"Now, people view NASA and space exploration with jaded cynicism, rather than with a sense of wonder."
True, but surely that's largely because for the last three decades NASA has been floundering and directionless, more concerned with their budget than with actually achieving anything worth a damn. If JFK had announced Apollo as a heroic national endeavour to wash his socks by the end of the decade, at a cost of billions, I suspect people would have been pretty jaded and cynical even then.
Give us something to get excited about, and we'll get excited.
Good point about the X-Prize, which has certainly reignited public interest in space, but Mars is going to need government investment for the forseeable future. Not enough money in it.
"I think that given the world we live in now, increased space program funding would be viewed as a waste of money rather than good PR."
Shrug. A significant Mars mission could be accomplished with current technology for a small fraction of what the current Iraq war has cost, and wouldn't kill large numbers of people or turn the US into an international pariah. Again, don't rule it out.
I agree it's unlikely, but it's not absolutely impossible. Nobody here seems to be considering the P.R. aspect of manned spaceflight.
It's very useful to US foreign policy to be well-regarded by the rest of the planet. For most of the late 20th Century, its role as "leader" in the Cold War helped maintain goodwill in Western Europe and parts of Asia. You can argue about whether that goodwill was deserved, but that's really beside the point. It's gone.
The US (by which I mean its government and policies, not the general public) is now viewed with some mixture of fear, loathing and frustration by almost everyone else. Its current "War on Terror" is doing far more to inflame tensions and increase risk than to mitigate them. The other major "crisis", climate change, requires action so diametrically opposed to US corporate culture that I fully expect to to see Belgium colonize Alpha Centauri before anything constructive gets done.
Which leaves space. The Apollo Project had a huge psychological impact on the global psyche. It was, and remains, one of the great heroic achievements of the human species, and it was done by Americans. (Well, and Germans.)
I think Mars could be the same. If US foreign policy continues racking up "blowback" at its current rate, that could become very attractive to a US president.
Why not just set it up as a Quick Search bookmark? Map it to keyword "a" or something, then just type "a mysearchterm" in the URL bar. YMMV, but I love this UI and find it far more usable than the "official" search UI, which is ludicrously small, clunky if you want to change engine and doesn't get the focus when you open a new tab.
C'mon, dorbie... I mostly agree with your sentiments, but I think you go overboard in a couple of places here.
The rendering and dispatch API semqantics have been optimized by the vendors in a standard way.
But there are important areas where the ARB has fumbled the ball spectacularly, render-to-texture being the most obvious.
Red herring features that do not make any sense or map to real hardware have no place in a programming interface explicitly designed to sit close to the metal like OpenGL
And yet we still have polygon stipple, and selection. There's a conflict between API cleanliness and backward compatibility, and the GL way isn't necessarily the ideal one for everybody. For short-term projects, a clean API tuned for the common things that people want to do might make sense. (I'm not saying D3D is such an API; I haven't used it since v5. I'm just not ruling out the possibility.)
How about a massive "conspiracy" (if something so open can be called that) keeping the Republicrat party in power?
Seriously, from a comparative perspective, the USA is a one-party state. Sure, you have elections. In Soviet Russia (TM) they had elections. Yes, all the candidates were members of the Communist Party, but there was probably more of an ideological divide between the wings of that party than exists between the Democrats and Republicans. (The current US election is a lot more virulently partisan than most, but still.)
Heh, that reminds me... among the marchers at the big (1-2 million strong) anti-war rally in London's Hyde Park, there were any number of Christian and Muslim banners, a fair few Jewish banners... and one lonely soul in a pentagram t-shirt with the banner "Satanists Against The War".
Implications for the relative ethical level of the US right are left as an exercise for the reader.
Okay, it's not quite the same thing as described in TFA, but...
About 10 years back I did some (non-sensitive) work on a test platform for the Tiger helicopter project. One of the experimental bits was an AR (augmented reality) feature; a laser scanner in the nose detected power lines up ahead and traced over them in REALLY BRIGHT COLOURS on the helmet visor.
You can see how something like that could be a lifesaver. Those things flew very low, and pretty fast. Not sure whether the feature made it into the final production model, though.
See? Prior art! How dare they try to patent... oh, wait. Sorry, wrong story.
I just don't get it. I mean, Congress bending over backwards to legitimize obnoxious behaviour by big corporations I can understand; that's pretty much what it's for, these days.
But spammers? They're not particularly organized, as far as I know. It's not as if the Viagra-and-penis-extension lobby is a major campaign contributor. So what gives? Are Congresscritters really so consistently stupid right across the board, AND their staff, AND all the IT and telecoms industry lobbyists who must have had something to say?
Or were they worried about the effect of (useful) legislation on political direct-email campaigns? Maybe. But I can't see how that would benefit one party more than the other, so why care?
technology has been the backbone of the USA since the industrial age
Since, maybe. During, no. The USA's initial industrialization was largely founded on cotton, which in turn was founded on genocide (providing cheap land) and slavery (providing cheap labour).
after a few years, once everybody sees what's going on, we usually correct our mistakes pretty quickly
The dual-path approach you're taking strikes me as eminently sensible, but AFAIK Gtk does not use the native look-and-feel for a platform, so I have doubts about whether it'll ever be a compelling alternative for non-Gnome users.
Did you give any thought to layering the unencumbered-GUI path on top of a crossplatform but native-widget toolkit, like SWT? Yes, it's Java, but I believe that Eclipse/SWT has been run in.NET using the IKVM virtual machine, so it's presumably not impossible.
There are several Funny-modded posts pointing out that the 2020 suit looks like a Darth Vader costume. Hell, even the mil spokesman describes it as "ominous". Nobody seems to see this as a drawback. The damn things look evil.
A lot of planning nowadays assumes that the most likely conflict scenarios involving US forces are so-called "fourth-generation wars", where cultural perceptions and media strategy are as important as hardware. The intifada is still the textbook example. Those kids weren't throwing stones because they didn't have access to guns. They were throwing stones because stones against tanks makes a great video-bite for the media.
So: on the "imperial" side we have legions of anonymous mooks in hulking black armour and face-concealing visors. Backed up by horrifying robotic killing machines. On the "rebel" side we have rag-tag, lightly-armed folk in nice earth-hued organic-looking clothing. Got that? Now put it on a TV screen. Regardless of your political views on a given conflict, there is a huge amount of cultural programming that leads Western viewers to root for the rebels. (Non-Western viewers generally don't need much convincing.)
Another, more worrying aspect: there is a lot of experimental and real-world evidence to show that the willingness of troops, police etc to commit atrocities is strongly correlated with their anonymity. Visors and even sunglasses increase the likelihood; big bold nametags reduce it. Anything that makes eye-contact difficult also makes it harder to win the trust of any locals you have to deal with.
And haven't these people even read the Evil Overlord List? It's item #1 for crying out loud!
The FSF actually does development in a very closed manner when it can (the gcc egcs split was partly because of this)
..and pshaw. egcs was a radical rewrite of GCC; it was run as a separate research project in order to be able to make huge changes and get releases out for testing without blocking bugfix work on the old, stable codebase. (Since radical rewrites tend to be high-risk.)
I've never heard that any kind of "openness" issue was involved.
* Doom3 is about to ship. A LOT of people will be buying nice new high-profit-margin gaming kit right about now.
* There's a large overlap between the FPS-gaming set and the patent-hating Slashdot set. This isn't like GIFs, where 99.999% of end-users didn't give a damn about patent abuse.
If Intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades
(my emphasis)
Even if ETs do exist, there are a host of long-standing doubts about whether they'll be using "transmissions" (questionable), or whether those transmissions will be distinguishable from random noise (OK, probably).
Wanting your hardware to work with your software properly (not to mention out of the box!) is your idea of a "slashbot knee-jerk"?
Not at all. The parlous state of video drivers under Linux is the reason I haven't switched - all the apps I use are available on Linux - and I can certainly sympathise. However, the "give me GPLed drivers or give me death" sentiment is reliably trotted out whenever an article on video cards is posted, and usually gets modded up, so it does tend to draw the bots. Along with the "but nobody needs 7000fps in Quake3" trolls, and a few other usual suspects.
What really screamed "slashbot", though, was the OP's sentence "there isn't much to lose in opening up a driver's code". Where the big players are concerned this assertion is untrue, naive, and does nothing to advance the poster's agenda.
Normally I'd disregard this as the usual slashbot knee-jerk, but in this case opening the driver source is actually plausible.
NV and (to a lesser extent) ATI have invested a huge amount of effort in their drivers. A good GL driver was never trivial, and if anything is becoming more complicated as drivers take on responsibilities like compiling and optimizing shader code. Even without the oft-rumoured third-party IP issues, I don't see much chance of the big players releasing their source anytime soon.
S3, on the other hand, may be starting with a pretty clean slate. Their drivers are probably still pretty shaky once you step off the usual Quake rendering paths, and tightening them up could take years if they only have in-house dev resource. They're positioning this as a budget part, and are presumably very keen to keep costs down. They're an outsider at the moment and might happily grab a niche like Linux as a toehold from which to make a play for the wider market.
(Jeepers, a Microsoftie reading/. at <=2. I congratulate you on the efficacy of your asbestos underpants, sir.)
I assume all the usual Win32 SDK will be included... what about the relevant bits of the MSDN library? Probably not practical for the download, but maybe for a store-shelf SKU?
Does anybody know whether this this will still be possible with Express C++, or will it only compile to IL for the.Net runtime? (In defiance of tradition I did RTFFAQ, but it didn't FAnswer.)
Doesn't surprise me. Even on a vanilla win2k desktop, I've seen the Visual Studio.NET setup crash the box all the way down to a BIOS error screen. They appear to be doing some distinctly hairy stuff in there.
No, it's not my site - I'm not affiliated with it in any way, which unfortunately means I don't get to be an extra. Maybe they should hold a competition; you know, send in a picture of some piece of land/sea which doesn't deserve to be burned/boiled...
Odd that you're having Camino problems - it's still zippy even after being linked to on/., and has always worked fine for me (Moz 1.6).
Slashdot Mirror
"Now, people view NASA and space exploration with jaded cynicism, rather than with a sense of wonder."
True, but surely that's largely because for the last three decades NASA has been floundering and directionless, more concerned with their budget than with actually achieving anything worth a damn. If JFK had announced Apollo as a heroic national endeavour to wash his socks by the end of the decade, at a cost of billions, I suspect people would have been pretty jaded and cynical even then.
Give us something to get excited about, and we'll get excited.
Good point about the X-Prize, which has certainly reignited public interest in space, but Mars is going to need government investment for the forseeable future. Not enough money in it.
"I think that given the world we live in now, increased space program funding would be viewed as a waste of money rather than good PR."
Shrug. A significant Mars mission could be accomplished with current technology for a small fraction of what the current Iraq war has cost, and wouldn't kill large numbers of people or turn the US into an international pariah. Again, don't rule it out.
I agree it's unlikely, but it's not absolutely impossible. Nobody here seems to be considering the P.R. aspect of manned spaceflight.
It's very useful to US foreign policy to be well-regarded by the rest of the planet. For most of the late 20th Century, its role as "leader" in the Cold War helped maintain goodwill in Western Europe and parts of Asia. You can argue about whether that goodwill was deserved, but that's really beside the point. It's gone.
The US (by which I mean its government and policies, not the general public) is now viewed with some mixture of fear, loathing and frustration by almost everyone else. Its current "War on Terror" is doing far more to inflame tensions and increase risk than to mitigate them. The other major "crisis", climate change, requires action so diametrically opposed to US corporate culture that I fully expect to to see Belgium colonize Alpha Centauri before anything constructive gets done.
Which leaves space. The Apollo Project had a huge psychological impact on the global psyche. It was, and remains, one of the great heroic achievements of the human species, and it was done by Americans. (Well, and Germans.)
I think Mars could be the same. If US foreign policy continues racking up "blowback" at its current rate, that could become very attractive to a US president.
You're not a certain ex-CD named Steve by any chance, are you?
Why not just set it up as a Quick Search bookmark? Map it to keyword "a" or something, then just type "a mysearchterm" in the URL bar. YMMV, but I love this UI and find it far more usable than the "official" search UI, which is ludicrously small, clunky if you want to change engine and doesn't get the focus when you open a new tab.
C'mon, dorbie... I mostly agree with your sentiments, but I think you go overboard in a couple of places here.
The rendering and dispatch API semqantics have been optimized by the vendors in a standard way.
But there are important areas where the ARB has fumbled the ball spectacularly, render-to-texture being the most obvious.
Red herring features that do not make any sense or map to real hardware have no place in a programming interface explicitly designed to sit close to the metal like OpenGL
And yet we still have polygon stipple, and selection. There's a conflict between API cleanliness and backward compatibility, and the GL way isn't necessarily the ideal one for everybody. For short-term projects, a clean API tuned for the common things that people want to do might make sense. (I'm not saying D3D is such an API; I haven't used it since v5. I'm just not ruling out the possibility.)
How about a massive "conspiracy" (if something so open can be called that) keeping the Republicrat party in power?
Seriously, from a comparative perspective, the USA is a one-party state. Sure, you have elections. In Soviet Russia (TM) they had elections. Yes, all the candidates were members of the Communist Party, but there was probably more of an ideological divide between the wings of that party than exists between the Democrats and Republicans. (The current US election is a lot more virulently partisan than most, but still.)
"satanist Muslims"?
Heh, that reminds me... among the marchers at the big (1-2 million strong) anti-war rally in London's Hyde Park, there were any number of Christian and Muslim banners, a fair few Jewish banners... and one lonely soul in a pentagram t-shirt with the banner "Satanists Against The War".
Implications for the relative ethical level of the US right are left as an exercise for the reader.
Okay, it's not quite the same thing as described in TFA, but...
About 10 years back I did some (non-sensitive) work on a test platform for the Tiger helicopter project. One of the experimental bits was an AR (augmented reality) feature; a laser scanner in the nose detected power lines up ahead and traced over them in REALLY BRIGHT COLOURS on the helmet visor.
You can see how something like that could be a lifesaver. Those things flew very low, and pretty fast. Not sure whether the feature made it into the final production model, though.
See? Prior art! How dare they try to patent... oh, wait. Sorry, wrong story.
I just don't get it. I mean, Congress bending over backwards to legitimize obnoxious behaviour by big corporations I can understand; that's pretty much what it's for, these days.
But spammers? They're not particularly organized, as far as I know. It's not as if the Viagra-and-penis-extension lobby is a major campaign contributor. So what gives? Are Congresscritters really so consistently stupid right across the board, AND their staff, AND all the IT and telecoms industry lobbyists who must have had something to say?
Or were they worried about the effect of (useful) legislation on political direct-email campaigns? Maybe. But I can't see how that would benefit one party more than the other, so why care?
Old saying I'm rather fond of:
"Brits think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time."
technology has been the backbone of the USA since the industrial age
Since, maybe. During, no. The USA's initial industrialization was largely founded on cotton, which in turn was founded on genocide (providing cheap land) and slavery (providing cheap labour).
after a few years, once everybody sees what's going on, we usually correct our mistakes pretty quickly
Erm... how can I put this delicately...
The dual-path approach you're taking strikes me as eminently sensible, but AFAIK Gtk does not use the native look-and-feel for a platform, so I have doubts about whether it'll ever be a compelling alternative for non-Gnome users.
Did you give any thought to layering the unencumbered-GUI path on top of a crossplatform but native-widget toolkit, like SWT? Yes, it's Java, but I believe that Eclipse/SWT has been run in .NET using the IKVM virtual machine, so it's presumably not impossible.
There are several Funny-modded posts pointing out that the 2020 suit looks like a Darth Vader costume. Hell, even the mil spokesman describes it as "ominous". Nobody seems to see this as a drawback. The damn things look evil.
A lot of planning nowadays assumes that the most likely conflict scenarios involving US forces are so-called "fourth-generation wars", where cultural perceptions and media strategy are as important as hardware. The intifada is still the textbook example. Those kids weren't throwing stones because they didn't have access to guns. They were throwing stones because stones against tanks makes a great video-bite for the media.
So: on the "imperial" side we have legions of anonymous mooks in hulking black armour and face-concealing visors. Backed up by horrifying robotic killing machines. On the "rebel" side we have rag-tag, lightly-armed folk in nice earth-hued organic-looking clothing. Got that? Now put it on a TV screen. Regardless of your political views on a given conflict, there is a huge amount of cultural programming that leads Western viewers to root for the rebels. (Non-Western viewers generally don't need much convincing.)
Another, more worrying aspect: there is a lot of experimental and real-world evidence to show that the willingness of troops, police etc to commit atrocities is strongly correlated with their anonymity. Visors and even sunglasses increase the likelihood; big bold nametags reduce it. Anything that makes eye-contact difficult also makes it harder to win the trust of any locals you have to deal with.
And haven't these people even read the Evil Overlord List? It's item #1 for crying out loud!
The FSF actually does development in a very closed manner when it can (the gcc egcs split was partly because of this)
..and pshaw. egcs was a radical rewrite of GCC; it was run as a separate research project in order to be able to make huge changes and get releases out for testing without blocking bugfix work on the old, stable codebase. (Since radical rewrites tend to be high-risk.)
I've never heard that any kind of "openness" issue was involved.
Yeah, yeah. The usual smoke-blowing.
But...
* Doom3 is about to ship. A LOT of people will be buying nice new high-profit-margin gaming kit right about now.
* There's a large overlap between the FPS-gaming set and the patent-hating Slashdot set. This isn't like GIFs, where 99.999% of end-users didn't give a damn about patent abuse.
From the first sentence of TFA:
If Intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades (my emphasis)
Even if ETs do exist, there are a host of long-standing doubts about whether they'll be using "transmissions" (questionable), or whether those transmissions will be distinguishable from random noise (OK, probably).
Sensationalist, moi?
Wanting your hardware to work with your software properly (not to mention out of the box!) is your idea of a "slashbot knee-jerk"?
Not at all. The parlous state of video drivers under Linux is the reason I haven't switched - all the apps I use are available on Linux - and I can certainly sympathise. However, the "give me GPLed drivers or give me death" sentiment is reliably trotted out whenever an article on video cards is posted, and usually gets modded up, so it does tend to draw the bots. Along with the "but nobody needs 7000fps in Quake3" trolls, and a few other usual suspects.
What really screamed "slashbot", though, was the OP's sentence "there isn't much to lose in opening up a driver's code". Where the big players are concerned this assertion is untrue, naive, and does nothing to advance the poster's agenda.
Normally I'd disregard this as the usual slashbot knee-jerk, but in this case opening the driver source is actually plausible.
NV and (to a lesser extent) ATI have invested a huge amount of effort in their drivers. A good GL driver was never trivial, and if anything is becoming more complicated as drivers take on responsibilities like compiling and optimizing shader code. Even without the oft-rumoured third-party IP issues, I don't see much chance of the big players releasing their source anytime soon.
S3, on the other hand, may be starting with a pretty clean slate. Their drivers are probably still pretty shaky once you step off the usual Quake rendering paths, and tightening them up could take years if they only have in-house dev resource. They're positioning this as a budget part, and are presumably very keen to keep costs down. They're an outsider at the moment and might happily grab a niche like Linux as a toehold from which to make a play for the wider market.
Fingers crossed.
I think that the existing "Minimum font size" pref is a better (not to mention cleaner) way of solving the same problem.
an article with no comments? can such a thing be?
You misspelled "Frist psot!".
Well, as others have pointed out, I can't. But I'll promise to mod up the next post of yours I see in another thread.
Please? Pretty please? Dammit, Excellent karma has to be good for something. (Well, it was excellent before these Offtopic mods, anyhow.)
</grovel>Thanks.
(Jeepers, a Microsoftie reading /. at <=2. I congratulate you on the efficacy of your asbestos underpants, sir.)
I assume all the usual Win32 SDK will be included ... what about the relevant bits of the MSDN library? Probably not practical for the download, but maybe for a store-shelf SKU?
Does anybody know whether this this will still be possible with Express C++, or will it only compile to IL for the .Net runtime? (In defiance of tradition I did RTFFAQ, but it didn't FAnswer.)
Doesn't surprise me. Even on a vanilla win2k desktop, I've seen the Visual Studio .NET setup crash the box all the way down to a BIOS error screen. They appear to be doing some distinctly hairy stuff in there.
No, it's not my site - I'm not affiliated with it in any way, which unfortunately means I don't get to be an extra. Maybe they should hold a competition; you know, send in a picture of some piece of land/sea which doesn't deserve to be burned/boiled...
Odd that you're having Camino problems - it's still zippy even after being linked to on /., and has always worked fine for me (Moz 1.6).