There's still moving parts, additional components that could conceivably fail, and whose success is now a factor of the overall success of the mission.
True, but consider this: if my idea fails, the mission is no worse off than it is now. The protective sheet stops scrolling for whatever reason (jammed or burned-out motor, or maybe a torn sheet... that's about all that could realistically go wrong), dust starts to accumulate in front of the cells, and 90 days later the available light falls below the design threshold.
If an atomic generator fails (admittedly unlikely; RTGs are pretty simple and reliable beasts), the whole mission is jeopardized.
I would rather see RTGs used as well, but it's still absurd to think that keeping dust off of solar cells is a "hard" problem compared to the rest of the technological issues faced by a Mars mission.
Actually, as soon as I hit 'Post' on that, it occurred to me that the right way to do it wouldn't even require a pulley. Instead of a tear-off sheet, they should have used a continuous sheet of transparent material pulled between two spools by a simple motor armature inside the takeup spool. No belts, pulleys, or gears needed; the only moving parts would be the spools themselves. The rate at which the sheet would be pulled across the solar cell front surface would be measured in inches per day, completely negating any concerns about power consumption.
If you can build a fully-articulated robot arm, it shouldn't be all that hard to come up with a way to keep your solar cells clean. I really don't care what the weight budget was -- something this trivial should have have been implemented to free up mission-life constraints. Spirit has already lost a week, after all...
John Carmack is an ass. If he's gotten this far into his X-Prize project without realizing that EVERYTHING having to do with the monetary, power, and weight budgets of a rocket program is, in fact, Rocket Science, then he... well, nobody really deserves to die in a fiery explosion, but...
I do agree that the amount of public hand-waving he's been doing has set Armadillo up for some substantial embarrassment (at best) if their effort fails. My point still stands, though -- the dust issue has all the earmarks of a problem that should not be a problem.
Joints? Servos? All they needed were one or more transparent tearaway strips like those used on drivers' visors in open-cockpit auto racing, and a simple motor/pulley arrangement to remove the strips as needed.
As Carmack is so fond of pointing out, not everything in rocket science is rocket science....
I don't think society should deny adults the right to make their own decisions about what offends them, but I'm not sure the same is true of children.
... followed by:
People have to learn the difference between right and wrong and acquire the mental tools for detecting dishonesty and unsound arguments - we're not born knowing these things.
You're contradicting yourself. Which way do you want to go?
It sounds like the journalist at the time was confusing the Mac with the Apple//c, which was released around the same time as the first Mac. Not counting its attached monitor, the//c was about the size of a 500-sheet stack of paper.
It was a neat little package, but the Apple II platform's best days were behind it by then, and most people have probably never seen a//c.
I like the idea of a major player getting on with it and DOING something.
I agree. The deafening silence of the Internet "standards bodies" on the subject of spam control speaks for itself.
If Eric Raymond, IETF, et al. are interested in addressing the problem, then let's see their proposed solutions. Otherwise, I'm somewhat less than interested in hearing them whine about attempts by private industry to do their job for them.
Very true. No need to mess around at 100 Mb/s, though. 8-port Gigabit switches are only about US $200 these days, amazingly enough (if you can stand the fan noise).
Would you argue an uber-Scalia Strict Constructionist view that indviduals do need to own large tactical weapons (howitzers, jet fighters, etc) as a hedge against oppressive federalism?
I'm actually not that big a fan of the Second Amendment, to tell the truth. It's the first in a long line of poorly-written legislative statements from the Feds. If the Founders had taken the time to think it all the way through, it wouldn't mention "militias" at all, or possibly even "arms", but a more general (and less negotiable) right to self-defense. Something along the lines of "The right of the People to secure their own defense shall not be infringed." That would have given future courts a way to distinguish between arms wieldable by individuals in defensive combat (yes, including bazookas) and megalomaniacs who challenge the government's monopoly on hot nuclear death.
There are probably a couple of reasons why the amendment wasn't written that way. First, in light of what the early US colonists had just gone through, anyone suggesting that you don't have the right to defend yourself would have been looked at real funny, and then, probably, shot. It would have seemed like a paen to the 18th-century ancestor of Captain Obvious. Second, the phrase "well-regulated militia" was commonly understood to consist of every able-bodied man who could pick up a rock and throw it. In employing that phrase, the authors were merely emphasizing the importance of not turning into a nation of helpless wusses dependent on a state-sanctioned army for their defense. Nothing more, nothing less. Unfortunately, the phrase does leave a lot of wiggle-room for creative deconstruction.
All you have to do, though, is ask what other amendments in the Bill of Rights are written to grant rights to the government rather than the People, and then ask why the Second would be any different. I don't see a good answer to that one on the ACLU page, do you?
No, unfortunately it's not. The ACLU's position is, in a nutshell, that some of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are reserved to the government, not the people. Everything we know about the Constitution and its authors screams otherwise, but the ACLU has very selective hearing.
I don't know of any US organization that stands up for the entire Bill of Rights. If I did, I'd join it. Given their pick-and-choose policy, there is no way I can justify sending money to the ACLU.
Yep. In my case, circa 1984 on an Apple ][ at lunchtime:
10 FOR I=1 to 6000000 : NEXT 20 PRINT CHR$(7) 30 PRINT "<name of teacher> SUCKS THE BIG ONE" 40 GOTO 20
This little bit of "hacking" got me banned from the computer lab for the rest of the year, depriving me of the chance to play with the brand-new Macintosh they'd just received. This punishment sucked total ass at the time, but as things turned out, being forced to stick with my old Apple ][+ at home was the best thing that could have happened to me. By investing all my learning time in the 6502, I managed to build the necessary skills to drop out of real life and join the game industry, hacking Ultimas at Origin Systems.
Like the Dread Pirate himself said: "I, myself, am often surprised at life's little quirks."
... that when we finally figure out how it works, the brain will prove to be a multiresolution (read: holographic) storage device, rather than a simple network of interconnected neurons. It only makes sense, based on what we've seen in patients that have been injured by arrows, bullets, and other projectiles without losing any specific memories or abilities.
If that's true, then no, it won't ever be practical to identify the exact physical location of a particular memory, because there isn't one.
Parent should be modded down; I've been made aware (very effectively, too) that this was a PageRank exploit. Not Google's fault, move along, nothing to see. Sorry for the alarmism.
OK, mea culpa. I did not know that was how Google worked. I'd respectfully submit that it takes a pretty seriously-broken search algorithm to allow this type of exploit, but, hey, it's Google, so it must not be broken after all.
And if you support W, then you've been politically brainwashed.
Interesting. Sure enough, the first link when you search Google for "miserable failure" is www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html... a page which certainly does not contain the terms "miserable failure".
This can't possibly be a coincidence; it doesn't seem likely to be a bug; and it damned sure isn't a legitimate search result. What it is, is the first instance of overt politicization I've seen in Google's ranking system.
I'm not a Bush defender, but this deliberate bogus query shows a lack of professionalism on Google's part that isn't the least bit cool. Google does not represent itself as a subjective editorial site. Search engines, like armies, are valuable public resources with the potential to do a lot of good or a lot of harm. They both work best when they keep their politics to themselves.
... of getting links to expertsexhange.com in half the Google searches I make anymore.
If I want to pay $20/month to find answers, I'll use something besides Google. They seriously need to quit linking to pay-for-support sites, or at least charge them for sponsorship.
It's about the need for human creativity and artistry being diminished.
Aw, c'mon. They said the same thing about player pianos.
I, as a geek, like tech to the extent that it reduces the tedium and frees us to be creative. This is realizing that the very thing we love can be used to work against us. And that is the realization that is truly and deeply scary.
This sort of artistic Luddism has no place in today's world. If you're worthy of the self-applied title "geek," you'll find ways to use this technology to create sounds and effects, maybe even entire musical genres, that were never possible or practical before.
This isn't going to put Loreena McKennitt out of business, but I could see it giving Enya the willies.
Sadly, this is true, even for classics and exotics. Just last year, I had to wait *weeks* to get all the proper parts for a complete rebuild on the four Weber two-barrels that sit atop my Ferrari Dino 308gt4 - these parts simply did not exist in North America, and had to be shipped from Italy (presumably by oxen-powered paddle-wheel boat by way of Venezuela and Fiji...)
That's odd; I haven't heard of any problems getting DCNF rebuild kits. They are sold on eBay all the time. Personally, I use Pierce Manifolds for carburetor parts and jets. Not always the cheapest, but they offer great tech support and I've never heard "Sorry, we don't have that in stock" from them.
What part(s) in particular were so hard to find? Have you surfed the forums at ferrarichat.com to learn about all the suppliers out there?
Actually, I run Quake 1 regularly, in the form of GLQuake, on my Rage 9700 Pro card. TIMEDEMO DEMO1 = 500+ frames per seconds in 640x480 maximum-quality mode.:)
The latest ATI drivers fixed the only bug I ever noticed (random green flashes when wearing the Ring), so I'm a pretty happy camper now. So to speak.
That was until they started making inexpensive DVD players which would upconvert the 480p material to 1080i
What would be the point? Let the TV do that. You can't synthesize resolution where it doesn't exist. All you can do is fake it with interpolation, and the Pioneer Elite RPTVs do that about as well as it's ever going to be done.
You're not missing anything -- trust me. I have a 630HD, and I'm perfectly content with the video quality from my DV-47ai through the component inputs. I can't tell any difference when I switch the DVD player between interlaced and progressive decoding. The TV is that good.
You just have to take some simple precautions, stuff that should be obvious to anyone with the most basic understanding of how computers work, the kind of thing they should be teaching in about sixth grade now. I.e., the difference between code and data, where code comes from, how it gets loaded and executed. Nothing a child couldn't understand.
No. That was my whole point: just knowing the difference between code and data is no longer enough. (Besides, thanks to the legions of idiots at Microsoft writing kernel components based on gets() and developing applications with unnecessarily-godlike scripting capabilities, there no longer is much of a difference.)
The measures you cited -- not running IE or Outlook; configuring a standalone NAT firewall to support various apps and games without introducing weird problems of its own; knowing how to discover and disable unnecessary NT services -- are absolutely not child's play. I've been online since I built my own 300-baud modem for my Apple II in 1982, and at this point I no longer feel competent at defending my hardware from anonymous miscreants.
For one thing, IE6 is still the best overall browsing solution for Windows, and very few people have a legitimate reason to use anything else. If you can manage to patch it before your box gets r00tzored, IE is actually reasonably bulletproof at this point. Furthermore, most other email clients have one or more fairly-gruesome drawbacks compared to Outlook. (I'm always amused when my Eudora-using friends spam everyone they know with, "Sorry, my mail database got corrupted again, did you send me anything recently?")
It looks like I'm going to have to spend a whole weekend poring over firewall documentation, and the thought does not cheer me. I, along with 100,000,000 other Windows users, have better things to do with my time.:(
I have *never* had a computer virus or worm on my win95, wind98 or win2k boxes, and i don't bother with antivirus software.
That's always been my attitude, too, but it's an obsolete one these days. The last two Windows boxes I've built have been infected with W32.Welchia in the time it takes to download the latest patches from Windows Update. We're talking 30 minutes, max, from plugging in the network cable to rebooting after installing the last security patch.
Firewalls are a huge pain in the ass for home users, especially gamers, but I'm beginning to believe they're absolutely necessary.
What actually is the status of MS-DOS in Longhorn?
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 1
I haven't heard any straight answers. Are they planning to abandon the DOS CLI entirely in favor of MONAD?
Slashdot Mirror
There's still moving parts, additional components that could conceivably fail, and whose success is now a factor of the overall success of the mission.
True, but consider this: if my idea fails, the mission is no worse off than it is now. The protective sheet stops scrolling for whatever reason (jammed or burned-out motor, or maybe a torn sheet... that's about all that could realistically go wrong), dust starts to accumulate in front of the cells, and 90 days later the available light falls below the design threshold.
If an atomic generator fails (admittedly unlikely; RTGs are pretty simple and reliable beasts), the whole mission is jeopardized.
I would rather see RTGs used as well, but it's still absurd to think that keeping dust off of solar cells is a "hard" problem compared to the rest of the technological issues faced by a Mars mission.
Actually, as soon as I hit 'Post' on that, it occurred to me that the right way to do it wouldn't even require a pulley. Instead of a tear-off sheet, they should have used a continuous sheet of transparent material pulled between two spools by a simple motor armature inside the takeup spool. No belts, pulleys, or gears needed; the only moving parts would be the spools themselves. The rate at which the sheet would be pulled across the solar cell front surface would be measured in inches per day, completely negating any concerns about power consumption.
If you can build a fully-articulated robot arm, it shouldn't be all that hard to come up with a way to keep your solar cells clean. I really don't care what the weight budget was -- something this trivial should have have been implemented to free up mission-life constraints. Spirit has already lost a week, after all...
John Carmack is an ass. If he's gotten this far into his X-Prize project without realizing that EVERYTHING having to do with the monetary, power, and weight budgets of a rocket program is, in fact, Rocket Science, then he... well, nobody really deserves to die in a fiery explosion, but...
I do agree that the amount of public hand-waving he's been doing has set Armadillo up for some substantial embarrassment (at best) if their effort fails. My point still stands, though -- the dust issue has all the earmarks of a problem that should not be a problem.
Joints? Servos? All they needed were one or more transparent tearaway strips like those used on drivers' visors in open-cockpit auto racing, and a simple motor/pulley arrangement to remove the strips as needed.
As Carmack is so fond of pointing out, not everything in rocket science is rocket science....
My priorities in a cell phone:
...
1) Size
2) Battery life
3) Weight
4) Price
69,105) Games
69,106) Camera
69,107) Other crap I'll never use
</luddite>
You wrote:
... followed by:
I don't think society should deny adults the right to make their own decisions about what offends them, but I'm not sure the same is true of children.
People have to learn the difference between right and wrong and acquire the mental tools for detecting dishonesty and unsound arguments - we're not born knowing these things.
You're contradicting yourself. Which way do you want to go?
It sounds like the journalist at the time was confusing the Mac with the Apple //c, which was released around the same time as the first Mac. Not counting its attached monitor, the //c was about the size of a 500-sheet stack of paper.
//c.
It was a neat little package, but the Apple II platform's best days were behind it by then, and most people have probably never seen a
I like the idea of a major player getting on with it and DOING something.
I agree. The deafening silence of the Internet "standards bodies" on the subject of spam control speaks for itself.
If Eric Raymond, IETF, et al. are interested in addressing the problem, then let's see their proposed solutions. Otherwise, I'm somewhat less than interested in hearing them whine about attempts by private industry to do their job for them.
Very true. No need to mess around at 100 Mb/s, though. 8-port Gigabit switches are only about US $200 these days, amazingly enough (if you can stand the fan noise).
Would you argue an uber-Scalia Strict Constructionist view that indviduals do need to own large tactical weapons (howitzers, jet fighters, etc) as a hedge against oppressive federalism?
I'm actually not that big a fan of the Second Amendment, to tell the truth. It's the first in a long line of poorly-written legislative statements from the Feds. If the Founders had taken the time to think it all the way through, it wouldn't mention "militias" at all, or possibly even "arms", but a more general (and less negotiable) right to self-defense. Something along the lines of "The right of the People to secure their own defense shall not be infringed." That would have given future courts a way to distinguish between arms wieldable by individuals in defensive combat (yes, including bazookas) and megalomaniacs who challenge the government's monopoly on hot nuclear death.
There are probably a couple of reasons why the amendment wasn't written that way. First, in light of what the early US colonists had just gone through, anyone suggesting that you don't have the right to defend yourself would have been looked at real funny, and then, probably, shot. It would have seemed like a paen to the 18th-century ancestor of Captain Obvious. Second, the phrase "well-regulated militia" was commonly understood to consist of every able-bodied man who could pick up a rock and throw it. In employing that phrase, the authors were merely emphasizing the importance of not turning into a nation of helpless wusses dependent on a state-sanctioned army for their defense. Nothing more, nothing less. Unfortunately, the phrase does leave a lot of wiggle-room for creative deconstruction.
All you have to do, though, is ask what other amendments in the Bill of Rights are written to grant rights to the government rather than the People, and then ask why the Second would be any different. I don't see a good answer to that one on the ACLU page, do you?
That would be the ACLU
No, unfortunately it's not. The ACLU's position is, in a nutshell, that some of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are reserved to the government, not the people. Everything we know about the Constitution and its authors screams otherwise, but the ACLU has very selective hearing.
I don't know of any US organization that stands up for the entire Bill of Rights. If I did, I'd join it. Given their pick-and-choose policy, there is no way I can justify sending money to the ACLU.
Yep. In my case, circa 1984 on an Apple ][ at lunchtime:This little bit of "hacking" got me banned from the computer lab for the rest of the year, depriving me of the chance to play with the brand-new Macintosh they'd just received. This punishment sucked total ass at the time, but as things turned out, being forced to stick with my old Apple ][+ at home was the best thing that could have happened to me. By investing all my learning time in the 6502, I managed to build the necessary skills to drop out of real life and join the game industry, hacking Ultimas at Origin Systems.
Like the Dread Pirate himself said: "I, myself, am often surprised at life's little quirks."
Twice the power of ordinary bees!
... that when we finally figure out how it works, the brain will prove to be a multiresolution (read: holographic) storage device, rather than a simple network of interconnected neurons. It only makes sense, based on what we've seen in patients that have been injured by arrows, bullets, and other projectiles without losing any specific memories or abilities.
If that's true, then no, it won't ever be practical to identify the exact physical location of a particular memory, because there isn't one.
Parent should be modded down; I've been made aware (very effectively, too) that this was a PageRank exploit. Not Google's fault, move along, nothing to see. Sorry for the alarmism.
OK, mea culpa. I did not know that was how Google worked. I'd respectfully submit that it takes a pretty seriously-broken search algorithm to allow this type of exploit, but, hey, it's Google, so it must not be broken after all.
And if you support W, then you've been politically brainwashed.
So saith the anti-Bush zombie army....
Interesting. Sure enough, the first link when you search Google for "miserable failure" is www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html... a page which certainly does not contain the terms "miserable failure".
This can't possibly be a coincidence; it doesn't seem likely to be a bug; and it damned sure isn't a legitimate search result. What it is, is the first instance of overt politicization I've seen in Google's ranking system.
I'm not a Bush defender, but this deliberate bogus query shows a lack of professionalism on Google's part that isn't the least bit cool. Google does not represent itself as a subjective editorial site. Search engines, like armies, are valuable public resources with the potential to do a lot of good or a lot of harm. They both work best when they keep their politics to themselves.
That on the other hand is true, glad you see it. It is the ultimate abuse of other people.
Methinks you need to do a little more reading before you issue such sweeping pronouncements from the sunless warren beneath your parents' garage.
... of getting links to expertsexhange.com in half the Google searches I make anymore.
If I want to pay $20/month to find answers, I'll use something besides Google. They seriously need to quit linking to pay-for-support sites, or at least charge them for sponsorship.
It's about the need for human creativity and artistry being diminished.
Aw, c'mon. They said the same thing about player pianos.
I, as a geek, like tech to the extent that it reduces the tedium and frees us to be creative. This is realizing that the very thing we love can be used to work against us. And that is the realization that is truly and deeply scary.
This sort of artistic Luddism has no place in today's world. If you're worthy of the self-applied title "geek," you'll find ways to use this technology to create sounds and effects, maybe even entire musical genres, that were never possible or practical before.
This isn't going to put Loreena McKennitt out of business, but I could see it giving Enya the willies.
Sadly, this is true, even for classics and exotics. Just last year, I had to wait *weeks* to get all the proper parts for a complete rebuild on the four Weber two-barrels that sit atop my Ferrari Dino 308gt4 - these parts simply did not exist in North America, and had to be shipped from Italy (presumably by oxen-powered paddle-wheel boat by way of Venezuela and Fiji...)
That's odd; I haven't heard of any problems getting DCNF rebuild kits. They are sold on eBay all the time. Personally, I use Pierce Manifolds for carburetor parts and jets. Not always the cheapest, but they offer great tech support and I've never heard "Sorry, we don't have that in stock" from them.
What part(s) in particular were so hard to find? Have you surfed the forums at ferrarichat.com to learn about all the suppliers out there?
('76 vetroresina 308 GTB here...)
Actually, I run Quake 1 regularly, in the form of GLQuake, on my Rage 9700 Pro card. TIMEDEMO DEMO1 = 500+ frames per seconds in 640x480 maximum-quality mode. :)
The latest ATI drivers fixed the only bug I ever noticed (random green flashes when wearing the Ring), so I'm a pretty happy camper now. So to speak.
That was until they started making inexpensive DVD players which would upconvert the 480p material to 1080i
What would be the point? Let the TV do that. You can't synthesize resolution where it doesn't exist. All you can do is fake it with interpolation, and the Pioneer Elite RPTVs do that about as well as it's ever going to be done.
You're not missing anything -- trust me. I have a 630HD, and I'm perfectly content with the video quality from my DV-47ai through the component inputs. I can't tell any difference when I switch the DVD player between interlaced and progressive decoding. The TV is that good.
You just have to take some simple precautions, stuff that should be obvious to anyone with the most basic understanding of how computers work, the kind of thing they should be teaching in about sixth grade now. I.e., the difference between code and data, where code comes from, how it gets loaded and executed. Nothing a child couldn't understand.
:(
No. That was my whole point: just knowing the difference between code and data is no longer enough. (Besides, thanks to the legions of idiots at Microsoft writing kernel components based on gets() and developing applications with unnecessarily-godlike scripting capabilities, there no longer is much of a difference.)
The measures you cited -- not running IE or Outlook; configuring a standalone NAT firewall to support various apps and games without introducing weird problems of its own; knowing how to discover and disable unnecessary NT services -- are absolutely not child's play. I've been online since I built my own 300-baud modem for my Apple II in 1982, and at this point I no longer feel competent at defending my hardware from anonymous miscreants.
For one thing, IE6 is still the best overall browsing solution for Windows, and very few people have a legitimate reason to use anything else. If you can manage to patch it before your box gets r00tzored, IE is actually reasonably bulletproof at this point. Furthermore, most other email clients have one or more fairly-gruesome drawbacks compared to Outlook. (I'm always amused when my Eudora-using friends spam everyone they know with, "Sorry, my mail database got corrupted again, did you send me anything recently?")
It looks like I'm going to have to spend a whole weekend poring over firewall documentation, and the thought does not cheer me. I, along with 100,000,000 other Windows users, have better things to do with my time.
I have *never* had a computer virus or worm on my win95, wind98 or win2k boxes, and i don't bother with antivirus software.
That's always been my attitude, too, but it's an obsolete one these days. The last two Windows boxes I've built have been infected with W32.Welchia in the time it takes to download the latest patches from Windows Update. We're talking 30 minutes, max, from plugging in the network cable to rebooting after installing the last security patch.
Firewalls are a huge pain in the ass for home users, especially gamers, but I'm beginning to believe they're absolutely necessary.
I haven't heard any straight answers. Are they planning to abandon the DOS CLI entirely in favor of MONAD?