What spacecraft? SpaceX has built one spacecraft, which is the what, 5th craft of basically the identical type that does the same job? Sorry, they've got a tight focus, a good management structure, and a good eye for incremental cost cutting and understanding system cost issues, but none of this is revolutionary. Nor are their costs 1/10th of those of other vendors. In fact ULA charges currently between 150 and 200% of what SpaceX charges, but they also have an unbroken string of launch successes going back a couple decades, vs what 6 total launches for SpaceX, which consequently charges a discount price. Clearly Falcon CAN be operated more cheaply than Delta, but its nothing like 10x cheaper.
So, frankly I just reject your numbers. You can go look up the actual pricing on ULA and SpaceX launches if you want. Given that NASA doesn't currently directly operate any launch systems there's no way to equate a cost there. However it is notable that the Russians fee structure is pretty similar to ULAs. SpaceX is definitely undercutting existing vendors in a market that is transitioning to a commodity. This is simply totally different from executing a cutting-edge one-off like a manned Mars mission. Trust me, I've worked on this sort of thing, I know a lot of people that have worked on this stuff. It is ludicrous to believe that anyone will do it 10x cheaper the first time around. Even if you handed the project to SpaceX how would you know it was 10x cheaper? Cheaper than what? Nobody has done it before. I guarantee you it will be REALLY expensive. $200 billion IMHO is pretty optimistic given the actual costs incurred for things like ISS and Shuttle.
Again though, SpaceX is doing something that has been done HUNDREDS of times before. NASA and the USSR/Russia have developed almost a dozen manned spacecraft and literally 100's of boosters. Every single element of the design of Falcon and Dragon are highly conservative. No team designing a booster would even blink an eye at anything SpaceX has chosen to do. The most radical technical advance they've made are some advances in using composites in rocket nozzles. I'd also note that SpaceX has yet to demonstrate that they can man-rate their launch systems economically. IMHO they will do it, but what they've done so far is not the whole enchillada, even in just getting a man into orbit. Costs increase dramatically at that point due to the huge expense of the incremental costs of higher reliability systems (once costs escalate somewhat it is even more necessary to use more conservative design to protect those investments, causing even more cost increases).
The point is Mars is a whole new beast. It isn't simply doing what someone else has done before. There is NO indication that any such thing as 10x cost savings can be achieved in such a project. In fact I simply reject the notion that this is possible. Its a popular notion amongst some groups of people, but it has no basis in reality. Once manned travel to Mars has been achieved to a degree that it is ALMOST routine then I would fully expect SpaceX to reproduce that technology for 1/10th of the initial cost and operate it at 500% discount, but not until then. Doing something for the first time is just much riskier and thus impossible to fund economically, and simply requires large amounts of time, large resources, and the ability to try out many approaches iteratively and incrementally. Commercial ventures simply lack the structure for that kind of effort, and as soon as you marry them to a public venture you have basically NASA. I mean it isn't like NASA directly developed most of its own hardware, it was all supplied by contractors at the lowest price they could bid. It was expensive because things had to be overengineered for unknowns, most designs had to be tossed out or iterated 3-5 times, etc.
Obviously time will tell. I'll be thrilled if prices for all sorts of space ventures come down a large amount. I am just skeptical that cutting edge ventures will ever be much cheaper than they are now.
It is getting cheaper, and since launch to LEO is a fairly high expense it is generally encouraging. My understanding of the economics of space launch though is it will never get a LOT cheaper. It might drop by another factor of 3, maybe with really high demand 5, but rockets are just EXPENSIVE, they exist at the very limits of the maximum performance of physical machines. Other launch technologies are intriguing but clearly many decades, possibly centuries, from realization (IE we could probably build a rail gun type system, but it would have only limited application for small payloads with very high G acceleration tolerance). Things like towers, bolos, elevators, etc are pretty out there still, with largely unknown engineering challenges. Laser/microwave launch systems may be the most feasible, but would still seem to be at least 30-50 years from maturity (its possible a crash program could develop such a system in say 20 years maybe, hard to say).
I'm not sure who the worst pessimists are. It seems to me few people predicted a slower or more limited manned entry into space than what we have actually had, aside from pre-Sputnik era scoffers who insisted that space flight in general was impossible or infeasible. It seems to me that since then there's been a pretty consistent underestimation of the time and money required. My experience as an engineer and working some in aerospace is that engineers generally underestimate by a factor of at least 4, sometimes up to 10. So the guys like Zubrin et all are probably short by AT LEAST 400% in their cost estimates, though time estimates are more variable. These kinds of prognostications are of course hard to empirically validate, but they have proven out fairly well experientally.
It is hard to see how that will be overcome. Its a catch-22, and again it implies that the probable development of manned spaceflight is that we'll continue with smaller limited operations with things like the ISS, maybe some other near-Earth missions (lunar, NEO, LaGrange points, etc) plus possibly space tourism. That might gradually lead to some limited manned commercial operations of other types, salvage, some manufacturing of propellants or volatiles, maybe SPSes, and at some point operations will be cheap enough that repeat Mars missions and such will be inexpensive enough that it will be attractive and we'll cross over that hump. I'd expect another factor would be the tapping out of automated missions. The 20th unmanned rover is going to be pretty marginal and at that point all that will be left is to actually send people to sort out the stuff those missions can never really resolve. That could easily be 50 or more years down the road though.
Again, I just don't think the time is ripe. Mars is a bridge too far with current technology and expertise. We COULD do it, but it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to do it now vs building up to it over at least a few more decades. Of course my sense of how fast that build up is going to happen could well be off. Maybe the next 15 years holds some massive amount of orbital activity that will drop the bottom out of prices or something. However, judging by how overly optimistic people have been historically about space flight it seems more likely to me that things will go slower than one would niaively imagine.
But a Mars mission is not an assembly line produced low-cost consumer item like a blue LED. There isn't even any analogy to be made there. A Mars mission is more like building a tunnel under the English Channel. Yes, there are other things you will do with the technology and other projects which will contribute technical knowhow, but it is a project unto itself. "Engineering" a Mars mission IS going to Mars, pure and simple. The end result of the engineering process is footprints on the surface. There's no assembly line where you amortize the costs.
Again, this cost thing is going back to the "Government can only waste money" silliness. Trust me, when you do something for the first time it is EXPENSIVE. Could going to the Moon have been cheaper? I doubt it. In fact the real lesson with large projects is that once you get into the implementation phase the cheapest way to do them is sustained forward effort directed towards soonest results. Dabbling along slowly is a recipe for project failure and massive cost overruns which has been proven again and again during the space program as well as in every other branch of engineering where it is relevant. It is of course possible that with 20/20 hindsight we can see where slowing down and making a few different decisions etc would have actually been better, but the forward momentum of the project would have failed and it wouldn't have panned out that way. Hindsight is basically worthless, which is why Epimethius was Prometheus' idiot brother. So, I reject the claim that Apollo isn't a reasonable cost basis. Even supposing it is not, what is, the Space Shuttle? ISS? Ummm, you ain't got a lot of examples to go on there and NONE of them points towards things costing less than anticipated, ever.
Actually hardness corresponds EXACTLY to cost in engineering. How else would you measure it? Obviously if we were talking about making a starship then we might have a 'scientific breakthrough' sort of hardness to talk about, but going to Mars is a purely engineering challenge without any real need for anything beyond incremental applied science and incremental aerology study, etc.
You miss the point of my reference to things like SpaceX. They got to orbit fairly cheaply because 95% of the work was done already and could simply be applied. Sunk cost indeed, but the point is if you measured the TOTAL cost of going to orbit reliably and relatively cheaply by what SpaceX spent then you would underestimate the total investmeny by a factor of 20 (at least, I'm pulling that number, it is probably much higher). Thus any argument that by analogy if NASA needs $1 trillion to go to Mars that SpaceX needs only say $100 billion to do the same thing is fatally flawed because it is not an analogous situation (IE NASA has been to orbit already, but not to Mars). As for sending men to Mars there are no sunk costs, 95% or more of the cost required is ahead of us, so it makes perfectly good sense to consider whether we should spend those funds.
My point with "do it later, Mars will be there" is that things always get cheaper. In 50 years we'll have even cheaper launch costs, much more experience with cost-efficient manned space operations, etc. We can also spend those 50 or more years gathering all the needed information and doing all the studies we could possibly need. This will reduce the number of engineering dead ends and re-directions that are required along the way when you do the science and the engineering in parallel. At some point the unknowns will be much smaller, the costs smaller, and the risks smaller. At that time the cost will be GEOMETRICALLY less because you can then leave off many redundancies and use more of a standard off-the-shelf approach using Nth generation perfected commercial technology, which clearly will itself be an order of magnitude cheaper. Thus the cost in corrected $ of a manned Mars mission conducted in say 2080 could well be $50 billion, vs $1.2 trillion to do it now. Is it really worth pushing it that hard? It is one thing to argue that the high cost is worth it in some sense if that's the cost and it can't be reduced much then that's simply the cost of the human race 'being human' and going there. BUT if you instead consider the huge costs now against all the other lost opportunities that need not be lost at all if we wait a few decades then we have to seriously wonder if it isn't better to just pace ourselves and take carefull measured steps in a fiscally prudent fashion. We can use the $1+ trillion to solve our energy problems today and STILL get to Mars, maybe one generation late, at a trivial cost.
Sorry, I think Kartu and Guzzirider are correct, going to Mars is AT LEAST 10x harder than going to the Moon, and may well be 100x harder. Meanwhile our technological capabilities are only modestly improved over 1969. We have slightly better rocket technology (we were already bumping up against the practical limits of what is possible with Saturn V). Clearly we have improved our ability to conduct space operations, somewhat, but there's nothing we are doing now that was impossible back in the 70's and none of it has gotten appreciably cheaper.
If you just 'cut two or three orders of magnitude off that price' what you end up with is not a cheap program, you end up with failure. I know it is all fashionable to suppose that NASA etc are all just vast money-wasting organizations that can't do for a buck what they should be able to do for a dime, but the truth is that stuff is hogwash. It is VERY expensive to do the vast amounts of trial-and-error iterative design work required to get an engine or a guidance system, or a life support system right. Each of these things has 1000's of details involved, each and every one of which MUST be perfect. If you skimp on modeling how your plumbing works then 5 weeks out in deep space when your water system screws itself everyone DIES. It is that simple. I've worked on these systems, I KNOW what I'm talking about. Systems engineering is HARD, and labor intensive, and slow.
You're going to get ONE shot at Mars. The truth is once you start it gets expensive, and then you need to protect that investment and it gets more expensive, etc. This is why the larger projects run over and fail or achieve only limited success so often. The COMMERCIAL ventures, like SpaceX, are simply riding the coat tails of 1000's of man lifetimes of work done by NASA. Yes, for a very limited specific set of capabilities they will deliver, NOW as the 3rd generation, a significant cost savings into the niche they understand, delivery of materials into Earth orbit. You cannot extrapolate their cost structure to unknown open-ended goal activities like a manned mission to Mars, it simply won't scale that way.
PERSONALLY I think Mars is out of practical reach of current technology for a manned mission. We need 20 more years of space operations expertise, a dozen more rovers, and we need to develop a much more capable type of spacecraft propelled with nuclear energy. A nuclear-powered VASIMER-like 'tractor' that can drag large payloads back and forth to Mars with turn-arounds on the order of 3 months would vastly simplify the problems involved. Each such simplification then redounds back to lower risks, which inherently creates lower costs as you can work with greater error margins. Build a couple of these nuclear tractors, haul lots of tons of stuff over there (launch costs are still NASTY but not insurmountable). Now you can do things like put men in orbit and have a backup return vehicle, establish an orbiting base, try out landers, prove them out, preposition them on the surface, keep spares in orbit, repair things, etc. Eventually landing itself becomes a much smaller stepping stone. Whether this stuff happens in this century or not is a good question. I think it could be possible in the late 21st Century, but it may still slip into the 22nd. Frankly Mars isn't going away. There's no specific time constraint.
And just to add, as a commercial ISV why would I ever in a million years either donate code/work to your code base when I have no reason to believe I'm even allowed to use it or that it will continue to be available to me in the future, or that my competitors won't just skeef that code and use it to beat me in the market. Anyone who thinks "POSS" means jack seems full of it to me. If you can't be bothered to find a license you can live with and expect the rest of us to just hope we won't be screwed or walked all over you are going to be sadly disappointed. FOSS is about everyone giving back, those licenses exist for a reason. You're not doing business with me without I get their protection, and for every project out there there are a lot of alternatives. IMHO the OSS licensed ones will prevail.
LOL, yeah, all I did for 10 years was water them when they looked dry. All my plants thrived. When they were 'cared for' by other people? THEN they died. I conclude that plants pretty much want be left alone (OK, I do recomend repotting them maybe every 5-10 years depending on how much they grow. You MIGHT also add a few drops of plant food to their water, maybe once a year or so).
Yeah, I've looked at it. The latest release is a bit old, so I ended up testing out FC17 first. I think I'll put Mageia in a VM though. What do you know about ROSA? It seems to release more often.
Yeah, I used Mandriva for years mainly for the fact that it had by far the best repos around. Since that has gone into implosion mode F17 has been a good fallback. Of course I have no desire to touch Gnome anything with a 10' model M keyboard...
As others have said, it can go either way. My business is building enterprise class trading systems, which are MOSTLY Java based systems. IME the TCO for Linux servers is lower, so we do preferentially deploy stuff on them. OTOH sometimes Windows will be a platform of choice for some installations simply because they have the infrastructure in place, need to run various Windows components anyway, etc.
What I am seeing is people moving to the cloud, and that seems to favor Linux. AWS for instance if you have either option there's little incentive to use Windows, the cost is about 2x as much for EC2 per-instance, which can add up. While in theory it might seem important to use RHEL for example, negating any cost advantage, truthfully the Amazon custom AMIs work fine, actually better than the RHEL/CentOS, and will run pretty much anything out of the box. Certainly if you're running OSS based web apps then its almost always the way to go. I suspect Windows will be increasingly not relevant in that sector and it will eventually eat the vast majority of application server business.
Ummmmm, Unix has been the server platform of choice in practically every secondary education institution in the US (one might even say on Earth) since time immemorial. It would be HIGHLY unusual to see anything with "University" in its name running any significant outward-facing IT infrastructure on Windows. Smaller and newer institutions, yes perhaps, but even most colleges that have been around since the 80's are basically Unix shops (and these days are mostly basically Linux shops, though you will still find a decent amount of AIX/Solaris/etc here and there). Not to say that Windows isn't quite common and even prevalent in some niches in the schools I've been associated with, but none of them would have had any difficulty or hesitation in running a line-of-business web application on a *nix platform, and most wouldn't have even thought about using Windows for that unless there was a specific reason for doing so.
In the US if you have 5 million voters seriously motivated on a topic you can bet it will get some attention, as that is about 5% of the people who are likely to vote in any given election. 5% is PLENTY enough to win you practically any national election in US history.
Yeah, OTOH Chess programs could beat someone like me back in the C64 days at least some of the time, and its only in the last year or two they've reached that level with Go. Nothing is even close to the "unbeatable by all but the few most advanced human players" level of the current crop of the best chess programs. There are still levels of flexibility and adaptability in play that even the best chess programs lack but my reading is this is quite a bit more true with Go. Go is definitely in some sense a 'deeper' game. Certainly the number of possible distinct board positions is very large and more critically it shows very dense branching, you always have a LARGE number of potentially good moves. Its very hard to prune a Go move tree from what I can see. In chess many variations of lines are fairly trivial or lead to the same/equivalent points, and there are generally only a small number of significant trees to explore, 99.9% of the possibilities can be eliminated within 1-2 ply.
Yeah, if you look at Karpov, Kasparov, Fisher, etc etc etc, you rapidly see that high level chess is rife with 'meta-game'. There are other levels of meta-game as well. Players will master different types of game and different lines, focus on different parts of the game, etc. Some players are more defensive, others more offensive, some more tactical, like Kasparov, others more strategic. One player might be a master of specific styles of opening lines, and other might be a mid-game generalist or an expert at end games. Players will also tweak their game and their focus of study in order to better match other players they are likely to face. The game is RICH in possibilities and thus allows for many different successful approaches. One can almost say that a tournament between top players is more a matchup of overall strategies than one of tactics, though the individual moves of each game in the end are where the action is.
Well, M:tG has both 'resource complexity', there are a vast number of possible cards you can play with and they do an equally vast number of slightly different things, and it also has what you are calling 'strategic' (though I would say most of these games have strategy AND tactics) complexity. That is even if you play the same 2 M:tG decks against each other many many times the players are likely to be able to make a number of different tactical choices in each game. Actually I think the tactical depth and strategic depth of chess are a good bit higher than with M:tG, but its a fairly complex game with a huge number of setup options (IE how you make your deck). The tactical consequences of a move or the strategic consequences of learning certain lines or aspects of the game in chess are however more significant than the individual moves in M:tG, which can often be quite insignificant.
Go of course occupies the uttermost extreme in terms of being utterly simple in form and yet so immensely complex in both strategic and tactical depth that no software yet written even approaches the better human players.
OK, that was poorly worded, lol. Java is more like "like.NET BUT it IS platform-independent". In any case Java is certainly one of those things that is thought of one way but really is mostly something else.
Normally the browser plug-in is a totally different independent install from Java itself. Its POSSIBLE an installer could bundle java and a java browser plug-in (like say icedtea). Linux distros will generally install java to satisfy the plugin's dependencies for instance, which in something like Ubuntu could happen almost automatically. I don't think anything like that will happen in Windows or OSX normally.
Lots of people DO have Java installed for completely other reasons than web applets though. In fact it is mostly used the same way.NET is, as a platform-independent managed code runtime. Nowadays frankly I don't see a lot of reason for most people to install the plugin though. Applets are OK, but most stuff is migrating to HTML5/JS anyway.
http://wh.gov/UCL9 sign on folks! I can hardly wait to see the mealy mouthed BS answer to this... Oh, and expect to be on some FBI troublemaker list, if you're not yet. Consider it a badge of honor.;)
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What spacecraft? SpaceX has built one spacecraft, which is the what, 5th craft of basically the identical type that does the same job? Sorry, they've got a tight focus, a good management structure, and a good eye for incremental cost cutting and understanding system cost issues, but none of this is revolutionary. Nor are their costs 1/10th of those of other vendors. In fact ULA charges currently between 150 and 200% of what SpaceX charges, but they also have an unbroken string of launch successes going back a couple decades, vs what 6 total launches for SpaceX, which consequently charges a discount price. Clearly Falcon CAN be operated more cheaply than Delta, but its nothing like 10x cheaper.
So, frankly I just reject your numbers. You can go look up the actual pricing on ULA and SpaceX launches if you want. Given that NASA doesn't currently directly operate any launch systems there's no way to equate a cost there. However it is notable that the Russians fee structure is pretty similar to ULAs. SpaceX is definitely undercutting existing vendors in a market that is transitioning to a commodity. This is simply totally different from executing a cutting-edge one-off like a manned Mars mission. Trust me, I've worked on this sort of thing, I know a lot of people that have worked on this stuff. It is ludicrous to believe that anyone will do it 10x cheaper the first time around. Even if you handed the project to SpaceX how would you know it was 10x cheaper? Cheaper than what? Nobody has done it before. I guarantee you it will be REALLY expensive. $200 billion IMHO is pretty optimistic given the actual costs incurred for things like ISS and Shuttle.
Again though, SpaceX is doing something that has been done HUNDREDS of times before. NASA and the USSR/Russia have developed almost a dozen manned spacecraft and literally 100's of boosters. Every single element of the design of Falcon and Dragon are highly conservative. No team designing a booster would even blink an eye at anything SpaceX has chosen to do. The most radical technical advance they've made are some advances in using composites in rocket nozzles. I'd also note that SpaceX has yet to demonstrate that they can man-rate their launch systems economically. IMHO they will do it, but what they've done so far is not the whole enchillada, even in just getting a man into orbit. Costs increase dramatically at that point due to the huge expense of the incremental costs of higher reliability systems (once costs escalate somewhat it is even more necessary to use more conservative design to protect those investments, causing even more cost increases).
The point is Mars is a whole new beast. It isn't simply doing what someone else has done before. There is NO indication that any such thing as 10x cost savings can be achieved in such a project. In fact I simply reject the notion that this is possible. Its a popular notion amongst some groups of people, but it has no basis in reality. Once manned travel to Mars has been achieved to a degree that it is ALMOST routine then I would fully expect SpaceX to reproduce that technology for 1/10th of the initial cost and operate it at 500% discount, but not until then. Doing something for the first time is just much riskier and thus impossible to fund economically, and simply requires large amounts of time, large resources, and the ability to try out many approaches iteratively and incrementally. Commercial ventures simply lack the structure for that kind of effort, and as soon as you marry them to a public venture you have basically NASA. I mean it isn't like NASA directly developed most of its own hardware, it was all supplied by contractors at the lowest price they could bid. It was expensive because things had to be overengineered for unknowns, most designs had to be tossed out or iterated 3-5 times, etc.
Obviously time will tell. I'll be thrilled if prices for all sorts of space ventures come down a large amount. I am just skeptical that cutting edge ventures will ever be much cheaper than they are now.
It is getting cheaper, and since launch to LEO is a fairly high expense it is generally encouraging. My understanding of the economics of space launch though is it will never get a LOT cheaper. It might drop by another factor of 3, maybe with really high demand 5, but rockets are just EXPENSIVE, they exist at the very limits of the maximum performance of physical machines. Other launch technologies are intriguing but clearly many decades, possibly centuries, from realization (IE we could probably build a rail gun type system, but it would have only limited application for small payloads with very high G acceleration tolerance). Things like towers, bolos, elevators, etc are pretty out there still, with largely unknown engineering challenges. Laser/microwave launch systems may be the most feasible, but would still seem to be at least 30-50 years from maturity (its possible a crash program could develop such a system in say 20 years maybe, hard to say).
I'm not sure who the worst pessimists are. It seems to me few people predicted a slower or more limited manned entry into space than what we have actually had, aside from pre-Sputnik era scoffers who insisted that space flight in general was impossible or infeasible. It seems to me that since then there's been a pretty consistent underestimation of the time and money required. My experience as an engineer and working some in aerospace is that engineers generally underestimate by a factor of at least 4, sometimes up to 10. So the guys like Zubrin et all are probably short by AT LEAST 400% in their cost estimates, though time estimates are more variable. These kinds of prognostications are of course hard to empirically validate, but they have proven out fairly well experientally.
It is hard to see how that will be overcome. Its a catch-22, and again it implies that the probable development of manned spaceflight is that we'll continue with smaller limited operations with things like the ISS, maybe some other near-Earth missions (lunar, NEO, LaGrange points, etc) plus possibly space tourism. That might gradually lead to some limited manned commercial operations of other types, salvage, some manufacturing of propellants or volatiles, maybe SPSes, and at some point operations will be cheap enough that repeat Mars missions and such will be inexpensive enough that it will be attractive and we'll cross over that hump. I'd expect another factor would be the tapping out of automated missions. The 20th unmanned rover is going to be pretty marginal and at that point all that will be left is to actually send people to sort out the stuff those missions can never really resolve. That could easily be 50 or more years down the road though.
Again, I just don't think the time is ripe. Mars is a bridge too far with current technology and expertise. We COULD do it, but it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to do it now vs building up to it over at least a few more decades. Of course my sense of how fast that build up is going to happen could well be off. Maybe the next 15 years holds some massive amount of orbital activity that will drop the bottom out of prices or something. However, judging by how overly optimistic people have been historically about space flight it seems more likely to me that things will go slower than one would niaively imagine.
But a Mars mission is not an assembly line produced low-cost consumer item like a blue LED. There isn't even any analogy to be made there. A Mars mission is more like building a tunnel under the English Channel. Yes, there are other things you will do with the technology and other projects which will contribute technical knowhow, but it is a project unto itself. "Engineering" a Mars mission IS going to Mars, pure and simple. The end result of the engineering process is footprints on the surface. There's no assembly line where you amortize the costs.
Again, this cost thing is going back to the "Government can only waste money" silliness. Trust me, when you do something for the first time it is EXPENSIVE. Could going to the Moon have been cheaper? I doubt it. In fact the real lesson with large projects is that once you get into the implementation phase the cheapest way to do them is sustained forward effort directed towards soonest results. Dabbling along slowly is a recipe for project failure and massive cost overruns which has been proven again and again during the space program as well as in every other branch of engineering where it is relevant. It is of course possible that with 20/20 hindsight we can see where slowing down and making a few different decisions etc would have actually been better, but the forward momentum of the project would have failed and it wouldn't have panned out that way. Hindsight is basically worthless, which is why Epimethius was Prometheus' idiot brother. So, I reject the claim that Apollo isn't a reasonable cost basis. Even supposing it is not, what is, the Space Shuttle? ISS? Ummm, you ain't got a lot of examples to go on there and NONE of them points towards things costing less than anticipated, ever.
Actually hardness corresponds EXACTLY to cost in engineering. How else would you measure it? Obviously if we were talking about making a starship then we might have a 'scientific breakthrough' sort of hardness to talk about, but going to Mars is a purely engineering challenge without any real need for anything beyond incremental applied science and incremental aerology study, etc.
You miss the point of my reference to things like SpaceX. They got to orbit fairly cheaply because 95% of the work was done already and could simply be applied. Sunk cost indeed, but the point is if you measured the TOTAL cost of going to orbit reliably and relatively cheaply by what SpaceX spent then you would underestimate the total investmeny by a factor of 20 (at least, I'm pulling that number, it is probably much higher). Thus any argument that by analogy if NASA needs $1 trillion to go to Mars that SpaceX needs only say $100 billion to do the same thing is fatally flawed because it is not an analogous situation (IE NASA has been to orbit already, but not to Mars). As for sending men to Mars there are no sunk costs, 95% or more of the cost required is ahead of us, so it makes perfectly good sense to consider whether we should spend those funds.
My point with "do it later, Mars will be there" is that things always get cheaper. In 50 years we'll have even cheaper launch costs, much more experience with cost-efficient manned space operations, etc. We can also spend those 50 or more years gathering all the needed information and doing all the studies we could possibly need. This will reduce the number of engineering dead ends and re-directions that are required along the way when you do the science and the engineering in parallel. At some point the unknowns will be much smaller, the costs smaller, and the risks smaller. At that time the cost will be GEOMETRICALLY less because you can then leave off many redundancies and use more of a standard off-the-shelf approach using Nth generation perfected commercial technology, which clearly will itself be an order of magnitude cheaper. Thus the cost in corrected $ of a manned Mars mission conducted in say 2080 could well be $50 billion, vs $1.2 trillion to do it now. Is it really worth pushing it that hard? It is one thing to argue that the high cost is worth it in some sense if that's the cost and it can't be reduced much then that's simply the cost of the human race 'being human' and going there. BUT if you instead consider the huge costs now against all the other lost opportunities that need not be lost at all if we wait a few decades then we have to seriously wonder if it isn't better to just pace ourselves and take carefull measured steps in a fiscally prudent fashion. We can use the $1+ trillion to solve our energy problems today and STILL get to Mars, maybe one generation late, at a trivial cost.
Sorry, I think Kartu and Guzzirider are correct, going to Mars is AT LEAST 10x harder than going to the Moon, and may well be 100x harder. Meanwhile our technological capabilities are only modestly improved over 1969. We have slightly better rocket technology (we were already bumping up against the practical limits of what is possible with Saturn V). Clearly we have improved our ability to conduct space operations, somewhat, but there's nothing we are doing now that was impossible back in the 70's and none of it has gotten appreciably cheaper.
If you just 'cut two or three orders of magnitude off that price' what you end up with is not a cheap program, you end up with failure. I know it is all fashionable to suppose that NASA etc are all just vast money-wasting organizations that can't do for a buck what they should be able to do for a dime, but the truth is that stuff is hogwash. It is VERY expensive to do the vast amounts of trial-and-error iterative design work required to get an engine or a guidance system, or a life support system right. Each of these things has 1000's of details involved, each and every one of which MUST be perfect. If you skimp on modeling how your plumbing works then 5 weeks out in deep space when your water system screws itself everyone DIES. It is that simple. I've worked on these systems, I KNOW what I'm talking about. Systems engineering is HARD, and labor intensive, and slow.
You're going to get ONE shot at Mars. The truth is once you start it gets expensive, and then you need to protect that investment and it gets more expensive, etc. This is why the larger projects run over and fail or achieve only limited success so often. The COMMERCIAL ventures, like SpaceX, are simply riding the coat tails of 1000's of man lifetimes of work done by NASA. Yes, for a very limited specific set of capabilities they will deliver, NOW as the 3rd generation, a significant cost savings into the niche they understand, delivery of materials into Earth orbit. You cannot extrapolate their cost structure to unknown open-ended goal activities like a manned mission to Mars, it simply won't scale that way.
PERSONALLY I think Mars is out of practical reach of current technology for a manned mission. We need 20 more years of space operations expertise, a dozen more rovers, and we need to develop a much more capable type of spacecraft propelled with nuclear energy. A nuclear-powered VASIMER-like 'tractor' that can drag large payloads back and forth to Mars with turn-arounds on the order of 3 months would vastly simplify the problems involved. Each such simplification then redounds back to lower risks, which inherently creates lower costs as you can work with greater error margins. Build a couple of these nuclear tractors, haul lots of tons of stuff over there (launch costs are still NASTY but not insurmountable). Now you can do things like put men in orbit and have a backup return vehicle, establish an orbiting base, try out landers, prove them out, preposition them on the surface, keep spares in orbit, repair things, etc. Eventually landing itself becomes a much smaller stepping stone. Whether this stuff happens in this century or not is a good question. I think it could be possible in the late 21st Century, but it may still slip into the 22nd. Frankly Mars isn't going away. There's no specific time constraint.
And just to add, as a commercial ISV why would I ever in a million years either donate code/work to your code base when I have no reason to believe I'm even allowed to use it or that it will continue to be available to me in the future, or that my competitors won't just skeef that code and use it to beat me in the market. Anyone who thinks "POSS" means jack seems full of it to me. If you can't be bothered to find a license you can live with and expect the rest of us to just hope we won't be screwed or walked all over you are going to be sadly disappointed. FOSS is about everyone giving back, those licenses exist for a reason. You're not doing business with me without I get their protection, and for every project out there there are a lot of alternatives. IMHO the OSS licensed ones will prevail.
LOL, yeah, all I did for 10 years was water them when they looked dry. All my plants thrived. When they were 'cared for' by other people? THEN they died. I conclude that plants pretty much want be left alone (OK, I do recomend repotting them maybe every 5-10 years depending on how much they grow. You MIGHT also add a few drops of plant food to their water, maybe once a year or so).
ALL UR PLANT R US!
"Remote Kill" can take on a whole new meaning.
Yeah, I've looked at it. The latest release is a bit old, so I ended up testing out FC17 first. I think I'll put Mageia in a VM though. What do you know about ROSA? It seems to release more often.
Right next to the 10' long Model P ....
Yeah, I used Mandriva for years mainly for the fact that it had by far the best repos around. Since that has gone into implosion mode F17 has been a good fallback. Of course I have no desire to touch Gnome anything with a 10' model M keyboard...
I guess the places I've dealt with are fortunate not to be in that boat, lol.
As others have said, it can go either way. My business is building enterprise class trading systems, which are MOSTLY Java based systems. IME the TCO for Linux servers is lower, so we do preferentially deploy stuff on them. OTOH sometimes Windows will be a platform of choice for some installations simply because they have the infrastructure in place, need to run various Windows components anyway, etc.
What I am seeing is people moving to the cloud, and that seems to favor Linux. AWS for instance if you have either option there's little incentive to use Windows, the cost is about 2x as much for EC2 per-instance, which can add up. While in theory it might seem important to use RHEL for example, negating any cost advantage, truthfully the Amazon custom AMIs work fine, actually better than the RHEL/CentOS, and will run pretty much anything out of the box. Certainly if you're running OSS based web apps then its almost always the way to go. I suspect Windows will be increasingly not relevant in that sector and it will eventually eat the vast majority of application server business.
Ummmmm, Unix has been the server platform of choice in practically every secondary education institution in the US (one might even say on Earth) since time immemorial. It would be HIGHLY unusual to see anything with "University" in its name running any significant outward-facing IT infrastructure on Windows. Smaller and newer institutions, yes perhaps, but even most colleges that have been around since the 80's are basically Unix shops (and these days are mostly basically Linux shops, though you will still find a decent amount of AIX/Solaris/etc here and there). Not to say that Windows isn't quite common and even prevalent in some niches in the schools I've been associated with, but none of them would have had any difficulty or hesitation in running a line-of-business web application on a *nix platform, and most wouldn't have even thought about using Windows for that unless there was a specific reason for doing so.
In the US if you have 5 million voters seriously motivated on a topic you can bet it will get some attention, as that is about 5% of the people who are likely to vote in any given election. 5% is PLENTY enough to win you practically any national election in US history.
Yeah, OTOH Chess programs could beat someone like me back in the C64 days at least some of the time, and its only in the last year or two they've reached that level with Go. Nothing is even close to the "unbeatable by all but the few most advanced human players" level of the current crop of the best chess programs. There are still levels of flexibility and adaptability in play that even the best chess programs lack but my reading is this is quite a bit more true with Go. Go is definitely in some sense a 'deeper' game. Certainly the number of possible distinct board positions is very large and more critically it shows very dense branching, you always have a LARGE number of potentially good moves. Its very hard to prune a Go move tree from what I can see. In chess many variations of lines are fairly trivial or lead to the same/equivalent points, and there are generally only a small number of significant trees to explore, 99.9% of the possibilities can be eliminated within 1-2 ply.
Yeah, if you look at Karpov, Kasparov, Fisher, etc etc etc, you rapidly see that high level chess is rife with 'meta-game'. There are other levels of meta-game as well. Players will master different types of game and different lines, focus on different parts of the game, etc. Some players are more defensive, others more offensive, some more tactical, like Kasparov, others more strategic. One player might be a master of specific styles of opening lines, and other might be a mid-game generalist or an expert at end games. Players will also tweak their game and their focus of study in order to better match other players they are likely to face. The game is RICH in possibilities and thus allows for many different successful approaches. One can almost say that a tournament between top players is more a matchup of overall strategies than one of tactics, though the individual moves of each game in the end are where the action is.
Well, M:tG has both 'resource complexity', there are a vast number of possible cards you can play with and they do an equally vast number of slightly different things, and it also has what you are calling 'strategic' (though I would say most of these games have strategy AND tactics) complexity. That is even if you play the same 2 M:tG decks against each other many many times the players are likely to be able to make a number of different tactical choices in each game. Actually I think the tactical depth and strategic depth of chess are a good bit higher than with M:tG, but its a fairly complex game with a huge number of setup options (IE how you make your deck). The tactical consequences of a move or the strategic consequences of learning certain lines or aspects of the game in chess are however more significant than the individual moves in M:tG, which can often be quite insignificant.
Go of course occupies the uttermost extreme in terms of being utterly simple in form and yet so immensely complex in both strategic and tactical depth that no software yet written even approaches the better human players.
OK, that was poorly worded, lol. Java is more like "like .NET BUT it IS platform-independent". In any case Java is certainly one of those things that is thought of one way but really is mostly something else.
Normally the browser plug-in is a totally different independent install from Java itself. Its POSSIBLE an installer could bundle java and a java browser plug-in (like say icedtea). Linux distros will generally install java to satisfy the plugin's dependencies for instance, which in something like Ubuntu could happen almost automatically. I don't think anything like that will happen in Windows or OSX normally.
Lots of people DO have Java installed for completely other reasons than web applets though. In fact it is mostly used the same way .NET is, as a platform-independent managed code runtime. Nowadays frankly I don't see a lot of reason for most people to install the plugin though. Applets are OK, but most stuff is migrating to HTML5/JS anyway.
Oh, nonsense. Keep up with advances in battery tech. Its basically in the bag now.
Its a pretty decent list of features. I'll just add to make sure you have at least 10 hours of battery use, while actually USING the device.
http://wh.gov/UCL9 sign on folks! I can hardly wait to see the mealy mouthed BS answer to this... Oh, and expect to be on some FBI troublemaker list, if you're not yet. Consider it a badge of honor. ;)