owever, you were making the point that the libraries were the stumbling block to a truly free Java implementation. My point was that it is the sheer size of the class library that's making this difficult, not the complexity of the code per se.
I wholeheartedly agree. I chose Swing as an example not because it's rocket science -- it isn't -- but because it's astoundingly massive and has a million tiny pieces that need to behave exactly like the reference implementation to ensure complete compatibility. And most of these behaviors are not things you could infer from the specs.
Extrapolate that out to the entire class library, and you have a nigh-insurmountable problem. Sure, you could easily get toy programs working properly between Sun's class library and SomeoneElse's class library, but a million-line client-side app will crash and burn hard due to the different set of bugs between the two systems.
Yes, with an insane amount of hacking effort, it's possible to remove IE from Windows. It's something that no ordinary user would ever do, so who cares?
In contrast, you can (for instance) swap out which XML parser Java uses by setting a single property value.
Wow, please calm down and wipe the froth off of your mouth. Thanks.
I said "any monkey can write a VM". I stand by my statement -- any reasonably competent code monkey could do it.
You, however, seem to have interpreted my statement as "any monkey can write a VM that is every bit as fast and reliable as HotSpot, including a JIT and/or other dynamic compiler".
I did not say that. There is a big difference between "a VM" and "a top-tier VM competitive with the best efforts of Sun and IBM". However, I still feel that it's way, way easier than trying to duplicate the entire frickin' class library.
Nevertheless, I just dont understand what opening Java is supposed to mean? ANSI-Java? I don't get it, anyone can make their own JVM and release it as a Java JVM long as it conforms to the JLS right!? IBM has already done this right?
The problem is the libraries. The VM is easy -- any monkey can write a VM. Have fun writing a completely compatible implementation of Swing. And that's just one of the many APIs that would need to be duplicated.
Yes, IBM has their own VM. But they use Sun's class libraries just like everybody else does. Sun is the only game in town as far as the class library is concerned. What people are asking for is for the class libraries to be opened up.
(Yes, there have been attempts to clone the Sun class library in open-source. However, they are all targeting support for really old versions of Java -- which is a lot like cloning Windows 3.11 today.)
Does anyone actually think this is actually gonna happen? Sun has always impressed me as a Microsoft wannabe. The only reason they are currently allying themselves with Linux is because "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Oh, bullshit.
When Microsoft wants to include a new technology (such as their web browser), they integrate it in such a way that you are forced to use it, can't replace it with something else, and end up using it for unrelated functions whether you want to or not. And half the interface is undocumented and inaccessible to people outside of Microsoft.
Sure, you can download and install your own web browser, but IE is always there, sucking up resources, no matter what you do.
When Sun wants to integrate something new into Java, the JCP develops a standard API for accessing it. Sun develops or licenses their own implementation of it, but allows you to use any implementation you choose so long as it implements the standard. Other VM distributors are free to replace Sun's implementation with their own. In fact, it's remarkably easy to be completely unaware of which implementation you are using.
If Microsoft had developed a standard web browsing API which allowed you to swap out IE in favor of Mozilla, and allowed computer manufacturers the right to do so on preinstalled machines if they chose, nobody would be complaining about the IE integration.
Well, that's exactly how Sun would have chosen to do it, based on their track record. They make it remarkably easy to swap out portions of the runtime library with alternate implementations.
Re:Mini Ipod Review on WinXP
on
iPod Mini Ships
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· Score: 3, Informative
Are you sure? I was under the impression that all Vaios all came with iLink ports, which are just another branding of IEEE 1394 aka Firewire.
Yes, I'm sure. The Firewire port on her laptop is a 4-pin port, the iPod Firewire cable is 6-pin, and we didn't have an adapter lying around. It is connected via USB.
Re:Mini Ipod Review on WinXP
on
iPod Mini Ships
·
· Score: 3, Informative
One caveat: It does not work with USB 1.1. The older ipods can sync with 1.1 and 2.0. You'll have to either buy a USB2.0 card or a firewire card to sync on a USB 1.1 machine.
My wife syncs her iPod Mini using USB 1.1 without difficulty. She's on a Sony Vaio GR-something-or-other laptop.
And considering she got her Mini last Thursday, this story seems a little belated.
But the point is, most processors aren't on the desktop and don't have the cycles or space to check every pointer. And some applications are real-time. You just have 1ms to do X. So maybe you have go down to assember to get the work.
Irrelevant. We are talking about security and buffer overflows. Cars, DVD players, and other embedded systems are closed and don't generally need to be concerned about people exploiting buffer overflows. I am only concerned with "real" computers here, not embedded systems.
The first step is to realise that a bad programmer produces broken code whatever language he/she uses. Bounds-checking is no substitute for correct error-checking and -handling, code-review, testing and debugging, whatever the language
And designing factory equipment with workers' safety in mind is no substitute for hardhats and proper safety precautions, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't design equipment for safety. If you want safety, be it in the physical world or in software, there is no substitute for multiple layers of sensible precautions. Bounds checking makes code much safer. The cost is minimal, particularly on the sorts of programs that are most affected by buffer overflows (such as web servers). What possible reason is there to fight against the idea of doing it?
You also suggest that C++ fixes this problem by allowing you to use STL and avoid pointers. Nonsense -- if it fixed the problem, we wouldn't still have buffer overflows in C++ programs. C++ makes it a bit easier to write safe code, I agree. But the fix is not to allow you to write safe code, but to (as much as is practical) make it impossible to do otherwise.
I'm all for error checking, code review, and the like. Never said otherwise. But doesn't it make sense to design the underlying system such that when a bug inevitably slips through (and it will happen), the impact is likely to be minimal?
So if there is a buffer overflow in explorer.exe, and I exploit this buffer, it kills explorer.exe.
and if I do this to IIS, repeatedly, from an outlook virus I just created to scan IP ranges and shut down any IIS server it can locate.
Yes, that's correct. In this example, there is still a severe bug in IIS, and the new AMD chips don't change that. The difference is that the worst you can (generally) do to a program under this new scenario is to crash it, as opposed to giving it arbitrary code to execute and potentially letting you root the box or perform other horribly nastiness.
...when I was a wee programmer, I was taught that the solution to this problem was to write better code.
And that strategy sure seems to be working well for the industry, doesn't it?
Bugs are a fact of life. The programmer who can write everything perfectly on the first try and never make an innocent screwup does not exist. Even if such a programmer existed, he would not be allowed the time or development budget to actually write perfect code, as his code would be pushed out the door as soon as it looked reasonably complete.
So, you can sit on your ass idly envisioning a world in which everybody writes perfect, bug-free code, or you can come back to the real world and try to make it more difficult to produce bugs and reduce the impact of the ones that inevitably occur.
After years working exclusively in Java, I am horrified that C programmers still consider the lack of array bounds checking to be a natural, normal part of life. It isn't. It's disaster after disaster waiting to happen, and there is absolutely no excuse for it. Performance is not an excuse -- we have machines running at multiple gigahertz now. They can spare a few cycles to do bounds checking. This crap needs to be fixed.
AMD can't make us all switch to sane programming languages, but they can at least ensure that code segments can't be modified. It's a good first step. The next step is to realize that C/C++ is horribly, unbelievably broken at a fundamental level and needs to be discarded.
When the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up, seven astronauts were killed. Brave people who knew the risks they were taking and had at least considered that they might not make it back alive.
Six people died in this fire. We treated Columbia as a national tragedy, yet when six unknown Indians die, most people won't even notice. These were people who didn't expect to die, who hadn't told their loved ones those "Just in case I don't make it back..." last messages and prepared for the worst.
My heart goes out to their families. Please try to have some respect for the dead. They were just as much a part of the space program as the Columbia astronauts were.
I always wonder whether the "It's accelerating so it'll drift apart in the end" folks understand basic calculus.
You always wonder whether astrophysicists understand basic calculus?
I'm doing my best to come up with something witty or intelligent to say to that, but I'm having trouble coming up with anything more than "What...? Huh?"
Considering that modern physics is largely just a whole hell of a lot of math, yes, I think it's safe to say that astrophysicists understand the principles of calculus. Have you even seen a modern physics paper?
The article is an accurate description of some call centers. The (very large and well-known) company that I work for outsources its tech support to Houston and India, and we have had a ridiculous number of complaints from our customers regarding the poor quality of our tech support. Everything I have heard here fits with what that article described.
We have been working hard on turning the situation around, with some success. My wife ran into a problem with her account a while back, and in light of this I decided that I would try to play customer rather than just getting the responsible engineer to fix it. The people I talked to were helpful, courteous, and didn't have a frickin' clue how to solve the problem. The standard response was "we changed something about your account, but it won't have any effect for a few hours. Check then, and call back if you're still having a problem."
I went through that three times before I just had a coworker fix it. Sounds an awful lot like the experiences described in the article.
i thought black holes were not proven to exist, or am i living in the past?
There is a tremendous amount of evidence favoring the existence of black holes. Whether or not you personally consider this evidence "proof" is up to you. Some people accepted the theory of evolution as soon as Darwin proposed it, while others still don't, despite the unbelievable preponderance of evidence and complete lack of scientific alternatives. In the end, all you have is the evidence, and what you make of it is up to you.
For what it's worth, virtually every astrophysicist considers the existence of black holes to be a simple fact at this point. As they know a hell of a lot more about the subject than I do, I tend to simply accept their beliefs on such matters. This in no way means that they can't be wrong, but they're much more likely to have things figured out than I am.
If the bolt fails because it was faulty - not because it was the wrong bolt - then it isnt the bridge Eng's fault. If your string library fails its the fault of the string libraries developer.
Yes, and when I tell my customers "Well, it's not my fault. The bug is actually in Microsoft's code", what do you think they're going to say? "Oh, ok, don't worry about it then. I don't mind that my entire ordering system is offline, because at least it wasn't your fault."
In the real world, it's always your fault. You either didn't QA well enough to find the bug, or you found it but didn't fix it, or (on the off chance it isn't one of those two things) you're stil going to be blamed for it, so buck up and figure out a workaround.
Yeah, my desktop w/ 19" monitor works great when I'm on the plane. Sure, I get a few funny looks from the flight crew, but I can't understand why anybody would bother with a laptop when desktops are so much cheaper.
It's also really cool using a desktop while in the john.
I read my eBooks on my PDA. This reader, in some sense, was free -- I bought it for other purposes, and only later thought about using it for eBooks, so I paid a grand total of $0 specifically to be able to read eBooks.
You can also read them on a laptop (or even a desktop), which most of you have, and that would also fall under the "free in a sense" category.
If you're looking for eBooks to use on non-dedicated devices such as computers and PDAs, check out Palm Digital Media.
Sure they do. They are far more efficient than incandescent bulbs, so they produce significantly less heat per lumen, but a very bright fluorescent or LED light can get quite hot.
In fact, high-brightness LEDs like the Luxeon Star have to be mounted on heat sinks to keep them from burning up.
Well, actually it's right, and it implies that the average house internet connection is 1.0mbps. Do the math... 1000000 bits / 8 = 125000 bytes/s 125000 bytes / 1024 = 122.0703125 kb/s 122.0703125 / 1024 = 0.1192092mb/s That means it's a 0.1192092mb/s line to mars, and probably with brutal latency. Let's just hope that they're not serving up warez from it...or that slashdot doesn't link to a webserver hosted on it...
You have confused your units. Network speeds are reported in bits, not bytes -- an average cable modem is around 1.5Mbps, not 1.5MBps.
The orbiter then uses its more-powerful antenna to send as many as one million bits of data per second back to Earth. While fairly fast for an attenuated radio connection, that's only about a tenth of the speed of a cable-modem connection for the average home-computer user.
Uhhh... did I miss something? My DSL line peaks at 1.5Mb on a good day. Where can I get a ten-megabit cable modem? And "average home-computer users" have them? I thought average home-computer users were still using 56K modems.
Oh, I get it now. According to this calendar, it's 2008. Damn, that was a nice nap. Need to catch up on the last four years of news. Hope something horrible happened to Microsoft.
Same goes for digital cameras - even the best still don't match the resolution of a decent 35mm film.
Then you either haven't used a good digital camera or you haven't done a fair comparison.
My wife is a professional photographer who shoots with a Nikon D1x. Film admittedly has higher line pair resolution, but as my wife isn't taking pictures of line pairs, that's irrelevant. For real-world shooting like portraits and nature photography, the D1x is easily comparable to 35mm film (a bit better in some respects, a bit worse in others).
And the D1x is only a 5.5 megapixel camera. There are already much higher resolution cameras on the market, and anyone who believes that 35mm film actually compares favorably to a good 16 megapixel imager is suffering from a severe inability to accept reality. The fight is already over. Film is dead.
Of course, I'm sure that a hundred years ago there were still horse-and-buggy proponents arguing that cars were inferior...
For all intents and purposes, no. They are in completely different orbits, with Hubble hundreds of kilometers higher. Neither one has the ability to maneuver itself to match the other's orbit, even if they wanted to.
It takes an absurd amount of fuel to substantially alter an orbit, which is why it is never done: we launch something into a particular orbit and more or less just keep it there.
What are all these posts about "the replacement isn't ready"? Why should there be exactly one functional space telescope at any given time? It looks like people assume there is just one guy using space telescopes, with 0 he'll get bored, and with 2 he'll be overworked. Not so!
So really the science done is proportional to their number (and capabilities). The rest is just economics. There's no important reason to aim for exactly 1 telescope at any given time.
Nobody is saying "there should be exactly one space telescope at any given time". What we're saying is "there should be at least one space telescope at any given time".
If something truly exciting, like Shoemaker-Levy or an amazingly bright supernova, happens again, we want to have at least one space telescope out there to watch it.
Gravity is weak compared to the other fundamental forces, such as magnetism. Imagine a paper clip lying on your desk. Why is it lying there, as opposed to floating freely? Gravity. The whole earth is busy pulling on it.
Yet, you could easily lift it with the magnetic field of a small refrigerator magnet.
We say "gravity is weak" because the magnetic field a one-gram magnet can pull more powerfully than the gravity of an entire frickin' planet.
Slashdot Mirror
owever, you were making the point that the libraries were the stumbling block to a truly free Java implementation. My point was that it is the sheer size of the class library that's making this difficult, not the complexity of the code per se.
I wholeheartedly agree. I chose Swing as an example not because it's rocket science -- it isn't -- but because it's astoundingly massive and has a million tiny pieces that need to behave exactly like the reference implementation to ensure complete compatibility. And most of these behaviors are not things you could infer from the specs.
Extrapolate that out to the entire class library, and you have a nigh-insurmountable problem. Sure, you could easily get toy programs working properly between Sun's class library and SomeoneElse's class library, but a million-line client-side app will crash and burn hard due to the different set of bugs between the two systems.
Was that supposed to be some kind of rebuttal?
Yes, with an insane amount of hacking effort, it's possible to remove IE from Windows. It's something that no ordinary user would ever do, so who cares?
In contrast, you can (for instance) swap out which XML parser Java uses by setting a single property value.
If he killed it in the process then it's murder or more like involuntary manslaughter. Autopsy can only be given post-mortem.
The correct term is "vivisection". Murder and manslaughter refer to crimes, and this was not a crime.
Wow, please calm down and wipe the froth off of your mouth. Thanks.
I said "any monkey can write a VM". I stand by my statement -- any reasonably competent code monkey could do it.
You, however, seem to have interpreted my statement as "any monkey can write a VM that is every bit as fast and reliable as HotSpot, including a JIT and/or other dynamic compiler".
I did not say that. There is a big difference between "a VM" and "a top-tier VM competitive with the best efforts of Sun and IBM". However, I still feel that it's way, way easier than trying to duplicate the entire frickin' class library.
Nevertheless, I just dont understand what opening Java is supposed to mean? ANSI-Java? I don't get it, anyone can make their own JVM and release it as a Java JVM long as it conforms to the JLS right!? IBM has already done this right?
The problem is the libraries. The VM is easy -- any monkey can write a VM. Have fun writing a completely compatible implementation of Swing. And that's just one of the many APIs that would need to be duplicated.
Yes, IBM has their own VM. But they use Sun's class libraries just like everybody else does. Sun is the only game in town as far as the class library is concerned. What people are asking for is for the class libraries to be opened up.
(Yes, there have been attempts to clone the Sun class library in open-source. However, they are all targeting support for really old versions of Java -- which is a lot like cloning Windows 3.11 today.)
Does anyone actually think this is actually gonna happen? Sun has always impressed me as a Microsoft wannabe. The only reason they are currently allying themselves with Linux is because "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Oh, bullshit.
When Microsoft wants to include a new technology (such as their web browser), they integrate it in such a way that you are forced to use it, can't replace it with something else, and end up using it for unrelated functions whether you want to or not. And half the interface is undocumented and inaccessible to people outside of Microsoft.
Sure, you can download and install your own web browser, but IE is always there, sucking up resources, no matter what you do.
When Sun wants to integrate something new into Java, the JCP develops a standard API for accessing it. Sun develops or licenses their own implementation of it, but allows you to use any implementation you choose so long as it implements the standard. Other VM distributors are free to replace Sun's implementation with their own. In fact, it's remarkably easy to be completely unaware of which implementation you are using.
If Microsoft had developed a standard web browsing API which allowed you to swap out IE in favor of Mozilla, and allowed computer manufacturers the right to do so on preinstalled machines if they chose, nobody would be complaining about the IE integration.
Well, that's exactly how Sun would have chosen to do it, based on their track record. They make it remarkably easy to swap out portions of the runtime library with alternate implementations.
Are you sure? I was under the impression that all Vaios all came with iLink ports, which are just another branding of IEEE 1394 aka Firewire.
Yes, I'm sure. The Firewire port on her laptop is a 4-pin port, the iPod Firewire cable is 6-pin, and we didn't have an adapter lying around. It is connected via USB.
One caveat: It does not work with USB 1.1. The older ipods can sync with 1.1 and 2.0. You'll have to either buy a USB2.0 card or a firewire card to sync on a USB 1.1 machine.
My wife syncs her iPod Mini using USB 1.1 without difficulty. She's on a Sony Vaio GR-something-or-other laptop.
And considering she got her Mini last Thursday, this story seems a little belated.
But the point is, most processors aren't on the desktop and don't have the cycles or space to check every pointer. And some applications are real-time. You just have 1ms to do X. So maybe you have go down to assember to get the work.
Irrelevant. We are talking about security and buffer overflows. Cars, DVD players, and other embedded systems are closed and don't generally need to be concerned about people exploiting buffer overflows. I am only concerned with "real" computers here, not embedded systems.
The first step is to realise that a bad programmer produces broken code whatever language he/she uses. Bounds-checking is no substitute for correct error-checking and -handling, code-review, testing and debugging, whatever the language
And designing factory equipment with workers' safety in mind is no substitute for hardhats and proper safety precautions, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't design equipment for safety. If you want safety, be it in the physical world or in software, there is no substitute for multiple layers of sensible precautions. Bounds checking makes code much safer. The cost is minimal, particularly on the sorts of programs that are most affected by buffer overflows (such as web servers). What possible reason is there to fight against the idea of doing it?
You also suggest that C++ fixes this problem by allowing you to use STL and avoid pointers. Nonsense -- if it fixed the problem, we wouldn't still have buffer overflows in C++ programs. C++ makes it a bit easier to write safe code, I agree. But the fix is not to allow you to write safe code, but to (as much as is practical) make it impossible to do otherwise.
I'm all for error checking, code review, and the like. Never said otherwise. But doesn't it make sense to design the underlying system such that when a bug inevitably slips through (and it will happen), the impact is likely to be minimal?
So if there is a buffer overflow in explorer.exe, and I exploit this buffer, it kills explorer.exe.
and if I do this to IIS, repeatedly, from an outlook virus I just created to scan IP ranges and shut down any IIS server it can locate.
Yes, that's correct. In this example, there is still a severe bug in IIS, and the new AMD chips don't change that. The difference is that the worst you can (generally) do to a program under this new scenario is to crash it, as opposed to giving it arbitrary code to execute and potentially letting you root the box or perform other horribly nastiness.
Personally, I consider that a major improvement.
...when I was a wee programmer, I was taught that the solution to this problem was to write better code.
And that strategy sure seems to be working well for the industry, doesn't it?
Bugs are a fact of life. The programmer who can write everything perfectly on the first try and never make an innocent screwup does not exist. Even if such a programmer existed, he would not be allowed the time or development budget to actually write perfect code, as his code would be pushed out the door as soon as it looked reasonably complete.
So, you can sit on your ass idly envisioning a world in which everybody writes perfect, bug-free code, or you can come back to the real world and try to make it more difficult to produce bugs and reduce the impact of the ones that inevitably occur.
After years working exclusively in Java, I am horrified that C programmers still consider the lack of array bounds checking to be a natural, normal part of life. It isn't. It's disaster after disaster waiting to happen, and there is absolutely no excuse for it. Performance is not an excuse -- we have machines running at multiple gigahertz now. They can spare a few cycles to do bounds checking. This crap needs to be fixed.
AMD can't make us all switch to sane programming languages, but they can at least ensure that code segments can't be modified. It's a good first step. The next step is to realize that C/C++ is horribly, unbelievably broken at a fundamental level and needs to be discarded.
When the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up, seven astronauts were killed. Brave people who knew the risks they were taking and had at least considered that they might not make it back alive.
Six people died in this fire. We treated Columbia as a national tragedy, yet when six unknown Indians die, most people won't even notice. These were people who didn't expect to die, who hadn't told their loved ones those "Just in case I don't make it back..." last messages and prepared for the worst.
My heart goes out to their families. Please try to have some respect for the dead. They were just as much a part of the space program as the Columbia astronauts were.
I always wonder whether the "It's accelerating so it'll drift apart in the end" folks understand basic calculus.
You always wonder whether astrophysicists understand basic calculus?
I'm doing my best to come up with something witty or intelligent to say to that, but I'm having trouble coming up with anything more than "What...? Huh?"
Considering that modern physics is largely just a whole hell of a lot of math, yes, I think it's safe to say that astrophysicists understand the principles of calculus. Have you even seen a modern physics paper?
The article is an accurate description of some call centers. The (very large and well-known) company that I work for outsources its tech support to Houston and India, and we have had a ridiculous number of complaints from our customers regarding the poor quality of our tech support. Everything I have heard here fits with what that article described.
We have been working hard on turning the situation around, with some success. My wife ran into a problem with her account a while back, and in light of this I decided that I would try to play customer rather than just getting the responsible engineer to fix it. The people I talked to were helpful, courteous, and didn't have a frickin' clue how to solve the problem. The standard response was "we changed something about your account, but it won't have any effect for a few hours. Check then, and call back if you're still having a problem."
I went through that three times before I just had a coworker fix it. Sounds an awful lot like the experiences described in the article.
i thought black holes were not proven to exist, or am i living in the past?
There is a tremendous amount of evidence favoring the existence of black holes. Whether or not you personally consider this evidence "proof" is up to you. Some people accepted the theory of evolution as soon as Darwin proposed it, while others still don't, despite the unbelievable preponderance of evidence and complete lack of scientific alternatives. In the end, all you have is the evidence, and what you make of it is up to you.
For what it's worth, virtually every astrophysicist considers the existence of black holes to be a simple fact at this point. As they know a hell of a lot more about the subject than I do, I tend to simply accept their beliefs on such matters. This in no way means that they can't be wrong, but they're much more likely to have things figured out than I am.
If the bolt fails because it was faulty - not because it was the wrong bolt - then it isnt the bridge Eng's fault. If your string library fails its the fault of the string libraries developer.
Yes, and when I tell my customers "Well, it's not my fault. The bug is actually in Microsoft's code", what do you think they're going to say? "Oh, ok, don't worry about it then. I don't mind that my entire ordering system is offline, because at least it wasn't your fault."
In the real world, it's always your fault. You either didn't QA well enough to find the bug, or you found it but didn't fix it, or (on the off chance it isn't one of those two things) you're stil going to be blamed for it, so buck up and figure out a workaround.
IMO, buying a laptop is the height of stupidity.
Yeah, my desktop w/ 19" monitor works great when I'm on the plane. Sure, I get a few funny looks from the flight crew, but I can't understand why anybody would bother with a laptop when desktops are so much cheaper.
It's also really cool using a desktop while in the john.
I read my eBooks on my PDA. This reader, in some sense, was free -- I bought it for other purposes, and only later thought about using it for eBooks, so I paid a grand total of $0 specifically to be able to read eBooks.
You can also read them on a laptop (or even a desktop), which most of you have, and that would also fall under the "free in a sense" category.
If you're looking for eBooks to use on non-dedicated devices such as computers and PDAs, check out Palm Digital Media.
Fluorescent and LED lights do not get hot.
Sure they do. They are far more efficient than incandescent bulbs, so they produce significantly less heat per lumen, but a very bright fluorescent or LED light can get quite hot.
In fact, high-brightness LEDs like the Luxeon Star have to be mounted on heat sinks to keep them from burning up.
Well, actually it's right, and it implies that the average house internet connection is 1.0mbps. Do the math... 1000000 bits / 8 = 125000 bytes/s 125000 bytes / 1024 = 122.0703125 kb/s 122.0703125 / 1024 = 0.1192092mb/s That means it's a 0.1192092mb/s line to mars, and probably with brutal latency. Let's just hope that they're not serving up warez from it...or that slashdot doesn't link to a webserver hosted on it...
You have confused your units. Network speeds are reported in bits, not bytes -- an average cable modem is around 1.5Mbps, not 1.5MBps.
The orbiter then uses its more-powerful antenna to send as many as one million bits of data per second back to Earth. While fairly fast for an attenuated radio connection, that's only about a tenth of the speed of a cable-modem connection for the average home-computer user.
... did I miss something? My DSL line peaks at 1.5Mb on a good day. Where can I get a ten-megabit cable modem? And "average home-computer users" have them? I thought average home-computer users were still using 56K modems.
Uhhh
Oh, I get it now. According to this calendar, it's 2008. Damn, that was a nice nap. Need to catch up on the last four years of news. Hope something horrible happened to Microsoft.
What? SCOSoft? Oh, shit.
Same goes for digital cameras - even the best still don't match the resolution of a decent 35mm film.
Then you either haven't used a good digital camera or you haven't done a fair comparison.
My wife is a professional photographer who shoots with a Nikon D1x. Film admittedly has higher line pair resolution, but as my wife isn't taking pictures of line pairs, that's irrelevant. For real-world shooting like portraits and nature photography, the D1x is easily comparable to 35mm film (a bit better in some respects, a bit worse in others).
And the D1x is only a 5.5 megapixel camera. There are already much higher resolution cameras on the market, and anyone who believes that 35mm film actually compares favorably to a good 16 megapixel imager is suffering from a severe inability to accept reality. The fight is already over. Film is dead.
Of course, I'm sure that a hundred years ago there were still horse-and-buggy proponents arguing that cars were inferior...
For all intents and purposes, no. They are in completely different orbits, with Hubble hundreds of kilometers higher. Neither one has the ability to maneuver itself to match the other's orbit, even if they wanted to.
It takes an absurd amount of fuel to substantially alter an orbit, which is why it is never done: we launch something into a particular orbit and more or less just keep it there.
What are all these posts about "the replacement isn't ready"? Why should there be exactly one functional space telescope at any given time? It looks like people assume there is just one guy using space telescopes, with 0 he'll get bored, and with 2 he'll be overworked. Not so!
So really the science done is proportional to their number (and capabilities). The rest is just economics. There's no important reason to aim for exactly 1 telescope at any given time.
Nobody is saying "there should be exactly one space telescope at any given time". What we're saying is "there should be at least one space telescope at any given time".
If something truly exciting, like Shoemaker-Levy or an amazingly bright supernova, happens again, we want to have at least one space telescope out there to watch it.
Gravity is weak compared to the other fundamental forces, such as magnetism. Imagine a paper clip lying on your desk. Why is it lying there, as opposed to floating freely? Gravity. The whole earth is busy pulling on it.
Yet, you could easily lift it with the magnetic field of a small refrigerator magnet.
We say "gravity is weak" because the magnetic field a one-gram magnet can pull more powerfully than the gravity of an entire frickin' planet.