No. The key to Linux is getting to the point where hardware support has the same width and depth as XP does, and with the same or better performance.
This is NOT where we are currently at (by a long shot). Support alone isn't the only point, either: under XP, things (generally) just work. Under (insert your favorite flavor of *nix here), even if it CAN work, it takes someone experienced / intelligent / trained / willing-to-read-countless-HOWTO's to MAKE it work.
You get hardware support up to speed, then the gamers will follow. A "gamer's distro" will attract some number of users, but getting hardware support up to speed will get them, their friends, and my mother, and my friends, and...and...etc.
As the old gaming paradigms age, we might see a period of gaming lameness (or gaming absence). But ultimately, creative efforts by designers and gamers will create new forms, new syntheses of old notions that go beyond 'rehashing' of old ideas, and will spark a new golden age.
> You should know that I of course believe that > God created the world in 7 days.
Which is why most of us would classify you as mentally ill.
> The fact is that I am also a believer in > science. Anyone who is a Christian will quickly >realize that our beliefs tell us only about > goings-on in Heaven and Earth
So, it's ok to believe silly, unfounded things on our own planet, but on other planets we have to be bound by evidence? Heh.
> I would bet that most Christian-bashers on > Slashdot would consider themselves great, > tolerant progressives, yet they seem to only be > tolerant of the cause du jour. How sad.
No, it's just that we're tolerant of things that MAKE SENSE.
Do you know ANYTHING about planetary science? The discovery of liquid water (briny or otherwise) is a huge discovery, and changes a great deal of what we've assumed about conditions on Mars (and thus its evolution, potential for life, available resources, etc.).
1st: I'm not interested in fighting, only debating, so just as a prophylactic measure (I haven't seen or done anything nasty), I'll say it clearly: I'm only debating, not fighting.
> The people who have to service it would say no.
I beg to differ. See the following:
"I can say without hesitation that traveling to space to upgrade the instruments and ensure the future of the Hubble Space Telescope was worth the potential risk to my life."
I estimate that the vast majority of astronaut corps members would jump at the chance to service HST.
These are people who chose careers in space because they love both knowledge and adventure, and were willing to pay the price to participate. Astronaut willingness to service HST is not the problem
>...but much of its designed capabilities can now > be done with ground telescopes, and in the near > future with even better ground systems
The wavelengths in question don't GET to the ground, and therefore aren't observable from the ground, adaptive optics or no.
> and next-generation space telescopes.
The next-generation space telescope in question is the James Webb Space Telescope (formerly NGST, see http://ngst.gsfc.nasa.gov/), which isn't due to launch until 2011 - which suggests that it won't actually launch until 2012 or 2013 (from estimates by people who use HST, Chandra, etc. on a regular basis). JWST is the only significant observatory capable of observing in these wavebands that will be lost when HST dies.
Having infrared or X-ray telescopes in orbit is great - but it doesn't take the place of an optical and UV observatory in orbit. When HST dies, we (astronomers) face as much as a decade without access to observations taken in those wavebands, the very ones that have made HST such a remarkable instrument and valuable instrument.
> Why should Hubble be kept running? It may have > been state-of-the art when it was launched, but > there are now ground telescopes that are even > better than it due to advances in adaptive > reflector control....It could probably > survive and produce data for another 10 years, > but at lower quality and much greater expense > than we can get elsewhere.
Duh, wrong. Adaptive optics can, indeed, do marvelous things. But HST is above the atmosphere, and is used often in wavebands that are don't make it to the surface (UV). Additionally, HST is most definitely still "state of the art", and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which has already been built and is sitting in a warehouse waiting to be installed, will offer spectroscopy of a degree of precision unavailable anywhere on Earth.
Please, check your facts before making sweeping statements about how HST isn't state-of-the-art.
He, and countless other nonscientist functionaries at NASA are busily trying to prove to the pResident that they are on-board with his "bold new plan"...and the way that they do that is by "making hard decisions".
> nobody can type the squiggly symbols, unless > you are all lightning-fast TeX or MathML gurus
Hmm...I don't know. It's always seemed pretty easy. Anyone who's ever programmed or used Mathematica would probably recognize something along the lines of:
Integrate[x^3, {x, 0, Pi}]
to mean "integrate x cubed over the range 0 to Pi". This can also be represented in even shorter (read: easy to type with a stylus or quick keystrokes) notation, such as:
int x3 0 pi
Quick messages in a lecture hall could easily be phrased as simple interrogatives:
x3 or x2 ?
Most people learning any new language (in both the linguistic and algorithmic senses) *do* have a steep initial learning curve, but then quickly learn those elements that they use every day. This might exhibit the same phenomenon.
You say "september 2003" - if you can arrive just a hair earlier, try and get yourself out to the Burning Man festival in the barrenest, emptiest part of Nevada. For more info, see Burning Man or "Burning Man" search @ Google.
> Should we place the President under oath before
> things like press conferences and the State Of
> The Union address, or should the Oath Of Office
> be enough?
I don't see why not. Why not make it clear that the President - elected or appointed, Southern Democrat or Texas Robber Baron, I don't care - is *always* under oath, and that *any* lie is grounds for impeachment?
I was wondering if anyone was going to make note of the fact that "line of sight" is pretty much the norm, not the anomaly, with regard to planets.
That being said, and even in light of the fact that planets arerarely "lined up" to facilitate bouncing messages linearly between several planets, I do think that there are good reasons to consider "IP-in-space" implemenatations.
Most notably, think about a scale in between our own terrestrial, ground-based networks and the proposed interplanetary network above - think about how useful an array of communications relay sats orbiting Mars would be, for instance. In the case of Mars, line-of-sight is obstructed for a rover on the ground for about half of every Martian day, and the ability to beam real-time data to an orbiting sat directly, and allow that sat and its companions to worry about how to get the data to Earth simplifies things for the rover, and makes it unnecessary for the rover to have a high-gain antenna, etc.
So...as an Oregonian, you would deny mental health treatment because of some peculiarity of their disorder? You would treat only those whose disorders are commonplace and take common forms?
> I just said they couldn't be retrofitted to make the trip to Mars
I understood this part of your reply. When you say that "there aren't too many [profitable endeavors] in LEO", I agree wholeheartedly....which I why I'm very much in favor of using both the financial and technological know-how currently directed towards NASA's efforts to study how peas sprout in micro-g to actually accomplish something up there ('up there' meaning beyond LEO).
How much could $14B (sorry, too pressed for time to look up NASA's current budget) and thousands of engineers do if they were working in the private sector? I don't know, but I'm guessing a LOT more than they do now, working for a remarkable, but still top-heavy organization like NASA.
Re:If every space flight was guaranteed not to ret
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
If someone were to come up with a plan for a one way trip to Mars that offered even a glimmer of hope for surviving, you'd have no trouble finding people who would rather live a few months on Mars than the rest of their lives on Earth. Time by itself isn't a reason to live.
Well said. We can bitch about losing money when something like this happens...that's valid. But the lives lost? They knew, no, they EMBRACED the risk, because they believed in what they were doing.
A trip to Mars? Just issue me a suit, and I'm gone.
He didn't say actually take the shuttles TO Mars, he said "Turn them into the first step...", which is quite a diffferent thing.
When you get down to it, his point is that we need to break free of the gravity well with something like a LEO infrastructure that could support Moon & Mars missions. Makes sense to me, even if the immediate proposal is unworkable. We really do need to establish something more in orbit than an overpriced chemistry set built into a multi-billion dollar bathtub.
What do I mean? We need fuel storage depots, construction equippment, multiple Soyuz-style docking points for consumables and human delivery, housing for dozens of people, not 6.
While I'm not sure about grounding the shuttle fleet, I do think that it's time to start thinking outside of the confines of gov't funded, massive overhead, short-sighted and negative-profit endeavors in space.
It's not appropriate to change my address to keep out unsolicited email, any more than it is my job to move my home to avoid salesmen at my front door.
Rather, it is an ISP's job to ensure that their customers are using their access in appropriate ways, and that includes ensuring that they're not facilitating unsolicited commercial email.
If they refuse to make changes to their TOS, or refuse to improve enforcement of existing TOS, then blocking traffic is an entirely appropriate means of behavior modification.
It sucks that you'll miss out on your friend's mail - but when they complain that their messages aren't getting through to the U.S., the ISP will quickly adjust their policies. And if they don't, then we were right to block traffic in the first place.
As for using a web-based email service - I get plenty of spam with Yahoo!, Hotmail, etc., despite the filters. And no, I don't publicize those addresses. Besides - allowing my choice of email service (WWW, POP, IMAP, free, pay, whatever) to be dictated by the actions of people sending unnsolicited advertising is unwarranted, because I'm not the person engaging in socially unacceptable behavior.
(the address below is heavily filtered...and some still sneaks through.)
Slashdot Mirror
"Is the Key to Linux a Games-Based Distro?"
No. The key to Linux is getting to the point where hardware support has the same width and depth as XP does, and with the same or better performance.
This is NOT where we are currently at (by a long shot). Support alone isn't the only point, either: under XP, things (generally) just work. Under (insert your favorite flavor of *nix here), even if it CAN work, it takes someone experienced / intelligent / trained / willing-to-read-countless-HOWTO's to MAKE it work.
You get hardware support up to speed, then the gamers will follow. A "gamer's distro" will attract some number of users, but getting hardware support up to speed will get them, their friends, and my mother, and my friends, and...and...etc.
This is a good thing!
As the old gaming paradigms age, we might see a period of gaming lameness (or gaming absence). But ultimately, creative efforts by designers and gamers will create new forms, new syntheses of old notions that go beyond 'rehashing' of old ideas, and will spark a new golden age.
So sayeth the sage.
> You should know that I of course believe that
> God created the world in 7 days.
Which is why most of us would classify you as mentally ill.
> The fact is that I am also a believer in
> science. Anyone who is a Christian will quickly
>realize that our beliefs tell us only about
> goings-on in Heaven and Earth
So, it's ok to believe silly, unfounded things on our own planet, but on other planets we have to be bound by evidence? Heh.
> I would bet that most Christian-bashers on
> Slashdot would consider themselves great,
> tolerant progressives, yet they seem to only be
> tolerant of the cause du jour. How sad.
No, it's just that we're tolerant of things that MAKE SENSE.
> This seems like a lot of hype..
Mod me as flamebait, but...
Do you know ANYTHING about planetary science? The discovery of liquid water (briny or otherwise) is a huge discovery, and changes a great deal of what we've assumed about conditions on Mars (and thus its evolution, potential for life, available resources, etc.).
> The people who have to service it would say no.
I beg to differ. See the following:
(src: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=9907
I estimate that the vast majority of astronaut corps members would jump at the chance to service HST.
These are people who chose careers in space because they love both knowledge and adventure, and were willing to pay the price to participate. Astronaut willingness to service HST is not the problem
> ...but much of its designed capabilities can now
> be done with ground telescopes, and in the near
> future with even better ground systems
The wavelengths in question don't GET to the ground, and therefore aren't observable from the ground, adaptive optics or no.
> and next-generation space telescopes.
The next-generation space telescope in question is the James Webb Space Telescope (formerly NGST, see http://ngst.gsfc.nasa.gov/), which isn't due to launch until 2011 - which suggests that it won't actually launch until 2012 or 2013 (from estimates by people who use HST, Chandra, etc. on a regular basis). JWST is the only significant observatory capable of observing in these wavebands that will be lost when HST dies.
Having infrared or X-ray telescopes in orbit is great - but it doesn't take the place of an optical and UV observatory in orbit. When HST dies, we (astronomers) face as much as a decade without access to observations taken in those wavebands, the very ones that have made HST such a remarkable instrument and valuable instrument.
> Why should Hubble be kept running? It may have
> been state-of-the art when it was launched, but
> there are now ground telescopes that are even
> better than it due to advances in adaptive
> reflector control....It could probably
> survive and produce data for another 10 years,
> but at lower quality and much greater expense
> than we can get elsewhere.
Duh, wrong. Adaptive optics can, indeed, do marvelous things. But HST is above the atmosphere, and is used often in wavebands that are don't make it to the surface (UV). Additionally, HST is most definitely still "state of the art", and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which has already been built and is sitting in a warehouse waiting to be installed, will offer spectroscopy of a degree of precision unavailable anywhere on Earth.
Please, check your facts before making sweeping statements about how HST isn't state-of-the-art.
> O'Keefe said....
You believe O'keefe? Really?
He, and countless other nonscientist functionaries at NASA are busily trying to prove to the pResident that they are on-board with his "bold new plan"...and the way that they do that is by "making hard decisions".
Bordering on racist.
And not even funny in the bargain.
Hmm...
500 x $100 seems to total up to $50,000.00 rather than $50.
Yes, I am aware of the european usage of the decimal point in place of the more proper comma. But...I couldn't help myself.
Sue me.
> nobody can type the squiggly symbols, unless
> you are all lightning-fast TeX or MathML gurus
Hmm...I don't know. It's always seemed pretty easy. Anyone who's ever programmed or used Mathematica would probably recognize something along the lines of:
Integrate[x^3, {x, 0, Pi}]
to mean "integrate x cubed over the range 0 to Pi". This can also be represented in even shorter (read: easy to type with a stylus or quick keystrokes) notation, such as:
int x3 0 pi
Quick messages in a lecture hall could easily be phrased as simple interrogatives:
x3 or x2 ?
Most people learning any new language (in both the linguistic and algorithmic senses) *do* have a steep initial learning curve, but then quickly learn those elements that they use every day. This might exhibit the same phenomenon.
You say "september 2003" - if you can arrive just a hair earlier, try and get yourself out to the Burning Man festival in the barrenest, emptiest part of Nevada. For more info, see Burning Man or "Burning Man" search @ Google.
> Should we place the President under oath before > things like press conferences and the State Of > The Union address, or should the Oath Of Office > be enough? I don't see why not. Why not make it clear that the President - elected or appointed, Southern Democrat or Texas Robber Baron, I don't care - is *always* under oath, and that *any* lie is grounds for impeachment?
I was wondering if anyone was going to make note of the fact that "line of sight" is pretty much the norm, not the anomaly, with regard to planets.
That being said, and even in light of the fact that planets arerarely "lined up" to facilitate bouncing messages linearly between several planets, I do think that there are good reasons to consider "IP-in-space" implemenatations.
Most notably, think about a scale in between our own terrestrial, ground-based networks and the proposed interplanetary network above - think about how useful an array of communications relay sats orbiting Mars would be, for instance. In the case of Mars, line-of-sight is obstructed for a rover on the ground for about half of every Martian day, and the ability to beam real-time data to an orbiting sat directly, and allow that sat and its companions to worry about how to get the data to Earth simplifies things for the rover, and makes it unnecessary for the rover to have a high-gain antenna, etc.
except for the climbing, of course. Climbing is good there.
"penial"? dictionaries, man, dictionaries. pun intended.
> I just said they couldn't be retrofitted to make the trip to Mars I understood this part of your reply. When you say that "there aren't too many [profitable endeavors] in LEO", I agree wholeheartedly. ...which I why I'm very much in favor of using both the financial and technological know-how currently directed towards NASA's efforts to study how peas sprout in micro-g to actually accomplish something up there ('up there' meaning beyond LEO).
How much could $14B (sorry, too pressed for time to look up NASA's current budget) and thousands of engineers do if they were working in the private sector? I don't know, but I'm guessing a LOT more than they do now, working for a remarkable, but still top-heavy organization like NASA.
Well said. We can bitch about losing money when something like this happens...that's valid. But the lives lost? They knew, no, they EMBRACED the risk, because they believed in what they were doing.
A trip to Mars? Just issue me a suit, and I'm gone.
When you get down to it, his point is that we need to break free of the gravity well with something like a LEO infrastructure that could support Moon & Mars missions. Makes sense to me, even if the immediate proposal is unworkable. We really do need to establish something more in orbit than an overpriced chemistry set built into a multi-billion dollar bathtub.
What do I mean? We need fuel storage depots, construction equippment, multiple Soyuz-style docking points for consumables and human delivery, housing for dozens of people, not 6.
While I'm not sure about grounding the shuttle fleet, I do think that it's time to start thinking outside of the confines of gov't funded, massive overhead, short-sighted and negative-profit endeavors in space.
> Why the sarcasm? Because it's FUNNY.
It's not appropriate to change my address to keep out unsolicited email, any more than it is my job to move my home to avoid salesmen at my front door.
Rather, it is an ISP's job to ensure that their customers are using their access in appropriate ways, and that includes ensuring that they're not facilitating unsolicited commercial email.
If they refuse to make changes to their TOS, or refuse to improve enforcement of existing TOS, then blocking traffic is an entirely appropriate means of behavior modification.
It sucks that you'll miss out on your friend's mail - but when they complain that their messages aren't getting through to the U.S., the ISP will quickly adjust their policies. And if they don't, then we were right to block traffic in the first place.
As for using a web-based email service - I get plenty of spam with Yahoo!, Hotmail, etc., despite the filters. And no, I don't publicize those addresses. Besides - allowing my choice of email service (WWW, POP, IMAP, free, pay, whatever) to be dictated by the actions of people sending unnsolicited advertising is unwarranted, because I'm not the person engaging in socially unacceptable behavior.
(the address below is heavily filtered...and some still sneaks through.)