US $150, available after all the Mars guys, then JPL interested guys get them. And as far as I can tell, everybody that bought one paid out of their own pocket
$150 for a hand-made mechanical watch? Sorry, I don't believe you. There's a watch shop near my office that I just looked in on my way to get coffee and $1500 (at least!) is more like it. If anyone is paying $150 then it's heavily subsidized somewhere along the way. And people wonder why NASA is always going over budget!
so anyone who wants to continue using it and fix bugs can do so. With Win98, that's not an option.
So those Win98 users - the ones whose needs aren't sophisticated enough to justify upgrading to Win2K or WinXP - are all kernel developers now?
You can wriggle all you like, but the fact is that Microsoft is offering a near-unprecedented level of support for an EOL'd product, and Red Hat dropped the ball bigtime.
Looks like there's no books in the home of the future.
In fact that's the one thing they got right - no-one who liked books would light an apartment like that, or vice versa. Hell, it would be easier to read by candlelight than with those LEDs.
to spread the cost for the public benefit of universal access.
I would be very interested to see if there is any hard evidence that it is a "public benefit". I mean, would it be a "public" benefit" if the government subsidized every household having a PlayStation?
It's like computers in schools. Sure, they sound like a good idea, but as Clifford Stoll observes between the ages of 6 and 16, computers are actually bad for education, because they divert time and resources away from real learning... it's as if astronomy students spent all their time studying telescopes and none on actual stars.
So even in a rural province - we have an extremely high level of access, and we don't pay through the nose for it.
Actually, being in a rural location may be an advantage. It means the telco has to do less multiplexing at the exchange, which is built from standard components designed for areas of higher population density. You can't hear the effect of heavy muxing if you're a voice user (usually!) but it plays hell with the portion of the frequency spectrum that ADSL uses.
The worst people off will be those who live in an area that has experienced rapid increase in the number of people per exchange, for whatever reason.
OS/2 was doomed to fail when directly competing against Windows.
OS/2 was doomed to fail by the internal structure of IBM. You see, the OS/2 group fell under operating systems (or whatever IBM called that group) and the PC group fell under hardware. Each group was responsible for delivering a profit to head office. The OS/2 group said "can you preinstall this on all IBM PCs?" and the PC group replied "why should we take on a risk to our revenue stream just to dig you out of a hole?".
If IBM had structured things so there was one PC group responsible for PC hardware and for PC operating systems, it would have turned out very differently. Most business managers don't really care about OSs beyond them being able to fulfill the business need. If IBM's shipping PCs as part of a turnkey solution (as it used to before it got out of commodity PCs) in 20,000 seat deals and it put OS/2 on them, businesses would have been fine with that, so long as it ran what applications they wanted.
Luna's lack of gravity makes it easier to land, refuel, refill, maintain, take off.
How do you plan to get the fuel to there in the first place? Ship it all the way from Earth?
It can be manufactured on Mars. And there are the raw materials for alloys and ceramics too, so you can even fabricate components there too, which you can't on Luna. The moon will never be more than an outpost because it can never be self-sufficient. But once the infrastructure (made from locally-sourced materials) is in place, Mars could be.
The moon IS the road to Mars. If we can't inhabit the moon for 18 months at a time, we sure can't go to Mars.
Sorry, but you are wrong, and Dr Zubrin explains why at great length in his books. Summary: it is far easier to get to Mars and make use of locally available resources (primarily the atmosphere which is easy to convert to fuel, oxygen, etc, using a catalytic process, this has been demonstrated on Earth) than it is to ship everything you need to the Moon from Earth, because on the Moon there are almost no resources in a usable form.
I think establishing a permanent moon base first should be a priority
The two are too dissimilar, well apart from being roughly spherical and airless. On Mars there are resources - metals and other minerals, easy access to methane for fuel, water sources, etc. Mars has an atmosphere to shield against radiation and small meteorites. Mars has a reasonable amount of gravity. It's already been demonstrated here on Earth that plants can grow in a sealed greenhouse at Mars atmospheric pressure, which greatly simplifies their construction.
The moon on the other hand, has almost nothing. Sure there's lots of silicon, but not in a form you can do much useful with without vast amounts of energy (which means shipping in a nuclear reactor before you can make solar cells), few useful metals or minerals, no atmosphere at all, etc etc.
There is a very strong case (read The Case For Mars by Dr Robert Zubrin) for skipping the moon altogether until we have a working fusion reactor (at which point the moon becomes interesting for its dueterium) and going straight to Mars.
BUT... Same as with GM leaving Michigan, it is partly the employees fault. If you keep on demanding more and more, wages benefits, whatnot, then you might as well excpect that they eventually will give up, and give the job to someone more humble in needs.
I don't remember the exact quote offhand, but someone recently pointed out that to all intents and purposes, the "Big 3" auto manufacturers are a healthcare plan that happens to make cars as a sideline. Over the years the unions demanded a bit more here, a bit more there and pretty soon the rate at which benefits accumulated outstripped the rate at which productivity increased... then the writing was on the wall.
No answer here, except a no-brainer, 'greed sucks'
A lot of people say that management is greedy - but a lot of people also forget that unions frequently bite the hand that feeds them clean off.
If we want to keep our standard of living, we need to choose to pay more for American-made goods. I make a practice of looking for American made goods when I buy, but I know that I'm totally in the minority when I do so.
Exactly right. I'm sitting here in English-made shoes, socks, suit, pants, shirt, belt, cufflinks... the only item of clothing I'm wearing that isn't English is my watch (Finnish). I wouldn't buy these goods if they didn't meet my price/quality requirement of course, but given the choice between English goods that do and foreign goods that do, I'll choose English every time.
No-one who is wearing mostly-imported clothes, driving an imported car, listening to an imported stereo etc etc has the right to complain about jobs going overseas. All these Slashdot geeks love to talk the talk, how many walk the walk too?
Perhaps the solution would be establishing a minimum duration for any executive job of, say, ten years. That would make them care.
I believe Halliburton have a similar arrangement with Dick Cheney - he gets his pay for when he did work for them paid out now that he he no longer does. Assuming he knew this upfront (and he probably did) he was fully incentivized to make decisions that would be best for the company even after he left.
It seems obvious that part of the licensing deal would stipulate that HP cannot undercut Apple's pricing.
It's not obvious at all. Remember HP and Apple have radically different business models. HP is all about commodity and volume and price competition. Apple's model is "if it's cool enough, we can charge what we like, even if it means our volume is lower".
And if anything, they'll be physically bigger, or won't look as nice. Apple's going to keep the high ground somehow.
Indeed. This is potentially a win-win, since the two companies are strong in different markets.
Computer security costs the same if you use some lame hack like MS is doing, or use real cryptography. The cost is nothing. Cryptography algorithms are freely available, and modern processors can handle the encryption without serious inconvenience to the user.
Word passwords are deliberately weak. They are designed such that if you forget the password, all is not lost. Average consumers with industrial grade crypto would be a support nightmare - if you forget your bank PIN, you can get a new one, if you lost the passphrase for a PGP-style secret key, your document is as good as shredded. A serious user would use EFS or PGPdisk or something.
most of the code I have seen churned out at software companies was done in such a rush because of deadlines the programmers didn't have time to optimize there code.
I would argue that in the vast majority of cases, processor-specific microcode (as opposed to language and algorithmic) optimizations aren't the programmer's job - that's what a compiler is for. A professional-grade compiler like MIPSpro or ICC can generate code over twice as fast as GCC on the same processor, because it's smarter about processor-specifics. It's the same as on processors with OOOE and the like; the onus is on the compiler writers working with the hardware designers. On an older architecture like VAX, there was less need for that because the instruction set was so rich, but a more modern architecture like MIPS really needs it.
Unfortunately, historically CPU speed has increased faster than memory bandwidth. That's why we've had ever more layers of cache added to our systems, to make up for the relative deficiency.
Aye. Sun has big plans for CMT, which one of their sales reps was quick to tell us all about, up to 32 SPARC cores on one chip. That'll work well in the lots-of-small-tasks model where you can take advantage of direct access (say between disk cache and network card) on FirePlane with very simple code (like a webserver) that can execute out of the processor's cache. But we're heavy database users, and the first question he got asked was, are you seriously telling us Sun is about to makes its memory bandwith an order of magnitude greater? He couldn't answer that question. Now, that means either he was clueless, or Sun is jumping on the Intel benchmark bandwagon.
Re:There is indeed a Soyuz for emergency
on
ISS May Have A Leak
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· Score: 1
As I recall, NASA was very much opposed to trying to run ISS with only a two-person crew rather than the usual three, so having only one crewmember on board would *really* seem to be pushing it.
The funny thing with ISS is that it takes 2.5 people just to operate it (obviously that means two full-time crewmembers and one part-time). That is just to keep the station running as it should, perform regular maintenance and checks, etc. The original plan was for the ISS to have 8 aboard - 2 full time crew, 5 full time scientists and one dividing his/her time between the two. But due to cost overruns (which is why NASA should never have been allowed to work on this without adult supervision) this was cut to 3. So, we have a space station with a crew that does almost nothing but maintain the space station, they don't have the manpower for anything else!
That is why many scientists say that the ISS is a complete waste of money.
I'm not sure I get your reference to Google Answers, since search relevance on GA is horrible. It does prove your point that even Google results stink without context for PageRank.
What I mean is that you can post a question on Google Answers and get an intelligent, context sensitive response. At the moment, the only way to do that is for GA to offload the actual thinking to humans and just handle the interface. When Google (or someone) has natural language parsing and just enough AI to do GA without humans getting involved, then and only then will they have the "killer app" for search engines. It is foolish for Google to IPO now because they don't presently have sufficient barriers to entry - and AltaVista demonstrated just how quickly users switch their favourite search engine.
Google makes great search appliances for networks.
Yes and no. Google's great strength is that it looks for links to a document as an indication of the quality of the document. In other words, it leverages evaluations of a document collectively made by humans. That works (or at least, worked) fabulously well for a most hand-written Internet, or in a case where someone familiar with the knowledge domain had written automated software to cross reference specific sections of it.
But what if there's nothing for PageRank to go on? What if you have 100,000 pre-Web documents in SGML/RTF/Word/FrameMaker, without any hyperlinking at all? Well, then all Google has to go on is keywords... it's "edge" evaporates.
Google's business is a commodity - what they have right now is a great brand and a solid (but not particularly spectacular) technology. When they have a technology that can do what Google Answers does, then it'll be safe for them to IPO, but not before.
If there are intelligent aliens already out there, they've doubtless gone through this narrow 50-150 year "clear transmission" window. The chances of us managing to "catch" it would be infinitesimal.
Indeed. There are good, physics-based reasons to believe that any industrial culture will only use broadcast when no viable alternative exists. Physics constrains EM bandwidth; it is logical to reuse the same bit of spectrum in small low-power cells with short range transmitters rather than to tie up that entire chunk of spectrum with broadcasts. Similarly, two-way communication works badly in a broadcast model. Broadcasting wastes bandwidth and power needlessly - in fact, even if power was "free" there's no way around the waste of bandwidth.
There are also bulk EM emissions for other purposes such as radar. The frequencies and regularity of such signals ought to make them obviously artificial (or maybe they're explained away by alien astronomers as "quasars" or somesuch). For reasons of efficiency, civilians have already moved to a transponder model, the military haven't yet, but stealth is becoming ever-more valuable, so massive radar installations may soon be obsolete also. That's more cultural than physics-based, tho'. Altho' I suppose it would be possible for a culture to exist where all mass communication was one-way (i.e. broadcasting) but what're the chances of such a culture becoming technologically sophisticated?
It's a little difficult to do great work in school if you are always sitting down to Advanced Linguistic Anthropology after eight hours of waiting tables or restocking the paper towels at Wal-Mart.
Life is about compromises - evaluating a set of options, weighing alternatives, deploying limited resources. So really there are two choices here:
Take "Advanced Linguistic Anthropology" (I presume that's some sort of Liberal Arts thing?), spend every night getting stoned (some call this "having a life"), max out your loans and credit cards, graduate under a mountain of debt, realize you are qualified for nothing and spend the rest of your career miserable in low-paid clerical or administrative jobs
Take Engineering classes, work in a low-paid job in your spare time, spend at least some of your nights studying, steer clear of credit cards and make a budget and stick to it, graduate, get on the career track (impressing interviewers with your work ethic and time-management skills), pay off what little debt you have amassed, then get down to the serious business of really having a life.
I think that, while there are a few genuine hardship cases, anyone who goes to college to study Linguistic Anthroplogy and thinks working in Walmart while they do so is beneath them doesn't deserve too much sympathy if it all goes wrong...
Slashdot Mirror
US $150, available after all the Mars guys, then JPL interested guys get them. And as far as I can tell, everybody that bought one paid out of their own pocket
$150 for a hand-made mechanical watch? Sorry, I don't believe you. There's a watch shop near my office that I just looked in on my way to get coffee and $1500 (at least!) is more like it. If anyone is paying $150 then it's heavily subsidized somewhere along the way. And people wonder why NASA is always going over budget!
so anyone who wants to continue using it and fix bugs can do so. With Win98, that's not an option.
So those Win98 users - the ones whose needs aren't sophisticated enough to justify upgrading to Win2K or WinXP - are all kernel developers now?
You can wriggle all you like, but the fact is that Microsoft is offering a near-unprecedented level of support for an EOL'd product, and Red Hat dropped the ball bigtime.
Looks like there's no books in the home of the future.
In fact that's the one thing they got right - no-one who liked books would light an apartment like that, or vice versa. Hell, it would be easier to read by candlelight than with those LEDs.
What does it look like at night?
Dark. Very dark.
Some English content here, including the worrying-looking ROBO-GUARD.
to spread the cost for the public benefit of universal access.
I would be very interested to see if there is any hard evidence that it is a "public benefit". I mean, would it be a "public" benefit" if the government subsidized every household having a PlayStation?
It's like computers in schools. Sure, they sound like a good idea, but as Clifford Stoll observes between the ages of 6 and 16, computers are actually bad for education, because they divert time and resources away from real learning... it's as if astronomy students spent all their time studying telescopes and none on actual stars.
So even in a rural province - we have an extremely high level of access, and we don't pay through the nose for it.
Actually, being in a rural location may be an advantage. It means the telco has to do less multiplexing at the exchange, which is built from standard components designed for areas of higher population density. You can't hear the effect of heavy muxing if you're a voice user (usually!) but it plays hell with the portion of the frequency spectrum that ADSL uses.
The worst people off will be those who live in an area that has experienced rapid increase in the number of people per exchange, for whatever reason.
OS/2 was doomed to fail when directly competing against Windows.
OS/2 was doomed to fail by the internal structure of IBM. You see, the OS/2 group fell under operating systems (or whatever IBM called that group) and the PC group fell under hardware. Each group was responsible for delivering a profit to head office. The OS/2 group said "can you preinstall this on all IBM PCs?" and the PC group replied "why should we take on a risk to our revenue stream just to dig you out of a hole?".
If IBM had structured things so there was one PC group responsible for PC hardware and for PC operating systems, it would have turned out very differently. Most business managers don't really care about OSs beyond them being able to fulfill the business need. If IBM's shipping PCs as part of a turnkey solution (as it used to before it got out of commodity PCs) in 20,000 seat deals and it put OS/2 on them, businesses would have been fine with that, so long as it ran what applications they wanted.
Luna's lack of gravity makes it easier to land, refuel, refill, maintain, take off.
How do you plan to get the fuel to there in the first place? Ship it all the way from Earth?
It can be manufactured on Mars. And there are the raw materials for alloys and ceramics too, so you can even fabricate components there too, which you can't on Luna. The moon will never be more than an outpost because it can never be self-sufficient. But once the infrastructure (made from locally-sourced materials) is in place, Mars could be.
The moon IS the road to Mars. If we can't inhabit the moon for 18 months at a time, we sure can't go to Mars.
Sorry, but you are wrong, and Dr Zubrin explains why at great length in his books. Summary: it is far easier to get to Mars and make use of locally available resources (primarily the atmosphere which is easy to convert to fuel, oxygen, etc, using a catalytic process, this has been demonstrated on Earth) than it is to ship everything you need to the Moon from Earth, because on the Moon there are almost no resources in a usable form.
I think establishing a permanent moon base first should be a priority
The two are too dissimilar, well apart from being roughly spherical and airless. On Mars there are resources - metals and other minerals, easy access to methane for fuel, water sources, etc. Mars has an atmosphere to shield against radiation and small meteorites. Mars has a reasonable amount of gravity. It's already been demonstrated here on Earth that plants can grow in a sealed greenhouse at Mars atmospheric pressure, which greatly simplifies their construction.
The moon on the other hand, has almost nothing. Sure there's lots of silicon, but not in a form you can do much useful with without vast amounts of energy (which means shipping in a nuclear reactor before you can make solar cells), few useful metals or minerals, no atmosphere at all, etc etc.
There is a very strong case (read The Case For Mars by Dr Robert Zubrin) for skipping the moon altogether until we have a working fusion reactor (at which point the moon becomes interesting for its dueterium) and going straight to Mars.
BUT... Same as with GM leaving Michigan, it is partly the employees fault. If you keep on demanding more and more, wages benefits, whatnot, then you might as well excpect that they eventually will give up, and give the job to someone more humble in needs.
I don't remember the exact quote offhand, but someone recently pointed out that to all intents and purposes, the "Big 3" auto manufacturers are a healthcare plan that happens to make cars as a sideline. Over the years the unions demanded a bit more here, a bit more there and pretty soon the rate at which benefits accumulated outstripped the rate at which productivity increased... then the writing was on the wall.
No answer here, except a no-brainer, 'greed sucks'
A lot of people say that management is greedy - but a lot of people also forget that unions frequently bite the hand that feeds them clean off.
If we want to keep our standard of living, we need to choose to pay more for American-made goods. I make a practice of looking for American made goods when I buy, but I know that I'm totally in the minority when I do so.
Exactly right. I'm sitting here in English-made shoes, socks, suit, pants, shirt, belt, cufflinks... the only item of clothing I'm wearing that isn't English is my watch (Finnish). I wouldn't buy these goods if they didn't meet my price/quality requirement of course, but given the choice between English goods that do and foreign goods that do, I'll choose English every time.
No-one who is wearing mostly-imported clothes, driving an imported car, listening to an imported stereo etc etc has the right to complain about jobs going overseas. All these Slashdot geeks love to talk the talk, how many walk the walk too?
Perhaps the solution would be establishing a minimum duration for any executive job of, say, ten years. That would make them care.
I believe Halliburton have a similar arrangement with Dick Cheney - he gets his pay for when he did work for them paid out now that he he no longer does. Assuming he knew this upfront (and he probably did) he was fully incentivized to make decisions that would be best for the company even after he left.
It seems obvious that part of the licensing deal would stipulate that HP cannot undercut Apple's pricing.
It's not obvious at all. Remember HP and Apple have radically different business models. HP is all about commodity and volume and price competition. Apple's model is "if it's cool enough, we can charge what we like, even if it means our volume is lower".
And if anything, they'll be physically bigger, or won't look as nice. Apple's going to keep the high ground somehow.
Indeed. This is potentially a win-win, since the two companies are strong in different markets.
what if I wanted to use photoshop to make some fake Canadian money? :D
:-P
Why bother, the blank paper's worth more!
Computer security costs the same if you use some lame hack like MS is doing, or use real cryptography. The cost is nothing. Cryptography algorithms are freely available, and modern processors can handle the encryption without serious inconvenience to the user.
Word passwords are deliberately weak. They are designed such that if you forget the password, all is not lost. Average consumers with industrial grade crypto would be a support nightmare - if you forget your bank PIN, you can get a new one, if you lost the passphrase for a PGP-style secret key, your document is as good as shredded. A serious user would use EFS or PGPdisk or something.
most of the code I have seen churned out at software companies was done in such a rush because of deadlines the programmers didn't have time to optimize there code.
I would argue that in the vast majority of cases, processor-specific microcode (as opposed to language and algorithmic) optimizations aren't the programmer's job - that's what a compiler is for. A professional-grade compiler like MIPSpro or ICC can generate code over twice as fast as GCC on the same processor, because it's smarter about processor-specifics. It's the same as on processors with OOOE and the like; the onus is on the compiler writers working with the hardware designers. On an older architecture like VAX, there was less need for that because the instruction set was so rich, but a more modern architecture like MIPS really needs it.
Unfortunately, historically CPU speed has increased faster than memory bandwidth. That's why we've had ever more layers of cache added to our systems, to make up for the relative deficiency.
Aye. Sun has big plans for CMT, which one of their sales reps was quick to tell us all about, up to 32 SPARC cores on one chip. That'll work well in the lots-of-small-tasks model where you can take advantage of direct access (say between disk cache and network card) on FirePlane with very simple code (like a webserver) that can execute out of the processor's cache. But we're heavy database users, and the first question he got asked was, are you seriously telling us Sun is about to makes its memory bandwith an order of magnitude greater? He couldn't answer that question. Now, that means either he was clueless, or Sun is jumping on the Intel benchmark bandwagon.
As I recall, NASA was very much opposed to trying to run ISS with only a two-person crew rather than the usual three, so having only one crewmember on board would *really* seem to be pushing it.
The funny thing with ISS is that it takes 2.5 people just to operate it (obviously that means two full-time crewmembers and one part-time). That is just to keep the station running as it should, perform regular maintenance and checks, etc. The original plan was for the ISS to have 8 aboard - 2 full time crew, 5 full time scientists and one dividing his/her time between the two. But due to cost overruns (which is why NASA should never have been allowed to work on this without adult supervision) this was cut to 3. So, we have a space station with a crew that does almost nothing but maintain the space station, they don't have the manpower for anything else!
That is why many scientists say that the ISS is a complete waste of money.
Aye. There are 3 (and ONLY 3) reasons to own a stock:
Remember what they say in poker. If you look around the table and you can't tell who the sucker is... it's you.
I'm not sure I get your reference to Google Answers, since search relevance on GA is horrible. It does prove your point that even Google results stink without context for PageRank.
What I mean is that you can post a question on Google Answers and get an intelligent, context sensitive response. At the moment, the only way to do that is for GA to offload the actual thinking to humans and just handle the interface. When Google (or someone) has natural language parsing and just enough AI to do GA without humans getting involved, then and only then will they have the "killer app" for search engines. It is foolish for Google to IPO now because they don't presently have sufficient barriers to entry - and AltaVista demonstrated just how quickly users switch their favourite search engine.
Google makes great search appliances for networks.
Yes and no. Google's great strength is that it looks for links to a document as an indication of the quality of the document. In other words, it leverages evaluations of a document collectively made by humans. That works (or at least, worked) fabulously well for a most hand-written Internet, or in a case where someone familiar with the knowledge domain had written automated software to cross reference specific sections of it.
But what if there's nothing for PageRank to go on? What if you have 100,000 pre-Web documents in SGML/RTF/Word/FrameMaker, without any hyperlinking at all? Well, then all Google has to go on is keywords... it's "edge" evaporates.
Google's business is a commodity - what they have right now is a great brand and a solid (but not particularly spectacular) technology. When they have a technology that can do what Google Answers does, then it'll be safe for them to IPO, but not before.
If there are intelligent aliens already out there, they've doubtless gone through this narrow 50-150 year "clear transmission" window. The chances of us managing to "catch" it would be infinitesimal.
Indeed. There are good, physics-based reasons to believe that any industrial culture will only use broadcast when no viable alternative exists. Physics constrains EM bandwidth; it is logical to reuse the same bit of spectrum in small low-power cells with short range transmitters rather than to tie up that entire chunk of spectrum with broadcasts. Similarly, two-way communication works badly in a broadcast model. Broadcasting wastes bandwidth and power needlessly - in fact, even if power was "free" there's no way around the waste of bandwidth.
There are also bulk EM emissions for other purposes such as radar. The frequencies and regularity of such signals ought to make them obviously artificial (or maybe they're explained away by alien astronomers as "quasars" or somesuch). For reasons of efficiency, civilians have already moved to a transponder model, the military haven't yet, but stealth is becoming ever-more valuable, so massive radar installations may soon be obsolete also. That's more cultural than physics-based, tho'. Altho' I suppose it would be possible for a culture to exist where all mass communication was one-way (i.e. broadcasting) but what're the chances of such a culture becoming technologically sophisticated?
Life is about compromises - evaluating a set of options, weighing alternatives, deploying limited resources. So really there are two choices here:
I think that, while there are a few genuine hardship cases, anyone who goes to college to study Linguistic Anthroplogy and thinks working in Walmart while they do so is beneath them doesn't deserve too much sympathy if it all goes wrong...