I had hoped the WTC attacks would be America's wakeup call and alert them to the fact that their foreign policy stinks. It seems this is not the case. America continues to play chess, using the less powerful nations as pawns. It was this behavior that caused the WTC attacks and if the US keeps throwing it's weight around like it is, more attacks will follow. How many attacks will be needed to wake up the US government? Hopefully, not too many.
Anyway, the moral of the story is: Just because a country is smaller and less powerful than your own does not mean you do not have to be diplomatic and considerate when dealing with them. Antagonise people enough and they will bite. It's a shame the WTC bite only served to complete the vicious circle of retaliation and counter-retaliation.
This is indeed a Good Thing for games such as Elite. Instead of the game designers having to create each world, using minimal detail, as many worlds as are wanted can now be created in infinite detail. I look forward to the first Elite-style game using this technology.
VSTa has been in development for over a decade now, and to be honest, it's still very primative: VSTa doesn't have an installer, it resides entirely in a/vsta subdirectory of the install partition, it's painful to setup (manual editing of/etc/passwd, etc) and has a very small HCL. Saying it already supports SMP when it's over a decade old is not very impressive.
VSTa was designed as a research OS, to play around with new ideas, and it's definately achieved that goal, but it definately isn't "very promising" or an "upcoming OS".
Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of the ideas that went into VSTa - the file permissions,/env, the IPC, to name a few, but VSTa is a research OS, and only a research OS, do not expect to be using it on your desktop.
If you like very modular microkernel OSes, check out QNX. QNX is a very nice OS, based on an extremely nice microkernel, and is under active development. The only downside to QNX is that it's not Free Software (although still free as in beer).
But unfortunately, I don't have the huge amounts of money needed to buy an Apple G4, let alone a G5. The ideal thing, for me, would be for some motherboard manufacturer to produce a G5 board compatible with ATX form factor and supporting all the PC usuals (ATA100, lots of PCI slots, AGP, etc). If this happens, it could be a very good thing for those of us looking to dump the x86 architecture.
It would also bring about the possibility of MacOS X on a PC (well, 90% PC...), which is an appealing prospect.
Yes, the current system is better for teaching science to the majority, but is the majority going to advance science? No, that's down to the Einsteins, the Hawkins and the Lobachevskys; the minority.
I'm not saying we should forget about the non-scientists. I'm saying we should not force them to do science and instead let them do what they like doing, which is where they are going to perform better anyway.
From my own bitter experience of school science classes, I can tell you that the current system really does not work for anyone but hard working students who are not particularly gifted in science subjects and therefore have little prior knowledge. The students who really have no interest in science do not take classes seriously, learn very little, and generally waste their time. The scientific students are even worse as they have already ammased a large amount of scientific knowledge and are forced to sit through classes in which teachers try to teach them things they taught themselves many years ago. As a result, they get bored and unhappy and fail to perform well.
As for critical thinking, I agree wholeheartedly. Critical thinking is very important and yet, is discouraged in schools. Schools teach you to think normal, act normal, be normal, accept everything, challenge nothing. Apart from stifling independant thought, this has the added effect of alienating those who still dare to think different.
The pressure to conform comes from two main causes: Fear of the unknown, and convenience. A very large number of teachers get uncomftable and upset when students start thinking differently or thinking ahead as it interrupts their complete control of the classroom situation. This is especially an issue for elementry school pupils as they are treated as small children and most teachers hate being corrected or taught by a small child. This isn't exactly helped by the fact that young children, even very intelligent ones, lack tact and don't know when it's best not to speak.
And as for convenience, well, even a good teacher needs to teach the class, or subsets of the class, as a group. Teachers simply do not have time to teach each member of the class as an individual. If there's a good teacher and they take a liking to you, good, you're well catered for. If not, you're just another member of the class; one of the majority.
You are probably also right about attracting better teachers, but as teaching is generally looked down upon by many, and hated by the critical thinkers who had to endure school themselves, it would be a long, uphill journey.
Scientific Elites very rarely have been taught most of their scientific knowledge. Rather, they teach themselves, where they can work at their own speed, learn what interests them, and not be restrained by the rigid structure of present day school.
I personally have very little respect for most teachers (there are always a few really good ones, but these are a bit of an endangered species) and prefer to teach myself science whenever possible.
So, instead of higher paid teachers, who are not all that useful to those really interested in the subject, more money should be spent on better facilities and suchlike.
And as for the scientific illiterates? Well, science is probably not their subject, so instead of being force fed it, they should be allowed to spend more time doing subjects they enjoy and are good at - be it art, music, english, whatever.
The IDE driver is quite mature. The problem is, instead of interfacing with the IDE chipset directly, like Linux, and most other modern OSes, it goes through the BIOS. Not only does this cause a speed reduction, but it creates a HUGE geometry translation headache - if the BIOS is not setup to see the drive the same way non-BIOS-dependant OSes see it, your OSes are going to start overwriting each other's partitions. From what I gather, Kurt only has AtheOS on his development machine so has no real need to write another IDE driver.
Using X11's driver API is a good idea, but if you're gonna write a whole new OS and API from scratch, you may as well break the driver interface while you're at it...
AtheOS is not a microkernel. It's a strange hybrid design in which most drivers live inside a monolithic kernel but drivers not needing to service interrupts (and maybe other kernel-only features I'm not aware of) can work in userland. Also, the kernel is not programmed in object oriented C++, like the rest of the system - it's 100% C.
AtheOS and HURD also had very different goals. HURD was designed to be a scalable, clusterable microkernel-based OS with lots of advanced features, while AtheOS was designed to be something that works, here and now. Albeit heavily inspired by BeOS's "multimedia OS" idea.
I do admire Kurt for getting so much done, almost all on his own, but I wonder if AtheOS is ambitious enough to survive in the future, or whether adding new features will be like flogging a dead horse.
I've thrown a mini tower with a P200 system in it out of a 3rd story window. It landed on a concrete pavement... *CRUNCH*. The case was a total writeoff - looking at it from the side, it was no longer a rectangle, it was a parallelogram. The hard drive was also completely knackered and the PSU mysteriously failed to work (yet showed no signs of physical damage). The CPU and RAM was fine, and a couple of expansion cards survived, with minor (well, quite major actually, but repairable) denting. The mobo worked again once a damaged capacitor had been replaced.
Still, the box was running Windows 98... no wonder it crashed so badly.
The difference between the SR-71 and a space shuttle is that an SR-71 can go about 3500mph while a space shuttle can go faster than 30,000mph.
Rather than just going straight up, a shuttle also needs to gain horizontal speed, so that instead of getting out of the atmosphere and falling back in, it can orbit the earth.
But, yes, I agree, we need to do more to get more of us into space, and do it all the more cheaply. The Earth is only going to satisfy us for so long, and there are so many planets out there with so much more potential - Mars, for instance. Huge amounts of iron ore lying on the surface means building materials would be extremely cheap.
I personally am all for nuclear rockets. Even if one or two do go bang, we probably will not even notice - how many satellite reactors have spread radioactives around the world so far? Also, for each reactor that goes bang, we gain more knowledge and decrease our chances of doing it again. Play with fire and you'll get burned; keep playing with fire, and you'll learn not to get burned.
Think of it this way: We have maybe 100 years left before very large numbers of us can afford to leave Earth and colonise other planets; a little damage to the Earth's environment now is a very small price to pay to be free of Earth once and for all. I only hope I'll be alive to see the day when we can finally colonise other planets.
Yes, nuclear power was shot down because it was not nearly as inexpensive as was promised, but alternate power sources are much more expensive to use in a rocket than nuclear power is.
Nuclear power uses far less fuel: On the ground, this is not really that useful, especially considering the fuel is considerably rarer than fossil fuels. In the sky, however, this is a godsend. In the case of a hydrogen rocket, many thousands of tonnes of hydrogen are used for fuel, and pretty much all that hydrogen has to be lifted off the ground by something else - more hydrogen! This means that for every extra kilo of payload, you need to add a rediculous amount of extra fuel. With nuclear power, fuel is much lighter (in terms of energy density, not substance density), so you can use much larger payloads without having to have huge amounts of fuel.
Nuclear power produces dangerous radiation: True. However, a stationary reactor on the ground is very different to a fast moving reactor in the air. The ground reactor is in close proximity to lifeforms, and will be for a very long time. The reactor in a nuclear rocket will be a long way away from any densely populated area and will pass by any close lifeforms very quickly indeed, so lowering the time they are exposed to radiation.
Nuclear power plants can meltdown: Nuclear rocket power plants will never melt down, as they are not a sealed unit. Cherenobyl melted down because too much pressure built up, in a nuclear rocket, the reactor is open, so pressure cannot build up.
Nuclear power produces nuclear waste: Nuclear waste is mainly produced by power plants that operate for years and years, producing many petajoules of energy. A nuclear rocket will not produce nearly as much energy and will therefore not produce nearly as much waste. As to what they should do with the waste, I think they'd be best off placing it in a large nuclear rocket and firing it away from earth.
Nuclear power is definately a much nicer power source to use in a rocket, but unless NASA can somehow pull the wool over the public's eyes, these rockets will not be flying for a very long time. A shame indeed.
Difference is, when it was taken out of the ground, it was U-238, with a halflife of about 4.5 billion years but when it's disposed of, it's Pu-239, with a halflife of 25000 years. Pu-239 is far more radioactive, and also toxic. Nasty stuff, not at all like the relatively harmless U-238.
Also, it is taken out from deep underground, where it's radiation is absorbed by rocks and never reaches the surface (yes, there are surface rocks that contain uranium, but they aren't mined). If the plutonium in the pacemakers gets incinerated and introduced into the atmosphere, it's far more dangerous than it would be underground.
Still, if it's disposed of properly (used as fuel in reactors, or buried deep underground), then it's really not a problem.
Makes you wonder if lithium batteries with coils for inductive charging would be a neater solution though... in a pacemaker, they would last for ages (when was the last time that CMOS battery needed replacing?) and they could be charged infrequently by placing a current-inducing coil on your chest.
Nuclear pacemakers aren't powered by a fuel rod, but a tiny pellet of radioactive material. That link talks about Pu-238 being used, maybe that's a error or maybe it's a very unusual isotope of plutonium (the normal isotope is Pu-239). In the case of Pu-239, the half-life is about 25000 years... considerably longer than the life of the human it's sustaining. When plutonium decays, it gives out heat, and this heat is used to power the pacemaker. Probably using the Thompson effect.
Unfortunately, this technology will never work for artificial hearts, which require far more power than a pacemaker power source can supply.
Personally, I think instead of using alien (to the human body) power sources, like batteries, plutonium pellets, etc, they'd be better off using fuel cells. Fuel cells can metabolise substances in the bloodstream, just like the human heart does. Think of it this way: the heart is pumping huge amounts of blood, all packed full of sugar and oxygen; why not use that power supply instead of ignoring it for some artificial alternative?
instead of using NS's or Mozilla's built in email clients, try using a dedicated email program. If you're using GNOME, Balsa works well, and if you're using KDE, KMail is a very good choice.
Course, you could always go the console route and use pine or mutt, but I prefer graphical email programs.
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Who said anything about fuel? The kinetic energy of a falling engine is enough to do serious damage.
And planes weren't designed for ramming into buildings. They're pretty good at it though, aren't they?
Why bother trying to crash into both buildings? Just drop an engine on the first and crash into the second.
:)
Hell, if you hijack a 747, you've got four engines and a plane to hit targets with. The white house, the pentagon, congress... what else?
So they're all at it.
*sigh*
I had hoped the WTC attacks would be America's wakeup call and alert them to the fact that their foreign policy stinks. It seems this is not the case. America continues to play chess, using the less powerful nations as pawns. It was this behavior that caused the WTC attacks and if the US keeps throwing it's weight around like it is, more attacks will follow. How many attacks will be needed to wake up the US government? Hopefully, not too many.
Anyway, the moral of the story is: Just because a country is smaller and less powerful than your own does not mean you do not have to be diplomatic and considerate when dealing with them. Antagonise people enough and they will bite. It's a shame the WTC bite only served to complete the vicious circle of retaliation and counter-retaliation.
This is indeed a Good Thing for games such as Elite. Instead of the game designers having to create each world, using minimal detail, as many worlds as are wanted can now be created in infinite detail. I look forward to the first Elite-style game using this technology.
VSTa has been in development for over a decade now, and to be honest, it's still very primative: VSTa doesn't have an installer, it resides entirely in a /vsta subdirectory of the install partition, it's painful to setup (manual editing of /etc/passwd, etc) and has a very small HCL. Saying it already supports SMP when it's over a decade old is not very impressive.
/env, the IPC, to name a few, but VSTa is a research OS, and only a research OS, do not expect to be using it on your desktop.
VSTa was designed as a research OS, to play around with new ideas, and it's definately achieved that goal, but it definately isn't "very promising" or an "upcoming OS".
Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of the ideas that went into VSTa - the file permissions,
If you like very modular microkernel OSes, check out QNX. QNX is a very nice OS, based on an extremely nice microkernel, and is under active development. The only downside to QNX is that it's not Free Software (although still free as in beer).
id used to be iD, and before that, they were ID.
If you play Commander Keen, you'll see "ID" (stood for In Demand), if you play Wolf3D, you'll see "iD" and if you play DooM, you'll see "id".
But unfortunately, I don't have the huge amounts of money needed to buy an Apple G4, let alone a G5. The ideal thing, for me, would be for some motherboard manufacturer to produce a G5 board compatible with ATX form factor and supporting all the PC usuals (ATA100, lots of PCI slots, AGP, etc). If this happens, it could be a very good thing for those of us looking to dump the x86 architecture.
It would also bring about the possibility of MacOS X on a PC (well, 90% PC...), which is an appealing prospect.
He didn't create the OS entirely in C++. The kernel and kernel daemons (the "systems programming" bit) are written in C.
Yes, the current system is better for teaching science to the majority, but is the majority going to advance science? No, that's down to the Einsteins, the Hawkins and the Lobachevskys; the minority.
I'm not saying we should forget about the non-scientists. I'm saying we should not force them to do science and instead let them do what they like doing, which is where they are going to perform better anyway.
From my own bitter experience of school science classes, I can tell you that the current system really does not work for anyone but hard working students who are not particularly gifted in science subjects and therefore have little prior knowledge. The students who really have no interest in science do not take classes seriously, learn very little, and generally waste their time. The scientific students are even worse as they have already ammased a large amount of scientific knowledge and are forced to sit through classes in which teachers try to teach them things they taught themselves many years ago. As a result, they get bored and unhappy and fail to perform well.
As for critical thinking, I agree wholeheartedly. Critical thinking is very important and yet, is discouraged in schools. Schools teach you to think normal, act normal, be normal, accept everything, challenge nothing. Apart from stifling independant thought, this has the added effect of alienating those who still dare to think different.
The pressure to conform comes from two main causes: Fear of the unknown, and convenience. A very large number of teachers get uncomftable and upset when students start thinking differently or thinking ahead as it interrupts their complete control of the classroom situation. This is especially an issue for elementry school pupils as they are treated as small children and most teachers hate being corrected or taught by a small child. This isn't exactly helped by the fact that young children, even very intelligent ones, lack tact and don't know when it's best not to speak.
And as for convenience, well, even a good teacher needs to teach the class, or subsets of the class, as a group. Teachers simply do not have time to teach each member of the class as an individual. If there's a good teacher and they take a liking to you, good, you're well catered for. If not, you're just another member of the class; one of the majority.
You are probably also right about attracting better teachers, but as teaching is generally looked down upon by many, and hated by the critical thinkers who had to endure school themselves, it would be a long, uphill journey.
Scientific Elites very rarely have been taught most of their scientific knowledge. Rather, they teach themselves, where they can work at their own speed, learn what interests them, and not be restrained by the rigid structure of present day school.
I personally have very little respect for most teachers (there are always a few really good ones, but these are a bit of an endangered species) and prefer to teach myself science whenever possible.
So, instead of higher paid teachers, who are not all that useful to those really interested in the subject, more money should be spent on better facilities and suchlike.
And as for the scientific illiterates? Well, science is probably not their subject, so instead of being force fed it, they should be allowed to spend more time doing subjects they enjoy and are good at - be it art, music, english, whatever.
The IDE driver is quite mature. The problem is, instead of interfacing with the IDE chipset directly, like Linux, and most other modern OSes, it goes through the BIOS. Not only does this cause a speed reduction, but it creates a HUGE geometry translation headache - if the BIOS is not setup to see the drive the same way non-BIOS-dependant OSes see it, your OSes are going to start overwriting each other's partitions. From what I gather, Kurt only has AtheOS on his development machine so has no real need to write another IDE driver.
Using X11's driver API is a good idea, but if you're gonna write a whole new OS and API from scratch, you may as well break the driver interface while you're at it...
AtheOS is not a microkernel. It's a strange hybrid design in which most drivers live inside a monolithic kernel but drivers not needing to service interrupts (and maybe other kernel-only features I'm not aware of) can work in userland. Also, the kernel is not programmed in object oriented C++, like the rest of the system - it's 100% C.
AtheOS and HURD also had very different goals. HURD was designed to be a scalable, clusterable microkernel-based OS with lots of advanced features, while AtheOS was designed to be something that works, here and now. Albeit heavily inspired by BeOS's "multimedia OS" idea.
I do admire Kurt for getting so much done, almost all on his own, but I wonder if AtheOS is ambitious enough to survive in the future, or whether adding new features will be like flogging a dead horse.
Heh, not bad.
I've thrown a mini tower with a P200 system in it out of a 3rd story window. It landed on a concrete pavement... *CRUNCH*. The case was a total writeoff - looking at it from the side, it was no longer a rectangle, it was a parallelogram. The hard drive was also completely knackered and the PSU mysteriously failed to work (yet showed no signs of physical damage). The CPU and RAM was fine, and a couple of expansion cards survived, with minor (well, quite major actually, but repairable) denting. The mobo worked again once a damaged capacitor had been replaced.
Still, the box was running Windows 98... no wonder it crashed so badly.
The difference between the SR-71 and a space shuttle is that an SR-71 can go about 3500mph while a space shuttle can go faster than 30,000mph.
Rather than just going straight up, a shuttle also needs to gain horizontal speed, so that instead of getting out of the atmosphere and falling back in, it can orbit the earth.
But, yes, I agree, we need to do more to get more of us into space, and do it all the more cheaply. The Earth is only going to satisfy us for so long, and there are so many planets out there with so much more potential - Mars, for instance. Huge amounts of iron ore lying on the surface means building materials would be extremely cheap.
I personally am all for nuclear rockets. Even if one or two do go bang, we probably will not even notice - how many satellite reactors have spread radioactives around the world so far? Also, for each reactor that goes bang, we gain more knowledge and decrease our chances of doing it again. Play with fire and you'll get burned; keep playing with fire, and you'll learn not to get burned.
Think of it this way: We have maybe 100 years left before very large numbers of us can afford to leave Earth and colonise other planets; a little damage to the Earth's environment now is a very small price to pay to be free of Earth once and for all. I only hope I'll be alive to see the day when we can finally colonise other planets.
Yes, nuclear power was shot down because it was not nearly as inexpensive as was promised, but alternate power sources are much more expensive to use in a rocket than nuclear power is.
Nuclear power uses far less fuel: On the ground, this is not really that useful, especially considering the fuel is considerably rarer than fossil fuels. In the sky, however, this is a godsend. In the case of a hydrogen rocket, many thousands of tonnes of hydrogen are used for fuel, and pretty much all that hydrogen has to be lifted off the ground by something else - more hydrogen! This means that for every extra kilo of payload, you need to add a rediculous amount of extra fuel. With nuclear power, fuel is much lighter (in terms of energy density, not substance density), so you can use much larger payloads without having to have huge amounts of fuel.
Nuclear power produces dangerous radiation: True. However, a stationary reactor on the ground is very different to a fast moving reactor in the air. The ground reactor is in close proximity to lifeforms, and will be for a very long time. The reactor in a nuclear rocket will be a long way away from any densely populated area and will pass by any close lifeforms very quickly indeed, so lowering the time they are exposed to radiation.
Nuclear power plants can meltdown: Nuclear rocket power plants will never melt down, as they are not a sealed unit. Cherenobyl melted down because too much pressure built up, in a nuclear rocket, the reactor is open, so pressure cannot build up.
Nuclear power produces nuclear waste: Nuclear waste is mainly produced by power plants that operate for years and years, producing many petajoules of energy. A nuclear rocket will not produce nearly as much energy and will therefore not produce nearly as much waste. As to what they should do with the waste, I think they'd be best off placing it in a large nuclear rocket and firing it away from earth.
Nuclear power is definately a much nicer power source to use in a rocket, but unless NASA can somehow pull the wool over the public's eyes, these rockets will not be flying for a very long time. A shame indeed.
Difference is, when it was taken out of the ground, it was U-238, with a halflife of about 4.5 billion years but when it's disposed of, it's Pu-239, with a halflife of 25000 years. Pu-239 is far more radioactive, and also toxic. Nasty stuff, not at all like the relatively harmless U-238.
Also, it is taken out from deep underground, where it's radiation is absorbed by rocks and never reaches the surface (yes, there are surface rocks that contain uranium, but they aren't mined). If the plutonium in the pacemakers gets incinerated and introduced into the atmosphere, it's far more dangerous than it would be underground.
Still, if it's disposed of properly (used as fuel in reactors, or buried deep underground), then it's really not a problem.
Makes you wonder if lithium batteries with coils for inductive charging would be a neater solution though... in a pacemaker, they would last for ages (when was the last time that CMOS battery needed replacing?) and they could be charged infrequently by placing a current-inducing coil on your chest.
Nuclear pacemakers aren't powered by a fuel rod, but a tiny pellet of radioactive material. That link talks about Pu-238 being used, maybe that's a error or maybe it's a very unusual isotope of plutonium (the normal isotope is Pu-239). In the case of Pu-239, the half-life is about 25000 years... considerably longer than the life of the human it's sustaining. When plutonium decays, it gives out heat, and this heat is used to power the pacemaker. Probably using the Thompson effect.
Unfortunately, this technology will never work for artificial hearts, which require far more power than a pacemaker power source can supply.
Personally, I think instead of using alien (to the human body) power sources, like batteries, plutonium pellets, etc, they'd be better off using fuel cells. Fuel cells can metabolise substances in the bloodstream, just like the human heart does. Think of it this way: the heart is pumping huge amounts of blood, all packed full of sugar and oxygen; why not use that power supply instead of ignoring it for some artificial alternative?
instead of using NS's or Mozilla's built in email clients, try using a dedicated email program. If you're using GNOME, Balsa works well, and if you're using KDE, KMail is a very good choice.
Course, you could always go the console route and use pine or mutt, but I prefer graphical email programs.