I believe that the commercial exploitation of solar power via power satellites is the most likely conduit for space access. Power satellites are the first high profit use of space I have seen.
Once in place, the maintanence costs for these power generators will make space travel seem quite cheap for the cost incurred.
I say we should turn the asteroid Eros into a space colony. Drill into one end and hollow out a burrow. Add an airlock. Power it with power sats. Then you have a space station. Over time you can build a larger alcove to house hundreds of people. Spin it up to one G. Strap some nuke drive on it and you have a real spaceship.
I agree. Also, whats the part about waiting for the computer to ' turn on in the morning'. Why doesn't he just leave it on and use a screen blanker like everyone I know.
They lost $99,000,000,000 last year! Their yearly revenue is 1/9th of this; their total market capitalization is only half of this. This is an unrecoverable situation, Steve Case and Ted Turner knew it and bailed.
The value of a product is not defined by its creators. It is defined by its market. Meaning its users and customers.
Linux is doomed to be a niche player until this fact is more widely accepted. It doesn't matter what geeks think about the product if the end user is not satisfied, overjoyed even.
As it is today, woe to any newbie who wants to jump on the linux bandwagon; all they get is name calling and static when they have real problems. The overall experience can be very unpleasant.
I am a "trained pilot" and that training may indeed help me recognize things in the air better than a baker would. But it doesn't take an Einstein to pilot an aircraft, and pilots do not have special deductive or analytical powers. Pilots can be gullible and jump to conclusions just like people in any other profession.
What I do know is that it is not possible for a pilot to determine the trajectory of another object in the air for certain. A gust of wind can pitch or yaw the plane that I am in, making it appear that objects outside my craft have made sudden jumps across the sky. Human inner-ear is not capable of adapting to some sorts of disorientation. Pilots are trained to not trust inner-ear orientation, and use other cues instead. A radar is not immune to this problem either; in fact radar's have more problems than you can shake a stick at, even ground based ones.
Ideally pilots would attribute apparent strange motion of flying objects to his own craft's instability. However, older pilots were not trained to distrust the inner ear; and many pilots are just plain stubborn and still try to fly 'by the seat of their pants'. This is to detriment of their own safety and credibility as well.
Bottom line is that pilots chasing strange things in the air is not cause for belief in aliens, but rather cause for reflection on human error.
After a short and successful career in computer programming I retired.
To me it is humorous, but also sad, seeing the folks on this forum worry and bemone their futures. While at the same time railing against the Evil Corporation and spouting from the hill tops about the glory of freeware.
A lesson the Linux worlds needs to learn
on
Why VHS Was Better
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The value of a product is not defined by its creators. It is defined by its market. Meaning its users and customers.
Linux is doomed to be a niche player until this fact is more widely accepted. It doesn't matter what geeks think about the product if the end user is not satisfied, overjoyed even.
As it is today, woe to any newbie who wants to jump on the linux bandwagon; all they get is name calling and static when they have real problems. The overall experience can be very unpleasant.
You missed the point entirely. Have you never seen the claims hundreds of famous scientists made about flight? They said it would break the laws of physics!
The Wright brothers were not famous scientists, just a couple of dudes. They used TLAR engineering. What you think they had wind tunnels and CAD programs? They are only praised as great engineers in HINDSIGHT because their efforsts panned out. They would have remained crackpots otherwise.
They scoffed at the Wright Brothers. Now we have Airplanes. They jibed Sikorsky. Now we have helicopters. They called Goddard a loon. Now we have rockets.
You know what? All that bitching never helped. There simply is no benefit from it. Let the people with vision do their wacky things. Sometimes it won't pan out. Sometimes it will.
Making progress is not easy. Complaints from the peanut gallery that it will never work because it hasnt been done before is just stupid.
So many people have made silly comments about this being obvious, useless or whatever. This is probably because they did not actually READ the paper.
The paper is not about obvious code redundancy bugs, it is about subtle errors which are not as simple as just duplicate code. It is about code that *appears* to be executed but actually is not.
Go take a look at the examples and see how long it takes you to notice the different errors...now imagine have a thousand pages of code to peruse..would you catch it? Many of them probably not.
The conclusion of the paper is basically, errors cluster around errors; finding a trivial unoptimal syntactical constructions tends to point to real bugs.
The tobacco comment is not entirely on target. Yes, today's kids do know that tobacco is unhealthy and addictive. However, my parents did not know these facts. That alone is not enough to argue my point, but what is absolutely actionable lawbreaking is the tobacco companies both: knew exactly how unhealthy tobacco was and lied to the FDA about it; and they purposefully made tobacco products many times more addictive than they are naturally and they lied about it.
Even today, you can still get to a C: prompt under Windows XP, which means a disk operating system is hiding there no matter what Microsoft wants us to believe.
The command processor has nothing to do with the operating system. This statement displays Mr Cringely's deep ignorance of operating sytems.
Having worked on development of MSDOS,Window 95 and Windows NT, I can state authoratatively that DOS is not the foundation of windows XP (which is really NT with lipstick). Anybody who knows anything about OS's knows this anyway.
These benchmarks, like so many you see nowadays, do not include or even mention deviation across benchmark runs. There is no evidence that the tests were run more than once in order to achieve a more statistically accurate view of the benchmark numbers. In theory, all benchmarks should come with an average value, and an error margin. Without this, the data should be not be trusted. It not only implies that the margin of error *might* be over 100%, it indicates the people running the bench marks don't know what they are doing.
There are a lot of reasons benchmarks can have errors, one of them being the benchmark program itself can be broken. How would you know that the numbers returned on some test weren't random if you didnt run it more than once? Also, disk drives and networks have latencies which can make a huge difference; those difference can wash out apparent benefits of OS tweaks.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it support WiFi?
I believe that the commercial exploitation of solar power via power satellites is the most likely conduit for space access. Power satellites are the first high profit use of space I have seen.
Once in place, the maintanence costs for these power generators will make space travel seem quite cheap for the cost incurred.
I say we should turn the asteroid Eros into a space colony. Drill into one end and hollow out a burrow. Add an airlock. Power it with power sats. Then you have a space station. Over time you can build a larger alcove to house hundreds of people. Spin it up to one G. Strap some nuke drive on it and you have a real spaceship.
I agree. Also, whats the part about waiting for the computer to ' turn on in the morning'. Why doesn't he just leave it on and use a screen blanker like everyone I know.
They lost $99,000,000,000 last year! Their yearly revenue is 1/9th of this; their total market capitalization is only half of this.
This is an unrecoverable situation, Steve Case and Ted Turner knew it and bailed.
AOL Enron Worldcom Global Crossing Dot Com.
How to be a Professional Programmer:
Demand to get paid for your work.
The value of a product is not defined by its creators. It is defined by its market. Meaning its users and customers.
Linux is doomed to be a niche player until this fact is more widely accepted. It doesn't matter what geeks think about the product if the end user is not satisfied, overjoyed even.
As it is today, woe to any newbie who wants to jump on the linux bandwagon; all they get is name calling and static when they have real problems. The overall experience can be very unpleasant.
I am a "trained pilot" and that training may indeed help me recognize things in the air better than a baker would. But it doesn't take an Einstein to pilot an aircraft, and pilots do not have special deductive or analytical powers. Pilots can be gullible and jump to conclusions just like people in any other profession.
What I do know is that it is not possible for a pilot to determine the trajectory of another object in the air for certain. A gust of wind can pitch or yaw the plane that I am in, making it appear that objects outside my craft have made sudden jumps across the sky. Human inner-ear is not capable of adapting to some sorts of disorientation. Pilots are trained to not trust inner-ear orientation, and use other cues instead. A radar is not immune to this problem either; in fact radar's have more problems than you can shake a stick at, even ground based ones.
Ideally pilots would attribute apparent strange motion of flying objects to his own craft's instability. However, older pilots were not trained to distrust the inner ear; and many pilots are just plain stubborn and still try to fly 'by the seat of their pants'. This is to detriment of their own safety and credibility as well.
Bottom line is that pilots chasing strange things in the air is not cause for belief in aliens, but rather cause for reflection on human error.
And here I was thinking that the most damning critism was that a "doctor" was pulling cow guts out of a foam rubber "alien"!
After a short and successful career in computer programming I retired.
To me it is humorous, but also sad, seeing the folks on this forum worry and bemone their futures. While at the same time railing against the Evil Corporation and spouting from the hill tops about the glory of freeware.
The human mind is a terrible computation machine. How many people can give you the sqrt(17) to 8 digits without pen and paper?
Human minds are great pattern matchers. How many computers can recognize the difference between a dog and a cat?
what airport is that? I wanna go see!
The value of a product is not defined by its creators. It is defined by its market. Meaning its users and customers.
Linux is doomed to be a niche player until this fact is more widely accepted. It doesn't matter what geeks think about the product if the end user is not satisfied, overjoyed even.
As it is today, woe to any newbie who wants to jump on the linux bandwagon; all they get is name calling and static when they have real problems. The overall experience can be very unpleasant.
Im not gonna dig up ten, but here a start:
Lord Kelvin "Heavier than air flying machines are impossible."
and look here.
You missed the point entirely. Have you never seen the claims hundreds of famous scientists made about flight? They said it would break the laws of physics!
The Wright brothers were not famous scientists, just a couple of dudes. They used TLAR engineering. What you think they had wind tunnels and CAD programs? They are only praised as great engineers in HINDSIGHT because their efforsts panned out. They would have remained crackpots otherwise.
Thank god they didn't listen to the naysayers!
You cannot fly experimental aircraft anywhere any other private aircraft may be flown. There are specific restrictions. From the FARs:
"No person may operate an aircraft that has an experimental certificate over a densely populated area or in a congested airway"
This includes over large cities and congested airspace within (usually) 30 miles of a large airport.
They scoffed at the Wright Brothers. Now we have Airplanes.
They jibed Sikorsky. Now we have helicopters.
They called Goddard a loon. Now we have rockets.
You know what? All that bitching never helped. There simply is no benefit from it. Let the people with vision do their wacky things. Sometimes it won't pan out. Sometimes it will.
Making progress is not easy. Complaints from the peanut gallery that it will never work because it hasnt been done before is just stupid.
Uh yeah, pretend this was an answer to this post here :P what I was rebutting
So many people have made silly comments about this being obvious, useless or whatever. This is probably because they did not actually READ the paper.
The paper is not about obvious code redundancy bugs, it is about subtle errors which are not as simple as just duplicate code. It is about code that *appears* to be executed but actually is not.
Go take a look at the examples and see how long it takes you to notice the different errors...now imagine have a thousand pages of code to peruse..would you catch it? Many of them probably not.
The conclusion of the paper is basically, errors cluster around errors; finding a trivial unoptimal syntactical constructions tends to point to real bugs.
Where there's smoke, there's fire.
Hotmail still exists and is still free. Microsoft's own gaming site, the Zone is free too.
This information makes me think that in fact Microsoft would keep battle net free.
The tobacco comment is not entirely on target. Yes, today's kids do know that tobacco is unhealthy and addictive. However, my parents did not know these facts. That alone is not enough to argue my point, but what is absolutely actionable lawbreaking is the tobacco companies both: knew exactly how unhealthy tobacco was and lied to the FDA about it; and they purposefully made tobacco products many times more addictive than they are naturally and they lied about it.
Thus the tobacco companies should be held liable.
Can be downloaded here The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Great cyberpunk style science fiction, and you can download it right now!
Im serious, this is up there with the best of 'em.
Once other detail, if you ever come back and read this comment, is that FAT32 was first in Windows 95 OSR 2.
Even today, you can still get to a C: prompt under Windows XP, which means a disk operating system is hiding there no matter what Microsoft wants us to believe.
The command processor has nothing to do with the operating system. This statement displays Mr Cringely's deep ignorance of operating sytems.
Having worked on development of MSDOS,Window 95 and Windows NT, I can state authoratatively that DOS is not the foundation of windows XP (which is really NT with lipstick). Anybody who knows anything about OS's knows this anyway.
These benchmarks, like so many you see nowadays, do not include or even mention deviation across benchmark runs. There is no evidence that the tests were run more than once in order to achieve a more statistically accurate view of the benchmark numbers.
In theory, all benchmarks should come with an average value, and an error margin. Without this, the data should be not be trusted. It not only implies that the margin of error *might* be over 100%, it indicates the people running the bench marks don't know what they are doing.
There are a lot of reasons benchmarks can have errors, one of them being the benchmark program itself can be broken. How would you know that the numbers returned on some test weren't random if you didnt run it more than once?
Also, disk drives and networks have latencies which can make a huge difference; those difference can wash out apparent benefits of OS tweaks.