Mind you, it's still possible to have quality and originality come out of an EA. SSX is a hell of a lot of fun, for instance. But it's more evolution than revolution. The truly original stuff always comes from a Bullfrog or an Origin...
Bullfrog is owned by Electronic Arts, and indeed has been for some years now. Peter Molyneux (the original creative mind behind Bullfrog) became completely disenchanted with the E.A. way of running his company after the sale, and decided to go it alone with a new company called Lionhead games. They've just released their first game, Black & White, which is currently receiving some truly amazing reviews from the computer games press.
...that Microsoft are going to be the sole owners of the ONLY MS Computer Museum in the whole of Albuquerque? Have they learned nothing from the Justice Department experience? This is clearly yet another demonstration of Microsoft's domination of the marketplace!
;-)
--
Re:hillarious interview with Steve Jobs about OS X
on
OS X
·
· Score: 2
Damn! I was so close, too!;-)
--
Re:hillarious interview with Steve Jobs about OS X
on
OS X
·
· Score: 2
I believe that the PHB's reply to the 'what color Database would you like?' was:
The third world needs to be brought into the net age, without shameless profiteering. This will eliminate lots of human suffering, once all humans are connected in one network. Think of how many Linus's and RMS's there are in third world countries like Nepal, Nairobi, Rhodesia, Malaysia and France
Nairobi is the capital city of Kenya, not a country.
Rhodesia is more commonly referred to as Zimbabwe these days, since independence.
France? Hmmm, am I detecting the subtle odour of a troll here?
Type 1 diabetes is almost always caused by an incorrect immune system response. In type 1 diabetes, the immune system typically attacks the Beta cells in your pancreas that create Insulin for you.
Arthritis (more specifically rheumatoid arthritis) is caused by the body's immune system attacking the cartiledge layers in between your joints. Under attack the cartiledge layers become inflamed, causing the characteristic joint swelling and immobility.
Heart Disease is a common term to describe medical conditions that cause damage to the heart. These can be physical conditions (such as obstructions to the blood supply to the heart), viral/bacterial infections, or auto-immune responses.
Well Mrs. Smith, it appears that either your husbands new body is rejecting his head, or your husbands head is rejecting his new body. We're unsure as to which one to amputate.
I remember that experiment being reported. I believe the biggest problem was that both monkeys died within hours of the procedure being carried out.
I don't know about anyone else, but if I'm having a head-swap I'm going to want a life expetancy a little longer than "maybe he'll make it 'til lunch-time"!
"I don't see it as getting shut down due to file sharing. I see it as getting shut down due to lack of funding. They weren't making money....they couldn't get another round of funding"
Exactly how much funding is a small company with lawsuits being driven by industry behemoths hanging above it going to get?
Maybe the current political climate in the U.S.A. has increased my already sky-high levels of cynicism, but exactly how do we know that he actually calculated that the billionth-millionth-squillionth (whatever) binary digit of Pi is a zero? He might just have guessed! After all, he's got a pretty good chance of guessing right and what are you going to do, prove him wrong?
How about an even cheaper way to find out if a lander works: Land it on EARTH!!!
The primary reasons that I was thinking of the Moon rather than Earth was the fact that conditions here are radically different from Mars. Firstly, you're dealing with a soupy-thick atmosphere (well, compared to Mars and the Moon you are, anyway). Secondly, you're dealing with a relatively stable and narrow temperature range (again, compared to the temperatures that are experienced on Mars and the Moon). Thirdly, gravity is way higher here.
I was just thinking that the Moon would provide greater validity for the test than here.
As an aside, NASA already test their technologies on Earth before blasting them into the depths.
Hey, more parking spaces available for the rest of us. I'm all for it!
I swear, the next time I see a Pathfinder or some other obnoxious subdivision-sized SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle? Don't make me laugh!) parked across two spaces, or crammed into a 'small car' space, I'm going to, oh, get really angry and swear a bit (OK, bit of an anti-climax at the end there).
Just to keep us on-topic here...
I was interested to see that they're not considering air-bag landings for the robot landers, as they apparently add too much weight to the package. Guess they're going to have to work a lot harder on those thruster-assisted landings then!
I wonder if they've considered sending some purely lander prototypes (i.e. just stick a minimal science package on it) to the moon to test? I know that the moon's gravitational field is significantly less than Mars', but they could have at least diagnosed problems like landing strut deployment causing premature engine shut-down. Not only that, but it takes far less time to find out that your lander has a fundamental flaw;-)
It would be nice if we'd spend tax money on feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and protecting the environment before defense and space missions.
You know, we could do all that right now without having to cut back on spending on scientific research. The reason that this isn't done now is that there's not enough political capital in writing off third world debt, and there's certainly not enough corporate capital in giving away the various technolgies (genetic/chemical/information) required for the developing nations to feed and house themselves. I don't believe for a moment that any money cut from the NASA and scientific research budgets would ever go toward helping the poor.
People often consider money put into scientific research and these 'big science' projects to be lost, as if the tens of billions of dollars allocated just falls into a huge black hole, never to be seen again. This isn't typically the case. The dollars put into research end up fuelling the growth of the high tech industries within this country, creating new jobs and increasing the demand and requirement for a highly skilled high-tech workforce. This in turn can only help the research efforts that are currently concentrating on finding solutions to the world's more mundane problems such as poverty, starvation and illness.
The stimulation of high-technology industry within the U.S.A. can only be good for this country in the global economy. Who knows, with the increase in foreign trade income that the growth of technology industries should produce, maybe the U.S.A. will feel generous enough to forget foreign debt?
NASA has some great ideas, and these robots will pave the way for more exploration, but when are we going to put a man on mars?
I see these missions as more of the 'ground work' necessary before putting a human on Mars rather than as an alternative to doing so. I am confident that mankind will one day walk on the surface of Mars. However, we must remember that a journey to Mars is radically more difficult than the journey to the moon. A journey time of months rather than days introduces hoards of new technical problems to solve (exposure to solar radiation, how to minimise bone-density loss, the enlargement of certain vital organs due to micro/zero gravity environment.) The International Space Station, coupled with the Russian experiences with Mir will hopefully help us to find solutions to these issues.
Of course, there is also the technical challenge of building a craft/lander large enough to sustain the human crew for the duration of the flight there and back, plus their stay on the Red Planet itself. We've experimented with sealed-system ecologies already, and those experiments have show us just how difficult it would be to balance such a closed system. I believe that considerably more research into technologies such as hydroponics are needed before we can think of providing the long-term support systems that a mission to Mars would require.
Heck when are we going to put a man back on the moon?
Personally I don't see any world government putting another person on the moon again. The first gargantuan effort was undertaken primarily for political reasons, and I don't believe that there is enough scientific justification for funding more manned moon missions. That doesn't mean that I don't believe that people wont once again walk on the surface of the moon though. I just don't think it'll happen until some corporation works out how to cost-effectively access the moon's mineral wealth.
...is whether they'll be able to get Congressional support for the funding of these missions.
It doesn't matter how forward thinking NASA's current mission plans and objectives are, without the financial backing necessary to realise them they're going nowhere.
Here's hoping that the next administration gives NASA the backing and support that this type of 'big science' needs and deserves.
I can wholeheartedly agree with Mark's comments about the need for good coding discipline, communication and documentation within a project. In my experience it doesn't matter how brilliant your developers may be; if there is a lack of discipline when it comes to design and documentation then it is extremely hard for that project to succeed. As an example, my current project (a global system for a large investment bank) started out as a group of smart but inexperienced college graduates. Every one of the initial project releases was plagued by 'show stopper' bugs which used to take weeks to track down due to the disparate coding/design styles and lack of documentation. Over the past two years the project has, due to the efforts of the senior developers to instill the required discipline in the team, matured to the point where releases are now extremely close to 100% reliable. The bottom line is that we now have happy users, happy developers, and happy pay-checks come bonus time!
For further reading in a similar vein, I can recommend the "Software Engineering Classics" boxed set (yes, I know it's Microsoft Press. Please don't hold that against them, as these books contain much useful information and insight into Project/Team leadership within Software Engineering.)
The individual books are:
1. Debugging the Development Process
Steve Maguire
2. Dynamics of Software Development
Jim McCarthy
3. Software Project Survival Guide
Steve McConnell
I've always found wireless keyboards to be horrendous ergonomically. In order to be in the correct position for typing, you need to be sitting at a desk or table. If you're going to be sitting at a desk to use the keyboard, then what's the big benefit of having the keyboard wireless?
Nah, I'll be sticking to my regular 'fully tethered' input devices for the time being.
Slashdot Mirror
Mind you, it's still possible to have quality and originality come out of an EA. SSX is a hell of a lot of fun, for instance. But it's more evolution than revolution. The truly original stuff always comes from a Bullfrog or an Origin...
Bullfrog is owned by Electronic Arts, and indeed has been for some years now. Peter Molyneux (the original creative mind behind Bullfrog) became completely disenchanted with the E.A. way of running his company after the sale, and decided to go it alone with a new company called Lionhead games. They've just released their first game, Black & White, which is currently receiving some truly amazing reviews from the computer games press.
--
...that Microsoft are going to be the sole owners of the ONLY MS Computer Museum in the whole of Albuquerque? Have they learned nothing from the Justice Department experience? This is clearly yet another demonstration of Microsoft's domination of the marketplace!
;-)
--
Damn! I was so close, too! ;-)
--
I believe that the PHB's reply to the 'what color Database would you like?' was:
"I hear purple has more 'RAM'"
--
The third world needs to be brought into the net age, without shameless profiteering. This will eliminate lots of human suffering, once all humans are connected in one network. Think of how many Linus's and RMS's there are in third world countries like Nepal, Nairobi, Rhodesia, Malaysia and France
Nairobi is the capital city of Kenya, not a country.
Rhodesia is more commonly referred to as Zimbabwe these days, since independence.
France? Hmmm, am I detecting the subtle odour of a troll here?
--
(Granted, it's stupid to have a console in a car, there is a certain cool factor in doing it)
:)
Ah, there speaks a man who's never had to drive fourteen hours in a car containing children
--
Here's a link to a CNN story that I found particularly apt.
Enjoy!
--
Type 1 diabetes is almost always caused by an incorrect immune system response. In type 1 diabetes, the immune system typically attacks the Beta cells in your pancreas that create Insulin for you.
Arthritis (more specifically rheumatoid arthritis) is caused by the body's immune system attacking the cartiledge layers in between your joints. Under attack the cartiledge layers become inflamed, causing the characteristic joint swelling and immobility.
Heart Disease is a common term to describe medical conditions that cause damage to the heart. These can be physical conditions (such as obstructions to the blood supply to the heart), viral/bacterial infections, or auto-immune responses.
More information on Diabetes can be found at the American Diabetes Association. Information on Rheumatoid Arthritis can be found at the Arthritis Foundation
--
I've always wanted to be able to stick computer memory to my fridge door!
--
Well Mrs. Smith, it appears that either your husbands new body is rejecting his head, or your husbands head is rejecting his new body. We're unsure as to which one to amputate.
--
I remember that experiment being reported. I believe the biggest problem was that both monkeys died within hours of the procedure being carried out.
I don't know about anyone else, but if I'm having a head-swap I'm going to want a life expetancy a little longer than "maybe he'll make it 'til lunch-time"!
--
Seems like we can now transplant just about everything short of the brain
Actually, there's a company offering brain transplants here. I've had it done three times now, and I've NUT n0TiSSeDD aY-KnEe sIyD FekTs YeTTT.
--
"I don't see it as getting shut down due to file sharing. I see it as getting shut down due to lack of funding. They weren't making money....they couldn't get another round of funding"
Exactly how much funding is a small company with lawsuits being driven by industry behemoths hanging above it going to get?
--
"oh crap, these are metric algae, not Imperial-measured algae!"
Tell me again, were we meant to send 100 TONS of algae, or 100 TONNES?
--
Maybe the current political climate in the U.S.A. has increased my already sky-high levels of cynicism, but exactly how do we know that he actually calculated that the billionth-millionth-squillionth (whatever) binary digit of Pi is a zero? He might just have guessed! After all, he's got a pretty good chance of guessing right and what are you going to do, prove him wrong?
--
How about an even cheaper way to find out if a lander works: Land it on EARTH!!!
The primary reasons that I was thinking of the Moon rather than Earth was the fact that conditions here are radically different from Mars. Firstly, you're dealing with a soupy-thick atmosphere (well, compared to Mars and the Moon you are, anyway). Secondly, you're dealing with a relatively stable and narrow temperature range (again, compared to the temperatures that are experienced on Mars and the Moon). Thirdly, gravity is way higher here.
I was just thinking that the Moon would provide greater validity for the test than here.
As an aside, NASA already test their technologies on Earth before blasting them into the depths.
--
Hey, more parking spaces available for the rest of us. I'm all for it!
;-)
I swear, the next time I see a Pathfinder or some other obnoxious subdivision-sized SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle? Don't make me laugh!) parked across two spaces, or crammed into a 'small car' space, I'm going to, oh, get really angry and swear a bit (OK, bit of an anti-climax at the end there).
Just to keep us on-topic here...
I was interested to see that they're not considering air-bag landings for the robot landers, as they apparently add too much weight to the package. Guess they're going to have to work a lot harder on those thruster-assisted landings then!
I wonder if they've considered sending some purely lander prototypes (i.e. just stick a minimal science package on it) to the moon to test? I know that the moon's gravitational field is significantly less than Mars', but they could have at least diagnosed problems like landing strut deployment causing premature engine shut-down. Not only that, but it takes far less time to find out that your lander has a fundamental flaw
--
It would be nice if we'd spend tax money on feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and protecting the environment before defense and space missions.
You know, we could do all that right now without having to cut back on spending on scientific research. The reason that this isn't done now is that there's not enough political capital in writing off third world debt, and there's certainly not enough corporate capital in giving away the various technolgies (genetic/chemical/information) required for the developing nations to feed and house themselves. I don't believe for a moment that any money cut from the NASA and scientific research budgets would ever go toward helping the poor.
People often consider money put into scientific research and these 'big science' projects to be lost, as if the tens of billions of dollars allocated just falls into a huge black hole, never to be seen again. This isn't typically the case. The dollars put into research end up fuelling the growth of the high tech industries within this country, creating new jobs and increasing the demand and requirement for a highly skilled high-tech workforce. This in turn can only help the research efforts that are currently concentrating on finding solutions to the world's more mundane problems such as poverty, starvation and illness.
The stimulation of high-technology industry within the U.S.A. can only be good for this country in the global economy. Who knows, with the increase in foreign trade income that the growth of technology industries should produce, maybe the U.S.A. will feel generous enough to forget foreign debt?
--
NASA has some great ideas, and these robots will pave the way for more exploration, but when are we going to put a man on mars?
I see these missions as more of the 'ground work' necessary before putting a human on Mars rather than as an alternative to doing so. I am confident that mankind will one day walk on the surface of Mars. However, we must remember that a journey to Mars is radically more difficult than the journey to the moon. A journey time of months rather than days introduces hoards of new technical problems to solve (exposure to solar radiation, how to minimise bone-density loss, the enlargement of certain vital organs due to micro/zero gravity environment.) The International Space Station, coupled with the Russian experiences with Mir will hopefully help us to find solutions to these issues.
Of course, there is also the technical challenge of building a craft/lander large enough to sustain the human crew for the duration of the flight there and back, plus their stay on the Red Planet itself. We've experimented with sealed-system ecologies already, and those experiments have show us just how difficult it would be to balance such a closed system. I believe that considerably more research into technologies such as hydroponics are needed before we can think of providing the long-term support systems that a mission to Mars would require.
Heck when are we going to put a man back on the moon?
Personally I don't see any world government putting another person on the moon again. The first gargantuan effort was undertaken primarily for political reasons, and I don't believe that there is enough scientific justification for funding more manned moon missions. That doesn't mean that I don't believe that people wont once again walk on the surface of the moon though. I just don't think it'll happen until some corporation works out how to cost-effectively access the moon's mineral wealth.
--
...is whether they'll be able to get Congressional support for the funding of these missions.
It doesn't matter how forward thinking NASA's current mission plans and objectives are, without the financial backing necessary to realise them they're going nowhere.
Here's hoping that the next administration gives NASA the backing and support that this type of 'big science' needs and deserves.
--
A very well written article.
I can wholeheartedly agree with Mark's comments about the need for good coding discipline, communication and documentation within a project. In my experience it doesn't matter how brilliant your developers may be; if there is a lack of discipline when it comes to design and documentation then it is extremely hard for that project to succeed. As an example, my current project (a global system for a large investment bank) started out as a group of smart but inexperienced college graduates. Every one of the initial project releases was plagued by 'show stopper' bugs which used to take weeks to track down due to the disparate coding/design styles and lack of documentation. Over the past two years the project has, due to the efforts of the senior developers to instill the required discipline in the team, matured to the point where releases are now extremely close to 100% reliable. The bottom line is that we now have happy users, happy developers, and happy pay-checks come bonus time!
For further reading in a similar vein, I can recommend the "Software Engineering Classics" boxed set (yes, I know it's Microsoft Press. Please don't hold that against them, as these books contain much useful information and insight into Project/Team leadership within Software Engineering.)
The individual books are:
1. Debugging the Development Process Steve Maguire
2. Dynamics of Software Development Jim McCarthy
3. Software Project Survival Guide Steve McConnell
The ISBN number for the box set is 0-7356-0597-1.
--
Errr, that's not Signal 11, that's Siqnal 11. Completely different account.
--
...any time a geek uses his palm for something other than personal gratification is a cause for celebration.
;-)
--
I've always found wireless keyboards to be horrendous ergonomically. In order to be in the correct position for typing, you need to be sitting at a desk or table. If you're going to be sitting at a desk to use the keyboard, then what's the big benefit of having the keyboard wireless?
Nah, I'll be sticking to my regular 'fully tethered' input devices for the time being.
--
Easy - they're going to have to plan on training the contestants on deep-sea diving techniques rather than that whole cosmonaut program.
--