Re:When to use Tags (versus Categories)
on
Google Upgrades Blogger
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As regular readers of both I MUCH prefer categories. If I'm interested in what one of my blog heros has to say on a broad topic I have a lot more success and fun browsing through everything in a category than by trying to figure out some arbitrary keyword.
Categories also allow your users to read 'virtual blogs'. On several blogs that I read regularly, I don't have the main page bookmarked - but rather one or more category pages. This allows me to read entries on say, geocaching, while avoiding entries on cats.
14. yahoo.com - Unable to point to a great iconic achievement, the portals will wind up sharing a footnote with AOL.
What made Yahoo different than other search engines back in that day was their directory - links chosen and edited by human beings and arranged by category with a description. Rarely used today, but powerful in it's day.
GUI != mouse-user-interface, just graphical-user-interface
DESQview was a windowing system - not a graphical system. Windowing != GUI. (Frameworks used a windowing system in the mid 80's - and nobody would call it a GUI.)
I used Desqview/X for several months and quite enjoyed the experience.
PS, it also worked with a mouse.
DESQview/X != DESQview. The two were considerably different despite sharing a name.
One of the unique realities of living in the area of Huntsville, Alabama (MSFC) is that you get contact with people who are actually doing things. If you make the right contacts, you know who and what is going on. Here is what is going on regards to NASA and the original data from the Apollo missions. More precisely what has gone on.
What seems to have gone one is that either you have ingested a large quantity of drugs - or you have ingested a massive quantity of drugs.
The US officials at NASA ordered the destruction of all of the records associated with the Apollo Missions after the last flight to the moon.
Contained in these records are films, data stores, and all of the technical documents for operation of the Apollo System.
Then how precisely do I have over a 5 gig of Apollo era documents, all downloaded from NASA servers, residing on my hard drive? Anyone can view these by going to Google Groups, locating the group sci.space.history, and searching on 'PDF Rusty'. (Rusty is a regular poster to that group with an uncanny ability to locate stuff NASA has put on the web. It's all publically available, but the search system is somewhat slow, and with litterally tens of thousands of documents in the results that have to be slogged through.)
The description of some details here is slightly modified so as to keep some nasty people off the trail and to protect the records.
Yes - so modified as to no longer have any connection with reality.
Burger King, Wendy's and Subway - all make considerable money by offering food that *isn't* handled in a robotic way. Your beliefs are warped by working at McDonalds, which makes its money on absolute conformity and discourages special orders.
I don't have any "beliefs" from working at McDonalds, just a little bit better understanding than most of how the process works.
No - it makes you *think* you have a little better understanding of the process. Through both your original post and your reply, it's very obvious that you are blinkered by your worms eye view - and confuse it the with big picture of how the whole fast food industry works.
Just because someone allows variation in the ingredients doesn't mean that the process is any less of an assembly line. Burger King doesn't cook the hamburgers when you order it, they assemble and place dressing on an already cooked sandwitch. Watch the way that Subway, works - order, bun, meat, dressing, topping, wrap, present order and take money - that's an assembly line.
Try actually reading my message. At no point did I state that fast food places other than McDonalds didn't use an assembly line style process. I stated that they did not handle orders robotically - the two terms are not interchangeable.
Actually - thats not quite correct. McDonald's openly solicts *new* menu and system items from the franchises - both the Quarter Pounder and the McFish came from franchisees. (So did the drive-through window.) What you aren't allowed to do is to change existing menu items.
You're correct, but the changes that they do allow are also very restricted and usually are for regional or international differences rather than just allowing experimenting. It would be highly unlikely that you will find two stores on different blocks with even minor differences in their menu. (Here in the county where I live - the McDonalds at the North and South ends of the counties *do* in fact have slightly different menus - the fact that they are owned by two different franchisees explains that.
Again, the problem with reading comprehension.
The Quarter Pounder and the McFish were introduced as experiments - first by the local franchisee, then at the corporate level. That's allowed. What nobody is allowed to do is alter existing items - which is why your manager got clamped down on. (Your reply/restatment of my wording is just as confused and incorrect as your original wording.) You'll rarely find that adjacent restaurants have different menus, because commonly they are owned by the same franchisee - and that is where menu decisions are made, not at the level of the individual restaurant.
There should have been little surprise at that outcome - as McDonalds has been 'training' it's customers to behave that way for decades.
This isn't any recent phenomenon - I worked there in the 70's - and it isn't specific to McDonalds. Other fast food restaurants do pretty much the same thing, it's just that the selection is just a bit wider.
Three for three.
I never stated it was a recent phenomenon did I? By the 70's McDonalds (and the McDonalds System) was over twenty twenty years old. The other fast food restaurants capitalize on this yes, but they also encourage special orders and have systems set up to handle special orders - something McDonalds does not do.
Burger King, Wendy's and Subway - all make considerable money by offering food that *isn't* handled in a robotic way.
Nonsense. Subway is entirely robotic - even the customer moves along assembly line fashion. You have a limited range of choices and the human|robot pickes the options out of bins that are always in the same position - hell, they get so used to putting cheese on a sandwich that even after they ask the "do you want cheese with that" question they start to put cheese on the sandwich and have to stop themselves (so I'm betting the staff are mostly running on autopilot).
As you say - nonsense. The Subway system is *designed* to deal with changing orders, very different from McDonalds. You, like the grandparent poster confuse your experience with a global experience.
BK - yeah, it's have it your way, but again all that means is that they use a dynamic picklist (so it's still robotic), and then only for the rare order that is special. The rest will be handled as robotically as at McDonalds. It's really no different from McDonalds - if you want a Big Mac without the special sauce you can get one, they just don't make a song and dance about the fact like BK do. Nor have I found that BK are all that special at taking special orders, seeing as the amount of errors that I've come accross (as I'm one of the few who actually take them up on the have it your way offer).
Again, you are incorrect. The system is *designed* to handle exceptional requests - and in the main does so quite gracefully. You, like the grandparent poster confuse your experience with a global experience.
Fast food service is nothing but robotic work already, and that's the way the chains like it.
I hate to break it to you, but the reason that it's so robotic isn't because the chains like it that way, it's because customers prefer it that way.
Burger King, Wendy's and Subway - all make considerable money by offering food that *isn't* handled in a robotic way. Your beliefs are warped by working at McDonalds, which makes its money on absolute conformity and discourages special orders.
When I worked at McDonalds a bunch of years ago, our manager decided to change the menu a little: we would put lettuce on hamburgers, Mac sauce on Filets, anything that the customer wanted. Some customers loved it. McDonalds hated it. Most customers ordered exactly what they were used to. McDonalds eventually heard about it and clamped down (changes to their menu were forbidden in the franchise agreement).
Actually - thats not quite correct. McDonald's openly solicts *new* menu and system items from the franchises - both the Quarter Pounder and the McFish came from franchisees. (So did the drive-through window.) What you aren't allowed to do is to change existing menu items.
Were customers happer about the change? It didn't seem so. They seemed more confused than anything - they knew what they wanted when they came in and they weren't really thinking about what they wanted on it.
There should have been little surprise at that outcome - as McDonalds has been 'training' it's customers to behave that way for decades.
Read over 50 comments from local Hoboken residents on http://hoboken411.com/archives/3524/ This debacle continues and despite the heroic statements from our inept town government, it still stinks.
56 comments to date, by about eight or ten people in total... Not very impressive. (Especially when you consider that both the sites name and one of the most prolific commenters name both match your Slashdot user ID - and ID with exactly one post at this moment.) Further reading shows it to pretty much be a random (and muckraking) blog - despite it's brave claims to be something much better. *yawn*.
Yeah, Gates dropped out of Harvard... that's not exactly a rags to riches story, it's more like a riches to ridiculous riches story.
Indeed. As a friend of mine puts it "Gates couldn't start his business in his parent's garage - until he convinced them to move the Sunday Rolls and the Monday Lincoln out of his way".
Coats even sees this as a driver of open source software. 'If you can get (open source software) you can't be shut down.' But that's harder to do in highly custom applications."
Er...BECAUSE it's open source, it's easier to customize. That's one of the major selling points. Maybe someone missed that memo.
No, you miss the point. The author of TFA is pointing out that writing software that requires detail knowledge of a problem domain outside of computer science and/or dealing with specialized hardware is something that F/OSS does very poorly at. Geeks write mostly for their own satisfaction and that of other geeks - and they tend to stay inside their comfort zone. Hence Sourceforge is filled with thousands of video codecs, hundreds of wikis, dozens of slashcode clones and knockoffs - and not one fully functional home or business accounting program. (As has been related on Slashdot before.)
Furthermore, because of the cost of obtaining the hardware, and holding it idle for months while writing and testing the software, is extremely prohibitive. Who can afford it? (Beyond the manufacturer, who by holding it closed can amortize that expense across multiple installations.) If it has a bug, software like that used to run the parking system won't attract the the thousands of eyes that one in a distro kernel might. (And many of the eyes it might attract won't be experienced and knowledgeable within the problem domain.) The same problem applies when it comes to adding on to or extending the software. Worse yet, industrial controllers of this nature tend to run on hardware and OS combination that aren't on the average geeks desktop - even testing the boot sequence could be problematical. F/OSS is a good thing, but it's not a universal solvent for all problems - and never can be.
The answer in this case is better EULA laws, better licensing laws, and (though I hate to say this) hiring better lawyers when it comes time for you to buy this kind of solution.
The first result in a search for "Serial Box" Serial Box gives an example of the new behaviour. A page headed "Malware Warning" appears and warns you the page you are about to visit may harm your computer.
Yet they *still* rank it in first place. As usual - Google's left hand doesn't know what its right is doing.
This is a killer issue for companies that have huge hardware inventories. Consider Digi-Key. They have the broadest inventory of electronic parts in the industry, with over 70,000 parts. Which is a big win for them, because you can usually use them as your only supplier. So there's an Internet-based company that really does profit from the "long tail".
Sorry - but I call bullshit. Digi-key's model long predates the internet - and isn't exactly uncommon among dealers in bulk commodity parts.
Where in a brick and mortar store, which suffers from space constraints so the ROI for any give stock has to be fairly high,
There's more than one model in the brick-and-mortar world.
If you can keep ROI high on faster moving items, you can balance them with lower ROI items. (Used and rare bookstores have been following this model for decades.) Big Box Retail uses the model you state - because their costs are high (from having to locate near malls and high traffic areas), the competition is fierce, and there is little to differentiate between them. Grocery stores on the other hand have an extremely low ROI overall - they depend on absolute volume to make the difference.
Anyways, the long tail is only relevant to the brick and mortar world if the store owner can afford to keep lots of slow selling product in stock.
Used bookstores have been doing this for decades. Contrary to what seems to be the popular opinion on Slashdot - not everything in a brick-and-mortar store needs to sell quickly, so long as *on average* you sell enough to meet costs and provide profit. Even if all of your stock is slow moving, you can still run a brick-and-mortar store as a 'pipeline'. So long as you sell enough volume to pay costs - the average dwell time on your shelves matters very little.
The Big Box Retail model (keep everything moving quickly) isn't the only viable retail model out there.
The interesting part is that the linked article 0.8 percent of NetFlix inventory generates 30% of the rentals.
That means of course that the remaining 99.2% of the inventory generate 70% of the rentals. If they "got rid" of this catalog they would lose a lot of customers.
Yes, they'd lose a lot of customers - but they'd also no longer need as much warehouse space, less labor, fewer handling/sorting machines, etc... etc... The loss in revenue would be balanced by lower costs. It's a pretty complex tradeoff.
Of course the data is very coarse, as Spider-Man II happens to fall into the 99.2% category.
Yep. And so does Futurama, and all of John Wayne, and a whole bunch of other stuff famous and not (outside of a narrow circle).
How long does a body have to be in the ground before digging it up the corpse and taking its valuables stops being grave robbing and becomes archeology? Is it archeology if you just take enough pictures and measurements? Shall we do some "archeology" on Westminster Abbey? The Vatican?
Actually archaeological digs on 'recent' burials and in the West is fairly common. (The just completed one at Little Big Horn about a decade back for example.) Then there is the study of the Franklin expedition back in the 80's, at least half a dozen English kings in the last few decades, etc... etc...
Time after time, from the Incas, the Mayas, the Egyptians, American Indians, etc. entire cities or societies worked for a generation to ensure that their royalty, leaders, or god-kings could rest forever undisturbed.
if you believe that only non-white get their bones disturbed - you are quite mistaken.
I am being a little hard on them, admittedly... I just think they created this nice public website for a purpose and giving some preliminary translations would further that purpose beautifully...
Preliminary translations will take months - once the have deciphered the images, this isn't just a case of running it through Bablefish.
The first step is character recognition - a human has to examine each character and determine what it is. Once that's done, entire words can be examined to see if they actually are words. (Foulups in the character recognition can pridace wgrds taat kjflas moue aljefh.) Once *that* is done, the words can be strung together and sentences roughly translated - if they orange bluebird, then they have to redo some of the earlier steps. Worse yet, the meaninings of the various Greek words don't map directly into English - so each of the words and possible meanings have to be compared and considered in context. (A single sentence can possible have anywhere from 2-3 to 5 or more possible meanings.) That process has to be repeated again at (what would correspond to) the paragraph level, and then again at the chapter and book levels.
For the same reason earthbound geologists will sometimes spend weeks or months camped in a single spot examining a small area or a single feature intensively. Taking random samples from the surface only tells you so much - sometimes you need to study whats *beneath* the surface. After you've done a broad area search - it's time to start looking at the details.
You are surely talking out of your ass.
Nope. I'm not.
It would be easy and cheap to equip a rover with a drill or trenching tool and get the benefit of both.
Nope, it's not. Drills and trenching tools (and the automated labs to make use of them) are heavy and power hungry - which means a very large and expensive rover to support them. And, as I pointed out, since you'll be in one spot for weeks or months - that [roving] gear spends most of its time as little more than ballast in the backpack, useless.
The primary mission is to obtain subsurface samples, and everything revolves around this goal. When you are weight, volume, and power limited - it makes little sense to carry something that will be little used. At the other end of the spectrum, it makes little sense to build a rover which will be unable to carry the science instruments you need. (Because of the aforementioned limits.) It's a tradeoff - and not an easy one.
Also the chance of plunking a lander down on exactly the right spot to sample is low. A rover would greatly increase the odds of finding a good site to sample.
That's why they are targeting the lander at a broad area that contains the broad geological features of interest - all they care is getting a sample of that general feature, not a specific location.
By the way I am a geologist.
So? I've spent decades following Mars exploration work and am extremely familiar with the issues and tradeoffs involved.
Why in the heck would we be launching a stationary lander when the Spirit and Opportunity have been roving the surface for over 2 years?
For the same reason earthbound geologists will sometimes spend weeks or months camped in a single spot examining a small area or a single feature intensively. Taking random samples from the surface only tells you so much - sometimes you need to study whats *beneath* the surface. After you've done a broad area search - it's time to start looking at the details.
Since those detailed studies will take weeks or months - the roving capabilities are redundant weight. (Weight that steals from the amount that can be dedicated to science capabilities.)
You don't even need to go that far. What is the main benefit we get out of exploring space? Research. Plain and simple. I can't even imagine how far and wide space research has influenced technology today.
Of course you can't imagine it. Because it hasn't happened. Contrary to popular belief and decades of NASA propoganda - the technology transfer from space to other fields has been essentially nil.
Better understanding of flight mechanics and materials have improved the aerospace industry.
Historically various providers of space rated components have been conservative in the extreme - they tend to use and reuse the same materials again and again. Partly because it's expensive and difficult to qualify new materials, partly because the costs of a mistake are so high. Overall, they (the space industry) wait until a new material has been thoroughly proven in another application before trying it themselves. (Kapton for example has been used for insulation (both electrical and thermal) since the mid 60's.)
The need to ensure the safety of astronauts has lead to new technology trickling down into the medical industry.
Not really. Medical monitoring systems at use in a typical hospital are better than that used by the astronauts by orders of magnitude or more. The systems used by the medical industry are a seperate (and much more advanced) evolutionary path.
New manufacturing processes.
And generally ones not needed elsewhere because spacecraft need combinations of lightness, strength, and extreme enviroments not found anywhere else.
Velcro. TANG!
Both developed prior to and seperate from the space program.
Even if we learn absolutely nothing directly from this mission there is always going to be derivative technology from what we had to develop to get there.
On the first two - you are utterly and completely incorrect. They did not die because of failed technology. (Unless you are one of those idiots who [mis]use the term 'technology' as is so often done today.) They died because fallible humans ignored clear warning signs. There was nothing unknown about their deaths in the least.
Insofar as the third, you are again completely and utterly incorrect. Not only was the design of the Block I capsule dodgy (hint: hatch), so was the construction (hint: frayed wires are believed to be the most probable cause).
Frankly I am astonished by each of your posts - I didn't think anyone could display such abysmal ignorance, and then twice prove again that he had not yet shown the full depths of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Categories also allow your users to read 'virtual blogs'. On several blogs that I read regularly, I don't have the main page bookmarked - but rather one or more category pages. This allows me to read entries on say, geocaching, while avoiding entries on cats.
DESQview was a windowing system - not a graphical system. Windowing != GUI. (Frameworks used a windowing system in the mid 80's - and nobody would call it a GUI.)
DESQview/X != DESQview. The two were considerably different despite sharing a name.
IIRC DESQview was controlled via the keyboard - while it was a windowing enviroment, it wasn't really a GUI.
What seems to have gone one is that either you have ingested a large quantity of drugs - or you have ingested a massive quantity of drugs.
Then how precisely do I have over a 5 gig of Apollo era documents, all downloaded from NASA servers, residing on my hard drive? Anyone can view these by going to Google Groups, locating the group sci.space.history, and searching on 'PDF Rusty'. (Rusty is a regular poster to that group with an uncanny ability to locate stuff NASA has put on the web. It's all publically available, but the search system is somewhat slow, and with litterally tens of thousands of documents in the results that have to be slogged through.)
Yes - so modified as to no longer have any connection with reality.
Try actually reading my message. At no point did I state that fast food places other than McDonalds didn't use an assembly line style process. I stated that they did not handle orders robotically - the two terms are not interchangeable.
Again, the problem with reading comprehension.
The Quarter Pounder and the McFish were introduced as experiments - first by the local franchisee, then at the corporate level. That's allowed. What nobody is allowed to do is alter existing items - which is why your manager got clamped down on. (Your reply/restatment of my wording is just as confused and incorrect as your original wording.) You'll rarely find that adjacent restaurants have different menus, because commonly they are owned by the same franchisee - and that is where menu decisions are made, not at the level of the individual restaurant.
Three for three.
I never stated it was a recent phenomenon did I? By the 70's McDonalds (and the McDonalds System) was over twenty twenty years old. The other fast food restaurants capitalize on this yes, but they also encourage special orders and have systems set up to handle special orders - something McDonalds does not do.
As you say - nonsense. The Subway system is *designed* to deal with changing orders, very different from McDonalds. You, like the grandparent poster confuse your experience with a global experience.
Again, you are incorrect. The system is *designed* to handle exceptional requests - and in the main does so quite gracefully. You, like the grandparent poster confuse your experience with a global experience.
Burger King, Wendy's and Subway - all make considerable money by offering food that *isn't* handled in a robotic way. Your beliefs are warped by working at McDonalds, which makes its money on absolute conformity and discourages special orders.
Actually - thats not quite correct. McDonald's openly solicts *new* menu and system items from the franchises - both the Quarter Pounder and the McFish came from franchisees. (So did the drive-through window.) What you aren't allowed to do is to change existing menu items.
There should have been little surprise at that outcome - as McDonalds has been 'training' it's customers to behave that way for decades.
The words you are looking for to describe your actions on Slashdot is 'astroturfing'.
56 comments to date, by about eight or ten people in total... Not very impressive. (Especially when you consider that both the sites name and one of the most prolific commenters name both match your Slashdot user ID - and ID with exactly one post at this moment.) Further reading shows it to pretty much be a random (and muckraking) blog - despite it's brave claims to be something much better. *yawn*.
Indeed. As a friend of mine puts it "Gates couldn't start his business in his parent's garage - until he convinced them to move the Sunday Rolls and the Monday Lincoln out of his way".
No, you miss the point. The author of TFA is pointing out that writing software that requires detail knowledge of a problem domain outside of computer science and/or dealing with specialized hardware is something that F/OSS does very poorly at. Geeks write mostly for their own satisfaction and that of other geeks - and they tend to stay inside their comfort zone. Hence Sourceforge is filled with thousands of video codecs, hundreds of wikis, dozens of slashcode clones and knockoffs - and not one fully functional home or business accounting program. (As has been related on Slashdot before.)
Furthermore, because of the cost of obtaining the hardware, and holding it idle for months while writing and testing the software, is extremely prohibitive. Who can afford it? (Beyond the manufacturer, who by holding it closed can amortize that expense across multiple installations.) If it has a bug, software like that used to run the parking system won't attract the the thousands of eyes that one in a distro kernel might. (And many of the eyes it might attract won't be experienced and knowledgeable within the problem domain.) The same problem applies when it comes to adding on to or extending the software. Worse yet, industrial controllers of this nature tend to run on hardware and OS combination that aren't on the average geeks desktop - even testing the boot sequence could be problematical. F/OSS is a good thing, but it's not a universal solvent for all problems - and never can be.
The answer in this case is better EULA laws, better licensing laws, and (though I hate to say this) hiring better lawyers when it comes time for you to buy this kind of solution.
Yet they *still* rank it in first place. As usual - Google's left hand doesn't know what its right is doing.
Sorry - but I call bullshit. Digi-key's model long predates the internet - and isn't exactly uncommon among dealers in bulk commodity parts.
There's more than one model in the brick-and-mortar world.
If you can keep ROI high on faster moving items, you can balance them with lower ROI items. (Used and rare bookstores have been following this model for decades.) Big Box Retail uses the model you state - because their costs are high (from having to locate near malls and high traffic areas), the competition is fierce, and there is little to differentiate between them. Grocery stores on the other hand have an extremely low ROI overall - they depend on absolute volume to make the difference.
Used bookstores have been doing this for decades. Contrary to what seems to be the popular opinion on Slashdot - not everything in a brick-and-mortar store needs to sell quickly, so long as *on average* you sell enough to meet costs and provide profit. Even if all of your stock is slow moving, you can still run a brick-and-mortar store as a 'pipeline'. So long as you sell enough volume to pay costs - the average dwell time on your shelves matters very little.
The Big Box Retail model (keep everything moving quickly) isn't the only viable retail model out there.
Yes, they'd lose a lot of customers - but they'd also no longer need as much warehouse space, less labor, fewer handling/sorting machines, etc... etc... The loss in revenue would be balanced by lower costs. It's a pretty complex tradeoff.
Yep. And so does Futurama, and all of John Wayne, and a whole bunch of other stuff famous and not (outside of a narrow circle).
Actually archaeological digs on 'recent' burials and in the West is fairly common. (The just completed one at Little Big Horn about a decade back for example.) Then there is the study of the Franklin expedition back in the 80's, at least half a dozen English kings in the last few decades, etc... etc...
if you believe that only non-white get their bones disturbed - you are quite mistaken.
Preliminary translations will take months - once the have deciphered the images, this isn't just a case of running it through Bablefish.
The first step is character recognition - a human has to examine each character and determine what it is. Once that's done, entire words can be examined to see if they actually are words. (Foulups in the character recognition can pridace wgrds taat kjflas moue aljefh.) Once *that* is done, the words can be strung together and sentences roughly translated - if they orange bluebird, then they have to redo some of the earlier steps. Worse yet, the meaninings of the various Greek words don't map directly into English - so each of the words and possible meanings have to be compared and considered in context. (A single sentence can possible have anywhere from 2-3 to 5 or more possible meanings.) That process has to be repeated again at (what would correspond to) the paragraph level, and then again at the chapter and book levels.
Nope. I'm not.
Nope, it's not. Drills and trenching tools (and the automated labs to make use of them) are heavy and power hungry - which means a very large and expensive rover to support them. And, as I pointed out, since you'll be in one spot for weeks or months - that [roving] gear spends most of its time as little more than ballast in the backpack, useless.
The primary mission is to obtain subsurface samples, and everything revolves around this goal. When you are weight, volume, and power limited - it makes little sense to carry something that will be little used. At the other end of the spectrum, it makes little sense to build a rover which will be unable to carry the science instruments you need. (Because of the aforementioned limits.) It's a tradeoff - and not an easy one.
That's why they are targeting the lander at a broad area that contains the broad geological features of interest - all they care is getting a sample of that general feature, not a specific location.
So? I've spent decades following Mars exploration work and am extremely familiar with the issues and tradeoffs involved.
Now, now - we can't have that. Actual study and thought is prohibited on Slashdot, especially when such breaks or bends strongly held canards.
For the same reason earthbound geologists will sometimes spend weeks or months camped in a single spot examining a small area or a single feature intensively. Taking random samples from the surface only tells you so much - sometimes you need to study whats *beneath* the surface. After you've done a broad area search - it's time to start looking at the details.
Since those detailed studies will take weeks or months - the roving capabilities are redundant weight. (Weight that steals from the amount that can be dedicated to science capabilities.)
Of course you can't imagine it. Because it hasn't happened. Contrary to popular belief and decades of NASA propoganda - the technology transfer from space to other fields has been essentially nil.
Historically various providers of space rated components have been conservative in the extreme - they tend to use and reuse the same materials again and again. Partly because it's expensive and difficult to qualify new materials, partly because the costs of a mistake are so high. Overall, they (the space industry) wait until a new material has been thoroughly proven in another application before trying it themselves. (Kapton for example has been used for insulation (both electrical and thermal) since the mid 60's.)
Not really. Medical monitoring systems at use in a typical hospital are better than that used by the astronauts by orders of magnitude or more. The systems used by the medical industry are a seperate (and much more advanced) evolutionary path.
And generally ones not needed elsewhere because spacecraft need combinations of lightness, strength, and extreme enviroments not found anywhere else.
Both developed prior to and seperate from the space program.
Based on history to date - no, there won't be.
On the first two - you are utterly and completely incorrect. They did not die because of failed technology. (Unless you are one of those idiots who [mis]use the term 'technology' as is so often done today.) They died because fallible humans ignored clear warning signs. There was nothing unknown about their deaths in the least.
Insofar as the third, you are again completely and utterly incorrect. Not only was the design of the Block I capsule dodgy (hint: hatch), so was the construction (hint: frayed wires are believed to be the most probable cause).
Frankly I am astonished by each of your posts - I didn't think anyone could display such abysmal ignorance, and then twice prove again that he had not yet shown the full depths of it.