But for now, it's like the old addage: "in order to make an omlette, you have to break a few eggs."
Ouch. This is exactly why I, as an atheist molecular biologist, remain 100% opposed to human reproductive cloning. More than two thousand years of medical ethics is solidly against medical experimentation on unsuspecting human subjects.
They then force your employees to stand away from their computers while they perform a system audit.
I remember one Slashdot poster years ago describing how a clueless auditor had to ask for help because the Windows warez-finding software they were using didn't seem to be running properly. . . on a Sun Ultra 10.
Whoa, that doesn't sound right. My understanding is that they don't care about this kind of thing, as long as you have as many licenses as seats. I've never heard of anything happening like the case you describe.
Obviously volume licensing is the way to go, but I thought this also yields lower profit margins for Microsoft- it's just more convenient and encourages big orders. When you buy a volume licensed copy, you get a special unkeyed installer. When I worked in a university IT department, they did exactly what you describe and ghosted an image across hundreds of machines, but probably only had one CD. They *did* have a certificate saying that they had a 100-seat (or whatever) license, but I can't imagine that Microsoft would care if they were presented with 100 certificates instead. (They'd probably try to pimp their evil subscription scheme, though.)
I suspect the practice your university got busted for is extremely widespread, and I imagine it would be grounds for a court case.
You have exposed yourself as a trolling, beginner grade *nix trainee chimp.
Actually, I'm a professional programmer, who works entirely on Unix, and administers several Linux servers at work (wholly apart from my personal tinkering). I ditched OS X after Apple broke NIS compatability in 10.2, which pretty much made it useless for our environment. That's in addition to their already horrid support for NFS. And the impossibility of configuring everything on the command line.
As for speed, 10.2 is still too slow. This is just the same old excuse that Microsoft makes - "it doesn't suck as much as it used to." I have no desire to continue waiting for Apple to get it right; my boss wants things done now.
The point I've been trying to make, which a lot of people miss, is that making launch costs reasonable does not depend on manned flight. NASA should absolutely continue to research this, because even in the short term it'll make launching probes cheaper. We don't need to be throwing humans into LEO to figure out how to design a more efficient propulsion system.
As an aside, there appears to be very little utility to micro-G experiments. People mistake the effect of zero-G on humans for an indication that it'd make a huge difference in unrelated fields. There's no reason to believe that any industrial application would be made cheap enough to offset the overhead.
Actually, I agree 100%. The problem is that too many people have been reading too much science fiction and believe that no amount of money is too much even if there's no payoff besides watching a Mars landing on CNN. So, they make up all sorts of bullshit about how the manned program is important to technology development, etc.
If we spend the next 50 years perfecting the unmanned missions, perhaps then we can do manned spaceflight right and cheaply. I'd rather see that than more disasters, both human (Columbia) and financial (ISS, the shuttle in general).
Personally, I have two uses for the federal government. My military and my space exploration. Beyond that, they're pushing into things that I think my state should handle.
I guarantee you'll benefit far more from the $20 billion NIH budget than from the $15 billion NASA budget. But I guess curing cancer and AIDS just isn't "cool."
Yes, and after doing this for a while, the technology will probably have improved immensely so that we can resume manned flight without it being a terrible risk and/or huge boondoggle.
Personally, I think we ought to do a Europa expedition (unmanned, of course).
It's amazing how many people I would have considered economic conservatives think it's a great idea to spend billions and billions of tax dollars on manned spaceflight because it's "cool." I'm happy with the government spending huge amounts of money on actualy research, but the space station and shuttle involve very little research. This is readily observable from the naked PR stunts like sending up the first Israeli/Saudi/schoolteacher/senior-citizen astronaut. (Of course the moon was a naked PR stunt too. . . I'm very conflicted about that. How do you reconcile the greatest scientific and technical acheivement in human history with the 30 barren years that followed?)
Some people argue that we need to continue manned spaceflight because the technology will improve to make it easier. Um, no. The technology can improve plenty without risking lives and wasting money; nuclear propulsion sounds like a great idea, but can be tested with robots. Once we can reliably send a probe to Mars quickly, let it roll around and do research, and have it return safely, with relatively little expense, then we can send people.
Partially correct. NASA's real value is in space missions of genuine scientific (but very little commercial) value- that is, the unmanned ones. There are cases where it may be valuable to send people into space, such as taking care of Hubble, but virtually all of the real innovation involves long-range probes and robots. They're simply not as popular because even though they're relatively inexpensive they still carry a hefty price tag that seems much worse because a) the shuttle costs aren't widely understood and b) they don't carry people.
In reality, private ventures will not fund, say, an unmanned expedition to Europa (unless someone like Bill Gates or Ted Turner decides to fund it). It's nice to imagine that they might handle manned spaceflight, but the costs are so immense that I doubt anyone would reasonably expect to profit from it.
and you're lying if you say that BeOS has a hand-up on OS X
But OS X is fucking slow. So slow, in fact, that I've stuck with Linux and never looked back on fifteen years of Mac usage. I installed BeOS on my old 300Mhz Dell Latitude, which fortunately has one of the rare combinations of hardware that BeOS supports. It is blazingly fast. It blows Win2k right out of the water, and is very competitive with Linux. In fact, the only reason it isn't necessarily faster outright than Linux is that I'm using WindowMaker and not bloated crap like KDE or GNOME. Too bad it isn't actually useful enough to replace Linux.
OS X has been a huge disappointment for me. The lack of customization is painful. The speed is horrendous. The Unix compatability is so broken as to be virtually useless. I'd take it over XP any day, but I'm sick of hearing about how great Apple is for bringing Unix to "the masses". It's markedly inferior to BeOS and IRIX from almost any perspective except application availability. I find little to admire in any user interface released since, say, 1993/4, and of course consumer OSes are just now catching up to features that enterprise OSes had long before then, like not crashing every few hours.
I compromise with Linux and IRIX. I may have to recompile the kernel just to link with my Zaurus; I have to jump through hoops to handle Word documents- I find using Crossover less painful than using StarOFfice. And the SGI, of course, can't even do most of this. But I can always be certain that, once I've spent two weeks setting it up, my computer works the way I want it to, not the way the trained chimps over at Apple and Microsoft dictate, and that it won't creak to a halt when I try to edit a file because 90% of the CPU is stuck rendering antialiased menu bars.
Most of the vendors have various advantages like this. SGI has been packing more and more chips into smaller boxes, and you can plug a bunch of machines into eachother and have them run on a single system image. Itanium2 is more powerful than all of them but it's also far less flexible than any of the established 64-bit architectures. Whether this will prove a problem remains to be seen.
Intel really is running into problems compared to other architectures. A coworker went to SC2002 in Baltimore, where a number of Opteron systems were on display. They invited him to touch the chip in a running system, *without heat sink*. Warm, but not uncomfortable.
SGI has been packing steadily more of its chips into small boxes. I work with an Origin 300, and the heat sinks on the R14000 are about the size of the chipset on your standard P4 motherboard. They're now able to get extremely high density because of low power consumption; they're having to make much larger boxes for their Itanium2-based Altix servers. The MIPS chips cannot compare to the Itanium2 for speed, but relative to heating and physical space required they kick IA64's ass. Even if each MIPS chip is half as powerful, you can fit four times as many of them into the same box and you get big savings there.
Automatic underclocking is cool enough, but it's not particularly more sophisticated compared to the features that most enterprise-class systems have had for years. And it's still essentially compensation for what amounts to a major design flaw.
I don't want to sound cynical, because this is a truly terrible accident (I hope). But the truth is that manned space flight has been one expensive disaster anyway for the past three decades. The space shuttle has been a fairly massive waste of money, used more for PR purposes like sending John Glenn or the occasional Saudi or Israeli pilot up than for real science. I don't mean to impugn the bravery of the astronauts, but this is not the future of space travel, and neither is the ISS. The future of space travel is unmanned probes exploring every corner of the solar system.
If the money spent on the ISS and the shuttle was diverted to projects like the Pathfinder, we'd have robots sampling Europa's oceans within the decade. Why risk human lives and billions of dollars on lower orbit?
Damn straight. The other distinction is that genes are found as part of basic research, whereas drugs (which I absolutely think should be protected) are an actual useful product. Gene patents are simply being used as a stranglehold on basic research by competitors; companies file huge numbers of patents because they're hoping that somewhere down the line, somebody else's research pays off and then that other group will be forced to share the wealth.
Science is all about risks. The purpose of the patent system is not to reward risk or investment, but to promote the development of useful stuff.
1. You discover a gene, and patent it. In the worst case, everyone is prohibited from doing research involving this gene without your approval for 17 years. Even if you're incapable of doing anything with it, like most of the companies with huge numbers of gene patents.
2. You discover a gene, and copyright your database. Others who wish to use your data pay you for access to the database. Anyone who doesn't want to pay can find the damn gene themselves, which takes time and money but isn't illegal.
Celera primarily chose (2), and received far more abuse than it deserved for their choice. They certainly shouldn't have been forced to make any of their data public*, but they shouldn't be able to prevent competitors from working on the same project.
Part of the problem is that molecular biology moves so quickly that a copyright may be useless after a few years. A patent, however, can cripple a promising area of research. Given that most basic research is done by academics, and having read enough articles about scientists getting screwed by companies, I'm inclined to side strongly against gene patents.
(* Except where required for publication in a journal.)
Same here- I went to an Ivy school, and was a bio major. I was amazed at how people who consistently scraped the bottom in organic chem still managed to earn high Cs or sometimes even Bs. And in biochemistry, I got a B with below-average test scores.
Now, I don't think upper-level classes should be curved. In a fourth-year advanced bio course, even if you have 50 kids all of them know their shit and will probably work very hard. Splitting the class into rigorously defined grades is both unfair and stupid. If everyone does very well, give them all As- there's no shame in this. The problem is usually that truly sub-par acheivement is rewarded with okay grades because of lax standards, not because of a weird curve or "inflation."
The difference between science and humanities is that science majors generally have to work much harder and spend more time in class due to labs. They also have class on Fridays more often. Basically, if you want to coast through four years and get good degree and excellent job prospects, you just pick a major like history. I'm still bitter about this.
I think a lot of people smoke just to be "cool" and "sophisticated". Teenagers, for example, don't start smoking for the nicotine fix. That's the reason they continue to smoke, but not the reason they start. This will fill the needs of the large "idiot" market in America. Carcinogens without the buzz- might as well start snorting asbestos.
I started smoking for the nicotine, because it actually helped me concentrate especially when I was working obscene hours and sleeping very little. One might argue that this is just as stupid as the 15-year-old who wants to act mature, I suppose. (My excuse was that college would knock more years off my life than smoking would. I would have done amphetamines instead if I knew a good source.)
Actually, Navigator was pretty decent when he actually worked on it; remember, he wrote the original X Windows version. Then he got moved to doing other stuff at Netscape, and the Unix versions really went downhill. He's certainly not to blame for the abomination of Communicator 4, which was the single worst aspect of using Linux (or Irix) until Mozilla matured.
If you read some of the other stuff he's written, you'll see that he still prefers to use Netscape 3 whenever possible.
$12 million for this Antarctic highway is an astronomically (heh) better investment than $45 billion or whatever it's supposed to be for a manned Mars mission.
Yeah, New England could really use some greenhouse effect right now. I walked all the way to work yesterday and was convinced that I'd never be a father.
I said "desertification", not "deforestation". The problem is that the arable land is disappearing- the stuff they're farming on already. The land is becoming useless to everyone. As for (2), there's always that risk, but that doesn't mean we should forget about foreign aid and leave the Third World to rot. If we spend $50b on manned spaceflight most of the money will go to defense contracters anyway.
So, as far as space research:
1) Prove it. Also, how does this require manned spaceflight? 2) Only once the economics work. 3) Why not renew hope and idealism about Planet Earth?
You've been reading too much science fiction. The truth is that the only reasonable justification right now for government-funded space travel is scientific curiosity, and this can be satisfied by unmanned exploration. Anything else is economically unfeasible or simple a waste of money.
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But for now, it's like the old addage: "in order to make an omlette, you have to break a few eggs."
Ouch. This is exactly why I, as an atheist molecular biologist, remain 100% opposed to human reproductive cloning. More than two thousand years of medical ethics is solidly against medical experimentation on unsuspecting human subjects.
Sometimes all it takes is running 'strings' on the binaries.
They then force your employees to stand away from their computers while they perform a system audit.
I remember one Slashdot poster years ago describing how a clueless auditor had to ask for help because the Windows warez-finding software they were using didn't seem to be running properly. . . on a Sun Ultra 10.
Whoa, that doesn't sound right. My understanding is that they don't care about this kind of thing, as long as you have as many licenses as seats. I've never heard of anything happening like the case you describe.
Obviously volume licensing is the way to go, but I thought this also yields lower profit margins for Microsoft- it's just more convenient and encourages big orders. When you buy a volume licensed copy, you get a special unkeyed installer. When I worked in a university IT department, they did exactly what you describe and ghosted an image across hundreds of machines, but probably only had one CD. They *did* have a certificate saying that they had a 100-seat (or whatever) license, but I can't imagine that Microsoft would care if they were presented with 100 certificates instead. (They'd probably try to pimp their evil subscription scheme, though.)
I suspect the practice your university got busted for is extremely widespread, and I imagine it would be grounds for a court case.
You have exposed yourself as a trolling, beginner grade *nix trainee chimp.
Actually, I'm a professional programmer, who works entirely on Unix, and administers several Linux servers at work (wholly apart from my personal tinkering). I ditched OS X after Apple broke NIS compatability in 10.2, which pretty much made it useless for our environment. That's in addition to their already horrid support for NFS. And the impossibility of configuring everything on the command line.
As for speed, 10.2 is still too slow. This is just the same old excuse that Microsoft makes - "it doesn't suck as much as it used to." I have no desire to continue waiting for Apple to get it right; my boss wants things done now.
The point I've been trying to make, which a lot of people miss, is that making launch costs reasonable does not depend on manned flight. NASA should absolutely continue to research this, because even in the short term it'll make launching probes cheaper. We don't need to be throwing humans into LEO to figure out how to design a more efficient propulsion system.
As an aside, there appears to be very little utility to micro-G experiments. People mistake the effect of zero-G on humans for an indication that it'd make a huge difference in unrelated fields. There's no reason to believe that any industrial application would be made cheap enough to offset the overhead.
Actually, I agree 100%. The problem is that too many people have been reading too much science fiction and believe that no amount of money is too much even if there's no payoff besides watching a Mars landing on CNN. So, they make up all sorts of bullshit about how the manned program is important to technology development, etc.
If we spend the next 50 years perfecting the unmanned missions, perhaps then we can do manned spaceflight right and cheaply. I'd rather see that than more disasters, both human (Columbia) and financial (ISS, the shuttle in general).
Humans can do the things that robots cannot do.
Yeah, like, die. And at many times the financial (as well as moral) cost.
Personally, I have two uses for the federal government. My military and my space exploration. Beyond that, they're pushing into things that I think my state should handle.
I guarantee you'll benefit far more from the $20 billion NIH budget than from the $15 billion NASA budget. But I guess curing cancer and AIDS just isn't "cool."
Yes, and after doing this for a while, the technology will probably have improved immensely so that we can resume manned flight without it being a terrible risk and/or huge boondoggle.
Personally, I think we ought to do a Europa expedition (unmanned, of course).
Yup.
It's amazing how many people I would have considered economic conservatives think it's a great idea to spend billions and billions of tax dollars on manned spaceflight because it's "cool." I'm happy with the government spending huge amounts of money on actualy research, but the space station and shuttle involve very little research. This is readily observable from the naked PR stunts like sending up the first Israeli/Saudi/schoolteacher/senior-citizen astronaut. (Of course the moon was a naked PR stunt too. . . I'm very conflicted about that. How do you reconcile the greatest scientific and technical acheivement in human history with the 30 barren years that followed?)
Some people argue that we need to continue manned spaceflight because the technology will improve to make it easier. Um, no. The technology can improve plenty without risking lives and wasting money; nuclear propulsion sounds like a great idea, but can be tested with robots. Once we can reliably send a probe to Mars quickly, let it roll around and do research, and have it return safely, with relatively little expense, then we can send people.
Partially correct. NASA's real value is in space missions of genuine scientific (but very little commercial) value- that is, the unmanned ones. There are cases where it may be valuable to send people into space, such as taking care of Hubble, but virtually all of the real innovation involves long-range probes and robots. They're simply not as popular because even though they're relatively inexpensive they still carry a hefty price tag that seems much worse because a) the shuttle costs aren't widely understood and b) they don't carry people.
In reality, private ventures will not fund, say, an unmanned expedition to Europa (unless someone like Bill Gates or Ted Turner decides to fund it). It's nice to imagine that they might handle manned spaceflight, but the costs are so immense that I doubt anyone would reasonably expect to profit from it.
and you're lying if you say that BeOS has a hand-up on OS X
But OS X is fucking slow. So slow, in fact, that I've stuck with Linux and never looked back on fifteen years of Mac usage. I installed BeOS on my old 300Mhz Dell Latitude, which fortunately has one of the rare combinations of hardware that BeOS supports. It is blazingly fast. It blows Win2k right out of the water, and is very competitive with Linux. In fact, the only reason it isn't necessarily faster outright than Linux is that I'm using WindowMaker and not bloated crap like KDE or GNOME. Too bad it isn't actually useful enough to replace Linux.
OS X has been a huge disappointment for me. The lack of customization is painful. The speed is horrendous. The Unix compatability is so broken as to be virtually useless. I'd take it over XP any day, but I'm sick of hearing about how great Apple is for bringing Unix to "the masses". It's markedly inferior to BeOS and IRIX from almost any perspective except application availability. I find little to admire in any user interface released since, say, 1993/4, and of course consumer OSes are just now catching up to features that enterprise OSes had long before then, like not crashing every few hours.
I compromise with Linux and IRIX. I may have to recompile the kernel just to link with my Zaurus; I have to jump through hoops to handle Word documents- I find using Crossover less painful than using StarOFfice. And the SGI, of course, can't even do most of this. But I can always be certain that, once I've spent two weeks setting it up, my computer works the way I want it to, not the way the trained chimps over at Apple and Microsoft dictate, and that it won't creak to a halt when I try to edit a file because 90% of the CPU is stuck rendering antialiased menu bars.
Most of the vendors have various advantages like this. SGI has been packing more and more chips into smaller boxes, and you can plug a bunch of machines into eachother and have them run on a single system image. Itanium2 is more powerful than all of them but it's also far less flexible than any of the established 64-bit architectures. Whether this will prove a problem remains to be seen.
Intel really is running into problems compared to other architectures. A coworker went to SC2002 in Baltimore, where a number of Opteron systems were on display. They invited him to touch the chip in a running system, *without heat sink*. Warm, but not uncomfortable.
SGI has been packing steadily more of its chips into small boxes. I work with an Origin 300, and the heat sinks on the R14000 are about the size of the chipset on your standard P4 motherboard. They're now able to get extremely high density because of low power consumption; they're having to make much larger boxes for their Itanium2-based Altix servers. The MIPS chips cannot compare to the Itanium2 for speed, but relative to heating and physical space required they kick IA64's ass. Even if each MIPS chip is half as powerful, you can fit four times as many of them into the same box and you get big savings there.
Automatic underclocking is cool enough, but it's not particularly more sophisticated compared to the features that most enterprise-class systems have had for years. And it's still essentially compensation for what amounts to a major design flaw.
I don't want to sound cynical, because this is a truly terrible accident (I hope). But the truth is that manned space flight has been one expensive disaster anyway for the past three decades. The space shuttle has been a fairly massive waste of money, used more for PR purposes like sending John Glenn or the occasional Saudi or Israeli pilot up than for real science. I don't mean to impugn the bravery of the astronauts, but this is not the future of space travel, and neither is the ISS. The future of space travel is unmanned probes exploring every corner of the solar system.
If the money spent on the ISS and the shuttle was diverted to projects like the Pathfinder, we'd have robots sampling Europa's oceans within the decade. Why risk human lives and billions of dollars on lower orbit?
Damn straight. The other distinction is that genes are found as part of basic research, whereas drugs (which I absolutely think should be protected) are an actual useful product. Gene patents are simply being used as a stranglehold on basic research by competitors; companies file huge numbers of patents because they're hoping that somewhere down the line, somebody else's research pays off and then that other group will be forced to share the wealth.
Science is all about risks. The purpose of the patent system is not to reward risk or investment, but to promote the development of useful stuff.
Fair enough. But there's two ways to go about it:
1. You discover a gene, and patent it. In the worst case, everyone is prohibited from doing research involving this gene without your approval for 17 years. Even if you're incapable of doing anything with it, like most of the companies with huge numbers of gene patents.
2. You discover a gene, and copyright your database. Others who wish to use your data pay you for access to the database. Anyone who doesn't want to pay can find the damn gene themselves, which takes time and money but isn't illegal.
Celera primarily chose (2), and received far more abuse than it deserved for their choice. They certainly shouldn't have been forced to make any of their data public*, but they shouldn't be able to prevent competitors from working on the same project.
Part of the problem is that molecular biology moves so quickly that a copyright may be useless after a few years. A patent, however, can cripple a promising area of research. Given that most basic research is done by academics, and having read enough articles about scientists getting screwed by companies, I'm inclined to side strongly against gene patents.
(* Except where required for publication in a journal.)
Same here- I went to an Ivy school, and was a bio major. I was amazed at how people who consistently scraped the bottom in organic chem still managed to earn high Cs or sometimes even Bs. And in biochemistry, I got a B with below-average test scores.
Now, I don't think upper-level classes should be curved. In a fourth-year advanced bio course, even if you have 50 kids all of them know their shit and will probably work very hard. Splitting the class into rigorously defined grades is both unfair and stupid. If everyone does very well, give them all As- there's no shame in this. The problem is usually that truly sub-par acheivement is rewarded with okay grades because of lax standards, not because of a weird curve or "inflation."
The difference between science and humanities is that science majors generally have to work much harder and spend more time in class due to labs. They also have class on Fridays more often. Basically, if you want to coast through four years and get good degree and excellent job prospects, you just pick a major like history. I'm still bitter about this.
I think a lot of people smoke just to be "cool" and "sophisticated". Teenagers, for example, don't start smoking for the nicotine fix. That's the reason they continue to smoke, but not the reason they start. This will fill the needs of the large "idiot" market in America. Carcinogens without the buzz- might as well start snorting asbestos.
I started smoking for the nicotine, because it actually helped me concentrate especially when I was working obscene hours and sleeping very little. One might argue that this is just as stupid as the 15-year-old who wants to act mature, I suppose. (My excuse was that college would knock more years off my life than smoking would. I would have done amphetamines instead if I knew a good source.)
Can we get the election turnout below 25%? Anyone?
after examining the current list of democratic presidential candidates, I'd say we're well on track. bleh.
Actually, Navigator was pretty decent when he actually worked on it; remember, he wrote the original X Windows version. Then he got moved to doing other stuff at Netscape, and the Unix versions really went downhill. He's certainly not to blame for the abomination of Communicator 4, which was the single worst aspect of using Linux (or Irix) until Mozilla matured.
If you read some of the other stuff he's written, you'll see that he still prefers to use Netscape 3 whenever possible.
$12 million for this Antarctic highway is an astronomically (heh) better investment than $45 billion or whatever it's supposed to be for a manned Mars mission.
Yeah, New England could really use some greenhouse effect right now. I walked all the way to work yesterday and was convinced that I'd never be a father.
I said "desertification", not "deforestation". The problem is that the arable land is disappearing- the stuff they're farming on already. The land is becoming useless to everyone. As for (2), there's always that risk, but that doesn't mean we should forget about foreign aid and leave the Third World to rot. If we spend $50b on manned spaceflight most of the money will go to defense contracters anyway.
So, as far as space research:
1) Prove it. Also, how does this require manned spaceflight?
2) Only once the economics work.
3) Why not renew hope and idealism about Planet Earth?
You've been reading too much science fiction. The truth is that the only reasonable justification right now for government-funded space travel is scientific curiosity, and this can be satisfied by unmanned exploration. Anything else is economically unfeasible or simple a waste of money.