For whatever reason, the faster the CPU is the slower the machine boots. Back in the 8-bit no-mass-storage days our machines booted instantly. Then they took seconds. Then they took minutes. Now they take several minutes. Two more generations from now, if your power fails you will have to wait 2 days for your machine to reboot (hell, it takes almost that long now if it decides to run scandisk or whatever).
The inverse proportion even runs to metaphors. I remember an ad or article or something a few years ago about how this speed-demon new CPU stole the poor engineer's coffee break -- well, now he'll get it back while the damn thing reboots. Maybe with a vacation thrown in for lagniappe.
Well, your cellphone company is clearly running inferior hardware.
I'm sure that if they rented the Goldstone tracking dish and pointed it at you, they could probably get full voice bandwidth to you on the Moon. Of course, they'd have to ignore the rest of their customers and keep the dish pointed at you all the time...
It is very doubtful that these early probes used anything more sophisiticated than parity bits and simple checksums. The computers they were able to fly back then were very stupid. I don't even think Pioneer had the ability to upload and run new code. If you note the pictures, you will notice it doesn't even have a dish -- just an axial dipole antenna. It is closer to a weather beacon in concept than more modern probes like Voyager with their reprogrammable, reconfigurable robotic platforms.
For one thing, there's probably not much we could learn from the Pi6 instruments that we can't find out easier elsewhere. Now that we know the nature of solar weather a lot better than we did in the 1960's, we can rely on instruments in Earth orbit and even groundside which do not tie up huge radio telescopes and return more data.
For another, power consumption is always a concern even on solar-powered craft. Operating instruments drop the bus voltage, which makes the other instruments less reliable; turning stuff off makes the stuff that stays on work better. It's also possible for an instrument to fail and short its power bus, which can kill the whole craft unless there is a backup system (and a lot of early probes weren't that overbuilt). Pi6's main contribution to science now is just what we got from it, the "damn, it's still working?" report.
Re: the conversion, this involves some folks with very long-term goals and it was worth their while to burn Pu242 (a dwindling supply) to power cyclotrons to irradiate U238 (unused and decayed fuel) with 25eV neutrons to make Pu239. When the Pu239 decays it becomes U235, which has a half-life of 7 ex 8 years (which is why there is still a little of it around).
The "standard" Pu isotope used in bombs and reactors is Pu242, half life 50,000 years. Pu239 does have a half-life of 24,100 years, and Pu238 92 years. I'm sure it is Pu238 on Cassini. Of course all these isotopes are "rare" (=nonexistent) having gone to U238 in the aeons since the original supernova formed the cloud that birthed Sol. But in the cores of breeder reactors it's Pu242 that's common, and Pu238 the more energetic, unusual, and dangerous isotope that was isolated (no doubt at great expense) for use on Cassini.
And again, I would expect the RTG to retain its integrity if it re-entered from LEO; that's what it's designed to do. Surviving a head-on collision with the ground at escape velocity is an entirely different thing, which has never been tested.
It wouldn't burn at all. Methane burns on Earth because there is oxygen in the atmosphere to combine with (this is itself a very "unnatural" condition created by living things). The atmosphere of Jupiter is chemically stable as far as we can tell; if you wanted to burn something, you'd have to haul an oxidizer there to combine with all that free methane.
Pu-235 has a 25.3 minute half-life. The one they use is Pu-238 with a half life of 87.7 years, so that the power provided during the first 10 years of the mission is more or less constant. Pu-239 has a half life of 24100 years.
My bad, what comes from posting after working all weekend instead of doing weekend stuff. I have been writing a story that involved the conversion of Pu239 to U235 for longer-term (100's of millions of years) use, and the number stuck in my head.
As far as the other comment, that the Pu238 "can't" oxidize, well, I suppose that depends on a lot of factors. It isn't supposed to oxidize, just like launch vehicles aren't supposed to explode. Personally I think if they screwed up badly enough to hit the earth dead-on at 30K+km/h that it would be hard to imagine all the Pu remaining in solid form regardless of any attempts to protect it. Other than the isotope goof I stand by the sentiment of my original post.
Ah, but how do you KNOW it will be there if you go out and look for it tomorrow? How do you KNOW it is there when there are clouds or it is daytime?
This is why we have to send spacecraft to all these planets, to spray them with UBIK. Otherwise we could wake up one day and find out they've turned into hair dryers or washed-up Presidential candidates floating in the sky.
(Phil Dick, who wrote UBIK (first), had some kind of epiphany in 1974 after which he came to believe that the entire world was an illusion and that we are really still reliving the years after Christ's death over and over, presumably until we get things right or see past the illusion. And the guy continued to write really good SF.)
The reason people were upset with Cassini was that it was different from preceeding probes in three ways:
1. It used the Plutonium isotope 239, rather than the more common 235. Pu239 is more reactive (has a much shorter half-life) than 235; this makes it better fuel for an RTG but makes it much more dangerous if you inhale a particle.
2. It used an especially large amount of this especially dangerous isotope of Plutonium.
3. In addition to the at launch risks (of course launch vehicles never blow up, right? The Challenger crew will back you up on that one) Cassini had to make not one but two near passes by Earth, using it as a gravity handle in order to get out to the outer Solar System. Of course NASA would never drive a spacecraft into a planet, just look at the job they did of inserting Mars Climate Orbiter into its current, um, location.
In any case like all risk calculations in matters nuclear the thing comes down to a multiplication of very large risks by very small probabilities, and in this case NASA didn't blow up the launch vehicle or drive the spacecraft into the planet. Had they done either there is a good chance the RTG would have survived re-entry intact; it is designed to do that, just as the spacecraft is designed not to blow up or drive into the planet, and usually those designs work.
However, there is a possibility that, in the unlikely event of a re-entry (particularly being driven into the planet during a gravity-handle exercise) the RTG would have breached. This would have been a very bad thing. Plutonium oxidizes readily into a very fine powder which can remain suspended in the air for amazing periods of time. Inhaling even one microscopic particle of this stuff (much worse than Pu235, which is bad enough) pretty much dooms you to lung cancer, at a minimum. You can argue with this if you feel like looking foolish but it's well known what happens when a particle of Pu gets embedded in lung tissue; every alpha particle passes through several hundred cells before it stops, and eventually one of them is going to do major mischief.
Now, if this happened it's likely that life would have gone on for most of us just as it has gone on after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island -- both accidents which have a long anecdotal and statistical history of ensuing mortality, which has been whitewashed, swept under the rug, or very occasionally outright covered up (ever try to get by-county infant mortality stats for Pennsylvania the year after TMI?). But it would indeed not be the End of the World (tm).
Is the smallish risk of that worth the pictures we're getting now? I am personally inclined to say yes. But then, it would probably be someone else who got lung cancer if the worst-case accident happened. The people who protested the mission have their point, which is that it's not my right to make that decision for them. I may not agree with them but that does not make them stupid or venal, and it's tiring to see the people I supposedly agree with taking the moral low road by making fun of them and refusing to get their point.
In 2001 the book the monolith was on Iapetus, in the center of the bright side -- reminding David Bowman of an eyeball with the monolith as its pupil. Of course, the movie moved the monolith to Io's Lagrange point, and Clarke decided to follow the movie rather than the original book when writing the sequel 2010 because more people were familiar with it.
But originally, Discovery had been planned as a two-way Jupiter probe which was rerouted to become a one-way Saturn probe whose crew would go into hibernation after doing their duties and await rescue by the as-yet-unbuilt Discovery II. In this scenario it made more sense for HAL the computer to go crazy because it had to keep the secret from Bowman and Poole on the outgoing journey (though you'd have to think they might suspect something big was up with such a large change in mission plan).
So I'm still waiting to see the pix of Iapetus. You will notice that Iapetus is one of Cassini's particular targets...
That damn storm is bigger than our entire planet. You probably wouldn't even notice it if you were in it -- you'd just be floating around in a mass of, well, call it air, with no idea that the "local" mass the size of North America you're floating in is travelling at thousands of km/h with respect to the rest of Jupiter.
In order to take time exposures CCD's must be chilled to cryogenic temperatures. Very sensitive CCD's are also sensitized in other exotic ways, such as by "drifting" atoms of dopants into the substrate so as to carefully control their distribution.
Detector design is an art, and these imagers are not the ones you buy in cameras at Wal-Mart or even in the back of amateur astronomy magazines. They are hand made one at a time and only the best of the best individual samples go into space.
These detectors are easily ruined. Long before the CCD melts its high sensitivity can be ruined as excessive temperature and radiation scramble these carefully arranged structures. They will still function as CCD's, but the characteristics which were achieved at such great cost will be ruined. This happened to a relative of mine back in the 70's when he was on vacation, and a coworker let the liquid nitrogen run out on one of his gamma ray detectors. It still detected gamma rays after its day at room temperature, but the energy peaks were broad and flat instead of nice and sharp as their research required.
The Hubble could focus on the Earth and Moon if the controllers wanted to risk trying, say, aiming at the night side. But they do not want to risk the usefulness of their detectors for faint deep-space objects on trying to resolve Neil's footprints.
Hubble did photog a near-earth asteroid awhile back that was passing at Moon-like distance, but I believe the problem with the Earth and Moon is the sheer size of highly illuminated area. And imaging a near-new Moon wouldn't help because, of course, then the Moon is mostly dark because the Sun is behind it.
it not nice to explain to joke, if they didnt get it the first time maybe they will next lifetime...
Yeah, but the problem -- which Crowley also missed -- is that if nobody ever gets the joke it never gets a chance to be funny. Laughing alone compares to laughing with others the way masturbation compares to sex.
crowley may have been a Troll but he was a classly one.. most of the time.
Agreed, I find much to admire in Crowley even though I think he was a snob and strongly disagree with him on a few points. It's just that watching the Xtians break out in hives after hearing do what thou wilt is about as funny as the 4,096th retelling of any other joke.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law was Aleister Crowley's deliberately provocative rewrite of the Wiccan creed Do what thou wilt and harm none.
Like much of what Crowley wrote, this comment was meant to be misinterpreted. Crowley felt that each of us has a true inner nature which can only be expressed in a climate of absolute freedom; and that when people are allowed to express their true natures, behavior in accordance with the original dictum will arise naturally anyway.
Crowley was an elitist who felt people too stupid to understand his true intent deserved not to understand it, but several folks have issued fine interpretations in the decades since his death which make it clear that Crowley only liked to look like some evil dude from hell. He found it funny and enjoyed shocking his enemies. In many ways he is the Original Troll, and you've both fallen for one of his classic jokes.
What does an asteroid need to do to be officially declared a "moon"? Maintain an eliptical or circular orbit around a planet?
Yep.
And no, they may not remain "moons" forever, in which case they would be reclassified. This usage has been pretty consistent since I started reading about such things, oh, in the mid-1970's.
It is by no means clear that any of the outer planet moons were formed in their current orbits. In fact, considering some of the recent work being done on the Rare Earth hypothesis, it seems likely that any small solid body near a gas giant probably came there from somewhere else.
It is also considered as near to certain as any of these things ever get that Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos are captured asteroids; yet they are definitely considered moons of Mars.
I am not the original poster, and I don't know what language Excel is written in. But there would be good reason to write it in asm if MSFT were so inclined.
Personally, I would like to see some evidence myself since my personal experience is that most of what MSFT has ever done has been f*cked and it would be a rare show of reality awareness if they dropped into asm for these important functions.
Actually NT supports nearly all INT21 and PC standard ROM BIOS calls, all of which it emulates -- though some of them do strange things.
Open a file named "COM1" for output, which you can do just like in DOS, and it will send the output to your serial port (assuming you've set the port up, probably with a batch file). Now, if you do this in DOS, your app will hang until the data is sent (uses the COM port handshake lines, no way to turn this behavior off because it's throught the BIOS) but your data gets sent and then your program continues operation.
In NT, nothing gets sent at all until you close the COM1 "file." And then, what gets sent, is the first 256 bytes of your data, repeated overandoverandoverandover until you have matched the byte count of your actual data output.
Ain't backward compatibility wunnerful?
Re:Programmers Make Computers Slower Year by Year
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Well, are you a developer? If so, then you know what you say isn't true. If you arn't a developer, you must not know many of them. Users literally scream for new features, and the developer has to implement them, and FAST.
Well, I am a developer and my experience is not that users scream for new features, but that marketers scream for them because they feel features are necessary in order to create a sense of difference between my and competing products; actual users don't generally use even 5% of most application functionality, wouldn't miss it if it wasn't there, and would be thrilled to see the speedup they would get if it magically disappeared.
Re:Programmers Make Computers Slower Year by Year
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Secondly, the calculation routines in a spreadsheet are not time-critical enough to the point where they should be written in asm.
You do not know what you are talking about.
Spreadsheet updates have always been cutting edge benchmark phenomena. When you are recalculating a spreadsheet with several hundred thousand or million entries (yes, people do build those) and you have to recalculate it again and again and again and again and again as you refine your model, you quickly learn the difference between 30 seconds and 2 seconds.
C itself is very highly tuned to be easily converted into fast asm code by an entity as dumb as a compiler, but the only way it could ever compare to actual asm code would be on a CPU like the old 650X 8-bit series where there are no high-speed registers to speak of. While there are some pretty good optimizing compilers there are none that can juggle the decisions of when to use registers, the stack, and mem storage the way a human being can.
C is also a crappy language for beginning programmers and for application programming in general, because it achieves the performance it gets by abandoning all error checking, so that writing to the 11th element of a 10-element array crashes your program instead of giving a sensible error message. While there is a place for C it is overused both at low levels where asm is really needed and at high levels where speed is not critical and a richer programming UI would speed development and bugriddance.
And C++ is just the worst language ever developed, all the worst aspects of the lean fast no-error-checking environment combined with the worst aspects of a high-abstraction is my veriable alive now? environment. Commit one of the 2^32 possible scoping bugs and get a crash instead of an error message, sheesh, it's a wonder that any program written in C++ ever works at all.
There are many people writing software today who have never seen a line of asm, or even a line of a language like BASIC or Fortran that uses the processor model of an instruction per line and thus reminds you of what has to be done to convert your instructions into actual activity. They have no idea what is necessary to call up the routines you drop into an event-driven environment like VB, how utterly alien such an environment is at the CPU level and how much resources it eats up. This is a big problem which is only getting bigger, as so many people in the industry have never even used a computer that didn't have a mouse and a GUI.
I was taught SOP for troubleshooting a device that is blowing fuses, is to replace the fuse with a piece of wire and look for the smoke. Been doing this for 15 years and only had a couple of explosions, though one was audible throughout the entire building.
"Self-replicating doodads" can be found in nature everywhere. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that you'd not be reading this article in the first place were it not for some self-replicating doodads in your head. =)
We are talking here about artificial doodads. Living things, including highly modified and engineered living things, are not in the same class as a propeller. For one thing, living things don't have rotating parts.
Oh, and the self-replicating doodads in my (and your) head have to stop self-replicating before they can do that "thinking" thing, suggesting that there are limits even to what living things can accomplish via nanotech.
This is an important point. In some states non-compete and tenure agreements aren't worth the paper they are printed on while in others these contracts have real teeth.
My company trained an employee and watched him jump ship to our biggest competitor; in Louisiana, the judge laughed at the signed non-compete contract. But in Mississippi, he has recovered wages and training costs from one ex-employee and been paid handsomely by the company who hired two more to let them off the hook.
The principle in some states is that you cannot sign away your right to work in the field where you are equipped to earn your livelihood -- not for training, not for the finder's bonus you were paid, not for anything. Whereas in other places it is treated like any other contract.
All of this breathless hype about nanotech is just silly. It is a long, long way from making a propeller spin to making it spin deliberately and perform a useful task. And the holy grail of nanotech, the self-replicating doodad that recreates itself at 1/2 scale, is just plain impossible. Have these folks never heard of the square-cubed law?
Show me a nanorobot capable of accepting a command and executing it, and I'll stop yawning.
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The inverse proportion even runs to metaphors. I remember an ad or article or something a few years ago about how this speed-demon new CPU stole the poor engineer's coffee break -- well, now he'll get it back while the damn thing reboots. Maybe with a vacation thrown in for lagniappe.
I'm sure that if they rented the Goldstone tracking dish and pointed it at you, they could probably get full voice bandwidth to you on the Moon. Of course, they'd have to ignore the rest of their customers and keep the dish pointed at you all the time...
It is very doubtful that these early probes used anything more sophisiticated than parity bits and simple checksums. The computers they were able to fly back then were very stupid. I don't even think Pioneer had the ability to upload and run new code. If you note the pictures, you will notice it doesn't even have a dish -- just an axial dipole antenna. It is closer to a weather beacon in concept than more modern probes like Voyager with their reprogrammable, reconfigurable robotic platforms.
For one thing, there's probably not much we could learn from the Pi6 instruments that we can't find out easier elsewhere. Now that we know the nature of solar weather a lot better than we did in the 1960's, we can rely on instruments in Earth orbit and even groundside which do not tie up huge radio telescopes and return more data.
For another, power consumption is always a concern even on solar-powered craft. Operating instruments drop the bus voltage, which makes the other instruments less reliable; turning stuff off makes the stuff that stays on work better. It's also possible for an instrument to fail and short its power bus, which can kill the whole craft unless there is a backup system (and a lot of early probes weren't that overbuilt). Pi6's main contribution to science now is just what we got from it, the "damn, it's still working?" report.
Ah-nold seems to have a running thread of these type of ideas in his movies, even those that aren't addressing such issues directly.
The "standard" Pu isotope used in bombs and reactors is Pu242, half life 50,000 years. Pu239 does have a half-life of 24,100 years, and Pu238 92 years. I'm sure it is Pu238 on Cassini. Of course all these isotopes are "rare" (=nonexistent) having gone to U238 in the aeons since the original supernova formed the cloud that birthed Sol. But in the cores of breeder reactors it's Pu242 that's common, and Pu238 the more energetic, unusual, and dangerous isotope that was isolated (no doubt at great expense) for use on Cassini.
And again, I would expect the RTG to retain its integrity if it re-entered from LEO; that's what it's designed to do. Surviving a head-on collision with the ground at escape velocity is an entirely different thing, which has never been tested.
It wouldn't burn at all. Methane burns on Earth because there is oxygen in the atmosphere to combine with (this is itself a very "unnatural" condition created by living things). The atmosphere of Jupiter is chemically stable as far as we can tell; if you wanted to burn something, you'd have to haul an oxidizer there to combine with all that free methane.
My bad, what comes from posting after working all weekend instead of doing weekend stuff. I have been writing a story that involved the conversion of Pu239 to U235 for longer-term (100's of millions of years) use, and the number stuck in my head.
As far as the other comment, that the Pu238 "can't" oxidize, well, I suppose that depends on a lot of factors. It isn't supposed to oxidize, just like launch vehicles aren't supposed to explode. Personally I think if they screwed up badly enough to hit the earth dead-on at 30K+km/h that it would be hard to imagine all the Pu remaining in solid form regardless of any attempts to protect it. Other than the isotope goof I stand by the sentiment of my original post.
This is why we have to send spacecraft to all these planets, to spray them with UBIK. Otherwise we could wake up one day and find out they've turned into hair dryers or washed-up Presidential candidates floating in the sky.
(Phil Dick, who wrote UBIK (first), had some kind of epiphany in 1974 after which he came to believe that the entire world was an illusion and that we are really still reliving the years after Christ's death over and over, presumably until we get things right or see past the illusion. And the guy continued to write really good SF.)
1. It used the Plutonium isotope 239, rather than the more common 235. Pu239 is more reactive (has a much shorter half-life) than 235; this makes it better fuel for an RTG but makes it much more dangerous if you inhale a particle.
2. It used an especially large amount of this especially dangerous isotope of Plutonium.
3. In addition to the at launch risks (of course launch vehicles never blow up, right? The Challenger crew will back you up on that one) Cassini had to make not one but two near passes by Earth, using it as a gravity handle in order to get out to the outer Solar System. Of course NASA would never drive a spacecraft into a planet, just look at the job they did of inserting Mars Climate Orbiter into its current, um, location.
In any case like all risk calculations in matters nuclear the thing comes down to a multiplication of very large risks by very small probabilities, and in this case NASA didn't blow up the launch vehicle or drive the spacecraft into the planet. Had they done either there is a good chance the RTG would have survived re-entry intact; it is designed to do that, just as the spacecraft is designed not to blow up or drive into the planet, and usually those designs work.
However, there is a possibility that, in the unlikely event of a re-entry (particularly being driven into the planet during a gravity-handle exercise) the RTG would have breached. This would have been a very bad thing. Plutonium oxidizes readily into a very fine powder which can remain suspended in the air for amazing periods of time. Inhaling even one microscopic particle of this stuff (much worse than Pu235, which is bad enough) pretty much dooms you to lung cancer, at a minimum. You can argue with this if you feel like looking foolish but it's well known what happens when a particle of Pu gets embedded in lung tissue; every alpha particle passes through several hundred cells before it stops, and eventually one of them is going to do major mischief.
Now, if this happened it's likely that life would have gone on for most of us just as it has gone on after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island -- both accidents which have a long anecdotal and statistical history of ensuing mortality, which has been whitewashed, swept under the rug, or very occasionally outright covered up (ever try to get by-county infant mortality stats for Pennsylvania the year after TMI?). But it would indeed not be the End of the World (tm).
Is the smallish risk of that worth the pictures we're getting now? I am personally inclined to say yes. But then, it would probably be someone else who got lung cancer if the worst-case accident happened. The people who protested the mission have their point, which is that it's not my right to make that decision for them. I may not agree with them but that does not make them stupid or venal, and it's tiring to see the people I supposedly agree with taking the moral low road by making fun of them and refusing to get their point.
But originally, Discovery had been planned as a two-way Jupiter probe which was rerouted to become a one-way Saturn probe whose crew would go into hibernation after doing their duties and await rescue by the as-yet-unbuilt Discovery II. In this scenario it made more sense for HAL the computer to go crazy because it had to keep the secret from Bowman and Poole on the outgoing journey (though you'd have to think they might suspect something big was up with such a large change in mission plan).
So I'm still waiting to see the pix of Iapetus. You will notice that Iapetus is one of Cassini's particular targets...
That damn storm is bigger than our entire planet. You probably wouldn't even notice it if you were in it -- you'd just be floating around in a mass of, well, call it air, with no idea that the "local" mass the size of North America you're floating in is travelling at thousands of km/h with respect to the rest of Jupiter.
Detector design is an art, and these imagers are not the ones you buy in cameras at Wal-Mart or even in the back of amateur astronomy magazines. They are hand made one at a time and only the best of the best individual samples go into space.
These detectors are easily ruined. Long before the CCD melts its high sensitivity can be ruined as excessive temperature and radiation scramble these carefully arranged structures. They will still function as CCD's, but the characteristics which were achieved at such great cost will be ruined. This happened to a relative of mine back in the 70's when he was on vacation, and a coworker let the liquid nitrogen run out on one of his gamma ray detectors. It still detected gamma rays after its day at room temperature, but the energy peaks were broad and flat instead of nice and sharp as their research required.
The Hubble could focus on the Earth and Moon if the controllers wanted to risk trying, say, aiming at the night side. But they do not want to risk the usefulness of their detectors for faint deep-space objects on trying to resolve Neil's footprints.
Hubble did photog a near-earth asteroid awhile back that was passing at Moon-like distance, but I believe the problem with the Earth and Moon is the sheer size of highly illuminated area. And imaging a near-new Moon wouldn't help because, of course, then the Moon is mostly dark because the Sun is behind it.
Yeah, but the problem -- which Crowley also missed -- is that if nobody ever gets the joke it never gets a chance to be funny. Laughing alone compares to laughing with others the way masturbation compares to sex.
crowley may have been a Troll but he was a classly one.. most of the time.
Agreed, I find much to admire in Crowley even though I think he was a snob and strongly disagree with him on a few points. It's just that watching the Xtians break out in hives after hearing do what thou wilt is about as funny as the 4,096th retelling of any other joke.
Like much of what Crowley wrote, this comment was meant to be misinterpreted. Crowley felt that each of us has a true inner nature which can only be expressed in a climate of absolute freedom; and that when people are allowed to express their true natures, behavior in accordance with the original dictum will arise naturally anyway.
Crowley was an elitist who felt people too stupid to understand his true intent deserved not to understand it, but several folks have issued fine interpretations in the decades since his death which make it clear that Crowley only liked to look like some evil dude from hell. He found it funny and enjoyed shocking his enemies. In many ways he is the Original Troll, and you've both fallen for one of his classic jokes.
Yep.
And no, they may not remain "moons" forever, in which case they would be reclassified. This usage has been pretty consistent since I started reading about such things, oh, in the mid-1970's.
It is by no means clear that any of the outer planet moons were formed in their current orbits. In fact, considering some of the recent work being done on the Rare Earth hypothesis, it seems likely that any small solid body near a gas giant probably came there from somewhere else.
It is also considered as near to certain as any of these things ever get that Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos are captured asteroids; yet they are definitely considered moons of Mars.
Personally, I would like to see some evidence myself since my personal experience is that most of what MSFT has ever done has been f*cked and it would be a rare show of reality awareness if they dropped into asm for these important functions.
Open a file named "COM1" for output, which you can do just like in DOS, and it will send the output to your serial port (assuming you've set the port up, probably with a batch file). Now, if you do this in DOS, your app will hang until the data is sent (uses the COM port handshake lines, no way to turn this behavior off because it's throught the BIOS) but your data gets sent and then your program continues operation.
In NT, nothing gets sent at all until you close the COM1 "file." And then, what gets sent, is the first 256 bytes of your data, repeated overandoverandoverandover until you have matched the byte count of your actual data output.
Ain't backward compatibility wunnerful?
Well, I am a developer and my experience is not that users scream for new features, but that marketers scream for them because they feel features are necessary in order to create a sense of difference between my and competing products; actual users don't generally use even 5% of most application functionality, wouldn't miss it if it wasn't there, and would be thrilled to see the speedup they would get if it magically disappeared.
You do not know what you are talking about.
Spreadsheet updates have always been cutting edge benchmark phenomena. When you are recalculating a spreadsheet with several hundred thousand or million entries (yes, people do build those) and you have to recalculate it again and again and again and again and again as you refine your model, you quickly learn the difference between 30 seconds and 2 seconds.
C itself is very highly tuned to be easily converted into fast asm code by an entity as dumb as a compiler, but the only way it could ever compare to actual asm code would be on a CPU like the old 650X 8-bit series where there are no high-speed registers to speak of. While there are some pretty good optimizing compilers there are none that can juggle the decisions of when to use registers, the stack, and mem storage the way a human being can.
C is also a crappy language for beginning programmers and for application programming in general, because it achieves the performance it gets by abandoning all error checking, so that writing to the 11th element of a 10-element array crashes your program instead of giving a sensible error message. While there is a place for C it is overused both at low levels where asm is really needed and at high levels where speed is not critical and a richer programming UI would speed development and bugriddance.
And C++ is just the worst language ever developed, all the worst aspects of the lean fast no-error-checking environment combined with the worst aspects of a high-abstraction is my veriable alive now? environment. Commit one of the 2^32 possible scoping bugs and get a crash instead of an error message, sheesh, it's a wonder that any program written in C++ ever works at all.
There are many people writing software today who have never seen a line of asm, or even a line of a language like BASIC or Fortran that uses the processor model of an instruction per line and thus reminds you of what has to be done to convert your instructions into actual activity. They have no idea what is necessary to call up the routines you drop into an event-driven environment like VB, how utterly alien such an environment is at the CPU level and how much resources it eats up. This is a big problem which is only getting bigger, as so many people in the industry have never even used a computer that didn't have a mouse and a GUI.
I was taught SOP for troubleshooting a device that is blowing fuses, is to replace the fuse with a piece of wire and look for the smoke. Been doing this for 15 years and only had a couple of explosions, though one was audible throughout the entire building.
About a minute ago their site froze solid. Time to upgrade the servers.
We are talking here about artificial doodads. Living things, including highly modified and engineered living things, are not in the same class as a propeller. For one thing, living things don't have rotating parts.
Oh, and the self-replicating doodads in my (and your) head have to stop self-replicating before they can do that "thinking" thing, suggesting that there are limits even to what living things can accomplish via nanotech.
My company trained an employee and watched him jump ship to our biggest competitor; in Louisiana, the judge laughed at the signed non-compete contract. But in Mississippi, he has recovered wages and training costs from one ex-employee and been paid handsomely by the company who hired two more to let them off the hook.
The principle in some states is that you cannot sign away your right to work in the field where you are equipped to earn your livelihood -- not for training, not for the finder's bonus you were paid, not for anything. Whereas in other places it is treated like any other contract.
Show me a nanorobot capable of accepting a command and executing it, and I'll stop yawning.