The first X Windows desktop I remember seeing something like this with was Enlightenment, back in ~1998, whose pager had miniature screenshots of all your other desktops. I'm sure Microsoft is updating the screenshots more frequently and zooming to them more smoothly, but since even Enlightenment's improved version of the pager is too obvious an idea to deserve a patent, in a sane world "Enlightenment + more eye candy" wouldn't stand a chance.
The infinite limit of this approach is a hologram.
I don't think so. Holograms let you produce 3D images of solid, completely opaque objects.
With this "spinning screen" approach to 3D, I don't think it's possible to produce object images that aren't somewhat translucent, no matter how many 2D images you put together to make the 3D display. You can make light radiate from all the appropriate places on the 3D image, but there doesn't seem to be any way to make sure that light is allowed to reach the viewer in some directions but occluded in others.
Every three days more people die of heart disease than died in the terrorist attacks(700,000 people a year, roughly). Nope, I can't have universal healthcare, but I can have Johhny Ashcroft breathing down my neck.
My preferred analogy is to automobile accidents (roughly 30,000 people a year, which isn't nearly enough for us to resume Prohibition, lower speed limits, etc.), but the point is the same.
However, something just occurred to me. We're comparing death rates among the general United States population. Well, the general population isn't voting on anti-terror laws, the Congress and President are.
And, considering that IMHO the two most likely targets for the next terrorist attack are the White House and the Capitol building, is it possible that the risks which are negligable to you or me are great enough to them to scare them witless? It's not like we're going to put term limits into the Constitution or start voting out incumbents en masse any time soon, so most of our Senators and Representatives are planning to spend the rest of their careers going to well-publicized meetings in buildings which are prime targets for the next set of maniacs who can fly a plane or assemble an artillery piece. Perhaps their reaction to the terrorist threat seems greatly exaggerated because their vulnerability to that threat is also greatly exaggerated.
GPL Projects. There's about 16,000 listed on Freshmeat, and some of them include some good code which should be reused in other projects if possible.
If the new Apache license is GPL compatible, then source code released under that license can be redistributed linked to GPL code. If not, then to redistribute such a combined work you have to have either special permission from the authors of any GPLed components to put additional restrictions on their code or special permission from the authors of the non-GPLed components to rerelease their code with fewer restrictions. Since that's enough of a PITA that it will make code reuse less common, it would be very nice if it wasn't necessary.
Slashdot reported it when Interbase was first announced to be going open source, and followed up on the actualreleases afterward, so lots of people cared a few years ago. Interbase keeps getting mentioned by users in more general database discussions as well, so at least some Slashdot users still care, even users who are more interested in database features than in database names.
Unfortunately, deflecting asteroids is likely to be both easier and cheaper than world peace. Rocketry and space travel are things we know how to do, so all we need is to be able to do them a little better. Not only do we have no idea how to create world peace (what do we emulate, the Roman Empire?), we have no guarantee that a world without wars between nations would be any safer from evil governments or terrorists within those nations.
You sound like the "scientists invent X; still no cure for cancer" jokes on Fark, except it seems like you're serious.
If enough of us do what you suggest, we won't receive any more spam from candidates advertising themselves. After all, a commercial spammer who pisses off only 99 people for every purchase would be a roaring success, but a political spammer who pisses off 4 people for every new convert would be a horrible failure, since 1 or 2 of those 4 people probably vote and will now vote against him.
This won't do anything to stop negative spam, though. If you get an email talking about what an idiot Kerry is, does that make you want to vote against Edwards, Dean, or Bush?
What's worse, if people like you are vocal enough and numerous enough, you'll just start to see a new type of spam: obnoxious emails purporting to support Candidate X, but actually sent by one of his competitors.
You can try and strike a balance in which your reduced support for the candidate in an unsolicited email exactly balances out the increased support he might get from others, but that just sounds hard. I suggest treating political spam like any other variety: filter it, ignore it, or delete it.
He may have misunderstood me
on
Space Burial
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· Score: 1
What I meant to say was "unless you're under constant thrust"; of course you could keep that thrust low enough that it exactly balances gravity and you're not accelerating.
Of course, if I wanted to be really pedantic I could point out that 0 acceleration is a constant...;-)
Re:Yes and no
on
Space Burial
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· Score: 2, Informative
Plus, you don't need extra speed to get you out of Earth's gravity well. Even if you travel at only one meter per second away from the Earth, you will still eventually get outside its gravity well. You only need to reach escape velocity if you plan to reach a velocity and then coast from there on out.
If you travel at only one meter per second away from the Earth, gravity will smack you back into the Earth shortly thereafter, unless you're under constant acceleration (which requires extra deltaV, which I loosely called "extra speed"). If you travel at 25 miles per second away from the Earth under no acceleration, you will of course eventually get out of its gravity well, but by the time you do you will have slowed down slightly.
Second of all, there is a much easier way. You just aim yourself at a planet and slingshot yourself off it to gain some pretty good speed. Then, you fly by another planet and use its gravity well not to change the magnitude of your velocity (although you'll do that too), but to change the direction you're travelling. If you do this right, you can be going straight towards the Sun at a very high rate of speed and with no component of your velocity that is perpendicular to the line between you and the Sun.
You're right; I stand corrected. The guy who replied to you and said You don't gain energy (or velocity) by slingshotting off another planet. The energy you gain going in is the same as the energy 'given back' when you go out. wasn't thinking about different frames of reference: in the frame of reference of the planet you pass your energy is unchanged, but in the frame of reference of the Sun you've gained or lost energy: if your new velocity minus your old velocity is in the direction the planet is orbiting, then some of the planets' momentum is transferred to you; if the opposite is true then some of your momentum is transferred to the planet.
There's a limit to how tight a turn you could make around any particular planet, so I'm not sure if you could kill all your radial velocity from a Hohmann orbit to Venus (or even if you could kill enough to send you to Mercury and from there into the Sun), but you could definitely swing around Jupiter straight into the Sun, and that's at least more fuel-efficient than the direct flight I was assuming.
Yes and no
on
Space Burial
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· Score: 5, Informative
This is the part you got right:
Actually, flying straight the sun is very difficult.
Yes, it is: to go into an orbit that will intersect the sun you have to kill nearly all your current velocity with respect to the sun. IIRC for the Earth that's about 25 miles per second (plus a bit extra to get you out of Earth's gravity well), which is more than three times as fast this "put your ashes in orbit" mission.
This is the part you just made up:
If you are pushed a hair off course, your remains will go into orbit around the sun, or be blown outward by the solar winds.
There is a reason why light-sail designs call for square miles of material thinner than paper: because unless you've got that much surface area to weight, neither sunlight nor solar wind will change your course very much.
Even if you aim precisely at the sun, the ever increasing pressure of the solar discharge will tend to push you off course and away.
That pressure will increase with the inverse square of your distance from the sun, as does the force of gravity pulling you towards the sun. If you were on course to begin with, you won't be blown off it, certainly not enough to miss a million mile wide target.
Not so much anymore, but about ten years ago when Russia and the United Space were regularly sending people up into space for research, or bragging rights, or whatever they did it for, it was shown that the Russian system was a lot more efficient, and cheaper.
Actually, the Russian system for sending non-people up into space is more efficient and cheaper, too, despite the fact that even the USA is using expendibles for that.
But I'm not arguing with your main point. It's cheaper to design expendible rockets than reusable rockets because the requirements aren't as strict, and it's much easier to design expendible rockets well because you can fly prototypes rather than being economically forced to depend on your first multibillion dollar white elephant. There is no appropriate comparison between the Space Shuttle, our first partially reusable rocket, and the mature expendable boosters of the time; the Space Shuttle is more analogous to the earliest prototype expendibles, and it's stuck in that state because we weren't willing to call the first design a "sunk cost" and start improving it. We've been able to redesign expendables again and again, whereas with the Space Shuttle we've mainly fixed the SRB O-rings and started using new alloys in the external tank.
Does this mean the solution to cheap space flight is to stick with the mature expendables? I doubt it. In the long term, R&D budgets get swamped by operating budgets. Tweaking expendable rocket technology is a low-risk route for commercial companies, so that's what they've all done, and so they've pushed the limits of cost savings about as far as they'll go for expendables... and it doesn't look like they'll ever go much farther than $1000/kg prices to orbit.
What the commercial companies aren't willing to risk (and so what government funding should risk in their place, if we have aspirations beyond tiny satellites and probes or if we're going to get serious about this "people on the Moon and Mars" stuff) is applying that same type of development (repeated design improvements with modern materials, flying the designs over and over again to learn how they can be improved) to reusable rockets as well.
This sounds horribly expensive, but it doesn't have to be. Even when it failed with the X-33, they didn't waste 10% of the Shuttle's regular operating budget. Private companies trying to do things similarly have failed for lack of funding, because they couldn't get investors to raise half of what they needed, which amounts to about 5% of what NASA spends each year operating a decades old prototype.
The problem is that (as the X33 showed) large private industry can't do it either - too much government supervision leads to designs like VentureStar that try to pack half a dozen bleeding edge technologies into one package, and too little government supervision leads to companies like Lockheed coming hat in hand for more money when one of those technologies fails. If you try to strike a happy medium, then you just end up losing on both counts. Back when the X-33 proposals were made, we should have funded all four of them, flipped Lockheed the bird when their project screwed up, and then awarded the big full scale contract to any of the groups which succeeded. Private industry only works better when there's competition for your dollar; otherwise it's just like a government project but with profits skimmed off the top. Unfortunately we've seen mergers down to two big aerospace companies, neither of which has much of an incentive to lower launch costs, and so we probably couldn't get much competition out of them today.
It sounds like the conclusion is that we're probably screwed and I'm just ranting about it for no reason, but this "prize money" mode of funding might be an exception to that. Unlike traditional R&D projects, prize offerings are zero risk for the government - if someone attempting to earn your prize fails, they do so on their own dollar. Unlike traditional R&D projects, prize of
Keep the proper scale in mind
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NASA's Own X Prize?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The X Prize isn't about putting another man on the moon, or even putting another one in orbit. It's just about building a rocket that can get people above the atmosphere repeatedly, quickly, safely, and cheaply. Such a rocket doesn't need much in the way of performance compared to a real launch vehicle.
For that goal (especially the "cheaply" part), increasing the amount of prize money could actually be detrimental. An expensive winning vehicle in 2000 (which could have been done, if the prize money was enough to lure a big aerospace company into the race) would have been much less of a "return on investment" than a cheap winning vehicle in 2005.
A big part of the reason why space exploration is stuck in a rut is that when we started it, we had a post-war technology (expendible artillery rockets) that could be used to "get people to space, and damn the cost". Well, we've been using those sorts of rockets ever since, and "DAMN, the COST!" Rocket fuel is cheap, but rockets and rocket engineers are expensive, and when we throw away the former and hire armies of the latter to supervise a few launches a year it gets really expensive. There are a lot of people (myself included) who think that the only way to change this is with reusable, rapid turnaround launch vehicles, and who speculate that the natural way to develop those vehicles is from technology developed flying suborbital prototypes. Our previous strategy of "start with a huge orbital rocket, and try to make it cost effective" (the Space Shuttle) turned out to be so expensive that when it failed we couldn't afford to try again. Hopefully the alternate strategy of "start with a cost effective rocket, and try to make it orbital" will be more successful, and even when it does have failures it's a lot easier to repeat a multimillion dollar experiment than a multibillion dollar one.
The reason these Centennial challenges (and the X Prize) are so exciting is that there's a problem with our alternate strategy: revenue. There's a commercial market for orbital rockets, but not much of a market (except for tourism, war, and the occasional science experiment) for suborbital rockets, and nobody wants to start a multi-decade research program if it's not going to bring in any money until the end. If NASA can provide funding for those projects in such a way that they can't be "cheated" into paying for failures (like they were with the X-33), it makes that long term strategy into a short term opportunity.
Hmm... I didn't intend that to be so long; I should shut up now, find a link for anyone who's actually still reading this, and go to sleep. There's a large relevant discussion at Jerry Pournelle's website; Pournelle's opinions on this subject don't differ much from mine, he's had most of them longer than I've been alive, and he's better at articulating them.
'Cuz you sure aren't talking about the IBM I know. IBM giving an asset away isn't poetic. I'd call it heart-stoppingly unimaginable.
Startimagining. IBM wouldn't be in this mess if it hadn't started giving away (well, GPLing at least) some of it's assets.
Some of the entries on those lists are a lot more advanced than SCO's code (compare IBM's NUMA contributions to the malloc version SCO was whining about under NDA, for example), too. At least a few prominent divisions of IBM see that open source isn't necessarily "IBM giving away an asset", but can often be "IBM adding value to their services and hardware". In the case of giving away Unix, it would be "IBM removing a perceived risk of their services and hardware".
You're right that this isn't the way IBM used to behave, and it's probably not the way every IBM executive would like to behave now. But is a way that they've started to behave, and it isn't implausible to hope that they'll continue. If you want implausible, you could consider that IBM's changes today give us hope for a changed Microsoft sometime in the future.;-)
That solution only works 50% of the time
on
Radar For Safer Driving
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The other 50% of the time, it's the driver in another car who should be looking over his shoulder, and you have no way of compelling him to drive responsibly.
And in fact, if this is designed correctly (which I'm skeptical about: for one thing the little light should be on when it's safe to merge rather than off, so you aren't lured into a false sense of security if it burns out) it could be helpful for responsible drivers, too. I know I certainly hate turning my head to look backwards while I'm driving forwards at 65mph. A system that tracked relative speeds could be better than my eyes in other ways, too; more than once I've had to swerve to avoid an accident because someone two lanes over decided they wanted to change lanes in my direction at the same time I tried to change lanes in theirs, and a quick glance to the side wasn't enough to tell that they had started moving towards me.
That's fallacious reasoning (or just an excuse to brag). If you're not making the median salary of a high-school graduate, what makes you think you would have been making the median salary of a new college graduate?
His post isn't very reader-friendly (it makes grossly implausible statements apparantly unwittingly, and includes no specific names or facts that could be verified by the skeptical or researched by the curious), it is very moderator-friendly (the author is pro-Linux and makes vague claims of being a professional in a technical field), and it comes from someone in a deep karma rut. My money is on "lying".
You don't send the client information that they don't need (say, the position of players that they can't see)
And then you fend off the complaints of all your customers who notice that when someone comes around a corner in your competitors games, they can be seen smoothly running into view, whereas when someone comes around a corner in your game they instantly "blink" into position a fraction of a second later when the server has made sure that yes, you really can see them. Avoiding this doesn't mean your server has to send every player the location of every other player, but just sending clients the locations of enemies they might see soon would be enough to let cheaters get in the first shot in many confrontations.
and you check to make sure the returned data is sane (for example, the player is traveling on foot more slowly than 200mph, the player isn't walking through solid obstacles, etc.
Good advice, but it seems to have already been taken on the FPS games I've played. Did Half Life 1 really allow cheats like this without a modified server?
It's MUCH harder to change your bank than to patch your browser.
Yes, it is. You should try the "fake user agent" patches that others have suggested, for example; they usually come in the cross-platform installer (.xpi) format that Mozilla and Firebird can install in two clicks.
While you might still be in the student phase of life where you've got nothing but some pizza and beer money in the account, and hence not much to transfer to another bank
Nice wisecrack, but you don't need to feign concern; I don't drink and I've got a few years pizza money saved up should it come to that.
When I do get a home mortgage, though, could you let me know which banks I ought to be avoiding? For such a serious concern it's odd how abstract this whole thread is. A brief "I banked with X, their website doesn't suppor Mozilla, and when I tried contacting their webmaster and using a user-agent faker the results were Y and Z" would be helpful.
Yes, Mozilla is better than IE in alot of cases... but don't forget, the average user still uses the internet for email, online banking, and news sites.
So do I.
And guess where you are more than likely to run into an "I.E. reccomended" site? Online banking.
Reality is, Mozilla is a far way from replacing I.E.
Well, if your bank sucks, I suppose so. I'd be curious about which bank it is, though; the only place I still see "You should have Internet Explorer!" pages is zone.msn.com.
I can host my own web/email server off of it, and they have never complained.
They never complained to me, either, they just quietly and permanently blocked port 80 during one of the IIS worm outbreaks. That's fine for a webserver that only sees infrequent personal use - I can just give people port 8080 URLs instead. For an email server that might see incoming mail, having a port blocked without warning (which they've reserved the right to do for their home users) could really suck.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't seen this implemented before.
The first X Windows desktop I remember seeing something like this with was Enlightenment, back in ~1998, whose pager had miniature screenshots of all your other desktops. I'm sure Microsoft is updating the screenshots more frequently and zooming to them more smoothly, but since even Enlightenment's improved version of the pager is too obvious an idea to deserve a patent, in a sane world "Enlightenment + more eye candy" wouldn't stand a chance.
The infinite limit of this approach is a hologram.
I don't think so. Holograms let you produce 3D images of solid, completely opaque objects.
With this "spinning screen" approach to 3D, I don't think it's possible to produce object images that aren't somewhat translucent, no matter how many 2D images you put together to make the 3D display. You can make light radiate from all the appropriate places on the 3D image, but there doesn't seem to be any way to make sure that light is allowed to reach the viewer in some directions but occluded in others.
Every three days more people die of heart disease than died in the terrorist attacks(700,000 people a year, roughly). Nope, I can't have universal healthcare, but I can have Johhny Ashcroft breathing down my neck.
My preferred analogy is to automobile accidents (roughly 30,000 people a year, which isn't nearly enough for us to resume Prohibition, lower speed limits, etc.), but the point is the same.
However, something just occurred to me. We're comparing death rates among the general United States population. Well, the general population isn't voting on anti-terror laws, the Congress and President are.
And, considering that IMHO the two most likely targets for the next terrorist attack are the White House and the Capitol building, is it possible that the risks which are negligable to you or me are great enough to them to scare them witless? It's not like we're going to put term limits into the Constitution or start voting out incumbents en masse any time soon, so most of our Senators and Representatives are planning to spend the rest of their careers going to well-publicized meetings in buildings which are prime targets for the next set of maniacs who can fly a plane or assemble an artillery piece. Perhaps their reaction to the terrorist threat seems greatly exaggerated because their vulnerability to that threat is also greatly exaggerated.
If you're going to karma whore by plagiarizing someone, it only works if you don't post anonymously.
GPL Projects. There's about 16,000 listed on Freshmeat, and some of them include some good code which should be reused in other projects if possible.
If the new Apache license is GPL compatible, then source code released under that license can be redistributed linked to GPL code. If not, then to redistribute such a combined work you have to have either special permission from the authors of any GPLed components to put additional restrictions on their code or special permission from the authors of the non-GPLed components to rerelease their code with fewer restrictions. Since that's enough of a PITA that it will make code reuse less common, it would be very nice if it wasn't necessary.
Slashdot reported it when Interbase was first announced to be going open source, and followed up on the actual releases afterward, so lots of people cared a few years ago. Interbase keeps getting mentioned by users in more general database discussions as well, so at least some Slashdot users still care, even users who are more interested in database features than in database names.
Unfortunately, deflecting asteroids is likely to be both easier and cheaper than world peace. Rocketry and space travel are things we know how to do, so all we need is to be able to do them a little better. Not only do we have no idea how to create world peace (what do we emulate, the Roman Empire?), we have no guarantee that a world without wars between nations would be any safer from evil governments or terrorists within those nations.
You sound like the "scientists invent X; still no cure for cancer" jokes on Fark, except it seems like you're serious.
When something requires more than 20 different extensions to fit in the modern world, it's perhaps time for a re-think.
When something designed 20 new ideas ago is so extensible that it still fits in the modern world, perhaps they did the thinking right the first time.
I'm surprised he is still alive, let alone coherent.
Don't jump to any conclusions about "coherent" until after you've read 3001...
If enough of us do what you suggest, we won't receive any more spam from candidates advertising themselves. After all, a commercial spammer who pisses off only 99 people for every purchase would be a roaring success, but a political spammer who pisses off 4 people for every new convert would be a horrible failure, since 1 or 2 of those 4 people probably vote and will now vote against him.
This won't do anything to stop negative spam, though. If you get an email talking about what an idiot Kerry is, does that make you want to vote against Edwards, Dean, or Bush?
What's worse, if people like you are vocal enough and numerous enough, you'll just start to see a new type of spam: obnoxious emails purporting to support Candidate X, but actually sent by one of his competitors.
You can try and strike a balance in which your reduced support for the candidate in an unsolicited email exactly balances out the increased support he might get from others, but that just sounds hard. I suggest treating political spam like any other variety: filter it, ignore it, or delete it.
What I meant to say was "unless you're under constant thrust"; of course you could keep that thrust low enough that it exactly balances gravity and you're not accelerating.
;-)
Of course, if I wanted to be really pedantic I could point out that 0 acceleration is a constant...
Plus, you don't need extra speed to get you out of Earth's gravity well. Even if you travel at only one meter per second away from the Earth, you will still eventually get outside its gravity well. You only need to reach escape velocity if you plan to reach a velocity and then coast from there on out.
If you travel at only one meter per second away from the Earth, gravity will smack you back into the Earth shortly thereafter, unless you're under constant acceleration (which requires extra deltaV, which I loosely called "extra speed"). If you travel at 25 miles per second away from the Earth under no acceleration, you will of course eventually get out of its gravity well, but by the time you do you will have slowed down slightly.
Second of all, there is a much easier way. You just aim yourself at a planet and slingshot yourself off it to gain some pretty good speed. Then, you fly by another planet and use its gravity well not to change the magnitude of your velocity (although you'll do that too), but to change the direction you're travelling. If you do this right, you can be going straight towards the Sun at a very high rate of speed and with no component of your velocity that is perpendicular to the line between you and the Sun.
You're right; I stand corrected. The guy who replied to you and said You don't gain energy (or velocity) by slingshotting off another planet. The energy you gain going in is the same as the energy 'given back' when you go out. wasn't thinking about different frames of reference: in the frame of reference of the planet you pass your energy is unchanged, but in the frame of reference of the Sun you've gained or lost energy: if your new velocity minus your old velocity is in the direction the planet is orbiting, then some of the planets' momentum is transferred to you; if the opposite is true then some of your momentum is transferred to the planet.
There's a limit to how tight a turn you could make around any particular planet, so I'm not sure if you could kill all your radial velocity from a Hohmann orbit to Venus (or even if you could kill enough to send you to Mercury and from there into the Sun), but you could definitely swing around Jupiter straight into the Sun, and that's at least more fuel-efficient than the direct flight I was assuming.
This is the part you got right:
Actually, flying straight the sun is very difficult.
Yes, it is: to go into an orbit that will intersect the sun you have to kill nearly all your current velocity with respect to the sun. IIRC for the Earth that's about 25 miles per second (plus a bit extra to get you out of Earth's gravity well), which is more than three times as fast this "put your ashes in orbit" mission.
This is the part you just made up:
If you are pushed a hair off course, your remains will go into orbit around the sun, or be blown outward by the solar winds.
There is a reason why light-sail designs call for square miles of material thinner than paper: because unless you've got that much surface area to weight, neither sunlight nor solar wind will change your course very much.
Even if you aim precisely at the sun, the ever increasing pressure of the solar discharge will tend to push you off course and away.
That pressure will increase with the inverse square of your distance from the sun, as does the force of gravity pulling you towards the sun. If you were on course to begin with, you won't be blown off it, certainly not enough to miss a million mile wide target.
The smell?
Not so much anymore, but about ten years ago when Russia and the United Space were regularly sending people up into space for research, or bragging rights, or whatever they did it for, it was shown that the Russian system was a lot more efficient, and cheaper.
Actually, the Russian system for sending non-people up into space is more efficient and cheaper, too, despite the fact that even the USA is using expendibles for that.
But I'm not arguing with your main point. It's cheaper to design expendible rockets than reusable rockets because the requirements aren't as strict, and it's much easier to design expendible rockets well because you can fly prototypes rather than being economically forced to depend on your first multibillion dollar white elephant. There is no appropriate comparison between the Space Shuttle, our first partially reusable rocket, and the mature expendable boosters of the time; the Space Shuttle is more analogous to the earliest prototype expendibles, and it's stuck in that state because we weren't willing to call the first design a "sunk cost" and start improving it. We've been able to redesign expendables again and again, whereas with the Space Shuttle we've mainly fixed the SRB O-rings and started using new alloys in the external tank.
Does this mean the solution to cheap space flight is to stick with the mature expendables? I doubt it. In the long term, R&D budgets get swamped by operating budgets. Tweaking expendable rocket technology is a low-risk route for commercial companies, so that's what they've all done, and so they've pushed the limits of cost savings about as far as they'll go for expendables... and it doesn't look like they'll ever go much farther than $1000/kg prices to orbit.
What the commercial companies aren't willing to risk (and so what government funding should risk in their place, if we have aspirations beyond tiny satellites and probes or if we're going to get serious about this "people on the Moon and Mars" stuff) is applying that same type of development (repeated design improvements with modern materials, flying the designs over and over again to learn how they can be improved) to reusable rockets as well.
This sounds horribly expensive, but it doesn't have to be. Even when it failed with the X-33, they didn't waste 10% of the Shuttle's regular operating budget. Private companies trying to do things similarly have failed for lack of funding, because they couldn't get investors to raise half of what they needed, which amounts to about 5% of what NASA spends each year operating a decades old prototype.
The problem is that (as the X33 showed) large private industry can't do it either - too much government supervision leads to designs like VentureStar that try to pack half a dozen bleeding edge technologies into one package, and too little government supervision leads to companies like Lockheed coming hat in hand for more money when one of those technologies fails. If you try to strike a happy medium, then you just end up losing on both counts. Back when the X-33 proposals were made, we should have funded all four of them, flipped Lockheed the bird when their project screwed up, and then awarded the big full scale contract to any of the groups which succeeded. Private industry only works better when there's competition for your dollar; otherwise it's just like a government project but with profits skimmed off the top. Unfortunately we've seen mergers down to two big aerospace companies, neither of which has much of an incentive to lower launch costs, and so we probably couldn't get much competition out of them today.
It sounds like the conclusion is that we're probably screwed and I'm just ranting about it for no reason, but this "prize money" mode of funding might be an exception to that. Unlike traditional R&D projects, prize offerings are zero risk for the government - if someone attempting to earn your prize fails, they do so on their own dollar. Unlike traditional R&D projects, prize of
The X Prize isn't about putting another man on the moon, or even putting another one in orbit. It's just about building a rocket that can get people above the atmosphere repeatedly, quickly, safely, and cheaply. Such a rocket doesn't need much in the way of performance compared to a real launch vehicle.
For that goal (especially the "cheaply" part), increasing the amount of prize money could actually be detrimental. An expensive winning vehicle in 2000 (which could have been done, if the prize money was enough to lure a big aerospace company into the race) would have been much less of a "return on investment" than a cheap winning vehicle in 2005.
A big part of the reason why space exploration is stuck in a rut is that when we started it, we had a post-war technology (expendible artillery rockets) that could be used to "get people to space, and damn the cost". Well, we've been using those sorts of rockets ever since, and "DAMN, the COST!" Rocket fuel is cheap, but rockets and rocket engineers are expensive, and when we throw away the former and hire armies of the latter to supervise a few launches a year it gets really expensive. There are a lot of people (myself included) who think that the only way to change this is with reusable, rapid turnaround launch vehicles, and who speculate that the natural way to develop those vehicles is from technology developed flying suborbital prototypes. Our previous strategy of "start with a huge orbital rocket, and try to make it cost effective" (the Space Shuttle) turned out to be so expensive that when it failed we couldn't afford to try again. Hopefully the alternate strategy of "start with a cost effective rocket, and try to make it orbital" will be more successful, and even when it does have failures it's a lot easier to repeat a multimillion dollar experiment than a multibillion dollar one.
The reason these Centennial challenges (and the X Prize) are so exciting is that there's a problem with our alternate strategy: revenue. There's a commercial market for orbital rockets, but not much of a market (except for tourism, war, and the occasional science experiment) for suborbital rockets, and nobody wants to start a multi-decade research program if it's not going to bring in any money until the end. If NASA can provide funding for those projects in such a way that they can't be "cheated" into paying for failures (like they were with the X-33), it makes that long term strategy into a short term opportunity.
Hmm... I didn't intend that to be so long; I should shut up now, find a link for anyone who's actually still reading this, and go to sleep. There's a large relevant discussion at Jerry Pournelle's website; Pournelle's opinions on this subject don't differ much from mine, he's had most of them longer than I've been alive, and he's better at articulating them.
'Cuz you sure aren't talking about the IBM I know. IBM giving an asset away isn't poetic. I'd call it heart-stoppingly unimaginable.
;-)
Start imagining. IBM wouldn't be in this mess if it hadn't started giving away (well, GPLing at least) some of it's assets.
Some of the entries on those lists are a lot more advanced than SCO's code (compare IBM's NUMA contributions to the malloc version SCO was whining about under NDA, for example), too. At least a few prominent divisions of IBM see that open source isn't necessarily "IBM giving away an asset", but can often be "IBM adding value to their services and hardware". In the case of giving away Unix, it would be "IBM removing a perceived risk of their services and hardware".
You're right that this isn't the way IBM used to behave, and it's probably not the way every IBM executive would like to behave now. But is a way that they've started to behave, and it isn't implausible to hope that they'll continue. If you want implausible, you could consider that IBM's changes today give us hope for a changed Microsoft sometime in the future.
The other 50% of the time, it's the driver in another car who should be looking over his shoulder, and you have no way of compelling him to drive responsibly.
And in fact, if this is designed correctly (which I'm skeptical about: for one thing the little light should be on when it's safe to merge rather than off, so you aren't lured into a false sense of security if it burns out) it could be helpful for responsible drivers, too. I know I certainly hate turning my head to look backwards while I'm driving forwards at 65mph. A system that tracked relative speeds could be better than my eyes in other ways, too; more than once I've had to swerve to avoid an accident because someone two lanes over decided they wanted to change lanes in my direction at the same time I tried to change lanes in theirs, and a quick glance to the side wasn't enough to tell that they had started moving towards me.
That's fallacious reasoning (or just an excuse to brag). If you're not making the median salary of a high-school graduate, what makes you think you would have been making the median salary of a new college graduate?
You're either lying or insane
His post isn't very reader-friendly (it makes grossly implausible statements apparantly unwittingly, and includes no specific names or facts that could be verified by the skeptical or researched by the curious), it is very moderator-friendly (the author is pro-Linux and makes vague claims of being a professional in a technical field), and it comes from someone in a deep karma rut. My money is on "lying".
You don't send the client information that they don't need (say, the position of players that they can't see)
And then you fend off the complaints of all your customers who notice that when someone comes around a corner in your competitors games, they can be seen smoothly running into view, whereas when someone comes around a corner in your game they instantly "blink" into position a fraction of a second later when the server has made sure that yes, you really can see them. Avoiding this doesn't mean your server has to send every player the location of every other player, but just sending clients the locations of enemies they might see soon would be enough to let cheaters get in the first shot in many confrontations.
and you check to make sure the returned data is sane (for example, the player is traveling on foot more slowly than 200mph, the player isn't walking through solid obstacles, etc.
Good advice, but it seems to have already been taken on the FPS games I've played. Did Half Life 1 really allow cheats like this without a modified server?
(fill out your own steps in the middle...)
ANDY
HANDY
HARDY
HARD
CARD
CARL
DARL
Yup, your story checks out.
It's MUCH harder to change your bank than to patch your browser.
Yes, it is. You should try the "fake user agent" patches that others have suggested, for example; they usually come in the cross-platform installer (.xpi) format that Mozilla and Firebird can install in two clicks.
While you might still be in the student phase of life where you've got nothing but some pizza and beer money in the account, and hence not much to transfer to another bank
Nice wisecrack, but you don't need to feign concern; I don't drink and I've got a few years pizza money saved up should it come to that.
When I do get a home mortgage, though, could you let me know which banks I ought to be avoiding? For such a serious concern it's odd how abstract this whole thread is. A brief "I banked with X, their website doesn't suppor Mozilla, and when I tried contacting their webmaster and using a user-agent faker the results were Y and Z" would be helpful.
Yes, Mozilla is better than IE in alot of cases... but don't forget, the average user still uses the internet for email, online banking, and news sites.
So do I.
And guess where you are more than likely to run into an "I.E. reccomended" site? Online banking.
Not at my little bank.
Reality is, Mozilla is a far way from replacing I.E.
Well, if your bank sucks, I suppose so. I'd be curious about which bank it is, though; the only place I still see "You should have Internet Explorer!" pages is zone.msn.com.
I can host my own web/email server off of it, and they have never complained.
They never complained to me, either, they just quietly and permanently blocked port 80 during one of the IIS worm outbreaks. That's fine for a webserver that only sees infrequent personal use - I can just give people port 8080 URLs instead. For an email server that might see incoming mail, having a port blocked without warning (which they've reserved the right to do for their home users) could really suck.