The Russians have achieved a low-cost, reliable launch capability because,
first of all, they used simple, damage-tolerant designs that were less than
optimum by Western standards (from a performance and weight minimiza-
tion standpoint). The Soviet boosters and their subsystems were designed to
be highly modular, allowing vehicle customization for various missions with-
out always requiring completely new launch systems. Soviet launcher modu-
larity also provided the opportunity for large manufacturing economies of
scale for many components. Either because of pragmatic engineering judg-
ment or because of economic necessity, the Soviets reused existing designs for
decades, making minor modifications only when necessary.
Their launch operations emphasize off-line processing and minimum pad
time; and their simple, rugged launch vehicles have required minimal launch
pad testing. Also, Russian boosters have enjoyed high launch rates, thus en-
hancing manufacturing economies of scale and driving unit costs down. It is
interesting to speculate on how well US industries would do if they applied
these simple factors in a completely commercially-driven venture. After all,
the reliable, low-cost Russian launch capability has been built by a country in
which inefficiency and waste have been historically endemic.
Think of this as empowering people who will not use vi or emacs, but prefer Eclipse or Visual Studio, to have a visually appealing arsenal of tools which can be chained in a pipelined fashion.
What is wrong with that? Yahoo pipes for example provided pointy clickety interface to mashing up data. Lot of people used it to do useful work.
It really does not matter if a even single sysadmin who already uses the shell does not start using this. It just needs to have its OWN users that is all. If you just consider ALL Eclipse users + ALL Visual Studio users, that is a HUGE user base... Now the vi/emacs user may feel superior to the others...
but in reality anyone in this world can have their own reasons to create products and use various tools. All the best to the author of this tool for taking the pain to code this...
If it works out and gains users... awesome... else it shows we still find Old tools useful. We have not stopped using Fire or Wheels today though they very OLD technologies. Whether the shell is as important as fire or wheels OR transitionary like Hydrogen blimps or something in between only time will tell...
I would prefer a world without software patents. If that is not possible,
* At least the courts should charge exponentially high prices for each extra claim you want to make beyond a limit.
* All publicly listed companies will have a cap on total number of patents they can apply for (probably proportional to R&D spending) after which the price increases exponentially.
* Any person or institution found patent trolling should find further litigation exponentially expensive.
All these and more measures won't solve the problem... but at least increases the threshold for trolling behaviour...
I hope some one writes a javascript library that takes a suitable formatted text and has an expandTo(length) function so that the same info can fit into various screen sizes without having a scrollbar.
Can anyone suggest a JS library that allows u to plot semilog graphs and log log graphs please... Do any of the above support it? At least it is not shown in the galleries...
I think something implying: "Online Code Repository" would be better. Portfolio may mean, you want to look at the outputs while you want to check out the "code" or attitude here...
I suddenly realized by accident that Chinese children do not have brothers and sisters. I mean just imagine a whole country... hundreds of millions of children... not one has a brother or a sister. Imagine a sixth of a population of the planet shudder when it hears words like "brotherly affection". Life must be so different there.
And without brothers or sisters, children won't have uncles or aunts. Family trees will be tall and narrow, not bushy.
Most developed countries are already producing children at less than replacement population rate. They will face the same situation in a couple generations.
That 'not one has a brother or sister' isn't completely true. In many cases, especially in rural areas, there are families with two children, the older of which is a girl.
India got independence only in 1947. All growth till then made the British richer. Till the 1990s india had a strange cross breed b/w socialism and capitalism where large govt factories and govt organization employed most people and had low productivity.
One major gain was a strong focus on education many of them learning English. However most of it is rote learning centric. It is only in recent years that India has been able to make a place for itself in the BRIC economies.
