There are better languages than JavaScript. Stop with this AJAX/DHTML buzzword wankery.
Such as? Name a single language that is ubiquitous as JavaScript, runs in all W3C compliant web browsers, and can provide the features we've been discussing?
I'll save you the trouble: You can't. JavaScript sucks sometimes, but it's the only language we have available to meet the needs of Web Applications. And make no mistake, AJAX may be a buzzword for XMLHttpRequest, but DHTML is not a buzzword. It is a very real technology with very real applications. If you want to make a lot of money as an expert in up to date technologies, you'd be wise to learn it now.
$500+ per year for an internet connection just so you can edit static documents wherever you go? MS Office is cheaper than that
Fantastic. Tell me, when does it support automation?
As soon as someone writes it into the software. Why? Do you think that JavaScript is somehow turing incomplete?
How about JavaScriptOffice interoperability with third-party products using a published API?
Geez, couldn't you have picked something a little harder? Plugins can easily be added through dynamically loaded JavaScript, server side updates, or a combination there of.
How long is it going to take for JavaScriptOffice to match even one tiny portion of Microsoft Office's functionality?
Well, that depends on how long it takes them to program it, which is usually a function of how much money is sunk into it.
(End of JavaScript love-fest thread; it's been a pleasure.)
I really wish I could reciprocate, but your poor understanding of the platform combined with your poor technical ability and lack of imagination has made it more frustrating than profitable. Please come back when you have something more vague to argue than "it won't work."
How does OpenOffice save its files so much faster than JavaScriptOffice? It uses fantastic technology known as the local hard drive.
You, sir, have failed it. Given that OOo does a COMPLETE save to disk every time it saves a file, JavaScriptOffice (assuming it sent updates in a fashion similar to what I described) would be WAY faster than OOo.
Once again, no network-based version of Office will ever take off so long as you need to maintain an Internet connection at all times. Why should I be sitting on a plane* unable to compose a letter to grandma because the JavaScriptOffice server isn't accessible?
Did you figure out HTAs yet? Let me know when you hear that popping noise.
You sir, would fail your software engineering courses with thinking like that. (Not to mention a Computer Science degree for failing to follow data structures.)
Here's a hint for you: Every action performed by the user can be recorded as an atomic event. If those atomic events are saved, packaged up, and sent to the server at regular intervals, the server side copy could be kept up to date with a minimal amount of bandwidth.
Now, consider for a moment: How does MS Office save it's files so much faster than OpenOffice? Here's a hint. It records atomic updates...
Unless you're willing to spend $700 per employee per year on Verizon Wireless data subscriptions, "application availability from any location" is not true.
I'll take HTA for $500, Alex.
# Open two Firefox windows: one with your really important document and one with a page that crashes Firefox. Poof: no more important document editing for you.
I just tried it with GMail. My document was still under the drafts label when I reopened the application. Who'd have thunk that designers could account for crashes, eh?
Why do you think I (and others) have been screaming for SVG? It's the final piece of the puzzle that will allow us to get rid of the last kludge in the stack. (i.e. Server generated images.) With Opera and Mozilla working to make SVG a required part of the browser, the future looks very bright indeed.:-)
By your logic, that means that an office suite should run on the Game Boy as well.
You see a problem with this? The Gameboy has the necessary processor and graphics hardware. What it's lacking (which AJAX/DHTML *do* have) is the proper input devices. Without proper I/O devices, making an Office Suite would be pointless. It's simply too tedious to interface with the device.
If you had your eyes open, you should now realize that there's no technical reason why a proper Office Suite cannot be done in AJAX/DHTML. None at all. Your ravings about "kludges" haven't been true since the DOM was made into a proper standard. The fact that most people don't know how to use the DOM is no reason to claim that it won't work. In fact, most of the resistence to AJAX applications has come from the camps who've never done a proper DOM program in their life. If they're lucky, they know that the standard exists. The fact that the standard covers everything from pixel perfect layout to a proper event model just happens to escape their notice.
Do me a favor, will you? Go to this link and click on the word "Lemmings" to the right of the picture. This should pop up a game window of Lemmings. Once you've played for a few minutes to get a feel for it, try to figure out what technologies it uses. When you think you know, come back here and we'll discuss your answers and how possible a full Office Suite is in DHTML/AJAX.
Anyone else remember the whole "Network Computer" concept of having a stripped-down machine that accessed applications and documents from a central server?
I do, but I'd have a hard time classifying them as "stripped down".;-)
Why tie an important application to the weakest link in any system (the network) and a foundation that was clearly not made to handle such demands (a web browser)?
1. Because tying your applications to the network affords a great number of features that can't exist (or exist poorly) in disparate systems. Such features include: centralized storage, powerful document search engines, automatic document sharing, application availability from any location, and protection against massive data loss through the failure of a client machine.
2. Modern Web Browsers actually are designed as application platforms. They have been since the days of Netscape 4. They just haven't been all that good at it until recently.
* No, AJAX is *NOT* good enough. It's fine for email. It's not good enough for anything else.
AJAX/DHTML is good enough. It's the programmers that aren't. Most of these "Web Office" products are really nothing more than beautified HTML Editor components disguised as something we haven't seen before. The types of features that make a Word Processor a real Word Processor are missing because no one else has done the work for them. Not to mention the lack of spreadsheets, presentation software, and database interfaces.
I don't know when it's going to percolate through the industry that you have to actually do a lot of work to be a leader and make money. If you just slap stuff together off the shelf, your competitors will be able to follow. Then while you're all arguing, a REAL company will pay talented professionals to develop software that actually meets the needs of customers.
Anyone else remember WordPerfect for Java?
Yeah, I remember. I also remember that it was badly planned from the get-go. If Corel had been really trying, they wouldn't have released a suite as a set of Applets. ThinkFree came along a few years later and showed that it was quite doable to replicate MS Office in Java.
I guess it's more understandable at lower levels, but you'd think that at the CEO level they might want to make sure they're getting what they paid for.
The thing is that he'd been with Radio Shack for 11 years, and become the top sales associate before being offered the job as CEO. Whatever checks might have happened, probably didn't happen 11 years ago. Since then, no one had any reason to question his education. He was a full time employee with an excellent record. What else was necessary?
After he crashed and burned the company, people started paying attention to who he was and where he came from.
Unforunately, they wanted to see her paystubs before they officially gave her the offer letter. And when they found out she was lying, she got nothing.
I have a feeling that the amount she gave was unreasonably high. Every year we hear a new article that gives the average wages someone in our position makes. Unfortunately, many technologists believe these averages to be around their actual market value. That simply isn't true. Some people have exceptionally high wages due to being in an invaluable position. (Been there, done that, both glad and sad it's over.) These salaries drag the industry average upwards, creating data that would make it appear that most technology workers are underpaid. Thus workers often hope for unreasonably high salaries when they switch jobs.
However, a new job will almost never want to match those figures unless they really want you on-board. In your friend's case, her high salary may have been a strong indication to them that she is an exceptional employee. But if they're basing their evaluations on a high salary, they probably will want proof of it. Just imagine how poor she looked in their eyes when they found she had not only lied about her salary (somewhat bad), but had significantly overstated her wages? Yeah, pretty bad. So bad that their opinion would have immediately went from hero to zero.
Each job negotiation is a delicate process with no hard and fast rules. So there's no telling what may work better. Generally I'd recommend telling the company to give you an offer if you don't want to state your real wages, but sometimes that has the exact opposite effect of what you want. Even if you read the interviewer fine, he/she may not be the one who finally has to be convinced. (You may not even see that person.) So tread carefully, and realize that it doesn't always work out.
If you absolutely *must* lie, though, try to explain the differences as bonuses in previous years. They're a bit more difficult to check, and sound quite good. (Though you may have to lie even more to explain what the bonuses were for.) Of course, once a company has your SSN info, it's all over. You just have to hope that your future boss doesn't check your tax information and/or credit report before hiring. (Note that many companies check credit reports as a method of protecting against embezzlement and position abuse.):-/
This could so seriously rock. Every time I need a library to do a specific function, I always have to do some searching to find all of the competing options. Invariably, at least a couple of options get missed as you sort through the excess nonsense and out of date information. (Sometimes it's the best solution that gets missed.) I can't count how many times I've wished there was a simpler way to get all the competing options.
And then there's the issue of missing modules that are referenced by other code. Usually you have to find them by trial and error. In a code search engine, (theoretically) it will simply come back with all instances of the constant I put in. Which means that I can locate the missing module faster than ever before!
If this works, Google will have seriously made the lives of thousands of programmers that much easier.:-)
Dude, seriously. I know you have an emotional need to show off your intelligence due to personal insecurity, but many people don't want to know. They want to figure it out for themselves. That's part of the fun.
I wonder what takes longer, reading my solution or deducing it from scratch...
Depends upon your age and experience. Someone exposed to higher mathematics would have little to no problem deducing the answer. Most others would attempt a solution through trial and error.
Very good. Except now you've spoiled it for everyone else. If you had posted the Petals Around the Rose solution, quite a few people would be screaming for your head.;-)
Somehow this strikes me as seeming really true, even if just from my own experience.
My first reaction was, "Hell, I could have told them that!"
I thought it was common knowledge that one of the best ways to attack a problem is to review the materials, give it a rest, then come back with a fresh perspective? I've always attributed the bursts of inspiration that come from this to the "unconcious processor." Many people refer to it as "letting it churn in the back of your head." One way or another, most of the people I know seem to be cognizant of the fact that their unconcious is an excellent place to work problems out.
What really convinced me of the true power of unconcious thought was a puzzle someone gave me when I was a teen. The puzzle consisted of an 8 cell grid drawn on a piece of paper. You had to fill each cell with a number from 1 through 8. The challenge was to place the numbers such that no consecutive numbers were adjacent to each other in the horizontal, vertical, or diagonal directions. The guy who showed me the puzzle had supposedly known it for 20 years, but had never solved it. I tried my hand at it quite a bit before bed that night. Finally I just let it go for the moment so I could get some sleep. As I started to drift off, I saw the puzzle in my head. As I watched in my mind, all the numbers dropped into place one by one.
I popped out of bed, grabbed a piece of paper, and replicated what I had just visualized. Sure enough, it was the solution to the puzzle! My unconcious mind had solved a problem that my concious mind hadn't been able to tackle after hours of trying! After that, I learned to rely more on shoving a problem back into my unconcious, then waiting for a solution to work its way forward.:-)
The things we want to learn are very specialized, and that takes specialized equipment. Just look at the Mars probes we've sent. Two rovers, ground penetrating radar, communications. That doesn't sound very standard to me.
Rovers are a trickier issue, but there's nothing all that odd about ground penetrating radar and communications relays. At some point NASA would like to build a packet network throughout the solar system (to improve communications), so I think you'll only see more communications instruments, not less.
Not to mention the environments are quite different. A Mars probe can use solar cells to power itself. Pluto though is so far away that you need a nuclear power source as the sun is so dim at that distance.
The large majority of probes we send are space-based, so environmental concerns are a rare concern. Nuclear and solar power are both fairly standard on space probes. I see no reason why a standardized framework can't be developed. At the very least you can have a standardized chassis designed for nuclear, and a standardized chassis designed for solar. The most desirable solution would be a single chassis that could support both power types.
Many of the instruments are pretty standard, but such a chassis would still need the ability to mount non-standard instruments. That's not a big deal though, because you'd have to pay for that instrument whether you used a standardized probe or not. The key is to ensure that the instrument can be mounted on the probe. Standardizing means that the restrictions are known at the time of the instrument's design rather than having to redesign the probe and the instrument several times to account for changes incurred during development. Standardizing also means that the instrument doesn't have to be designed again should another mission ever need it. The design could be pulled off the shelf and sent to manufacturing immediately. That's a tremendous savings in R&D!
FWIW, the ESA is reusing their Mars Express probe for the Venus Express mission. So there is a bit of precident here.
You need to get the thing to the space station to begin with, so that requires a launch.
Look further up the thread for a discussion on this.
The 20 year prep years are long gone. I don't know how long it took to plan and launch the current Mars rovers, but I think it was somewhere around 5 years.
The MER mission was the exception, not the rule. The project was explicitly accelerated to take advantage of the close proximity of Mars to Earth. Part of the reason for sending two rovers instead of one was to provide redundancy just in case the shortness of the project negatively impacted the performance of the mission. (Lord knows we've lost enough probes to Mars.)
A more common type of mission was the Pluto Kuiper Express. The project was in development for well over a decade, eventually morphing into the less ambitious New Horizons project. New Horizons finally launched in January.
The problem being that the materials need to come from somewhere... We just can't "beam" it into space I'm sorry to say.
There are two things that can be done to get the materials:
1. Launch a large booster packed full of parts and materials to build a significant number of probes. If you factor the number of probes that could be built from the raw materials and parts (as opposed to using a rocket to lift a fully constructed craft, then boosting it into an orbital transfer trajectory) the price to launch each probe would be significantly marginalized. The probes could then be constructed in space with space-only engines (such as Ion) that will inexpensively boost the vehicle on an orbital transfer trajectory.
2. Mine the materials from the moon or nearby asteroid. At the very least, this could provide some of the heaviest parts of the structure (e.g. the frame) while the individual instruments (which are usually pretty lightweight) can be shipped to orbit en masse.
The more I hear Griffin speak, the more I think he was the perfect choice to head up NASA. The guy knows exactly what needs to get done, isn't afraid to push what needs to be done, is able to eloquently express why it needs to be done, and yet is respectful of the role he plays in the government without becoming a political shill.
About this particular story, he's right about needing human spaceflight. Every time we decide to push back on human space flight, we further reduce the ability of science programs to do their work. New technologies that could have been developed to get science packages off the ground and into space faster and cheaper get lost because there's no push for more advanced vehicles and technology. I don't know about anyone else, but I pray for the day when science packages based on reconfigurable standard designs can be simply and inexpensively launched from a space station. (A la Star Trek probes.) The mass production would allow us to launch more probes for less, and the orbital launch would save tens of millions on each probe. Thus instead of spending 20 years preparing for a single mission, we'll be able to reduce each mission to as little as 5 years (or less!) preparation time.
Slashdot Mirror
something more vague to argue than "it won't work
*cough* "something less vague"
Apologies for the error. We're already well aware that you can do vague.
There are better languages than JavaScript. Stop with this AJAX/DHTML buzzword wankery.
Such as? Name a single language that is ubiquitous as JavaScript, runs in all W3C compliant web browsers, and can provide the features we've been discussing?
I'll save you the trouble: You can't. JavaScript sucks sometimes, but it's the only language we have available to meet the needs of Web Applications. And make no mistake, AJAX may be a buzzword for XMLHttpRequest, but DHTML is not a buzzword. It is a very real technology with very real applications. If you want to make a lot of money as an expert in up to date technologies, you'd be wise to learn it now.
$500+ per year for an internet connection just so you can edit static documents wherever you go? MS Office is cheaper than that
Not a fan of Jeopardy, I take it?
Oh, it supports keyboard shortcuts sometimes!
Sometimes?
Fantastic. Tell me, when does it support automation?
As soon as someone writes it into the software. Why? Do you think that JavaScript is somehow turing incomplete?
How about JavaScriptOffice interoperability with third-party products using a published API?
Geez, couldn't you have picked something a little harder? Plugins can easily be added through dynamically loaded JavaScript, server side updates, or a combination there of.
How long is it going to take for JavaScriptOffice to match even one tiny portion of Microsoft Office's functionality?
Well, that depends on how long it takes them to program it, which is usually a function of how much money is sunk into it.
(End of JavaScript love-fest thread; it's been a pleasure.)
I really wish I could reciprocate, but your poor understanding of the platform combined with your poor technical ability and lack of imagination has made it more frustrating than profitable. Please come back when you have something more vague to argue than "it won't work."
How does OpenOffice save its files so much faster than JavaScriptOffice? It uses fantastic technology known as the local hard drive.
You, sir, have failed it. Given that OOo does a COMPLETE save to disk every time it saves a file, JavaScriptOffice (assuming it sent updates in a fashion similar to what I described) would be WAY faster than OOo.
Once again, no network-based version of Office will ever take off so long as you need to maintain an Internet connection at all times. Why should I be sitting on a plane* unable to compose a letter to grandma because the JavaScriptOffice server isn't accessible?
Did you figure out HTAs yet? Let me know when you hear that popping noise.
See Fair Use doctrine for more info on why this isn't so cut and dry.
You sir, would fail your software engineering courses with thinking like that. (Not to mention a Computer Science degree for failing to follow data structures.)
Here's a hint for you: Every action performed by the user can be recorded as an atomic event. If those atomic events are saved, packaged up, and sent to the server at regular intervals, the server side copy could be kept up to date with a minimal amount of bandwidth.
Now, consider for a moment: How does MS Office save it's files so much faster than OpenOffice? Here's a hint. It records atomic updates...
Unless you're willing to spend $700 per employee per year on Verizon Wireless data subscriptions, "application availability from any location" is not true.
I'll take HTA for $500, Alex.
# Open two Firefox windows: one with your really important document and one with a page that crashes Firefox. Poof: no more important document editing for you.
I just tried it with GMail. My document was still under the drafts label when I reopened the application. Who'd have thunk that designers could account for crashes, eh?
it's a bit harder in DHTML/AJAX without SVG
:-)
Why do you think I (and others) have been screaming for SVG? It's the final piece of the puzzle that will allow us to get rid of the last kludge in the stack. (i.e. Server generated images.) With Opera and Mozilla working to make SVG a required part of the browser, the future looks very bright indeed.
By your logic, that means that an office suite should run on the Game Boy as well.
You see a problem with this? The Gameboy has the necessary processor and graphics hardware. What it's lacking (which AJAX/DHTML *do* have) is the proper input devices. Without proper I/O devices, making an Office Suite would be pointless. It's simply too tedious to interface with the device.
If you had your eyes open, you should now realize that there's no technical reason why a proper Office Suite cannot be done in AJAX/DHTML. None at all. Your ravings about "kludges" haven't been true since the DOM was made into a proper standard. The fact that most people don't know how to use the DOM is no reason to claim that it won't work. In fact, most of the resistence to AJAX applications has come from the camps who've never done a proper DOM program in their life. If they're lucky, they know that the standard exists. The fact that the standard covers everything from pixel perfect layout to a proper event model just happens to escape their notice.
Do me a favor, will you? Go to this link and click on the word "Lemmings" to the right of the picture. This should pop up a game window of Lemmings. Once you've played for a few minutes to get a feel for it, try to figure out what technologies it uses. When you think you know, come back here and we'll discuss your answers and how possible a full Office Suite is in DHTML/AJAX.
Anyone else remember the whole "Network Computer" concept of having a stripped-down machine that accessed applications and documents from a central server?
;-)
I do, but I'd have a hard time classifying them as "stripped down".
Why tie an important application to the weakest link in any system (the network) and a foundation that was clearly not made to handle such demands (a web browser)?
1. Because tying your applications to the network affords a great number of features that can't exist (or exist poorly) in disparate systems. Such features include: centralized storage, powerful document search engines, automatic document sharing, application availability from any location, and protection against massive data loss through the failure of a client machine.
2. Modern Web Browsers actually are designed as application platforms. They have been since the days of Netscape 4. They just haven't been all that good at it until recently.
* No, AJAX is *NOT* good enough. It's fine for email. It's not good enough for anything else.
AJAX/DHTML is good enough. It's the programmers that aren't. Most of these "Web Office" products are really nothing more than beautified HTML Editor components disguised as something we haven't seen before. The types of features that make a Word Processor a real Word Processor are missing because no one else has done the work for them. Not to mention the lack of spreadsheets, presentation software, and database interfaces.
I don't know when it's going to percolate through the industry that you have to actually do a lot of work to be a leader and make money. If you just slap stuff together off the shelf, your competitors will be able to follow. Then while you're all arguing, a REAL company will pay talented professionals to develop software that actually meets the needs of customers.
Anyone else remember WordPerfect for Java?
Yeah, I remember. I also remember that it was badly planned from the get-go. If Corel had been really trying, they wouldn't have released a suite as a set of Applets. ThinkFree came along a few years later and showed that it was quite doable to replicate MS Office in Java.
P.S. I can't find the records on Gary Focker, anywhere! :-P
I guess it's more understandable at lower levels, but you'd think that at the CEO level they might want to make sure they're getting what they paid for.
The thing is that he'd been with Radio Shack for 11 years, and become the top sales associate before being offered the job as CEO. Whatever checks might have happened, probably didn't happen 11 years ago. Since then, no one had any reason to question his education. He was a full time employee with an excellent record. What else was necessary?
After he crashed and burned the company, people started paying attention to who he was and where he came from.
Unforunately, they wanted to see her paystubs before they officially gave her the offer letter. And when they found out she was lying, she got nothing.
:-/
I have a feeling that the amount she gave was unreasonably high. Every year we hear a new article that gives the average wages someone in our position makes. Unfortunately, many technologists believe these averages to be around their actual market value. That simply isn't true. Some people have exceptionally high wages due to being in an invaluable position. (Been there, done that, both glad and sad it's over.) These salaries drag the industry average upwards, creating data that would make it appear that most technology workers are underpaid. Thus workers often hope for unreasonably high salaries when they switch jobs.
However, a new job will almost never want to match those figures unless they really want you on-board. In your friend's case, her high salary may have been a strong indication to them that she is an exceptional employee. But if they're basing their evaluations on a high salary, they probably will want proof of it. Just imagine how poor she looked in their eyes when they found she had not only lied about her salary (somewhat bad), but had significantly overstated her wages? Yeah, pretty bad. So bad that their opinion would have immediately went from hero to zero.
Each job negotiation is a delicate process with no hard and fast rules. So there's no telling what may work better. Generally I'd recommend telling the company to give you an offer if you don't want to state your real wages, but sometimes that has the exact opposite effect of what you want. Even if you read the interviewer fine, he/she may not be the one who finally has to be convinced. (You may not even see that person.) So tread carefully, and realize that it doesn't always work out.
If you absolutely *must* lie, though, try to explain the differences as bonuses in previous years. They're a bit more difficult to check, and sound quite good. (Though you may have to lie even more to explain what the bonuses were for.) Of course, once a company has your SSN info, it's all over. You just have to hope that your future boss doesn't check your tax information and/or credit report before hiring. (Note that many companies check credit reports as a method of protecting against embezzlement and position abuse.)
*cough* Um. How do I put this? Consecutive numbers can't be diagonal. You've got diagonal pairs for all your numbers.
Mmm... scratch that.
:-)
:-/
If this works, Google will have seriously made the lives of thousands of programmers that much easier.
Should be.
If this works, Krugle will have seriously made the lives of thousands of programmers that much easier.
Unfortunately, now that I know it's not actually Google launching this, my hopes are no longer especially high for a successful product.
This could so seriously rock. Every time I need a library to do a specific function, I always have to do some searching to find all of the competing options. Invariably, at least a couple of options get missed as you sort through the excess nonsense and out of date information. (Sometimes it's the best solution that gets missed.) I can't count how many times I've wished there was a simpler way to get all the competing options.
:-)
And then there's the issue of missing modules that are referenced by other code. Usually you have to find them by trial and error. In a code search engine, (theoretically) it will simply come back with all instances of the constant I put in. Which means that I can locate the missing module faster than ever before!
If this works, Google will have seriously made the lives of thousands of programmers that much easier.
Dude, seriously. I know you have an emotional need to show off your intelligence due to personal insecurity, but many people don't want to know. They want to figure it out for themselves. That's part of the fun.
I wonder what takes longer, reading my solution or deducing it from scratch...
Depends upon your age and experience. Someone exposed to higher mathematics would have little to no problem deducing the answer. Most others would attempt a solution through trial and error.
Very good. Except now you've spoiled it for everyone else. If you had posted the Petals Around the Rose solution, quite a few people would be screaming for your head. ;-)
I *think* I still remember the solution too. The key is to figure out the 1 and 2. Once you have those down, the rest follows naturally.
Somehow this strikes me as seeming really true, even if just from my own experience.
:-)
My first reaction was, "Hell, I could have told them that!"
I thought it was common knowledge that one of the best ways to attack a problem is to review the materials, give it a rest, then come back with a fresh perspective? I've always attributed the bursts of inspiration that come from this to the "unconcious processor." Many people refer to it as "letting it churn in the back of your head." One way or another, most of the people I know seem to be cognizant of the fact that their unconcious is an excellent place to work problems out.
What really convinced me of the true power of unconcious thought was a puzzle someone gave me when I was a teen. The puzzle consisted of an 8 cell grid drawn on a piece of paper. You had to fill each cell with a number from 1 through 8. The challenge was to place the numbers such that no consecutive numbers were adjacent to each other in the horizontal, vertical, or diagonal directions. The guy who showed me the puzzle had supposedly known it for 20 years, but had never solved it. I tried my hand at it quite a bit before bed that night. Finally I just let it go for the moment so I could get some sleep. As I started to drift off, I saw the puzzle in my head. As I watched in my mind, all the numbers dropped into place one by one.
I popped out of bed, grabbed a piece of paper, and replicated what I had just visualized. Sure enough, it was the solution to the puzzle! My unconcious mind had solved a problem that my concious mind hadn't been able to tackle after hours of trying! After that, I learned to rely more on shoving a problem back into my unconcious, then waiting for a solution to work its way forward.
The things we want to learn are very specialized, and that takes specialized equipment. Just look at the Mars probes we've sent. Two rovers, ground penetrating radar, communications. That doesn't sound very standard to me.
Rovers are a trickier issue, but there's nothing all that odd about ground penetrating radar and communications relays. At some point NASA would like to build a packet network throughout the solar system (to improve communications), so I think you'll only see more communications instruments, not less.
Not to mention the environments are quite different. A Mars probe can use solar cells to power itself. Pluto though is so far away that you need a nuclear power source as the sun is so dim at that distance.
The large majority of probes we send are space-based, so environmental concerns are a rare concern. Nuclear and solar power are both fairly standard on space probes. I see no reason why a standardized framework can't be developed. At the very least you can have a standardized chassis designed for nuclear, and a standardized chassis designed for solar. The most desirable solution would be a single chassis that could support both power types.
Many of the instruments are pretty standard, but such a chassis would still need the ability to mount non-standard instruments. That's not a big deal though, because you'd have to pay for that instrument whether you used a standardized probe or not. The key is to ensure that the instrument can be mounted on the probe. Standardizing means that the restrictions are known at the time of the instrument's design rather than having to redesign the probe and the instrument several times to account for changes incurred during development. Standardizing also means that the instrument doesn't have to be designed again should another mission ever need it. The design could be pulled off the shelf and sent to manufacturing immediately. That's a tremendous savings in R&D!
FWIW, the ESA is reusing their Mars Express probe for the Venus Express mission. So there is a bit of precident here.
You need to get the thing to the space station to begin with, so that requires a launch.
Look further up the thread for a discussion on this.
The 20 year prep years are long gone. I don't know how long it took to plan and launch the current Mars rovers, but I think it was somewhere around 5 years.
The MER mission was the exception, not the rule. The project was explicitly accelerated to take advantage of the close proximity of Mars to Earth. Part of the reason for sending two rovers instead of one was to provide redundancy just in case the shortness of the project negatively impacted the performance of the mission. (Lord knows we've lost enough probes to Mars.)
A more common type of mission was the Pluto Kuiper Express. The project was in development for well over a decade, eventually morphing into the less ambitious New Horizons project. New Horizons finally launched in January.
The problem being that the materials need to come from somewhere... We just can't "beam" it into space I'm sorry to say.
There are two things that can be done to get the materials:
1. Launch a large booster packed full of parts and materials to build a significant number of probes. If you factor the number of probes that could be built from the raw materials and parts (as opposed to using a rocket to lift a fully constructed craft, then boosting it into an orbital transfer trajectory) the price to launch each probe would be significantly marginalized. The probes could then be constructed in space with space-only engines (such as Ion) that will inexpensively boost the vehicle on an orbital transfer trajectory.
2. Mine the materials from the moon or nearby asteroid. At the very least, this could provide some of the heaviest parts of the structure (e.g. the frame) while the individual instruments (which are usually pretty lightweight) can be shipped to orbit en masse.
The more I hear Griffin speak, the more I think he was the perfect choice to head up NASA. The guy knows exactly what needs to get done, isn't afraid to push what needs to be done, is able to eloquently express why it needs to be done, and yet is respectful of the role he plays in the government without becoming a political shill.
About this particular story, he's right about needing human spaceflight. Every time we decide to push back on human space flight, we further reduce the ability of science programs to do their work. New technologies that could have been developed to get science packages off the ground and into space faster and cheaper get lost because there's no push for more advanced vehicles and technology. I don't know about anyone else, but I pray for the day when science packages based on reconfigurable standard designs can be simply and inexpensively launched from a space station. (A la Star Trek probes.) The mass production would allow us to launch more probes for less, and the orbital launch would save tens of millions on each probe. Thus instead of spending 20 years preparing for a single mission, we'll be able to reduce each mission to as little as 5 years (or less!) preparation time.