I don't know what anyone would ever do with a hard drive bigger than 10GB
Probably this doesn't deserve much of a response, but... let's see. Currently at home I'm working on a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) project which relies upon large aerial photographs that averge 250MB each. It doesn't take long to fill 10GB at that rate. My girlfriend is an artist and she regularly generates intermediate Photoshop files in the 20MB range. In the office, I regularly deal with databases which require several GB of storage space.
So, for what it's worth (which is probably not much), there you have it: real-world evidence that people really can take advantage of large drives.
More importantly, the asteroids would be more VALUABLE to reach than the moon. Actually the moon is relatively easy to reach, there just isn't much there to make it worth visiting.
The real trick, as outlined in The Case for Mars, is to establish a Mars waypoint. That opens up the entire asteroid belt for mining. Due to unpleasant technical details (see the book, IANAE [engineer]), it's apparently much, much easier and cheaper to mine asteroids from a Mars base than directly from Earth. Apparently even considering the vast mineral resources of the asteroids, once you get it all back to Earth, if you don't have a Mars waypoint you'll have spent more than you could profit.
None of which is particularly relevant to the main topic, of course...
Whether an app has a GUI or not is absolutely irrelevant to whether it can use stdin/stdout. Fawning over the "elegance and power of the unix command line" is particularly nauseating. Actually, I suspect this is how he ended up with "insightful". A little public-stroking seems to go a long way around here. "Gee all you unix guys sure are smart."
Both KDE and Gnome have made an art form out of silent use of their respective initial letters
An art form? Jesus, dude, you need to get out of the house more often. The crappy naming "conventions" of *nix software is very much a part of the reason Linux remains so unapproachable to the general public. I say "conventions" in quotes because, as is made apparent by this thread, the actual rules behind these conventions are not particularly useful for figuring out what the fsck any of this stuff actually does.
No matter how cute you kids may think all of this is, it still looks like pointless geek-talk to the rest of the world, and will continue to doom you to obscurity as an also-ran in the OS world. A small but critical piece of the puzzle...
Let me take a quick inventory of my latest motherboard full of PnP goodness... let's see... LAN card, sound card, video card, SCSI card, video card, six-zillion-button mouse, and even a USB Nikon camera.
Hell, even most monitors are PnP these days.
Bitch about MS or Windows all you want, but at least restrict yourself to facts, or reasonable facsimilies thereof. And you kids wonder why the profit-making world still snickers when somebody says the L-word...
What a weird coincidence. I'm reading "The Case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin (Amazon). Oddly, just before going to bed last night I read a few paragraphs which address this very issue, and what do I find this morning on/. but a New Miracle Engine post...
Here's the clincher: a faster engine will not make any significant difference. A few posts have noted some of the important aspects of a successful mission -- weight, supplies, etc. Other important aspects are setting yourself up for the right return window, and for an acceptable hierarchy of safe bail-out options.
The optimal launch scenario is when Mars and Earth are in conjunction alignment -- on opposite sides of the sun. At a speed of around 3km/s everything lines up very nicely, and these speeds can be attained using plain old 60's Saturn V launch platforms, or some modern-day equivalent (NASA has many such designs; for example, some based on alternate clusterings of shuttle boosters).
This launch configuration carries a fixed time-to-Mars of about 180-240 days. Going any faster would just complicate the issue (and eventually cause you to miss your target, which would pretty clearly be A Bad Thing.)
Obviously since Dr. Zubrin wrote a whole book the subject I can't get too detailed here, but if this topic interests you, GET THIS BOOK. Hell, the hardcover is only $17 and I think the softcover was something like $11. Most of us IT guys have made that much jack just browsing/. today...
The book rules, it's very interesting and informative, and it will piss you off that we aren't 75% there already. However, it's better to be pissed off and well-informed than techno-dazzled and blithely assuming NASA is spending wisely, which is what I personally suspect is behind a lot of these enthusiastic "KEWL" replies...
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Probably this doesn't deserve much of a response, but... let's see. Currently at home I'm working on a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) project which relies upon large aerial photographs that averge 250MB each. It doesn't take long to fill 10GB at that rate. My girlfriend is an artist and she regularly generates intermediate Photoshop files in the 20MB range. In the office, I regularly deal with databases which require several GB of storage space.
So, for what it's worth (which is probably not much), there you have it: real-world evidence that people really can take advantage of large drives.
Been there, done that. Under Windows this is known as COM Automation, and has been part of the COM spec for about six or seven years...
Ha.
Go forth and learn before you run your mouth again.
More importantly, the asteroids would be more VALUABLE to reach than the moon. Actually the moon is relatively easy to reach, there just isn't much there to make it worth visiting.
The real trick, as outlined in The Case for Mars, is to establish a Mars waypoint. That opens up the entire asteroid belt for mining. Due to unpleasant technical details (see the book, IANAE [engineer]), it's apparently much, much easier and cheaper to mine asteroids from a Mars base than directly from Earth. Apparently even considering the vast mineral resources of the asteroids, once you get it all back to Earth, if you don't have a Mars waypoint you'll have spent more than you could profit.
None of which is particularly relevant to the main topic, of course...
Whether an app has a GUI or not is absolutely irrelevant to whether it can use stdin/stdout. Fawning over the "elegance and power of the unix command line" is particularly nauseating. Actually, I suspect this is how he ended up with "insightful". A little public-stroking seems to go a long way around here. "Gee all you unix guys sure are smart."
How's that for insightful?
An art form? Jesus, dude, you need to get out of the house more often. The crappy naming "conventions" of *nix software is very much a part of the reason Linux remains so unapproachable to the general public. I say "conventions" in quotes because, as is made apparent by this thread, the actual rules behind these conventions are not particularly useful for figuring out what the fsck any of this stuff actually does.
No matter how cute you kids may think all of this is, it still looks like pointless geek-talk to the rest of the world, and will continue to doom you to obscurity as an also-ran in the OS world. A small but critical piece of the puzzle...
The actual irony is that you Linux-types are getting so worked up over this, but old Netcraft sez upnp.org is running IIS4. ;)
Let me take a quick inventory of my latest motherboard full of PnP goodness... let's see... LAN card, sound card, video card, SCSI card, video card, six-zillion-button mouse, and even a USB Nikon camera.
Hell, even most monitors are PnP these days.
Bitch about MS or Windows all you want, but at least restrict yourself to facts, or reasonable facsimilies thereof. And you kids wonder why the profit-making world still snickers when somebody says the L-word...
Actually according to his web site, it does say it's under GPL.
Here's the clincher: a faster engine will not make any significant difference. A few posts have noted some of the important aspects of a successful mission -- weight, supplies, etc. Other important aspects are setting yourself up for the right return window, and for an acceptable hierarchy of safe bail-out options.
The optimal launch scenario is when Mars and Earth are in conjunction alignment -- on opposite sides of the sun. At a speed of around 3km/s everything lines up very nicely, and these speeds can be attained using plain old 60's Saturn V launch platforms, or some modern-day equivalent (NASA has many such designs; for example, some based on alternate clusterings of shuttle boosters).
This launch configuration carries a fixed time-to-Mars of about 180-240 days. Going any faster would just complicate the issue (and eventually cause you to miss your target, which would pretty clearly be A Bad Thing.)
Obviously since Dr. Zubrin wrote a whole book the subject I can't get too detailed here, but if this topic interests you, GET THIS BOOK. Hell, the hardcover is only $17 and I think the softcover was something like $11. Most of us IT guys have made that much jack just browsing /. today...
The book rules, it's very interesting and informative, and it will piss you off that we aren't 75% there already. However, it's better to be pissed off and well-informed than techno-dazzled and blithely assuming NASA is spending wisely, which is what I personally suspect is behind a lot of these enthusiastic "KEWL" replies...