NOT frozen turkeys; previously frozen turkeys maybe, frozen turkeys are going to be outside the design requirements of the engine. How often do you see frozen turkeys flying at 30,000 ft?
Actually the launch costs are typically less than 10% of the total cost of the satellite. So if this satellite is actually cheaper than its launch costs that might be a first.
>Pushing IPv6 into mainstream use will only come once we have either a new internet or the one killer
>application that can't work without IPv6 features.
IPv6 basically supports QOS.
I think QOS will become important after VOIP/video phones/conferencing starts to take off. That's pretty close now.
At that point QOS becomes a selling feature- people will want to pay for an ISP that gives that as an available feature. Right now, it would be useful, but we can mostly live without it.
>We certainly accept free software as part of the software ecosystem. In fact, there's a
>very virtuous cycle where people do free things, some people find that adequate, sometimes companies will take that work and
>turn it into commercial products, those companies will hire people, pay taxes. And so you see the free software and the
>commercial software existing together.
I'm sure that Bill Gates thinks the idea of selling software he obtained that was written by the sweat of people that he doesn't have to pay is extremely virtuous. But let's put that to one side for the moment.
He also seems to be implying to politicians that they should outlaw the GPL licence so that Microsoft can steal open source software and charge for it, and pay more taxes- this would be a good thing- right?
Of course the fact that this would allow him to sack quite a lot of Microsoft and would end up reducing the taxes that he pays.
>In the free-software vision is that there would be no jobs in the software industry, there would be no testers, no engineers, no
>taxes paid, or anything of that notion. So I certainly don't agree with the full sort of free software foundation view that there
>should be no jobs in this area, and that the kind of commercial advances and risk taking that we've been able to do you can't
>get that, you can't get things like speech recognition on a tablet computer coming out of that kind of a paradigm.
Actually, this is extremely not clear. There's nothing to stop companies financing software that they need for their business and paying for it; and having the software remain open source. After all if one company has the software that it needs, it doesn't mean that its competitor can even use the same software that they use; and to the extent that their competitors can; they both benefit, and each can end up contributing improvements back.
That's where IBM is coming from- the fact that their main competitors SUN and Micro$oft can't use Linux much doesn't hurt.
Actually its worse than that. That bit about paying taxes is trying to throw a line to politicians to change the law so that GPL is no longer legally binding on Microsoft; that way they can extend and embrace Linux, charge as much as they do for Windows, and sack lots of their development staff...
Of course there's the inconvenient fact that they would end up paying less taxes that way... but perhaps your average politician won't notice.
I've always disliked Gates, but here he is so unbelievably slimy.
Broadband and web? Profit? Cisco is doing pretty OK. Other companies too; although there is a major recession right now- that won't last; trust me, I work in the industry. Bandwidth growth outstrips Moore's law and has done for a couple of decades.
'a bunch of shirt-losing and money-destroying has already been done'
All techs start with lots of expense, lots of high prices and lots of money spent. The point is that is now past and there's lots of prior art- lots of books you can buy telling you pretty much what to do, and what not.
'I don't credit US business with being sufficiently visionary to do anything with space. Space is a long-term thing, and a quarter-to-quarter focus just won't hack it. Space has 'worked' so far for business because the government has wanted stuff, and business will deliver it -- for a price.'
'IMHO, the Space Station has been cut below viability.'
Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
Actually Boeing and all the other aerospace companies have been feeding at the government teat for decades now. The mother is showing signs of kicking the prodigal sons off- and they already learnt to feed themselves quite well thank you very much. Space industry is worth $100 billion worldwide. NASA only gives them $20 billion. You do the math.
The point is that the businesses won't create breakthrough launch tech without a good reason. They need a good reason. The market (and there is a space market now) is starting to give them a reason.
The costs of space access have a long way they can fall. Even with conventional rocketry costs down at $10/kg do not seem totally out of the question but are not in reach at the moment, and new launch tech can probably do even better than that.
Yeah ~$10000/kg, and the estimated real cost (what it should cost anyway) is nearer $10/kg or atleast $100/kg. Nobody is anywhere near that of course right now although some are at $2600/kg or so.
Apollo 11 had nothing whatsoever to do with science. It was a purely political move to thumb the American nose at the Ruskies.
Basically they have been living on the political goodwill and pork barrel politics ever since.
Privatisation would do one thing- it would allow space to grow. There are fairly good reasons to think that a ticket to space could reach as low as $10,000 per person in the long run. NASA can't do that as they are limited by their budget, and constitutionally are not allow to turn a profit at all.
Last year space was a more than $100 billion industry IRC. NASA cost maybe $20 billion.
Most space launches are already commercial, not governmental; indeed arguably the Space Shuttle isn't even a very good space vehicle- well its technically brilliant, but fundamentally and irrevocably economically flawed.
Each launch of the Space Shuttle costs $400+ million. The russians can launch about 5 times for that price, and launch 5 times as much stuff. And although the Russian engineers are much cheaper; the Proton vehicle was designed from the ground-up for reduced costs; whilst the Space Shuttle design was damaged early on from aiming for more launches than the budget could sustain, and it will never recover.
I find it difficult to believe that anyone except the goverment can afford it- and right now not even the government is willing to pay. The implication is that the Space Shuttle may very well be doomed.
Finally, one thing you might like to consider- NASA is part of the government. Governments very rarely expand; businesses usually do, or die. Should a Government or a private organisation be in charge of space? Do you want Space to expand or stay the same?
America doesn't need to privatise Space; but its a damn good idea... in many ways the question is moot already; industry is moving in.
The bottom line is that space is massively overpriced right now- even the best launchers cost $2600/kg. The best estimate is that the price is heading for nearer $10-50/kg. Governmental subsidisies aren't going to do that- only launching a LOT will do that.
It's very unlikely indeed to ever be practical to carry liquid hydrogen around in a car; it boils way to easily for one thing. The practical issues with liquid hydrogen are immense. It's a deeply cryogenic fuel, it has large thermal expansion characteristics, it tends to freeze water (sticking valves!) and condense oxygen from the air (boom!). Hydrogen makes a very small molecule- it escapes from tanks without there being anything resembling a hole.
As I understand it, you can stuff it into a metal cylinder, but then the cylinders weighs lots. There's no point in compressing the gas down further if it adds hundreds of kilograms to the vehicle- performance suffers.
Or you can stuff it, cold fusion style, into a palladium catalyst. However, then the catalyst weighs a lot too.
Basically hydrogen turns out to be really bulky and/or heavy.
If you want to know how big- look at the space shuttle. If it wasn't for the fact they use hydrogen- that entire external tank would be gone and the space shuttle would be only slightly bigger.
Access to space probably isn't something that NASA should stick their nose into:
a) subsidised launch systems are a bad idea
b) NASA are bad at it (~$500 million per launch of the Space Shuttle? I don't think so.)
c) they can't compete with the much cheaper Russian hardware (it's a factor of 4 cheaper, and it's not a factor of 4 worse).
d) to a pretty reasonable degree the cost of access to space is related to frequency (the costs of getting to space are in launch pads, R&D, factories etc., not so much in fuel or rocket hardware), so because NASA doesn't launch much- the price goes up massively, and so they can't launch much because it's too expensive, so it goes up even more.
Propulsion, space tethers, sounds good. Space exploration, maybe a manned mission to Mars and asteoids- that can make sense.
Yeah; almost works, except you can't always predict how long each of the bits are really going to take; you get requirements churn, some of the people you employ may not work out, some fall under buses, some resign etc. etc.
Many times the critical path can be beaten though- you can often break the project up and form a new critical path. Even the classic pregnant woman can give birth in less than 9.5 months (although its not something you should aim for!)
There's atleast three fairly simple ways to do overlapping windows:
a) draw the window into a buffer, and then only copy the bits of the buffer to the screen that are visible.
b) have a draw routine that only draws a square part of the screen at a time, and then call it multiple times for squares that make up the visible portion
c) draw the whole window into a buffer and then mask off the pixels that aren't visible using bitblt techniques
There may be others, not sure which one Xerox or Apple used.
Yes, you said that. You were wrong. Try using English. Your car has been crashed whether or not you caused it. DOS has crashed whether or not the bug lay in the OS.
I repeatedly crashed it without any trouble at all, in every meaningful sense of the word. The fact that my PC was not communicating to the outside world or had blue screen of death or was rebooting is considered a good sign of a crashed OS. In fact DOS crashed often enough that I was able to tell a crashed OS ever more easily.
>Running an app that crashes and takes DOS with it was outside the spec.
Yep. DOS was broken already in the specification.
>When linux crashes because of broken driver made by nVidia is it Linux that's broken?
Yes. Device drivers are basically part of the OS. When you load a buggy device driver into Linux, you break Linux.
But in DOS, even the application is part of the OS. That ain't good.
>"Heck, Linux cannot even BOOT on C64! Therefore Linux must suck!"
You should try writing C under DOS sometime. Just running compiled programs from DOS. Uggggh.
It's certainly possible to get reliability under DOS, DOS itself is reliable, but applications that run under DOS mostly aren't and can take out the OS in a breath. DOS lacked functionality to the point of being broken; literally and metaphorically.
>DOS wasnt the best desktop/server/handheld Operating System, but it surely was a great
>learning experience for all who used and programmed for it.
It was certainly an education!
- look what dros we can actually sell!
- Oh look you're computer has crashed again!
- Clashes between TSR programs anyone?
- 640K limits anyone?
- horrible command line interface
- needed half a dozen separate programs to make it even faintly usable- and not really even then.
Dancing on its grave!
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
It's gone! At last! Only 30 years too late; oh- wait it was only 20 years old- no I was right the first time.
What kind of insane, broken, user hostile, program hostile, PC hostile world did we live in that forced users to use that broken down 640k limited, single tasking, interrupt restricted pile of junk?
Why, when decent OSs had been around for 20 years did Microsoft see fit to impose that pile on the computing public? What unbelieveable sin meant that was what we needed?
Good riddance MSDOG! You will be remembered; but not forgiven;-)
>... but the owner of a website can decide at ANY TIME who will get access to which data, not Tim.
That sounds obvious, but let's look at it more closely.
First it isn't necessarily true; there are limits under the law for the actions that parties may take; e.g. a monopoly that has been convicted of monopolistic practices may not be allowed by law to restrict accesses that are likely to extend their monopoly in an illegal direction.
Secondly, Microsoft wasn't restricting the users that access their site, they were restricting the software that they accessed it with. That's quite different.
Finally, we want a person on a standards commitee to be fairly unpragmatic. He needs to come from a point of view that competitors should actually cooperate together; this is not a natural position that competitors take- even when to do so would often be to their mutual advantage.
Actually, I think Tim gets it exactly. He's not exactly stupid.
>This is NOT an optimization, this is ignoring settings when they aren't good
>for benchmarking, the players of Quake 3 gain absolutely nothing from this.
I can see where you are coming from, but the players do atleast get the extra framerate.
Still, depending on how the card is advertised this optimisation may be illegal, the card has to be advertised truthfully.
> They are blatently trying to manipulate independent benchmarks, and *that* has gotta be unethical. no?
Yeah, if they are only manipulating benchmarks, but they aren't.
I think you would have a point if they'd only changed the benchmarks; but they have actually given you a greater framerate. The point of Quake III is that it can use higher framerates, or atleast lots of players seem to think so; so it's actually a legitimate optimisation. I mean its not THAT obvious when you are playing the game is it?
Its not nearly as bad as other optimisations I've heard of- Sun's Java VM JIT actually optimised away a benchmark entirely at one point and just returned the right answer. They'd added the *entire* benchmark into a list of bytes for the compiler to look out for... Compare that to this.
Slashdot Mirror
NOT frozen turkeys; previously frozen turkeys maybe, frozen turkeys are going to be outside the design requirements of the engine. How often do you see frozen turkeys flying at 30,000 ft?
Actually the launch costs are typically less than 10% of the total cost of the satellite. So if this satellite is actually cheaper than its launch costs that might be a first.
>Pushing IPv6 into mainstream use will only come once we have either a new internet or the one killer
>application that can't work without IPv6 features.
IPv6 basically supports QOS.
I think QOS will become important after VOIP/video phones/conferencing starts to take off. That's pretty close now.
At that point QOS becomes a selling feature- people will want to pay for an ISP that gives that as an available feature. Right now, it would be useful, but we can mostly live without it.
>We certainly accept free software as part of the software ecosystem. In fact, there's a
>very virtuous cycle where people do free things, some people find that adequate, sometimes companies will take that work and
>turn it into commercial products, those companies will hire people, pay taxes. And so you see the free software and the
>commercial software existing together.
I'm sure that Bill Gates thinks the idea of selling software he obtained that was written by the sweat of people that he doesn't have to pay is extremely virtuous. But let's put that to one side for the moment.
He also seems to be implying to politicians that they should outlaw the GPL licence so that Microsoft can steal open source software and charge for it, and pay more taxes- this would be a good thing- right?
Of course the fact that this would allow him to sack quite a lot of Microsoft and would end up reducing the taxes that he pays.
>In the free-software vision is that there would be no jobs in the software industry, there would be no testers, no engineers, no
>taxes paid, or anything of that notion. So I certainly don't agree with the full sort of free software foundation view that there
>should be no jobs in this area, and that the kind of commercial advances and risk taking that we've been able to do you can't
>get that, you can't get things like speech recognition on a tablet computer coming out of that kind of a paradigm.
Actually, this is extremely not clear. There's nothing to stop companies financing software that they need for their business and paying for it; and having the software remain open source. After all if one company has the software that it needs, it doesn't mean that its competitor can even use the same software that they use; and to the extent that their competitors can; they both benefit, and each can end up contributing improvements back.
That's where IBM is coming from- the fact that their main competitors SUN and Micro$oft can't use Linux much doesn't hurt.
Actually its worse than that. That bit about paying taxes is trying to throw a line to politicians to change the law so that GPL is no longer legally binding on Microsoft; that way they can extend and embrace Linux, charge as much as they do for Windows, and sack lots of their development staff...
Of course there's the inconvenient fact that they would end up paying less taxes that way... but perhaps your average politician won't notice.
I've always disliked Gates, but here he is so unbelievably slimy.
Broadband and web? Profit? Cisco is doing pretty OK. Other companies too; although there is a major recession right now- that won't last; trust me, I work in the industry. Bandwidth growth outstrips Moore's law and has done for a couple of decades.
'a bunch of shirt-losing and money-destroying has already been done'
All techs start with lots of expense, lots of high prices and lots of money spent. The point is that is now past and there's lots of prior art- lots of books you can buy telling you pretty much what to do, and what not.
'I don't credit US business with being sufficiently visionary to do anything with space. Space is a long-term thing, and a quarter-to-quarter focus just won't hack it. Space has 'worked' so far for business because the government has wanted stuff, and business will deliver it -- for a price.'
'IMHO, the Space Station has been cut below viability.'
Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
Actually Boeing and all the other aerospace companies have been feeding at the government teat for decades now. The mother is showing signs of kicking the prodigal sons off- and they already learnt to feed themselves quite well thank you very much. Space industry is worth $100 billion worldwide. NASA only gives them $20 billion. You do the math.
The point is that the businesses won't create breakthrough launch tech without a good reason. They need a good reason. The market (and there is a space market now) is starting to give them a reason.
The costs of space access have a long way they can fall. Even with conventional rocketry costs down at $10/kg do not seem totally out of the question but are not in reach at the moment, and new launch tech can probably do even better than that.
Yeah ~$10000/kg, and the estimated real cost (what it should cost anyway) is nearer $10/kg or atleast $100/kg. Nobody is anywhere near that of course right now although some are at $2600/kg or so.
Further, people have actually demoed quantum mechanical electronics using MRI so the theory seems cosher.
Ok, a 4 bit circuit when you're aiming for ~10,000 bits is a bit restrictive, but atleast it shows proof of concept.
Um. No.
Apollo 11 had nothing whatsoever to do with science. It was a purely political move to thumb the American nose at the Ruskies.
Basically they have been living on the political goodwill and pork barrel politics ever since.
Privatisation would do one thing- it would allow space to grow. There are fairly good reasons to think that a ticket to space could reach as low as $10,000 per person in the long run. NASA can't do that as they are limited by their budget, and constitutionally are not allow to turn a profit at all.
Last year space was a more than $100 billion industry IRC. NASA cost maybe $20 billion.
Most space launches are already commercial, not governmental; indeed arguably the Space Shuttle isn't even a very good space vehicle- well its technically brilliant, but fundamentally and irrevocably economically flawed.
Each launch of the Space Shuttle costs $400+ million. The russians can launch about 5 times for that price, and launch 5 times as much stuff. And although the Russian engineers are much cheaper; the Proton vehicle was designed from the ground-up for reduced costs; whilst the Space Shuttle design was damaged early on from aiming for more launches than the budget could sustain, and it will never recover.
I find it difficult to believe that anyone except the goverment can afford it- and right now not even the government is willing to pay. The implication is that the Space Shuttle may very well be doomed.
Finally, one thing you might like to consider- NASA is part of the government. Governments very rarely expand; businesses usually do, or die. Should a Government or a private organisation be in charge of space? Do you want Space to expand or stay the same?
America doesn't need to privatise Space; but its a damn good idea... in many ways the question is moot already; industry is moving in.
The bottom line is that space is massively overpriced right now- even the best launchers cost $2600/kg. The best estimate is that the price is heading for nearer $10-50/kg. Governmental subsidisies aren't going to do that- only launching a LOT will do that.
It's very unlikely indeed to ever be practical to carry liquid hydrogen around in a car; it boils way to easily for one thing. The practical issues with liquid hydrogen are immense. It's a deeply cryogenic fuel, it has large thermal expansion characteristics, it tends to freeze water (sticking valves!) and condense oxygen from the air (boom!). Hydrogen makes a very small molecule- it escapes from tanks without there being anything resembling a hole.
;-)
Solid hydrogen? Yeah right
As I understand it, you can stuff it into a metal cylinder, but then the cylinders weighs lots. There's no point in compressing the gas down further if it adds hundreds of kilograms to the vehicle- performance suffers.
Or you can stuff it, cold fusion style, into a palladium catalyst. However, then the catalyst weighs a lot too.
Basically hydrogen turns out to be really bulky and/or heavy.
If you want to know how big- look at the space shuttle. If it wasn't for the fact they use hydrogen- that entire external tank would be gone and the space shuttle would be only slightly bigger.
Access to space probably isn't something that NASA should stick their nose into:
a) subsidised launch systems are a bad idea
b) NASA are bad at it (~$500 million per launch of the Space Shuttle? I don't think so.)
c) they can't compete with the much cheaper Russian hardware (it's a factor of 4 cheaper, and it's not a factor of 4 worse).
d) to a pretty reasonable degree the cost of access to space is related to frequency (the costs of getting to space are in launch pads, R&D, factories etc., not so much in fuel or rocket hardware), so because NASA doesn't launch much- the price goes up massively, and so they can't launch much because it's too expensive, so it goes up even more.
Propulsion, space tethers, sounds good. Space exploration, maybe a manned mission to Mars and asteoids- that can make sense.
Yeah; almost works, except you can't always predict how long each of the bits are really going to take; you get requirements churn, some of the people you employ may not work out, some fall under buses, some resign etc. etc.
Many times the critical path can be beaten though- you can often break the project up and form a new critical path. Even the classic pregnant woman can give birth in less than 9.5 months (although its not something you should aim for!)
"There are lies, damned lies and project plans- but what else you gonna do?" - me
"Work expands to fill the time available for its completion." - Parkinsons Law
There's atleast three fairly simple ways to do overlapping windows:
a) draw the window into a buffer, and then only copy the bits of the buffer to the screen that are visible.
b) have a draw routine that only draws a square part of the screen at a time, and then call it multiple times for squares that make up the visible portion
c) draw the whole window into a buffer and then mask off the pixels that aren't visible using bitblt techniques
There may be others, not sure which one Xerox or Apple used.
>As I said you practically couldn't crash DOS.
Yes, you said that. You were wrong. Try using English. Your car has been crashed whether or not you caused it. DOS has crashed whether or not the bug lay in the OS.
I repeatedly crashed it without any trouble at all, in every meaningful sense of the word. The fact that my PC was not communicating to the outside world or had blue screen of death or was rebooting is considered a good sign of a crashed OS. In fact DOS crashed often enough that I was able to tell a crashed OS ever more easily.
>Running an app that crashes and takes DOS with it was outside the spec.
Yep. DOS was broken already in the specification.
>When linux crashes because of broken driver made by nVidia is it Linux that's broken?
Yes. Device drivers are basically part of the OS. When you load a buggy device driver into Linux, you break Linux.
But in DOS, even the application is part of the OS. That ain't good.
>"Heck, Linux cannot even BOOT on C64! Therefore Linux must suck!"
Yes, Linux sucks on a C64. Your point?
I prefer to write pi as 10.... atleast that's how it is written in base pi!
;-)
You should try writing C under DOS sometime. Just running compiled programs from DOS. Uggggh.
It's certainly possible to get reliability under DOS, DOS itself is reliable, but applications that run under DOS mostly aren't and can take out the OS in a breath. DOS lacked functionality to the point of being broken; literally and metaphorically.
>There's practically no way to make DOS crash.
No, no. DOS was trivial to crash.
DOS itself didn't cause the crash, but the programs that run under it crash all the time, and usually/often take DOS with it.
>Perhaps if you have broken hardware...
No just a broken OS.
Proper operating systems rarely crash when an application crashes. Do I have to point this out on a website devoted to Linux?
>DOS wasnt the best desktop/server/handheld Operating System, but it surely was a great
>learning experience for all who used and programmed for it.
It was certainly an education!
- look what dros we can actually sell!
- Oh look you're computer has crashed again!
- Clashes between TSR programs anyone?
- 640K limits anyone?
- horrible command line interface
- needed half a dozen separate programs to make it even faintly usable- and not really even then.
It's gone! At last! Only 30 years too late; oh- wait it was only 20 years old- no I was right the first time.
;-)
What kind of insane, broken, user hostile, program hostile, PC hostile world did we live in that forced users to use that broken down 640k limited, single tasking, interrupt restricted pile of junk?
Why, when decent OSs had been around for 20 years did Microsoft see fit to impose that pile on the computing public? What unbelieveable sin meant that was what we needed?
Good riddance MSDOG! You will be remembered; but not forgiven
> ... but the owner of a website can decide at ANY TIME who will get access to which data, not Tim.
That sounds obvious, but let's look at it more closely.
First it isn't necessarily true; there are limits under the law for the actions that parties may take; e.g. a monopoly that has been convicted of monopolistic practices may not be allowed by law to restrict accesses that are likely to extend their monopoly in an illegal direction.
Secondly, Microsoft wasn't restricting the users that access their site, they were restricting the software that they accessed it with. That's quite different.
Finally, we want a person on a standards commitee to be fairly unpragmatic. He needs to come from a point of view that competitors should actually cooperate together; this is not a natural position that competitors take- even when to do so would often be to their mutual advantage.
Actually, I think Tim gets it exactly. He's not exactly stupid.
>This is NOT an optimization, this is ignoring settings when they aren't good
>for benchmarking, the players of Quake 3 gain absolutely nothing from this.
I can see where you are coming from, but the players do atleast get the extra framerate.
Still, depending on how the card is advertised this optimisation may be illegal, the card has to be advertised truthfully.
> They are blatently trying to manipulate independent benchmarks, and *that* has gotta be unethical. no?
Yeah, if they are only manipulating benchmarks, but they aren't.
I think you would have a point if they'd only changed the benchmarks; but they have actually given you a greater framerate. The point of Quake III is that it can use higher framerates, or atleast lots of players seem to think so; so it's actually a legitimate optimisation. I mean its not THAT obvious when you are playing the game is it?
Its not nearly as bad as other optimisations I've heard of- Sun's Java VM JIT actually optimised away a benchmark entirely at one point and just returned the right answer. They'd added the *entire* benchmark into a list of bytes for the compiler to look out for... Compare that to this.