It was the first one to launch a manned spacecraft, and the first one to have a man in open space (i.e. outside the rocked, in a space suite).
Yuri almost died during his decent when his Vostok service module didn't detach properly.
Leonov almost died while trying to get back into Vokshod II...his space suit had ballooned up to the point where he didn't fit in the airlock. He had to partially deflate the suit to get back in.
Yup, not to mention the first satellite in orbit, the first probes to the Moon and most planets, the first space station...
Sputnik I didn't return any useful scientific data AT all. It was a completely useless design forced on Korolev by Kruschev(how do you spell that, anyway). Korolev wanted to wait for what became Sputnik II to be completed. On the other hand, Explorer I discovered the van allen radation belts, something even Sputnik II missed.
In terms of space probes: most soviet "firsts" in this area returned almost no useful data. They spent so much time and energy on being first that the spacecraft themselves were almost universally useless.
One must also remember that the soviets (And the russians since) have never made it out of the inner solar system. Their dislike of computer technology has prevented them from being able to plot the low-energy sling-shot trajectories required to fling spacecraft out to the outer planets. Of course the US has sent 3 or 4 generations of spacecraft out of the inner solar system.
So, in the end, they have only sent probes to the moon, mars, and venus. While the US has been to every planet apart from Pluto.
Finally, the first crew of their first useful (they had one or two failed launches) space station died on reentry.
So the question becomes: Yeah, they were first in some things during the early days of the space age, but most of their firsts either returned no information or almost killed their occupants; can they really be said to have lead the space race in any useful sense?
A single interrupt controller with IRQs from 0-63, or even 0-255, would be fine.
This would be a serious challenge...since each IRQ uses one physical wire on the bus (and thus going into the interrupt controller). Do you really want to add 64 wires to the PCI bus?
I think you've answered your own question there...
Why clean up the BIOS if no one uses it anyway?
Linux doesn't use it for anything other than a few initial hints on where certain devices are located, and perhaps for power management on laptops. Windows can still use it for accessing drives, but thats only because windows is so unstable that the proper hard drive drivers get clobbered from time to time. Linux only uses this part of the BIOS to pull the kernel into memory early during the boot process.
In Linux 2.2.x the VESA bios can be used to put a video card into graphics mode. But this is also done early during the boot process (before the switch to protected mode) and cannot be accessed again without a reboot. After boot the video card is accessed directly, in protected mode. This is, of course, of questionable interest, since it's just a way to work around stupid hardware suppliers who won't give out programming specs. A proper Linux box shouldn't contain such hardware in the first place.
PCI does a fine job of IRQ auto-configuration. Hell, even Apple has adopted it. One only really has interrupt problems when one tries to use ISA cards, and even that isn't a problem if one is halfway intelligent.
IRQ sharing is another matter, though. ISA boards just don't share IRQ's well (I don't think it's even officially allowed to have two boards driving an IRQ line at once on ISA), but again PCI solves this problem, too.
They'd be easy to hit because they dont' move relative to the ground.
I don't know about that...it just means that you have to move your laser around...
Of course, actually hitting a sat. in geostationary orbit (30000 miles (km?) away) with a beam that can actually harm it is practically impossible. For one thing the beam will have diverged far too much, and the atmosphere will interfere with targeting.
Polyus (I think that's right) was a Soviet orbital weapons platform they did indeed launch in the 1980s. Reportedly the booster carrying it up malfunctioned and it never reached orbit, but still, they tried breaking the treaty first.
The story I've heard is that the Polyus station's final stage was mounted at the very top of the booster stack (one of the few Energya launches) above the Polyus itself, so the whole station had to perform a 180 degree turn before this final stage ignited. This turn did not take place, so when the station figured out something was wrong (ie: it wasn't going to make orbit) it's self-destruct system went off.
Incedently, this was not the only soviet space station to have weapons on board. More then one Salyut station was fitted with a large canon. I don't know if any were ever fired, however.
The Scud was developed AS a nuclear missle. Until it hits, you can't tell what warhead has been installed. You won't see anything special from it's flight profile.
Uh, no. The Scud is little more than an upgraded V-2. It even uses carbon vanes for thrust vectoring. They were originally deployed by the Soviet army in the early 50s. Any nuclear weapon a modern Scud-using state could get their hands on would almost certainly be much too heavy for the scud to lift.
BTW, I've got some DIVX discs that I PAID to have permanently enabled. I've got my contract! It's valid forever right? With whoever takes over the DIVX consortium or buys up the pieces right?
I don't know, man...that last part kind of throws your sanity into question...
It's a technical problem for me. I browse behind both Squid and Junkbuster proxy servers. NYtimes gets confused by this and just sits there trying to force my browser to accept a cookie...over and over and over again. This is the only site I've ever seen do this. Hell if I'm going to play around with a setup which works on every other site in existance just for these idiots.
the government fell in love with the space shuttle, a brilliant idea, flawed execution.
I think the problem was that the government (well, congress) didn't fall in love with the shuttle. They cut the budget down so much that development was drawn out (beyond the lifetime of Skylab, for example), and high operational costs had to be accepted in favor of saving development funds.
the government fell in love with the space station, again good idea, crappy execution.
This is again a case where congress both didn't properly fund the program, and (more importantly) kept screwing around with the designs, forcing nasa to delay construction. Any of the early designs could be in orbit right now if congress had just kept their hands off things.
Of course the whole space station problem goes back to Nixon and the refusal to do another Saturn V production run. Building a space station using a vehicle designed for station resupply (ie: the shuttle) is just stupid.
The efficacy of the search hasn't changed any, so it doesn't really matter.
I think you've missed the point...the forces driving these changes DO end up harming the usefulness of the site...just look at dejanews, or the IMDB... Neither of these sites are nearly as useful as they once were. Dejanews is practically useless when used through the official web interface. Just wait, in a few months altavista will be rendered almost useless as well.
It's a perl script which will query dejanews for you and consolidate all of the found messages into one large html file which you can digest later off line.
My code will work anywhere, once someone ports the VM to it.
If you write decent C then your code will work "anywhere" once "anywhere" has a C compiler ported to it. And your code (again if you write it decently) will take advantage of many of the innate features of the hardware. Plus a C compiler will be available long before a java VM...
Don't get me wrong, Java was/is a neat idea. But portable, available, source code is so much better.
Hmm, do people prefer headphones or normal speakers? I think normal speakers work best for this type of thing.
Definitely speakers. Shuffling through paper documentation and running over to the closet for books is annoying when you're wearing headphones. Plus with the speakers you get the tactile experience as well...
Of course, if you're an Uberprogrammer then it doesn't matter, because you don't need the docs...
In Seattle KCTS (one of the 2 PBS stations) pretty regularly transmits HDTV these days... And I know KIRO used to transmit some with one of the early HDTV systems...I don';t know if they've moved to the modern one yet, though...
This is because the color component of NTSC (and PAL) is transmitted as phase changes to the chroma subcarrier... Unfortunately multipath and other annoyances to the signal can shift the phase of the overall signal so the color gets all screwed up. This is why NTSC sets have a Tint control.
PAL=Pay for Added Luxury
PAL actually stands for something in German...but it translates as "Phase Alternate Line". This is the same as the NTSC system except the phase of two adjacent scan lines are inverted to one another. So any overall phase shifts will be canceled out in the end. PAL sets have no Tint control.
Unfortunately decoding PAL requires the use of a one-frame acoustical delay line (a kind of analoge memory device), and at one time these were quite expensive, so PAL sets were more spendy than similar NTSC sets.
SECAM=System Essentially Contrary to American Method
SECAM is the French system. It's weird. It transmits the video information on an FM carrier (PAL and NTSC use AM)... It's generally assumed that the French did this for no other reason that to be different from everyone else. The Soviets chose the SECAM system so that their citizens couldn't watch non-Soviet transmissions.
France also at one point had an 800 line analog television system (B&W I think)... It used 21 MHz per channel...(NTSC uses 6 MHz, PAL 6 or 7)...
A PALplus picture has a 16:9 aspect ratio. It appears as a 16:9 letterboxed image with 430 active lines on conventional TVs, but a PALplus TV will display a 16:9 picture with 574 active lines (with extended vertical resolution to match). The full TV system bandwidth (5.0MHz on systems B/G, 5.5MHz on system I) is available for luminance detail. Cross colour effects are removed by use of so-called "Clean PAL" encoding and decoding. Put simply, Clean PAL encoding can be thought-of as the transmitter removing the sorts of signals (like fine patterned chequered shirts) which cause conventional PAL receivers to display stripey coloured interference bars.
There are other features as well (such as different Film and Video modes and ghost cancelation)...
Strangely, even though it took Europe quite a long time to move to color television (granted the war had something to do with this), it has been far more willing to add features to it's systems than the US has been. While we in the US have only added teletext and analogue stereo+sap, europeans have digital stereo, more teletext channels, data services, and of course Pal Plus. And of course PAL, with it's chroma phase alternation has far better color than NTSC.
I suspect much of this can be traced to the FCC's original decision to require that the US color system be compatable with the old US B&W system. Europe didn't have much legacy hardware to support.
I haven't looked into this in a while, but I believe algae and other single-celled photo-synthesizing organisms account for most of earth's oxygen generation. Forests and other higher-order plant life don't have much to do with it.
I'm attracted to their tables-capable text only browser as well, I don't think Mozilla has done that.
I thought that was interesting as well. But I get the impression that it was just a toy one of the programmers hacked together. It sounded like their marketing people (if opera is that large of a company) couldn't wrap their heads around a piece of text-mode software.
Well, it took what, 120+ subrevisions of 2.1 to hit 2.2? I just happen to think that it HASN'T been banged on enough.
Hold on there. The only reason 2.2 took so long is that Linus kept accepting feature changes even after he had called feature freezes (not that I blame him...those were generally very nifty features...). This had the unfortunate side effect of delaying a 2.2 stable release (although 2.1.80+ were all generally stable iirc). This also meant that far too much effort was wasted on back-porting new code to the 2.0.x kernels. Not only did this slow down 2.2 development, but it also destablized the 2.0.x tree with new features and therefor new bugs.
The idea with 2.3/2.4 is to shorten the cycle time by adding fewer new features at once. 2.3 has been in feature freeze for over 2 weeks now. It even looks like this freeze is going to stick.
The other point of all this is that there really aren't enough people running pre-release kernels. This is why there were problems with the early 2.2.x releases. Hopefully by having shorter devel cycles more people will be interested in trying the newer kernels (as there will be fewer dependency problems).
Open Source development should be faster then a closed source effort. The idea is to get the code into as many hands as possible. The only way to do that is to get it reasonably stable and inflict it on the world. People don't like to run the odd-numbered kernels (for good reason, it's too much of a moving target to code for), so you have to freeze it and move up to even numbers more quickly...
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Yuri almost died during his decent when his Vostok service module didn't detach properly.
Leonov almost died while trying to get back into Vokshod II...his space suit had ballooned up to the point where he didn't fit in the airlock. He had to partially deflate the suit to get back in.
Yup, not to mention the first satellite in orbit, the first probes to the Moon and most planets, the first space station...
Sputnik I didn't return any useful scientific data AT all. It was a completely useless design forced on Korolev by Kruschev(how do you spell that, anyway). Korolev wanted to wait for what became Sputnik II to be completed. On the other hand, Explorer I discovered the van allen radation belts, something even Sputnik II missed.
In terms of space probes: most soviet "firsts" in this area returned almost no useful data. They spent so much time and energy on being first that the spacecraft themselves were almost universally useless.
One must also remember that the soviets (And the russians since) have never made it out of the inner solar system. Their dislike of computer technology has prevented them from being able to plot the low-energy sling-shot trajectories required to fling spacecraft out to the outer planets. Of course the US has sent 3 or 4 generations of spacecraft out of the inner solar system.
So, in the end, they have only sent probes to the moon, mars, and venus. While the US has been to every planet apart from Pluto.
Finally, the first crew of their first useful (they had one or two failed launches) space station died on reentry.
So the question becomes: Yeah, they were first in some things during the early days of the space age, but most of their firsts either returned no information or almost killed their occupants; can they really be said to have lead the space race in any useful sense?
A single interrupt controller with IRQs from 0-63, or even 0-255, would be fine.
This would be a serious challenge...since each IRQ uses one physical wire on the bus (and thus going into the interrupt controller). Do you really want to add 64 wires to the PCI bus?
I think you've answered your own question there...
Why clean up the BIOS if no one uses it anyway?
Linux doesn't use it for anything other than a few initial hints on where certain devices are located, and perhaps for power management on laptops. Windows can still use it for accessing drives, but thats only because windows is so unstable that the proper hard drive drivers get clobbered from time to time. Linux only uses this part of the BIOS to pull the kernel into memory early during the boot process.
In Linux 2.2.x the VESA bios can be used to put a video card into graphics mode. But this is also done early during the boot process (before the switch to protected mode) and cannot be accessed again without a reboot. After boot the video card is accessed directly, in protected mode. This is, of course, of questionable interest, since it's just a way to work around stupid hardware suppliers who won't give out programming specs. A proper Linux box shouldn't contain such hardware in the first place.
PCI does a fine job of IRQ auto-configuration. Hell, even Apple has adopted it. One only really has interrupt problems when one tries to use ISA cards, and even that isn't a problem if one is halfway intelligent.
IRQ sharing is another matter, though. ISA boards just don't share IRQ's well (I don't think it's even officially allowed to have two boards driving an IRQ line at once on ISA), but again PCI solves this problem, too.
They'd be easy to hit because they dont' move relative to the ground.
I don't know about that...it just means that you have to move your laser around...
Of course, actually hitting a sat. in geostationary orbit (30000 miles (km?) away) with a beam that can actually harm it is practically impossible. For one thing the beam will have diverged far too much, and the atmosphere will interfere with targeting.
Polyus (I think that's right) was a Soviet orbital weapons platform they did indeed launch in the 1980s. Reportedly the booster carrying it up malfunctioned and it never reached orbit, but still, they tried breaking the treaty first.
The story I've heard is that the Polyus station's final stage was mounted at the very top of the booster stack (one of the few Energya launches) above the Polyus itself, so the whole station had to perform a 180 degree turn before this final stage ignited. This turn did not take place, so when the station figured out something was wrong (ie: it wasn't going to make orbit) it's self-destruct system went off.
Incedently, this was not the only soviet space station to have weapons on board. More then one Salyut station was fitted with a large canon. I don't know if any were ever fired, however.
The Scud was developed AS a nuclear missle. Until it hits, you can't tell what warhead has been installed. You won't see anything special from it's flight profile.
Uh, no. The Scud is little more than an upgraded V-2. It even uses carbon vanes for thrust vectoring. They were originally deployed by the Soviet army in the early 50s. Any nuclear weapon a modern Scud-using state could get their hands on would almost certainly be much too heavy for the scud to lift.
BTW, I've got some DIVX discs that I PAID to have permanently enabled. I've got my contract! It's valid forever right? With whoever takes over the DIVX consortium or buys up the pieces right?
I don't know, man...that last part kind of throws your sanity into question...
Same goes for zip disks and most other removable media...
It's a technical problem for me. I browse behind both Squid and Junkbuster proxy servers. NYtimes gets confused by this and just sits there trying to force my browser to accept a cookie...over and over and over again. This is the only site I've ever seen do this. Hell if I'm going to play around with a setup which works on every other site in existance just for these idiots.
somewhere along the line we lost our way.
the government fell in love with the space shuttle, a brilliant idea, flawed execution.
I think the problem was that the government (well, congress) didn't fall in love with the shuttle. They cut the budget down so much that development was drawn out (beyond the lifetime of Skylab, for example), and high operational costs had to be accepted in favor of saving development funds.
the government fell in love with the space station, again good idea, crappy execution.
This is again a case where congress both didn't properly fund the program, and (more importantly) kept screwing around with the designs, forcing nasa to delay construction. Any of the early designs could be in orbit right now if congress had just kept their hands off things.
Of course the whole space station problem goes back to Nixon and the refusal to do another Saturn V production run. Building a space station using a vehicle designed for station resupply (ie: the shuttle) is just stupid.
if we had only....
Intelligent people in washington?
I think you've missed the point...the forces driving these changes DO end up harming the usefulness of the site...just look at dejanews, or the IMDB... Neither of these sites are nearly as useful as they once were. Dejanews is practically useless when used through the official web interface. Just wait, in a few months altavista will be rendered almost useless as well.
You could try dejasearch http://homemade.hypermart.net/dejasearch/ ...
It's a perl script which will query dejanews for you and consolidate all of the found messages into one large html file which you can digest later off line.
If you write decent C then your code will work "anywhere" once "anywhere" has a C compiler ported to it. And your code (again if you write it decently) will take advantage of many of the innate features of the hardware. Plus a C compiler will be available long before a java VM...
Don't get me wrong, Java was/is a neat idea. But portable, available, source code is so much better.
Definitely speakers. Shuffling through paper documentation and running over to the closet for books is annoying when you're wearing headphones. Plus with the speakers you get the tactile experience as well...
Of course, if you're an Uberprogrammer then it doesn't matter, because you don't need the docs...
I agree. Animals is seriously under rated.
AHM isn't anything to sneeze at either...and Meddle has (albeit the studio version of) Echoes...
Early Floyd in general is under valued...
Beatles.
Led Zeppelin.
King Crimson.
Pink Floyd.
Artists and albums that discourage the swapping of CDs because it would feel nearly criminal to disrupt the story/mood the album develops as a whole.
Quite right... But you have to add Jethro Tull...and maybe Santana.
In Seattle KCTS (one of the 2 PBS stations) pretty regularly transmits HDTV these days... And I know KIRO used to transmit some with one of the early HDTV systems...I don';t know if they've moved to the modern one yet, though...
I though I would elaborate on these:
NTSC=Never The Same Color
This is because the color component of NTSC (and PAL) is transmitted as phase changes to the chroma subcarrier... Unfortunately multipath and other annoyances to the signal can shift the phase of the overall signal so the color gets all screwed up. This is why NTSC sets have a Tint control.
PAL=Pay for Added Luxury
PAL actually stands for something in German...but it translates as "Phase Alternate Line". This is the same as the NTSC system except the phase of two adjacent scan lines are inverted to one another. So any overall phase shifts will be canceled out in the end. PAL sets have no Tint control.
Unfortunately decoding PAL requires the use of a one-frame acoustical delay line (a kind of analoge memory device), and at one time these were quite expensive, so PAL sets were more spendy than similar NTSC sets.
SECAM=System Essentially Contrary to American Method
SECAM is the French system. It's weird. It transmits the video information on an FM carrier (PAL and NTSC use AM)... It's generally assumed that the French did this for no other reason that to be different from everyone else. The Soviets chose the SECAM system so that their citizens couldn't watch non-Soviet transmissions.
France also at one point had an 800 line analog television system (B&W I think)... It used 21 MHz per channel...(NTSC uses 6 MHz, PAL 6 or 7)...
At http://iiit.swan.ac.uk/~iisteve/palplu s.html is a very good technical primer on Pal Plus...it's old (1995), but I suspect the technology hasn't changed much since then.
To quote part of it:
There are other features as well (such as different Film and Video modes and ghost cancelation)...
Strangely, even though it took Europe quite a long time to move to color television (granted the war had something to do with this), it has been far more willing to add features to it's systems than the US has been. While we in the US have only added teletext and analogue stereo+sap, europeans have digital stereo, more teletext channels, data services, and of course Pal Plus. And of course PAL, with it's chroma phase alternation has far better color than NTSC.
I suspect much of this can be traced to the FCC's original decision to require that the US color system be compatable with the old US B&W system. Europe didn't have much legacy hardware to support.
I haven't looked into this in a while, but I believe algae and other single-celled photo-synthesizing organisms account for most of earth's oxygen generation. Forests and other higher-order plant life don't have much to do with it.
I'm attracted to their tables-capable text only browser as well, I don't think Mozilla has done that.
I thought that was interesting as well. But I get the impression that it was just a toy one of the programmers hacked together. It sounded like their marketing people (if opera is that large of a company) couldn't wrap their heads around a piece of text-mode software.
2.3 has been frozen for about 3 weeks now. The question is: will it stay that way. So far it looks good...
Well, it took what, 120+ subrevisions of 2.1 to hit 2.2? I just happen to think that it HASN'T been banged on enough.
Hold on there. The only reason 2.2 took so long is that Linus kept accepting feature changes even after he had called feature freezes (not that I blame him...those were generally very nifty features...). This had the unfortunate side effect of delaying a 2.2 stable release (although 2.1.80+ were all generally stable iirc). This also meant that far too much effort was wasted on back-porting new code to the 2.0.x kernels. Not only did this slow down 2.2 development, but it also destablized the 2.0.x tree with new features and therefor new bugs.
The idea with 2.3/2.4 is to shorten the cycle time by adding fewer new features at once. 2.3 has been in feature freeze for over 2 weeks now. It even looks like this freeze is going to stick.
The other point of all this is that there really aren't enough people running pre-release kernels. This is why there were problems with the early 2.2.x releases. Hopefully by having shorter devel cycles more people will be interested in trying the newer kernels (as there will be fewer dependency problems).
Open Source development should be faster then a closed source effort. The idea is to get the code into as many hands as possible. The only way to do that is to get it reasonably stable and inflict it on the world. People don't like to run the odd-numbered kernels (for good reason, it's too much of a moving target to code for), so you have to freeze it and move up to even numbers more quickly...
So you need a 64 bit machine.....emacs can do anything...