You're wrong, Commie_lover...plainly and simply wrong. The poster you are replying to was comparing the Japanese countryside (which is where I happen to live also) to Los Angeles. I originated from the BosWash megalopolis on the opposite coast of the continent.
The large conurbations along America's coasts, combined with the cities clustered near the Great Lakes, account for practically all of the nation's population, with only a handful of outliers like Denver and Dallas-Fort Worth. Sure, running fiber to every recluse in every shack deep in the Rockies and wiring in every survivalist camp in Montana and every religious cult compound in Texas will cost a chunk of change, but providing modern telecommunications infrastructure to most Americans is no special challenge. Just getting the East Coast up to modern expectations would cover more than half of America's population.
The parent poster claims to have been in Japan for three years. That's long enough to notice the differences in business philosophies between here and America. He's probably just too polite to mention them. You get like that if you spend too long here. In Japan, you are expected to provide a fair service or product for what you charge. In America, it is a standard business practice to try to lock in your customers then rape them mercilessly.
Newton/Leibniz and calculus is actually one of the very best arguments for why the individual is unimportant in the larger historical scheme of things. The same technological synchronicity can be seen in a number of inventions and developments, such as atomic energy/bombs, airplanes, telephone, computers, etc.
The thing is, when the precursors to a new technology get developed, the new technology becomes apparent to growing numbers of people until someone develops it.
I remember experimenting with GUIs in my local Atari Computer Club back in 1981 (using light pens instead of mice... light pens were easier to fabricate). People nowadays like to think that Bill Gates invented the Graphical User Interface. Slightly more savvy individuals think it was one of the Steves (Jobs/Woz) who did it. Marginally less clueless folks might think it was Xerox, or IBM or whoever. The fact is that as soon as cheap consumer-grade computers hit the market (mid-late 10970's), GUI controlled operating systems became inevitable. If there was a gang of people in my little backwater town working on the issue, there must have been thousands upon thousands of people experimenting with GUI controls nationwide.
Finally, compared to the technologies upon which it relies (with regards to the Internet), HTML, and, by extension the Web, is trivial. The ONLY important tag in HTML that matters is the link anchor, and this itself had precedents. How long would it have really taken for people to start including the gopher addresses of referenced documents in their documents that they posted on gopher? How long before gopher browsers were developed that could retrieve and display documents that were encoded in standard formats became available? Anyone who remembers using the gopher browser that shipped with early versions of OS/2 knows that gopher could have done the duty of http, given its absence... particularly as a standard document format would have eventually developed to ease spider indexing.
Really, folks, there were a lot of us working on this stuff back then. What we have now is a crude compromise (with Flash cancer), but that we would have a graphically navigable network of documents spanning the globe was never in doubt.
It's inevitable. It would cost more to get Ares I to work than to make new shuttle parts. What about having 1 shuttle launch a year for crew transfer only & what if that freed up enough money for a shuttle derived lunar capability involving half a lunar payload on a shuttle & half on an Ares V.
Can't happen. First, Ares V is too expensive to develop without using Ares I as the stalking horse to get the 5 segment solid booster developed and the new J-2X engine developed.
Second, the bulk of the cost for the shuttle is not in each flight, but in fixed costs. It doesn't really cost much more to launch the shuttle three, four or five times per year than it does to launch it only once. If you are going to maintain the system, you might as well utilize it efficiently.
You're right about the cost of Ares I, though. It can never really be a success, and Griffin doesn't expect it to be. Ares I is just an intermediary step to make Ares V look cheaper.
First of all, Mike Griffin is eager to kill the shuttle NOT because of the money that would free up (icing on the cake), but to burn bridges. You see, NASA was tasked by Congress with creating a new launch system utilizing as much of the STS infrastructure and components as possible, less the orbiter. This was to be a "Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicle", or SDLV. The idea being that the US taxpayers have paid a boatload to develop this system, and that investment shouldn't just be thrown away like the Apollo and Saturn capability was. Making an entirely new spacecraft and launch system would cost on the scale of a new Shuttle or Apollo development effort. There is also the issue of the massive, post-Apollo style brain drain that would occur if NASA killed STS and started something entirely different.
The problem here is that Mike Griffin REALLY WANTS the Ares V BFR, but there is no way that America will pay for that, what with the deficits and war and all. Furthermore, the Ares I and Ares V share NOTHING in common with the shuttle Space Transport System (STS), other than perhaps the orange paint that is used on the shuttle's external tank and (maybe) the steel casings used to make the bodies of the Solid Rocket Boosters (the least valuable components and technology of the STS, btw).
Congress still thinks that the Constellation architecture (Ares I and Ares V) is shuttle derived. Griffin and his accomplices have been misleading Congress for years to keep them believing this lie. Congress is starting to ask questions, however, and if there is a regime change in the US (looks very likely), then it is very probable that the Constellation architecture will get a thorough independent evaluation by some outfit like RAND. This will expose the fact that Constellation is NOT shuttle derived.
So, what is the big deal with shuttle derived? "Perhaps", you think, "Ares is the best that NASA can do right now". Fact is that there are other architectures that more accurately reflect the mandate given to NASA by Congress. One example would be Shuttle-C. Another would be an architecture developed by NASA engineers and contractors while off the clock (an open source-style project, actually) called DIRECT. Direct would cost a fraction of what Constellation is projected to cost, have lower operating costs, and be ready to fly in two or three years. The money freed up could be used to accelerate the development of the Orion capsule and even do interesting things like expand the ISS or do another Hubble maintenance mission. The Direct architecture could even support (relatively) cheap crewed missions to Near Earth Objects, like asteroids.
Griffin is aware of these alternatives to Constellation, and internal NASA studies have shown that Direct, at least, is far superior to Constellation. Being a true Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicle system, as long as STS infrastructure remains, Direct will be a cheap, quick drop-in replacement for Griffin's Big Freakin Rocket. As long as the shuttle exists, Griffin's BFR can be replaced by a real SDLV.
For this reason alone, Griffin wants shuttle dead ASAP. With all alternatives snuffed out, America will have no choice but to cough up the cash for his all new launch system, or so Griffin thinks. He is counting on no one noticing that Orion can ride to orbit on an Atlas or Delta Heavy.
Ares V will NOT get built (too expensive). If the STS is shut down without a reasonable (read: REAL shuttle derived) launch system in its place, NASA will experience crippling layoffs and a huge, post-Apollo style brain drain that will set America back decades in space presence.
The shuttle program needs to be kept alive until Congress realizes just how badly they have been deceived. The STS infrastructure and manufacturing capability and skill base needs to be maintained until its best parts can be rolled into a new, real, Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicle.
Very true. Hubble could have been serviced by Apollo. The Hubble can also be serviced by Orion, though not as part of the Constellation architecture. An Orion riding atop a Jupiter launch vehicle of the DIRECT architecture could do it, however.
OS/2 v1.3 provided preemptive multitasking for the PC in 1991. AmigaOS provided it on proprietary hardware earlier than that. Big iron has supported multitasking for many decades now.
gbjbaanb's point is a good one, however. Specifically, why is a typical contemporary desktop with Vista (and the necessary virus/trojan/spyware apps loaded and running) not significantly more responsive when doing typical tasks like word processing and web browsing than a 386 running Windows 3.1? How many people REALLY need the bloated bells and whistles in Office 2007, and can actually find the particular bell or whistle that they want in a timely and efficient manner? To prove the point to a particular Windows fanboy in grad school, I did all of my word processing on an old 512k Mac through a number of classes. My documents looked just as good, I got better grades, and I likely spent less time editing my papers, so what did XP buy him?
If you look at what could be done on an old Mostek 6502 machine, or a machine based on Motorola's 68000, then what you get today with "modern" apps and OSes is REALLY disappointing when you consider how much more advanced contemporary hardware is. Linux, for all that it is faster and more reliable than anything that Microsoft can produce, is superior not because it has tight and painstakingly optimized code or has brilliantly engineered structure but simply because it doesn't suck as bad.
If Microsoft can be knocked down to about 60% market share and thereby forced to take standards and interoperability seriously, there would be plenty of room for small businesses to develop and market leaner and better engineered OSes, like BeOS, OS/2 or AmigaOS were, and provide competing applications. That could provoke a more general move by the consumer away from mammoth, rapid-application-developed, industrially manufactured, one size fits all mega-applications like Office. Smaller applications with smaller development teams can be more artfully optimized.
In any event, the 901 is plenty powerful. With a trimmed down Linux install, you should be able to keep a few dozen tabs open in your browser, a few documents open in an editor, a chat client running and whatnot while you watch your DVD.
First, the BBC's collective attitude towards China is abysmal. In no other publication have I seen something so obviously two-faced as, on one hand, criticizing the shortages of modern housing in a major city, while in the same issue slamming city officials in that city for trying to expedite permits to build modern housing. WTF? You think you can build some new hi-rise condos in places that will attract people who can afford them without razing a portion of some "traditional" (read: dilapidated) neighborhood? Name a city that has avoided this and you will have found a city that isn't more than a few dozen years old anyway.
As for the hatred of Japan, China and Korea were horrendously treated by Japan. The crimes Japan committed in China, for example, made the very worst behavior of the Nazis seem like simple childish pranks in comparison. Japan's Prime Ministers occasionally offer heavily qualified apologies, while the officially sanctioned history books for Japanese school children continue to paint Japan's occupation of China as being charity for the Chinese people.
Japan has yet to face up to its own history, and until the Japanese do in concrete terms, the Chinese and Koreans are completely justified in treating the Japanese with deep suspicion.
Additionally, it is often hard for people to separate outside criticism of their government from criticism of their country. For a close-to-home example, what happened when the French criticized America's invasion of Iraq? "Freedom Fries" and "Shut up, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys!" When the world's model democracy and shining example of "Freedom" gets it so wrong, how can you criticize the Chinese?
As for Tibet being an "independent" nation prior to 1950, touch up on your history a little. The position of Dalai Lama has been one that was vetted, vetoed or outright appointed by the Chinese government since the position of "Dalai Lama" was created by Kublai Khan in the 13th century. Being that Tibet was "governed" through theocratic feudalism until recently, being able to influence the religious head of the church there gave China all the control they ever needed over the province. However, by the 1950's, it was time to start paving roads, building schools, hospitals, water treatment plants and the like. The feudal theocracy with nominal authority in the region was incapable of accomplishing this, so they had to be removed from direct control. The aristocracy didn't like this, so they rebelled, but failed to attract the support of the Tibetan population, which caused the rebellion to fail miserably, despite financial and strategic support from the CIA. Not wanting to actually, like, get jobs, the former Tibetan aristocracy bolted to India and America, where they've been living on welfare ever since.
It is easy to hate on the player that seems to be the indestructible juggernaut, and from a Western perspective that is what China seems to be. But realize that from the Chinese perspective, they are the underdog struggling against impossible odds and succeeding. The fact is that the Chinese perspective is the more accurate one.
Finally, Western nations conduct espionage against China. ..No one will claim that isn't happening and no one will claim it is wrong. Why get hypocritical and indignant about China doing the same?
Final note: You are right to be worried about unchecked nationalism, but you are wrong to think that China is the major threat to the world because of it. The Chinese have accomplished a great deal and have a right to be proud of their accomplishments, but if you think that their anti-anti Chinese protests are inappropriate, then justify the fact that most of the anti-Chinese protesters in Japan couldn't speak Japanese (or Tibetan) and, likewise, that few of the anti-Chinese protesters at the Olympic torch relay in Seoul, Korea could speak Korean (or Tibetan)? I was at both, and this issue completely floored me. If Americans and Brits are going to go to Japan or Korea to attack China, i
In this time period, Amigas were rendering the graphics for Babylon 5. GEOS was doing everything that Windows 3.1 was doing, only better and on 8 and 16 bit hardware. OS/2 was delivering a "Better Windows than Windows". To this day, if you want to run a Win32s application, you are better off installing OS/2 v3 to run it on than any product from Microsoft.
Yeah, maybe this was a good time for Microsoft, but it was a really bad time for software technology. Tons of fantastic minority players were snuffed so that Microsoft could pretend to meet the needs of everyone. ..poorly.
NT 4 was based upon OS/2 version 1.2. ..look at the two of them, side by side, and it is obvious. That also makes it obvious why NT 4 sucked so bad. The difference between Microsoft's best effort with OS/2 and IBM's first effort there are HUGE. By the time IBM released OS/2 v2.1, EVERYTHING Microsoft was working on was obsolete.
Oh yeah. ..here it is, 2008 and I have yet to use Word or Excel. ..and I am paid to work with computers! How can that be? What can you POSSIBLY do with a computer except work in Word or Excel?
You are a freakin` dumbass. ..just thought I'd mention it.
Is nonsense where Warp is concerned, it was first to market, was simillar in price, and ran the same software. Windows beat it because it was easier to set up, easier to use, and had better marketing. IBM lost fair and square. This is, of course, pure and total BULLSHIT.
When W95 was released, OS/2 installed on more hardware with fewer mouse clicks and keystrokes than Windows 95. Windows "won" because of preinstalls. ..and also because of crappy ad campaigns designed to appeal to morons. People (like you, apparently) thought that Windows was easier to install because they didn't have to install Windows! They never actually had to install Windows, so ANY effort beyond flipping the big red switch was considered too much.
Nice effort, trying to justify your bad decisions years after the fact (when they have started to hurt), but your arguments are bullshit. You bought into a cheezy scam and 13 or 14 years later, you are still trying to defend it. Suck it up, loser.
Dumbass said:
but one of them required users to edit text files on a setup disk to install from a CD and the other didn't. Guess which one won? The one that was preinstalled?
Sure, maybe W95 was Microsoft's best product ever. ..it still sucked hard.
OS/2 was not just a little better that Window 95. ..it was YEARS ahead. Microsoft didn't even start to catch up with 1994 vintage OS/2 until they released Win2k, and in a number of respects, they still have not caught up.
OS/2 users were on the Internet before Windows users even knew it existed. In fact, most Windows users can't even tell you the difference between the Web and the `Net, even now. Essentially, Windows and AOL users were the same crowd. When Microsoft finally patched W95 so that it could get on the `Net, it was like someone had unlocked the gates to the trailer park and all the trash spewed out and polluted the place. Windows users are now, and have always been, the lowest common denominator of computer users.
Sure, this post is flamebait, but these comments about how great W95 was are pure historical revisionism. People need to face up to the facts, stop making excuses for their past stupid behavior and realize that they were suckered by a slick campaign that leveraged their own ignorance against them. They bought the snake oil, and in order to avoid facing the fact that they allowed themselves to be taken by con men, they pretended that the crashes never happened, the maintenance was easy, the performance was stellar, the interface was "intuitive", etc. Like the simple townies in Samuel Clemens "Huckleberry Finn", they were "Sold". They bought into "The King's Camelopard" and the only way to save face was to make sure everyone else was "sold" too. Thus the perpetual and repeating "Windows is GREAT" campaigns, and the "OS/2 is dead", "BeOS is dead", "Macs are dead", "Linux is dying", "The next version of Windows will fix EVERYTHING" campaigns.
Face it, folks, you were "Sold". The next version (or the next, or the next, or. ..) of Windows NEVER delivered what you were promised in 1995. To this day, Microsoft has not delivered what they promised you'd get if you held off committing to an architecture (OS/2) until Win95 shipped. Still, with every version, you bought the hype and then made lots of noise that, unlike the previous version, "This one doesn't suck!" Now, a few years on, you idiot Windows users are claiming that W95 was the best?!?! Perhaps it was the best thing Microsoft ever produced, but it was still garbage and you were all ignorant suckers for buying into it.
You Windows users who are actually old enough to remember Win3.1, yet are still faithful: Tell me how much more 'responsive' Vista is on contemporary midrange hardware (with the required virus scanners, trojan sniffers, malware cleaners running in the background) than Win3.1 was on a 386SX with 1 meg of memory doing typical tasks (editing documents/email, surfing the Web, etc). Actually, don't tell me. ..tell yourself. I already know.
Sure, now you can do stuff like render video animation on a Windows PC. ..stuff people did on Amigas a decade and a half ago. Go ahead and brag about it, morons. You have a one-size-fits-all word processor with tens of thousands of features that almost no one ever uses, but in which it takes you fifteen minutes to figure out how to change the line spacing (BTW, don't bother trying to memorize that sequence of keystrokes and mouse clicks to change the line spacing as the next version of that word processor (which you will be convinced that is an absolute NECESSITY that you have) will have a completely different sequence of keystrokes and mouse clicks to do the same thing).
Sure, bleat that the bandwagon you jumped on didn't turn out to be the right one down the road, but it was a good one at the time. ..You know that's bullshit and I know that's bullshit. Windows has NEVER been any more than what it is now: Barely functional trash. You were scammed, and the scammers co-opted you into defending their scam. Give it up, already, and move on.
Perhaps you misunderstood me. I was referring to emissions, not efficiency. While carbon dioxide emissions are closely related to efficiency, there are many other emissions which are fairly trivial to mitigate at a large fossil fueled stationary power plant, but pose a much more significant technological challenge in light weight, compact, mobile power plants. For example, particulate emissions, non-carbon oxides such as sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides, and other emissions are easily and cost-effectively removed from the exhausts of large power generating installations.
Furthermore, you compare the best case efficiency of small plants (diesels-electrics attaining 30% efficiency) with what is almost the worst case for large plants (45% at the generator and 30% after distribution). This is inappropriate for a number of reasons. First of all, transmission losses only average around 7% in the US. Even with fairly old power stations supplying the electricity this compares well with modern diesel prime movers. Modern power stations, on the other hand, can achieve efficiencies of almost 60% and can scrub the exhaust gasses of practically everything except CO2. Additionally, as you suggest, advanced nations get a fair amount of their electricity from non-fossil fuels. Over 30% of America's base load power generation releases practically no emissions into the atmosphere.
Finally, expecting long haul freight and express passenger service to share tracks is ridiculous. This is only done in the US to maximize utilization of small investments in infrastructure. Even local routes where freight and passenger service may run on the same lines, the efficiency of the system is only lacking with respect to rail transportation on dedicated lines. In the worst case scenario (steam engines on the local lines?) passenger rail will still beat individual vehicles for efficiency and emissions.
BTW, the factor that is driving up SUV use is not fear of commercial vehicles, but rather fear of other SUVs. Commercial vehicles, particularly in the US, are driven by skilled professionals whose actions almost NEVER result in accidents. SUV drivers, on the other hand, tend to be far from professional. Feeling secure in their Hummer, they are comfortable in treating driving as a full contact sport.
Yep, emissions are much lower for rail even if you are only using diesel power units. If you develop your infrastructure to the point where you can use electric locomotives or EMUs, your emissions drop by another order of magnitude and your emissions end up coming from a single, non-mobile, more easily managed location (the electric power generating station).
Trucks can only compete with rail for long haul freight services in the US because much of the nation's rail infrastructure was ripped up over the last hundred years. Now that the heady days of cheap gas and diesel are gone for good, America is faced with rebuilding this strategically critical infrastructure from scratch. So much for letting the Free Market prepare you for the future.
Except for Norway, all other nations that "hunt whales" are simply countries that permit aboriginal peoples to hunt whales using traditional methods for the purposes of sustaining primitive tribal cultures. None of them are operating whale processing factory ships. Norway takes about 500 whales a year, and then only minke whales. Japan wanted to take about 1000 whales this year, but thanks to interference by Sea Shepherd, they likely only caught half that many.
All this discussion of "porting" is really silly. A developer who codes their game for Linux can still have portability even if they dump their graphics straight to the screen buffer and skip Open GL entirely. After all, what is to stop a developer from including their game on some distribution's live CD (or, more likely, live DVD)? Save the step in porting to Windows by just configuring the game to be booted on machines that don't have a supported OS. Linux is free as in beer, so it costs nothing to include a bootable minimal environment on the game distribution media. With a properly optimized mini-Linux environment, the developer can expect their game to run with far more responsiveness and better FPS than under any Microsoft OS ever made. Additionally, booting a stripped down Linux system specifically tailored to the game will likely be only a few seconds longer than the load time of a comparable game under Vista itself.
My point is that "non-scary" countries, such as Japan, also treat their domestic manufacturing facilities as being strategic national assets and protect them from foreign control. This suggests that China's concern about foreign companies having controlling interest in their domestic industries is not something that is a credible source of concern for Americans. ..that is, it is not something to be scared about. Furthermore, you claimed "we're open to their citizens but they are not really open to us". To be certain, America does welcome Chinese tourists and highly qualified immigrants and guest workers. America is very open to Chinese citizens. It can't be denied, however, that China is likewise very open to American citizens. Getting permits to visit, live and work in China is not at all challenging for Westerners. What's more, the Chinese trail only Thailand and Singapore with regards to the friendliness of their people to Western guests in the region, in my experience.
What scares people about China is not that it is getting ahead but that we're open to their citizens but they are not really open to us (for instance, no foreign companies can have more than 49% ownership in a domestic company over there).
This is no different from Japan, the US's chief ally in the region. Why should China let potentially hostile entities own controlling interest in facilities that may have strategic importance for their entire nation? To be honest, it would be really dumb.
Socially, the Chinese are MUCH friendlier and more 'open' to foreigners than are the Japanese. In none of my time in China was I ever made to feel unwelcome, yet it doesn't take long to see through the artificial politeness of the Japanese and start seeing that they are actually thinking "Damn, when will this gaijin get out of my country?".
Since when does developing nano technology require brute force cheap labor and low tech equipment?
Nano Tech will require bright minds and very highend industrial technology. Currently, the US leads China in both fields.
The problem with the "bright minds" that the US leads with is that America doesn't really produce them domestically any more. The US imports most of its bright minds nowadays and from where is it getting a lot of them? China.
Sure, some of those bright minds stay in America after they are sharpened in American universities and steeled in American corporations. ..but quite a few go home too. Think about it. ..you are a smart Chinese engineer with a great idea. Do you stay in America to develop your idea; hiring expensive, dumb-assed, lazy, and worthless trailer park punks to staff your fledgling company or do you go back to China to get the ball rolling? Tough decision, isn't it? Not!
Now, about that high end industrial technology. How far behind the US do you really think China is? (Keep in mind that most of the high tech goodies that Americans like to consume are produced in China). Do you think they are 25 to 30 years behind America? Wrong! Try 3 to 5 years behind - at the best! With a population way over a billion and a university system that is growing at warp speed, China is whittling that lead down fast.
Your national chauvinism likely blinds you to the fact, but China has, so far, reached all of the major technological milestones that they have set for themselves. Your comment about "low tech equipment" also suggests that you have not been there lately. Sure, there are still some places in the hinterlands where farmers continue to use water buffalo to prepare their rice fields, but the same is true for Japan. This is actually a good thing and means that China still has an opportunity to preserve some of their cultural heritage before it fades into history by turning some of these communities into domestic tourist destinations. The rest of China, however, is well into the process of becoming a 21st century megapower. You don't have to like that fact, but it is healthier to come to grips with it.
Now you're talking like a no-good Communist! "Develop infrastructure"? What kind of business model is that? I'll tell you what kind it is! It is the kind of business model that wastes good cash that could otherwise go into the pockets of top corporate officials and shareholders, that's what it is! Down that path lies socialism and corporate ruination! There is NOTHING more important than profits. ..not your porn nor your Linux ISOs nor your legally paid for iTunes media! If your getting 1bit/day throughput is what is necessary to guarantee the profits of your ISP, then suck it up. The 'free market', with all five of its players, will get around to fixing things sometime in the next millennium.
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The large conurbations along America's coasts, combined with the cities clustered near the Great Lakes, account for practically all of the nation's population, with only a handful of outliers like Denver and Dallas-Fort Worth. Sure, running fiber to every recluse in every shack deep in the Rockies and wiring in every survivalist camp in Montana and every religious cult compound in Texas will cost a chunk of change, but providing modern telecommunications infrastructure to most Americans is no special challenge. Just getting the East Coast up to modern expectations would cover more than half of America's population.
The parent poster claims to have been in Japan for three years. That's long enough to notice the differences in business philosophies between here and America. He's probably just too polite to mention them. You get like that if you spend too long here. In Japan, you are expected to provide a fair service or product for what you charge. In America, it is a standard business practice to try to lock in your customers then rape them mercilessly.
The thing is, when the precursors to a new technology get developed, the new technology becomes apparent to growing numbers of people until someone develops it.
I remember experimenting with GUIs in my local Atari Computer Club back in 1981 (using light pens instead of mice... light pens were easier to fabricate). People nowadays like to think that Bill Gates invented the Graphical User Interface. Slightly more savvy individuals think it was one of the Steves (Jobs/Woz) who did it. Marginally less clueless folks might think it was Xerox, or IBM or whoever. The fact is that as soon as cheap consumer-grade computers hit the market (mid-late 10970's), GUI controlled operating systems became inevitable. If there was a gang of people in my little backwater town working on the issue, there must have been thousands upon thousands of people experimenting with GUI controls nationwide.
Finally, compared to the technologies upon which it relies (with regards to the Internet), HTML, and, by extension the Web, is trivial. The ONLY important tag in HTML that matters is the link anchor, and this itself had precedents. How long would it have really taken for people to start including the gopher addresses of referenced documents in their documents that they posted on gopher? How long before gopher browsers were developed that could retrieve and display documents that were encoded in standard formats became available? Anyone who remembers using the gopher browser that shipped with early versions of OS/2 knows that gopher could have done the duty of http, given its absence... particularly as a standard document format would have eventually developed to ease spider indexing.
Really, folks, there were a lot of us working on this stuff back then. What we have now is a crude compromise (with Flash cancer), but that we would have a graphically navigable network of documents spanning the globe was never in doubt.
So.... that means it'll benchmark about the same as a pimped out 486 running DOS?
It's inevitable. It would cost more to get Ares I to work than to make new shuttle parts. What about having 1 shuttle launch a year for crew transfer only & what if that freed up enough money for a shuttle derived lunar capability involving half a lunar payload on a shuttle & half on an Ares V.
Can't happen. First, Ares V is too expensive to develop without using Ares I as the stalking horse to get the 5 segment solid booster developed and the new J-2X engine developed.
Second, the bulk of the cost for the shuttle is not in each flight, but in fixed costs. It doesn't really cost much more to launch the shuttle three, four or five times per year than it does to launch it only once. If you are going to maintain the system, you might as well utilize it efficiently.
You're right about the cost of Ares I, though. It can never really be a success, and Griffin doesn't expect it to be. Ares I is just an intermediary step to make Ares V look cheaper.
First of all, Mike Griffin is eager to kill the shuttle NOT because of the money that would free up (icing on the cake), but to burn bridges. You see, NASA was tasked by Congress with creating a new launch system utilizing as much of the STS infrastructure and components as possible, less the orbiter. This was to be a "Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicle", or SDLV. The idea being that the US taxpayers have paid a boatload to develop this system, and that investment shouldn't just be thrown away like the Apollo and Saturn capability was. Making an entirely new spacecraft and launch system would cost on the scale of a new Shuttle or Apollo development effort. There is also the issue of the massive, post-Apollo style brain drain that would occur if NASA killed STS and started something entirely different.
The problem here is that Mike Griffin REALLY WANTS the Ares V BFR, but there is no way that America will pay for that, what with the deficits and war and all. Furthermore, the Ares I and Ares V share NOTHING in common with the shuttle Space Transport System (STS), other than perhaps the orange paint that is used on the shuttle's external tank and (maybe) the steel casings used to make the bodies of the Solid Rocket Boosters (the least valuable components and technology of the STS, btw).
Congress still thinks that the Constellation architecture (Ares I and Ares V) is shuttle derived. Griffin and his accomplices have been misleading Congress for years to keep them believing this lie. Congress is starting to ask questions, however, and if there is a regime change in the US (looks very likely), then it is very probable that the Constellation architecture will get a thorough independent evaluation by some outfit like RAND. This will expose the fact that Constellation is NOT shuttle derived.
So, what is the big deal with shuttle derived? "Perhaps", you think, "Ares is the best that NASA can do right now". Fact is that there are other architectures that more accurately reflect the mandate given to NASA by Congress. One example would be Shuttle-C. Another would be an architecture developed by NASA engineers and contractors while off the clock (an open source-style project, actually) called DIRECT. Direct would cost a fraction of what Constellation is projected to cost, have lower operating costs, and be ready to fly in two or three years. The money freed up could be used to accelerate the development of the Orion capsule and even do interesting things like expand the ISS or do another Hubble maintenance mission. The Direct architecture could even support (relatively) cheap crewed missions to Near Earth Objects, like asteroids.
Griffin is aware of these alternatives to Constellation, and internal NASA studies have shown that Direct, at least, is far superior to Constellation. Being a true Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicle system, as long as STS infrastructure remains, Direct will be a cheap, quick drop-in replacement for Griffin's Big Freakin Rocket. As long as the shuttle exists, Griffin's BFR can be replaced by a real SDLV.
For this reason alone, Griffin wants shuttle dead ASAP. With all alternatives snuffed out, America will have no choice but to cough up the cash for his all new launch system, or so Griffin thinks. He is counting on no one noticing that Orion can ride to orbit on an Atlas or Delta Heavy.
Ares V will NOT get built (too expensive). If the STS is shut down without a reasonable (read: REAL shuttle derived) launch system in its place, NASA will experience crippling layoffs and a huge, post-Apollo style brain drain that will set America back decades in space presence.
The shuttle program needs to be kept alive until Congress realizes just how badly they have been deceived. The STS infrastructure and manufacturing capability and skill base needs to be maintained until its best parts can be rolled into a new, real, Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicle.
Very true. Hubble could have been serviced by Apollo. The Hubble can also be serviced by Orion, though not as part of the Constellation architecture. An Orion riding atop a Jupiter launch vehicle of the DIRECT architecture could do it, however.
gbjbaanb's point is a good one, however. Specifically, why is a typical contemporary desktop with Vista (and the necessary virus/trojan/spyware apps loaded and running) not significantly more responsive when doing typical tasks like word processing and web browsing than a 386 running Windows 3.1? How many people REALLY need the bloated bells and whistles in Office 2007, and can actually find the particular bell or whistle that they want in a timely and efficient manner? To prove the point to a particular Windows fanboy in grad school, I did all of my word processing on an old 512k Mac through a number of classes. My documents looked just as good, I got better grades, and I likely spent less time editing my papers, so what did XP buy him?
If you look at what could be done on an old Mostek 6502 machine, or a machine based on Motorola's 68000, then what you get today with "modern" apps and OSes is REALLY disappointing when you consider how much more advanced contemporary hardware is. Linux, for all that it is faster and more reliable than anything that Microsoft can produce, is superior not because it has tight and painstakingly optimized code or has brilliantly engineered structure but simply because it doesn't suck as bad.
If Microsoft can be knocked down to about 60% market share and thereby forced to take standards and interoperability seriously, there would be plenty of room for small businesses to develop and market leaner and better engineered OSes, like BeOS, OS/2 or AmigaOS were, and provide competing applications. That could provoke a more general move by the consumer away from mammoth, rapid-application-developed, industrially manufactured, one size fits all mega-applications like Office. Smaller applications with smaller development teams can be more artfully optimized.
In any event, the 901 is plenty powerful. With a trimmed down Linux install, you should be able to keep a few dozen tabs open in your browser, a few documents open in an editor, a chat client running and whatnot while you watch your DVD.
As for the hatred of Japan, China and Korea were horrendously treated by Japan. The crimes Japan committed in China, for example, made the very worst behavior of the Nazis seem like simple childish pranks in comparison. Japan's Prime Ministers occasionally offer heavily qualified apologies, while the officially sanctioned history books for Japanese school children continue to paint Japan's occupation of China as being charity for the Chinese people.
Japan has yet to face up to its own history, and until the Japanese do in concrete terms, the Chinese and Koreans are completely justified in treating the Japanese with deep suspicion.
Additionally, it is often hard for people to separate outside criticism of their government from criticism of their country. For a close-to-home example, what happened when the French criticized America's invasion of Iraq? "Freedom Fries" and "Shut up, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys!" When the world's model democracy and shining example of "Freedom" gets it so wrong, how can you criticize the Chinese?
As for Tibet being an "independent" nation prior to 1950, touch up on your history a little. The position of Dalai Lama has been one that was vetted, vetoed or outright appointed by the Chinese government since the position of "Dalai Lama" was created by Kublai Khan in the 13th century. Being that Tibet was "governed" through theocratic feudalism until recently, being able to influence the religious head of the church there gave China all the control they ever needed over the province. However, by the 1950's, it was time to start paving roads, building schools, hospitals, water treatment plants and the like. The feudal theocracy with nominal authority in the region was incapable of accomplishing this, so they had to be removed from direct control. The aristocracy didn't like this, so they rebelled, but failed to attract the support of the Tibetan population, which caused the rebellion to fail miserably, despite financial and strategic support from the CIA. Not wanting to actually, like, get jobs, the former Tibetan aristocracy bolted to India and America, where they've been living on welfare ever since.
It is easy to hate on the player that seems to be the indestructible juggernaut, and from a Western perspective that is what China seems to be. But realize that from the Chinese perspective, they are the underdog struggling against impossible odds and succeeding. The fact is that the Chinese perspective is the more accurate one.
Finally, Western nations conduct espionage against China. . .No one will claim that isn't happening and no one will claim it is wrong. Why get hypocritical and indignant about China doing the same?
Final note: You are right to be worried about unchecked nationalism, but you are wrong to think that China is the major threat to the world because of it. The Chinese have accomplished a great deal and have a right to be proud of their accomplishments, but if you think that their anti-anti Chinese protests are inappropriate, then justify the fact that most of the anti-Chinese protesters in Japan couldn't speak Japanese (or Tibetan) and, likewise, that few of the anti-Chinese protesters at the Olympic torch relay in Seoul, Korea could speak Korean (or Tibetan)? I was at both, and this issue completely floored me. If Americans and Brits are going to go to Japan or Korea to attack China, i
Yeah, maybe this was a good time for Microsoft, but it was a really bad time for software technology. Tons of fantastic minority players were snuffed so that Microsoft could pretend to meet the needs of everyone. . .poorly.
NT 4 was based upon OS/2 version 1.2. . .look at the two of them, side by side, and it is obvious. That also makes it obvious why NT 4 sucked so bad. The difference between Microsoft's best effort with OS/2 and IBM's first effort there are HUGE. By the time IBM released OS/2 v2.1, EVERYTHING Microsoft was working on was obsolete.
Everything before the IBM release of OS/2 v1.3 was garbage. MS released a version 1.3 of OS/2 also, but it didn't work. Bummer for them.
You are a freakin` dumbass. . .just thought I'd mention it.
When W95 was released, OS/2 installed on more hardware with fewer mouse clicks and keystrokes than Windows 95. Windows "won" because of preinstalls. . .and also because of crappy ad campaigns designed to appeal to morons. People (like you, apparently) thought that Windows was easier to install because they didn't have to install Windows! They never actually had to install Windows, so ANY effort beyond flipping the big red switch was considered too much.
Nice effort, trying to justify your bad decisions years after the fact (when they have started to hurt), but your arguments are bullshit. You bought into a cheezy scam and 13 or 14 years later, you are still trying to defend it. Suck it up, loser.
OS/2 was not just a little better that Window 95. . .it was YEARS ahead. Microsoft didn't even start to catch up with 1994 vintage OS/2 until they released Win2k, and in a number of respects, they still have not caught up.
OS/2 users were on the Internet before Windows users even knew it existed. In fact, most Windows users can't even tell you the difference between the Web and the `Net, even now. Essentially, Windows and AOL users were the same crowd. When Microsoft finally patched W95 so that it could get on the `Net, it was like someone had unlocked the gates to the trailer park and all the trash spewed out and polluted the place. Windows users are now, and have always been, the lowest common denominator of computer users.
Sure, this post is flamebait, but these comments about how great W95 was are pure historical revisionism. People need to face up to the facts, stop making excuses for their past stupid behavior and realize that they were suckered by a slick campaign that leveraged their own ignorance against them. They bought the snake oil, and in order to avoid facing the fact that they allowed themselves to be taken by con men, they pretended that the crashes never happened, the maintenance was easy, the performance was stellar, the interface was "intuitive", etc. Like the simple townies in Samuel Clemens "Huckleberry Finn", they were "Sold". They bought into "The King's Camelopard" and the only way to save face was to make sure everyone else was "sold" too. Thus the perpetual and repeating "Windows is GREAT" campaigns, and the "OS/2 is dead", "BeOS is dead", "Macs are dead", "Linux is dying", "The next version of Windows will fix EVERYTHING" campaigns.
Face it, folks, you were "Sold". The next version (or the next, or the next, or. . .) of Windows NEVER delivered what you were promised in 1995. To this day, Microsoft has not delivered what they promised you'd get if you held off committing to an architecture (OS/2) until Win95 shipped. Still, with every version, you bought the hype and then made lots of noise that, unlike the previous version, "This one doesn't suck!" Now, a few years on, you idiot Windows users are claiming that W95 was the best?!?! Perhaps it was the best thing Microsoft ever produced, but it was still garbage and you were all ignorant suckers for buying into it.
You Windows users who are actually old enough to remember Win3.1, yet are still faithful: Tell me how much more 'responsive' Vista is on contemporary midrange hardware (with the required virus scanners, trojan sniffers, malware cleaners running in the background) than Win3.1 was on a 386SX with 1 meg of memory doing typical tasks (editing documents/email, surfing the Web, etc). Actually, don't tell me. . .tell yourself. I already know.
Sure, now you can do stuff like render video animation on a Windows PC. . .stuff people did on Amigas a decade and a half ago. Go ahead and brag about it, morons. You have a one-size-fits-all word processor with tens of thousands of features that almost no one ever uses, but in which it takes you fifteen minutes to figure out how to change the line spacing (BTW, don't bother trying to memorize that sequence of keystrokes and mouse clicks to change the line spacing as the next version of that word processor (which you will be convinced that is an absolute NECESSITY that you have) will have a completely different sequence of keystrokes and mouse clicks to do the same thing).
Sure, bleat that the bandwagon you jumped on didn't turn out to be the right one down the road, but it was a good one at the time. . .You know that's bullshit and I know that's bullshit. Windows has NEVER been any more than what it is now: Barely functional trash. You were scammed, and the scammers co-opted you into defending their scam. Give it up, already, and move on.
Furthermore, you compare the best case efficiency of small plants (diesels-electrics attaining 30% efficiency) with what is almost the worst case for large plants (45% at the generator and 30% after distribution). This is inappropriate for a number of reasons. First of all, transmission losses only average around 7% in the US. Even with fairly old power stations supplying the electricity this compares well with modern diesel prime movers. Modern power stations, on the other hand, can achieve efficiencies of almost 60% and can scrub the exhaust gasses of practically everything except CO2. Additionally, as you suggest, advanced nations get a fair amount of their electricity from non-fossil fuels. Over 30% of America's base load power generation releases practically no emissions into the atmosphere.
Finally, expecting long haul freight and express passenger service to share tracks is ridiculous. This is only done in the US to maximize utilization of small investments in infrastructure. Even local routes where freight and passenger service may run on the same lines, the efficiency of the system is only lacking with respect to rail transportation on dedicated lines. In the worst case scenario (steam engines on the local lines?) passenger rail will still beat individual vehicles for efficiency and emissions.
BTW, the factor that is driving up SUV use is not fear of commercial vehicles, but rather fear of other SUVs. Commercial vehicles, particularly in the US, are driven by skilled professionals whose actions almost NEVER result in accidents. SUV drivers, on the other hand, tend to be far from professional. Feeling secure in their Hummer, they are comfortable in treating driving as a full contact sport.
Trucks can only compete with rail for long haul freight services in the US because much of the nation's rail infrastructure was ripped up over the last hundred years. Now that the heady days of cheap gas and diesel are gone for good, America is faced with rebuilding this strategically critical infrastructure from scratch. So much for letting the Free Market prepare you for the future.
No, that would be Thermate.
So corruption has become an export commodity for America?
Except for Norway, all other nations that "hunt whales" are simply countries that permit aboriginal peoples to hunt whales using traditional methods for the purposes of sustaining primitive tribal cultures. None of them are operating whale processing factory ships. Norway takes about 500 whales a year, and then only minke whales. Japan wanted to take about 1000 whales this year, but thanks to interference by Sea Shepherd, they likely only caught half that many.
All this discussion of "porting" is really silly. A developer who codes their game for Linux can still have portability even if they dump their graphics straight to the screen buffer and skip Open GL entirely. After all, what is to stop a developer from including their game on some distribution's live CD (or, more likely, live DVD)? Save the step in porting to Windows by just configuring the game to be booted on machines that don't have a supported OS. Linux is free as in beer, so it costs nothing to include a bootable minimal environment on the game distribution media. With a properly optimized mini-Linux environment, the developer can expect their game to run with far more responsiveness and better FPS than under any Microsoft OS ever made. Additionally, booting a stripped down Linux system specifically tailored to the game will likely be only a few seconds longer than the load time of a comparable game under Vista itself.
My point is that "non-scary" countries, such as Japan, also treat their domestic manufacturing facilities as being strategic national assets and protect them from foreign control. This suggests that China's concern about foreign companies having controlling interest in their domestic industries is not something that is a credible source of concern for Americans. . .that is, it is not something to be scared about. Furthermore, you claimed "we're open to their citizens but they are not really open to us". To be certain, America does welcome Chinese tourists and highly qualified immigrants and guest workers. America is very open to Chinese citizens. It can't be denied, however, that China is likewise very open to American citizens. Getting permits to visit, live and work in China is not at all challenging for Westerners. What's more, the Chinese trail only Thailand and Singapore with regards to the friendliness of their people to Western guests in the region, in my experience.
This is no different from Japan, the US's chief ally in the region. Why should China let potentially hostile entities own controlling interest in facilities that may have strategic importance for their entire nation? To be honest, it would be really dumb.
Socially, the Chinese are MUCH friendlier and more 'open' to foreigners than are the Japanese. In none of my time in China was I ever made to feel unwelcome, yet it doesn't take long to see through the artificial politeness of the Japanese and start seeing that they are actually thinking "Damn, when will this gaijin get out of my country?".
Nano Tech will require bright minds and very highend industrial technology. Currently, the US leads China in both fields.
The problem with the "bright minds" that the US leads with is that America doesn't really produce them domestically any more. The US imports most of its bright minds nowadays and from where is it getting a lot of them? China.
Sure, some of those bright minds stay in America after they are sharpened in American universities and steeled in American corporations. . .but quite a few go home too. Think about it. . .you are a smart Chinese engineer with a great idea. Do you stay in America to develop your idea; hiring expensive, dumb-assed, lazy, and worthless trailer park punks to staff your fledgling company or do you go back to China to get the ball rolling? Tough decision, isn't it? Not!
Now, about that high end industrial technology. How far behind the US do you really think China is? (Keep in mind that most of the high tech goodies that Americans like to consume are produced in China). Do you think they are 25 to 30 years behind America? Wrong! Try 3 to 5 years behind - at the best! With a population way over a billion and a university system that is growing at warp speed, China is whittling that lead down fast.
Your national chauvinism likely blinds you to the fact, but China has, so far, reached all of the major technological milestones that they have set for themselves. Your comment about "low tech equipment" also suggests that you have not been there lately. Sure, there are still some places in the hinterlands where farmers continue to use water buffalo to prepare their rice fields, but the same is true for Japan. This is actually a good thing and means that China still has an opportunity to preserve some of their cultural heritage before it fades into history by turning some of these communities into domestic tourist destinations. The rest of China, however, is well into the process of becoming a 21st century megapower. You don't have to like that fact, but it is healthier to come to grips with it.
Now you're talking like a no-good Communist! "Develop infrastructure"? What kind of business model is that? I'll tell you what kind it is! It is the kind of business model that wastes good cash that could otherwise go into the pockets of top corporate officials and shareholders, that's what it is! Down that path lies socialism and corporate ruination! There is NOTHING more important than profits. . .not your porn nor your Linux ISOs nor your legally paid for iTunes media! If your getting 1bit/day throughput is what is necessary to guarantee the profits of your ISP, then suck it up. The 'free market', with all five of its players, will get around to fixing things sometime in the next millennium.