That would all be valid and intriguing - but for the little fact that the universe does not change its state just because a human makes an observation. We're caught in the dangerous lands of antropo-centrism here. The cat of course does not exist in an unresolved state just because there is no human around to know whether it's currently dead or alive. Likewise the universe is not pending resolutions to human observation and be in a kind of "unresolved" state before humans observe something. Because: the universe does not care.
OK, I'm not an astronomer nor am I a theoretical mathematician, and I know I get flamed by this by a lot of astronomers and theoretical methematicians, but I can't resist:
It seems to me that a lot of people tend to infer *anything* from the existance of infinities now that we know they exist. While is holds true that on a theoretical basis *anything* is contained in an infinitely large space, it is also possible to have an infinitely large space filled with absolute nothing. So there is actually no proof at all that parallel "universes" - if they exist - do so in the extends of our own spacetime.
Mind you, the "distance" from you to your twin which they have calculated is based solely on whimsical probability assumptions. In the real world, we simply do not know the probability of our universe - exactly our universe - coming into existence out of nothing. So even if we think that big bang-like events (which to our knowledge today created matter and probably space as well) can co-exist in an infinite space volume, we really know nothing about how probable it is that an almost identical configuration comes into existence. We do not even know if it is possible.
For all we know, the infinite reaches out there could in reality all be filled with purple goo, a very big version of G.W. Bush's ass, or even nothing much at all - whichever you like best. And for these things, too, we can give random probabilities and calculate their distance from us based on that.
Well, I have to look at it from the other perspective. I have founded, work for, and have other people work for, a small internet software company in Germany. We've been in business for over two years now and we are going stronger each quarter, but none of us get payed even remotely well. Because we don't earn serious money, our company can survive and stay competetive and we all can keep our jobs. Every once in a while our team grows when a new guy enters. We tell everyone up front that they aren't going to make much money, are expected to put in extra time, and need to take their work seriously. Not a single new guy said "screw this, I'd rather get social benefits from the government because *they* pay more money for me doing nothing than *you* pay me for working my ass off". No one said that. People like to have a job where they can make a difference, a job where they can show their potential not only to their employer but also for themselves. For them, it's important to be important. And while we, of course, complain about money, we know there are more important things than having a sports car and stock options. Of course, we also hope that we'll do much better once the market picks up speed again. But in the mean time the whole point is being actually still in business when the time comes.
(I realize that my reply is offtopic, but so is the parent...)
All you need is a ship capable of sustaining 1g of acceleration for somewhere between 1 and 5 years, and when you return to earth hundreds of years will have past. I used to have a URL to a table that showed with 25 years of 1g acceleration you'd be outside the known universe, and if you round-tripped it, when you returned to your starting point, the sun will have been billions of years dead.
Would, if, when... Get real, who here hasn't at least read some very basic summary of the impact of relativity? What are you trying to tell us here, that could possibly be of any value?
By they way, hard to believe you are the *same guy* that flamed around about others living in a fantasy world "conquering some new solar system in your kilrathi fighter" when the topic was space elevators! The same guy who is trolling around about 1g space ships as time machines!
We're not doing it now because the tech isn't yet ready. Certain aspects of the nano-tubes tech has been seen to work in a lab, but it's not at a production level by any measure. I never said the tech is ready. By saying "we should do it" I mean we should really put steam behind the research and then move on to actually build it. That's not what is happening now. In case you haven't noticed, all sorts of projects receive NASA funding, most of them don't ever appear again (until 20 years later when someone remembers "hey, didn't we already think of something like this 20 years ago?"). So I suggest we *really* begin doing it.
Keep your $1,700 bucks and keep your ridiculous satistical assumptions based on your view of your little world. They don't help us here. Quit trying to find reasons to blame others. What are you talking about? My little world? So if your factual arguments desert you you just attack my writing style? If you think my world view doesn't apply to anything outside of my own head, then you could have as well just moved on, so why did you actually bother to answer? Ah, I see...
And thats still usefull, a space elevator isn't going to get us to the Mars without some other propulsion. You see, the thing is, in "my little world", the space elevator gets us to Mars with a lot less fuel in comparison to today's launch methods. And it will get us up more often. And it will allow for better equipped space crafts. That's all, but if that doesn't mean anything - oh well...
Get off your ass, out of your parents basement, and DO IT. The amusing part of those personal attacks is that in most cases it is YOU PEOPLE are sitting in your parent's basement while writing them.
Don't think you have the cash? Raise some. Don't have the talent? Read books. Go back to school. As a general get-off-your-butt statement, not bad, little boy. But since I think your comment is of a more personal nature: don't ever make any assumption on what I do/don't have, what my job is/isn't, what my educational background is/isn't, because you have no clue.
Go to school for the first time, just stop whining about how it's everyone elses fault (and those dumb "John Q Public" people) that you aren't out conquering some new solar system in your kilrathi fighter.... I don't know how pure flamebait got rated "5, Insightful", but I guess it represents the sad state the nerd "community" is in. I can remember a time when it was OK around here to talk about the pros/cons of new technologies, when it was OK to say that public money could be spent better - when it was OK to critisize the Things That Just Are, because if you don't they will just stay that way. Maybe thinking along new lines and proposing some change to the way we as a society currently handle things is not so modern *anymore*, but I can still remember times when it *was*. And maybe, we should get back to that spirit some day...
why would we want to build a space elevator in the first place? let alone making it "priority 1"
with that amount of money you could possibly solve world hunger...
You're a total crackpot aren't you? Well even so, you MUST realize that sums like that are spent multiple times over for any number of different things, just like that? And that sums like that actually go to solving world hunger every year, BUT HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT THE FACT THAT MONEY ALONE AIN'T GOING TO SOLVE WORLD HUNGER?
even the idea itself sounds primitive...like the tower of babel in the bible Yeah and tell us a nice Sodom and Gomorrha (sp?) story while you're at it because our lives are so fucking sinful, will you? Tell you a secret: The Elevator is a lot more elegant and efficient than rockets will ever be. Oh, of course, I forgot that religious fundamentalists didn't like rockets, too...
this wont get you to other planets and galaxies anyway.. Who said it would? Do you suggest we just sit around and do nothing until God himself drops the design schematics of interstellar space ships into our scientists heads?
why not work on real space craft or even teleportation while you're at it? Because we honestly CAN'T build those things yet, and we CAN'T solve world hunger yet, but we goddam well CAN build this elevator and get it on with space exploration and we goddam well CAN help third world countries develop educational resources to overcome their social self-destruction loop!
just because something is "feasible" doesnt mean u should do it... No, of course not. But if it helps to SAVE MONEY in space exploration, if it allows mankind to ENTER A NEW ERA of space exploration, if it means we can build a whole new scientific and economical infrastructure within our solar system, then tell me one good reason we should not do exactly THAT.
Why It Wont Be Built Soon
on
The Space Elevator
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Q: So why aren't we doing it? Why aren't we making this priority 1, when it could boost space exploration by several orders of magnitude? A: Because today's gov and NASA contractors still have a lot of expensive rocketry missions in store, to extract lots of funding from the taxpayer. The mechanism is identical to there being no alternative to gas-powered cars, because influential people have a lot to loose when new concepts make things cheaper! So they keep telling you it can't be done, and it CAN'T be done until someone actually does it!
If you would do a poll now asking the average American whether a space elevator could be done, I'm willing to bet a month's salary that the result will be: "90% think it's a ridiculous idea and it can never be done." and answers like "That's all science fiction, we better stick to our rockets, and by the way spacefaring is very complex it can't be done just by stepping into an elevator."
That's because of the way the public opinion works. If NASA would announce tomorrow "we are, as of now, committing a large part of our budget to build a speca elevator" you can bet that wise people keep appearing from all over the place, explaining the Reasonable Concept Of The Space Elevator And Why It Must Be Built.
But that won't happen any time soon. Sometimes I think science fiction may have done more to prevent space exploration progress than many other factors, because it's so easy to use it to ridicule concepts of technological progress.
It makes me so sad when I see what we could achieve even within our lifetime, but our world's inherent corruption prevents it from becoming a reality... (sniff)
Yes, I suppose an elevator like that would have a lifespan well below 10 years. But the beauty of the concept is, once you get ONE up, you can build many others (and whole buttloads of orbital infrstructure) at a fraction of the cost!
It's not only unethical but also very dangerous. People pay programmers to solve their problems, trusting them with their core business data while doing that. It's literally like having a safe built and the construction company is leaving a wooden door on the backside, as an invitation for everyone. Those things *will* get noticed, and those programmers can be lucky if the *customer* finds out, instead of a malicious hacker merrily copying data and/or formatting the system. Backdoors serve no one, ever, except maybe the enemies of the client who trusts his trade secrets into the hands of the software company.
Wow, a lot of that stuff is just the opposite of what I like in a game:
He feels that more of a focus should be made on the mass-market consumer... So, basically we already have the entire entertainment industry boiling products down to the *lowest* common intellectual denominator, and this guy proposes that games design be further trimmed down and be based even *more* on more consumer polling data??? Great.
Yet we make games that require 10, 20, 30, or more hours for the gamer to fully enjoy And I thought that we already live in an instant-gratification culture that has reduced our average attention span to below 10 seconds! And now we need more ego shooters and mario clones that don't require your brain to be used *at all* because having something esoteric like a story line (or any kind of in-game development process, for that matter) is taking away too much of our time?
Well, that's all not what I think the direction of games development should be. Computer games are becoming a more important social factor every year. Soon, they may take the place of television in the areas entertainment and education, especially for children. I don't care what marketers say, the nature of the games we play *does* reflect and even influence the state of our society. And please, I'm not talking about sex and violence here. But we should think hard about if we want to align our entire society by the lowest common denominator. I think not.
There is absolutely *nothing* going on on the ISS that could in any way be considered important (or at least remotely worth the expenses). And Pluto/Kuiper Belt space exploration seems to be pretty pointless, too, I agree with you here.
On the other side, we *have* to make some progress and the only way we know how is "learning by doing". Research should not always be about instant gratification and sometimes solutions to our problems come from unexpected discoveries. There is a very real need to know as much about our universe as we possibly can figure out.
So, we got to remain active on the space thing or else we won't evolve technologically in that area when it would be rewarding in the long run. Now, why that doesn't mean we establish a Moon and/or Mars colony and do some actual space faring instead of sending countless billion-dollar-probes on suicide missions to return almost no useful data - THAT escapes my limited understanding completely.
Can someone enlighten me on that one?
Let's at least build an automated assembly station on the moon (or something like that) so we can launch "mass produced" probes in a more efficient manner. That's because the cost of getting something in space is still a very huge expense because we're way in the stone ages when it comes to propulsion. And in addition, custom-designing and custom-manufacturing of probes is very expensive. Let's just make more, general purpose probes and send have them start from a low gravity place! Let's go to space using a collection of standardized off-the-shelf components! Why not? (This is normally the point where pseudo-experts jump in and rant about complexity of space missions, but keep in mind that the *actual* reason may be because there is a huge industry that has nothing to gain and everything to loose if space exploration would be made cheaper and more efficient. Our civilization is paralyzed by it's inherent corruption, sometimes it seems like we can almost never get anything actually done.)
Yeah, except that the new KDE look is much better than this. I actually liked the "flat" Office-XP style but, alas, it wasn't meant to last. This new style looks crowded, nervous, and disorienting. KDE is full of eye candy too, but it looks kind of peaceful and orderly by comparison. Seriously, I always write about how MS is good on UIs, but this one looks like a very bad WindowBlinds skin!
If the guy is so influencial why didn't MS follow his advice before he left?
Because at MS Bill and Steve have the last word on EVERYTHING. Once they have defined company strategy you simply can't deviate no matter what position you have within the company. And, of course, Bill is the ultimate Guru at MS, the leader geek...
So in essence the article suggests that M$ and media companies can (and should be required by law to) root our computers with good and hard DRM, while in exchange Disney will make the early Mickey Mouse (TM) comics public domain?!?
This Jim Blair guy is full of shit. You have 30 days to activate the software. It's not "crippled" in any way until that 30 day timer is over.
Nope, sorry dude. If you swap enough hardware in/out of your PC, XP will stop letting you log on *immediately*. Regardless whether your system was activated before or not!
Hell, once I swapped the network card and XP wouldn't let me log on before it had phoned home to get me permission to use my PC again. But the hard part was: without being able to log on I couldn't install the network driver, and without the driver the system couldn't activate! Deadlock! Well, had to use phone activation, but still...
The nice thing is, we can expect much more from MS where the whole Activation idea came from (DRM and whatnot). Now if only X11 wasn't so fucked up and KDE was more productive to use, I'd have made The Switch a long time before now...
It's occurred to me maybe we are being too diligent in actually validating the schema itself, but I'm wondering what others think?
Maybe. See, at our shop we're a bit lazy and often times our apps don't check validity at all. I think none of our apps really goes beyond the local realm of the validation chain which has its advantages.
Besides, you should keep a cached copy of the w3c master docs around. They are not changed very often, so you could as well keep them locally forever without having to have internet connection (which also slows everything down).
Yes, the video is pretty cool. But I don't think it's genuine. Here's why:
1. The girl is pointing to the tower and says something like "whats that". The reaction of the cameraman is to zoom right in until we see the craft hovering at the side of the building. I know *I* wouldn't have zoomed in instinctively at once if someone just said "look there".
2. Although the craft is moving *really* fast (exceeding 2000 kph in my opinion) the girl never looses track and continues to point to its exact location. I know that if *I* would ride a helicopter when a strange aircraft is passing by at ludicrous speeds (tm), *I* would be having trouble to track it in real time.
3. (now the most scientific point) Towards the end of the movie the aircraft passes in front of the helicopter at a speed of, say, at least 2000 kph. We can't be sure about distances here but let's say it's distance to the helicopter was 10 meters at its closest. Now: passing by in front of a brittle thing like a small mid air helicopter WITHOUT even making the helicopter shake a bit? Hell, the air draft alone (not to mention engine exhaust) should have gotten the heli into serious trouble at those speeds!
Mind you, I don't know a thing about aviation, that's probably why my analysis is wrong. Any pilots around here? I'd like to hear your opinion!
Despite all your explanation, Windows still SUCKS! I don't aim to make Windows attractive to you, son. As for programming languages, this has nothing to do with the discussion, but:
Dont want to program in Visual C++, want real C++ without hideous MFC. MFC is basically just an API-thing, otherwise Visual C++ is pretty much like standard C++.
Dont want to program in Visual Basic, want that silly language dead. Yeah, I hate that one too. But hey, nobody forces you to use it, right? Except maybe your employer? Oops. OK.
Dont want Visual C#, the M$ centric Java. Use REAL Java instead. C# IS NOT MS centric Java! When will people EVER learn? The language is quite different from Java. Have a look at the C# spec and then come back to make some informed comments about it. Personally, having to program in Java from time to time, I hate it, because so much code is required to produce so little results (well, depends on your type of project I presume). C# is more terse to code, much like Delphi for example.
Dont want anything vith Visual, non visual is very fine. GUIs *are* a reality, you know. Unless you code kernel or underlying architecture, you won't get around GUI programming in today's market. And, by the way, I don't like Visual products from MS too.
It's been a long time that I read such completely bogus. I don't want to flame but I have to. Here it goes:
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.
What a bunch of crap! So there is still a "disk operating system" under Linux because I can open a shell window, too? Man, what are you talking about?
DOS 7.1 brought the FAT32 file system to Win95, not the other way around
So what, FAT32 is a file system, and now - ? What does that say about the operating system? Nothing? Right.
Windows XP is not an operating system. It is a windowing system that sits atop an operating system much as KDE or Gnome sit atop Linux.
What's this guy's definition of an operating system? First, Windows has its OWN KERNEL (microkernel, btw). Second, it has its OWN DEVICE DRIVER and SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE. While I can agree that KDE/Gnome do a fairly large and important part of the work that non-Linux OSes provide as a whole package, Windows is doing ALL THE STUFF an OS does with *no* underlying foreign kernel or architecture.
The history of DR-DOS is especially interesting because it went through so many hands. [....]
Blah, blah, blah... where's all that DOS talk supposed to get us? Does it really make sense to talk about legacy crap like that? And if so, should we really begin to talk about text-mode-only Linux, from back in the days, also? What about legacy mainframe interfaces? Why? To prove the point that DOS is underlying of Windows just as Linux is the underlying architecture to KDE? WTF???
Now back to Microsoft putting Windows on top of Linux. Linux is better, faster, stronger than whatever is living underneath XP now, right? Performance would improve.
Give me a break here! Driver support for Windows often leads to much better performance (because PC manufacturers really cater to the Windows monopoly).
Apple has made a virtue of doing exactly this with MacOS-X, heralding its Mach kernel and BSD roots. Couldn't Microsoft do the same?
MacOS-X is a completely new system, it has a legacy-app compatibility layer (like Wine is for Linux) but otherwise it's a complete new system. And, they HAD to do it, because OS 9 and below where such utter crap (from a purely technical point of view, mind you). If MS where to switch (for whatever stupid reasons) to a *nix kernel like BSD or Linux they would have to provide a complete legacy Windows version inside the new system just to provide backwards-compatibility. And boy would *that* be slow! And, again, why??? It would mean to develop *LOADS* of new device drivers and APIs - for what?
I could go on like this forever. Articles like that make me want to puke. It would be suicide for MS if they did something like that, especially now, the first time they have a workable OS with Win2000/XP. Why oh why?
OK, I asked for it. Bomb me, I don't really care. Cringely articles I actually liked them in the past, but what the fuck is this load of crap supposed to be?
I do have one question, however; how is it that Internet Explorer is able to rewrite TCP rules? Doesn't it use win32's TCP service? Or does it call a different, special TCP service?
I have been wondering about that, too. Since Win32 TCP service is pretty high level in Win95/98/ME it would either mean that a) this feature doesn't work on Win 9x b) there are some undisclosed API calls that MS uses
Anyway, it should be possible to do it with the Win2000/XP stack, though I'm not sure about NT 4 (but who cares).
Maybe thats not so far from the truth. At work I get to see many web server statistics and regarding OS'es Linux is about 5-7% (!), trailed by Apple which is around 3-4%.
Hehe, I don't think it is. But as modularity goes, Outlook won't work with IE components just like 80% of the whole damn Win32 environment. Which makes sort of sense if only it would have been done right. But it wasn't done right, there's security holes and just plain buggyness all over the place! Well, BUT IN THEORY you should even be able to replace the IE component with an ActiveX version of Mozilla or something...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
That would all be valid and intriguing - but for the little fact that the universe does not change its state just because a human makes an observation. We're caught in the dangerous lands of antropo-centrism here.
The cat of course does not exist in an unresolved state just because there is no human around to know whether it's currently dead or alive.
Likewise the universe is not pending resolutions to human observation and be in a kind of "unresolved" state before humans observe something. Because: the universe does not care.
OK, I'm not an astronomer nor am I a theoretical mathematician, and I know I get flamed by this by a lot of astronomers and theoretical methematicians, but I can't resist:
It seems to me that a lot of people tend to infer *anything* from the existance of infinities now that we know they exist. While is holds true that on a theoretical basis *anything* is contained in an infinitely large space, it is also possible to have an infinitely large space filled with absolute nothing. So there is actually no proof at all that parallel "universes" - if they exist - do so in the extends of our own spacetime.
Mind you, the "distance" from you to your twin which they have calculated is based solely on whimsical probability assumptions. In the real world, we simply do not know the probability of our universe - exactly our universe - coming into existence out of nothing. So even if we think that big bang-like events (which to our knowledge today created matter and probably space as well) can co-exist in an infinite space volume, we really know nothing about how probable it is that an almost identical configuration comes into existence. We do not even know if it is possible.
For all we know, the infinite reaches out there could in reality all be filled with purple goo, a very big version of G.W. Bush's ass, or even nothing much at all - whichever you like best. And for these things, too, we can give random probabilities and calculate their distance from us based on that.
Well, I have to look at it from the other perspective. I have founded, work for, and have other people work for, a small internet software company in Germany.
We've been in business for over two years now and we are going stronger each quarter, but none of us get payed even remotely well. Because we don't earn serious money, our company can survive and stay competetive and we all can keep our jobs.
Every once in a while our team grows when a new guy enters. We tell everyone up front that they aren't going to make much money, are expected to put in extra time, and need to take their work seriously. Not a single new guy said "screw this, I'd rather get social benefits from the government because *they* pay more money for me doing nothing than *you* pay me for working my ass off". No one said that. People like to have a job where they can make a difference, a job where they can show their potential not only to their employer but also for themselves.
For them, it's important to be important. And while we, of course, complain about money, we know there are more important things than having a sports car and stock options.
Of course, we also hope that we'll do much better once the market picks up speed again. But in the mean time the whole point is being actually still in business when the time comes.
(I realize that my reply is offtopic, but so is the parent...)
All you need is a ship capable of sustaining 1g of acceleration for somewhere between 1 and 5 years, and when you return to earth hundreds of years will have past. I used to have a URL to a table that showed with 25 years of 1g acceleration you'd be outside the known universe, and if you round-tripped it, when you returned to your starting point, the sun will have been billions of years dead.
Would, if, when... Get real, who here hasn't at least read some very basic summary of the impact of relativity? What are you trying to tell us here, that could possibly be of any value?
By they way, hard to believe you are the *same guy* that flamed around about others living in a fantasy world "conquering some new solar system in your kilrathi fighter" when the topic was space elevators! The same guy who is trolling around about 1g space ships as time machines!
We're not doing it now because the tech isn't yet ready. Certain aspects of the nano-tubes tech has been seen to work in a lab, but it's not at a production level by any measure.
I never said the tech is ready. By saying "we should do it" I mean we should really put steam behind the research and then move on to actually build it. That's not what is happening now. In case you haven't noticed, all sorts of projects receive NASA funding, most of them don't ever appear again (until 20 years later when someone remembers "hey, didn't we already think of something like this 20 years ago?"). So I suggest we *really* begin doing it.
Keep your $1,700 bucks and keep your ridiculous satistical assumptions based on your view of your little world. They don't help us here. Quit trying to find reasons to blame others.
What are you talking about? My little world? So if your factual arguments desert you you just attack my writing style? If you think my world view doesn't apply to anything outside of my own head, then you could have as well just moved on, so why did you actually bother to answer? Ah, I see...
And thats still usefull, a space elevator isn't going to get us to the Mars without some other propulsion.
You see, the thing is, in "my little world", the space elevator gets us to Mars with a lot less fuel in comparison to today's launch methods. And it will get us up more often. And it will allow for better equipped space crafts. That's all, but if that doesn't mean anything - oh well...
Get off your ass, out of your parents basement, and DO IT.
The amusing part of those personal attacks is that in most cases it is YOU PEOPLE are sitting in your parent's basement while writing them.
Don't think you have the cash? Raise some. Don't have the talent? Read books. Go back to school.
As a general get-off-your-butt statement, not bad, little boy. But since I think your comment is of a more personal nature: don't ever make any assumption on what I do/don't have, what my job is/isn't, what my educational background is/isn't, because you have no clue.
Go to school for the first time, just stop whining about how it's everyone elses fault (and those dumb "John Q Public" people) that you aren't out conquering some new solar system in your kilrathi fighter....
I don't know how pure flamebait got rated "5, Insightful", but I guess it represents the sad state the nerd "community" is in. I can remember a time when it was OK around here to talk about the pros/cons of new technologies, when it was OK to say that public money could be spent better - when it was OK to critisize the Things That Just Are, because if you don't they will just stay that way. Maybe thinking along new lines and proposing some change to the way we as a society currently handle things is not so modern *anymore*, but I can still remember times when it *was*. And maybe, we should get back to that spirit some day...
why would we want to build a space elevator in the first place? let alone making it "priority 1"
with that amount of money you could possibly solve world hunger...
You're a total crackpot aren't you? Well even so, you MUST realize that sums like that are spent multiple times over for any number of different things, just like that? And that sums like that actually go to solving world hunger every year, BUT HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT THE FACT THAT MONEY ALONE AIN'T GOING TO SOLVE WORLD HUNGER?
even the idea itself sounds primitive...like the tower of babel in the bible
Yeah and tell us a nice Sodom and Gomorrha (sp?) story while you're at it because our lives are so fucking sinful, will you? Tell you a secret: The Elevator is a lot more elegant and efficient than rockets will ever be. Oh, of course, I forgot that religious fundamentalists didn't like rockets, too...
this wont get you to other planets and galaxies anyway..
Who said it would? Do you suggest we just sit around and do nothing until God himself drops the design schematics of interstellar space ships into our scientists heads?
why not work on real space craft or even teleportation while you're at it?
Because we honestly CAN'T build those things yet, and we CAN'T solve world hunger yet, but we goddam well CAN build this elevator and get it on with space exploration and we goddam well CAN help third world countries develop educational resources to overcome their social self-destruction loop!
just because something is "feasible" doesnt mean u should do it...
No, of course not. But if it helps to SAVE MONEY in space exploration, if it allows mankind to ENTER A NEW ERA of space exploration, if it means we can build a whole new scientific and economical infrastructure within our solar system, then tell me one good reason we should not do exactly THAT.
Q: So why aren't we doing it? Why aren't we making this priority 1, when it could boost space exploration by several orders of magnitude?
A: Because today's gov and NASA contractors still have a lot of expensive rocketry missions in store, to extract lots of funding from the taxpayer. The mechanism is identical to there being no alternative to gas-powered cars, because influential people have a lot to loose when new concepts make things cheaper! So they keep telling you it can't be done, and it CAN'T be done until someone actually does it!
If you would do a poll now asking the average American whether a space elevator could be done, I'm willing to bet a month's salary that the result will be: "90% think it's a ridiculous idea and it can never be done." and answers like "That's all science fiction, we better stick to our rockets, and by the way spacefaring is very complex it can't be done just by stepping into an elevator."
That's because of the way the public opinion works. If NASA would announce tomorrow "we are, as of now, committing a large part of our budget to build a speca elevator" you can bet that wise people keep appearing from all over the place, explaining the Reasonable Concept Of The Space Elevator And Why It Must Be Built.
But that won't happen any time soon. Sometimes I think science fiction may have done more to prevent space exploration progress than many other factors, because it's so easy to use it to ridicule concepts of technological progress.
It makes me so sad when I see what we could achieve even within our lifetime, but our world's inherent corruption prevents it from becoming a reality... (sniff)
Yes, I suppose an elevator like that would have a lifespan well below 10 years. But the beauty of the concept is, once you get ONE up, you can build many others (and whole buttloads of orbital infrstructure) at a fraction of the cost!
It's not only unethical but also very dangerous. People pay programmers to solve their problems, trusting them with their core business data while doing that. It's literally like having a safe built and the construction company is leaving a wooden door on the backside, as an invitation for everyone. Those things *will* get noticed, and those programmers can be lucky if the *customer* finds out, instead of a malicious hacker merrily copying data and/or formatting the system. Backdoors serve no one, ever, except maybe the enemies of the client who trusts his trade secrets into the hands of the software company.
Wow, a lot of that stuff is just the opposite of what I like in a game:
...
He feels that more of a focus should be made on the mass-market consumer
So, basically we already have the entire entertainment industry boiling products down to the *lowest* common intellectual denominator, and this guy proposes that games design be further trimmed down and be based even *more* on more consumer polling data??? Great.
Yet we make games that require 10, 20, 30, or more hours for the gamer to fully enjoy
And I thought that we already live in an instant-gratification culture that has reduced our average attention span to below 10 seconds! And now we need more ego shooters and mario clones that don't require your brain to be used *at all* because having something esoteric like a story line (or any kind of in-game development process, for that matter) is taking away too much of our time?
Well, that's all not what I think the direction of games development should be. Computer games are becoming a more important social factor every year. Soon, they may take the place of television in the areas entertainment and education, especially for children. I don't care what marketers say, the nature of the games we play *does* reflect and even influence the state of our society. And please, I'm not talking about sex and violence here. But we should think hard about if we want to align our entire society by the lowest common denominator. I think not.
There is absolutely *nothing* going on on the ISS that could in any way be considered important (or at least remotely worth the expenses). And Pluto/Kuiper Belt space exploration seems to be pretty pointless, too, I agree with you here.
On the other side, we *have* to make some progress and the only way we know how is "learning by doing". Research should not always be about instant gratification and sometimes solutions to our problems come from unexpected discoveries. There is a very real need to know as much about our universe as we possibly can figure out.
So, we got to remain active on the space thing or else we won't evolve technologically in that area when it would be rewarding in the long run. Now, why that doesn't mean we establish a Moon and/or Mars colony and do some actual space faring instead of sending countless billion-dollar-probes on suicide missions to return almost no useful data - THAT escapes my limited understanding completely.
Can someone enlighten me on that one?
Let's at least build an automated assembly station on the moon (or something like that) so we can launch "mass produced" probes in a more efficient manner. That's because the cost of getting something in space is still a very huge expense because we're way in the stone ages when it comes to propulsion. And in addition, custom-designing and custom-manufacturing of probes is very expensive. Let's just make more, general purpose probes and send have them start from a low gravity place! Let's go to space using a collection of standardized off-the-shelf components! Why not? (This is normally the point where pseudo-experts jump in and rant about complexity of space missions, but keep in mind that the *actual* reason may be because there is a huge industry that has nothing to gain and everything to loose if space exploration would be made cheaper and more efficient. Our civilization is paralyzed by it's inherent corruption, sometimes it seems like we can almost never get anything actually done.)
Yeah, except that the new KDE look is much better than this. I actually liked the "flat" Office-XP style but, alas, it wasn't meant to last. This new style looks crowded, nervous, and disorienting.
KDE is full of eye candy too, but it looks kind of peaceful and orderly by comparison. Seriously, I always write about how MS is good on UIs, but this one looks like a very bad WindowBlinds skin!
If the guy is so influencial why didn't MS follow his advice before he left?
Because at MS Bill and Steve have the last word on EVERYTHING. Once they have defined company strategy you simply can't deviate no matter what position you have within the company. And, of course, Bill is the ultimate Guru at MS, the leader geek...
So in essence the article suggests that M$ and media companies can (and should be required by law to) root our computers with good and hard DRM, while in exchange Disney will make the early Mickey Mouse (TM) comics public domain?!?
What a great trade off!
This Jim Blair guy is full of shit. You have 30 days to activate the software. It's not "crippled" in any way until that 30 day timer is over.
Nope, sorry dude. If you swap enough hardware in/out of your PC, XP will stop letting you log on *immediately*. Regardless whether your system was activated before or not!
Hell, once I swapped the network card and XP wouldn't let me log on before it had phoned home to get me permission to use my PC again. But the hard part was: without being able to log on I couldn't install the network driver, and without the driver the system couldn't activate! Deadlock! Well, had to use phone activation, but still...
The nice thing is, we can expect much more from MS where the whole Activation idea came from (DRM and whatnot). Now if only X11 wasn't so fucked up and KDE was more productive to use, I'd have made The Switch a long time before now...
It's occurred to me maybe we are being too diligent in actually validating the schema itself, but I'm wondering what others think?
Maybe. See, at our shop we're a bit lazy and often times our apps don't check validity at all. I think none of our apps really goes beyond the local realm of the validation chain which has its advantages.
Besides, you should keep a cached copy of the w3c master docs around. They are not changed very often, so you could as well keep them locally forever without having to have internet connection (which also slows everything down).
Yes, the video is pretty cool. But I don't think it's genuine. Here's why:
1. The girl is pointing to the tower and says something like "whats that". The reaction of the cameraman is to zoom right in until we see the craft hovering at the side of the building. I know *I* wouldn't have zoomed in instinctively at once if someone just said "look there".
2. Although the craft is moving *really* fast (exceeding 2000 kph in my opinion) the girl never looses track and continues to point to its exact location. I know that if *I* would ride a helicopter when a strange aircraft is passing by at ludicrous speeds (tm), *I* would be having trouble to track it in real time.
3. (now the most scientific point) Towards the end of the movie the aircraft passes in front of the helicopter at a speed of, say, at least 2000 kph. We can't be sure about distances here but let's say it's distance to the helicopter was 10 meters at its closest. Now: passing by in front of a brittle thing like a small mid air helicopter WITHOUT even making the helicopter shake a bit? Hell, the air draft alone (not to mention engine exhaust) should have gotten the heli into serious trouble at those speeds!
Mind you, I don't know a thing about aviation, that's probably why my analysis is wrong. Any pilots around here? I'd like to hear your opinion!
Despite all your explanation, Windows still SUCKS!
I don't aim to make Windows attractive to you, son. As for programming languages, this has nothing to do with the discussion, but:
Dont want to program in Visual C++, want real C++ without hideous MFC.
MFC is basically just an API-thing, otherwise Visual C++ is pretty much like standard C++.
Dont want to program in Visual Basic, want that silly language dead.
Yeah, I hate that one too. But hey, nobody forces you to use it, right? Except maybe your employer? Oops. OK.
Dont want Visual C#, the M$ centric Java. Use REAL Java instead.
C# IS NOT MS centric Java! When will people EVER learn? The language is quite different from Java. Have a look at the C# spec and then come back to make some informed comments about it. Personally, having to program in Java from time to time, I hate it, because so much code is required to produce so little results (well, depends on your type of project I presume). C# is more terse to code, much like Delphi for example.
Dont want anything vith Visual, non visual is very fine.
GUIs *are* a reality, you know. Unless you code kernel or underlying architecture, you won't get around GUI programming in today's market. And, by the way, I don't like Visual products from MS too.
It's been a long time that I read such completely bogus. I don't want to flame but I have to. Here it goes:
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.
What a bunch of crap! So there is still a "disk operating system" under Linux because I can open a shell window, too? Man, what are you talking about?
DOS 7.1 brought the FAT32 file system to Win95, not the other way around
So what, FAT32 is a file system, and now - ? What does that say about the operating system? Nothing? Right.
Windows XP is not an operating system. It is a windowing system that sits atop an operating system much as KDE or Gnome sit atop Linux.
What's this guy's definition of an operating system? First, Windows has its OWN KERNEL (microkernel, btw). Second, it has its OWN DEVICE DRIVER and SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE. While I can agree that KDE/Gnome do a fairly large and important part of the work that non-Linux OSes provide as a whole package, Windows is doing ALL THE STUFF an OS does with *no* underlying foreign kernel or architecture.
The history of DR-DOS is especially interesting because it went through so many hands. [....]
Blah, blah, blah... where's all that DOS talk supposed to get us? Does it really make sense to talk about legacy crap like that? And if so, should we really begin to talk about text-mode-only Linux, from back in the days, also? What about legacy mainframe interfaces? Why? To prove the point that DOS is underlying of Windows just as Linux is the underlying architecture to KDE? WTF???
Now back to Microsoft putting Windows on top of Linux. Linux is better, faster, stronger than whatever is living underneath XP now, right? Performance would improve.
Give me a break here! Driver support for Windows often leads to much better performance (because PC manufacturers really cater to the Windows monopoly).
Apple has made a virtue of doing exactly this with MacOS-X, heralding its Mach kernel and BSD roots. Couldn't Microsoft do the same?
MacOS-X is a completely new system, it has a legacy-app compatibility layer (like Wine is for Linux) but otherwise it's a complete new system. And, they HAD to do it, because OS 9 and below where such utter crap (from a purely technical point of view, mind you). If MS where to switch (for whatever stupid reasons) to a *nix kernel like BSD or Linux they would have to provide a complete legacy Windows version inside the new system just to provide backwards-compatibility. And boy would *that* be slow! And, again, why??? It would mean to develop *LOADS* of new device drivers and APIs - for what?
I could go on like this forever. Articles like that make me want to puke. It would be suicide for MS if they did something like that, especially now, the first time they have a workable OS with Win2000/XP. Why oh why?
OK, I asked for it. Bomb me, I don't really care. Cringely articles I actually liked them in the past, but what the fuck is this load of crap supposed to be?
While I don't agree with parent post, it is certainly NOT flamebait!!!
I do have one question, however; how is it that Internet Explorer is able to rewrite TCP rules? Doesn't it use win32's TCP service? Or does it call a different, special TCP service?
I have been wondering about that, too. Since Win32 TCP service is pretty high level in Win95/98/ME it would either mean that
a) this feature doesn't work on Win 9x
b) there are some undisclosed API calls that MS uses
Anyway, it should be possible to do it with the Win2000/XP stack, though I'm not sure about NT 4 (but who cares).
Forth:
9 (Monster, search may be incorrect)
12 (dice)
Pascal:
28 / Delphi: 158 (Monster)
17 / Delphi 58 (dice)
PHP:
189 (Monster)
31 (dice)
LISP:
12 (Monster)
9 (dice)
ADA
(search inconclusive)
Fortran
123 (Monster)
49 (dice)
Assembler
10 (Monster, search inconclusive)
Algol
0 (Monster)
2 (dice)
==================
Also:
COBOL
601 (Monster) !
547 (dice) !
Visual-Studio related jobs
299 (Monster)
142 (dice)
Linux-related jobs
881 (Monster)
400 (dice)
====
Software Developers total
3901 (Monster, 2106 "programmer" +1795 (software developer)
Maybe thats not so far from the truth. At work I get to see many web server statistics and regarding OS'es Linux is about 5-7% (!), trailed by Apple which is around 3-4%.
Parent is a valid, on-topic post. Don't mod something down just because you don't agree, stupid moderators...
Hehe, I don't think it is. But as modularity goes, Outlook won't work with IE components just like 80% of the whole damn Win32 environment. Which makes sort of sense if only it would have been done right. But it wasn't done right, there's security holes and just plain buggyness all over the place! Well, BUT IN THEORY you should even be able to replace the IE component with an ActiveX version of Mozilla or something... ;-)