Oracle has a solid core DB engine. It dates back to the seventies, but it has evolved and it's still really good. Everything built around it is pretty much crap. But people buy from Oracle for the DB engine, then get stuck buying a lot of other super-expensive, bad quality software. I love PostgreSQL, and it's getting better every day, but there's still some stuff the core Oracle engine did ten years ago you can't get anywhere else.
Actually, I take that back. Apple would never be happy just getting to orbit. Steve Jobs would be giving his presentation from the moon, if not Mars.:)
Right, but these are guys that have never delivered before. And there have been many delays. Didn't SpaceX *promise* they would have humans orbit by several years ago? Now, I don't mean to lay blame, this is hard stuff, and it takes a lot of money. But you run into the same problem as with many other tech companies. Yet get vapourware that often never shows up.
Now, if *Apple* was into space exploration, they would remain completely silent, then one day they would actually launch Steve Jobs into space, and he'd give a live press conference about it while floating in zero-G.:)
People have been promising private spaceflight for decades. I admit, it's getting closer, but the level of experience and capability is still very limited. I hope you're right and we have a new renaissance in space travel, but I'm very skeptical. But, I guess we just have to wait and see.
Exactly, I have family members in the same boat. You've got people with Macs *still under warrantee* (if they got Applecare) and they won't be able to run the latest version of Firefox without upgrading the OS? Not cool.
This is far too premature. Firefox is still supported on Windows 2000, yet Tiger was still shipping on new Mac less than three years ago. Lots of people are still running this on G3 machines that can't upgrade to Leopard. I think this is just too soon.
So, without the new Constellation Program, we're looking at what, fifteen years before the US has manned spaceflight capability again? Even if NASA spends time doing research for Mars, a lot of practical and institutional knowledge is going to be lost during this period. There was already going to be five years of depending on the Russians to get to the ISS, now if this is extended, we could be looking at ten years or more. I hate to say it, but this really looks like the death of US space exploration, not a refocusing as the Obama administration is trying to spin it.
Now that the return to the moon has been cancelled, I wonder if NASA will extend Shuttle missions beyond this year? They have already hinted they may extend the life of the ISS, but are they going to rely on the Russians for the next ten years?
I can't believe governments are spending so much time and effort going after file sharing. The types of punishment being proposed are also completely out of proportion. Why not spend this much effort going after other widespread crimes such as rape and human trafficking? Also, shouldn't the government be spending a lot more time worrying about environmental damage and climate change? Our futures are at stake, yet the biggest problem seems to be people exchanging bits on the Internet.
Well, of course. No one was storing music or video back in ancient Greece.:) We have much more *information* now, obviously. But if our civilization were to collapse, what would archaeologists of the future find? Only dust. Books (especially older books) can last hundreds of years. Stone tablets can last thousands. We have much more useful and efficient ways of using information, but that has nothing to do with how long it might last in physical form.
Paper books will always live. One the one hand, there are still a billion people in the world without access to regular electricity. On the other, we might have limited resources in the future to make new electronic devices, due to peak oil and climate change. Yet, we can always make paper on a small, local scale if necessary. But electronic devices require a large industrial infrastructure.
After all, we have thousands of years of written human history, but only a tiny moment of digital history. It would be presumptuous of us to assume the latter will last longer than the former.
Yes, but it was way behind schedule and for a long time had only a minimum crew. They needed to spend all their time just maintaining the station which didn't leave any time for scientific research. Now, finally, they have a full crew and can actually get down to business.
The purpose of this isn't really to teraform Mars. That is way too far off in the future. At this point we don't even have an idea when humans will finally get there. The real goal of this research is to understand the limits to life in extreme environments. This can help us to better understand where we might find life and whether it is possible that there might still be life on Mars today. Glad to see some useful research being done on the ISS after all the time and effort to get it up there.
But it's their time to spend as they want. There are people working on a new port of Firefox to Mac OS 9 (Classilla). That's an operating system that hasn't been updated in 10 years. But if people are having fun doing this, that's great. If the product was closed source, there would simply be no option.
This is the beauty of open source. Apache 1.3 is still widely used, and many products are still based on it. If the Apache Foundation no longer wants to maintain it, others are free to pick it up and carry on. I wouldn't be surprised if this happened sooner rather than later.
I think that's partly true. We also live in a culture that values conformity and cannot accept differences. We value physical strength over weakness, which I think was made clear by some of the other comments. We also have fairly strict ideas about gender, which can also tie into previous issue. But these are not universal truths or values, and children have grown up in other societies and cultures where these problems did not exist. So, the question has to go to a higher meta-level. Why does our culture create and promoting bullying, and why is that the case?
Interesting, but very the analysis lacks any cultural context. Is this really the fault (or failing) of the victims, or a consequence of the values and morals of our society and culture? The only way to answer that question is through a comparison to other cultures, past and present. The report seems to accept certain social behaviours as given or natural when perhaps they are only specific to our culture. I think more study is needed.
We did it for WWII. We rationed, cut back and completely changed the economy virtually overnight. In the UK they did the same, while they actually had bombs falling on them.
Guess what? We can probably solve this problem with half the effort our grandparents gave to secure our freedom. Don't our grandchilren deserve as much? No one's talking about caves or the stone age here, please don't be silly.
Well, I hope you're right. The problem, as I mention in the article, is that we won't have the cheap oil we had in the sixties to let us bootstrap the whole process. Once we're well past peak oil, rocket fuel will be much harder to make and much more expensive. That will also mean that the energy return on anything we find in space will have to be much higher in order to make it worthwhile. Of course, if we hadn't treated oil as a throwaway commodity for the past 100 years, we wouldn't have this problem.
Then there's the issue of global warming and climate change, which aside from the environmental costs and human lives lost, will likely contribute to more wars, more humanitarian crises and less government stability. Not a situation where space exploration is easy.
Yes, I don't know what the iPad battery looks like. They did do special molding for the new batteries in the Macbook Pros, which is how they were able to increase battery life so much. They have a page with a video describing this:
I'm sure they are doing similar things with their iPhones and iPods, and I don't see why they wouldn't do the same with the iPad. They want these products to be as thin and light as possible. I think that's likely the primary motivation. Is there a financial benefit by having people pay to replace their batteries? Sure, but that's secondary, product design is primary for Apple. At least, that's how I see it, I can't see in Steve Jobs' head.:)
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Oracle has a solid core DB engine. It dates back to the seventies, but it has evolved and it's still really good. Everything built around it is pretty much crap. But people buy from Oracle for the DB engine, then get stuck buying a lot of other super-expensive, bad quality software. I love PostgreSQL, and it's getting better every day, but there's still some stuff the core Oracle engine did ten years ago you can't get anywhere else.
Actually, I take that back. Apple would never be happy just getting to orbit. Steve Jobs would be giving his presentation from the moon, if not Mars. :)
Right, but these are guys that have never delivered before. And there have been many delays. Didn't SpaceX *promise* they would have humans orbit by several years ago? Now, I don't mean to lay blame, this is hard stuff, and it takes a lot of money. But you run into the same problem as with many other tech companies. Yet get vapourware that often never shows up.
Now, if *Apple* was into space exploration, they would remain completely silent, then one day they would actually launch Steve Jobs into space, and he'd give a live press conference about it while floating in zero-G. :)
People have been promising private spaceflight for decades. I admit, it's getting closer, but the level of experience and capability is still very limited. I hope you're right and we have a new renaissance in space travel, but I'm very skeptical. But, I guess we just have to wait and see.
That assumes the only goal is science.
Exactly, I have family members in the same boat. You've got people with Macs *still under warrantee* (if they got Applecare) and they won't be able to run the latest version of Firefox without upgrading the OS? Not cool.
This is far too premature. Firefox is still supported on Windows 2000, yet Tiger was still shipping on new Mac less than three years ago. Lots of people are still running this on G3 machines that can't upgrade to Leopard. I think this is just too soon.
So, without the new Constellation Program, we're looking at what, fifteen years before the US has manned spaceflight capability again? Even if NASA spends time doing research for Mars, a lot of practical and institutional knowledge is going to be lost during this period. There was already going to be five years of depending on the Russians to get to the ISS, now if this is extended, we could be looking at ten years or more. I hate to say it, but this really looks like the death of US space exploration, not a refocusing as the Obama administration is trying to spin it.
http://www.watchinghistory.com/2009/11/future-of-space-exploration.html
Now that the return to the moon has been cancelled, I wonder if NASA will extend Shuttle missions beyond this year? They have already hinted they may extend the life of the ISS, but are they going to rely on the Russians for the next ten years?
Yes, our economy is now based on massive consumption and yet we don't *make* anything anymore. Maybe that's actually the real problem.
I can't believe governments are spending so much time and effort going after file sharing. The types of punishment being proposed are also completely out of proportion. Why not spend this much effort going after other widespread crimes such as rape and human trafficking? Also, shouldn't the government be spending a lot more time worrying about environmental damage and climate change? Our futures are at stake, yet the biggest problem seems to be people exchanging bits on the Internet.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, of course. No one was storing music or video back in ancient Greece. :) We have much more *information* now, obviously. But if our civilization were to collapse, what would archaeologists of the future find? Only dust. Books (especially older books) can last hundreds of years. Stone tablets can last thousands. We have much more useful and efficient ways of using information, but that has nothing to do with how long it might last in physical form.
Paper books will always live. One the one hand, there are still a billion people in the world without access to regular electricity. On the other, we might have limited resources in the future to make new electronic devices, due to peak oil and climate change. Yet, we can always make paper on a small, local scale if necessary. But electronic devices require a large industrial infrastructure.
After all, we have thousands of years of written human history, but only a tiny moment of digital history. It would be presumptuous of us to assume the latter will last longer than the former.
http://www.selfdestructivebastards.com/2009/10/ebooks-versus-paper.html
So I guess the real choice is whether you want Bill Gates to have all your data, or Steve Jobs. But either way, google already has it. :)
Yes, but it was way behind schedule and for a long time had only a minimum crew. They needed to spend all their time just maintaining the station which didn't leave any time for scientific research. Now, finally, they have a full crew and can actually get down to business.
The purpose of this isn't really to teraform Mars. That is way too far off in the future. At this point we don't even have an idea when humans will finally get there. The real goal of this research is to understand the limits to life in extreme environments. This can help us to better understand where we might find life and whether it is possible that there might still be life on Mars today. Glad to see some useful research being done on the ISS after all the time and effort to get it up there.
But it's their time to spend as they want. There are people working on a new port of Firefox to Mac OS 9 (Classilla). That's an operating system that hasn't been updated in 10 years. But if people are having fun doing this, that's great. If the product was closed source, there would simply be no option.
This is the beauty of open source. Apache 1.3 is still widely used, and many products are still based on it. If the Apache Foundation no longer wants to maintain it, others are free to pick it up and carry on. I wouldn't be surprised if this happened sooner rather than later.
I think that's partly true. We also live in a culture that values conformity and cannot accept differences. We value physical strength over weakness, which I think was made clear by some of the other comments. We also have fairly strict ideas about gender, which can also tie into previous issue. But these are not universal truths or values, and children have grown up in other societies and cultures where these problems did not exist. So, the question has to go to a higher meta-level. Why does our culture create and promoting bullying, and why is that the case?
Interesting, but very the analysis lacks any cultural context. Is this really the fault (or failing) of the victims, or a consequence of the values and morals of our society and culture? The only way to answer that question is through a comparison to other cultures, past and present. The report seems to accept certain social behaviours as given or natural when perhaps they are only specific to our culture. I think more study is needed.
Maybe if the US stopped wasting money on boondoggles like this, they wouldn't have had to cancel plans to return to the Moon.
We did it for WWII. We rationed, cut back and completely changed the economy virtually overnight. In the UK they did the same, while they actually had bombs falling on them.
http://www.selfdestructivebastards.com/2009/12/world-war-ii.html
Guess what? We can probably solve this problem with half the effort our grandparents gave to secure our freedom. Don't our grandchilren deserve as much? No one's talking about caves or the stone age here, please don't be silly.
Well, I hope you're right. The problem, as I mention in the article, is that we won't have the cheap oil we had in the sixties to let us bootstrap the whole process. Once we're well past peak oil, rocket fuel will be much harder to make and much more expensive. That will also mean that the energy return on anything we find in space will have to be much higher in order to make it worthwhile. Of course, if we hadn't treated oil as a throwaway commodity for the past 100 years, we wouldn't have this problem.
Then there's the issue of global warming and climate change, which aside from the environmental costs and human lives lost, will likely contribute to more wars, more humanitarian crises and less government stability. Not a situation where space exploration is easy.
Yes, I don't know what the iPad battery looks like. They did do special molding for the new batteries in the Macbook Pros, which is how they were able to increase battery life so much. They have a page with a video describing this:
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/battery/
I'm sure they are doing similar things with their iPhones and iPods, and I don't see why they wouldn't do the same with the iPad. They want these products to be as thin and light as possible. I think that's likely the primary motivation. Is there a financial benefit by having people pay to replace their batteries? Sure, but that's secondary, product design is primary for Apple. At least, that's how I see it, I can't see in Steve Jobs' head. :)