uh, CVS? Whenever somebody wants to edit a file, CVS actually just gives them a copy. When they're done editing, CVS merges the new versin with the old, and checks it into the repository (and, IIRC, the repository's copy of the file gets locked to prevent multiple people from checking in changes at the same time).
Let's say you have a file, foo.txt, and imagine that multiple people were editing this file at the same time. The file would most likely get corrupted, and at the very least some weirdness would go on (imagine opening the file, and at the same time somebody else was saving changes to the file; you would only get part of their changes). People would overwrite each other's changes, people would try to save changes at the same time, etc.
No, I'm thinking of pigeons. I wasn't implying that pigeons are rodents, just that they might as well be for what they're worth.
Ask anybody who's lived in a big, crowded city, like New York or someplace like that. They'll all tell you that pigeons (yes, the kind of bird) are little more than rats that fly: they're dirty, they're annoying pests, they're all over the place, etc.
Except that the Americans got the last laugh... sort of. The Russians found that graphite dust from the pencils got EVERYWHERE, thanks to the lack of gravity.
Although I do agree that, unfortunately, a lot of NASA is just pork barrel stuff.
Especially in the space program, you can not, never in a million years, expect any launch vehicle to have a 100% safety record.
I agree.
I hate it when people say the shuttle has the highest failure rate of any launcher, because it isn't true. We just don't hear about the other failures, because people go, "Oh boy, Rocket Type X failed again, and so now Corporation Y has lost another satellite." The Arianne 5 (or whatever it's called), for example, has an insanely high statistical failure rate, much more so than the shuttle.
With that said, looking at the shuttle's failure rate in a purely statistical manner gives one a skewered view. Some people say, "1 launch in 60 has failed!" without actually doing the math. If one out of every 60 launches failed, that would be only a 1.6% failure rate, aka a 98.4% success rate. A 100% success rate is impossible, and even a 99% success rate would mean that 1 out of every 100 launches ended in disaster.
And let's also consider that while 1 of the 2 catastrophes was part design flaw (which was fixed), and part "It's good enough, so launch it already" thinking, the second catastrophe seems to have merely been caused by an accident (the tank insulation striking the wing).
The Columbia should have been retired years ago. At about 25 years of age, it was the oldest of the shuttle orbiters. Additionally, it had the misfortune of being the "first run" of the space shuttles, and all the problems that come with that. IIRC (I could be way wrong on this), the other shuttles were actually constructed a little differently than the Columbia was, based on lessons learned.
As another IIRC, and additional evidence that the Columbia should've been retired years ago, the Columbia was completely worthless as far as supporting the ISS goes, because it was the only shuttle that couldn't actually reach the ISS. I could be wrong about that, though.
Actually, the Russians had poisoned what would have been Laika's last meal, so that she would have died a quick and painless death.
Unfortunately, she didn't live long enough to eat that last meal; IIRC there was a problem and she was cooked alive. I don't remember for sure, but I think that the craft itself remained functional for a while after Laika's death.
So are you saying that by having a human in a space vehicle that the computers will then have to be less complicated??? Humans aren't rad-hardened either. Your statement makes no sense.
Actually, it makes perfect sense. You missed the point, though. It isn't that the computers would have to be less complicated, in fact they might be MORE complicated. But since you would have to shield the whole craft from radiaton anyway (for the humans), the computers would not have to be quite so rad-hardened.
Computer technology is evolving so extremely fast, they will be able to think in a few years.
Think in a few years? Not likely. Asking whether or not machines think is like asking if submarines can swim, but that's beside the point. AI is like those flying cars we were all supposed to be driving by now, in that much of it was just unrealistic "Wouldn't it be cool if..." pipe dreaming.
Computers are sufficently powerful enough and rad-hardened enough to accomplish sophisticated tasks now. Look at the computers they use in present day communications satellites and the Galileo probe.
Yeah, they seem sufficiently rad hardened on earth because they are being shielded from most of the cosmic and sun's radiation by the earth's atmosphere and magnetic field. In space, though, it's another matter. The Pentium 4 I'm typing this on would be unreliable at best, and wouldn't work at all at worst.
Also, it's interesting that you mention the Galileo probe, seeing that its computer was deep fried by the radiation and had all sorts of problems.
How far has space-shuttle technology evolved in the past few years?? It hasn't evolved a drop. It's the same 70's apollo-era technology. There is nothing about the space shuttle that is going to get people to mars other than it's a rocket.
No one has ever suggested that the shuttle would be a good vehicle for traveling to Mars in. In fact, even if the shuttle featured the most cutting edge in computing technology it would be unsuitable because it just can't carry enough fuel. In fact, IIRC most of the fuel for its engines gets used up during takeoff.
The most likely candidate would be to build an entirely new design, one that used nuclear propulsion so that the trip would be as short as possible.
As for it costing trillions of dollars? I don't think so. But, maybe this time we should just ask NASA, "Ok, how much realistically (i.e. taking into account unforseen problems, test failures, redesigns, etc.) will it cost?" instead of, "Ok, you've got this much to spend. Can you do it?" And then decide if it's too expensive.
The Columbia was 25 years old. It probably shouldn't have been used for that long, and was only intended to be used for 10 years. But still, if the shuttle were redesigned from scratch today, it probably would be safer and more economical. We've already gotten over the hurdle of building reusable vehicles, and we now know how to solve a lot of the pitfals and problems.
We already know what the earth looks like from the moon.
That wasn't the point of that statement. What I meant was seeing what the earth looks like from space or the moon IN PERSON. I would imagine that no picture in existence could do it justice.
And you can count on the public to get tired of just about anything after a few months of seeing it on the news nonstop. That alone doesn't mean you should stop doing it, though.
When NASA can present an honest solution to safe and economical manned space travel (not the one in thirty odds of catastrophic failure we apparently have now) perhaps a return to manned spaceflight could be undertaken if there is a specific rational goal to accomplish.
Except that traveling in space is inherently dangerous. There is no place in the solar system more inhospitable to humans than space. But the only way we are going to learn how to make space travel safer for humans is by doing it. Sort of like how we've learned to make airplanes safer by having flown so often.
The thing is, for all the times that the shuttle has has gone into space, there have only been two failures (catastrophic ones, though), and one of them (maybe both, we'll see in a few months when the investigation is over) was caused by human oversight and "It's good enough" thinking. Rockets, on the other hand, fail all the time.
Aside from the no-immediate-use stuff like "How do ants behave in space?" (answer: they dig like crazy), sooner or later we are going to have to send humans off-planet on a permanent/extended trip. Maybe we decide to start mining asteroids, or whatever, but it will most certainly require a human to be present.
There is only so much that a probe can do. A human geologist on-site could learn more about Mars' geology in a short while than a probe could over the course of its entire mission. You're forgetting that if you landed a probe on Mars, it would be extremely difficult to maneuver it, because of things like a 20 minute communications lag, the fact that you can only communicate with the probe for part of the day, and the limited computing power of the probe's computer.
The onboard computer is limited because it has to not only be extremly reliable, but it also has to be rad-hardened (maybe not once on Mars, but to survive the trip), which means using slower technology (it's slower because, in order to decrease the odds of cosmic radiation flipping bits, the gates and transistors have to be larger).
Besides all that, there is the "being there" aspect of it. Seeing what the earth looks like from the moon, school children communicating with astronauts (and even thinking up experiments to try in space, like the ants thing I mentioned above), and things like that, which may not have a direct and immediate scientific value, are no less important.
Or we could listen to you and just sit here, think small, look up at the stars and planets, but never visit them, because you think it's too expensive and dangerous.
Your post reminded me of something someone once said: "We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." -John F. Kennedy
Some people speculated that they might turn the rederfarm to Apple servers but I think it was just a rumor.
I doubt they'll do it. IIRC, they get their Sun machines dirt cheap, and in return they put, "Final Rendering on computers provided by Sun Microsystems".
They use Suns for non-rendering stuff too, like file serving, asset management, etc. I remember reading an article where the Pixar guy they interviewed said that they never take any of their old fileservers offline. Lots of VFX companies will just back up and then delete from the file servers anything not related to their current projects, but not Pixar evidently.
I think their reasoning was that by the time one of the file servers becomes obsolete, chances are that whatever is on it is also obsolete. However, they might want to go back and see how they did something in the past, etc., so they keep the old file servers online. The article used to be on Design in Motion, but now I can't find it.
Steve Jobs doesn't run Pixar the way he runs Apple.
And, in typical fashion, George Lucas takes credit for starting Pixar and then selling it to Steve Jobs.
IIRC, what really happened was that, in the early 1980s, all the people in the then-small ILM computer graphics department wanted to do full-length animated films using computer animation. Lucas, on the other hand, wanted ILM's CG department to supplement ILM's business as a VFX company for traditional films. They were able to reach an agreement where the guys in ILM's CG department would get to go out on their own, and in return they would hire and train their replacements, as well as giving ILM continued access to whatever technology they developed. Thus Pixar was formed.
In 1986(?), Steve Jobs acquired a controlling interest in the newly formed company. However, Pixar is John Lasseter's baby, and would most likely not have become so successful were it not for him.
On a side note, Lucas is a revisionist and a bit of a megalomaniac. I think that the new consolidation is an attempt to bring in the "wayward" companies (aka ILM). And while the LucasArts people might be glad about having better access to ILM's resources, I'll bet that the ILM people are none to pleased. I know I'd be pissed.
Yeah, Altered Beast wasn't that great. But Sonic? C'mon. I'd rather play Sonic 1, 2, or 3 than Mario, any day of the week.
I remember one occasion where a friend of mine called me up, and said something like, "Hey, my mom & dad finally bought me a Sega! They got me Jurassic Park to go with it!" So I went over to his house...
Well, it turns out his parents had bought him a SNES (why the hell he thought it was "a Sega" is beyond me), and when he fired up Jurassic Park, I just laughed my ass off. I mean, compared to the Genesis version (being made by a different company, it was completely different than Jurassic Park for the other systems) it was so pathetic. I had him come back over to my house, and showed him Jurassic Park on my Genesis.
He always was one of those weird people who'd rather play Mario World than Earthworm Jim.;)
In fact, now that I think about it, the EGA card could do something like 640x400 or 640x480 in black & white. It was the CGA card that could only do 640x200 (in B&W no less) IIRC.
Somebody should've made a video card for PCs back then that had the kind of video hardware that consoles had, only it could also hook up to a monitor. Things like multiple layers of independently scrolling backgrounds, sprites, and more than just the 16 colors that EGA could do, etc. While you could do all those things in software, it would have been a lot faster to do them in hardware, and I think that whatever company made 'em could've had a goldmine on their hands (assuming that they could've gotten enough developers to support their cards).
Actually, I've only programmed for the GameBoy and Genesis, but not professionally. I'm working on a homebrew game for GameBoy right now, and started but never finished one for the Genesis.
I tried programming for the Jaguar after Hasbro declared it an open system (aka they wouldn't sue anybody crazy enough to still be making games for it), but ran away screaming after I learned what a horridly buggy and unnecessarily complex machine it is.
My knowledge about the Saturn only comes from what others have said, and the list of CPUs came from the Saturn box that I have in my closet;)
As for my username, I didn't pick it. My sole PC was a 486DX @ 33mhz (later upgraded to a Pentium @ 133mhz) until about 1998. My friends would all be like, "So, have you played that new PC game that just came out?" and after saying no, my system was too old 100 times or so, they stuck me with the KewlPC on-line moniker (refusing to call me anything but "Mr Kewl PC" in my e-mails and whatnot).
Hey, at least I kept it to 4 paragraphs this time. Wait... doh!
The confusion comes from the fact that, while what you said is true for the 386 line, on the 486 line the DX does in fact mean that an on-chip co-processor is present, or so Intel wanted people to think.
In actuality, both the 486SX and the 486DX had an on-chip co-processor, but on the 486SX it was disabled.
See one of my above two posts explaining the whole 486SX/487SX boondoggle.
Actually, the whole SX/DX thing is different for the 486s.
486SX - on-chip math co-processor, but it's disabled 486DX - on-chip math co-processor 487SX - same as 486DX, but different pin layout so it wouldn't fit in a 486SX/DX socket. Was sold as a math co-processor for the 486SX, but in actuality was just a 486DX that disabled the 486SX when you turned the system on.
Re:Slight error in your notes
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The 1991 "X-Box"
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· Score: 4, Informative
Yeah, I remember the whole 487 thing. What a scam.
Basically, the 486SX was the 486 with the math co-processor disabled. Motherboards at the time often had an extra socket for a math co-processor in case you wanted to get one but didn't want to pay for a whole new CPU that had one on-chip.
Intel's math co-processors for the 386 (all of them on a separate chip) were called 387s. Since Intel made two versions of the 386 (the DX and the cheaper but slower SX), they decided to make the 486 have two versions too, and again used the DX/SX suffixes.
The 486DX had an on-chip math co-processor, whereas the 486SX did not (or so Intel told everyone). They decided to make a separate math co-processor for the 486SX, and called it the 487SX.
What Intel didn't tell anybody was that, IIRC, the 486SX actually did have an on-chip math co-processor, but it was merely disabled. Additionally, they didn't bother to tell anybody that the 487SX was actually a 486DX (the one with the math co-processor enabled) that just had a different pin layout than either the 486DX or 486SX.
What's more, when installed as a math co-processor (which was the only option, the different pin layout meant it wouldn't fit in either a 486SX or 486DX slot), it merely disabled the 486SX, taking over its job, and acted like the 486DX that it actually was (CPU + math co-processor).
My thoughts exactly. The author is either misinformed, has an extremely bad memory, or is making it up. As for which I believe to be true, well, those papers look a little too well preserved to have been created in 1991 IMHO (how many of you keep doodlings you made 12 years ago?).
CD-ROM drives in 1991 were OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive, as were sound cards. Flash ROM? In 1991? Affordable? Please...
An EGA card that can also output NTSC video (whether s-video or composite) would have been unheard of, namely because there wouldn't have been any point: EGA cards could do 640x200, but only in black & white (1-bit color). They could do up to 16 colors (4-bit color) in a different video mode, but only at 320x200. Yeah, that's right, 320x200, not 320x240. Oops, did somebody just get caught?
And the Voodoo 3 3000 was most certainly NOT available in 1995! Perhaps some cards based on the Voodoo 1 chipset, but the Voodoo 3 chipset wouldn't hit the scene until the late '90s.
The 286 had multitasking and protected mode, just like the 386. The real problem with it (as opposed to the "problem" the author states) was that, being a 16-bit machine (although the address space had been increased to 24-bit), it still had to use segments to be able to access all of its address space, and to handle programs with more than 64K of code and data.
As for the 286 being the first Intel processor that was backwardly compatible: no. No no no no no. The 8086 was "backward" compatible with the 8088 (in fact, they were exactly the same, except for the 8088 sacrificed some speed to cut down motherboard costs by only having 8 data lines instead of the 8086's 16, but made up for it (which is where the slowness comes in) by doing two reads in succession), the 80186 (yes, there was a 186, but it sold very poorly) was backwardly compatible with the 8088 and 8086, etc.
As for the SNES, both it and the Genesis probably had about equal market penetration. The SNES had better RPGs IIRC, but the Genesis had better sidescrolling action & platform games thanks to its faster processor. Yeah, the SNES had Mario, but the Genesis had Sonic The Hedgehog, Jurassic Park (the Genesis version of Jurassic Park was light years better than all the other versions and even had better graphics too; not coincidentally, the Genesis version was made by a different company than the one that did all the other versions), Vectorman, etc. "The SNES had the biggest, baddest games of its day." Not quite. When it first came out, most of the games sucked. Even for games where the same company made both a Genesis and an SNES version, the Genesis version was usually better. Take a look at Earthworm Jim if you don't believe me. It wasn't until games like StarFox and Donkey Kong Country came out that the SNES started to reach critical mass, but even then it always carried Nintendo's "kiddie" reputation thanks to the boatloads of games with cutesy characters (Mario, Yoshi, Kirby, etc.) that Nintendo churned out. Genesis remained the hardcore gamer's platform of choice for many years.
I'd like to think that this guy is just badly misinformed or looking at the past through a set of (highly revisionist) rose-colored glasses, but my honest oppinion is that he made this up. I could understand calling it System X, Console X, etc., but X Box? Howww conveeeenient...:(
Well, the Saturn didn't exactly have SMP. SMP implies that the machine has multiple, yet identical, CPUs. The Saturn had multiple, yet different (as in different instruction sets) CPUs.
It had 2 Hitachi SH2's, 1 Hitachi SH1, a Motorola 68EC000 (M68k), 2 video display processors (VDP1 and VDP2), a system control processor, and a DSP for sound. For those counting, that's 8 different processors, of which 4 or 5 are actual CPUs that you had to write separate programs for (rather than just ASICs that you had the main CPU pass simple commands to on the system bus, like how it is with sane consoles;) ).
And while all consoles have more than one "chip", whether it be one CPU and some ASICs for sprites, 3D, and sound, the well-designed consoles have chips that easily work together.
For example, the Genesis had 2 CPUs, an M68k and a Z80, and look at how easy to program it was. Lots of people used the Z80 for music (if they even used it at all), and the M68k for game logic (and in the case of Sonic The Hedgehog, insanely fast scrolling that the video hardware's scrolling engine couldn't do on its own), and beyond the M68k's program occasionally messing with the Z80's program (the Z80 was given 8K of RAM which was also accessible by the M68k; this made getting the two to work together fairly simple: just copy the music you wanted played into that 8K of RAM, then signal your Z80 program to play it), the two only had to interact when the programmer wanted them to (if at all).
Contrast the sane design of the Genesis with the Jaguar, whose CPUs did not get along. You had to write a separate program for EACH of them, even having to write programs which ran on the video processors, because they couldn't do anything on their own. The M68k wanted to take control of the system bus, interfering with the video CPUs, so what most people did was just use the M68k to boot the system and process input from the controllers, and the rest of the time disable it, opting instead to have the actual game logic run on one of the video processors, which, of course, also had to run the graphics code that you wrote for it! Never mind the hardware bugs that resulted in programmers having to keep the entire program in cache because said bugs caused cartridge access to be horrifically slow. By comparison, the Saturn was a breeze to program.
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uh, CVS?
Whenever somebody wants to edit a file, CVS actually just gives them a copy. When they're done editing, CVS merges the new versin with the old, and checks it into the repository (and, IIRC, the repository's copy of the file gets locked to prevent multiple people from checking in changes at the same time).
Let's say you have a file, foo.txt, and imagine that multiple people were editing this file at the same time. The file would most likely get corrupted, and at the very least some weirdness would go on (imagine opening the file, and at the same time somebody else was saving changes to the file; you would only get part of their changes). People would overwrite each other's changes, people would try to save changes at the same time, etc.
The only people who should be allowed to make Sonic games are Sonic Team, and the games should be sidescrollers. 2D optional.
This, to me, is actually kind of sad. I was always a big Sega fan.
No, I'm thinking of pigeons. I wasn't implying that pigeons are rodents, just that they might as well be for what they're worth.
Ask anybody who's lived in a big, crowded city, like New York or someplace like that. They'll all tell you that pigeons (yes, the kind of bird) are little more than rats that fly: they're dirty, they're annoying pests, they're all over the place, etc.
How fitting that you should say, "Look, I made a pigeon rat," what with pigeons being little more than flying rats and whatnot.
Except that the Americans got the last laugh... sort of. The Russians found that graphite dust from the pencils got EVERYWHERE, thanks to the lack of gravity.
Although I do agree that, unfortunately, a lot of NASA is just pork barrel stuff.
Especially in the space program, you can not, never in a million years, expect any launch vehicle to have a 100% safety record.
I agree.
I hate it when people say the shuttle has the highest failure rate of any launcher, because it isn't true. We just don't hear about the other failures, because people go, "Oh boy, Rocket Type X failed again, and so now Corporation Y has lost another satellite." The Arianne 5 (or whatever it's called), for example, has an insanely high statistical failure rate, much more so than the shuttle.
With that said, looking at the shuttle's failure rate in a purely statistical manner gives one a skewered view. Some people say, "1 launch in 60 has failed!" without actually doing the math. If one out of every 60 launches failed, that would be only a 1.6% failure rate, aka a 98.4% success rate. A 100% success rate is impossible, and even a 99% success rate would mean that 1 out of every 100 launches ended in disaster.
And let's also consider that while 1 of the 2 catastrophes was part design flaw (which was fixed), and part "It's good enough, so launch it already" thinking, the second catastrophe seems to have merely been caused by an accident (the tank insulation striking the wing).
The Columbia should have been retired years ago. At about 25 years of age, it was the oldest of the shuttle orbiters. Additionally, it had the misfortune of being the "first run" of the space shuttles, and all the problems that come with that. IIRC (I could be way wrong on this), the other shuttles were actually constructed a little differently than the Columbia was, based on lessons learned.
As another IIRC, and additional evidence that the Columbia should've been retired years ago, the Columbia was completely worthless as far as supporting the ISS goes, because it was the only shuttle that couldn't actually reach the ISS. I could be wrong about that, though.
Actually, the Russians had poisoned what would have been Laika's last meal, so that she would have died a quick and painless death.
Unfortunately, she didn't live long enough to eat that last meal; IIRC there was a problem and she was cooked alive. I don't remember for sure, but I think that the craft itself remained functional for a while after Laika's death.
Mars' gravity is 38% of Earth's, IIRC.
So are you saying that by having a human in a space vehicle that the computers will then have to be less complicated??? Humans aren't rad-hardened either. Your statement makes no sense.
Actually, it makes perfect sense. You missed the point, though. It isn't that the computers would have to be less complicated, in fact they might be MORE complicated. But since you would have to shield the whole craft from radiaton anyway (for the humans), the computers would not have to be quite so rad-hardened.
Computer technology is evolving so extremely fast, they will be able to think in a few years.
Think in a few years? Not likely. Asking whether or not machines think is like asking if submarines can swim, but that's beside the point. AI is like those flying cars we were all supposed to be driving by now, in that much of it was just unrealistic "Wouldn't it be cool if..." pipe dreaming.
Computers are sufficently powerful enough and rad-hardened enough to accomplish sophisticated tasks now. Look at the computers they use in present day communications satellites and the Galileo probe.
Yeah, they seem sufficiently rad hardened on earth because they are being shielded from most of the cosmic and sun's radiation by the earth's atmosphere and magnetic field. In space, though, it's another matter. The Pentium 4 I'm typing this on would be unreliable at best, and wouldn't work at all at worst.
Also, it's interesting that you mention the Galileo probe, seeing that its computer was deep fried by the radiation and had all sorts of problems.
How far has space-shuttle technology evolved in the past few years?? It hasn't evolved a drop. It's the same 70's apollo-era technology. There is nothing about the space shuttle that is going to get people to mars other than it's a rocket.
No one has ever suggested that the shuttle would be a good vehicle for traveling to Mars in. In fact, even if the shuttle featured the most cutting edge in computing technology it would be unsuitable because it just can't carry enough fuel. In fact, IIRC most of the fuel for its engines gets used up during takeoff.
The most likely candidate would be to build an entirely new design, one that used nuclear propulsion so that the trip would be as short as possible.
As for it costing trillions of dollars? I don't think so. But, maybe this time we should just ask NASA, "Ok, how much realistically (i.e. taking into account unforseen problems, test failures, redesigns, etc.) will it cost?" instead of, "Ok, you've got this much to spend. Can you do it?" And then decide if it's too expensive.
The Columbia was 25 years old. It probably shouldn't have been used for that long, and was only intended to be used for 10 years. But still, if the shuttle were redesigned from scratch today, it probably would be safer and more economical. We've already gotten over the hurdle of building reusable vehicles, and we now know how to solve a lot of the pitfals and problems.
We already know what the earth looks like from the moon.
That wasn't the point of that statement. What I meant was seeing what the earth looks like from space or the moon IN PERSON. I would imagine that no picture in existence could do it justice.
And you can count on the public to get tired of just about anything after a few months of seeing it on the news nonstop. That alone doesn't mean you should stop doing it, though.
When NASA can present an honest solution to safe and economical manned space travel (not the one in thirty odds of catastrophic failure we apparently have now) perhaps a return to manned spaceflight could be undertaken if there is a specific rational goal to accomplish.
Except that traveling in space is inherently dangerous. There is no place in the solar system more inhospitable to humans than space. But the only way we are going to learn how to make space travel safer for humans is by doing it. Sort of like how we've learned to make airplanes safer by having flown so often.
The thing is, for all the times that the shuttle has has gone into space, there have only been two failures (catastrophic ones, though), and one of them (maybe both, we'll see in a few months when the investigation is over) was caused by human oversight and "It's good enough" thinking. Rockets, on the other hand, fail all the time.
Aside from the no-immediate-use stuff like "How do ants behave in space?" (answer: they dig like crazy), sooner or later we are going to have to send humans off-planet on a permanent/extended trip. Maybe we decide to start mining asteroids, or whatever, but it will most certainly require a human to be present.
There is only so much that a probe can do. A human geologist on-site could learn more about Mars' geology in a short while than a probe could over the course of its entire mission. You're forgetting that if you landed a probe on Mars, it would be extremely difficult to maneuver it, because of things like a 20 minute communications lag, the fact that you can only communicate with the probe for part of the day, and the limited computing power of the probe's computer.
The onboard computer is limited because it has to not only be extremly reliable, but it also has to be rad-hardened (maybe not once on Mars, but to survive the trip), which means using slower technology (it's slower because, in order to decrease the odds of cosmic radiation flipping bits, the gates and transistors have to be larger).
Besides all that, there is the "being there" aspect of it. Seeing what the earth looks like from the moon, school children communicating with astronauts (and even thinking up experiments to try in space, like the ants thing I mentioned above), and things like that, which may not have a direct and immediate scientific value, are no less important.
Or we could listen to you and just sit here, think small, look up at the stars and planets, but never visit them, because you think it's too expensive and dangerous.
Your post reminded me of something someone once said:
"We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
-John F. Kennedy
Some people speculated that they might turn the rederfarm to Apple servers but I think it was just a rumor.
I doubt they'll do it. IIRC, they get their Sun machines dirt cheap, and in return they put, "Final Rendering on computers provided by Sun Microsystems".
They use Suns for non-rendering stuff too, like file serving, asset management, etc. I remember reading an article where the Pixar guy they interviewed said that they never take any of their old fileservers offline. Lots of VFX companies will just back up and then delete from the file servers anything not related to their current projects, but not Pixar evidently.
I think their reasoning was that by the time one of the file servers becomes obsolete, chances are that whatever is on it is also obsolete. However, they might want to go back and see how they did something in the past, etc., so they keep the old file servers online. The article used to be on Design in Motion, but now I can't find it.
Steve Jobs doesn't run Pixar the way he runs Apple.
And, in typical fashion, George Lucas takes credit for starting Pixar and then selling it to Steve Jobs.
IIRC, what really happened was that, in the early 1980s, all the people in the then-small ILM computer graphics department wanted to do full-length animated films using computer animation. Lucas, on the other hand, wanted ILM's CG department to supplement ILM's business as a VFX company for traditional films. They were able to reach an agreement where the guys in ILM's CG department would get to go out on their own, and in return they would hire and train their replacements, as well as giving ILM continued access to whatever technology they developed. Thus Pixar was formed.
In 1986(?), Steve Jobs acquired a controlling interest in the newly formed company. However, Pixar is John Lasseter's baby, and would most likely not have become so successful were it not for him.
On a side note, Lucas is a revisionist and a bit of a megalomaniac. I think that the new consolidation is an attempt to bring in the "wayward" companies (aka ILM). And while the LucasArts people might be glad about having better access to ILM's resources, I'll bet that the ILM people are none to pleased. I know I'd be pissed.
They use a lot of stuff from Sun Microsystems.
Yeah, for the bazillionth time, I mixed up EGA and CGA.
Still, though, the whole thing seems just a little too convenient.
Yeah, Altered Beast wasn't that great. But Sonic? C'mon. I'd rather play Sonic 1, 2, or 3 than Mario, any day of the week.
;)
I remember one occasion where a friend of mine called me up, and said something like, "Hey, my mom & dad finally bought me a Sega! They got me Jurassic Park to go with it!" So I went over to his house...
Well, it turns out his parents had bought him a SNES (why the hell he thought it was "a Sega" is beyond me), and when he fired up Jurassic Park, I just laughed my ass off. I mean, compared to the Genesis version (being made by a different company, it was completely different than Jurassic Park for the other systems) it was so pathetic. I had him come back over to my house, and showed him Jurassic Park on my Genesis.
He always was one of those weird people who'd rather play Mario World than Earthworm Jim.
Yeah, I've got a couple around here myself. But they're all in much worse condition than the paper shown in those scans.
The paper has faded and is often quite crumpled, the pencil marks have faded, etc.
On the other hand, the paper in those scans looks like it was done very recently.
I stand corrected.
In fact, now that I think about it, the EGA card could do something like 640x400 or 640x480 in black & white. It was the CGA card that could only do 640x200 (in B&W no less) IIRC.
Somebody should've made a video card for PCs back then that had the kind of video hardware that consoles had, only it could also hook up to a monitor. Things like multiple layers of independently scrolling backgrounds, sprites, and more than just the 16 colors that EGA could do, etc. While you could do all those things in software, it would have been a lot faster to do them in hardware, and I think that whatever company made 'em could've had a goldmine on their hands (assuming that they could've gotten enough developers to support their cards).
Actually, I've only programmed for the GameBoy and Genesis, but not professionally. I'm working on a homebrew game for GameBoy right now, and started but never finished one for the Genesis.
;)
I tried programming for the Jaguar after Hasbro declared it an open system (aka they wouldn't sue anybody crazy enough to still be making games for it), but ran away screaming after I learned what a horridly buggy and unnecessarily complex machine it is.
My knowledge about the Saturn only comes from what others have said, and the list of CPUs came from the Saturn box that I have in my closet
As for my username, I didn't pick it. My sole PC was a 486DX @ 33mhz (later upgraded to a Pentium @ 133mhz) until about 1998. My friends would all be like, "So, have you played that new PC game that just came out?" and after saying no, my system was too old 100 times or so, they stuck me with the KewlPC on-line moniker (refusing to call me anything but "Mr Kewl PC" in my e-mails and whatnot).
Hey, at least I kept it to 4 paragraphs this time. Wait... doh!
The SoundBlaster was for digital waveforms aka recorded sound. The AdLib was for music (FM Synthesis, MIDI too if memory serves).
So it seemed only natural that somebody would take the standard as far as music goes (AdLib) and add the ability to play back digital recorded sound.
The confusion comes from the fact that, while what you said is true for the 386 line, on the 486 line the DX does in fact mean that an on-chip co-processor is present, or so Intel wanted people to think.
In actuality, both the 486SX and the 486DX had an on-chip co-processor, but on the 486SX it was disabled.
See one of my above two posts explaining the whole 486SX/487SX boondoggle.
Actually, the whole SX/DX thing is different for the 486s.
486SX - on-chip math co-processor, but it's disabled
486DX - on-chip math co-processor
487SX - same as 486DX, but different pin layout so it wouldn't fit in a 486SX/DX socket. Was sold as a math co-processor for the 486SX, but in actuality was just a 486DX that disabled the 486SX when you turned the system on.
Yeah, I remember the whole 487 thing. What a scam.
Basically, the 486SX was the 486 with the math co-processor disabled. Motherboards at the time often had an extra socket for a math co-processor in case you wanted to get one but didn't want to pay for a whole new CPU that had one on-chip.
Intel's math co-processors for the 386 (all of them on a separate chip) were called 387s. Since Intel made two versions of the 386 (the DX and the cheaper but slower SX), they decided to make the 486 have two versions too, and again used the DX/SX suffixes.
The 486DX had an on-chip math co-processor, whereas the 486SX did not (or so Intel told everyone). They decided to make a separate math co-processor for the 486SX, and called it the 487SX.
What Intel didn't tell anybody was that, IIRC, the 486SX actually did have an on-chip math co-processor, but it was merely disabled. Additionally, they didn't bother to tell anybody that the 487SX was actually a 486DX (the one with the math co-processor enabled) that just had a different pin layout than either the 486DX or 486SX.
What's more, when installed as a math co-processor (which was the only option, the different pin layout meant it wouldn't fit in either a 486SX or 486DX slot), it merely disabled the 486SX, taking over its job, and acted like the 486DX that it actually was (CPU + math co-processor).
Later we would see the 486DX2, 486DX4, etc.
My thoughts exactly. The author is either misinformed, has an extremely bad memory, or is making it up. As for which I believe to be true, well, those papers look a little too well preserved to have been created in 1991 IMHO (how many of you keep doodlings you made 12 years ago?).
:(
CD-ROM drives in 1991 were OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive, as were sound cards. Flash ROM? In 1991? Affordable? Please...
An EGA card that can also output NTSC video (whether s-video or composite) would have been unheard of, namely because there wouldn't have been any point: EGA cards could do 640x200, but only in black & white (1-bit color). They could do up to 16 colors (4-bit color) in a different video mode, but only at 320x200. Yeah, that's right, 320x200, not 320x240. Oops, did somebody just get caught?
And the Voodoo 3 3000 was most certainly NOT available in 1995! Perhaps some cards based on the Voodoo 1 chipset, but the Voodoo 3 chipset wouldn't hit the scene until the late '90s.
The 286 had multitasking and protected mode, just like the 386. The real problem with it (as opposed to the "problem" the author states) was that, being a 16-bit machine (although the address space had been increased to 24-bit), it still had to use segments to be able to access all of its address space, and to handle programs with more than 64K of code and data.
As for the 286 being the first Intel processor that was backwardly compatible: no. No no no no no. The 8086 was "backward" compatible with the 8088 (in fact, they were exactly the same, except for the 8088 sacrificed some speed to cut down motherboard costs by only having 8 data lines instead of the 8086's 16, but made up for it (which is where the slowness comes in) by doing two reads in succession), the 80186 (yes, there was a 186, but it sold very poorly) was backwardly compatible with the 8088 and 8086, etc.
As for the SNES, both it and the Genesis probably had about equal market penetration. The SNES had better RPGs IIRC, but the Genesis had better sidescrolling action & platform games thanks to its faster processor. Yeah, the SNES had Mario, but the Genesis had Sonic The Hedgehog, Jurassic Park (the Genesis version of Jurassic Park was light years better than all the other versions and even had better graphics too; not coincidentally, the Genesis version was made by a different company than the one that did all the other versions), Vectorman, etc. "The SNES had the biggest, baddest games of its day." Not quite. When it first came out, most of the games sucked. Even for games where the same company made both a Genesis and an SNES version, the Genesis version was usually better. Take a look at Earthworm Jim if you don't believe me. It wasn't until games like StarFox and Donkey Kong Country came out that the SNES started to reach critical mass, but even then it always carried Nintendo's "kiddie" reputation thanks to the boatloads of games with cutesy characters (Mario, Yoshi, Kirby, etc.) that Nintendo churned out. Genesis remained the hardcore gamer's platform of choice for many years.
I'd like to think that this guy is just badly misinformed or looking at the past through a set of (highly revisionist) rose-colored glasses, but my honest oppinion is that he made this up. I could understand calling it System X, Console X, etc., but X Box? Howww conveeeenient...
Umm, no. Not even close.
MS-DOS is an operating system. Since no Atari system has ever run it, nor did the Colecovision (correct spelling), those systems aren't DOS systems.
And there were quite a few DOS games that were better than what you'd find on an old Atari: Commander Keen was just one of them.
Saturn? Yea, SMP is ready for consoles :p
;) ).
Well, the Saturn didn't exactly have SMP. SMP implies that the machine has multiple, yet identical, CPUs. The Saturn had multiple, yet different (as in different instruction sets) CPUs.
It had 2 Hitachi SH2's, 1 Hitachi SH1, a Motorola 68EC000 (M68k), 2 video display processors (VDP1 and VDP2), a system control processor, and a DSP for sound. For those counting, that's 8 different processors, of which 4 or 5 are actual CPUs that you had to write separate programs for (rather than just ASICs that you had the main CPU pass simple commands to on the system bus, like how it is with sane consoles
And while all consoles have more than one "chip", whether it be one CPU and some ASICs for sprites, 3D, and sound, the well-designed consoles have chips that easily work together.
For example, the Genesis had 2 CPUs, an M68k and a Z80, and look at how easy to program it was. Lots of people used the Z80 for music (if they even used it at all), and the M68k for game logic (and in the case of Sonic The Hedgehog, insanely fast scrolling that the video hardware's scrolling engine couldn't do on its own), and beyond the M68k's program occasionally messing with the Z80's program (the Z80 was given 8K of RAM which was also accessible by the M68k; this made getting the two to work together fairly simple: just copy the music you wanted played into that 8K of RAM, then signal your Z80 program to play it), the two only had to interact when the programmer wanted them to (if at all).
Contrast the sane design of the Genesis with the Jaguar, whose CPUs did not get along. You had to write a separate program for EACH of them, even having to write programs which ran on the video processors, because they couldn't do anything on their own. The M68k wanted to take control of the system bus, interfering with the video CPUs, so what most people did was just use the M68k to boot the system and process input from the controllers, and the rest of the time disable it, opting instead to have the actual game logic run on one of the video processors, which, of course, also had to run the graphics code that you wrote for it! Never mind the hardware bugs that resulted in programmers having to keep the entire program in cache because said bugs caused cartridge access to be horrifically slow. By comparison, the Saturn was a breeze to program.