Technically 10 years and 12 years from Gagarin to Salyut 1 and Skylab respectively. Those were pretty optimistic schedules too, and those guys on Salyut 1 didn't survive.
Why? I refuse to believe that everybody else in the world is in on the scam. Is it just because it would be work and they're too lazy? It doesn't make sense to me that a bank wouldn't want to get its account back, I mean that is literally money in the bank.
9 years to go from "we put a few guys in orbit" to "fully manned and fully operational space station" is a staggeringly optimistic schedule. If China is able to pull it off, I will tip my hat to them.
I wonder if they'll also be just as fast in discovering that manned space stations are generally a waste of time and money?
The banking system seems set up to facilitate fraud sometimes. Every time we hear about a wire transfer, the police have to point out how they're untraceable and any money sent over them is just gone. This sounds insane to me, why aren't there computerized logs of every single transaction? Finding out where money went should be as simple as "ok, it was transferred to , from there it was transferred to , and then to . At the last bank it was withdrawn as cash. With that information, you should be able to go to the bank and get the security camera footage, signature, account holder information, etc... It's not perfect, but it sure beats " electronic transfer are impossible to trace".
Heck, every time I've had to use wire transfers, it sits around for a few days so the fed can leech interest off of it. Seems to me it should be possible to head that fraudulent transaction off at the pass if the authorities can act fast enough. Granted, it would lead to the same outcry you get when Paypal freezes an account, but it seems better than funding organized crime all over the world.
Except that pure IPv6 networks aren't even what we're talking about here. Dual Stacking has been available for ages (and most OSes turn it on by default), but since your average home ISP (and their "router") won't touch IPv6, it's been sitting there doing nothing.
Really, the first step in getting IPv6 deployed is for ISPs to start handing out addresses. It's going to break a lot of stuff and people will have to go around fixing it all, but that has to be done anyway. Best to just get it out of the way before we're in a full-on address crunch.
Basically, quality is not a big enough selling point for most people as long as the old stuff was adequate. DVDs advantages over VHS went well beyond just the quality, with instant seeking, no degradation over time, extra features on the discs, and lower price points. They were compelling. Blu-Ray is just more quality for more money, there aren't really any new features, and it requires you to upgrade your screen to use it. Most people are still on SD screens, because they work and HD is just more expensive. Maybe when their old TVs break they'll upgrade to HD, but there is certainly no hurry.
Because there are lots of things that are more awkward with Ruby/Python/Perl than they are with shell scripts?
If you're running a bunch of commands on a system and just verifying return codes, a shell script is the right tool for the job. It's also the right tool for those times when you're working on a very stripped down machine that may or may not have your favorite interpreter installed.
Yeah, although the cosmic ray scenario is probably one of the least likely ones, it is illustrative. More likely is a brownout coupled with an iffy power supply or a dodgy capacitor or a straight up hardware/firmware/software bug that has the chip report something different once in a blue moon and cause your drive to instantly commit seppuku.
I'm just not paranoid enough to live with the idea that this thing could suddenly self destruct (in a way that a simple reboot can't work around) at any time, especially right before your big presentation when you already have it hooked up to the projector.
Then clearly you are worthless. Simple as that.
I think the article is talking about "Facebook cash" though, which is not exactly the same as Farmville cash (whatever it's called). I don't know of anybody who has ever used Facebook cash so I don't know how they're supposed to grow larger than JP Morgan or Bank of America or whatnot.
Nothing like having a ticking time bomb built right into your hardware. The first time some cosmic ray flips some bit that the drive queries to determine which host its attached to you lose all of your data. Nice. Hope you remembered your backups.
Being banned from the forums is not the same thing as having the Steam account banned. The latter would lock you out of your legitimate game purchases and is much more severe.
Heck, most of my high level math classes were open book. The reason being that even if you have the equations it's knowing how to apply them that is the skill.
So fine, 320x240 with 16 bit color is enough for a calculator (I'd argue that the graphing function could use more), but selling it for $120 in 2011 is an insult. Those calculators should be $25 or $30 at the most.
Ultimately, for the cost of sending one manned flight to Mars you can send a fleet of semi-autonomous robots that can do pretty much anything a human crew could do, but can stay there for months or years instead of days or weeks.
The reason we're not seriously considering sending people to Mars is not because there is a lack of "vision", it is because it just doesn't make sense.
Just out of curiosity, have you ever tried to do the math to figure out how long it would take a solar sail to propel you "almost up to the speed of light", or how long it would take to reach the nearest star using one?
The problem is that they're missing the entire point of the Commie-64. Every one should come with a full copy of LiveCode or something that lets kids mess around with building their own apps right out of the box, without the training overhead that comes from so many modern IDEs. ROM Basic is too primitive to be of much interest anymore (even with the sprite generator and SID chip), but there are lots of products that are similar and could engage a whole new generation. It needs to be simple enough that clever kids can figure it out by reading the (always available) source in existing programs, and powerful enough to be able to do something interesting.
Challenger probably would have been a disaster still. An explosion that large is hard to deal with, and you only have a scant few moments to figure out what happened and act to have any hopes of saving the vehicle (immediate separation of the upper stage and an attempt to land the vehicle somewhere).
Slashdot Mirror
Technically 10 years and 12 years from Gagarin to Salyut 1 and Skylab respectively. Those were pretty optimistic schedules too, and those guys on Salyut 1 didn't survive.
Why? I refuse to believe that everybody else in the world is in on the scam. Is it just because it would be work and they're too lazy? It doesn't make sense to me that a bank wouldn't want to get its account back, I mean that is literally money in the bank.
9 years to go from "we put a few guys in orbit" to "fully manned and fully operational space station" is a staggeringly optimistic schedule. If China is able to pull it off, I will tip my hat to them.
I wonder if they'll also be just as fast in discovering that manned space stations are generally a waste of time and money?
The banking system seems set up to facilitate fraud sometimes. Every time we hear about a wire transfer, the police have to point out how they're untraceable and any money sent over them is just gone. This sounds insane to me, why aren't there computerized logs of every single transaction? Finding out where money went should be as simple as "ok, it was transferred to , from there it was transferred to , and then to . At the last bank it was withdrawn as cash. With that information, you should be able to go to the bank and get the security camera footage, signature, account holder information, etc... It's not perfect, but it sure beats " electronic transfer are impossible to trace".
Heck, every time I've had to use wire transfers, it sits around for a few days so the fed can leech interest off of it. Seems to me it should be possible to head that fraudulent transaction off at the pass if the authorities can act fast enough. Granted, it would lead to the same outcry you get when Paypal freezes an account, but it seems better than funding organized crime all over the world.
What if you use Chrome, which doesn't have a search bar?
A few years ago there was an IPv6 only porn site built to try to get people to try it out. I think it has been shut down now however.
Except that pure IPv6 networks aren't even what we're talking about here. Dual Stacking has been available for ages (and most OSes turn it on by default), but since your average home ISP (and their "router") won't touch IPv6, it's been sitting there doing nothing.
Really, the first step in getting IPv6 deployed is for ISPs to start handing out addresses. It's going to break a lot of stuff and people will have to go around fixing it all, but that has to be done anyway. Best to just get it out of the way before we're in a full-on address crunch.
Basically, quality is not a big enough selling point for most people as long as the old stuff was adequate. DVDs advantages over VHS went well beyond just the quality, with instant seeking, no degradation over time, extra features on the discs, and lower price points. They were compelling. Blu-Ray is just more quality for more money, there aren't really any new features, and it requires you to upgrade your screen to use it. Most people are still on SD screens, because they work and HD is just more expensive. Maybe when their old TVs break they'll upgrade to HD, but there is certainly no hurry.
Because there are lots of things that are more awkward with Ruby/Python/Perl than they are with shell scripts?
If you're running a bunch of commands on a system and just verifying return codes, a shell script is the right tool for the job. It's also the right tool for those times when you're working on a very stripped down machine that may or may not have your favorite interpreter installed.
Fox will report it, they'll talk about how great it is and how everybody should love it because it makes the internet so much better, etc...
Yeah, although the cosmic ray scenario is probably one of the least likely ones, it is illustrative. More likely is a brownout coupled with an iffy power supply or a dodgy capacitor or a straight up hardware/firmware/software bug that has the chip report something different once in a blue moon and cause your drive to instantly commit seppuku.
I'm just not paranoid enough to live with the idea that this thing could suddenly self destruct (in a way that a simple reboot can't work around) at any time, especially right before your big presentation when you already have it hooked up to the projector.
Then clearly you are worthless. Simple as that. I think the article is talking about "Facebook cash" though, which is not exactly the same as Farmville cash (whatever it's called). I don't know of anybody who has ever used Facebook cash so I don't know how they're supposed to grow larger than JP Morgan or Bank of America or whatnot.
Nothing like having a ticking time bomb built right into your hardware. The first time some cosmic ray flips some bit that the drive queries to determine which host its attached to you lose all of your data. Nice. Hope you remembered your backups.
Being banned from the forums is not the same thing as having the Steam account banned. The latter would lock you out of your legitimate game purchases and is much more severe.
Heck, most of my high level math classes were open book. The reason being that even if you have the equations it's knowing how to apply them that is the skill.
So fine, 320x240 with 16 bit color is enough for a calculator (I'd argue that the graphing function could use more), but selling it for $120 in 2011 is an insult. Those calculators should be $25 or $30 at the most.
That's true of the robotic space exploration program as well.
Ultimately, for the cost of sending one manned flight to Mars you can send a fleet of semi-autonomous robots that can do pretty much anything a human crew could do, but can stay there for months or years instead of days or weeks.
The reason we're not seriously considering sending people to Mars is not because there is a lack of "vision", it is because it just doesn't make sense.
Just out of curiosity, have you ever tried to do the math to figure out how long it would take a solar sail to propel you "almost up to the speed of light", or how long it would take to reach the nearest star using one?
Isn't that the plot to Ender's Game?
The problem is that they're missing the entire point of the Commie-64. Every one should come with a full copy of LiveCode or something that lets kids mess around with building their own apps right out of the box, without the training overhead that comes from so many modern IDEs. ROM Basic is too primitive to be of much interest anymore (even with the sprite generator and SID chip), but there are lots of products that are similar and could engage a whole new generation. It needs to be simple enough that clever kids can figure it out by reading the (always available) source in existing programs, and powerful enough to be able to do something interesting.
It's more expensive than a lot of laptops, and almost all netbooks.
And certainly more open to criticism than most of their critics on the net.
It would be really cool if they had it "exploded" with doors and windows so you could see the internal workings.
Challenger probably would have been a disaster still. An explosion that large is hard to deal with, and you only have a scant few moments to figure out what happened and act to have any hopes of saving the vehicle (immediate separation of the upper stage and an attempt to land the vehicle somewhere).