The point in this thread was that FOSS has had very little to do with the development of 10.4. Not that FOSS has had very little to do with OS X as a whole.
And while gcc and mach are significant, they are proportionally very small parts of OS X, and they could be replaced by something else. There are certainly other compilers out there than gcc - betters ones too - and there are certainly other kernels too. I mean, Apple could have potentially licensed the Solaris or BeOS kernels, maybe QNX, or whatever else. Hell, perhaps even WinCE or something. There *ARE* options. Some are better than others, of course. But to say that there would be no Apple without FOSS, and especially to suggest that 10.4 is largely developed by the open source community, well, that's just bull.
Right, because as we all know, Spotlight, Dashboard, ImageCore, QuickTime, iTunes, FileVault, Aqua, Quartz, Finder, Carbon, Cocoa, iChat, iCal, iSync, DVD Player, Preview, XCode, etc., etc., etc. are all developed by the open source community and given to Apple for free.
Safari and the BSD layer of OS X are just about the only things of any significance that have roots in open source. But even for those, just about *ALL* the new code that ends up in OS X in those, is being done by Apple's own engineers.
The dipole booms are 20 meters long each, and the center monopole boom is 7 meters. Even when folded into 13 segments, each bipole boom segment is 1.5 meters long. If they were folded 3 times, they would each be nearly 7 meters long and not fit into the launching rocket (a Soyuz).
In general, you can pretty much assume that if you think the scientists have done a stupid error, then you just don't know the whole story.
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean you should ridicule it and call it pathetic. Good thing you're posting anonymously, because you're making quite a fool out of yourself.
Here's some examples of what you conveniently forgot:
- Two rovers on Mars, which have covered more than 10 km so far, combined, and taken tens of thousands of high resolution photos and other measurements, found solid evidence of past water, and expanded our knowledge of our closest neighbor so much that it will take years and years to even fully comprehend it all - Huygens landing on Titan - Cassini's elaborate tour of Saturn which is revolutionary in how much it teaches us about how the solar system came to be - High resolution mappings of the moon, Mars, Jupiter & moons and Saturn & moons, as well as a few asteroids - Vast amounts of experience about large scale construction work (crucial to planetary missions) and long duration living in space - Near 100% track record of current satellite launchers, such as the Titan, Delta, Soyuz and Ariane rockets. Majorly improved from the days of Apollo - Major advancements in adaptive optics in telescopes, which give ground based telescopes close to equal resolution to the Hubble - First private flight to space - The arrival of commercial companies in larger scale to the space business (Orbital Sciences, SpaceX, Starsem, etc.) - A high number of new members of the space launch capable countries; India, Japan, China, and soon Brazil, South Korea and probably many others I've forgotten
Pretty much the only thing we haven't done is go to Mars or continue going to the moon. But going to the moon always has been a topic that is very hard to understand for many. Because it's so much further away than low earth orbit, people assume that going there is equally much more complex and hard. That's simply not the case.
The biggest challenge by far in space exploration is getting heavy equipment to go fast enough that it stays on orbit. To get to low earth orbit, you have to reach a velocity of nearly 8km per second. And the main challenge here is that you're launching through a thick atmosphere. Once you're in low earth orbit, getting to the moon only requires a very small (proportionally) amount of additional velocity. You don't burn the engines all the way to the moon - you just light them up for long enough to accelerate 2 more km/s. To go to Mars, just a tiny bit more velocity still is needed compared to going to the moon.
The navigational challenge of going to the moon is actually quite simple. We're doing orders of magnitude more complex things right now with probes like Stardust, NEAR, Cassini, Gallileo, all of the Mars probes, and for example Rosetta. Compared to what those have done in terms of navigation, going to the moon is child's play.
And of course, to land on the moon and go back to earth, all you have to do is change your velocity a little bit more. But since the moon's gravity is low and because there's no atmosphere, it's way easier than launching a rocket to space from earth.
ESA's Smart-1 probe is a good example of what we can do today. It went to the moon using less than 100kg of fuel, and using pin-point accuracy navigation. It did so hitching a ride on an empty slot of a rocket that was putting up a couple of satellites in geosynchronous orbit. With less than 100kg more fuel, and a lot of smart people, it's nor orbiting the moon.
That's how far we've come from the Challenger days. That's what you're calling pathetic.
And sure, we've had some problems too. But no more than we used to back in the Apollo days. Or have you forgotten Apollo 1, Apollo 13, Gemini 8 spinning out of control and making an emergency landing, Friendship 7 (Mercury) failing to jettison the retro rocket pack and nearly burning up on the way down, Aurora 7 (Mercury) running out of fuel, Liberty Bell 7 (Mercury again) having a hatch just suddenly blow after landing, without being commanded to do so, half the Ra
The benefit of a lifting body (or winged vehicle) is that you have more cross-track navigation control. Also, the g-loads on people inside the craft are much lower that way, which is good when they are coming back from a two year trip to Mars in zero gravity (or very low gravity while on Mars). Even for a long trip to the moon, it will be very helpful.
Orbital rendezvous is good for a number of things. It allows you to have modularity so you can assembler larger crafts, add special modules later on that you haven't even thought of now (as more advanced technology becomes available 10 years down the road), use it to dock with the International Space Station, use it to dock with possible rescue crafts, etc.
This is a vehicle for carrying people. It's not the full set of technologies needed to get to and land on Mars.
And it's taking 15 years because there's no Soviet Union that's making everyone piss in their pants in fear.
Those statistics are missing the Airbus A340 (with no fatalities) and the Airbus A330 (with no fatalities, except for an early test flight - due to pilot error - before it was in commercial use).
Let's look at the models of Airbus and Boeing:
The A319/320/321 is equivalent to the Boeing 737 in size and type, and has more or less the same safety record.
The A330 could be compared to the Boeing 777 - each with no major accidents during their operational life, and both roughly the same size, type and age.
The A340 is roughly equivalent with the Boeing 747 in size, but is much younger. A340 has no fatal accidents and Boeing 747 has a quite poor safety record compared to most other western plane models.
For the Airbus A300/310's (which are more or less the same plane - but different size), they are more or less the same size, type and age as the Boeing 757 and 767's. Here, it's clear that Boeing has the upper hand in safety.
But when discussing manufacturers, it should be noted that a lot of things have changed in the 30 years since the Airbus A300 and 310's have been designed. Comparing any of the new Airbus models (320 series, or 330/340 series) to the 300/310's is like comparing Boeing 777's to Boeing 707's. There's just very little commonality.
I can understand someone boycotting an Airbus A300/310 due to the higher number of fatal accidents. But then by the same logic, the Boeing 747 should be boycotted too.
What I don't understand is someone drawing their conclusions about what is safe and what isn't based on two incidents where one is - according to the NTSB that investigated the accident - caused by the pilot slamming the plane from one tail-slide to another, finally overloading the rudder with forces more than twice the designed max load. Pilot error - not plane error. Not delamination. Nothing of the sort. And the other incident is completely un-investigated as of now, but includes a rudder that ripped off for some reason. For all we know, it could be terrorism or it could be rusty bolts that were not inspected properly by the airline, or a million other things. But instead, the author of the parent post chooses to just draw his own conclusions and blame Airbus and decide that their planes are unsafe to fly. And all the while, all the faults in other manufacturers planes (such as the rudder problems in 737's that have brought down two of them so far) are just being ignored by him. A little selective?
And of course I care about my chances of dying on the flight. It's the same for everyone, I'm sure. And that's why the statistics you quote, and the ones I'm quoting, are the fatal accients divided by millions of flights - NOT taking into account the number of people in any way.
May I ask you why you are still willing to fly Boeing when two Boeing 737's have dropped from the sky due to unexplained, sudden extreme rudder deflections? In addition to this, there have been other cases of extreme and sudden rudder deflections that have later on not been explained, but luckily did not cause a crash. Then there are the cases of breakups of 747's in flight for various reasons. There's been major structural problems with 737's. In one case, the entire top part of the plane hull broke off!
The point here is very simple: all planes have problems - Boeing is no different from Airbus. And like statistics show, they have very similar safety records. Boeing 747, in fact, is statistically less safe than the Airbus 300/310's you're talking about. Airbus 320, a 20 year old design, is on par with Boeing 737 in safety. And Airbus 330/340 is in a league of their own - only comperable to the Boeing 777. You can't examine safety by looking through a microscope on just a few cases. You have to step back and take into account the countless millions of flights that an aircraft type has flown.
To refuse to fly Airbus and to spread propaganda like this, is irrational and unfair.
Oh geez, what uninformed nonsense. Why don't you check the statistics of actual aircraft accidents and base your opinion of how safe or unsafe a plane is on actual facts. They are quite readily available if you care to search:
Because the command module was made by a different company than the lunar module and nobody thought about coordinating / unifying components between the two since nobody ever envisioned that there would actually be any need to use parts from one as spare parts for the other.
Contrary to popular belief, NASA does very little itself. Pretty much everything is done by subcontractors.
I never said you go in the direction of the sun. I said you increase your velocity around the sun. That is, since you're orbiting the sun (as Earth and Mars are too), you fly out further from the sun by increasing your orbital velocity. To fly closer to the sun, to reach Venus for example, you decrease your orbital velocity around the sun. Changes in orbital velocity affect the altitude of the point in the opposite side of the orbit. For this reason, when you fly to Mars, it takes about 6-7 months at best, because that's how long it takes to get to the opposite side of the orbit.
The close orbit was actually not very relevant. The distance was not substantially more close than it is every other year anyway. It was only a matter of a few days to a few weeks less of a trip.
Earth goes around the sun once every year. Mars on the other hand goes around once per roughly 1.8 years. Now if you imagine two concentic circles which are the orbits of Earth and Mars, you'll understand that Earth will pass close to Mars quite often (every 26 months to be exact). The only difference between how close exactly it will come results from the fact that Mars' orbit is not perfectly round. But the difference is really not very substantial.
Add to that the fact that you don't fly "straight out" to Mars. What you do is increase your velocity around the sun so that you go onto a "transfer orbit" that takes you sort-of spiraling out from the Earth's orbit (which is closer to the sun) so that you end up at Mars' orbit. So the actual distance you travel to get from Earth to Mars is quite a bit longer than the actual distance between Earth and Mars at the time of the launch.
Just to give a rough idea of how little it matters, Mars Odyssey launched in 2001 and reached Mars in just over 6 months. Mars Climate Orbiter launched in 1998 took 9 months. The Pathfinder rover that launched in 1996 took 6 months. And so on and so forth..
Thanks:) I used an Advantech PC-104 with a 1GHz C1 processor, 256MB of RAM. It was really high powered for my purposes, but I wanted it to be that way so I could throw in more stuff in the future and have the platform be ready for it. The interface to motors and sensors is a mix of USB and plain old serial interfaces (RS232). I found a nice small board that words through an RS232 cable that lets you control up to 8 standard RC-car/plane servos. To that, I hooked up the steering and an electronic stepless speed controller servo. The downside of the high powered computer was battery consumption. I strung up two 7.2v 3300mAh batteries as a powersource for it. Quite expensive and quite heavy, but at least it provides the juice it needs to run for about 60-120 minutes, depending on the CPU load.
One mistake I made was to go with a 2.5" HDD. I should have used a CF card instead. I figured it wouldn't be a big deal, but I managed to trash one HDD - probably due to shaking. After that, i still got a HDD to replace it (due to the much lower cost), but I added much better padding for it.
The software was custom made for the purpose - in Java. Due to ease of finding drivers (for digital camera, WiFi card, etc.), I ran Windows 2000 on it, but I could have used basically any OS. Other hardware included a Logitech webcam, a Garmin GPS and a D-Link USB WiFi "card".
The control software was also Java based, and originally ran on a Win2K laptop, but later on a Mac PowerBook. No changes were necessary in the software to make it work 100% on the Mac. The control software has a moving map that shows waypoints and where the robot is, it shows the image from the camera on the robot, has a command line interface to it, has some buttons to control speed and steering, a bunch of dialogs for controlling auto navigation routes and other navigation parameters, and a long list of telemetry variables for just about anything and everything on the robot (to help figure out why it's doing what it's doing).
The two stories mentioned in the article were the source for inspiration for me that caused me to start building a wheeled robot that I had been thinking about for a long time. I read the baloon story on Slashdot and then searched for more similar stuff online and I found the glider article. That was about a year ago - maybe a year and a half.
Today, the robot (which I call Bonsai) is ready. The goal for it was to be able to do a couple of fairly basic things that would allow it to be a platform for later ideas that could be built on the base work. The things it had to do were:
It had to be able to know where it was in the world, how it was oriented and moving in the world, and to be able to use that information to figure out how to drive to get from point A to point B (possibly through a complex path).
It had to be able to be manually controlled in addition to the automatic control.
It had to have a good remote control software complete with moving map, full telemetry of all functions on the robot, and the ability to command every function of the robot remotely.
It had to have a camera, and the remote control software had to be able to see the image from that camera real-time (or as close to real-time as possible).
It had to have a wireless communications link.
It would have to be able to operate at least 60 minutes.
It had to have a solid vehicle base that had to be able to operate for at least 60 minutes and be able to operate precisely and reliably.
The vehicle base would have to be able to carry the load of the computer, batteries, as well as a sizeble amount of additional electronics and equipment in the future.
The whole thing would have to look decent.
It took about a year to design and build, but it was very fun and in the end, it turned out to be fairly easy and nowhere near as expensive as I imagined it would be. Projects like that are a great way to learn new stuff about electronics and I highly recommend it to anyone who has been thinking about something like this. In the end, all the goals of the project were met, and I now have a really fun toy!:)
The URL below is a picture of the robot in its final form: http://www.saunalahti.fi/macpeep/bonsai/bon sai1.jp g
As far as crash proofness goes, I only put the computer to sleep. I don't shut it down or reboot unless some update requires it, I'm going on a long trip where I will not use the computer for two weeks, or similar. The time I have between reboots is thus typically on the order of months at a time and the stability has been absolutely superb. I'm running OS X 10.3.7, that is, the latest updated Panther version. So really, while some earlier OS X version might have been unstable, the current OS X seems quite stable indeed! Perhaps the hardware you were using was somehow broken? Faulty memory, heat issues due to broken fans, or something of that kind..
Be that as it may, if Linux works better for you, then by all means use it. I never said people shouldn't. In fact, I believe strongly in using whatever works the best for you, no matter if that's closed-source Microsoft software or open-source stuff. Whatever works for you!!
I was simply saying that for most people (I'd guess 99 out of 100), a Mac is SO much better of an experience than PC + Windows (or PC + Linux) is, that you'd make a mistake in just comparing it GHz to GHz and $ to $. It's the total experience you're buying there, and you can't easily put numbers on it.
In any case, we'll find out in the coming months what the general public thinks about it. My bet is that it (the Mac Mini) will sell like crazy and will boost Apple's market share like never before!
Apple products are not just about the numbers in the spec sheet. They are not just about the price tag.
Apple products are about the asthetics, the incredible high level of polish and the good feeling you get when you're using them. It's in every single detail of their products. It's in the hardware and it's in the software. It's in every layer of it: from the beautifully precision crafted aluminum shell on the PowerBook's with their perfectly cut power buttons, the led-light that pulses on & off in the same pace the average sleeping person breaths when the computer is in sleep mode, to the elegant Aqua graphical user interface in OS X, the brilliant Objective-C based Cocoa API you use to program it, the seamless integration of Java to the operating system, iTunes + the iTunes music store + iPods, the BSD UNIX core... It's in the millions of small details - everywhere in Apple's products. Every portion of the system (hardware + software) just works brilliantly. It INSPIRES YOU!! That's why Mac users are so passionate about it!
All of that makes using a Mac just so much better of an experience than using a PC with, say, Windows XP. Even if you assume for a minute (and that's assuming a lot) that the XP never crashes and you manage to keep it virus and adware & spyware free. And don't even try to compare it to Linux. It will be cheaper to run Linux, for sure, but 99 people out of 100 will be a million times less inspired and productive with Linux.
I've used just about any type of computer you can imagine. Apple IIe's, Commodore 64's, various Amigas, old generation Mac's, and just about any and every version of PC's and operating systems for them, starting with DOS 3.x versions on XT's and AT's, through various Linux, OS/2 and Windows versions with modern PC hardware. And when I tried a Mac with OS X the first time about a year ago, it was an incredible accute experience of "OF COURSE!! This is how it SHOULD be!! Why isn't everything like this?!". When I digged in deeper and started examining the guts of it, Carbon, Cocoa, the BSD layer, XCode, the ADC reference library, etc. it just got more and more clear how incredibly well designed and implemented the entire thing is!
So when Apple releases a beautiful headless Mac for $499, you're making a major mistake if you just compare it GHz for GHz and $ for $ with PC hardware. You're not just paying for GHz's, USB ports and MB's of harddisk space. You're paying for a totally different level of experience and for feeling inspired with whatever you'll do with the computer.
I run MS Office 2004 on OS X (10.3.7) and it's 526MB installed (a complete installation with every single component, application, help files, sample documents and files, etc. including Windows Media Player, a bunch of document format converters and other tools). It both loads and runs very fast and is extremely responsive, stable and usable on my 1.33GHz G4 PowerBook with 512MB of RAM.
You may have some issues about the price, cause it's not very cheap at $399 for the standard version, but calling it bloated and slow is quite unfair and incorrect IMHO. I'm no Microsoft fan, as I'm sure not a lot of other Mac users are either, but nothing is gained from low blows like that that have no basis in reality.
Ok.. So it actually seems they are not taken at different times but that it's the same photo and stuff is added & removed to the 2nd one (the bigger one). But my point still stands. They clearly did it because it's not ready yet and so they made the edited photo show what it will look like when it's ready. What's the big deal?
I think you're blowing this way out of proportion. First of all, the company is well known for making high quality planes. It's not like this is just a PR stunt. They have already made lots and lots of planes with very similar designs as this. For example the Voyager that was the first plane to fly non-stop around the world.
Second, some of the major flukes such as the "exhausts missing" are probably just different versions of the plane, or taken at different times. That is, it might be that the component missing is currently in service or not yet installed in the photo where it is missing. So what?
Third, the landing gear that seems to be Photoshopped away might be just that. It might be that they forgot them down or that the hydraulics for moving them doesn't work unless you charge the batteries etc. etc. first. And so they just Photoshopped them away instead. What's the big deal?
I mean, what exactly are you suggesting? That they don't know how to make retractable landing gears?
"Kinda like the reputation C++ has for buffer overruns and poor memory management, because so many C++ programmers never bothered to learn about the tools it provides to fix them, you mean?:-)"
Yes, exactly like that. I have nothing against C/C++. I code C++ for a living. I code Java and a number of other languages on my free time. There are good and bad sides with both.
Usually when you see people religiously defending or advocating one language, it's because that's all they know how to use properly.
"Gee, I've heard this argument for so many years... why have I never seen a VM pull it off?"
I have. Like I think I said in my previous post, it's certainly possible, but it's not what you see in most cases. I've demonstrated to co-workers how a prime-number seeking app with the exact same source code (just enough mods to make it compile on Java vs. C) performed slightly better with the Hotspot VM than with a compiled C app. It's quite easy to set up a similar test yourself and just try it out. Even if you dont see Java outperforming C yourself, you'll certainly see it coming VERY close.
And yes. I'm quite aware that in real life situations, it doesn't usually go like this. I was merely pointing out that the statement wasn't as ridiculous as the reply was making it sound.
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The point in this thread was that FOSS has had very little to do with the development of 10.4. Not that FOSS has had very little to do with OS X as a whole.
And while gcc and mach are significant, they are proportionally very small parts of OS X, and they could be replaced by something else. There are certainly other compilers out there than gcc - betters ones too - and there are certainly other kernels too. I mean, Apple could have potentially licensed the Solaris or BeOS kernels, maybe QNX, or whatever else. Hell, perhaps even WinCE or something. There *ARE* options. Some are better than others, of course. But to say that there would be no Apple without FOSS, and especially to suggest that 10.4 is largely developed by the open source community, well, that's just bull.
Right, because as we all know, Spotlight, Dashboard, ImageCore, QuickTime, iTunes, FileVault, Aqua, Quartz, Finder, Carbon, Cocoa, iChat, iCal, iSync, DVD Player, Preview, XCode, etc., etc., etc. are all developed by the open source community and given to Apple for free.
Safari and the BSD layer of OS X are just about the only things of any significance that have roots in open source. But even for those, just about *ALL* the new code that ends up in OS X in those, is being done by Apple's own engineers.
The dipole booms are 20 meters long each, and the center monopole boom is 7 meters. Even when folded into 13 segments, each bipole boom segment is 1.5 meters long. If they were folded 3 times, they would each be nearly 7 meters long and not fit into the launching rocket (a Soyuz).
In general, you can pretty much assume that if you think the scientists have done a stupid error, then you just don't know the whole story.
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean you should ridicule it and call it pathetic. Good thing you're posting anonymously, because you're making quite a fool out of yourself.
Here's some examples of what you conveniently forgot:
- Two rovers on Mars, which have covered more than 10 km so far, combined, and taken tens of thousands of high resolution photos and other measurements, found solid evidence of past water, and expanded our knowledge of our closest neighbor so much that it will take years and years to even fully comprehend it all
- Huygens landing on Titan
- Cassini's elaborate tour of Saturn which is revolutionary in how much it teaches us about how the solar system came to be
- High resolution mappings of the moon, Mars, Jupiter & moons and Saturn & moons, as well as a few asteroids
- Vast amounts of experience about large scale construction work (crucial to planetary missions) and long duration living in space
- Near 100% track record of current satellite launchers, such as the Titan, Delta, Soyuz and Ariane rockets. Majorly improved from the days of Apollo
- Major advancements in adaptive optics in telescopes, which give ground based telescopes close to equal resolution to the Hubble
- First private flight to space
- The arrival of commercial companies in larger scale to the space business (Orbital Sciences, SpaceX, Starsem, etc.)
- A high number of new members of the space launch capable countries; India, Japan, China, and soon Brazil, South Korea and probably many others I've forgotten
Pretty much the only thing we haven't done is go to Mars or continue going to the moon. But going to the moon always has been a topic that is very hard to understand for many. Because it's so much further away than low earth orbit, people assume that going there is equally much more complex and hard. That's simply not the case.
The biggest challenge by far in space exploration is getting heavy equipment to go fast enough that it stays on orbit. To get to low earth orbit, you have to reach a velocity of nearly 8km per second. And the main challenge here is that you're launching through a thick atmosphere. Once you're in low earth orbit, getting to the moon only requires a very small (proportionally) amount of additional velocity. You don't burn the engines all the way to the moon - you just light them up for long enough to accelerate 2 more km/s. To go to Mars, just a tiny bit more velocity still is needed compared to going to the moon.
The navigational challenge of going to the moon is actually quite simple. We're doing orders of magnitude more complex things right now with probes like Stardust, NEAR, Cassini, Gallileo, all of the Mars probes, and for example Rosetta. Compared to what those have done in terms of navigation, going to the moon is child's play.
And of course, to land on the moon and go back to earth, all you have to do is change your velocity a little bit more. But since the moon's gravity is low and because there's no atmosphere, it's way easier than launching a rocket to space from earth.
ESA's Smart-1 probe is a good example of what we can do today. It went to the moon using less than 100kg of fuel, and using pin-point accuracy navigation. It did so hitching a ride on an empty slot of a rocket that was putting up a couple of satellites in geosynchronous orbit. With less than 100kg more fuel, and a lot of smart people, it's nor orbiting the moon.
That's how far we've come from the Challenger days. That's what you're calling pathetic.
And sure, we've had some problems too. But no more than we used to back in the Apollo days. Or have you forgotten Apollo 1, Apollo 13, Gemini 8 spinning out of control and making an emergency landing, Friendship 7 (Mercury) failing to jettison the retro rocket pack and nearly burning up on the way down, Aurora 7 (Mercury) running out of fuel, Liberty Bell 7 (Mercury again) having a hatch just suddenly blow after landing, without being commanded to do so, half the Ra
The benefit of a lifting body (or winged vehicle) is that you have more cross-track navigation control. Also, the g-loads on people inside the craft are much lower that way, which is good when they are coming back from a two year trip to Mars in zero gravity (or very low gravity while on Mars). Even for a long trip to the moon, it will be very helpful.
Orbital rendezvous is good for a number of things. It allows you to have modularity so you can assembler larger crafts, add special modules later on that you haven't even thought of now (as more advanced technology becomes available 10 years down the road), use it to dock with the International Space Station, use it to dock with possible rescue crafts, etc.
This is a vehicle for carrying people. It's not the full set of technologies needed to get to and land on Mars.
And it's taking 15 years because there's no Soviet Union that's making everyone piss in their pants in fear.
Here Finland, we have a saying:
It's not the person who asks who is stupid. It's the person who pays.
It's not Java 5. It's Java 2 Standard Edition 5.0.
:)
But I agree it's ridiculous.
Those statistics are missing the Airbus A340 (with no fatalities) and the Airbus A330 (with no fatalities, except for an early test flight - due to pilot error - before it was in commercial use).
Let's look at the models of Airbus and Boeing:
The A319/320/321 is equivalent to the Boeing 737 in size and type, and has more or less the same safety record.
The A330 could be compared to the Boeing 777 - each with no major accidents during their operational life, and both roughly the same size, type and age.
The A340 is roughly equivalent with the Boeing 747 in size, but is much younger. A340 has no fatal accidents and Boeing 747 has a quite poor safety record compared to most other western plane models.
For the Airbus A300/310's (which are more or less the same plane - but different size), they are more or less the same size, type and age as the Boeing 757 and 767's. Here, it's clear that Boeing has the upper hand in safety.
But when discussing manufacturers, it should be noted that a lot of things have changed in the 30 years since the Airbus A300 and 310's have been designed. Comparing any of the new Airbus models (320 series, or 330/340 series) to the 300/310's is like comparing Boeing 777's to Boeing 707's. There's just very little commonality.
I can understand someone boycotting an Airbus A300/310 due to the higher number of fatal accidents. But then by the same logic, the Boeing 747 should be boycotted too.
What I don't understand is someone drawing their conclusions about what is safe and what isn't based on two incidents where one is - according to the NTSB that investigated the accident - caused by the pilot slamming the plane from one tail-slide to another, finally overloading the rudder with forces more than twice the designed max load. Pilot error - not plane error. Not delamination. Nothing of the sort. And the other incident is completely un-investigated as of now, but includes a rudder that ripped off for some reason. For all we know, it could be terrorism or it could be rusty bolts that were not inspected properly by the airline, or a million other things. But instead, the author of the parent post chooses to just draw his own conclusions and blame Airbus and decide that their planes are unsafe to fly. And all the while, all the faults in other manufacturers planes (such as the rudder problems in 737's that have brought down two of them so far) are just being ignored by him. A little selective?
And of course I care about my chances of dying on the flight. It's the same for everyone, I'm sure. And that's why the statistics you quote, and the ones I'm quoting, are the fatal accients divided by millions of flights - NOT taking into account the number of people in any way.
May I ask you why you are still willing to fly Boeing when two Boeing 737's have dropped from the sky due to unexplained, sudden extreme rudder deflections? In addition to this, there have been other cases of extreme and sudden rudder deflections that have later on not been explained, but luckily did not cause a crash. Then there are the cases of breakups of 747's in flight for various reasons. There's been major structural problems with 737's. In one case, the entire top part of the plane hull broke off!
The point here is very simple: all planes have problems - Boeing is no different from Airbus. And like statistics show, they have very similar safety records. Boeing 747, in fact, is statistically less safe than the Airbus 300/310's you're talking about. Airbus 320, a 20 year old design, is on par with Boeing 737 in safety. And Airbus 330/340 is in a league of their own - only comperable to the Boeing 777. You can't examine safety by looking through a microscope on just a few cases. You have to step back and take into account the countless millions of flights that an aircraft type has flown.
To refuse to fly Airbus and to spread propaganda like this, is irrational and unfair.
Oh geez, what uninformed nonsense. Why don't you check the statistics of actual aircraft accidents and base your opinion of how safe or unsafe a plane is on actual facts. They are quite readily available if you care to search:
http://www.airdisaster.com/statistics/
Because the command module was made by a different company than the lunar module and nobody thought about coordinating / unifying components between the two since nobody ever envisioned that there would actually be any need to use parts from one as spare parts for the other.
Contrary to popular belief, NASA does very little itself. Pretty much everything is done by subcontractors.
I never said you go in the direction of the sun. I said you increase your velocity around the sun. That is, since you're orbiting the sun (as Earth and Mars are too), you fly out further from the sun by increasing your orbital velocity. To fly closer to the sun, to reach Venus for example, you decrease your orbital velocity around the sun. Changes in orbital velocity affect the altitude of the point in the opposite side of the orbit. For this reason, when you fly to Mars, it takes about 6-7 months at best, because that's how long it takes to get to the opposite side of the orbit.
The close orbit was actually not very relevant. The distance was not substantially more close than it is every other year anyway. It was only a matter of a few days to a few weeks less of a trip.
Earth goes around the sun once every year. Mars on the other hand goes around once per roughly 1.8 years. Now if you imagine two concentic circles which are the orbits of Earth and Mars, you'll understand that Earth will pass close to Mars quite often (every 26 months to be exact). The only difference between how close exactly it will come results from the fact that Mars' orbit is not perfectly round. But the difference is really not very substantial.
Add to that the fact that you don't fly "straight out" to Mars. What you do is increase your velocity around the sun so that you go onto a "transfer orbit" that takes you sort-of spiraling out from the Earth's orbit (which is closer to the sun) so that you end up at Mars' orbit. So the actual distance you travel to get from Earth to Mars is quite a bit longer than the actual distance between Earth and Mars at the time of the launch.
Just to give a rough idea of how little it matters, Mars Odyssey launched in 2001 and reached Mars in just over 6 months. Mars Climate Orbiter launched in 1998 took 9 months. The Pathfinder rover that launched in 1996 took 6 months. And so on and so forth..
On your URL, it states that the size of that thing is "2.5" (H) x 8.25" (W) x 10.25" (D)". That is, the volume is 3464 cm^2.
The Mac Mini, on the other hand, is 5.08cm x 16.51cm x 16.51cm, that is, 1384 cm^2.
Put another way, the Mac Mini is less than half the size (40% in fact) of the case you asked us to check out.
Thanks :) I used an Advantech PC-104 with a 1GHz C1 processor, 256MB of RAM. It was really high powered for my purposes, but I wanted it to be that way so I could throw in more stuff in the future and have the platform be ready for it. The interface to motors and sensors is a mix of USB and plain old serial interfaces (RS232). I found a nice small board that words through an RS232 cable that lets you control up to 8 standard RC-car/plane servos. To that, I hooked up the steering and an electronic stepless speed controller servo. The downside of the high powered computer was battery consumption. I strung up two 7.2v 3300mAh batteries as a powersource for it. Quite expensive and quite heavy, but at least it provides the juice it needs to run for about 60-120 minutes, depending on the CPU load.
:)
One mistake I made was to go with a 2.5" HDD. I should have used a CF card instead. I figured it wouldn't be a big deal, but I managed to trash one HDD - probably due to shaking. After that, i still got a HDD to replace it (due to the much lower cost), but I added much better padding for it.
The software was custom made for the purpose - in Java. Due to ease of finding drivers (for digital camera, WiFi card, etc.), I ran Windows 2000 on it, but I could have used basically any OS. Other hardware included a Logitech webcam, a Garmin GPS and a D-Link USB WiFi "card".
The control software was also Java based, and originally ran on a Win2K laptop, but later on a Mac PowerBook. No changes were necessary in the software to make it work 100% on the Mac. The control software has a moving map that shows waypoints and where the robot is, it shows the image from the camera on the robot, has a command line interface to it, has some buttons to control speed and steering, a bunch of dialogs for controlling auto navigation routes and other navigation parameters, and a long list of telemetry variables for just about anything and everything on the robot (to help figure out why it's doing what it's doing).
But the main point is that it's a fun toy.
The two stories mentioned in the article were the source for inspiration for me that caused me to start building a wheeled robot that I had been thinking about for a long time. I read the baloon story on Slashdot and then searched for more similar stuff online and I found the glider article. That was about a year ago - maybe a year and a half.
:)
n sai1.jp g
Today, the robot (which I call Bonsai) is ready. The goal for it was to be able to do a couple of fairly basic things that would allow it to be a platform for later ideas that could be built on the base work. The things it had to do were:
It had to be able to know where it was in the world, how it was oriented and moving in the world, and to be able to use that information to figure out how to drive to get from point A to point B (possibly through a complex path).
It had to be able to be manually controlled in addition to the automatic control.
It had to have a good remote control software complete with moving map, full telemetry of all functions on the robot, and the ability to command every function of the robot remotely.
It had to have a camera, and the remote control software had to be able to see the image from that camera real-time (or as close to real-time as possible).
It had to have a wireless communications link.
It would have to be able to operate at least 60 minutes.
It had to have a solid vehicle base that had to be able to operate for at least 60 minutes and be able to operate precisely and reliably.
The vehicle base would have to be able to carry the load of the computer, batteries, as well as a sizeble amount of additional electronics and equipment in the future.
The whole thing would have to look decent.
It took about a year to design and build, but it was very fun and in the end, it turned out to be fairly easy and nowhere near as expensive as I imagined it would be. Projects like that are a great way to learn new stuff about electronics and I highly recommend it to anyone who has been thinking about something like this. In the end, all the goals of the project were met, and I now have a really fun toy!
The URL below is a picture of the robot in its final form:
http://www.saunalahti.fi/macpeep/bonsai/bo
As far as crash proofness goes, I only put the computer to sleep. I don't shut it down or reboot unless some update requires it, I'm going on a long trip where I will not use the computer for two weeks, or similar. The time I have between reboots is thus typically on the order of months at a time and the stability has been absolutely superb. I'm running OS X 10.3.7, that is, the latest updated Panther version. So really, while some earlier OS X version might have been unstable, the current OS X seems quite stable indeed! Perhaps the hardware you were using was somehow broken? Faulty memory, heat issues due to broken fans, or something of that kind..
Be that as it may, if Linux works better for you, then by all means use it. I never said people shouldn't. In fact, I believe strongly in using whatever works the best for you, no matter if that's closed-source Microsoft software or open-source stuff. Whatever works for you!!
I was simply saying that for most people (I'd guess 99 out of 100), a Mac is SO much better of an experience than PC + Windows (or PC + Linux) is, that you'd make a mistake in just comparing it GHz to GHz and $ to $. It's the total experience you're buying there, and you can't easily put numbers on it.
In any case, we'll find out in the coming months what the general public thinks about it. My bet is that it (the Mac Mini) will sell like crazy and will boost Apple's market share like never before!
Apple products are not just about the numbers in the spec sheet. They are not just about the price tag.
Apple products are about the asthetics, the incredible high level of polish and the good feeling you get when you're using them. It's in every single detail of their products. It's in the hardware and it's in the software. It's in every layer of it: from the beautifully precision crafted aluminum shell on the PowerBook's with their perfectly cut power buttons, the led-light that pulses on & off in the same pace the average sleeping person breaths when the computer is in sleep mode, to the elegant Aqua graphical user interface in OS X, the brilliant Objective-C based Cocoa API you use to program it, the seamless integration of Java to the operating system, iTunes + the iTunes music store + iPods, the BSD UNIX core... It's in the millions of small details - everywhere in Apple's products. Every portion of the system (hardware + software) just works brilliantly. It INSPIRES YOU!! That's why Mac users are so passionate about it!
All of that makes using a Mac just so much better of an experience than using a PC with, say, Windows XP. Even if you assume for a minute (and that's assuming a lot) that the XP never crashes and you manage to keep it virus and adware & spyware free. And don't even try to compare it to Linux. It will be cheaper to run Linux, for sure, but 99 people out of 100 will be a million times less inspired and productive with Linux.
I've used just about any type of computer you can imagine. Apple IIe's, Commodore 64's, various Amigas, old generation Mac's, and just about any and every version of PC's and operating systems for them, starting with DOS 3.x versions on XT's and AT's, through various Linux, OS/2 and Windows versions with modern PC hardware. And when I tried a Mac with OS X the first time about a year ago, it was an incredible accute experience of "OF COURSE!! This is how it SHOULD be!! Why isn't everything like this?!". When I digged in deeper and started examining the guts of it, Carbon, Cocoa, the BSD layer, XCode, the ADC reference library, etc. it just got more and more clear how incredibly well designed and implemented the entire thing is!
So when Apple releases a beautiful headless Mac for $499, you're making a major mistake if you just compare it GHz for GHz and $ for $ with PC hardware. You're not just paying for GHz's, USB ports and MB's of harddisk space. You're paying for a totally different level of experience and for feeling inspired with whatever you'll do with the computer.
I run MS Office 2004 on OS X (10.3.7) and it's 526MB installed (a complete installation with every single component, application, help files, sample documents and files, etc. including Windows Media Player, a bunch of document format converters and other tools). It both loads and runs very fast and is extremely responsive, stable and usable on my 1.33GHz G4 PowerBook with 512MB of RAM.
You may have some issues about the price, cause it's not very cheap at $399 for the standard version, but calling it bloated and slow is quite unfair and incorrect IMHO. I'm no Microsoft fan, as I'm sure not a lot of other Mac users are either, but nothing is gained from low blows like that that have no basis in reality.
First of all, it's ESA, not NASA. Second, yes, it is automatic.
Ok.. So it actually seems they are not taken at different times but that it's the same photo and stuff is added & removed to the 2nd one (the bigger one). But my point still stands. They clearly did it because it's not ready yet and so they made the edited photo show what it will look like when it's ready. What's the big deal?
I think you're blowing this way out of proportion. First of all, the company is well known for making high quality planes. It's not like this is just a PR stunt. They have already made lots and lots of planes with very similar designs as this. For example the Voyager that was the first plane to fly non-stop around the world.
Second, some of the major flukes such as the "exhausts missing" are probably just different versions of the plane, or taken at different times. That is, it might be that the component missing is currently in service or not yet installed in the photo where it is missing. So what?
Third, the landing gear that seems to be Photoshopped away might be just that. It might be that they forgot them down or that the hydraulics for moving them doesn't work unless you charge the batteries etc. etc. first. And so they just Photoshopped them away instead. What's the big deal?
I mean, what exactly are you suggesting? That they don't know how to make retractable landing gears?
"No one gets harmed with music trading. Everybody who has done actualy studies come to the same conclusion. Music swaping increases sales."
Could you please point us to some of these studies? Thanks!
"Kinda like the reputation C++ has for buffer overruns and poor memory management, because so many C++ programmers never bothered to learn about the tools it provides to fix them, you mean? :-)"
Yes, exactly like that. I have nothing against C/C++. I code C++ for a living. I code Java and a number of other languages on my free time. There are good and bad sides with both.
Usually when you see people religiously defending or advocating one language, it's because that's all they know how to use properly.
"Gee, I've heard this argument for so many years... why have I never seen a VM pull it off?"
I have. Like I think I said in my previous post, it's certainly possible, but it's not what you see in most cases. I've demonstrated to co-workers how a prime-number seeking app with the exact same source code (just enough mods to make it compile on Java vs. C) performed slightly better with the Hotspot VM than with a compiled C app. It's quite easy to set up a similar test yourself and just try it out. Even if you dont see Java outperforming C yourself, you'll certainly see it coming VERY close.
And yes. I'm quite aware that in real life situations, it doesn't usually go like this. I was merely pointing out that the statement wasn't as ridiculous as the reply was making it sound.