That said, when I get my new Linux development workstation in a few months, it'll be dual-core AMD based, not Intel Pentium 4. The P4 is total garbage, and I'll damned before I spend my own money on one.
My plan is to build a system around the Tyan Dual Socket 940 NForce4 SLI board. I'll start with one Opteron 246/248, then in a few months as prices drop add the second CPU. Then in another year or two I'll swap out the two 240-series chips and pop in the (by the hopefully dirt cheap) dual 275s or better. I'm pretty sure such a system will have the best longevity of any system I've owned. It'll be great for both Linux and Windows.
I'll also be buying Intel-based Macs when they come out I'm sure. I'm more than ready to completely migrate off Windows.:-)
Intel is Apple's first choice because Intel's mobile processors are better than AMD's -- and don't try to argue this, you will lose.
I made a very similar point myself actually.:-)
The difference was that I don't think Pentium-M is "better", I just think it's better established since it's an older chip, and it's (as usual with Intel) well marketed and/or well foisted on manufacturers.;-)
However, I'd personally argue that the Turions are as good or better than Pentium-M across the board, and 64-bit to boot. We'll see how uptake is going forward.
AMD may have the lead in desktop CPUs, but find me a major manufacturer who is making AMD laptops.
Um, HP? You know, the #1 PC manufacturer? How about Gateway/eMachines? Not to mention Acer, Asus and many other volume Taiwanese manufacturers.
Then consider that laptops are outselling desktops by a pretty decent margin.
By a razor-thin margin you mean.:^)
Pentium M is not a bad architecture.
Nope, the PIII has surprising legs eh?
It wouldn't surprise me to see Apple move the XServe line to Opterons, but the desktops will probably stay Intel for the forseeable future.
We'll see...it certainly depends on what happens in the intervening 24 months or so. Right now AMD's desktop chips are substantially better than Intels.
Most "workstation" apps are highly optimized for Intel chips.
Since the newest Opterons even support SSE3 I'm not sure what "optimizations" are possible for Intel of which AMD wouldn't take advantage. Plus there are lots of Opteron workstations shipping from PC manufacturers (notably IBM, HP and Sun), so one guesses that those workstation apps will increasingly support Opteron as a first-class target.
1) The ISS does not have enough: power, people, or fuel to support a construction operation.
Assuming this is so, how many 24-ton shots and manned missions do you think it would take to correct? What do you envision as the "construction operation"?
2) Putting enough mass for a 3 year ONE WAY voyage on a ship built to carry more than 7 people in the same orbit as the ISS is not a safe idea.
This sentence requires a lot of response.
It is not a 3 year mission.
It is not a ONE WAY mission.
It doesn't involve (necessarily) 7 crew members.
It is a safe idea.
If it was un powered at the time but was dragged towards the earth it could kill a lot of people on the ground.
Did that happen when Skylab landed? How 'bout when the (quite primitive by comparison) various Soviet nuclear reactors reentered the atmosphere? No? Why not?
3) Bush doesn't make the plans for how we are supposed to get to Mars. He does, however, have some say on the funding, which this whole article is about. So perhaps he should actually urge congress to properly fund NASA.
Maybe he should urge NASA to "think different". You know, better, faster, cheaper...
4) There is no way to get a ship to Mars in a few weeks. It is 78.32e6 km or 261 lt sec. You would need to be going.04 times the speed of light to get there in two weeks, that is not low thrust.
The first two numbers are right,.04 C is wrong though. I make the average velocity to get there in two weeks to be.000216 C. Also, I said "a few weeks" not "two weeks".
If one were to make the flight at.01 G constant acceleration, accelerating to the halfway point and the decelerating the rest of the way, here are my numbers. I'm not taking into account orbital mechanics, so this is a back of the envelope calculation for going 70 million miles in a straight line really - I'm sure you could actually get to Mars on a shorter orbit, so this is a fairly realistic calculation.
total dist: 112630000.0 km
a: 0.01 G
t: 24.8070548893 days
max vel: 105098.164113 m/s 0.0350569691081 % C
Twenty four days isn't too bad, eh? At.005 G:
total dist: 112630000.0 km
a: 0.005 G
t: 35.082473467 days
max vel: 74315.6245348 m/s 0.0247890205842 % C
Note that halving the acceleration didn't double the flight time. Even at 1/1000 of a G constant boost:
total dist: 112630000.0 km
a: 0.001 G
t: 78.446795491 days
max vel: 33234.95765 m/s 0.0110859870244 % C
Even at 1/1000 G the flight time is cut to under 3 months. And remember, this is for a 70,000,000 mile flight, not the ~50,000,000 mile flight that would most likely be required.
The drastically reduced flight times would completely change the requirements for the crew module. In fact, artificial gravity wouldn't necessarily be required. My point with all this is that it might be beneficial to wait for a few more breathroughs before attempting Mars, instead of spending "hundreds of billions" for dubious gain and no chance at colonization. Better, faster, cheaper...
Here's the Python script I used to generate the numbers above, FYI:
#!/usr/bin/python
import math
def fly_to_mars(): dist = 70.0e6 * 1609. # Dist in meters halfway = dist / 2. G = 9.807 # m/s^2 C = 299792500 # m/s a = G *.001 t = math.sqrt((2. * halfway) / a) print 'total dist: ', dist / 1000., 'km' print 'a: ', a / G, 'G' print 't: ', ((2. * t) / (60. * 60. * 24.)), ' days' print 'max vel: ', (a * t), 'm/s', ((a * t * 100.) / C), '% C' return
fly_to_mars()
I see ecode didn't handle indentation properly, sorry...easy to fix though.
I'm sure that wasn't intended as an ad-hominem...;-)
The ISS was built to be a research station, not an assembly plant for massive vehicles. Building ships in space would require a new sort of space station entirely.
Utter hogwash. Defend your position.
If the EIC (exo-atmospheric interplanetary craft) were properly designed, assembly wouldn't consist of much more than bolting the pieces together. Further, since everything is happening in space, there is no structural issue with the space station itself. If for some reason more ISS crew quarters were needed, they could be launched attached. One of the beauties of space stations is that they can be expanded easily and cheaply.
There are huge safety issues with lifting enough fissionable material into space. A launch-failure could potentially spread an awful lot of radiation.
In short, this really isn't true. Read my post below regarding pebble bed reactors. Also note that the launch would probably take place from the middle of the Pacific.
And, how much of what we know about making nuclear reactors on Earth translates well into low-G environs?
Um, all of it? Plus, reactors have been in space before, as another reply points out.
Ahh, I see the luddites wasted no time in responding. Just to make sure there's some serious discussion though...
While I'm impressed with SpaceX's progress so far and have my fingers crossed for a successful launch within the next month, keep in mind that they have yet to prove the Falcon 1, much less the Falcon 9 or the impressive 27 engine, side-stacked spin-off they've proposed.
I've read their material extensively, and if they're proceeding as stated it looks to me like they have every potential to succeed. They're using low-risk technology, applying it brilliantly, testing thoroughly and seem to have a great business plan. We'll see, but it's sure looking good. I hope nothing untoward happens, I'm sure SpaceX is ruffling a lot of feathers.
Remember also, that the $78 million price tag is a goal, probably slightly optimistic, and that's the launch cost only. It doesn't include the cost of the payload.
I don't think those prices are "optimistic", since SpaceX is selling flights at those prices right now. Of course, it is possible that SpaceX is taking a loss or only breaking even on these flights in order to get traction in the marketplace.
While those prices don't include the cost of the payload (obviously, a single satellite can go into the billions), insurance is factored into the cost.
I think eventually a nuclear-powered Mars shuttle could be a great idea. If we were to reach the point of regular Martian travel, it could be fueled and mated to a payload (such as a lander) in earth orbit, deliver the payload to a Mars orbit and return another payload from Mars back to an earth orbit where it would be refueled and mated with a new payload for the next mission.
It's really not a "Mars shuttle". It's an exo-atmospheric interplanetary spacecraft. By no means would it be limited to Mars, though it might require a much more sophisticated crew space to make it to Jupiter, for instance. Venus would be immediately in range, though it doesn't look particularly worthwhile.
At this point, however, we need to focus on getting to Mars and figuring out exactly what it will take to establish a permanent presence and if it's worth the cost before we invest billions of dollars developing, billions testing, and billions more building a craft with such a focused purpose.
As I pointed out above, this spacecraft wouldn't be *particularly* focused. It might find it's greatest use in asteroid mining (go to asteroid, attach drivers, process asteroid in Earth orbit a few years later). Almost unimaginable wealth lies down that road.
My view though, really, is that we should probably colonize the Moon before moving on to Mars. There is not a tremendous difference in available resources or hospitability, and the Moon is a much more convenient testbed. The one big difference is 1/6 G versus 1/3 G. It'd be interesting to know if either of them has a gravity field that allows the human body to exist and develop normally. My hunch is that 1/6 isn't close to enough...
I think there would have to be large centrifuges available at a lunar colony in order for colonists to exercise and retain bone/muscle mass. Exposure to near-earth G levels may be a requirement for some other areas of our biochemistry.
Trust me, it will take billions to design a new fission reactor and get it certified for launch, and there will be a huge fuss (probably costing billions more) over who's qualified to launch it, if anybody.
The fission reactor SHOULD be mostly a non-issue. If it is one of the new pebble-bed designs, it can't melt down, and the fuel is in inert ceramic-coated pellets. If it were launched from the Marshall Islands, the reactor would land somewhere in the Pacific if the flight aborted. Most likely the reactor vessel wouldn't be compromised, but even if so the pellets are fairly innocuous. If people were scientifically inclined enough to understand their natural radiation environment, they'd see that the risk from l
1) Steve tried to get IBM to essentially give them a free new design for a low power version of the 970
Yeah, I'm sure IBM has no use for a low-power 970.../smirk
2) IBM wouldn't give in to the demand
3) Steve takes his ball and goes home
"IBM didn't meet its obligations, so Apple looked elsewhere"
4) AMD doesn't have the capacity to supply even Apple's paltry number of machines a year
Absolutely not true, and will be even less of an issue as Fab 36 comes online next year.
I think Apple wanted Intel mainly because it IS the "market leader", and Apple/Jobs is tired of Apple's "niche" image.
5) Intel becomes Apple's 'first choice'
It most likely has been for some time. Intel was NeXT's primary target when Jobs was CEO there.
6) Steve goes out on stage at the WWDC and does a hour long damage control and history rewriting monologue.
"Steve goes out on stage at WWDC and gets the developers fired up about Intel Macs!"
He didn't do much IBM bashing, as a matter of fact.
IBM has really earned my respect by taking the high road and letting Jobs run his mouth off with lies about the whole mess. It is too bad Steve has fucked up the relationship so bad that the only place for Apple to go is Intel and their horrendously fucked up chip roadmap.
IBM is just a company, no more no less. It made its decisions just as Apple made its decisions - trying to maximize shareholder value. The two sides couldn't come to an agreement - c'est la vie!
Intel's chip roadmap isn't so bad, Intel clearly has the advantage in the mobile space (a very strategic area for Apple), and Intel's desktop chips are competitive if not great. By the time Apple brings out Intel PowerMacs, it will be using a next-generation processor. I'm sure Apple and Intel are both hoping that'll be a great part. Rumors of K10 problems are out there too.
I'd like to see Apple bring out AMD models also - and I think it'll happen once the transition is over, perhaps in 2008-2009.
How does the cost of NASA compare the amount squandered on the military?
NASA is much smaller. Note that some view the money spent on NASA as "squandered". I see value in what NASA does, but I do feel it's a very inefficient organization in some areas (manned space flight being the worst). Now we have the ISS doing nothing useful for 5 or so years... Yeesh that thing is a white elephant.
If Bush were serious about interplanetary flight he'd start construction of a nuclear powered space-only ship, with a hefty lander, using ISS as the assembly plant. I'm pretty sure we could build a low-thrust nuclear design that'd get to Mars in a few weeks rather than many months. That would greatly change the equation in many ways, and would show the utility of the space station concept. It would even make Mars colonization practical.
SpaceX is doing some great things, and shows the power of private ownership to lower costs. Their newest design, Falcon 9, is impressive with an ability to loft 24 metric tons at a time into LEO, at only $78 million a shot. You could build a massive interplanetary craft with just a few shots... I can't see this approach costing "hundreds of billions of dollars", but then again I'm not a government expert at inflating costs.
Of course our Luddite anti-nuclear "friends" would scream bloody murder about the Mars ship being nuclear, so it won't happen anytime soon, IMO.
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 1
despite the fact that GCJ doesn't optimize Java code as good as GCC optimizes C code,
GCJ does just fine. On the one benchmark I really messed with, almabench, GCJ ended up within 5% of gcc with the right command line switches (-ffast-math, -funroll-loops, -fno-bounds-check IIRC). They both use the same backend optimizer, so that makes sense.
On the other hand, gcc isn't all that great at optimizations yet. Intel C was about twice as fast as gcc on that benchmark. Gcc 4.0 has potential, but isn't a big improvement - hopefully future versions will be.
(BTW, I don't think the gcj compiler is used by OO, just the interpreter gij...I'd like clarification on this.)
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
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OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 2, Informative
In this case, as previous posts here have suggested, the use of a JRE for scripting capabilities is resulting in long startup times, even if most of OO.o is written in C++.
No, the only post that seems to complain about long startup times is dealing with the case where there is NO JVM INSTALLED, but OO is looking for one.
Disabling Java support resulted in vastly improved startup times.
Since OO was no longer searching for a JVM that wasn't there in the first place...
That does lead us to believe that Java is somewhat responsible for some of the problems that have been noted.
I know Java fans don't like this, but Java is too slow for competitive apps.
ROFL. Total BS.
This is why it is restricted pretty much to serving as a learning tool and for interfacing with database packages.
Yeah, and that's why the #1 Sourceforge project, Azureus, uses it? What about Eclipse, *the* most actively used and developed IDE on the planet? Eclipse startup is way faster than the times quoted in GP, and it's a) highly complex and b) written 100% in Java! Since no memory size is mentioned, I'd guess the GP needed more RAM in the machine.
Java has it's drawbacks, but they're not nearly as severe as you make out.
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 1
Um, I believe the JRE most often used is Sun's.
Actually, you're right, given that OO is mostly used on Windows. I'm sure the original article was testing under Windows as well.
I was actually referring to the Linux version, which on RH and I assume other distributions, uses gcj so as to have a "free as in speech" JRE.
Sorry for the mixup!
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
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OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 2, Informative
How much of this slowness is the application's fault vs. this being a giant Java app running in a JRE?
OpenOffice is *not* written in Java. It'd most likely work better if it were.;-) It is written in C++. I wonder if there'd be much of a speedup compiling it with the Intel compiler....
It does have some Java functionality, which is why a JRE is required. IIRC, gcj is the JRE most often used, which might impact interpreted Java performance. Gcj has a slow interpreter, though I think the most recent version has an optional JITC.
I'm talking about the complexity of the *rules*. That is also what Sid was talking about.
Not entirely. He did make the point that chess was played on an 8x8 board. That speaks to the size of the "game universe" and the same issue applies with go vs. chess. Complexity comes in many flavors.
Functional languages like LISP and ML won't ever be popular again.
Were they "popular" at some point in the past? o.O
I think Dylan has a shot at significant popularity, now that high quality open source compilers exist. It has all the flexibility, expressiveness and power of CL/Scheme, the safety and portability of Java, and the efficiency of C++.
It's true enough that the journalists aren't considering every possible need, and a good journalist would take note, at least, that the heavy laptop isn't bad if you're going to leave it on your desk all the time. However, in fairness, for most of us, heavy laptops do stink. Anything over, I don't know exactly, but around 6 lbs.-- it's just not worth carrying anywhere.
This is nonsense. For me, the difference between a 8 lb. laptop and a 4 lb. laptop is negligible, even if I'm carrying it around. I'm much more concerned with processor speed, memory capacity, disk size, and especially having a decent sized display to look at.
As soon as the Macintel powerbooks come out I plan on buying the 17" model. =)
You forgot one thing: the AMDs are much more expensive, the premium to pay for the dual core Opterons over the single core ones is quite a lot higher than for the intel dual cores. You're correct in saying that Intel is targeting the consumer/low end business market with their dual core CPUs, but it's not just in terms of performance, it's more so in terms of price, and I really think that for now, intel is selling orders of magnitude more of dual core CPUs than AMD does.
You're looking at it the wrong way. The only question you need to ask is "Is AMD selling all the dual core CPUs it produces?". If the answer is yes, then AMD is making a lot more money PER CHIP than Intel is. Why would AMD want to sell their chips at a lower price? Supply vs. demand, eh?
Once Fab 36 kicks in, AMD dual cores will drop in price a whole lot. Intel will be hurting even more. Count on it.
I'm seeing Intel dual-core processors appearing in ~$700 PCs. From that angle Intel absolutely devastates AMD, as somehow their dual-cores are far less expensive.
You're talking about Pentium-D of course, not Xeon...
At any rate, that is actually bad for Intel. AMD brought out enterprise-class dual core CPUs that have obvious applications on workstations/servers, which run lots of tasks and threads, and can always use more horsepower for higher throughput. Intel brought out, at about the same time, the Pentium-D for consumers. Not only is it clocked at about 1 GHz. slower than the fastest single-core Pentium, but desktop PCs don't typically run large thread and process workloads like servers. In fact, the Pentium D runs games substantially slower than cheaper, single-core Pentia. So, I expect a lot of consumers are out there scratching there heads over whether or not to buy Pentium-D.
AMD's dual core chips, on the other hand, only run 200 MHz. slower than the corresponding single core chip. Game performance suffers hardly at all. AMD will ramp up production of dual-core consumer chips once it feels it has a firm hold on the workstation/server side. Then we'll see the prices drop, and dual core will become mainstream. Maybe game developers will even start programming multithreaded games.;-)
In summary, AMD is laughing all the way to the bank, while Intel has to content itself with low consumer product profit margins. It seems this new Xeon won't change that dynamic much.
Intel's sales will again beat AMD's by several fold.
Perhaps, although AMD has made impressive inroads into the server/enterprise marketplace and there's no sign of it slowing down.
The reason seems to be that most PC and server purchases are not intended for games, beyond Solitare of course,
Non sequitur, Opterons smoke Xeons at enterprise tasks like web serving, database hosting and so on, in almost every benchmark. Especially in the more enterprise-relevant 2-way and 4-way (4 or 8 core) configurations.
and people prefer the reliability, power savings and lower temperatures of the Intel chips.
RTFA. For several YEARS AMD's chips have been lower power and cooler than Intel's - a combination of doing more work at lower clock frequencies, and SOI. You're recalling something from the K6 days that is totally backwards today.
AMD should be happy they ran Cyrix out of the business but, they should have realized by now that they will not impact Intel sales no matter how vocal their fanboys might be.
AMD has already impacted Intel's sales in a big way. Did you hear about Intel's disappointing earnings today? Even worse for Intel, AMD has *creamed* the Itanium. Now 90% of what were potential Itanium customers (big bucks for Intel) are now going to do AMD64 instead...even if it happens to run on Intel silicon. Itanium is a financial and technical disaster for Intel.
Remember the days when AMD cloned Intel's instruction sets, not vice versa?
BTW, could I borrow your Opteron, I need to fry an egg for breakfast.
Wow, how...witty. At any rate, looks like Xeons are the hot ticket there...;-)
I do believe revealing privileged details of a military operation, including current positions and destinations of forces, is closer to treason than a minor media rule infraction.
Possibly, but the potential consequences were still far less than those resulting from an illegitimate presidential win.
As you said, "there is no comparison as far as seriousness goes."
Right. In one case, the welfare of some troops was at risk. In the other, the entire future of our country was at risk.
Geraldo's gaffe (which is all it was) was trivial compared to what Rather tried to pull off...
You mean like when Geraldo was with the 82nd Airborne during the beginning of our occupation of Iraq and on live tv said, to the effect, "We're here and we're going here" and then, when the military wanted to throw him out, whined and moaned how he hadn't given up operational secrets and it was really the fault of his former employer just trying to speak badly of him and Fox News fired him and distanced the network from the story?
You're seriously comparing a possible case of breaking military media rules (which resulted in zero problems, btw) to a situation where a major national news organization tried to influence the outcome of a presidential election?!? There is no comparison as far as seriousness goes.
You mean like that situation?
No. (And by the way, Geraldo seems quite popular with the troops.)
Call me crazy, but if Fox reported John Kerry was a space alien during the election and then it was later "discovered" that the source was a republican party staffer- Fox would do little more than shrug, because half their audience wouldn't care, and the other half would still think Kerry was an alien.
As opposed to CBS, where if Dan Rather were caught running a story with no factual evidence, which was received from an admitted Bush-hater and designed to throw the presidential election for Kerry, they would immediately fire him and distance the network from the story with massively visible retractions...oh, wait.
What is the point of colonizing other planets when we are struggling to survive on a planet we are designed to live on?
To learn? To survive? (The all the eggs in one basket issue.) To get away from all the crazies who want to keep populating/fighting while simultaneously jettisoning science and technology? To find ever-elusive freedom? All seem like reasonable motivations to me...
When you can't even properly distribute food and water and shelter to people on earth, what makes you think we can do it across planets?
If a planet is colonized, the food and water will be produced there, no?
I have plenty of vision, but all the problems we face on earth arn't going to suddenly disappear because we can travel space.
In fact, one of the stronger motivations to "travel space" is to escape the problems here. =)
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My plan is to build a system around the Tyan Dual Socket 940 NForce4 SLI board. I'll start with one Opteron 246/248, then in a few months as prices drop add the second CPU. Then in another year or two I'll swap out the two 240-series chips and pop in the (by the hopefully dirt cheap) dual 275s or better. I'm pretty sure such a system will have the best longevity of any system I've owned. It'll be great for both Linux and Windows.
I'll also be buying Intel-based Macs when they come out I'm sure. I'm more than ready to completely migrate off Windows. :-)
I made a very similar point myself actually. :-)
The difference was that I don't think Pentium-M is "better", I just think it's better established since it's an older chip, and it's (as usual with Intel) well marketed and/or well foisted on manufacturers. ;-)
However, I'd personally argue that the Turions are as good or better than Pentium-M across the board, and 64-bit to boot. We'll see how uptake is going forward.
AMD may have the lead in desktop CPUs, but find me a major manufacturer who is making AMD laptops.
Um, HP? You know, the #1 PC manufacturer? How about Gateway/eMachines? Not to mention Acer, Asus and many other volume Taiwanese manufacturers.
Then consider that laptops are outselling desktops by a pretty decent margin.
By a razor-thin margin you mean. :^)
Pentium M is not a bad architecture.
Nope, the PIII has surprising legs eh?
It wouldn't surprise me to see Apple move the XServe line to Opterons, but the desktops will probably stay Intel for the forseeable future.
We'll see...it certainly depends on what happens in the intervening 24 months or so. Right now AMD's desktop chips are substantially better than Intels.
Most "workstation" apps are highly optimized for Intel chips.
Since the newest Opterons even support SSE3 I'm not sure what "optimizations" are possible for Intel of which AMD wouldn't take advantage. Plus there are lots of Opteron workstations shipping from PC manufacturers (notably IBM, HP and Sun), so one guesses that those workstation apps will increasingly support Opteron as a first-class target.
At any rate, we'll certainly see. :-)
Assuming this is so, how many 24-ton shots and manned missions do you think it would take to correct? What do you envision as the "construction operation"?
2) Putting enough mass for a 3 year ONE WAY voyage on a ship built to carry more than 7 people in the same orbit as the ISS is not a safe idea.
This sentence requires a lot of response.
If it was un powered at the time but was dragged towards the earth it could kill a lot of people on the ground.
Did that happen when Skylab landed? How 'bout when the (quite primitive by comparison) various Soviet nuclear reactors reentered the atmosphere? No? Why not?
3) Bush doesn't make the plans for how we are supposed to get to Mars. He does, however, have some say on the funding, which this whole article is about. So perhaps he should actually urge congress to properly fund NASA.
Maybe he should urge NASA to "think different". You know, better, faster, cheaper...
4) There is no way to get a ship to Mars in a few weeks. It is 78.32e6 km or 261 lt sec. You would need to be going .04 times the speed of light to get there in two weeks, that is not low thrust.
The first two numbers are right, .04 C is wrong though. I make the average velocity to get there in two weeks to be .000216 C. Also, I said "a few weeks" not "two weeks".
If one were to make the flight at .01 G constant acceleration, accelerating to the halfway point and the decelerating the rest of the way, here are my numbers. I'm not taking into account orbital mechanics, so this is a back of the envelope calculation for going 70 million miles in a straight line really - I'm sure you could actually get to Mars on a shorter orbit, so this is a fairly realistic calculation.
total dist: 112630000.0 km a: 0.01 G
t: 24.8070548893 days
max vel: 105098.164113 m/s 0.0350569691081 % C
Twenty four days isn't too bad, eh? At .005 G:
total dist: 112630000.0 km
a: 0.005 G
t: 35.082473467 days
max vel: 74315.6245348 m/s 0.0247890205842 % C
Note that halving the acceleration didn't double the flight time. Even at 1/1000 of a G constant boost:
total dist: 112630000.0 km
a: 0.001 G
t: 78.446795491 days
max vel: 33234.95765 m/s 0.0110859870244 % C
Even at 1/1000 G the flight time is cut to under 3 months. And remember, this is for a 70,000,000 mile flight, not the ~50,000,000 mile flight that would most likely be required.
The drastically reduced flight times would completely change the requirements for the crew module. In fact, artificial gravity wouldn't necessarily be required. My point with all this is that it might be beneficial to wait for a few more breathroughs before attempting Mars, instead of spending "hundreds of billions" for dubious gain and no chance at colonization. Better, faster, cheaper...
Here's the Python script I used to generate the numbers above, FYI:
I see ecode didn't handle indentation properly, sorry...easy to fix though.
I'm sure that wasn't intended as an ad-hominem... ;-)
The ISS was built to be a research station, not an assembly plant for massive vehicles. Building ships in space would require a new sort of space station entirely.
Utter hogwash. Defend your position.
If the EIC (exo-atmospheric interplanetary craft) were properly designed, assembly wouldn't consist of much more than bolting the pieces together. Further, since everything is happening in space, there is no structural issue with the space station itself. If for some reason more ISS crew quarters were needed, they could be launched attached. One of the beauties of space stations is that they can be expanded easily and cheaply.
In short, this really isn't true. Read my post below regarding pebble bed reactors. Also note that the launch would probably take place from the middle of the Pacific.
And, how much of what we know about making nuclear reactors on Earth translates well into low-G environs?
Um, all of it? Plus, reactors have been in space before, as another reply points out.
While I'm impressed with SpaceX's progress so far and have my fingers crossed for a successful launch within the next month, keep in mind that they have yet to prove the Falcon 1, much less the Falcon 9 or the impressive 27 engine, side-stacked spin-off they've proposed.
I've read their material extensively, and if they're proceeding as stated it looks to me like they have every potential to succeed. They're using low-risk technology, applying it brilliantly, testing thoroughly and seem to have a great business plan. We'll see, but it's sure looking good. I hope nothing untoward happens, I'm sure SpaceX is ruffling a lot of feathers.
Remember also, that the $78 million price tag is a goal, probably slightly optimistic, and that's the launch cost only. It doesn't include the cost of the payload.
I don't think those prices are "optimistic", since SpaceX is selling flights at those prices right now. Of course, it is possible that SpaceX is taking a loss or only breaking even on these flights in order to get traction in the marketplace.
While those prices don't include the cost of the payload (obviously, a single satellite can go into the billions), insurance is factored into the cost.
I think eventually a nuclear-powered Mars shuttle could be a great idea. If we were to reach the point of regular Martian travel, it could be fueled and mated to a payload (such as a lander) in earth orbit, deliver the payload to a Mars orbit and return another payload from Mars back to an earth orbit where it would be refueled and mated with a new payload for the next mission.
It's really not a "Mars shuttle". It's an exo-atmospheric interplanetary spacecraft. By no means would it be limited to Mars, though it might require a much more sophisticated crew space to make it to Jupiter, for instance. Venus would be immediately in range, though it doesn't look particularly worthwhile.
At this point, however, we need to focus on getting to Mars and figuring out exactly what it will take to establish a permanent presence and if it's worth the cost before we invest billions of dollars developing, billions testing, and billions more building a craft with such a focused purpose.
As I pointed out above, this spacecraft wouldn't be *particularly* focused. It might find it's greatest use in asteroid mining (go to asteroid, attach drivers, process asteroid in Earth orbit a few years later). Almost unimaginable wealth lies down that road.
My view though, really, is that we should probably colonize the Moon before moving on to Mars. There is not a tremendous difference in available resources or hospitability, and the Moon is a much more convenient testbed. The one big difference is 1/6 G versus 1/3 G. It'd be interesting to know if either of them has a gravity field that allows the human body to exist and develop normally. My hunch is that 1/6 isn't close to enough...
I think there would have to be large centrifuges available at a lunar colony in order for colonists to exercise and retain bone/muscle mass. Exposure to near-earth G levels may be a requirement for some other areas of our biochemistry.
Trust me, it will take billions to design a new fission reactor and get it certified for launch, and there will be a huge fuss (probably costing billions more) over who's qualified to launch it, if anybody.
The fission reactor SHOULD be mostly a non-issue. If it is one of the new pebble-bed designs, it can't melt down, and the fuel is in inert ceramic-coated pellets. If it were launched from the Marshall Islands, the reactor would land somewhere in the Pacific if the flight aborted. Most likely the reactor vessel wouldn't be compromised, but even if so the pellets are fairly innocuous. If people were scientifically inclined enough to understand their natural radiation environment, they'd see that the risk from l
Yeah, I'm sure IBM has no use for a low-power 970... /smirk
2) IBM wouldn't give in to the demand
3) Steve takes his ball and goes home
"IBM didn't meet its obligations, so Apple looked elsewhere"
4) AMD doesn't have the capacity to supply even Apple's paltry number of machines a year
Absolutely not true, and will be even less of an issue as Fab 36 comes online next year.
I think Apple wanted Intel mainly because it IS the "market leader", and Apple/Jobs is tired of Apple's "niche" image.
5) Intel becomes Apple's 'first choice'
It most likely has been for some time. Intel was NeXT's primary target when Jobs was CEO there.
6) Steve goes out on stage at the WWDC and does a hour long damage control and history rewriting monologue.
"Steve goes out on stage at WWDC and gets the developers fired up about Intel Macs!"
He didn't do much IBM bashing, as a matter of fact.
IBM has really earned my respect by taking the high road and letting Jobs run his mouth off with lies about the whole mess. It is too bad Steve has fucked up the relationship so bad that the only place for Apple to go is Intel and their horrendously fucked up chip roadmap.
IBM is just a company, no more no less. It made its decisions just as Apple made its decisions - trying to maximize shareholder value. The two sides couldn't come to an agreement - c'est la vie!
Intel's chip roadmap isn't so bad, Intel clearly has the advantage in the mobile space (a very strategic area for Apple), and Intel's desktop chips are competitive if not great. By the time Apple brings out Intel PowerMacs, it will be using a next-generation processor. I'm sure Apple and Intel are both hoping that'll be a great part. Rumors of K10 problems are out there too.
I'd like to see Apple bring out AMD models also - and I think it'll happen once the transition is over, perhaps in 2008-2009.
NASA is much smaller. Note that some view the money spent on NASA as "squandered". I see value in what NASA does, but I do feel it's a very inefficient organization in some areas (manned space flight being the worst). Now we have the ISS doing nothing useful for 5 or so years... Yeesh that thing is a white elephant.
If Bush were serious about interplanetary flight he'd start construction of a nuclear powered space-only ship, with a hefty lander, using ISS as the assembly plant. I'm pretty sure we could build a low-thrust nuclear design that'd get to Mars in a few weeks rather than many months. That would greatly change the equation in many ways, and would show the utility of the space station concept. It would even make Mars colonization practical.
SpaceX is doing some great things, and shows the power of private ownership to lower costs. Their newest design, Falcon 9, is impressive with an ability to loft 24 metric tons at a time into LEO, at only $78 million a shot. You could build a massive interplanetary craft with just a few shots... I can't see this approach costing "hundreds of billions of dollars", but then again I'm not a government expert at inflating costs.
Of course our Luddite anti-nuclear "friends" would scream bloody murder about the Mars ship being nuclear, so it won't happen anytime soon, IMO.
GCJ does just fine. On the one benchmark I really messed with, almabench, GCJ ended up within 5% of gcc with the right command line switches (-ffast-math, -funroll-loops, -fno-bounds-check IIRC). They both use the same backend optimizer, so that makes sense.
On the other hand, gcc isn't all that great at optimizations yet. Intel C was about twice as fast as gcc on that benchmark. Gcc 4.0 has potential, but isn't a big improvement - hopefully future versions will be.
(BTW, I don't think the gcj compiler is used by OO, just the interpreter gij...I'd like clarification on this.)
No, the only post that seems to complain about long startup times is dealing with the case where there is NO JVM INSTALLED, but OO is looking for one.
Disabling Java support resulted in vastly improved startup times.
Since OO was no longer searching for a JVM that wasn't there in the first place...
That does lead us to believe that Java is somewhat responsible for some of the problems that have been noted.
Logic error, retrying....
ROFL. Total BS.
This is why it is restricted pretty much to serving as a learning tool and for interfacing with database packages.
Yeah, and that's why the #1 Sourceforge project, Azureus, uses it? What about Eclipse, *the* most actively used and developed IDE on the planet? Eclipse startup is way faster than the times quoted in GP, and it's a) highly complex and b) written 100% in Java! Since no memory size is mentioned, I'd guess the GP needed more RAM in the machine.
Java has it's drawbacks, but they're not nearly as severe as you make out.
Actually, you're right, given that OO is mostly used on Windows. I'm sure the original article was testing under Windows as well.
I was actually referring to the Linux version, which on RH and I assume other distributions, uses gcj so as to have a "free as in speech" JRE.
Sorry for the mixup!
OpenOffice is *not* written in Java. It'd most likely work better if it were. ;-) It is written in C++. I wonder if there'd be much of a speedup compiling it with the Intel compiler....
It does have some Java functionality, which is why a JRE is required. IIRC, gcj is the JRE most often used, which might impact interpreted Java performance. Gcj has a slow interpreter, though I think the most recent version has an optional JITC.
Not entirely. He did make the point that chess was played on an 8x8 board. That speaks to the size of the "game universe" and the same issue applies with go vs. chess. Complexity comes in many flavors.
That just isn't so. Most scientists, mathematicians, and engineers find:
c = sqrt(a**2 + b**2)
much more readable than
(c (sqrt (+ (pow a 2) (pow b 2))
Infix syntax isn't a good fit for lots of people. That's the main reason LISP didn't catch on for general use back in the Golden Age of AI Languages.
Were they "popular" at some point in the past? o.O
I think Dylan has a shot at significant popularity, now that high quality open source compilers exist. It has all the flexibility, expressiveness and power of CL/Scheme, the safety and portability of Java, and the efficiency of C++.
So, get out there and use it! :-)
This is nonsense. For me, the difference between a 8 lb. laptop and a 4 lb. laptop is negligible, even if I'm carrying it around. I'm much more concerned with processor speed, memory capacity, disk size, and especially having a decent sized display to look at.
As soon as the Macintel powerbooks come out I plan on buying the 17" model. =)
You're looking at it the wrong way. The only question you need to ask is "Is AMD selling all the dual core CPUs it produces?". If the answer is yes, then AMD is making a lot more money PER CHIP than Intel is. Why would AMD want to sell their chips at a lower price? Supply vs. demand, eh?
Once Fab 36 kicks in, AMD dual cores will drop in price a whole lot. Intel will be hurting even more. Count on it.
You're talking about Pentium-D of course, not Xeon...
At any rate, that is actually bad for Intel. AMD brought out enterprise-class dual core CPUs that have obvious applications on workstations/servers, which run lots of tasks and threads, and can always use more horsepower for higher throughput. Intel brought out, at about the same time, the Pentium-D for consumers. Not only is it clocked at about 1 GHz. slower than the fastest single-core Pentium, but desktop PCs don't typically run large thread and process workloads like servers. In fact, the Pentium D runs games substantially slower than cheaper, single-core Pentia. So, I expect a lot of consumers are out there scratching there heads over whether or not to buy Pentium-D.
AMD's dual core chips, on the other hand, only run 200 MHz. slower than the corresponding single core chip. Game performance suffers hardly at all. AMD will ramp up production of dual-core consumer chips once it feels it has a firm hold on the workstation/server side. Then we'll see the prices drop, and dual core will become mainstream. Maybe game developers will even start programming multithreaded games. ;-)
In summary, AMD is laughing all the way to the bank, while Intel has to content itself with low consumer product profit margins. It seems this new Xeon won't change that dynamic much.
Intel's sales will again beat AMD's by several fold.
Perhaps, although AMD has made impressive inroads into the server/enterprise marketplace and there's no sign of it slowing down.
The reason seems to be that most PC and server purchases are not intended for games, beyond Solitare of course,
Non sequitur, Opterons smoke Xeons at enterprise tasks like web serving, database hosting and so on, in almost every benchmark. Especially in the more enterprise-relevant 2-way and 4-way (4 or 8 core) configurations.
and people prefer the reliability, power savings and lower temperatures of the Intel chips.
RTFA. For several YEARS AMD's chips have been lower power and cooler than Intel's - a combination of doing more work at lower clock frequencies, and SOI. You're recalling something from the K6 days that is totally backwards today.
AMD should be happy they ran Cyrix out of the business but, they should have realized by now that they will not impact Intel sales no matter how vocal their fanboys might be.
AMD has already impacted Intel's sales in a big way. Did you hear about Intel's disappointing earnings today? Even worse for Intel, AMD has *creamed* the Itanium. Now 90% of what were potential Itanium customers (big bucks for Intel) are now going to do AMD64 instead...even if it happens to run on Intel silicon. Itanium is a financial and technical disaster for Intel.
Remember the days when AMD cloned Intel's instruction sets, not vice versa?
BTW, could I borrow your Opteron, I need to fry an egg for breakfast.
Wow, how...witty. At any rate, looks like Xeons are the hot ticket there... ;-)
Possibly, but the potential consequences were still far less than those resulting from an illegitimate presidential win.
As you said, "there is no comparison as far as seriousness goes."
Right. In one case, the welfare of some troops was at risk. In the other, the entire future of our country was at risk.
Geraldo's gaffe (which is all it was) was trivial compared to what Rather tried to pull off...
You're seriously comparing a possible case of breaking military media rules (which resulted in zero problems, btw) to a situation where a major national news organization tried to influence the outcome of a presidential election?!? There is no comparison as far as seriousness goes.
You mean like that situation?
No. (And by the way, Geraldo seems quite popular with the troops.)
As opposed to CBS, where if Dan Rather were caught running a story with no factual evidence, which was received from an admitted Bush-hater and designed to throw the presidential election for Kerry, they would immediately fire him and distance the network from the story with massively visible retractions...oh, wait.
LOL!
To learn? To survive? (The all the eggs in one basket issue.) To get away from all the crazies who want to keep populating/fighting while simultaneously jettisoning science and technology? To find ever-elusive freedom? All seem like reasonable motivations to me...
When you can't even properly distribute food and water and shelter to people on earth, what makes you think we can do it across planets?
If a planet is colonized, the food and water will be produced there, no?
I have plenty of vision, but all the problems we face on earth arn't going to suddenly disappear because we can travel space.
In fact, one of the stronger motivations to "travel space" is to escape the problems here. =)
You're all being way too negative!