the top, well ahead of the center of gravity. You could put a rocket on the end of a stick, like a bottle rocket, and it would perform adequately at stratospheric altitudes. The only force you can rely on at this height is gravity, you'll need it to keep the rocket oriented upwards.
Once the boost phase is over, the aircraft can basically tumble through the stratosphere. There is no air to provide lift and no drag that can orient the plane forward. It will need a wing design that has adequate lift, once it hits the denser lower atmosphere, and a good dihedral angle that can automatically correct a roll, and a good tail fin to correct spin. But none of those wing surfaces will have any effect at launch height.
IMHO the best design provided by readers is suspending an angled launch platform at the end of a 50 meter cable. This is enough distance to clear the balloon. Look at the wikipedia entry for Rockoon. It shows a photo of a Deacon Rockoon, it uses this design. It's been tested by real rocket scientists and it works. The wiki entry has a link to JP Aerospace, their Rockoon page has a similar design, and shows an actual launch photo.
http://www.jpaerospace.com/rockoons.html
The Plane that Fell to Earth
I suggest you first take a look at the flight plan, before designing the aircraft. This might address my criticism of PARIS which landed very close to the release point, indicating it did not really fly, so much as plummet. I noticed Samsung copied the PARIS flight concept as a commercial stunt, they sent up a balloon with hundreds of paper airplanes with memory chips affixed to them. They reported planes recovered hundreds of miles from the release point. This shows these simple fixed wing paper planes had a good glide slope, flying horizontally for a considerable distance. However, this is also a disadvantage in recovery, unless you have an international team to recover LOHAN across Europe (and perhaps the seas).
So I suggest taking some design cues from model rocketry. There is a type of rocket known as a "boost glider" that somewhat resembles my proposed design goals for LOHAN. A boost glider has two flight phases. First, the rocket boosts to a high altitude, and the boost stage burns out and ejects. Then the glider stage deploys, the wing shifts its aerodynamic qualities from vertical flight to glider. The key factor here is that in order to not chase the glider to a distant landing point, the wings are designed to put the glider into a gentle spiral, circling the release point. This is intended to maximize flight duration without flying the thing in a straight line into another country. This also has the advantage that the characteristics of the spiral flight can be fixed into the design without need for autopilots. In some cases, a simple aileron adjustment is all that is necessary to create the gentle turn required for a circular flight path.
The best boost glider kit I ever built will address some of the problems I see in Murray Pearson's proposal. His folding wing design seems to require a mechanism to unfold and fix the wings into flight position. The design I built was a kit from Estes, with a one-piece solid wing that rotated into place around a central pivot. During flight phase, the oval wing as inline with the rocket body. When the boost stage separated, it released the wing, which pivoted 90 degrees, pulled by a rubber band. This is a much simpler design than Pearson's which requires dual wing deployment. Vintage Estes model rocket plans are archived on hobbyist websites, but I was unable to find the rotating wing design. Still, that was perhaps more of a design stunt than would be necessary for LOHAN. Most boost glider designs have fixed wings that merely adjust ailerons during the flight phase. This would be sufficient for LOHAN, since the balloon will lift the glider during the initial lift phase, eliminating the need for aerodynamic characteristics needed for self-powered vertical flight. However, your proposal for a rocket powered initial flight stage would still require a stable flight platform. I might suggest using an example like the SEMROC Swift-BG design.
http://www.cdimodelrocketry.com/proddetail.php?prod=SEMROCKV27
It doesn't have any complex unfolding wing design, it's simple and looks effective.
Legal yes, but undriveable
That car looks like it has a ground clearance of about 4 inches, it would need perfectly flat roads. It wouldn't even make it out of my driveway. Looks like it has a top speed of about 35mph too. If I ran a racing shop and made this, I'd be embarrassed.
Lag
I'm having trouble with lag lately. I'm still playing (get this, you won't believe it) Halo 1 for Mac. The main host is still running after all these years. But it seems like the only people that play it are in regions in South America, small "guilds" within a regional subnet but with high pings from any international site on the net. So what happens is the guild and the host are all close together with low latency, and everyone else who joins is a half second to two seconds behind. The guild kicks everybody's ass, especially the host who has home server advantage.
Copyfraud
For a further (and previous) analysis of this problem, you might look for my article on El Reg, entitled "Copyfraud: Poisoning the Public Domain."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/26/copyfraud/
Thanks Tom.
I worked with DG Eclipse machines early in the 80s, my first real pro computer gig. Can you believe I was translating FORTRAN II legacy programs into the new 16 bit environment? Nobody in our office quite got the hang of their fancy Array Processor accessory.
I still remember one thing most vividly from the "Soul of a New Machine" book. He said he liked hiring Comp Sci grads straight out of school, because they didn't know what was impossible yet. Now that I'm an old veteran with 35 years of experience, I've tried to keep that attitude that nothing is impossible. If for no other reason, I really owe Tom West for that one idea.
Guy believes in God.
Guy believes HE IS God, at least where Apple's concerned. Guy has spent many years since his brief time at Apple, spouting his arrogant crap about how his "evangelism" saved Apple. But his turf, developer relations, prospered DESPITE Guy, not because of him.
Drone Attack Methods
This use of drones shouldn't be particularly surprising. That's what they were invented for. The first drone attack I heard of was by the Israelis, in the 6 day war IIRC. At that time, drones didn't carry weapons. So the Israelis sent a wave of drones at antiaircraft sites. The drones didn't have a very big radar signature, so they got fairly close, then the Egyptians thought they were an incoming attack wave of fighter-bombers. So like a 1/4 scale or less drone gets about 4x closer than a full size plane to give the same radar return.
So the drones get close, really close, and then the Egyptians turn on the SAM site radars to attack them. The Egyptians think they're shooting at a full attack wave, like 3 or 4x further away than the drones really are. At this point, the REAL attack wave is just popping up over the horizon, now they have fully illuminated radar sites to attack with HARM missiles. Brilliant.
Apple has always hoarded cash
Apple has always had monumental cash reserves. Alas, that was part of the problem that lead to Apple's problems in the 1980s. I remember when I sold Macs in the late 1980s, Apple had a cooperative deal with GMAC (I think it was GMAC) for financing and leasing computers. It added considerably to the cost of Macs (giving Microsoft and IBM an opening) but helped them acquire a huge cash hoard. Even as Apple was supposedly "dying," their cash reserves kept growing. This was one of the reasons behind Michael Dell's remarks about how he'd "liquidate the company and give all the stockholders their money back." There was a LOT of money to give back.
Contax
I wonder how these new Hasselblad-branded lenses compare to the old Contax lenses of the classic Hassleblad system. That was what really made the distinctive Hasselblad quality, the Contax lenses. They had unsurpassed sharpness and color saturation, which worked wonders for all sorts of lighting conditions, from artificial & studio flash, to available light. And since the film was 2 1/4, you could use a faster film (and even push B&W) and the graininess was less prominent than in 35mm shots on the same film.
I used to have a 45 degree angle prism viewfinder on my old 500 C/M. I always thought that was the best way to shoot a medium format camera. I'm surprised there isn't a similar product for the new Hassleblad system, this big digital camera looks like it would be hard to use when held up to the eye like a 35mm SLR.
Older hard drives e.g. Corvus
I suspect older drives in working condition could be found. Corvus Systems shipped 10Mb Winchester hard drives for the Apple ][, back around 1979. They were pretty tough, I bet someone has a Corvus drive that still works sitting on a shelf somewhere. I was a Corvus tech back in the day, so if any such drive appears, I would be glad to help get it up and running (such as I am able).
Jeez, now I think back to ~1980 when 10Mb of hard disk seemed like an infinite storage space, compared to Apple ][ 140k floppies. And then I recall backing up a 10Mb Corvus disk to 140k floppies, ouch.
Recoil?
This isn't a "Target Engagement System" as the DoD describes it. This is shoulder artillery. Doesn't the Academy of Law teach heavy weapons handling to cadets anymore? Recoil is nothing. Just be glad you weren't issued a Stub Gun.
Osborne Effect
Oh Tony, you should have done more research on The Osborne Effect. There is a rather unique article in the archives of El Reg that debunks the so-called Osborne Effect. Incidentally, that article quotes ME extensively, I ran a major Osborne repair site.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/20/no_osborne_effect_at_osborne/
My iPhone turned me into a newt!
I got better.
Sales Principles for the Lazy
I took many sales training courses and read many books back in my days as a salesman at ComputerLand. Then one day my boss and I were talking about a new research finding he just read. It claimed that salesmen have a basic "comfort level," they work at a fixed level of effort and their sales figures hovered around a specific number and did not vary much. You can motivate a salesman or improve results with training and motivational support, but the improved sales results are temporary. The salesman will gradually return to his old level of effort.
My boss figured the only solution to this was to add sales support to the rainmakers, so his immediate response was to hire sales coordinators and secretaries for his top salesmen. If the top sales guys were closers, let the coordinators do the research and come up with quotes and offers for cross-sells, upsells, etc.
Good data but little of it
I was expecting a much larger leak. But I did read all of it and it does seem to show management orders for illegal record erasing to hide further unknown shenanigans. A lot of it is emails from the leaker who got raided by the police and is under intense pressure from the bank. I think there's more coming, the guy says he's keeping more evidence, but no sense playing your ace in the hole early in the game. There is so much illegal flim flam in the financial industry that goes unpunished, it's hard to believe they would go to the trouble to cover something up unless it was pretty serious. Where there's smoke there's fire?
Zatoichi's Cane Sword
That's the only fantasy sword I want.
Heads up
That headline is going in my collection. Even the cleverest headline writer could go his whole life without writing Surrey Shocked by Shag Sheet Snatch.
Rigged bidding on this job.
I am sure I could have submitted a winning bid for £590.
Holy..
What the hell? That's not a yacht, that's a destroyer. How many gun emplacements does it have?
Need more options
You should put this out to the public and collect more possible names.
My choice: "Space Junk." To be consumed while playing the DEVO song "Space Junk."
Yen
This had a lot to do with the exchange rate. Between 1985 and 88, the exchange rate doubled between the Yen and the US Dollar, making the Yen worth twice as much. That was the basis of the "bubble economy." There were a few years where it made sense for Japanese corporations (and individuals) to buy anything that could be purchased with dollars.
CL SD
This story is a bit later than 1984. Our group merged with CL SD and became the largest retailer in the world.
RH/RR
Personally, I rely on my 1975 Pocket Pal. I kept it on my desk even when I was running Scitex equipment at a service bureau.
BFA
I finished my BFA in 1996, majoring in painting. I had already been a professional computer artist.
Saving Apple
We didn't lose Disney, they still bought millions of dollars worth of Macs. But they started shifting slowly towards PCs, and Macs were harder to justify. Still, with the expanding computer market, they never bought fewer Macs than before.
I think the main theme is that I was trying to save Apple from itself. Mac users and sales reps tended to know how to market the Mac better than Apple did. It is hard to realize the impact of the abysmal years just after Jobs was ousted, when the financial type people started running the show. Apple could easily have died off, but once I helped establish it into major accounts, it would never die out. And it did face that risk in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
re: recollections
I've used an Editwriter. It used text markup and it wasn't WYSIWYG. Soft proofing is not interactive and does not show live editing, so it's barely more useful than real proofing. And for that matter, the Editwriter wasn't a desktop, it was bigger than a desk, it took up the whole desk plus a big cabinet that sat on the floor.
You have made a good effort, but failed to show me any evidence of a true DTP system that existed before the 1980 system I described in my article. For many years, I have challenged my typesetting colleagues to show me proof of any DTP system that existed before 1980, and fulfilled the criterion I described. Nobody has ever come forward with anything even close. This is what was revolutionary about DTP in 1980, it was not the quality of output or the technical capabilities, it was the total integration of features that we now take for granted. Many high-end professional typesetting systems had one or more of the DTP-style features, but nobody put them all together as DTP. It was impossible, no suitable microcomputer existed before that time.
re: (untitled)
I sold a lot of Zenith Z-89 CP/M systems to William C Brown.
Flew?
I'm not actually convinced the plane actually flew. Since it was found so close to the point where it separated from the balloon, the proper term might be "plummet," "nosedive," or just plain "fall." None of those conditions are really aerodynamic flight.
I use to fly model rockets with glider payloads, the usual idea was to build the glider so it would fly in circles, so it didn't just go on a straight line into the next county. But this has to be tested before the flight, to make sure it has the ability to fly level with a slight bank. Did you actually flight test Vulture 1 before dropping it? Because the project results seem to me, to indicate the plane just dropped from the sky instead of flew. On your next attempt, I would like to see some evidence that the aircraft has aerodynamic flight properties somewhat better than a falling rock.
Steal This Backup
This is a ridiculous idea. An iPad is so easily lost or stolen, it is the absolute worst possible backup medium. I still remember the first review of the MacBook Air in the New York Times. The reviewer sheepishly admitted that it was accidentally tossed in the trash. He was using it at home on the weekend and left it sitting on a stack of Sunday newspapers. His wife threw away the whole pile without ever realizing there was an ultralight laptop in it.
Another point worth considering is compression. Most current formats for large files are already optimally compressed. If you zip a video file, you will get almost no further compression. Zip a 1.0Gb video file and you will almost always get a 0.99Gb zip. And on a slow processor as used in iPads and other low power consumption CPUs, uncompression is very time consuming.
Cold out != Warm in
I'm not convinced the extreme insulation to "keep the cold out" (as you put it) is likely to work. You also need to warm the interior. Other similar amateur balloon lift projects have used little chemical heat pads inside their styrofoam electronics containers, to keep the batteries warm. You can probably buy something useful at any drugstore, they're little chem packs, you break the interior vial so the catalyst mixes into the pack, and it stays warm for a few hours.
Logical
This is a logical, rational decision. If a download was considered a performance, it could be equally argued that the mailman delivering a CD by post was also a performance.
Ballast
Brilliant solution on the powder. But I'm still not clear on the concept. Why is any "ballast" needed in the tube? It seems to only be there to occupy space, to displace part of the air in the tube. It might have been easier to just use the proper length of tube, which would contain just the right amount of air to yield the proper expansion.
Also, it's good that you dealt with these temperature issues, but I still would be concerned that the rubber tube will freeze up in action. Maybe you should test it at lower temps with dry ice, see if it still stays flexible. It would probably be unnecessary to test it at both low temp and low pressure, if it passes the low temp test separately.
All publicity is good publicity.
Microsoft managed to get more publicity for its dollar with this stunt. It's all over the newspapers. You can't buy publicity like that.
I personally agree with the theme of the conference that more women should be working in IT. Specifically, I want to see more women in gold bikinis working in IT.
Diagonals
Those diagonals look like they're only going to concentrate the stresses. There is no diagonal bracing between the two inmost spars, that's where the torsional stresses will end up.
Embarrassing
That was the most embarrassing Microsoft promotional stunt since the release video for Microsoft Songsmith.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/26/songsmith/
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