Something Random

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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My brother did a lot of very odd tasks through some internet sites when he went through a period of unemployment. Nothing quite so odd as pictures of restaurants, but weird nonetheless.


Cool flash mob video. In explaining the level of coolness, it should be noted that a full size harp like that weighs around 100lbs.

[video=youtube;sTHXIzHPyqE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTHXIzHPyqE&feature=player_embedded[/video]
 

LunarMist

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So Felix Baumgartner now has the record for the highest freefall and he broke the sound speed barrier, but Joe Kittinger still holds the longest freefall record because Baumgartner opened his parachute after about 4m19s while Kittinger's record was 4m36s.

Is he Canadian? I wonder how long it would take to land if he jumped with the parachute open?
 

jtr1962

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Is he Canadian? I wonder how long it would take to land if he jumped with the parachute open?
He's Austrian. And I'm pretty sure if he jumped with the parachute open he would have died. There is little air resistance at 128,000. He probably still would have gone supersonic or close to it with an open chute. Then when he hit thicker air the chute would be ripped to shreds. Or if it wasn't, the deceleration would have killed him. Or ripped the straps holding him to the chute right off.
 

LunarMist

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Oh. I don't normally watch that channel where they jump off of bridges or planes, whatever. Going 128km into space is a rather crazy stunt, but I guess they have oxygen.
 

Handruin

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That was an interesting read. Lots of companies (mine included) faced similar battles. In our situation the lab environments got cannibalized to meet the demands for customers. Drives got pulled from lots of lab arrays so that the supply could be met until stabilized. Surprisingly it's still next to impossible to get SSD drives in our arrays.

Speaking of arrays...in the last several days I've been planning the migration to a new storage array for our team. Our company rotates out arrays every couple years and we rarely capitalize them for a given team. We are getting a VNX 7500 with 190, 600GB SAS drives (114TB RAW). Planning the distribution of it between the various projects has been interesting. The various team leads are "shopping" for their new LUN configurations (RAID 10, RAID 6, etc). We have 22 servers that connect to it for storage in various ways. This is on of two VNX we use. I'm excited for the upgrade from slower 1TB SATA 7200RPM to 10K RPM. The IO improvement will be noticeable.
 

Mercutio

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I just had a help call from someone I've never even met, asking what his wireless passphrase is. He was indignant that I didn't know so I walked him through resetting his wireless router instead.
I'm helping!
 

Howell

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He's Austrian. And I'm pretty sure if he jumped with the parachute open he would have died. There is little air resistance at 128,000. He probably still would have gone supersonic or close to it with an open chute. Then when he hit thicker air the chute would be ripped to shreds. Or if it wasn't, the deceleration would have killed him. Or ripped the straps holding him to the chute right off.

There would not be that much of an air density gradient in the 30' from body to chute. The effects of the thinner air on the chute would be the same as the were on the body, reduced drag. The chute might not have inflated properly due to not being designed for the thinner air but I think it would have been fine.

What I've been wondering is if his suit needed to protect him from heat like the black tiles did for the shuttle. And also, the chute might not have been designed for that.
 

Handruin

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What I've been wondering is if his suit needed to protect him from heat like the black tiles did for the shuttle. And also, the chute might not have been designed for that.

I would expect his suite does not require the same level of shielding because he did not reach anywhere near the speeds that a shuttle would upon re-entry. Given the shuttle is required to meet the escape velocity to orbit earth at such a high velocity, it does not have enough power or time to reduce the velocity prior to reentry so it uses the friction of air to reduce its speed. The space shuttle requires heat protection shielding because:

"The reentry speed is largely dictated by the Earth gravitational pull and given the physics of such a reentry the speed is typically approximately 25,405 feet per second (17,322 statute miles per hour)."
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/587531.html
http://science.howstuffworks.com/space-shuttle7.htm
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/faq/2009/09/22/how-does-the-space-shuttle-slow-down-during-re-entry
 

Mercutio

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The latest trend in technology news: Speculation that Apple will buy something.
Because $10 billion is pocket change to Apple right now.
Never mind if the purchase doesn't make any sense, or that 10% of a company's cash on hand isn't really pocket change. I've probably seen a dozen tech news publications that were predicting Apple buyouts just this week.
Keep track of how often you see someone suggest it, 'cause it comes up A LOT these days.
 

jtr1962

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There would not be that much of an air density gradient in the 30' from body to chute. The effects of the thinner air on the chute would be the same as the were on the body, reduced drag. The chute might not have inflated properly due to not being designed for the thinner air but I think it would have been fine.
I know there wouldn't be much of an air density gradient from the body to the chute. I'm thinking more along the lines of the chute not inflating much due to very little air pressure. Felix would probably still reach close to supersonic speeds by the time he hit maybe 100,000 feet. And the air gets thicker pretty fast below 100,000 feet, so you might have the chute suddenly popping open at speeds it wasn't designed for.

What I've been wondering is if his suit needed to protect him from heat like the black tiles did for the shuttle. And also, the chute might not have been designed for that.
Heat is a non-issue here. To put things into perspective, the SR-71 could go at least Mach 3.5 (and was rumored to be much faster) at 80,000 to 85,000 feet. Granted, heat was an issue, with the leading edge of the engine nacelles glowing red, but we're traveling in much thicker air and at more than 3 times the speed of Felix. Heating is roughly proportional to velocity squared. I'm guessing if there was any heating at all, it was only a few degrees.
 

ddrueding

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I think the part about not burning up that hasn't been brought up is mass. The only reason heat would build up is if there is enough energy in the system to push through the resistance of the air and in giving up this energy as heat. The energy can only come from increased mass or increased speed (as Handruin alluded to). His starting speed was near zero, there must have been some atmosphere or the balloon wouldn't have worked. That leaves inertia from his mass vs surface area of his suit. Being as un-dense as a human, this can't be that big an issue.

Next time give him a squirrel suit.
 

Howell

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I would expect his suite does not require the same level of shielding because he did not reach anywhere near the speeds that a shuttle would upon re-entry. Given the shuttle is required to meet the escape velocity to orbit earth at such a high velocity, it does not have enough power or time to reduce the velocity prior to reentry so it uses the friction of air to reduce its speed.

Ah, of course a heavier object would/could have a higher terminal velocity and higher air friction. Couldn't see the forest for the trees.


I know there wouldn't be much of an air density gradient from the body to the chute. I'm thinking more along the lines of the chute not inflating much due to very little air pressure. Felix would probably still reach close to supersonic speeds by the time he hit maybe 100,000 feet. And the air gets thicker pretty fast below 100,000 feet, so you might have the chute suddenly popping open at speeds it wasn't designed for.

Incompatible statements.

Terminal velocity is dependent on density; time dropping a penny in water and oil. The chute pops open from completely deflated in the most dense air as a normal situation. As the body gets closer to the earth it will slow down due to friction forces.


My prediction is that he could have used a static line and been fine; even hitting supersonic speeds.
 

ddrueding

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Cool name, awesome ship. More important to me than reducing the number of ships is to massively reduce the number of personnel; I don't think the military (or the population at large) really appreciates how much additional cost each set of "boots on the ground" has over their lifetime.

Fewer, smarter ships and UAVs combined with special forces and surgical strikes should allow us to cut the military headcount by 50% and the budget by at least 25%.
 

Mercutio

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I don't think the military (or the population at large) really appreciates how much additional cost each set of "boots on the ground" has over their lifetime.

Actually I suspect that the military is painfully aware of those costs, but at the same time moving to special forces and drones leads us down a path where our military foreign policy amounts to assassination, and there will be repercussions for that come the day when that technology is cheap enough that third-rate powers have access to them. I think we're kind of getting away with that right now because we're dealing with enemies that aren't associated with any particular polity, but we really, really do need to stop and think about what we're doing with some of this stuff.

It's not like North Korea or Iran is suddenly going to whip out an ICBM or carrier group, but fly-by-wire is cheap and easy enough that I can buy a proof-of-concept at my local shopping mall.
 

ddrueding

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Actually I suspect that the military is painfully aware of those costs, but at the same time moving to special forces and drones leads us down a path where our military foreign policy amounts to assassination, and there will be repercussions for that come the day when that technology is cheap enough that third-rate powers have access to them. I think we're kind of getting away with that right now because we're dealing with enemies that aren't associated with any particular polity, but we really, really do need to stop and think about what we're doing with some of this stuff.

It's not like North Korea or Iran is suddenly going to whip out an ICBM or carrier group, but fly-by-wire is cheap and easy enough that I can buy a proof-of-concept at my local shopping mall.

I was under the impression that the point of wars were to take out or stop the people making the decisions we disagreed with. The only reason we killed all those poor slobs on the way was because we didn't have another method. I'd rather not kill everyone else, and in the process lose many of our own, just to accomplish that goal.

As far as what others will do, I don't think they are waiting for our permission. As soon as they can they will.
 

Mercutio

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We had to get done with WWI to understand that chemical weapons aren't really the brightest idea either. Maybe the fact that the current crop of military leadership worldwide doesn't remember things like nukes and mustard gas is the reason we're not giving more thought as to how we should proceed.
 

Stereodude

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Fewer, smarter ships and UAVs combined with special forces and surgical strikes should allow us to cut the military headcount by 50% and the budget by at least 25%.
You can cut headcount significantly but it's going to get more expensive not less expensive. People are much less expensive weapons (from a $$$ standpoint) than technology. However, the American public no longer has any stomach for troop casualties and limited tolerance of collateral damage and civilian deaths.
 

ddrueding

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Troop casualties suck, but they are nothing compared to the cost of a wounded soldier for the rest of their life. I've heard estimates of $1M each. Tomahawks are still stupid expensive in comparison, but UAVs with dumb munitions can be very cost effective.
 

jtr1962

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Part of the reason the military is such a large part of our budget is that those in charge are still acting as if the Cold War never finished. The military needs to reinvent itself to deal with the primary threats of our era-terrorism and rogue states like North Korea or Iran. I wonder why we still have so many nuclear subs and aircraft carriers. The irony in this is such a large naval presence is causing China to want to build a similar fleet. If it does, we might be in another Cold War. Even worse, this time it might be that China can outspend us the way we outspent the USSR.

Yeah, the American public wants war to be like a video game. Shoot, destroy the target, only the bad guys get killed. It doesn't work that way in the real world. I could make a good argument that our soldiers would be way more cost effective and efficient if we didn't need to bring them home (i.e. essentially send them on suicide missions just like Al Queda). Of course, nobody in any first world country would tolerate that concept. You would also be hard-pressed to find enough volunteers for one-way missions. So that pretty much leaves using expendable drones which can more or less functionally do the same thing. To get these drones to the level of effectiveness of a trained combat soldier is going to be very expensive.
 
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