You're right. To send people, it would be faster, but 1000 times more expensive (and I don't think that the above figure pulled out of my ass is a terrible exaggeration)
However, in the case of this mission, a robotic lander was absolutely the way to go. If you'll remember, the Polar Lander used an extremely risky trajectory that was calculated to only have a 50% probability of success, due to the various difficulties associated with a polar landing (which requires you to plot a collision course with your planet, rather than the usual technique of inserting yourself into the orbit, and 'slowly' allowing yourself to return to the atmosphere). Putting humans in that sort of risk would simply be unacceptable. The MPL was essentially expendable surplus hardware that would have been scrapped, due to the high failure rate of similar missions.
Human mars exploration might be a good idea. However, in this case, sending a robot was completely justified. Polar landings are risky, and we have very little experience with them. If we land a human on Mars, it sure as hell won't be near the poles the first time.
Not to mention that PowerPC is officially defunct on desktop platforms.
Granted, multiple-platform support is important, but PowerPC will be less and less of an issue as time goes on, in terms of graphics drivers and user-level applications.
(And yes. I write this from a PPC machine with a completely-unsupported graphics card. I would be using Ubuntu were it not for this fact. However, I acknowledge that it's probably not a huge priority for developers to support a platform that has no future, given the limited manpower that exists.)
Those are all ID titles. ID have always been very strong Linux supporters, way before Linux was even beginning to catch on, and have offered native ports of most of their products.
However, the fact that it didn't come along with the money to support it is. Sacrifices had be made somewhere, and in the case of a program as far-reaching as NCLB, those sacrifices tended to be quite significant.
Some of the logic behind its implementation was a bit misguided, though the underlying philosophy isn't all that bad. With proper funding and refinement, it might actually achieve its designated goals.
(It's also worth noting that some special-needs students cost their districts upwards of $50,000/year to support. In terms of fairness, is it unfair that other students aren't receiving that sort of funding, or would it be unfair if those students didn't receive the support that they require? It's a dilemma to be certain, and I don't quite have a clear answer for it)
Estimates don't place the Anwar reserves to be all that big. If we extracted all of it tomorrow, we'd be set for about a year.
Offshore drilling has the potential to provide a better, long-term solution. I'd rather explore this route than wreck one of the last pristine environments on North America.
Come live in the UK for a while. The UK has the infrastructure and mentality to deal with $12 gas.
Cities are built densely, with essential services within walking distance to virtually all residences, and good public transportation exists everywhere -- even the countryside.
I could realistically live and survive almost anywhere in the UK without a vehicle. In the US, this simply isn't an option in most cities.
6. The culture sucks. No matter how much they try to change, years of hiring the sub-par have infused the gov't with a culture of sluggish bureaucracy. This will take decades to undo. Also, this is precisely the kind of environment that will drive a decent technical person raving mad in short order. Actually, funny you mention that.
There's actually a (rather distant) historical precedent for firing everyone in the government. Everyone.
Mind you, that would be a rash and ultimately unfair decision. However, it wouldn't be out of the question for the next president to initiate a series of massive layoffs to reduce unnecessary staff, redundant agencies, and re-form the system to serve the people rather than itself.
The present system has failed, and some major changes are needed. We're now suffering from decades of conservatives blatantly sabotaging governmental and social programs to drive their point across (Amtrak comes to mind as one such agency that's been deliberately mismanaged.)
We haven't properly slashdotted a server in years.
Servers got more powerful, bandwidth increased, and the number of users on slashdot declined. Do the math.
The server outage is either unrelated, or due to another site.
Of course, it is a bit odd, considering that we've had two or three "slashdotted" articles in the past day, and hadn't had any for quite a long time before that.
It also supports Gopher! Don't forget that behemoth of a feature!
(Also, while the latest release of Safari might have the edge with regards to speed, FF3 blows everything out of the water when it comes to memory use. It's still not perfect, but it's about the best darn thing that there is*)
*I'm sure somebody is going to tell me that Opera does it better. Frankly, I don't care.
Apple aren't refusing to put Flash on the iPhone. Adobe are.
Flash is (more or less) only available for major operating systems on x86-based architectures.
Non-Intel Linux isn't supported, and 64-bit OSes aren't supported on any platform. For a piece of software as major and significant as Flash, this is a pretty big deal.
PPC Macs are still supported, although support has been waning for several years, and was never all that good to begin with (extremely slow and buggy, even compared to the "good" Windows version).
Also, given the absurd levels CPU usage incurred by the Flash player, it's no small wonder that Apple don't want it on their device.
When I was referring to criminals, I was talking about violent ones - the ones in gangs, the mob, etc... The illegality of drugs has created an underground criminal network, and they fight and kill each other over territory, supplies, disputes. Territory that wouldn't matter if drugs were legal. Supplies that could be had out of a catalog. Disputes could be settled in court. People do what they have to in order to get by, and none of us are perfect. We can fall victim to poverty, addiction, depression, etc.... That doesn't fundamentally change who we are, or necessarily take away our ability to recover.
Do you really think the world is divided between "good people" and "bad people"?
If you're a Christian, read over the gospels. This is pretty much their biggest, most profound underlying message, and certainly the most important one, whether or not you actually believe in some sort of higher power.
*I'm excluding suicides because they'd just find another, and accidents because the real accident rate is insignificant. That might not necessarily be the best exception to make. There's strong evidence that many suicide attempts are aborted either part-way through, or in the middle of the act (eg. there is immediate regret). "Hesitation marks" can be seen in knife wounds, and are used to help differentiate between suicides and homicides.
Arguably, if guns are less accessible, there will be the same number of suicide attempts, but possibly fewer actual deaths.
Why do Americans think they're so darn different from the rest of the world?
Even long after something has been proven to work around the rest of the world, Americans continually argue that, for whatever small insignificant reason, it won't work for them... be it the right to roam, nationalized healthcare, or simply liberalization in general.
In "secular Europe," the concept of family hasn't really suffered, and yet the vast majority of Americans claim that even the slightest shift toward liberal policy will entirely obliterate the concept of family structure.
The agricultural economy in Scotland isn't terribly different from that in the US (and yes, I've lived in both places). Scotland's "roaming" laws explicitly prohibit entering clearly fenced-off or built-up lands, but also preserve roaming rights for people with peaceful intents. Although the concept did indeed seem strange to me at first (Americans love property rights), Scotland's roaming privileges just simply work, and there are rarely (if ever) problems.
Criminals are going to be criminals. If somebody wants to steal your cattle, trespassing laws aren't going to stop them (and if they get caught, trespassing offenses will be the least of their worries). The notion of the American "right" to shoot trespassers also seems more and more barbaric once you think it over further.
Give it a shot. It's actually a pretty neat concept. We don't live in the 1800s anymore, and please refrain from calling Scotland a tiny, insignificant area in the future.
Wait a second.... that article is claiming that the quality of the connector will affect the amount of time it takes the signal to travel to its destination?
That's a pretty serious accusation, and seems to be bending the laws of physics quite a bit.
For consumer-grade equipment, a ±5% source of something that might degrade the quality of the image isn't really all that alarming, and is perfectly within the "acceptable" range, even for high-end installations.
If you're doing production work, you're not going to be using HDMI anyway. There are connectors designed to properly cope with RF signals in the GHz range that should preserve the full signal.
I wouldn't confuse Denon's consumer arm with its professional-range of products. They're likely run by completely different people, and very likely in different parts of the world. Various other companies in the industry (Yamaha, Sony, etc...) operate in the same manner.
If your flatmates are musicians, chances are that they won't be remotely interested in the consumer-grade stuff that Denon have to offer. It's also pretty difficult to pull any sort of BS in the professional sector, because their clients are professionals who are trained to know better. I honestly wouldn't base your purchasing decision around this sort of thing.... Talking from experience, Denon's professional division make fairly decent products.
"Audio Geeks" can more or less be divided into three categories, and there's a bit of superstition involved with all of them; audiophiles, recording folks, and live sound guys. Whereas audiophiles tend to be full of shit, an experienced recording/live-sound guy will know a variety of tricks to get the best sound out of a PA, properly balance an EQ to a room, etc...
would not sacrifice the Space Shuttle, Space Station, Hubble, and the unmanned exploration of space .
You bring up a few points there:
Firsly is that for the ISS to go up into orbit, numerous sacrifices had to be made. In the early 90s, when the ISS was being considered, the US had a 20+ year lead in scientific research. The Superconducting Supercollider, a massive particle accelerator, was being built in Texas. It was set to be several times larger than the already-huge LHC, which is set to go online .
In the end, when the ISS was proposed, there was only enough money to build it, or the SSC. Doing both wasn't fiscally responsible, and the SSC got scrapped after construction has already been begun, and $2Billion had been spent. From there on, scientific research in the US has been on a sharp and steady decline, and our "20-year" lead is gone completely, and it will be very difficult to recover.
The ISS and Space Shuttle have been horrendously inefficient projects, in terms of scientific-output versus dollars spent.
Hubble, and many recent unmanned missions have been proven to be extremely successful, although it seems that increasing NASA's budget decreases the frequency of these projects in favor of big capital projects such as the shuttle/ISS.
As far as Hubble's concerned, I've never really understood why we can't simply build another, rather than risking lives/equipment to repair it.
It's odd that this is being mentioned, because this is the third time this week that somebody's brought up the Oil Shale argument, claiming that it will bring us $30/barrel oil.
Did Fox run a special or something?
(And to counteract the FUD, the vaguely intelligent oil companies have already been researching Oil Shale extraction with their own money, on their own land for several years now. None of the conspiracy theorists seem to point that one out....)
The X server should be mostly scrapped and rewritten in Java. Java is a language that is suited for managing information like that, while still being high-performance I'm confused. Do I mod this as "Funny"? Fantastic.
His arguement (which, frankly, isn't that absurd) gets modded as Funny, and my joke gets modded as Insightful.
The calculations you're displaying are irrelevant to the argument we're currently making.
Benchmarks in that field are important to consider, but ultimately irrelevant. "Simple Aritmetic" applications don't really show Java's weaknesses, because the programs are essentially the same. Java sometimes automatically adds a few neat tricks to speed things up.
On the other hand, Java tends to encourage terrible programming practices in large applications. Sure, it keeps the "training wheels" on to prevent security/memory/stability issues from arising, but this comes at a performance hit. Also, the "treat everything as an object or class" paradigm doesn't seem to make for elegant or efficient code in many situations.
A well-written Java app should be competitive with C. Unfortunately, well-written Java apps are few and far between.
The article also doesn't seem to consider the various CPU-optimized mathematics libraries provided by Intel, AMD, Sun, etc.... along with a few Open-source ones that aren't quite as good, but still provide a massive improvement over "pure" C.
The X server should be mostly scrapped and rewritten in Java. Java is a language that is suited for managing information like that, while still being high-performance I'm confused. Do I mod this as "Funny"?
Re:Anything else out there?
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm guessing that X.Org inherited an absolutely terrifying codebase from xfree86.
Simply getting xfree to compile was a chore, even on the (few and far between) stable releases.
Personally, I'm still unconvinced that X is a particularly "good idea." 15 years later, and the promises of simplicity and compatibility are still unrealized, as every single implementation of the protocol has suffered from numerous problems. Perhaps it would be best to start from scratch, and revise X11 to be a more realistic/practical specification.
Even back in 1994, it was being called the Iran-Contra of user-interfaces.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. To send people, it would be faster, but 1000 times more expensive (and I don't think that the above figure pulled out of my ass is a terrible exaggeration)
However, in the case of this mission, a robotic lander was absolutely the way to go. If you'll remember, the Polar Lander used an extremely risky trajectory that was calculated to only have a 50% probability of success, due to the various difficulties associated with a polar landing (which requires you to plot a collision course with your planet, rather than the usual technique of inserting yourself into the orbit, and 'slowly' allowing yourself to return to the atmosphere). Putting humans in that sort of risk would simply be unacceptable. The MPL was essentially expendable surplus hardware that would have been scrapped, due to the high failure rate of similar missions.
Human mars exploration might be a good idea. However, in this case, sending a robot was completely justified. Polar landings are risky, and we have very little experience with them. If we land a human on Mars, it sure as hell won't be near the poles the first time.
Not to mention that PowerPC is officially defunct on desktop platforms.
Granted, multiple-platform support is important, but PowerPC will be less and less of an issue as time goes on, in terms of graphics drivers and user-level applications.
(And yes. I write this from a PPC machine with a completely-unsupported graphics card. I would be using Ubuntu were it not for this fact. However, I acknowledge that it's probably not a huge priority for developers to support a platform that has no future, given the limited manpower that exists.)
Those are all ID titles. ID have always been very strong Linux supporters, way before Linux was even beginning to catch on, and have offered native ports of most of their products.
NCLB isn't an inherently awful idea.
However, the fact that it didn't come along with the money to support it is. Sacrifices had be made somewhere, and in the case of a program as far-reaching as NCLB, those sacrifices tended to be quite significant.
Some of the logic behind its implementation was a bit misguided, though the underlying philosophy isn't all that bad. With proper funding and refinement, it might actually achieve its designated goals.
(It's also worth noting that some special-needs students cost their districts upwards of $50,000/year to support. In terms of fairness, is it unfair that other students aren't receiving that sort of funding, or would it be unfair if those students didn't receive the support that they require? It's a dilemma to be certain, and I don't quite have a clear answer for it)
Estimates don't place the Anwar reserves to be all that big. If we extracted all of it tomorrow, we'd be set for about a year.
Offshore drilling has the potential to provide a better, long-term solution. I'd rather explore this route than wreck one of the last pristine environments on North America.
Cities are built densely, with essential services within walking distance to virtually all residences, and good public transportation exists everywhere -- even the countryside.
I could realistically live and survive almost anywhere in the UK without a vehicle. In the US, this simply isn't an option in most cities.
There's actually a (rather distant) historical precedent for firing everyone in the government. Everyone.
Mind you, that would be a rash and ultimately unfair decision. However, it wouldn't be out of the question for the next president to initiate a series of massive layoffs to reduce unnecessary staff, redundant agencies, and re-form the system to serve the people rather than itself.
The present system has failed, and some major changes are needed. We're now suffering from decades of conservatives blatantly sabotaging governmental and social programs to drive their point across (Amtrak comes to mind as one such agency that's been deliberately mismanaged.)
We haven't properly slashdotted a server in years.
Servers got more powerful, bandwidth increased, and the number of users on slashdot declined. Do the math.
The server outage is either unrelated, or due to another site.
Of course, it is a bit odd, considering that we've had two or three "slashdotted" articles in the past day, and hadn't had any for quite a long time before that.
It also supports Gopher! Don't forget that behemoth of a feature!
(Also, while the latest release of Safari might have the edge with regards to speed, FF3 blows everything out of the water when it comes to memory use. It's still not perfect, but it's about the best darn thing that there is*)
*I'm sure somebody is going to tell me that Opera does it better. Frankly, I don't care.
Fine. Then explain away Juno.
A lighthearted comedy about a teenage pregnancy. How the hell is that supposed to work, and who on earth agreed to fund it?
In the end, though, it was an absolutely fantastic film, precisely because the characters were perfectly crafted, and the cast knew how to play them.
Apple aren't refusing to put Flash on the iPhone. Adobe are.
Flash is (more or less) only available for major operating systems on x86-based architectures.
Non-Intel Linux isn't supported, and 64-bit OSes aren't supported on any platform. For a piece of software as major and significant as Flash, this is a pretty big deal.
PPC Macs are still supported, although support has been waning for several years, and was never all that good to begin with (extremely slow and buggy, even compared to the "good" Windows version).
Also, given the absurd levels CPU usage incurred by the Flash player, it's no small wonder that Apple don't want it on their device.
The number of stabbings in all of Britain in a month is less than the number of shootings in Detroit in a day.
I'm too lazy to dig up the numbers (again), but you can indeed look it up and confirm it.
Do you really think the world is divided between "good people" and "bad people"?
If you're a Christian, read over the gospels. This is pretty much their biggest, most profound underlying message, and certainly the most important one, whether or not you actually believe in some sort of higher power.
Arguably, if guns are less accessible, there will be the same number of suicide attempts, but possibly fewer actual deaths.
This is one thing that I still don't understand.
Why do Americans think they're so darn different from the rest of the world?
Even long after something has been proven to work around the rest of the world, Americans continually argue that, for whatever small insignificant reason, it won't work for them... be it the right to roam, nationalized healthcare, or simply liberalization in general.
In "secular Europe," the concept of family hasn't really suffered, and yet the vast majority of Americans claim that even the slightest shift toward liberal policy will entirely obliterate the concept of family structure.
The agricultural economy in Scotland isn't terribly different from that in the US (and yes, I've lived in both places). Scotland's "roaming" laws explicitly prohibit entering clearly fenced-off or built-up lands, but also preserve roaming rights for people with peaceful intents. Although the concept did indeed seem strange to me at first (Americans love property rights), Scotland's roaming privileges just simply work, and there are rarely (if ever) problems.
Criminals are going to be criminals. If somebody wants to steal your cattle, trespassing laws aren't going to stop them (and if they get caught, trespassing offenses will be the least of their worries). The notion of the American "right" to shoot trespassers also seems more and more barbaric once you think it over further.
Give it a shot. It's actually a pretty neat concept. We don't live in the 1800s anymore, and please refrain from calling Scotland a tiny, insignificant area in the future.
Wait a second.... that article is claiming that the quality of the connector will affect the amount of time it takes the signal to travel to its destination?
That's a pretty serious accusation, and seems to be bending the laws of physics quite a bit.
For consumer-grade equipment, a ±5% source of something that might degrade the quality of the image isn't really all that alarming, and is perfectly within the "acceptable" range, even for high-end installations.
If you're doing production work, you're not going to be using HDMI anyway. There are connectors designed to properly cope with RF signals in the GHz range that should preserve the full signal.
I wouldn't confuse Denon's consumer arm with its professional-range of products. They're likely run by completely different people, and very likely in different parts of the world. Various other companies in the industry (Yamaha, Sony, etc...) operate in the same manner.
If your flatmates are musicians, chances are that they won't be remotely interested in the consumer-grade stuff that Denon have to offer. It's also pretty difficult to pull any sort of BS in the professional sector, because their clients are professionals who are trained to know better. I honestly wouldn't base your purchasing decision around this sort of thing.... Talking from experience, Denon's professional division make fairly decent products.
"Audio Geeks" can more or less be divided into three categories, and there's a bit of superstition involved with all of them; audiophiles, recording folks, and live sound guys. Whereas audiophiles tend to be full of shit, an experienced recording/live-sound guy will know a variety of tricks to get the best sound out of a PA, properly balance an EQ to a room, etc...
Given the way that the senate has handled tech. issues over the past 7 years, I'd say that that those guys have indeed never used a computer.
You bring up a few points there:
Firsly is that for the ISS to go up into orbit, numerous sacrifices had to be made. In the early 90s, when the ISS was being considered, the US had a 20+ year lead in scientific research. The Superconducting Supercollider, a massive particle accelerator, was being built in Texas. It was set to be several times larger than the already-huge LHC, which is set to go online .
In the end, when the ISS was proposed, there was only enough money to build it, or the SSC. Doing both wasn't fiscally responsible, and the SSC got scrapped after construction has already been begun, and $2Billion had been spent. From there on, scientific research in the US has been on a sharp and steady decline, and our "20-year" lead is gone completely, and it will be very difficult to recover.
The ISS and Space Shuttle have been horrendously inefficient projects, in terms of scientific-output versus dollars spent.
Hubble, and many recent unmanned missions have been proven to be extremely successful, although it seems that increasing NASA's budget decreases the frequency of these projects in favor of big capital projects such as the shuttle/ISS.
As far as Hubble's concerned, I've never really understood why we can't simply build another, rather than risking lives/equipment to repair it.
It's odd that this is being mentioned, because this is the third time this week that somebody's brought up the Oil Shale argument, claiming that it will bring us $30/barrel oil.
Did Fox run a special or something?
(And to counteract the FUD, the vaguely intelligent oil companies have already been researching Oil Shale extraction with their own money, on their own land for several years now. None of the conspiracy theorists seem to point that one out....)
His arguement (which, frankly, isn't that absurd) gets modded as Funny, and my joke gets modded as Insightful.
Beautiful!
The calculations you're displaying are irrelevant to the argument we're currently making.
Benchmarks in that field are important to consider, but ultimately irrelevant. "Simple Aritmetic" applications don't really show Java's weaknesses, because the programs are essentially the same. Java sometimes automatically adds a few neat tricks to speed things up.
On the other hand, Java tends to encourage terrible programming practices in large applications. Sure, it keeps the "training wheels" on to prevent security/memory/stability issues from arising, but this comes at a performance hit. Also, the "treat everything as an object or class" paradigm doesn't seem to make for elegant or efficient code in many situations.
A well-written Java app should be competitive with C. Unfortunately, well-written Java apps are few and far between.
The article also doesn't seem to consider the various CPU-optimized mathematics libraries provided by Intel, AMD, Sun, etc.... along with a few Open-source ones that aren't quite as good, but still provide a massive improvement over "pure" C.
I'm guessing that X.Org inherited an absolutely terrifying codebase from xfree86.
Simply getting xfree to compile was a chore, even on the (few and far between) stable releases.
Personally, I'm still unconvinced that X is a particularly "good idea." 15 years later, and the promises of simplicity and compatibility are still unrealized, as every single implementation of the protocol has suffered from numerous problems. Perhaps it would be best to start from scratch, and revise X11 to be a more realistic/practical specification.
Even back in 1994, it was being called the Iran-Contra of user-interfaces.