2. What's with the dates? The Clipper was supposed to be in service by 2010, not 2011. Originally this would have put it ahead of the CEV, but the latest projections have the CEV flying by 2008.
3. HOTOL, Skylon, Hermes; need I say more? Russia obviously wants the money for building, not the enigineering experience of the ESA.
4. "The Clipper would allow Russia and Europe to collaborate with the Americans on lunar exploration, allowing six astronauts to orbit the Moon and to act as a back-up rescue craft, if needed." I'd be happy if we collaborated, but I think it's a bit premature considering that Russia never landed anyone on the moon. Did they get close? Maybe. The details are a bit sketchy there. There certainly seems to be a coverup involved, but considering the number of "Moon Rockets" that Russia had blow up on the pad, I wouldn't have held my breath either way.
5. You'll note that Russia is looking at a winged vehicle. Lockheed proposed a lifting body for the CEV, but was turned down. I'm consoled, however, in that the CEV vehicle will be a small part of the future stack and very easy to replace. Even if the CEV flies capsules for the first couple of years, there's a strong liklihood that we'll go back to lifting bodies with reinforced carbon-carbon heat shielding. (For those of you who complain about carrying wings and landing gear into space, it really isn't that big of a deal. The problem with the Space Shuttle is that it's FREAKING HUGE so that it can carry satellite packages. Reduced to a more normal size for human cargo, its wings and gear wouldn't cost all that much in weight.)
6. "The Clipper also enhances the possibility of space tourism." I just love Russian zeal. Those guys are never worried about the, "Why not?" =)
7. "The development and operational side of the programme is expected to cost around 100m (£68m) euros a year." Am I the only one who thinks that price tag is a little low? Even if you expect Russia to take the brunt of the costs, you're still a billion or so Euros shy. According to this page, they are thinking of using the Zenit booster (now there's a hell of a ride) so I imagine that would help reduce the costs. Still...
Personally, I wish them the best of luck. If all goes well, maybe the ESA will build its own Clippers and begin flying them. Their recent Galileo system certainly suggests that Europe is finally looking to be technologically independent from the US.:-)
AIs that rely on doing things faster than humans could (see RTSs) are also lame.
Is that what the AI in the original Command & Conquer did? Because in multiplayer mode, the #$!% AI always seems to be able to built his base and defenses WAY faster than I could. I'd barely pop out a small platoon and charge his base only to find that he has bunker walls, turrets, tanks, and plenty o' men!
Bah, you're just jealous. You know as well as I do that games give the editors an excuse to play games while on the job.
[CmdrTaco sees Zonk playing X-Box] CmdrTaco: "Just what do you think you're doing, Zonk? Zonk: "Who, me?" [fumbles the controller a bit] "I'm, uh, reviewing a new game. Yeah, that's it." CmdrTaco: "Oh, well that's okay then. Make sure it's a good article with plenty of screenshots!" Zonk: (grumbling under his breath) "rastafrastanogood now i have to do a writeup"
$3000 is a lot to spend on a prototype. But it's cheap considering how new this is. Consider trying to buy an IBM PC motherboard and 640K of RAM in 1977.
You're comparing Apples to Potatos. An IBM PC Motherboard in 1977 was still a highly advanced computer board with thousands of dollars in off the shelf, but still very expensive components. The retail price for one of those things was in the range of $2500. Considering that mass production always costs less, is there any wonder that the dev boards were more than $3000?
In this case, eInk has paired their new (supposedly inexpensive) display technology with a dev board that costs less than $200. So eInk wants us to believe that their display technology costs $2800 a pop? I don't care what they say, there is no way in hell that they can mass manufacture their technology at reasonable costs if they can't produce dev units for around 2-3x the expected market price.
(For those who don't get it, "System" is a login with higher privleges than even Administrator. There's nothing that System can't do. Just to brighten up your day, it's also the default user for Windows Services. Feel safe yet?)
The Gumstix they're bundling retails for no more than $250. What is that thing made out of? Diamond?
Amen. $3000 just isn't reasonable. I could grab all the parts from Digikey, design my own board for printing on Pad2Pad, pay for someone else to assemble/test it, and I'd STILL have at least $2000 in my pocket! They can't believe that anyone is going to think this device is cost effective when we can't even afford the dev board.:-/
P.S. Your Journal entries expire after a few days. No one can post there anymore. If you want to allow people to email you, create a GMail account and set it to forward to your real account. That way you can shut it down or move to a new address if it ever begins to annoy you.:-)
Re:Really did innovate- not recently
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The Palm OS has stagnated. Windows Mobile for all its flaws is simply a better OS.
This really isn't true either. The truth is that both OSes and devices sucked, and that consumers are finally giving up on them. On one hand you had the Palm Pilot. It was a good device, sized perfectly for a satellite device, but failed to keep up with improvements in embedded technology, memory needs, and display resolutions. In the end, the device ended up being overpriced for too little power.
On the other hand you've got WinCE devices. They're far more powerful, have color screens, run Microsoft software, play multimedia, and they do it all for seemingly no reason what-so-ever. In the Real World(TM) it seems that no one really is looking to play movies on their tiny handheld screens, nor are they looking to wait five minutes for Excel CE to come up so they can do computations they could have done on the back of a napkin in less time.
So then along comes the Blackberry. The idea is seemingly stupid. It's a super-simple email reader with an analog coupler for a modem. It flops. Then they add wireless support. Suddenly, everyone loves the thing. It's the pager/personal organizer that everyone wanted. It does what they need and it does it simply. You have your email at all times, and you can even type a simple message without resorting to a stylus. So where are all the Palms and WinCE devices now? Replaced by BlackBerries. Funny how the world works, eh?
(Disclaimer: My wife uses her Palm everyday to manage our home and finances. She can't live without the thing.)
What about successes?
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Mistakes? What about what Palm did right? e.g. Realizing that everyone didn't want to play movies/music on their handheld? Or their strong focus on using the Palm as a satellite device, and not as a REALLY SLOW desktop replacement. (I don't know what Microsoft was thinking with their Word and Excel CE versions... no wait, yes I do. They weren't thinking.) Not to mention their slowness to move to color screens when high quality grayscale provided a better experience and better battery life.
If anything, I think Palm's biggest "mistake" was their push for expensive networking features when no good infrastructure existed. Their devices kept going up in cost over useless features all while they stuck with that hideous dragonball processor and low-res screens. Thank God for Sony and their Clie series, or Palm never would have gotten their heads out of their rears. Sadly, it may have been too little, too late.
Paperbacks don't last. They're for reading, then either throwing away, giving away, or keeping until they fall apart. What you're thinking of is hardcover books with decent bindings. I read eBooks myself, but I still keep a shelf full of hardcover books that are near and dear to me. That's not going to change. Ever.
I hate to break it to you, but in the "real world", an inexpensive dev board can become a product unto itself. Take the Spartan 3 Dev Kit for example. It costs $99. (Which is actually incredibly cheap for a dev board.) Xilinx probably moves thousands of these kits, making the venture actually profitable. While many of their customers may be hobbyists, those hobbyists will remember the inexpensive Xilinx solutions and recommend those for their day job. Even if they do it only as amatuers and never expect to go into the field, they *still* generate buzz about Xilinx products. And buzz == free advertising. Advertising == Product Awareness. Product Awareness == $$$.
Let me put it this way. This kit was just featured on Slashdot, a site with hundreds of thousands of members, and probably MANY more non-members. Were this board affordable (i.e. $300-$500), they'd already be moving hundreds of them from this story alone. At $1000-$1500, they'd probably still move a hundred or so boards. At $3000 everyone is going to say, "The technology is cool, but it's too expensive for the moment." and move on.
1. Hi-Res Palm Pilots are 300x300 whereas this first-gen dev kit is 800x600.
2. In theory, eInk has all the contrast of paper. In practice it often has a slightly grey background, but still plenty of contrast in comparison to computer screens.
3. This effectively means that the processor can be put in a wait state or possibly turned off when the screen isn't being updated. For ebook readers, watches, and personal organizers, there's even the possibility of using something REALLY low power like a PIC since you're only updating the screen on very rare occasions.
GOOD GRAVY THIS SUCKER IS EXPENSIVE! 3,000 for a DEV BOARD? Maybe if eInk thought about pricing a more reasonable dev board, they could get more hobbyists onboard. More hobbyists == more market experience. More market experience == more products made. More products made == more $$$ for eInk.
Cripes, you'd think didn't actually want people to use these things.
I don't know about anyone else, but I've been looking for a dev kit like this forever. Even just as an E-Reader (what the dev kit is preconfigured for) the possibilities are tremendous!
I'm a bit annoyed that it's taken 30 years since Xerox first developed the idea, but at least it's here now. Just imagine if this technology catches on. No more need for paperback books (you can keep all the latest on your pocket reader), technical books can finally be portable now that page graphics can be shown in detail, and eye strain will reduce considerably as your eyes can lock onto something that's actually there rather than simulated by a beam of light.
MULTICS wasn't only segmented and paged, but ALL I/O was mapped into memory! i.e. Instead of opening a file, you simply obtained a memory address for the file and began to read/write. The concept was later picked up on Unix as memory mapped files, and has even been extended into using paging for file system I/O.:-)
1. It's called "sarcasm". 2. Microsoft's "Embrace and Extend" strategy is well documented. 3. The article claimed that they were "very different" seemingly because one ran on Windows and the other ran on Unix. 4. Microsoft is "fixing" JBoss.
BTW, as a Java programmer, I can say with honesty that there are plenty of things you can do to explicitly tie a program to a given OS. There are even things you can do while still being "100% Java". (e.g. File system structures, native network services, login services, command line hooks, etc.):-)
WAAAAAYYYYYY back in the day, AT&T (Bell Labs), GE, and MIT collaborated on a project known as MULTICS. Their idea was to build an ultra-scalable machine that could handle any number of users in a multi-user environment. The thought these companies had was that they'd be able to sell computer power like they sold power. Home users would have a network cable strung to their home, and they'd be able to "plug in" appliances that could make use of that power.
Sadly, the project was very difficult to pull off with the technology of the time. As a result, a fellow by the name of Ken Thompson created a much simpler, single user version of the system (don't laugh, I'm not joking) called "UNICS". UNICS caught on under the name "UNIX", and the world has been striving to regain the idea of remote computing power ever since.
Products from the two companies are similar in purpose, but very different in design. The JBoss application server, based on Java, runs on Windows, Linux and Unix systems. Microsoft's Windows-based application server tools, based on the company's.Net programming model, are part of its Windows Server operating system.
Oh, well that explains everything. One product runs everywhere, the other runs only on Windows. See? They're different!
Don't worry, though. Microsoft is working hard to correct the problem. Once they "make sure that JBoss runs well on Windows", both products will be very similar. After all, who needs Linux and Unix support?
I like the concept of the Sun Ray but Sun really blew it when they marketed them.
At the time they were pretty expensive, but that was partly because of the cost of the CRT. They're now a bit more reasonable ($359 for basic unit), but I'm sure Sun is still making a killing on them. Still, the lower costs of administration tend to work out in most companies' favor.
The biggest mistake that Sun has made (IMHO) is greatly overestimate the size of the system needed for users. Back when I was admining a Citrix WinFrame environment, we packed 40+ users on a Duel PPro machine w/512MB of memory. Sun (and Microsoft for that matter) would have tried to sell us four machines with at least four processors and twice the memory each. That's just silly, though, because it would have been significantly oversized for our workload.
Slashdot Mirror
With a name like "Clipper"... it's gotta be good! :-P
(With apologies to Smuckers.)
Collection of random thoughts, aka A Brain Dump:
:-)
1. This news is older than the hills.
2. What's with the dates? The Clipper was supposed to be in service by 2010, not 2011. Originally this would have put it ahead of the CEV, but the latest projections have the CEV flying by 2008.
3. HOTOL, Skylon, Hermes; need I say more? Russia obviously wants the money for building, not the enigineering experience of the ESA.
4. "The Clipper would allow Russia and Europe to collaborate with the Americans on lunar exploration, allowing six astronauts to orbit the Moon and to act as a back-up rescue craft, if needed." I'd be happy if we collaborated, but I think it's a bit premature considering that Russia never landed anyone on the moon. Did they get close? Maybe. The details are a bit sketchy there. There certainly seems to be a coverup involved, but considering the number of "Moon Rockets" that Russia had blow up on the pad, I wouldn't have held my breath either way.
5. You'll note that Russia is looking at a winged vehicle. Lockheed proposed a lifting body for the CEV, but was turned down. I'm consoled, however, in that the CEV vehicle will be a small part of the future stack and very easy to replace. Even if the CEV flies capsules for the first couple of years, there's a strong liklihood that we'll go back to lifting bodies with reinforced carbon-carbon heat shielding. (For those of you who complain about carrying wings and landing gear into space, it really isn't that big of a deal. The problem with the Space Shuttle is that it's FREAKING HUGE so that it can carry satellite packages. Reduced to a more normal size for human cargo, its wings and gear wouldn't cost all that much in weight.)
6. "The Clipper also enhances the possibility of space tourism." I just love Russian zeal. Those guys are never worried about the, "Why not?" =)
7. "The development and operational side of the programme is expected to cost around 100m (£68m) euros a year." Am I the only one who thinks that price tag is a little low? Even if you expect Russia to take the brunt of the costs, you're still a billion or so Euros shy. According to this page, they are thinking of using the Zenit booster (now there's a hell of a ride) so I imagine that would help reduce the costs. Still...
Personally, I wish them the best of luck. If all goes well, maybe the ESA will build its own Clippers and begin flying them. Their recent Galileo system certainly suggests that Europe is finally looking to be technologically independent from the US.
AIs that rely on doing things faster than humans could (see RTSs) are also lame.
Is that what the AI in the original Command & Conquer did? Because in multiplayer mode, the #$!% AI always seems to be able to built his base and defenses WAY faster than I could. I'd barely pop out a small platoon and charge his base only to find that he has bunker walls, turrets, tanks, and plenty o' men!
Indeed. But I keep wondering, are they actual in-game screenshots? I mean, they look beautiful and all, but what's with the Batman camera tilt?
Fair enough. But the majority of Windows Services still run as "Local System". :-/
$3000 is a lot to spend on a prototype. But it's cheap considering how new this is. Consider trying to buy an IBM PC motherboard and 640K of RAM in 1977.
You're comparing Apples to Potatos. An IBM PC Motherboard in 1977 was still a highly advanced computer board with thousands of dollars in off the shelf, but still very expensive components. The retail price for one of those things was in the range of $2500. Considering that mass production always costs less, is there any wonder that the dev boards were more than $3000?
In this case, eInk has paired their new (supposedly inexpensive) display technology with a dev board that costs less than $200. So eInk wants us to believe that their display technology costs $2800 a pop? I don't care what they say, there is no way in hell that they can mass manufacture their technology at reasonable costs if they can't produce dev units for around 2-3x the expected market price.
Right. We should rename them, "SystemKits".
(For those who don't get it, "System" is a login with higher privleges than even Administrator. There's nothing that System can't do. Just to brighten up your day, it's also the default user for Windows Services. Feel safe yet?)
They've already got Sony and Phillips to that for them. Why bother selling a Dev Kit if they don't want to attract startups and hobbyists?
The Gumstix they're bundling retails for no more than $250. What is that thing made out of? Diamond?
:-/
:-)
Amen. $3000 just isn't reasonable. I could grab all the parts from Digikey, design my own board for printing on Pad2Pad, pay for someone else to assemble/test it, and I'd STILL have at least $2000 in my pocket! They can't believe that anyone is going to think this device is cost effective when we can't even afford the dev board.
P.S. Your Journal entries expire after a few days. No one can post there anymore. If you want to allow people to email you, create a GMail account and set it to forward to your real account. That way you can shut it down or move to a new address if it ever begins to annoy you.
The Palm OS has stagnated. Windows Mobile for all its flaws is simply a better OS.
This really isn't true either. The truth is that both OSes and devices sucked, and that consumers are finally giving up on them. On one hand you had the Palm Pilot. It was a good device, sized perfectly for a satellite device, but failed to keep up with improvements in embedded technology, memory needs, and display resolutions. In the end, the device ended up being overpriced for too little power.
On the other hand you've got WinCE devices. They're far more powerful, have color screens, run Microsoft software, play multimedia, and they do it all for seemingly no reason what-so-ever. In the Real World(TM) it seems that no one really is looking to play movies on their tiny handheld screens, nor are they looking to wait five minutes for Excel CE to come up so they can do computations they could have done on the back of a napkin in less time.
So then along comes the Blackberry. The idea is seemingly stupid. It's a super-simple email reader with an analog coupler for a modem. It flops. Then they add wireless support. Suddenly, everyone loves the thing. It's the pager/personal organizer that everyone wanted. It does what they need and it does it simply. You have your email at all times, and you can even type a simple message without resorting to a stylus. So where are all the Palms and WinCE devices now? Replaced by BlackBerries. Funny how the world works, eh?
(Disclaimer: My wife uses her Palm everyday to manage our home and finances. She can't live without the thing.)
Mistakes? What about what Palm did right? e.g. Realizing that everyone didn't want to play movies/music on their handheld? Or their strong focus on using the Palm as a satellite device, and not as a REALLY SLOW desktop replacement. (I don't know what Microsoft was thinking with their Word and Excel CE versions... no wait, yes I do. They weren't thinking.) Not to mention their slowness to move to color screens when high quality grayscale provided a better experience and better battery life.
If anything, I think Palm's biggest "mistake" was their push for expensive networking features when no good infrastructure existed. Their devices kept going up in cost over useless features all while they stuck with that hideous dragonball processor and low-res screens. Thank God for Sony and their Clie series, or Palm never would have gotten their heads out of their rears. Sadly, it may have been too little, too late.
Actually computer screens have much greater contrast than paper.
:-)
I was referring to LCD screens on handheld devices which rarely have good contrast.
Paperbacks don't last. They're for reading, then either throwing away, giving away, or keeping until they fall apart. What you're thinking of is hardcover books with decent bindings. I read eBooks myself, but I still keep a shelf full of hardcover books that are near and dear to me. That's not going to change. Ever.
I hate to break it to you, but in the "real world", an inexpensive dev board can become a product unto itself. Take the Spartan 3 Dev Kit for example. It costs $99. (Which is actually incredibly cheap for a dev board.) Xilinx probably moves thousands of these kits, making the venture actually profitable. While many of their customers may be hobbyists, those hobbyists will remember the inexpensive Xilinx solutions and recommend those for their day job. Even if they do it only as amatuers and never expect to go into the field, they *still* generate buzz about Xilinx products. And buzz == free advertising. Advertising == Product Awareness. Product Awareness == $$$.
Let me put it this way. This kit was just featured on Slashdot, a site with hundreds of thousands of members, and probably MANY more non-members. Were this board affordable (i.e. $300-$500), they'd already be moving hundreds of them from this story alone. At $1000-$1500, they'd probably still move a hundred or so boards. At $3000 everyone is going to say, "The technology is cool, but it's too expensive for the moment." and move on.
To expand:
1. Hi-Res Palm Pilots are 300x300 whereas this first-gen dev kit is 800x600.
2. In theory, eInk has all the contrast of paper. In practice it often has a slightly grey background, but still plenty of contrast in comparison to computer screens.
3. This effectively means that the processor can be put in a wait state or possibly turned off when the screen isn't being updated. For ebook readers, watches, and personal organizers, there's even the possibility of using something REALLY low power like a PIC since you're only updating the screen on very rare occasions.
Just to add to my post...
GOOD GRAVY THIS SUCKER IS EXPENSIVE! 3,000 for a DEV BOARD? Maybe if eInk thought about pricing a more reasonable dev board, they could get more hobbyists onboard. More hobbyists == more market experience. More market experience == more products made. More products made == more $$$ for eInk.
Cripes, you'd think didn't actually want people to use these things.
I don't know about anyone else, but I've been looking for a dev kit like this forever. Even just as an E-Reader (what the dev kit is preconfigured for) the possibilities are tremendous!
I'm a bit annoyed that it's taken 30 years since Xerox first developed the idea, but at least it's here now. Just imagine if this technology catches on. No more need for paperback books (you can keep all the latest on your pocket reader), technical books can finally be portable now that page graphics can be shown in detail, and eye strain will reduce considerably as your eyes can lock onto something that's actually there rather than simulated by a beam of light.
MULTICS wasn't only segmented and paged, but ALL I/O was mapped into memory! i.e. Instead of opening a file, you simply obtained a memory address for the file and began to read/write. The concept was later picked up on Unix as memory mapped files, and has even been extended into using paging for file system I/O. :-)
1. It's called "sarcasm".
:-)
2. Microsoft's "Embrace and Extend" strategy is well documented.
3. The article claimed that they were "very different" seemingly because one ran on Windows and the other ran on Unix.
4. Microsoft is "fixing" JBoss.
BTW, as a Java programmer, I can say with honesty that there are plenty of things you can do to explicitly tie a program to a given OS. There are even things you can do while still being "100% Java". (e.g. File system structures, native network services, login services, command line hooks, etc.)
WAAAAAYYYYYY back in the day, AT&T (Bell Labs), GE, and MIT collaborated on a project known as MULTICS. Their idea was to build an ultra-scalable machine that could handle any number of users in a multi-user environment. The thought these companies had was that they'd be able to sell computer power like they sold power. Home users would have a network cable strung to their home, and they'd be able to "plug in" appliances that could make use of that power.
Sadly, the project was very difficult to pull off with the technology of the time. As a result, a fellow by the name of Ken Thompson created a much simpler, single user version of the system (don't laugh, I'm not joking) called "UNICS". UNICS caught on under the name "UNIX", and the world has been striving to regain the idea of remote computing power ever since.
Products from the two companies are similar in purpose, but very different in design. The JBoss application server, based on Java, runs on Windows, Linux and Unix systems. Microsoft's Windows-based application server tools, based on the company's .Net programming model, are part of its Windows Server operating system.
Oh, well that explains everything. One product runs everywhere, the other runs only on Windows. See? They're different!
Don't worry, though. Microsoft is working hard to correct the problem. Once they "make sure that JBoss runs well on Windows", both products will be very similar. After all, who needs Linux and Unix support?
I like the concept of the Sun Ray but Sun really blew it when they marketed them.
At the time they were pretty expensive, but that was partly because of the cost of the CRT. They're now a bit more reasonable ($359 for basic unit), but I'm sure Sun is still making a killing on them. Still, the lower costs of administration tend to work out in most companies' favor.
The biggest mistake that Sun has made (IMHO) is greatly overestimate the size of the system needed for users. Back when I was admining a Citrix WinFrame environment, we packed 40+ users on a Duel PPro machine w/512MB of memory. Sun (and Microsoft for that matter) would have tried to sell us four machines with at least four processors and twice the memory each. That's just silly, though, because it would have been significantly oversized for our workload.
You can move from Ray Station to Ray station, but you can't go to a meeting room, move from your table to a chair in the cafeteria, and so on.
/Me smacks lelitsch's wrist
Go reread what I wrote. (Specifically, the part with the SECOND link.)
:-)
Actually, I was looking for an amused chuckle. (Seeing as Slashdot uses cookies.) Then again, humor must be an outmoded concept.