Rotary Rocket has other problems. The current Rotary Rocket vehicle is suborbital only; they can't quite make it to orbit because the weight budget is so tight. The original rotary-nozzle engine was supposed to take them to orbit, but they couldn't afford the development, and they're now using an off-the-shelf engine with a turbopump. This broke their weight budget.
The design can probably be made to work, given funding. Of course the devil is in the details. One problem they have is that most of the launch demand appears to be above 9000 lbs, and they are only launching 7000lbs. The demand may change if they can launch cheaply though; or they may be able to launch geosats separately to the LEO-GEO booster.
The "cheap, dumb booster" idea has been floated, but launch success rates now hover around 80%, which is not very good. A cheaper booster with an even lower success rate would not be a win as a satellite launcher.
True, but there isn't much correlation between size and failure rate. There's a much bigger correlation between number of previous launches of a design and success rate.
Besides big rockets are cheaper not because the scaling laws help big rockets, more because the number of people you need doesn't increase much as the size of the rocket grows. For all intents and purposes all of the cost of a rocket goes into personnel costs. The Russians make the cheapest rockets- take the proton- about $3-4 million per tonne. Some of their launchers have an excellent safety record.
No. You're plausible, but it turns out you're wrong.
First, chemical fueled rockets aren't impractical. Its a little known fact that the most thermodynamically efficient engine ever built is the rocket engine- its about 60%. This is because they run at very high temperature.
If reusable rockets can be built, the actual cost per passenger is little more than the cost of a Concorde ticket, assuming designs like the Roton can be made to work, space travel becomes a heck of a lot more airline like.
That's where the costs go. Not in fuel (fuel costs are insignificant percentage-wise), but in the rockets that get currently thrown away after each flight. But that isn't why they are so expensive- its simpler than that, its because so few rockets are made. Costs for low numbers - its often cheaper to build one than 20; but even cheaper to build 1000.
You mention nuclear. Nuclear is fantastic for interplanetary drives. But launching from the earth is different story. Nobody has even successfully made a nuclear aeroplane. Weight is even more critical achieving orbit, and nuclear reactors need heavy shielding. And the devastation if it crashes would be Chernobyl like.
Actually the situation is improving. For one thing there are a lot more launchers out there now. The price is coming down due to competition; people are asking how can we get some of that 30 billion a year cake that makes up space?
I give it 30 years and then we'll see thousands of people living in space. The reasons it will take that long are economic. Somebody with a couple of billion to spare could make it happen much sooner though.
Nobody could be that stupid. Von Braun? Heard of him? Hint: Saturn V. Anyway, he tried the propulsion unit at the top. It doesn't work. Any misalignment between the thrust vector and the center of mass and the rocket goes in a circle. Well, more of a semi circle really. Ouch.
The optimum place is actually near the middle, but you can get big problems with the blue-hot exhaust playing on the outside of your big tanks full of nasty explosive fuel. That's why modern rockets usually put the nozzle at the bottom and gimble the exhaust to ensure stability.
Incidentally gravity doesn't help or hinder stability- the acceleration due to gravity is identical for all parts of the rocket at all times.
In the UK in order to get a patent, there must be no prior publication of the ideas.
This is a good thing; and this case is a fantastic example of why.
BT did emphatically NOT invent the concept of hyperlinks. At best they bought the patent of someone else, who didn't invent it either.
Hypertext was invented in the 1960s by Doug Engelbart, and the term Hypertext was coined in 1968 by Ted Nelson. The patent would have run out by now if it had been patented at that time.
In the US it is entirely different of course... if someone else invents something but you steal the idea and stick a few grand down- the idea is now legally yours and you can successfully sue the person who invented it!
Lets assume you are trying to get a message that is being sent to someone. All you need to do to crack the code is pretty much maths that is taught to 15 year olds: a)get all the pads on the internet or atleast all the pads that the bad guys are likely to have used. b) guess a few words of the message c) produce a big matrix of all the pads multiplied by a vector of 1's or 0s (1 means that pad used, 0 means it wasn't) and then make it equal to the guessed text. OK we are now down to simple matrix multiplication (well in this case exclusive-or multiplication but this makes little difference.) Invert the matrix (which takes a while for a big matrix, but not ridiculously so.) multiply by the guessed message and calculate the vector that tells you which of the pads were used. Check that the rest of the message makes sense, if so you have cracked the message, otherwise guess again. It doesn't absolutely always work (because you have to guess the message), but it works often enough that the scheme is pretty much worthless. This is called a 'known plaintext' attack. This code is not proof against it. Other codes are proof against it, and should be used instead. Don't waste your time with this.
Personally I think it sucks that the home of communism in the world has scored a first by offering the first paid seat in space.
Clearly the guy who is pouring money into the russian system is a lefty-pinko communist at heart. I mean he's proven it by first amassing wealth and then giving it to the Ruskies.
It's also a crime that the space shuttle can't even begin to compete with the price that is being offered either- I mean everyone knows that American technology is the best in the world, and that backwards Russian stuff is incomparable, even if it does literally cost one tenth the cost, with similar performance. It must be something to do with that 'partnership' between the Russians and the Americans we hear so much about. Clearly communist symps have infiltrated NASA, and are holding her back.
I mean sure the Russian launchers are ok, but can they land on their wheels? Can you fly it like a plane? Does it have all these cool tiles everywhere? Nah! American tech rocks!
I say the guy should be refused a passport and be forced to fork out 150 million to use the Space Shuttle like God intended; oh yeah and then chain him to a pc with a microsoft operating system to show him real capitalist AMERICAN technology. Its only fair.
Even if it means the difference between sending thirty people and 3 people?
Even if getting the mass gives a net income rather than a net loss?
Even if the resulting commerce results in permanent, sustainable space habitation, rather than the one shot throw-away-Apollo style mars mission?
Even if asteroid mining reduces the cost of your cars catalytic converter?
Even if asteroid mining decreases the chance of earth dying from a meteorite?
Because that's really what's at stake. Mars looks like there's certainly stuff there that is good to get, but there's lots more other stuff elsewhere that is better, easier and cheaper, and will help us get to mars for a fraction the cost and with incredibly more style.
Amen brother! But the space stations come in when we have industry in space, and that comes in when we have some way to make money...
The fall of communism showed that people don't do things for the right reason- they do them out of self interest. The nice thing about money, and a few other things is that it lines up self interests really well.
Space stations may well turn out to be an end in their own right. Terraforming is an enormous task. Space stations over 10 miles across are buildable with known materials, using known engineering processes. Paying for it is the tricky bit.
a) the total amount of metal in one asteroid, Eros is greater than the entire mineable surface of the earth. And there are probably millions of asteroids where that came from...
b) solar energy is an unlimited source of energy, which is available 24x7 in orbit and is relatively easy to tap.
c) the actual, real underlying cost of putting a man into orbit is similar to the cost of crossing the atlantic (it sounds nutty, but the cost of rockets is completely dominated by building each one by hand and then throwing it away afterwards, it's a bit like building a 767 and then trashing it after one flight; the fuel cost is only a few tens of dollars per pound)
d) there's plenty of water and carbon up there- where do you think the earth got its carbon from? It condensed out of the body of a supernova.. as did the asteroids.
VASIMIR only makes some kind of sense if everything is supposed to be launched from the earths surface.
Launch costs from the earths surface are about $8000/lb right now. But there's plenty of stuff already up there that you can use for reaction mass, once you get there.
Minimising reaction mass isn't the problem. That isn't the bottleneck to getting to Mars. Finance is the bottleneck. Missions to Mars require maybe 100 tonnes launched to get there. You do the math.
If we use asteroid mass to build our hardware, the costs drop by several orders of magnitude. Going straight to Mars ain't gonna happen in my opinion.
It's highly radioactive there, as it has practically no atmosphere (only 1% of the atmosphere of earth), and it almost certainly has no life. (Atleast there's no signs from the earth, and the mars landers haven't found any either.)
It would be almost impossible to live on it too. Probably the only sources of energy are nuclear and solar- and solar is weaker than earth; nuclear would have to be delivered for quite a while.
It's also mega expensive to get there and back (although cheaper than escaping from the earths gravity); and nobody has the slightest clue how to make any money there.
I can see that going there would be mega cool; but the asteroids are actually a better bet, and closer in many dimensions including cost, distance, velocity and time. Returning an asteroid to the earth would actually be useful- we could build technology like satellites and even return mined platinum group metals to the earth- they are worth $400/ounce right now!
b) they're gonna demo a 10 kilowatt version and expect it to scale by 3 orders of magnitude?
c) What's the point in doing this when all the really good stuff is on the asteroids anyway- and asteroids are stuffed full of this neat fuel called, wait for it, WATER (which incidentally makes a really great radiation shield...) and they have loads of rare metals, like URANIUM. Hey that's handy;-)
d) this system pisses away power like crazy- throwing exhaust away at 30km/s is actually too fast... very little of the energy ends up in the spacecraft almost all of it goes into the exhaust. Unless you have energy to burn you probably don't need the speed.
e) check out the link above- the timetable to get the nuclear reactor that big in space doesn't happen till 2020... with conventional technology we could be there in 5 years- 10 if we stop off at the asteroids- and asteroids can actually generate revenue.
"MS shouldn't be split into many companies for the same reason that shoplifters and jaywalkers shouldn't be executed. They may have done wrong, but that doesn't mean they're completely without rights."
Hardly a valid comparison.
Noone is suggesting that the company be liquidated and the people running it be forbidden from owning businesses for a period of time. (Hey! On second thoughts...;-)
No, in all seriousness, they've broken the law, they've been caught and the law is being applied. Its pretty much as simple as that at the end of the day. Don't like the law? Lobby your nearest politician. In the meantime out of the way- pass the popcorn, we want to watch the breakup!
It talks about ways to move around the solar system using either solar energy to make steam rockets(!), or nuclear powered steam rockets!
Rather than use solar panels, they suggest big mirrors (much lighter and more efficient.)
Turns out its a) really easy to collect water b) steam rockets are really efficient in the sense that it minimises the amount of mirrors/nuclear material. c) they get you to your destination pretty fast
Those big hydrogen-oxygen jobs are good for leaving the earth but once you are in orbit, steam rockets are much better than ion drives or H-OX- assuming large quantities of water are available.
Basically this is space opening technology- travelling to mars would be pretty simple for example.
Correct. Under any sensible system, a passphrase is required to access your private key.
Trouble is, under PGP or any other UNIX system, root can install a new kernel or PGP program that can record your passphrase elsewhere as you enter it... and they also have access to the unencrypted data as well.
In practice, operating systems aren't secureable without hardware support.
Why?
Simply because the operating system has to boot up. The software to boot the operating system up has to check whether the operating system has been patched, possibly whilst the OS was down.
It can't do that if it too has been patched...
About the only system that can't be patched is actual, bonafide hardware.
The only part of the system that HAS to be secure is the security system itself.
Incidentally the problem about where you store your keys is easy. You store them in a file! They can be secured with a passphrase. Once unlocked they need to be put in the security system in non volatile ram...
Bios and motherboard support is required. Even then the game is up if someone has physical access to your machine and replaces the motherboard...;-)
You need to read the original decision where he found for the DOJ. Basically most of the behaviour of Microsoft for the last 10-15 years has been aimed at preserving the OS monopoly.
e.g. directX - this is an obscure interface to ensure that games HAVE to be written for Windows. That's why they give it away for free- its not out of the goodness of their heart- its because it locks games into Windows. hint: what OS do most of your friends have on their PCs? Bet it isn't Linux... "I only use Windows to play games."
'Regardless, the Court of Appeals has historically been more favorable toward Microsoft than Judge Jackson, so I have no doubts Microsoft will WIN their appeal'
Lets just say that if they do it will be the biggest legal upset since OJ Simpson. The case is overwhelming. It would taking a simply amazing screw up on behalf of Judge Jackson for them to get away with it.
"You think Microsoft-Apps will port Office to Linux? Why would they?"
If they think they can make money that way then of course they will- that arm of the company couldn't before because the company overall would have lost money.
There are companies out there installing Linux right now. If the market gets big enough- they will have to. It's the only way they can ensure their continued monopoly for one thing...
Disk latency is bigger. The underlying true latency in networks is ~1ms per 150km. Show me a disk with 6ms seek time and you're doing well. Swap to someone in the same town/city and latency can be negligible. More than 6x faster.
On the system I'm on right now, ping time to the next machine is less than 1ms... actually ping can't measure that low. Things are going that way- networks are getting faster even quicker than processors are getting faster.
Disks are slow. Networks are fast. Read computer networks by Tanenbaum for more info.
>I'll give you something to ponder: is there a better way to implement virtual memory other than spilling over into hard drive? You have to be able to index them and swap them in and out--on things called pages.
Yes there is. Spill them to someone elses RAM across a fast network. A lot of the time they aren't using all their RAM, and it's a LOT faster to do that than write it to disk.
>Give me a faster general purpose index (or for that matter, OS-specific purpose) than a B-tree.
Easy: skip lists
>Until there is a new and radical type of hardware (other than storage, input, and output) there is little need to change what and OS does or how it does it radically. Rather, as mentioned way above, the techniques used now are optimized for a particular piece of hardware and/or software.
You don't need new hardware in fact.
As the relative performances of the various components change you get sudden points of inflexion where you discover that doing something entirely different suddenly is worth doing. The Internet being a burgeoning example...
Another example: for a short while OS manufacturers wrote compression routines in the file system. Suddenly the disks went faster- phoom the compression was actually slower again- so they took it out...
Actually gravity simulation is pretty cool algorithmically as well as hardware wise. Originally the gravity simulators had to work out the attraction between every pair of particles. This meant that if you simulate 1000 particles they had to do 1000,000 calculations. Slow.
So along come some doods who said why don't we recursively stick the particles into boxes and then calculate the attraction between the boxes instead and it should be a lot faster. So they tried it and it seemed to work great- it only takes more like 10,000 calculations to do 1000 particles.
Anyway along came some other guys and they were a bit suspicious. They showed that some galaxies fell apart under some conditions with the recursive boxes method, when like they shouldn't. Back to the drawing board.
There are some fixes for this now- they run more slowly, but still a lot faster than the boring way. Still, its better than the end of the universe. Even if it is only a toy universe.
For descriptions of loadsa algorithms, including 'symplectics' which are able to predict the future of the solar system to 1 part in 10^13 ten million years in the future check out this link:
'Calling a virtual function can have 5-10 times as much overhead'
It can be much, much higher than that! I set my compiler to -O11 (I knew it was a good compiler cos the optimisation goes upto 11!) and my code was compiled to just 10 bytes!
It ran in only 10 ms!
I then changed one line to 'virtual' and it came out to 150K, I started running it yesterday and it still hasn't finished! That just shows how bad C++ is.
I hear that Java only has virtual functions. That must be slow as a rock! Everyone knows that C is the best language in the world, I can't see why anyone would use this object rubbish. I mean that must be the reason I hear all these software projects keep failing, they're all using Java.
And as for security, Java's been out for years and we still get viruses! What gives I ask? When are people going to learn?
'On traditional processors: probably, but what about the MAJC processor (see article) or Crusoe?'
Purpose built processors don't usually help. Sure they start off fast, but unless you have a huge development budget (and Intel has a huge budget!) you quickly get outdeveloped and then you are slower.
I love the crusoe tech though. Because it's smaller it might help keep development costs down.
Slashdot Mirror
The design can probably be made to work, given funding. Of course the devil is in the details. One problem they have is that most of the launch demand appears to be above 9000 lbs, and they are only launching 7000lbs. The demand may change if they can launch cheaply though; or they may be able to launch geosats separately to the LEO-GEO booster.
The "cheap, dumb booster" idea has been floated, but launch success rates now hover around 80%, which is not very good. A cheaper booster with an even lower success rate would not be a win as a satellite launcher.
True, but there isn't much correlation between size and failure rate. There's a much bigger correlation between number of previous launches of a design and success rate.
Besides big rockets are cheaper not because the scaling laws help big rockets, more because the number of people you need doesn't increase much as the size of the rocket grows. For all intents and purposes all of the cost of a rocket goes into personnel costs. The Russians make the cheapest rockets- take the proton- about $3-4 million per tonne. Some of their launchers have an excellent safety record.
First, chemical fueled rockets aren't impractical. Its a little known fact that the most thermodynamically efficient engine ever built is the rocket engine- its about 60%. This is because they run at very high temperature.
If reusable rockets can be built, the actual cost per passenger is little more than the cost of a Concorde ticket, assuming designs like the Roton can be made to work, space travel becomes a heck of a lot more airline like.
That's where the costs go. Not in fuel (fuel costs are insignificant percentage-wise), but in the rockets that get currently thrown away after each flight. But that isn't why they are so expensive- its simpler than that, its because so few rockets are made. Costs for low numbers - its often cheaper to build one than 20; but even cheaper to build 1000.
You mention nuclear. Nuclear is fantastic for interplanetary drives. But launching from the earth is different story. Nobody has even successfully made a nuclear aeroplane. Weight is even more critical achieving orbit, and nuclear reactors need heavy shielding. And the devastation if it crashes would be Chernobyl like.
Actually the situation is improving. For one thing there are a lot more launchers out there now. The price is coming down due to competition; people are asking how can we get some of that 30 billion a year cake that makes up space?
I give it 30 years and then we'll see thousands of people living in space. The reasons it will take that long are economic. Somebody with a couple of billion to spare could make it happen much sooner though.
The optimum place is actually near the middle, but you can get big problems with the blue-hot exhaust playing on the outside of your big tanks full of nasty explosive fuel. That's why modern rockets usually put the nozzle at the bottom and gimble the exhaust to ensure stability.
Incidentally gravity doesn't help or hinder stability- the acceleration due to gravity is identical for all parts of the rocket at all times.
This is a good thing; and this case is a fantastic example of why.
BT did emphatically NOT invent the concept of hyperlinks. At best they bought the patent of someone else, who didn't invent it either.
Hypertext was invented in the 1960s by Doug Engelbart, and the term Hypertext was coined in 1968 by Ted Nelson. The patent would have run out by now if it had been patented at that time.
In the US it is entirely different of course... if someone else invents something but you steal the idea and stick a few grand down- the idea is now legally yours and you can successfully sue the person who invented it!
The US patent system is nutty.
Lets assume you are trying to get a message that is being sent to someone. All you need to do to crack the code is pretty much maths that is taught to 15 year olds: a)get all the pads on the internet or atleast all the pads that the bad guys are likely to have used. b) guess a few words of the message c) produce a big matrix of all the pads multiplied by a vector of 1's or 0s (1 means that pad used, 0 means it wasn't) and then make it equal to the guessed text. OK we are now down to simple matrix multiplication (well in this case exclusive-or multiplication but this makes little difference.) Invert the matrix (which takes a while for a big matrix, but not ridiculously so.) multiply by the guessed message and calculate the vector that tells you which of the pads were used. Check that the rest of the message makes sense, if so you have cracked the message, otherwise guess again. It doesn't absolutely always work (because you have to guess the message), but it works often enough that the scheme is pretty much worthless. This is called a 'known plaintext' attack. This code is not proof against it. Other codes are proof against it, and should be used instead. Don't waste your time with this.
The space shuttle, whilst more or less a technical triumph, economically is a very great disaster and has met none of its objectives (nowhere near).
Russian launch technology is actually eminently practical and (by current rocketry standards) very cost effective.
Clearly the guy who is pouring money into the russian system is a lefty-pinko communist at heart. I mean he's proven it by first amassing wealth and then giving it to the Ruskies.
It's also a crime that the space shuttle can't even begin to compete with the price that is being offered either- I mean everyone knows that American technology is the best in the world, and that backwards Russian stuff is incomparable, even if it does literally cost one tenth the cost, with similar performance. It must be something to do with that 'partnership' between the Russians and the Americans we hear so much about. Clearly communist symps have infiltrated NASA, and are holding her back.
I mean sure the Russian launchers are ok, but can they land on their wheels? Can you fly it like a plane? Does it have all these cool tiles everywhere? Nah! American tech rocks!
I say the guy should be refused a passport and be forced to fork out 150 million to use the Space Shuttle like God intended; oh yeah and then chain him to a pc with a microsoft operating system to show him real capitalist AMERICAN technology. Its only fair.
Even if getting the mass gives a net income rather than a net loss?
Even if the resulting commerce results in permanent, sustainable space habitation, rather than the one shot throw-away-Apollo style mars mission?
Even if asteroid mining reduces the cost of your cars catalytic converter?
Even if asteroid mining decreases the chance of earth dying from a meteorite?
Because that's really what's at stake. Mars looks like there's certainly stuff there that is good to get, but there's lots more other stuff elsewhere that is better, easier and cheaper, and will help us get to mars for a fraction the cost and with incredibly more style.
The fall of communism showed that people don't do things for the right reason- they do them out of self interest. The nice thing about money, and a few other things is that it lines up self interests really well.
Space stations may well turn out to be an end in their own right. Terraforming is an enormous task. Space stations over 10 miles across are buildable with known materials, using known engineering processes. Paying for it is the tricky bit.
a) the total amount of metal in one asteroid, Eros is greater than the entire mineable surface of the earth. And there are probably millions of asteroids where that came from...
b) solar energy is an unlimited source of energy, which is available 24x7 in orbit and is relatively easy to tap.
c) the actual, real underlying cost of putting a man into orbit is similar to the cost of crossing the atlantic (it sounds nutty, but the cost of rockets is completely dominated by building each one by hand and then throwing it away afterwards, it's a bit like building a 767 and then trashing it after one flight; the fuel cost is only a few tens of dollars per pound)
d) there's plenty of water and carbon up there- where do you think the earth got its carbon from? It condensed out of the body of a supernova.. as did the asteroids.
Launch costs from the earths surface are about $8000/lb right now. But there's plenty of stuff already up there that you can use for reaction mass, once you get there.
Minimising reaction mass isn't the problem. That isn't the bottleneck to getting to Mars. Finance is the bottleneck. Missions to Mars require maybe 100 tonnes launched to get there. You do the math.
If we use asteroid mass to build our hardware, the costs drop by several orders of magnitude. Going straight to Mars ain't gonna happen in my opinion.
It would be almost impossible to live on it too. Probably the only sources of energy are nuclear and solar- and solar is weaker than earth; nuclear would have to be delivered for quite a while.
It's also mega expensive to get there and back (although cheaper than escaping from the earths gravity); and nobody has the slightest clue how to make any money there.
I can see that going there would be mega cool; but the asteroids are actually a better bet, and closer in many dimensions including cost, distance, velocity and time. Returning an asteroid to the earth would actually be useful- we could build technology like satellites and even return mined platinum group metals to the earth- they are worth $400/ounce right now!
b) they're gonna demo a 10 kilowatt version and expect it to scale by 3 orders of magnitude?
c) What's the point in doing this when all the really good stuff is on the asteroids anyway- and asteroids are stuffed full of this neat fuel called, wait for it, WATER (which incidentally makes a really great radiation shield...) and they have loads of rare metals, like URANIUM. Hey that's handy ;-)
d) this system pisses away power like crazy- throwing exhaust away at 30km/s is actually too fast... very little of the energy ends up in the spacecraft almost all of it goes into the exhaust. Unless you have energy to burn you probably don't need the speed.
e) check out the link above- the timetable to get the nuclear reactor that big in space doesn't happen till 2020... with conventional technology we could be there in 5 years- 10 if we stop off at the asteroids- and asteroids can actually generate revenue.
Hardly a valid comparison.
Noone is suggesting that the company be liquidated and the people running it be forbidden from owning businesses for a period of time. (Hey! On second thoughts... ;-)
No, in all seriousness, they've broken the law, they've been caught and the law is being applied. Its pretty much as simple as that at the end of the day. Don't like the law? Lobby your nearest politician. In the meantime out of the way- pass the popcorn, we want to watch the breakup!
It talks about ways to move around the solar system using either solar energy to make steam rockets(!), or nuclear powered steam rockets!
Rather than use solar panels, they suggest big mirrors (much lighter and more efficient.)
Turns out its a) really easy to collect water b) steam rockets are really efficient in the sense that it minimises the amount of mirrors/nuclear material. c) they get you to your destination pretty fast
Those big hydrogen-oxygen jobs are good for leaving the earth but once you are in orbit, steam rockets are much better than ion drives or H-OX- assuming large quantities of water are available.
Basically this is space opening technology- travelling to mars would be pretty simple for example.
Trouble is, under PGP or any other UNIX system, root can install a new kernel or PGP program that can record your passphrase elsewhere as you enter it... and they also have access to the unencrypted data as well.
Why?
Simply because the operating system has to boot up. The software to boot the operating system up has to check whether the operating system has been patched, possibly whilst the OS was down.
It can't do that if it too has been patched...
About the only system that can't be patched is actual, bonafide hardware.
The only part of the system that HAS to be secure is the security system itself.
Incidentally the problem about where you store your keys is easy. You store them in a file! They can be secured with a passphrase. Once unlocked they need to be put in the security system in non volatile ram...
Bios and motherboard support is required. Even then the game is up if someone has physical access to your machine and replaces the motherboard... ;-)
e.g. directX - this is an obscure interface to ensure that games HAVE to be written for Windows. That's why they give it away for free- its not out of the goodness of their heart- its because it locks games into Windows. hint: what OS do most of your friends have on their PCs? Bet it isn't Linux... "I only use Windows to play games."
'Regardless, the Court of Appeals has historically been more favorable toward Microsoft than Judge Jackson, so I have no doubts Microsoft will WIN their appeal'
Lets just say that if they do it will be the biggest legal upset since OJ Simpson. The case is overwhelming. It would taking a simply amazing screw up on behalf of Judge Jackson for them to get away with it.
"You think Microsoft-Apps will port Office to Linux? Why would they?"
If they think they can make money that way then of course they will- that arm of the company couldn't before because the company overall would have lost money.
There are companies out there installing Linux right now. If the market gets big enough- they will have to. It's the only way they can ensure their continued monopoly for one thing...
On the system I'm on right now, ping time to the next machine is less than 1ms... actually ping can't measure that low. Things are going that way- networks are getting faster even quicker than processors are getting faster.
Disks are slow. Networks are fast. Read computer networks by Tanenbaum for more info.
In the meantime I recommend Linux!
Yes there is. Spill them to someone elses RAM across a fast network. A lot of the time they aren't using all their RAM, and it's a LOT faster to do that than write it to disk.
>Give me a faster general purpose index (or for that matter, OS-specific purpose) than a B-tree.
Easy: skip lists
>Until there is a new and radical type of hardware (other than storage, input, and output) there is little need to change what and OS does or how it does it radically. Rather, as mentioned way above, the techniques used now are optimized for a particular piece of hardware and/or software.
You don't need new hardware in fact.
As the relative performances of the various components change you get sudden points of inflexion where you discover that doing something entirely different suddenly is worth doing. The Internet being a burgeoning example...
Another example: for a short while OS manufacturers wrote compression routines in the file system. Suddenly the disks went faster- phoom the compression was actually slower again- so they took it out...
- big time growth of distributed systems
- use of b-trees for much faster file systems
- supercomputers on the desktop
- networking
- 3D graphics drivers
- gigabit ethernet on the desktop
- security becoming MUCH more important
- Multimedia support through the computer == realtime computing on your desktop
- loads of new algorithms- balanced binary trees, skip lists
- big time deployment of virtual memory
- big time deployment of garbage collection
- new garbage collection algorithms
The OS is trying to stretch to encompass this stuff.The nice thing about Linux is that it is very modular and can be plugged to give lots of this stuff.
Quantum computing is on the horizon too... parallel computing in different universes anyone? We'll have to see whether Linux is upto it there... ;-)
So along come some doods who said why don't we recursively stick the particles into boxes and then calculate the attraction between the boxes instead and it should be a lot faster. So they tried it and it seemed to work great- it only takes more like 10,000 calculations to do 1000 particles.
Anyway along came some other guys and they were a bit suspicious. They showed that some galaxies fell apart under some conditions with the recursive boxes method, when like they shouldn't. Back to the drawing board.
There are some fixes for this now- they run more slowly, but still a lot faster than the boring way. Still, its better than the end of the universe. Even if it is only a toy universe.
For descriptions of loadsa algorithms, including 'symplectics' which are able to predict the future of the solar system to 1 part in 10^13 ten million years in the future check out this link:
It can be much, much higher than that! I set my compiler to -O11 (I knew it was a good compiler cos the optimisation goes upto 11!) and my code was compiled to just 10 bytes!
It ran in only 10 ms!
I then changed one line to 'virtual' and it came out to 150K, I started running it yesterday and it still hasn't finished! That just shows how bad C++ is.
I hear that Java only has virtual functions. That must be slow as a rock! Everyone knows that C is the best language in the world, I can't see why anyone would use this object rubbish. I mean that must be the reason I hear all these software projects keep failing, they're all using Java.
And as for security, Java's been out for years and we still get viruses! What gives I ask? When are people going to learn?
Purpose built processors don't usually help. Sure they start off fast, but unless you have a huge development budget (and Intel has a huge budget!) you quickly get outdeveloped and then you are slower.
I love the crusoe tech though. Because it's smaller it might help keep development costs down.
Hey, here's an idea. How about you read the report Mr Anonymous?