Internally the modern x86 is really a RISC at heart anyway. But it's got a really massive support system on top of that that converts the older style CISC instruction set into a VLIW/ RISC style that's more efficiently executed in a superscalar way.
If you look at a picture of any modern CPU die, the real estate is totally dominated by the caches. That "massive support system" (which in reality is only a tiny fraction of the whole die area) serves largely as a decoder that unpacks the compact CISC-style opcodes (many of which are only one or two bytes long) into whatever obscure internal superscalar architecture is in vogue this year. This saves huge amounts of instruction cache space compared to unpacking bloated one-size-fits-all RISC-style opcodes into the some similar internal architecture du jour. Thus, the X86 can end up needing less die area overall. This is one reason that despite what elitists geeks say, over the years X86 has usually provided more bang for the buck than any competing processor family.
This scheme is so advantageous, that even ARM has tacked on a similarly convoluted opcode decompresser. If ARM ever evolves into a mainstream general-purpose high-end CPU, there will be undoubtedly dozens more layers of cruft added to the ARM architecture to make it competitive with X86, at which point it will be similarly complex. (For another example, take a look at how the POWER architecture ended up over time. You can hardly call it RISC any more.)
Offtopic, by why are the majority of aerospace projects painted in that hideous baby puke green?
I know there must be technical reason behind it, what is it?
Note that the picture shows the interior structure of the capsule, not the final external panels. I assume that it's probably a yellow-green zinc chromate coating that is commonly used to prevent corrosion on aluminum parts on aircraft and spacecraft.
Just because something existed in the 70's doesn't necessarily mean people should have known about it or that it had any impact on future developments.
That's because in the mind of most dweebs, nothing exists until Apple reinvents it.
But anti-nuke activists will consider this the worse tragedy
If one of these reactors ends up totally failing, it will be considered the worse tragedy by nearly everyone. Why? Because judging such events is a subjective process. That's why one baby trapped in a well is a huge crisis, whereas 100 people dying on the road each and every day doesn't even warrant news coverage. That's the way the human mind works, and you can't just brush it off.
If they were to end up with a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone around the plant for decades, then the meltdown would be remembered around the world long after the tsunami itself has faded from memory.
The USSR managed to land their tank-like lunar rovers on the moon with a Proton rocket. That rocket is still available for < $100M per launch. Six identical copies of a probe system just aren't going to cost massive amounts of money, considering that almost everything in the mission has been done before.
The US Surveyor program, which landed 5 probes on the moon, cost less than $500M ($3.5B today). Considering that almost nothing of what they did had ever been done before by the US, that kind of puts an upper limit on the cost.
In stark contrast, any manned return to the moon would have severe new political constraints. The cold war is over: The public will no longer tolerate the incredible risk levels associated with the Apollo program just to collect some rocks. Sending people to the moon *safely* will require starting from scratch to develop a new manned spacecraft system, and will costs hundreds of billions of dollars (see Constellation program).
Tens of billions? The current mars rovers cost less than $1B each, and lunar rovers would be vastly simpler: far smaller launch vehicle, no deceleration from interplanetary speeds, 1 second control delay vs. 20 minutes (which allows direct interactive remote control like a kid's toy). Even the USSR was able to operate rudimentary rovers on the moon back in the 1970s (which also traveled dozens of kilometers) after their manned moon project tanked.
I didn't mean a jury of idiots off the street. I meant a jury of experts in each field.
From your overwrought and emotional response, I gather that you must be a patent lawyer or examiner. If so, you really are cog in an out-of-control machine that's doing great harm to this country. Consider a change in careers; it looks like it would be good for your blood pressure.
My view is that if we tried to duplicate the successes of Apollo with robots, we'd end up spending a similar amount of money, perhaps a third to half as much. Despite the program not being very focused on science and astronauts lingering at most a few days, these missions still accomplished a remarkable amount of science.
I totally disagree with that assessment. With current situation, we couldn't get people back to the moon within 10 years if we wanted to. Getting a probe on the moon could be done in a couple of years with almost all off-the-shelf technology. I would peg the cost at 1% of a manned mission.
Almost all of the science Apollo accomplished was a result of either earthbound analysis of returned rock samples, or astronauts plopping instruments out on the lunar surface. A sample return mission plus a few small instrument landers would replicate all of those tasks. All you need is a radio controlled gocart with some high-def cameras to pick out good rocks and dump them in a can. Launching them back to earth is the only thing that's unconventional, and from the moon it's not that hard of a problem.
That ain't how it works. Most patents are refinements of existing techniques -- and they still take real money to generate, so invalidating them lets theft go underterred.
So what. The value patents provide for developers of mundane little improvements is overshadowed by the drag such patents put on the economy as a whole. Just because you spend money on something doesn't give you a natural right to a monopoly over it. It would be better off not to obsess over such trivia. We can start by not misrepresenting it as "theft", especially since most patent infringements on obscure claims are probably due to independent discovery, not copying.
I do agree with much of what you're saying. IMO, the last 40 years of NASA human space expenditures has been totally wasted. If it had instead been spent on producing standardized probe designs in larger quantities, we probably could have had 10X the number of unmanned missions by now on the same space budget.
I don't agree that humans are the best decision makers in deep space missions. 99% of the resources of any such mission will be dedicated to simply keeping the humans alive, and such missions will always be rushed due to supply, radiation and psychological issues. Even pulling off a single human mission to mars would probably suck dry NASA's funding for two decades, just to pull off little more than a flag planting stunt.
People tend to assume that robotic missions can't achieve much because they always think in terms of a solitary self-contained lander or rover. However, on Mars for example, what if a complete robotic base station were built up over time, including a nuclear power generator, general-purpose lab/maintenance robots, and a fleet of exploratory rovers. Without the time constraints of human missions, you wouldn't even need that much AI. Everything could happen in slow motion like the current mars rovers. The time to real results would still probably be faster than trying ramp up a human mission, and the science could go on continuously for decades.
Backlog, schmaklog. The real reform we need would be to reduce the number of patents issued by orders of magnitude. The bar for patentability should be raised from "not blatantly obvious to below-average freshman engineer" to "that's freakin' genius". That would simplify things for everybody, eliminate most of the huge burdens on society involved with accounting for tens of millions of extant patent claims, while still ensuring that people with genuine Big Ideas get rewarded.
IMO, it would be an improvement to make the patent system a reality show like The Apprentice or American Idol. Allocate something like 100 possible patents each year to each field of industry, then have juries (not bureaucrats) review all of the applicants in rounds, make the would-be idea monopolists defend their claims in public. Keep voting applications off the island until the few truly worthy patent candidates still stand.
You'll soon be able to buy astronaut ice cream with a chinese space program theme. That and watch them go to the moon, then mars, all while NASA rocket scientists are driving cabs and eating government cheese.
Good. That means we can focus our resources on real space science, while the Chinese discover for themselves that there's no valid reason to send humans into space for the foreseeable future.
As for NASA rocket scientists, why do we need them? There are plenty of off-the-shelf commercial launch systems available now, and more cost effective commercial systems in the works. NASA should focus its efforts on the things not already provided by established industry: probes, telescopes and robotic landers.
So? At the end of the day, overall net system efficiency is what matters. Heat engines will always be saddled with the laws of thermodynamics, which force them to waste much of your enhanced spectrum. Solar cells, without the limitations of the Carnot cycle, can convert more of the available energy in the part of the spectrum that they *do* use.
Solar cells also don't need to be cooled to the same low temperatures that the outlet of a heat engine requires to run efficiently. In the desert, that's much easier to achieve.
If you are doing a thermal cycle with concentrators, you need a *big* system. Small thermal engines aren't much more efficient than garden variety solar cells. (And presumably, concentrated solar would use high-tech cells that rival the efficiency of big heat engines anyway.) That means that you have to use a complex "power tower" arrangement with a field of precision synchronized mirrors pointed at one huge collector. You also need a big cold sink for thermal cycles; most power plants use a bunch of water for that, which is hard to come by in the desert.
The solar cell approach would also have the advantage of mechanical simplicity, and the ability to add capacity in small self-contained increments.
They certainly did a lot of "ranging" coming up with that acronym.
One of the instruments on the probe is a laser altimeter, which is a kind of LIDAR (which stands for Light Detection and Ranging). So regardless of the stupidity of the overall name, the acronym letter actually fits.
If I were in charge, though, I'd just call it "Messenger" without all-caps. The word itself is fine (and Mercury-related) without trying to cram it into a backronym.
You're the stereotypical neckbeard who thinks they're smarter than everyone else because they run Linus Torvald's UNIX clone. Slashdot has become so ridiculously over the top with its Apple hatred lately
Hey, I'm clean shaven, and I've hated Apple, its stuck up customers, and its overpriced gear since almost a decade before Linux was even created.
By bringing up this tired line of thought, you demonstrate a profound ignorance of the mechanics of the earth's varioius carbon cycles. Please go educate yourself on the topic before spouting off again.
Given the nature of modern CPU bus specifications, your proposal would be so mechanically, electrically and logically complex that it would undoubtedly be cheaper just to buy a whole new computer system.
(Next rebuttal will be "Microsoft stuck an underscore in front of the name, so it doesn't count!!!)
Face it, Microsofties like to use "\\" in their path separators more often than not. Their documentation does *not* discourage this practice in any significant way. They have little reason to deter this practice because it's yet another subtle way to encourage developers to break compatibility with non-MS operating systems, which in turn increases the costs of migrating away from Microsoft's "ecosystem".
Slashdot Mirror
Internally the modern x86 is really a RISC at heart anyway. But it's got a really massive support system on top of that that converts the older style CISC instruction set into a VLIW/ RISC style that's more efficiently executed in a superscalar way.
If you look at a picture of any modern CPU die, the real estate is totally dominated by the caches. That "massive support system" (which in reality is only a tiny fraction of the whole die area) serves largely as a decoder that unpacks the compact CISC-style opcodes (many of which are only one or two bytes long) into whatever obscure internal superscalar architecture is in vogue this year. This saves huge amounts of instruction cache space compared to unpacking bloated one-size-fits-all RISC-style opcodes into the some similar internal architecture du jour. Thus, the X86 can end up needing less die area overall. This is one reason that despite what elitists geeks say, over the years X86 has usually provided more bang for the buck than any competing processor family.
This scheme is so advantageous, that even ARM has tacked on a similarly convoluted opcode decompresser. If ARM ever evolves into a mainstream general-purpose high-end CPU, there will be undoubtedly dozens more layers of cruft added to the ARM architecture to make it competitive with X86, at which point it will be similarly complex. (For another example, take a look at how the POWER architecture ended up over time. You can hardly call it RISC any more.)
Offtopic, by why are the majority of aerospace projects painted in that hideous baby puke green?
I know there must be technical reason behind it, what is it?
Note that the picture shows the interior structure of the capsule, not the final external panels. I assume that it's probably a yellow-green zinc chromate coating that is commonly used to prevent corrosion on aluminum parts on aircraft and spacecraft.
Modern nuclear reactor designs do not experience meltdown. They are designed to be passively safe.
So what? The bigger risk has generally been (and in this case still is) keeping stored spent fuel from igniting after an emergency or attack.
Just because something existed in the 70's doesn't necessarily mean people should have known about it or that it had any impact on future developments.
That's because in the mind of most dweebs, nothing exists until Apple reinvents it.
Yeah, everything's just peachy. They ought to hang a "Mission Accomplished" banner on the plant right now.
I would like to understand clearly and concisely why it has not been possible after so many days to maintain levels of coolant.
It's because contrary to what all the overconfident pro-nuke techies that infest this site seem to believe: In the real world, shit happens.
But anti-nuke activists will consider this the worse tragedy
If one of these reactors ends up totally failing, it will be considered the worse tragedy by nearly everyone. Why? Because judging such events is a subjective process. That's why one baby trapped in a well is a huge crisis, whereas 100 people dying on the road each and every day doesn't even warrant news coverage. That's the way the human mind works, and you can't just brush it off.
If they were to end up with a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone around the plant for decades, then the meltdown would be remembered around the world long after the tsunami itself has faded from memory.
The USSR managed to land their tank-like lunar rovers on the moon with a Proton rocket. That rocket is still available for < $100M per launch. Six identical copies of a probe system just aren't going to cost massive amounts of money, considering that almost everything in the mission has been done before.
The US Surveyor program, which landed 5 probes on the moon, cost less than $500M ($3.5B today). Considering that almost nothing of what they did had ever been done before by the US, that kind of puts an upper limit on the cost.
In stark contrast, any manned return to the moon would have severe new political constraints. The cold war is over: The public will no longer tolerate the incredible risk levels associated with the Apollo program just to collect some rocks. Sending people to the moon *safely* will require starting from scratch to develop a new manned spacecraft system, and will costs hundreds of billions of dollars (see Constellation program).
Tens of billions? The current mars rovers cost less than $1B each, and lunar rovers would be vastly simpler: far smaller launch vehicle, no deceleration from interplanetary speeds, 1 second control delay vs. 20 minutes (which allows direct interactive remote control like a kid's toy). Even the USSR was able to operate rudimentary rovers on the moon back in the 1970s (which also traveled dozens of kilometers) after their manned moon project tanked.
I didn't mean a jury of idiots off the street. I meant a jury of experts in each field.
From your overwrought and emotional response, I gather that you must be a patent lawyer or examiner. If so, you really are cog in an out-of-control machine that's doing great harm to this country. Consider a change in careers; it looks like it would be good for your blood pressure.
My view is that if we tried to duplicate the successes of Apollo with robots, we'd end up spending a similar amount of money, perhaps a third to half as much. Despite the program not being very focused on science and astronauts lingering at most a few days, these missions still accomplished a remarkable amount of science.
I totally disagree with that assessment. With current situation, we couldn't get people back to the moon within 10 years if we wanted to. Getting a probe on the moon could be done in a couple of years with almost all off-the-shelf technology. I would peg the cost at 1% of a manned mission.
Almost all of the science Apollo accomplished was a result of either earthbound analysis of returned rock samples, or astronauts plopping instruments out on the lunar surface. A sample return mission plus a few small instrument landers would replicate all of those tasks. All you need is a radio controlled gocart with some high-def cameras to pick out good rocks and dump them in a can. Launching them back to earth is the only thing that's unconventional, and from the moon it's not that hard of a problem.
That ain't how it works. Most patents are refinements of existing techniques -- and they still take real money to generate, so invalidating them lets theft go underterred.
So what. The value patents provide for developers of mundane little improvements is overshadowed by the drag such patents put on the economy as a whole. Just because you spend money on something doesn't give you a natural right to a monopoly over it. It would be better off not to obsess over such trivia. We can start by not misrepresenting it as "theft", especially since most patent infringements on obscure claims are probably due to independent discovery, not copying.
I do agree with much of what you're saying. IMO, the last 40 years of NASA human space expenditures has been totally wasted. If it had instead been spent on producing standardized probe designs in larger quantities, we probably could have had 10X the number of unmanned missions by now on the same space budget.
I don't agree that humans are the best decision makers in deep space missions. 99% of the resources of any such mission will be dedicated to simply keeping the humans alive, and such missions will always be rushed due to supply, radiation and psychological issues. Even pulling off a single human mission to mars would probably suck dry NASA's funding for two decades, just to pull off little more than a flag planting stunt.
People tend to assume that robotic missions can't achieve much because they always think in terms of a solitary self-contained lander or rover. However, on Mars for example, what if a complete robotic base station were built up over time, including a nuclear power generator, general-purpose lab/maintenance robots, and a fleet of exploratory rovers. Without the time constraints of human missions, you wouldn't even need that much AI. Everything could happen in slow motion like the current mars rovers. The time to real results would still probably be faster than trying ramp up a human mission, and the science could go on continuously for decades.
Backlog, schmaklog. The real reform we need would be to reduce the number of patents issued by orders of magnitude. The bar for patentability should be raised from "not blatantly obvious to below-average freshman engineer" to "that's freakin' genius". That would simplify things for everybody, eliminate most of the huge burdens on society involved with accounting for tens of millions of extant patent claims, while still ensuring that people with genuine Big Ideas get rewarded.
IMO, it would be an improvement to make the patent system a reality show like The Apprentice or American Idol. Allocate something like 100 possible patents each year to each field of industry, then have juries (not bureaucrats) review all of the applicants in rounds, make the would-be idea monopolists defend their claims in public. Keep voting applications off the island until the few truly worthy patent candidates still stand.
You'll soon be able to buy astronaut ice cream with a chinese space program theme. That and watch them go to the moon, then mars, all while NASA rocket scientists are driving cabs and eating government cheese.
Good. That means we can focus our resources on real space science, while the Chinese discover for themselves that there's no valid reason to send humans into space for the foreseeable future.
As for NASA rocket scientists, why do we need them? There are plenty of off-the-shelf commercial launch systems available now, and more cost effective commercial systems in the works. NASA should focus its efforts on the things not already provided by established industry: probes, telescopes and robotic landers.
Please reread both of my posts more carefully. This time, try to understand the qualifiers.
So? At the end of the day, overall net system efficiency is what matters. Heat engines will always be saddled with the laws of thermodynamics, which force them to waste much of your enhanced spectrum. Solar cells, without the limitations of the Carnot cycle, can convert more of the available energy in the part of the spectrum that they *do* use.
Solar cells also don't need to be cooled to the same low temperatures that the outlet of a heat engine requires to run efficiently. In the desert, that's much easier to achieve.
If you are doing a thermal cycle with concentrators, you need a *big* system. Small thermal engines aren't much more efficient than garden variety solar cells. (And presumably, concentrated solar would use high-tech cells that rival the efficiency of big heat engines anyway.) That means that you have to use a complex "power tower" arrangement with a field of precision synchronized mirrors pointed at one huge collector. You also need a big cold sink for thermal cycles; most power plants use a bunch of water for that, which is hard to come by in the desert.
The solar cell approach would also have the advantage of mechanical simplicity, and the ability to add capacity in small self-contained increments.
They certainly did a lot of "ranging" coming up with that acronym.
One of the instruments on the probe is a laser altimeter, which is a kind of LIDAR (which stands for Light Detection and Ranging). So regardless of the stupidity of the overall name, the acronym letter actually fits.
If I were in charge, though, I'd just call it "Messenger" without all-caps. The word itself is fine (and Mercury-related) without trying to cram it into a backronym.
You're the stereotypical neckbeard who thinks they're smarter than everyone else because they run Linus Torvald's UNIX clone. Slashdot has become so ridiculously over the top with its Apple hatred lately
Hey, I'm clean shaven, and I've hated Apple, its stuck up customers, and its overpriced gear since almost a decade before Linux was even created.
By bringing up this tired line of thought, you demonstrate a profound ignorance of the mechanics of the earth's varioius carbon cycles. Please go educate yourself on the topic before spouting off again.
I'd like the freedom to make bad decisions, please.
Your right to make bad decisions ends where you start screwing up my climate.
Given the nature of modern CPU bus specifications, your proposal would be so mechanically, electrically and logically complex that it would undoubtedly be cheaper just to buy a whole new computer system.
Ok, how about _mkdir()?
(Next rebuttal will be "Microsoft stuck an underscore in front of the name, so it doesn't count!!!)
Face it, Microsofties like to use "\\" in their path separators more often than not. Their documentation does *not* discourage this practice in any significant way. They have little reason to deter this practice because it's yet another subtle way to encourage developers to break compatibility with non-MS operating systems, which in turn increases the costs of migrating away from Microsoft's "ecosystem".
And yes, either one works, but '\\' is not necessary and it's a POS pattern that too many people follow because they don't or can't read the docs.)
Here's a snippet from Microsoft's own current MSDN example on the PathMatchSpec() API call:
Gee, I wonder where these people get their path separator ideas? Maybe it's because they *did* read the docs.