In a twist of fate, Microsoft announces Visual MIX
on
Donald Knuth On NPR
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Most of us struggle with basic assembly language. But Knuth goes and invents his own VM (MIX) and programs all of his examples to it. You just have to admire that.
I called the other day because my Toaster wasn't my toast correctly and I got some guy on the phone saying: "I don't care about your toaster, you zionist pig infidel Yankee American." So I was like, "well, could you transfer me to tech support before you blow yourself up."
or Mac. Heck, my dream would be that my shareware app takes off and then I could write it for Linux and Macintosh both. I'd love to learn to program X/Windows with a real toolkit and have a clean C/C++ Api to work with like Unix does.
Ok, first off, having laser correction on ground based telescopes is still not as good as a spaced based telescope because the atmosphere still filters out many wavelengths of light and there's not a damn thing you can do about that.
And, it's not a simple matter of detecting asteroids, you have to do mineral assays of them before you can determine if they are worth mining. To do that, you need to either go to the asteroid, or you need at least good spectroscopy, and even Hubble is not high res enough for the former.
Then we can work out particulars.
How much asteroid material are we bringing back? Let's assume that we have a space shuttle II that can hold 100 tons of cargo in its hold and land it safely on earth. Let's assume we get lucky and get an asteroid that, by weight, is 50% iron, 20% nickel, 30% platinum group.
So let's figure out the potential profits of our asteroid. Iron ore I think is roughly $50 a ton, but since we'd be brining back nearly perfect iron, steel like prices of $500/ton might be achievable. So for our first 50 tons of cargo, we've made maybe $25,000.
Nickel now is $10,000 a ton. Our next 20 tons of cargo makes us $200,000, bringing us up to $225,000. Not too bad.
The platinum group metals, though, is where we make bank. If you figure 30 tons x $400/oz x 32000oz/ton, or about 384 million dollars.
Now, we could figure for our spaceship to -only- bring back 100 tons of pg elements from the asteroid. Then we'd be talking about 1.28 billion dollars a flight.
But to do that, we have to solve that little problem of developing a spacecraft that can fly out to an asteroid, mine 100 tons of it, then, bring that back to the earth and land it. Assuming each ship makes one flight per year, and an investment return of 10%, we'd roughly double our investment in 7 years or pay the ship off in 3.5. So our vehicle cost can be up to 3.5 billion dollars. A lot of dough? But that doesn't include development money.
There are lots of projects: lunar mining, asteroid detection/diversion/mining, serious propulsion experiments...terraforming experiments on Mars...
Let's face it, we can easily see where we need to go next, spending another $10,000,000,000 on a new (or even 20 year old) eyepiece ain't neccesary.
I'll ask. How do you find the asteroid worth mining without the 10 billion dollar eyepiece? It's easy enough to throw out slogans. But lets get real. The reality is that there is absolutely no economic benefit to living, working, or retrieving materials from space.
None. If it made economic sense to drill for oil on Titan, believe me, Exxon Mobile would be there.
That is post xeno stage.
So what we do have is funded research bodies, such as NASA and also ESA, that explore different things in space. Sometimes we send probes to other planets, sometimes we put people in space. Sometimes we try out new ideas in aeronautics. Sometimes we look at asteroids or comets. It's not a commercial thing.
If you want McSpace, you have to invent the SpaceMac.
The company Enron ultimately did pay the price for what it did, so, in the gross sense, the system did work. The shareholders and banks bailed on the company and the accounting firm was indicted.
Out of it too came Sarbanes Oxley, which, most IT developers in corporations ought to be familiar with by now.
So thanks to Ken Lay and CO, we all have more IT work.
First off, despite what Enron did, the State of California dug itself into a hole because of NIMBY. There was little or no plant construction in California during the 1990s, a time when the population boomed. It was impossible to get permits for new plants and most new construction was tied up in courts over environmental issues. When the crunch did happen, Enron and others wrongly exploited California, but not at all in the way that has been oversimplified by the press or even the idiot Ralph Nader types.
California, because it had not built enough power plants, was importing power from other states.
In order to import power you have to have your own power system suitably balanced. It's not like you put electrons on trucks and wheel them in. To do this, you offer financial incentives to buy or sell power at various points on the grid. To this day, PJM does this on the east coast and you can actually check it out here PJM LMP pricing
Also, you have to adequate transmission rights to get the power in.
So what Enron did was rather clever. First, they had better software than the California ISO for determining grid imbalances and so they scheduled power deals to manipulate the grid. Import power in the north, export it in the south, boom there is an imbalance, and you can sell the power you exported back to the state for a lot of dough. Then, they would also go and buy up transmission rights into the state (which is actually pretty cheap), and then play games at peak times.
The amazing thing about the whole thing is that gaming California's stupid grid managers WAS LEGAL. That's right. Enron didn't do -anything- wrong by screwing the state of California. The state made its rules for its market place and Enron exploited them, but California should not have made those rules to begin with. To cap it all off, California deregulation stripped utilities of the ability to pass variable costs to consumers. So, if the price of electricity shot up, it should have shot up for consumers as well, and guess what, people turn their air conditioners down, and there is no power crisis. But oh no, California made it so that the utilities could not recover the costs and so they had to sell power at a loss, and all the utilities in California went bankrupt, and Enron made a mountain of money, legally.
The thing that got Enron into trouble was that they were lying on their financial statements, and for that, the company is now bankrupt, her executives are either on trial, and the accounting firm that certified those statements no longer exists.
Come on, join IT, girls, it's very exciting. You don't want to hang out with football players. You want to hang out and play Dungeons and Dragons and collect guns. Then, you can get outsourced like the rest of us!
Regardless of whether it runs under Windows or on its own, the Linux API, something that can be programmed outside of Windows, is what makes Linux the threat.
MS's whole business works because it has developers writing for it. Everything they make is programmable in a fashion. If Linux ran on Windows, it would only hurt MS because it would make it more accessible to Windows developers, who might like it.
Not to mention an end to the genocide in the Balkans. As usual, it was the United States and United Kingdom coming in to clean that mess up too.
Actually, the British alone among Europeans made the huge sacrifice for freedom by fighting World War II alone! They could have quit, signed a peace treaty and kept their empire. But nope, they saw what needed to be done, and threw it all on the table to stop the Nazis and the Japs.
12 years of United Nations Security Council Resolutions, 100's of meetings and many treaties and diplomatic maneuvers, did nothing to depose Saddam Hussein and the Taliban and bring about elections to two countries in the middle east.
180,000 soldiers from the United States and United Kingdom did.
So the ICC's validity is worth 200,000 people dead in Darfur? That's European logic for you. So long as Europeans don't die, the world is better off. If giving up your sovereignty is that important to you, why don't you Europeans just petition to be admitted to the United States? I would extend such an invitation until I realized just how morally disgusting Europe is.
In all of human history, Europeans have NEVER done anything that benefits anyone other than Europeans, not real. Crimes that the USA have inflicted on the world PALE compared to the messes brought on by European colonialism and its aftermath. Have you looked at Africa lately? Way to go France and Germany.
History for the last 500 years has either been Europe brutalizing the world or the rest of the world, in particular, the United States, riding to the rescue of the Europe.
Until Europe comes to the defense of liberty in one place, any place actually, the way the United States did at Normandy Beach, until Europe is willing to put its cities on the nuclear line to defend another nation the way the United States did for Europe against Communist Russia, then Europeans can take their alphabet soup of worthless treaties and their high minded diplomacy and shove them up their asses.
So the ICC's validity is worth 200,000 people dead in Darfur? If giving up your sovereignty is that important to you, why don't you Europeans just petition to be admitted to the United States?
The re-imagined Galactica is hands down the best science fiction on TV right now. The Trek world is cool, don't get me wrong, but, Galactica is newer, fresher, has better writing, better actors, and thank god, does not have holodecks.
And yes, the new Col Tigh is infinitely more interesting than any Star Trek XO ever was.
X-33 failed, so it was cancel. I talked to some Lockheed engineers about this and:
a) They did not get as much lift out of the lifting body that they thought they would, so this put strains on their weight budget.
b) The fancy composite fuel tanks that were supposed to keep weight down didn't work. They would have had to go with more conventional materials and that broke the weight budget, so the project was cancelled.
I thought we used directional radio already to guide ships in on a beam. It's just that GPS is much less expensive and more accurate, but, the technology to replace light houses has already been around since the 1960s and in America most lighthouses I believe are museums.
How can you say that the Bush administration is retreating from knowledge when he:
a) DOUBLED the budget for the National Science Foundation. That's right. DOUBLED the federal outlay for basic research in all matters from health to basic physics.
b) Has FULLY funded NASA's plan to send a manned mission to the Moon and ultimately to Mars.
c) Is FULLY funding the Prometheus project and the Jupiter Icey Moons orbiter.
Thanks to the Bush administration, we are well on our way towards establishing that a baseline for life once existed on Mars, are on our way towards looking for life on Mars, and are taking the first steps towards looking for proof of liquid water not only on Europa but also on Callisto and the other of Jupiter's icey moons.
Just because some idiots in Kentucky vote for Bush doesn't mean that Bush thinks like them, any more than crystal touting LSD gobbling 60's flower relics made Clinton an LSD gobbling cook. Sometimes you just take the vote and move on.
The use of unmanaged code in.NET is unsafe, but,.NET itself has a security policy system which checks to see if unsafe code is actually used. So, Gosling
Using the import attribute to talk to a Windows DLL, that code is automatically unsafe. Link with a C++ library and wrap it using the "IJW" managed / unmanaged bridging in C++ for.NET, is also unsafe. Using the "unsafe" keyword and pointers within C# is also unsafe. Also, since.NET 1.0 SP3, using the compiler services to generate code is also unsafe.
All unsafe code is trapped by the.NET runtime system, which checks security permissions for that application. You cannot ship an unsafe application without the explicitly allowing unsafe content to execute. Unsafe applications cannot be run off of a network drive, nor can they be run off of a web page.
Gosling is a super programmer, and, as the inventor of Java, made popular the idea of virtual machines.
I was a fan of the original series but the new Galactica has much better acting and much better writing. Lorne Green was a great Adama, but Edward Olmos is -better-. And the new Col Tigh is just as good as old one.
The simple fact of the matter is that British policy at the time prohibited colonies from making a wide variety of manufactured goods that Americans were increasingly being able to manufacture. Britain wanted to keep the colonies as suppliers of raw materials, and nothing more, but Americans wanted to manufacture. A classic example is the British laws against metal shovels in the colonies, but, there are many others.
If I write a shareware application, I can use a windows installer for visual studio and build a wizard that handles the installation of my application. I don't even know where to start with Linux. What version of C libraries, what version of the compiler, all that stuff, and, then, worrying about whether or not full screen or sound access requires root access? Like, I'm going to walk a 10 year old kid through that? Yeah, some kids are computer smart, but, a lot see them like toasters.
Make a Linux distro that can play games with the efficiency of an XBox, so you can
a) easily install games and remove them. b) works solidly with exact pc specifications - this motherboard, this graphics card and this sound card, (no component based substitution), and you got yourself a winner.
The moral of the story is the idea of interchangable peripherals for consumer pc's has failed. Remember how reliable those old ataris, amigas, macs, etc all were? Slots are a design mistake.
If I'm going to drop 5 million bucks on developing a game, seems to me that I would want to use the API that gets me closer to XBOX. XBOX is already running Windows, already running DirectX, and so, if all I gotta do is tweak an existing app and then I can ship for a very lucrative XBox market, why would I bother with OpenG/L?
This "end of PC's hyped" is completely overrated largely because we overvalue consumer data. Most data consumers put on their PCs is shortlived - they don't view their PCs as "permanent" data repositories. They write letters, print them and send them. They put their bills into them, do their kid's movies for graduation, play games and surf. None of that actually requires data to be not backed up and the common fix for most consumers for bad computers is to buy a new one or to reinstall everything from the "start over disk". Honestly if Windows shipped with the default to delete everything over 90 days old, turned on, a lot of people would actually probably like it.
The Chinese probably will supplant the US owing to their sheer population, but the EU never will because not only is their population declining in real terms, so is their economic growth. USA consitently rings of GDP growth of > 2% whereas the EU manages to scrape up 1%. This year the USA grew at 4% and the EU practically grew at 0. Over time this discrepancy compounds. Right now the EU is getting poorer relative to the USA, not richer, and given the economic policies of the EU versus the pro-growth policies of the USA, this is likely to remain the case.
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Most of us struggle with basic assembly language. But Knuth goes and invents his own VM (MIX) and programs all of his examples to it. You just have to admire that.
I called the other day because my Toaster wasn't my toast correctly and I got some guy on the phone saying: "I don't care about your toaster, you zionist pig infidel Yankee American." So I was like, "well, could you transfer me to tech support before you blow yourself up."
or Mac. Heck, my dream would be that my shareware app takes off and then I could write it for Linux and Macintosh both. I'd love to learn to program X/Windows with a real toolkit and have a clean C/C++ Api to work with like Unix does.
Ok, first off, having laser correction on ground based telescopes is still not as good as a spaced based telescope because the atmosphere still filters out many wavelengths of light and there's not a damn thing you can do about that.
And, it's not a simple matter of detecting asteroids, you have to do mineral assays of them before you can determine if they are worth mining. To do that, you need to either go to the asteroid, or you need at least good spectroscopy, and even Hubble is not high res enough for the former.
Then we can work out particulars.
How much asteroid material are we bringing back? Let's assume that we have a space shuttle II that can hold 100 tons of cargo in its hold and land it safely on earth. Let's assume we get lucky and get an asteroid that, by weight, is 50% iron, 20% nickel, 30% platinum group.
So let's figure out the potential profits of our asteroid. Iron ore I think is roughly $50 a ton, but since we'd be brining back nearly perfect iron, steel like prices of $500/ton might be achievable. So for our first 50 tons of cargo, we've made maybe $25,000.
Nickel now is $10,000 a ton. Our next 20 tons of cargo makes us $200,000, bringing us up to $225,000. Not too bad.
The platinum group metals, though, is where we make bank. If you figure 30 tons x $400/oz x 32000oz/ton, or about 384 million dollars.
Now, we could figure for our spaceship to -only- bring back 100 tons of pg elements from the asteroid. Then we'd be talking about 1.28 billion dollars a flight.
But to do that, we have to solve that little problem of developing a spacecraft that can fly out to an asteroid, mine 100 tons of it, then, bring that back to the earth and land it. Assuming each ship makes one flight per year, and an investment return of 10%, we'd roughly double our investment in 7 years or pay the ship off in 3.5. So our vehicle cost can be up to 3.5 billion dollars. A lot of dough? But that doesn't include development money.
And it's not like they were scheduling the refuelings during summer.
You wrote:
There are lots of projects: lunar mining, asteroid detection/diversion/mining, serious propulsion experiments...terraforming experiments on Mars...
Let's face it, we can easily see where we need to go next, spending another $10,000,000,000 on a new (or even 20 year old) eyepiece ain't neccesary.
I'll ask. How do you find the asteroid worth mining without the 10 billion dollar eyepiece? It's easy enough to throw out slogans. But lets get real. The reality is that there is absolutely no economic benefit to living, working, or retrieving materials from space.
None. If it made economic sense to drill for oil on Titan, believe me, Exxon Mobile would be there.
That is post xeno stage.
So what we do have is funded research bodies, such as NASA and also ESA, that explore different things in space. Sometimes we send probes to other planets, sometimes we put people in space. Sometimes we try out new ideas in aeronautics. Sometimes we look at asteroids or comets. It's not a commercial thing.
If you want McSpace, you have to invent the SpaceMac.
The company Enron ultimately did pay the price for what it did, so, in the gross sense, the system did work. The shareholders and banks bailed on the company and the accounting firm was indicted.
Out of it too came Sarbanes Oxley, which, most IT developers in corporations ought to be familiar with by now.
So thanks to Ken Lay and CO, we all have more IT work.
First off, despite what Enron did, the State of California dug itself into a hole because of NIMBY. There was little or no plant construction in California during the 1990s, a time when the population boomed. It was impossible to get permits for new plants and most new construction was tied up in courts over environmental issues. When the crunch did happen, Enron and others wrongly exploited California, but not at all in the way that has been oversimplified by the press or even the idiot Ralph Nader types.
California, because it had not built enough power plants, was importing power from other states.
In order to import power you have to have your own power system suitably balanced. It's not like you put electrons on trucks and wheel them in. To do this, you offer financial incentives to buy or sell power at various points on the grid. To this day, PJM does this on the east coast and you can actually check it out here PJM LMP pricing
Also, you have to adequate transmission rights to get the power in.
So what Enron did was rather clever. First, they had better software than the California ISO for determining grid imbalances and so they scheduled power deals to manipulate the grid. Import power in the north, export it in the south, boom there is an imbalance, and you can sell the power you exported back to the state for a lot of dough. Then, they would also go and buy up transmission rights into the state (which is actually pretty cheap), and then play games at peak times.
The amazing thing about the whole thing is that gaming California's stupid grid managers WAS LEGAL. That's right. Enron didn't do -anything- wrong by screwing the state of California. The state made its rules for its market place and Enron exploited them, but California should not have made those rules to begin with. To cap it all off, California deregulation stripped utilities of the ability to pass variable costs to consumers. So, if the price of electricity shot up, it should have shot up for consumers as well, and guess what, people turn their air conditioners down, and there is no power crisis. But oh no, California made it so that the utilities could not recover the costs and so they had to sell power at a loss, and all the utilities in California went bankrupt, and Enron made a mountain of money, legally.
The thing that got Enron into trouble was that they were lying on their financial statements, and for that, the company is now bankrupt, her executives are either on trial, and the accounting firm that certified those statements no longer exists.
Come on, join IT, girls, it's very exciting. You don't want to hang out with football players. You want to hang out and play Dungeons and Dragons and collect guns. Then, you can get outsourced like the rest of us!
Regardless of whether it runs under Windows or on its own, the Linux API, something that can be programmed outside of Windows, is what makes Linux the threat.
MS's whole business works because it has developers writing for it. Everything they make is programmable in a fashion. If Linux ran on Windows, it would only hurt MS because it would make it more accessible to Windows developers, who might like it.
Not to mention an end to the genocide in the Balkans. As usual, it was the United States and United Kingdom coming in to clean that mess up too.
Actually, the British alone among Europeans made the huge sacrifice for freedom by fighting World War II alone! They could have quit, signed a peace treaty and kept their empire. But nope, they saw what needed to be done, and threw it all on the table to stop the Nazis and the Japs.
12 years of United Nations Security Council Resolutions, 100's of meetings and many treaties and diplomatic maneuvers, did nothing to depose Saddam Hussein and the Taliban and bring about elections to two countries in the middle east.
180,000 soldiers from the United States and United Kingdom did.
So the ICC's validity is worth 200,000 people dead in Darfur? That's European logic for you. So long as Europeans don't die, the world is better off. If giving up your sovereignty is that important to you, why don't you Europeans just petition to be admitted to the United States? I would extend such an invitation until I realized just how morally disgusting Europe is.
In all of human history, Europeans have NEVER done anything that benefits anyone other than Europeans, not real. Crimes that the USA have inflicted on the world PALE compared to the messes brought on by European colonialism and its aftermath. Have you looked at Africa lately? Way to go France and Germany.
History for the last 500 years has either been Europe brutalizing the world or the rest of the world, in particular, the United States, riding to the rescue of the Europe.
Until Europe comes to the defense of liberty in one place, any place actually, the way the United States did at Normandy Beach, until Europe is willing to put its cities on the nuclear line to defend another nation the way the United States did for Europe against Communist Russia, then Europeans can take their alphabet soup of worthless treaties and their high minded diplomacy and shove them up their asses.
So the ICC's validity is worth 200,000 people dead in Darfur? If giving up your sovereignty is that important to you, why don't you Europeans just petition to be admitted to the United States?
The re-imagined Galactica is hands down the best science fiction on TV right now. The Trek world is cool, don't get me wrong, but, Galactica is newer, fresher, has better writing, better actors, and thank god, does not have holodecks.
And yes, the new Col Tigh is infinitely more interesting than any Star Trek XO ever was.
X-33 failed, so it was cancel. I talked to some Lockheed engineers about this and:
a) They did not get as much lift out of the lifting body that they thought they would, so this put strains on their weight budget.
b) The fancy composite fuel tanks that were supposed to keep weight down didn't work. They would have had to go with more conventional materials and that broke the weight budget, so the project was cancelled.
I thought we used directional radio already to guide ships in on a beam. It's just that GPS is much less expensive and more accurate, but, the technology to replace light houses has already been around since the 1960s and in America most lighthouses I believe are museums.
How can you say that the Bush administration is retreating from knowledge when he:
a) DOUBLED the budget for the National Science Foundation. That's right. DOUBLED the federal outlay for basic research in all matters from health to basic physics.
b) Has FULLY funded NASA's plan to send a manned mission to the Moon and ultimately to Mars.
c) Is FULLY funding the Prometheus project and the Jupiter Icey Moons orbiter.
Thanks to the Bush administration, we are well on our way towards establishing that a baseline for life once existed on Mars, are on our way towards looking for life on Mars, and are taking the first steps towards looking for proof of liquid water not only on Europa but also on Callisto and the other of Jupiter's icey moons.
Just because some idiots in Kentucky vote for Bush doesn't mean that Bush thinks like them, any more than crystal touting LSD gobbling 60's flower relics made Clinton an LSD gobbling cook. Sometimes you just take the vote and move on.
The use of unmanaged code in .NET is unsafe, but, .NET itself has a security policy system which checks to see if unsafe code is actually used. So, Gosling
.NET, is also unsafe. Using the "unsafe" keyword and pointers within C# is also unsafe. Also, since .NET 1.0 SP3, using the compiler services to generate code is also unsafe.
.NET runtime system, which checks security permissions for that application. You cannot ship an unsafe application without the explicitly allowing unsafe content to execute. Unsafe applications cannot be run off of a network drive, nor can they be run off of a web page.
Using the import attribute to talk to a Windows DLL, that code is automatically unsafe. Link with a C++ library and wrap it using the "IJW" managed / unmanaged bridging in C++ for
All unsafe code is trapped by the
Gosling is a super programmer, and, as the inventor of Java, made popular the idea of virtual machines.
I was a fan of the original series but the new Galactica has much better acting and much better writing. Lorne Green was a great Adama, but Edward Olmos is -better-. And the new Col Tigh is just as good as old one.
The simple fact of the matter is that British policy at the time prohibited colonies from making a wide variety of manufactured goods that Americans were increasingly being able to manufacture. Britain wanted to keep the colonies as suppliers of raw materials, and nothing more, but Americans wanted to manufacture. A classic example is the British laws against metal shovels in the colonies, but, there are many others.
If I write a shareware application, I can use a windows installer for visual studio and build a wizard that handles the installation of my application. I don't even know where to start with Linux. What version of C libraries, what version of the compiler, all that stuff, and, then, worrying about whether or not full screen or sound access requires root access? Like, I'm going to walk a 10 year old kid through that? Yeah, some kids are computer smart, but, a lot see them like toasters.
Make a Linux distro that can play games with the efficiency of an XBox, so you can
a) easily install games and remove them.
b) works solidly with exact pc specifications - this motherboard, this graphics card and this sound card, (no component based substitution), and you got yourself a winner.
The moral of the story is the idea of interchangable peripherals for consumer pc's has failed. Remember how reliable those old ataris, amigas, macs, etc all were? Slots are a design mistake.
If I'm going to drop 5 million bucks on developing a game, seems to me that I would want to use the API that gets me closer to XBOX. XBOX is already running Windows, already running DirectX, and so, if all I gotta do is tweak an existing app and then I can ship for a very lucrative XBox market, why would I bother with OpenG/L?
This "end of PC's hyped" is completely overrated largely because we overvalue consumer data. Most data consumers put on their PCs is shortlived - they don't view their PCs as "permanent" data repositories. They write letters, print them and send them. They put their bills into them, do their kid's movies for graduation, play games and surf. None of that actually requires data to be not backed up and the common fix for most consumers for bad computers is to buy a new one or to reinstall everything from the "start over disk". Honestly if Windows shipped with the default to delete everything over 90 days old, turned on, a lot of people would actually probably like it.
The Chinese probably will supplant the US owing to their sheer population, but the EU never will because not only is their population declining in real terms, so is their economic growth. USA consitently rings of GDP growth of > 2% whereas the EU manages to scrape up 1%. This year the USA grew at 4% and the EU practically grew at 0. Over time this discrepancy compounds. Right now the EU is getting poorer relative to the USA, not richer, and given the economic policies of the EU versus the pro-growth policies of the USA, this is likely to remain the case.