We currently have our multi-core, 64-bit processors and 8+GB of RAM in our computers at affordable prices only because of AMD and Intel rivalry for the almighty dollar. If AMD never existed, Intel would never needed to develop the technology they currently use.
I believe you are unwittingly making the opposite point you were trying to. You are describing the virtues of competition in a free market. This bears no resemblance to the Constellation projects, which are (like the Shuttle) a government run development program. Government is good at stimulating early-stage tech industries with its purchasing power (especially the computing industry, from punched cards to supercomputers), but developing those technologies itself? When has a government ever been good at that?
Compare: Ares was projected to cost in excess of $40B to develop. SpaceX with a few hundred million dollars of funding has developed the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9, both of which have now gone to orbit. We are talking about a few orders of magnitude difference in development cost. Ares would have cost more per pound to LEO than the Space Shuttle it's replacing. Why are people arguing to keep it?
NASA needs to hire companies like SpaceX to get astronauts into orbit. It needs to focus its technologies on what lies beyond: Interplanetary-capable craft, in-situ resource utilization on the Moon or Mars, automated precursor missions, and so on. All of this is consistent with what Obama's proposing. Nobody is proposing the end of manned spaceflight. There's a lot that needs to get done, and shelling out the majority of NASA's budget for a new rocket to get people into Low Earth Orbit, when much cheaper commercial alternatives exist, is a plan only a Senator from Alabama could love.
A person might figure they could afford to hire a couple of engineers who already went through this trial and error.
Two failures on a brand-new launch vehicle is not unusual for any country. These are complex systems operating close to their design limits, and they can only be partially tested on the ground. It's certainly a setback for the Korean engineers, but I would not look at two failures and immediately conclude they lack the right talent.
This is an especially difficult case because none of the components have much flight heritage, which is ultimately how you reduce risk. This is why you see so much re-use in rocket designs in general, especially of high-risk components like engines and avionics.
In many ways it's like software development. Any good developer knows that no matter how smart and experienced the engineers are, new code will almost always have bugs early on. Testing under realistic conditions is the only way to identify them. Unfortunately the only fully realistic test for a rocket is a launch.
I can't tell if you're trolling, but not much of this makes sense.
(a) How does the language of the native API on platform X have anything to do with its "openness"? Yes iOS is objective-C and Android is Java. Openness has everything to do with what you exclude. Anyone is free to deploy a C program to Android, using a C-to-Java-bytecode interpreter for example. The converse is not true for the iPhone, where Java in any form is strictly disallowed.
(b) How can you make statements about Chrome OS, when it isn't even released? Do you have spies inside Google?
(c) Where did Google claim that "Adobe Flash is open"? Either come up with a citation, or admit you're just making shit up.
(d) It was the Manhattan Project that destroyed the PhD brand, if anything the tech companies collectively are restoring it.
Imagine that you're at a cocktail party and someone you know starts slapping his wife around. Do you just say to yourself "Wow.. sucks to be her. I think I'll protest his actions by not shopping at his store anymore" or do you step in
Hmm, I don't know... Yes it can be difficult to witness suffering. On the other hand who are we to impose our Judeo-Christian ethics? What about his feelings? Should we not collectively rejoice in witnessing this self-actualizing exploration of the parameters of his relationship through unconventional modalities? Embracing the Father Figure paradigm and its implied hierarchical subtext of womyn-subjugation and military-industrial supremacy forces us to consider our actions within a broader contextual framework.
I wonder what Google uses for an accounting package? Very hard to find accounting programs that do not require Windows OS.
Corporate accounting? General ledger, accounts payable, that sort of thing? No company of Google's size would do that with a Windows-based application. They would likely do accounting with SAP or Oracle, probably running in a Unix environment of some kind. Both of these have web UIs nowadays, so all the employees who need access can use any OS they want.
The market also feels the fortune 50 company I work at is worth less than our inventory on hand.
What's funny is, I bought Apple stock back in the mid-90s when it was in the same boat. Actually even worse: For a time Apple's market cap was lower than its cash on hand, even if you were to take that cash and use it to pay off all outstanding debt. This doesn't happen too often in the stock market, it's basically the market's way of saying: "give your cash back to the investors and close up shop, before you do any more harm." A vote of absolute no-confidence.
What a difference 15 years makes! I saw about 40x growth in the value of those shares. Unfortunately I was too poor (grad school) to have bought much at the time.
Recently I sold. Jobs's health situation is a concern to me, as was Apple's obfuscation during his serious illness several years ago. See, I don't for a minute doubt that all of that 40x was due to him. The company will be in a world of hurt when he leaves; who else could run it? He doesn't seem like the kind of guy to groom a successor.
Google has really lost theyre way..."do no eval??" Hah! This "PAC MAN' waste everybody time and make big headachs for all users. First China, than this. Shame on you Google!!!
Exactly. I gave up my Dawkins-like hatred for organized religion somewhere in my 40s. I'd rather attract "victims" (heh heh) to critical thought with sweet science than pour vinegar on someone's religion.
The people in the history books who brought about social change were mostly all "obnoxious" in their time (Galileo, Rosa Parks,...). These were people willing to go to the mat for what they believed. Time will tell with Dawkins, but he's certainly brave and I respect that. And there are certainly enough people on the other side willing to sacrifice everything for what they believe.
Uh, what does this have to do with data centers? Last time I checked people use electricity for lots of different things, and there is this cool technology called a grid that's made out of copper that allows you to move energy (in the form of electricity) to any user (within geographical limits) at nearly the speed of light.
I have read all of Zubrin's spaceflight-related books, including The Case for Mars. I agree he's a good writer, and several of his ideas have now become part of the mainstream (ISRU, unmanned precursor missions).
Where I depart from Zubrin is that I don't think there's much value to be gained from a trip to Mars as he envisions it, because his mission ideas aren't conceived with a strategy in mind (or rather, his strategy simply consists of "we want to go to Mars"). Again, we learned from Apollo what happens when you have an isolated mission that isn't part of a larger strategy: It doesn't lead anywhere.
I believe the only real justification for human spaceflight is colonization. That is the goal. Every mission concept and technology investment must be measured accordingly. The question is, if you have a budget of $X billion dollars a year, what activities would you pursue to achieve this goal as quickly as possible?
What I think is easy to underestimate is the difficulty of colonizing space. We haven't even colonized Antarctica, or the deep ocean for that matter. A number of genuine research problems need to be solved first, before colonizing Mars would be practical. To me it boils down to how to best do this R&D. It's not going to get solved by shipping people to Mars and telling them good luck.
A problem with "big" projects like Apollo, Constellation, and so on is that the vast majority of your money goes into solving mundane engineering problems that are important for building a flight-ready system, but from which you don't learn much new. A small fraction of your money goes into high-return activities, like designing high-efficiency engines, testing high-performance materials, or getting experience with alternative spacesuit designs. So from this standpoint the "big" projects are lower-return than smaller, more focused ones.
Perhaps the big projects are needed to sustain public support over the long run? Maybe, but I doubt it. The public gets very interested in low-cost projects like the Mars Exploration Rovers, which told us a lot that will be useful for colonization. I am also encouraged by NASA's recent plans to pursue small-scale technology demonstrations of key capabilities, like ISRU and automated landing. You can gamble and make faster progress on small efforts like this, just as Goddard and the Wright brothers made fast progress by being lean and focused. What is missing today is a way to develop manned spaceflight capabilities in this lean way, without costing $xx billion per project. I think we need new ideas there.
He suggested sustained human presence in Mars, where each crew lives on Mars for over a year, in habitats made on earth. IMO this is not "Apollo sort", quite the opposite.
I call it "Apollo sort" because it's very expensive per person, and nowhere close to economically self-sustaining. I haven't seen any plan from Zubrin or others that costs less than $1B/person/trip. This cost profile isn't politically sustainable for very long. Apollo proved that.
The main purpose of the crew is to find ways to live off the land and as the crew are highly educated scientists and engineers, chances are that they will accomplish a lot.
Learning to "live of the land" on Mars is something we can do far better and cheaper here on Earth. The Martian environment is fairly well-characterized now, and we can build simulated Martian environments on Earth for a tiny fraction of the cost of going there. And for doing your research and testing you have the entire resources of humanity at your disposal. It's just the rational way to go. (This type of R&D hasn't been funded much, but that could change.)
But this does not mean that human space exploration and colonization needs radical new propulsion systems that will always be 30 years from now. We can do this with existing technology.
We've had the technology to go to Mars for a long time. What we can't do without breakthroughs is make it economically self-sustaining. With chemical rockets (Isp around 400 seconds), getting into LEO is marginal: It takes multistage rockets and a very high propellant:payload ratio. With this technology very few people can pay their way into orbit, let alone all the way to Mars.
The proper goal of human spaceflight is colonization, and right now the best investments toward that end are on Earth: (a) better rocket technology, and (b) learning to live (semi) self-sufficiently in the Martian environment.
Zubrin's Mars Direct program was estimated to cost $55B over 10 years, according to the Wikipedia article. Zubrin himself estimated at least $10B in The Case for Mars, if I recall correctly. I suspect both numbers are too low. In any case, it's well over a billion dollars per person using this approach.
Based on the other large-scale human migrations that have occurred in the past, a viable large-scale colonization effort to Mars will not occur until:
The cost to transport a person from Earth to Mars is well within the lifetime earning power of a reasonable number of people
Methods exist to live semi-indefinitely on the Martian surface using resources available there, with very limited material supply from Earth
It's clear that we are far, far away from achieving either of these conditions today. Until then, any human mission to Mars will be of the Apollo sort, and will not result in a vibrant long-term presence. Constellation didn't get us any closer to the above objectives than we are with the Space Shuttle, or Saturn V -- not a step forward in any sense.
We need technologies to radically improve the economics of spaceflight. For lifting vehicles, we need propulsion systems with specific impulse (Isp) in the thousands of seconds, not ~400 as with current high-thrust rockets. Potential technologies for this exist, such as nuclear thermal rockets, but they receive no funding and attention in an environment where nobody cares about the cost of spaceflight.
until we're talking about settling another planet/moon, people in space are just tourists. so why is the government funding it?
Precisely. Why these ex-astronauts feel they can speak with authority on this issue is beyond me. The US spent billions of dollars sending them on a grand adventure, so of course they're in favor of human spaceflight. I don't doubt their courage or abilities, or diminish one bit of what Apollo achieved. But we need to think about what is the eventual end goal toward which we're striving, and I haven't heard Armstrong et al put forth a compelling vision in this regard.
Borrowed time perhaps, but then with old technology the number of interested people goes way down over time too.
The best objective indicator of scarcity is market price. Is there an obsolete technology that is worth more today than it cost originally, in inflation-adjusted dollars? Obviously some cars and comic books are "collectible" in this way. Any technology examples? What would somebody pay for a mint condition Apple ][, or an original arcade game console (Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, etc.)?
A case example would be the Curta mechanical calculator, which has become a hot collectors item due to its uniqueness and interesting history. They sold for $600 fifty years ago, and meanwhile inflation over this period has been around 7.5x. I don't believe these are worth $4,500 today, even in very good condition. Could there ever be a collectible technology, or does demand always fall off faster than the supply of working parts?
Seriously, everything from The Register is -1 Flamebait.
This article consists of:
(a) quoting some guy in Germany who is outraged about something Google is doing, but apparently without any legal or technical basis
(b) misquoting Eric Schmidt
(c) pointing out that Der Spiegel has called Google a "data octopus"
Allegations of being a "data octopus"? This is news?
They're already trying to grab some of Google's ad revenue:
"French President Nicolas Sarkozy is mulling a recommendation to impose a tax on Internet ad revenues in France. The proposal is aimed at helping the French culture industries survive the new digital age. But critics say it is absurd, unworkable and will do little more than prop up failing business models."
...and now you understand why Google has no physical presence in France. Same with Italy. The "failing business model" in this case is a country's leaders thinking they can regulate the internet just as they've always regulated physical goods.
Duh. STFU and just stop peering with them if you don't want the traffic. Of course then your customers won't get anything back when they request pages from Google. Good luck with that. Maybe they'll feel better when you pass along all your network cost savings to them. Right.
Bullshit PR aside, the facts are plain: Your continuing to peer with Google is proof you believe you derive positive economic value by serving Google's content. Given this reality, maybe now you can explain carefully why Google owes you something?
And when you're done answering that question, how about this one: Why is it that with TV distribution it's the cable providers paying the content providers, not vice versa as you'd propose Google do? Why shouldn't you be owing them money, for turning your dumb pipes into something people will pay $50 a month for?
This is journalism? Does the Financial Times just run press releases now?
I agree Apple farmed out too much of it, and it will be hard for them to maintain control. The Google Voice incident shows they understand the dynamic very well.
The trend is that a lot of the functionality is migrating off the device and into the cloud (so to speak): Maps, turn-by-turn navigation, voice recognition, etc. Apple has shown they can do content distribution online (iTMS), but they have never done a really hard-to-build online service like search or voice recognition. These are problems that take sustained R&D over years and lots of smart CS types, and I don't believe it's in Apple's DNA to do them well. They don't have enough CS types in positions of leadership, and Apple's culture of extreme secrecy is generally a turnoff to the brightest engineers.
Regarding TFA, it's easy to lowball how difficult it is to build a Google-class search engine. Yes, Google looks simple, and given a few engineers you can get a basic search engine running. But to really compete with Google you'll have to address all the same problems of ranking, spam, relevance, user intent, freshness, and so on -- hard problems with no shortcuts, where the only approach is years of sustained effort. Interestingly even ex-Google people (cf Cuil) can be deceived into thinking it's easier than it really is.
Not surprisingly, higher SAT scores correlate with a higher eventual annual income, something to the tune of $20k/yr per 40 points in the combined SAT score (critical reading + math + writing). Assuming wages increase at the inflation rate of 3%, income is earned from ages 23 through 65, and a discount rate of 10%, the average additional lifetime earning potential of +100 points equates to $162k in present dollars.
Obviously not all eggs result in a baby; only about 10% of eggs result in a live birth. Even so, the economic value of higher SAT scores makes the $2350 look pretty trivial.
As for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine discouraging "compensation based on donors' personal characteristics"...well, they're exactly not raising my kid are they?
It's easy to read this as nickle-and-diming, but I see it as a redefinition of what a "demo" is. The problem today is that many games now cost $50M+ to develop -- similar to Hollywood movies -- which from a commercial standpoint is a big risk and leads to mostly sequels and derivative gameplay. An approach like this allows developers to test the waters and reduce investment risk, which for gamers should result in more investment, more games, and a greater diversity of gameplay.
Portal shows what this could do. Valve was able to test the waters by piggybacking the game onto the Orange Box, and later as a $10-15 download. This success has led them to develop Portal 2, which will presumably be a bigger game (read: more expensive to develop) but will have a known big audience in spite of its funky premise. Portal would probably never happen if it were a $50M development project from the start.
An interesting question is whether a similar model would ever be applied in Hollywood, i.e. produce a made-for-DVD film for $5M, as a way to test the waters for a full $100M+ production. It seems to me the games industry is well ahead of Hollywood in using digital distribution to its advantage.
The real casualty of these actions is China's long-term economic future. A growing number of multinational companies have gotten bruised trying to legitimately do business in China, and this will surely influence other companies' decisions in the future. It amounts to a form of protectionism, which to first order sounds good (gives a leg up to the local competition), but ultimately causes stagnation and a low influx of new ideas. These types of actions contribute to a general perception that China is a business-unfriendly environment for non-domestic companies. If history is any guide, donning the golden straitjacket is an important step toward Western-level prosperity. Perhaps the Chinese leaders feel China is different, by virtue of size or culture.
Phase 2 of this type of service would be the Netflix strategy: Get the "adapter" embedded into as many TV-connected devices as possible. Cable boxes, Blu-Ray/DVD players, even TVs themselves. You could pull in a huge number of potential gamers if the service was simply a part of the hardware they already own (...and if it's cheap and easy to try). Imagine the potential market for a game like World of Warcraft, if literally anyone with an enabled TV could try it free for an hour, with no hardware or shrink-wrapped game to buy.
People that are inclined to play PC games already have hardware that can handle it.
I think you suffer from observer bias. There is a huge market out there for fun games that are quick and easy to play, where performance is secondary. Look at pretty much any Wii game, or a game like Farmville, or anything on the iPhone. The revenue from these games is enormous. The people who play them won't go out of their way to buy a gaming PC. They have never heard of NewEgg, or Frys. Many have no idea what a video card is. They probably have a $400 underpowered laptop with integrated graphics. They definitely aren't willing to shell out $65 for the latest game, sight unseen. State of the art games make no revenue from this casual gaming crowd today, and services like this potentially give them a way to do so. Don't view this as the same product delivered in a different way (like Steam); this is a fundamentally different product, with a different target market.
I think a big factor in their potential success is how cheap and easy is it to try out. If they can keep the up-front costs low (or zero) so the casual gamers can get a taste, they may be able to convince a good number of them to spend $30+ a month for the service. But the key is it's got to be cheap and easy to try, to get people hooked (a formula that's worked for Farmville, and many iPhone/XBox Arcade games with free trials). To me the $15 up-front commitment is a problem.
The following is my personal experience with the Dvorak layout. I've always been a fast qwerty typist, around 120 wpm if I focus on it. In grad school, because of some wrist pain -- and out of curiosity too -- I decided to switch to Dvorak. After a few weeks of consistent practice I was back up to around 80-90 wpm, then gradually got about equivalent to my speed at qwerty. In a nutshell I find the claims that Dvorak is faster than qwerty to be very plausible, if the task is transcribing English text. For English text Dvorak has a more efficient placement of keys, resulting in noticeably less hand movement than when typing with qwerty.
That said, I found Dvorak didn't help much in practice, and in many ways was an annoyance. Three factors primarily limit the "real world" benefit of Dvorak, if the goal is simply speed:
1) If you compose as you type -- rather than transcribe text like a secretary in the 1950s -- then you probably can't compose text at better than 50-60 wpm anyway. If you're faster than this with qwerty, you probably aren't going to see much real benefit with Dvorak, since your composition speed is the limiting factor. (perhaps I'm a slow thinker...)
2) Often the stuff I type isn't vanilla English text, for which Dvorak is optimized. Programming or LaTeX for example have such unusual letter frequencies that there is no discernible difference between qwerty and Dvorak (both are suboptimal for these tasks).
3) Keyboard shortcuts in programs become super-annoying with Dvorak. Ctrl-C, ctrl-x, ctrl-v, shift-zz: All of these were chosen to be quick and easy on a qwerty keyboard. Under Dvorak they get mapped into inconvenient locations. Yes you can define a keymap that maps back to qwerty when you press the control key, but after a while you forget the qwerty layout and you get lost. I never found a good solution to this problem, which was annoying because I found myself using keyboard shortcuts less frequently than I otherwise would.
There may be ergonomic reasons for Dvorak (I don't know), but it sounds like that's not your issue.
Ok, I give. You're right, there is no one perfect hardware for everyone. About the display, the N1 has better contrast (OLED generally gives blacker blacks), 2x the resolution (pretty useful for web browsing), and lower power consumption.
Looking around, I found a recent technical performance comparison of the N1 and iPhone 3GS displays, which is quite critical of the N1. I have both phones and I don't perceive the flaws they find in the N1's display, but I know it's hard to see many of these flaws under normal use. To an iPhone user the resolution and contrast certainly pop out at you when you see the N1 display.
Slashdot Mirror
We currently have our multi-core, 64-bit processors and 8+GB of RAM in our computers at affordable prices only because of AMD and Intel rivalry for the almighty dollar. If AMD never existed, Intel would never needed to develop the technology they currently use.
I believe you are unwittingly making the opposite point you were trying to. You are describing the virtues of competition in a free market. This bears no resemblance to the Constellation projects, which are (like the Shuttle) a government run development program. Government is good at stimulating early-stage tech industries with its purchasing power (especially the computing industry, from punched cards to supercomputers), but developing those technologies itself? When has a government ever been good at that?
Compare: Ares was projected to cost in excess of $40B to develop. SpaceX with a few hundred million dollars of funding has developed the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9, both of which have now gone to orbit. We are talking about a few orders of magnitude difference in development cost. Ares would have cost more per pound to LEO than the Space Shuttle it's replacing. Why are people arguing to keep it?
NASA needs to hire companies like SpaceX to get astronauts into orbit. It needs to focus its technologies on what lies beyond: Interplanetary-capable craft, in-situ resource utilization on the Moon or Mars, automated precursor missions, and so on. All of this is consistent with what Obama's proposing. Nobody is proposing the end of manned spaceflight. There's a lot that needs to get done, and shelling out the majority of NASA's budget for a new rocket to get people into Low Earth Orbit, when much cheaper commercial alternatives exist, is a plan only a Senator from Alabama could love.
A person might figure they could afford to hire a couple of engineers who already went through this trial and error.
Two failures on a brand-new launch vehicle is not unusual for any country. These are complex systems operating close to their design limits, and they can only be partially tested on the ground. It's certainly a setback for the Korean engineers, but I would not look at two failures and immediately conclude they lack the right talent.
This is an especially difficult case because none of the components have much flight heritage, which is ultimately how you reduce risk. This is why you see so much re-use in rocket designs in general, especially of high-risk components like engines and avionics.
In many ways it's like software development. Any good developer knows that no matter how smart and experienced the engineers are, new code will almost always have bugs early on. Testing under realistic conditions is the only way to identify them. Unfortunately the only fully realistic test for a rocket is a launch.
I can't tell if you're trolling, but not much of this makes sense.
(a) How does the language of the native API on platform X have anything to do with its "openness"? Yes iOS is objective-C and Android is Java. Openness has everything to do with what you exclude. Anyone is free to deploy a C program to Android, using a C-to-Java-bytecode interpreter for example. The converse is not true for the iPhone, where Java in any form is strictly disallowed.
(b) How can you make statements about Chrome OS, when it isn't even released? Do you have spies inside Google?
(c) Where did Google claim that "Adobe Flash is open"? Either come up with a citation, or admit you're just making shit up.
(d) It was the Manhattan Project that destroyed the PhD brand, if anything the tech companies collectively are restoring it.
Imagine that you're at a cocktail party and someone you know starts slapping his wife around. Do you just say to yourself "Wow.. sucks to be her. I think I'll protest his actions by not shopping at his store anymore" or do you step in
Hmm, I don't know... Yes it can be difficult to witness suffering. On the other hand who are we to impose our Judeo-Christian ethics? What about his feelings? Should we not collectively rejoice in witnessing this self-actualizing exploration of the parameters of his relationship through unconventional modalities? Embracing the Father Figure paradigm and its implied hierarchical subtext of womyn-subjugation and military-industrial supremacy forces us to consider our actions within a broader contextual framework.
I wonder what Google uses for an accounting package? Very hard to find accounting programs that do not require Windows OS.
Corporate accounting? General ledger, accounts payable, that sort of thing? No company of Google's size would do that with a Windows-based application. They would likely do accounting with SAP or Oracle, probably running in a Unix environment of some kind. Both of these have web UIs nowadays, so all the employees who need access can use any OS they want.
The market also feels the fortune 50 company I work at is worth less than our inventory on hand.
What's funny is, I bought Apple stock back in the mid-90s when it was in the same boat. Actually even worse: For a time Apple's market cap was lower than its cash on hand, even if you were to take that cash and use it to pay off all outstanding debt. This doesn't happen too often in the stock market, it's basically the market's way of saying: "give your cash back to the investors and close up shop, before you do any more harm." A vote of absolute no-confidence.
What a difference 15 years makes! I saw about 40x growth in the value of those shares. Unfortunately I was too poor (grad school) to have bought much at the time.
Recently I sold. Jobs's health situation is a concern to me, as was Apple's obfuscation during his serious illness several years ago. See, I don't for a minute doubt that all of that 40x was due to him. The company will be in a world of hurt when he leaves; who else could run it? He doesn't seem like the kind of guy to groom a successor.
Google has really lost theyre way..."do no eval??" Hah! This "PAC MAN' waste everybody time and make big headachs for all users. First China, than this. Shame on you Google!!!
Exactly. I gave up my Dawkins-like hatred for organized religion somewhere in my 40s. I'd rather attract "victims" (heh heh) to critical thought with sweet science than pour vinegar on someone's religion.
The people in the history books who brought about social change were mostly all "obnoxious" in their time (Galileo, Rosa Parks, ...). These were people willing to go to the mat for what they believed. Time will tell with Dawkins, but he's certainly brave and I respect that. And there are certainly enough people on the other side willing to sacrifice everything for what they believe.
Uh, what does this have to do with data centers? Last time I checked people use electricity for lots of different things, and there is this cool technology called a grid that's made out of copper that allows you to move energy (in the form of electricity) to any user (within geographical limits) at nearly the speed of light.
Oh yeah, marketing BS. Forgot about that.
I have read all of Zubrin's spaceflight-related books, including The Case for Mars. I agree he's a good writer, and several of his ideas have now become part of the mainstream (ISRU, unmanned precursor missions).
Where I depart from Zubrin is that I don't think there's much value to be gained from a trip to Mars as he envisions it, because his mission ideas aren't conceived with a strategy in mind (or rather, his strategy simply consists of "we want to go to Mars"). Again, we learned from Apollo what happens when you have an isolated mission that isn't part of a larger strategy: It doesn't lead anywhere.
I believe the only real justification for human spaceflight is colonization. That is the goal. Every mission concept and technology investment must be measured accordingly. The question is, if you have a budget of $X billion dollars a year, what activities would you pursue to achieve this goal as quickly as possible?
What I think is easy to underestimate is the difficulty of colonizing space. We haven't even colonized Antarctica, or the deep ocean for that matter. A number of genuine research problems need to be solved first, before colonizing Mars would be practical. To me it boils down to how to best do this R&D. It's not going to get solved by shipping people to Mars and telling them good luck.
A problem with "big" projects like Apollo, Constellation, and so on is that the vast majority of your money goes into solving mundane engineering problems that are important for building a flight-ready system, but from which you don't learn much new. A small fraction of your money goes into high-return activities, like designing high-efficiency engines, testing high-performance materials, or getting experience with alternative spacesuit designs. So from this standpoint the "big" projects are lower-return than smaller, more focused ones.
Perhaps the big projects are needed to sustain public support over the long run? Maybe, but I doubt it. The public gets very interested in low-cost projects like the Mars Exploration Rovers, which told us a lot that will be useful for colonization. I am also encouraged by NASA's recent plans to pursue small-scale technology demonstrations of key capabilities, like ISRU and automated landing. You can gamble and make faster progress on small efforts like this, just as Goddard and the Wright brothers made fast progress by being lean and focused. What is missing today is a way to develop manned spaceflight capabilities in this lean way, without costing $xx billion per project. I think we need new ideas there.
He suggested sustained human presence in Mars, where each crew lives on Mars for over a year, in habitats made on earth. IMO this is not "Apollo sort", quite the opposite.
I call it "Apollo sort" because it's very expensive per person, and nowhere close to economically self-sustaining. I haven't seen any plan from Zubrin or others that costs less than $1B/person/trip. This cost profile isn't politically sustainable for very long. Apollo proved that.
The main purpose of the crew is to find ways to live off the land and as the crew are highly educated scientists and engineers, chances are that they will accomplish a lot.
Learning to "live of the land" on Mars is something we can do far better and cheaper here on Earth. The Martian environment is fairly well-characterized now, and we can build simulated Martian environments on Earth for a tiny fraction of the cost of going there. And for doing your research and testing you have the entire resources of humanity at your disposal. It's just the rational way to go. (This type of R&D hasn't been funded much, but that could change.)
But this does not mean that human space exploration and colonization needs radical new propulsion systems that will always be 30 years from now. We can do this with existing technology.
We've had the technology to go to Mars for a long time. What we can't do without breakthroughs is make it economically self-sustaining. With chemical rockets (Isp around 400 seconds), getting into LEO is marginal: It takes multistage rockets and a very high propellant:payload ratio. With this technology very few people can pay their way into orbit, let alone all the way to Mars.
The proper goal of human spaceflight is colonization, and right now the best investments toward that end are on Earth: (a) better rocket technology, and (b) learning to live (semi) self-sufficiently in the Martian environment.
Wrong. Look up "The case for mars" by Zubrin.
Zubrin's Mars Direct program was estimated to cost $55B over 10 years, according to the Wikipedia article. Zubrin himself estimated at least $10B in The Case for Mars, if I recall correctly. I suspect both numbers are too low. In any case, it's well over a billion dollars per person using this approach.
Based on the other large-scale human migrations that have occurred in the past, a viable large-scale colonization effort to Mars will not occur until:
It's clear that we are far, far away from achieving either of these conditions today. Until then, any human mission to Mars will be of the Apollo sort, and will not result in a vibrant long-term presence. Constellation didn't get us any closer to the above objectives than we are with the Space Shuttle, or Saturn V -- not a step forward in any sense.
We need technologies to radically improve the economics of spaceflight. For lifting vehicles, we need propulsion systems with specific impulse (Isp) in the thousands of seconds, not ~400 as with current high-thrust rockets. Potential technologies for this exist, such as nuclear thermal rockets, but they receive no funding and attention in an environment where nobody cares about the cost of spaceflight.
until we're talking about settling another planet/moon, people in space are just tourists. so why is the government funding it?
Precisely. Why these ex-astronauts feel they can speak with authority on this issue is beyond me. The US spent billions of dollars sending them on a grand adventure, so of course they're in favor of human spaceflight. I don't doubt their courage or abilities, or diminish one bit of what Apollo achieved. But we need to think about what is the eventual end goal toward which we're striving, and I haven't heard Armstrong et al put forth a compelling vision in this regard.
Borrowed time perhaps, but then with old technology the number of interested people goes way down over time too.
The best objective indicator of scarcity is market price. Is there an obsolete technology that is worth more today than it cost originally, in inflation-adjusted dollars? Obviously some cars and comic books are "collectible" in this way. Any technology examples? What would somebody pay for a mint condition Apple ][, or an original arcade game console (Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, etc.)?
A case example would be the Curta mechanical calculator, which has become a hot collectors item due to its uniqueness and interesting history. They sold for $600 fifty years ago, and meanwhile inflation over this period has been around 7.5x. I don't believe these are worth $4,500 today, even in very good condition. Could there ever be a collectible technology, or does demand always fall off faster than the supply of working parts?
Seriously, everything from The Register is -1 Flamebait.
This article consists of:
(a) quoting some guy in Germany who is outraged about something Google is doing, but apparently without any legal or technical basis
(b) misquoting Eric Schmidt
(c) pointing out that Der Spiegel has called Google a "data octopus"
Allegations of being a "data octopus"? This is news?
...and now you understand why Google has no physical presence in France. Same with Italy. The "failing business model" in this case is a country's leaders thinking they can regulate the internet just as they've always regulated physical goods.
Duh. STFU and just stop peering with them if you don't want the traffic. Of course then your customers won't get anything back when they request pages from Google. Good luck with that. Maybe they'll feel better when you pass along all your network cost savings to them. Right.
Bullshit PR aside, the facts are plain: Your continuing to peer with Google is proof you believe you derive positive economic value by serving Google's content. Given this reality, maybe now you can explain carefully why Google owes you something?
And when you're done answering that question, how about this one: Why is it that with TV distribution it's the cable providers paying the content providers, not vice versa as you'd propose Google do? Why shouldn't you be owing them money, for turning your dumb pipes into something people will pay $50 a month for?
This is journalism? Does the Financial Times just run press releases now?
I agree Apple farmed out too much of it, and it will be hard for them to maintain control. The Google Voice incident shows they understand the dynamic very well.
The trend is that a lot of the functionality is migrating off the device and into the cloud (so to speak): Maps, turn-by-turn navigation, voice recognition, etc. Apple has shown they can do content distribution online (iTMS), but they have never done a really hard-to-build online service like search or voice recognition. These are problems that take sustained R&D over years and lots of smart CS types, and I don't believe it's in Apple's DNA to do them well. They don't have enough CS types in positions of leadership, and Apple's culture of extreme secrecy is generally a turnoff to the brightest engineers.
Regarding TFA, it's easy to lowball how difficult it is to build a Google-class search engine. Yes, Google looks simple, and given a few engineers you can get a basic search engine running. But to really compete with Google you'll have to address all the same problems of ranking, spam, relevance, user intent, freshness, and so on -- hard problems with no shortcuts, where the only approach is years of sustained effort. Interestingly even ex-Google people (cf Cuil) can be deceived into thinking it's easier than it really is.
Not surprisingly, higher SAT scores correlate with a higher eventual annual income, something to the tune of $20k/yr per 40 points in the combined SAT score (critical reading + math + writing). Assuming wages increase at the inflation rate of 3%, income is earned from ages 23 through 65, and a discount rate of 10%, the average additional lifetime earning potential of +100 points equates to $162k in present dollars.
Obviously not all eggs result in a baby; only about 10% of eggs result in a live birth. Even so, the economic value of higher SAT scores makes the $2350 look pretty trivial.
As for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine discouraging "compensation based on donors' personal characteristics"...well, they're exactly not raising my kid are they?
It's easy to read this as nickle-and-diming, but I see it as a redefinition of what a "demo" is. The problem today is that many games now cost $50M+ to develop -- similar to Hollywood movies -- which from a commercial standpoint is a big risk and leads to mostly sequels and derivative gameplay. An approach like this allows developers to test the waters and reduce investment risk, which for gamers should result in more investment, more games, and a greater diversity of gameplay.
Portal shows what this could do. Valve was able to test the waters by piggybacking the game onto the Orange Box, and later as a $10-15 download. This success has led them to develop Portal 2, which will presumably be a bigger game (read: more expensive to develop) but will have a known big audience in spite of its funky premise. Portal would probably never happen if it were a $50M development project from the start.
An interesting question is whether a similar model would ever be applied in Hollywood, i.e. produce a made-for-DVD film for $5M, as a way to test the waters for a full $100M+ production. It seems to me the games industry is well ahead of Hollywood in using digital distribution to its advantage.
The real casualty of these actions is China's long-term economic future. A growing number of multinational companies have gotten bruised trying to legitimately do business in China, and this will surely influence other companies' decisions in the future. It amounts to a form of protectionism, which to first order sounds good (gives a leg up to the local competition), but ultimately causes stagnation and a low influx of new ideas. These types of actions contribute to a general perception that China is a business-unfriendly environment for non-domestic companies. If history is any guide, donning the golden straitjacket is an important step toward Western-level prosperity. Perhaps the Chinese leaders feel China is different, by virtue of size or culture.
(replying to myself, hit submit too early)
Phase 2 of this type of service would be the Netflix strategy: Get the "adapter" embedded into as many TV-connected devices as possible. Cable boxes, Blu-Ray/DVD players, even TVs themselves. You could pull in a huge number of potential gamers if the service was simply a part of the hardware they already own (...and if it's cheap and easy to try). Imagine the potential market for a game like World of Warcraft, if literally anyone with an enabled TV could try it free for an hour, with no hardware or shrink-wrapped game to buy.
I think you suffer from observer bias. There is a huge market out there for fun games that are quick and easy to play, where performance is secondary. Look at pretty much any Wii game, or a game like Farmville, or anything on the iPhone. The revenue from these games is enormous. The people who play them won't go out of their way to buy a gaming PC. They have never heard of NewEgg, or Frys. Many have no idea what a video card is. They probably have a $400 underpowered laptop with integrated graphics. They definitely aren't willing to shell out $65 for the latest game, sight unseen. State of the art games make no revenue from this casual gaming crowd today, and services like this potentially give them a way to do so. Don't view this as the same product delivered in a different way (like Steam); this is a fundamentally different product, with a different target market.
I think a big factor in their potential success is how cheap and easy is it to try out. If they can keep the up-front costs low (or zero) so the casual gamers can get a taste, they may be able to convince a good number of them to spend $30+ a month for the service. But the key is it's got to be cheap and easy to try, to get people hooked (a formula that's worked for Farmville, and many iPhone/XBox Arcade games with free trials). To me the $15 up-front commitment is a problem.
The following is my personal experience with the Dvorak layout. I've always been a fast qwerty typist, around 120 wpm if I focus on it. In grad school, because of some wrist pain -- and out of curiosity too -- I decided to switch to Dvorak. After a few weeks of consistent practice I was back up to around 80-90 wpm, then gradually got about equivalent to my speed at qwerty. In a nutshell I find the claims that Dvorak is faster than qwerty to be very plausible, if the task is transcribing English text. For English text Dvorak has a more efficient placement of keys, resulting in noticeably less hand movement than when typing with qwerty.
That said, I found Dvorak didn't help much in practice, and in many ways was an annoyance. Three factors primarily limit the "real world" benefit of Dvorak, if the goal is simply speed:
1) If you compose as you type -- rather than transcribe text like a secretary in the 1950s -- then you probably can't compose text at better than 50-60 wpm anyway. If you're faster than this with qwerty, you probably aren't going to see much real benefit with Dvorak, since your composition speed is the limiting factor. (perhaps I'm a slow thinker...)
2) Often the stuff I type isn't vanilla English text, for which Dvorak is optimized. Programming or LaTeX for example have such unusual letter frequencies that there is no discernible difference between qwerty and Dvorak (both are suboptimal for these tasks).
3) Keyboard shortcuts in programs become super-annoying with Dvorak. Ctrl-C, ctrl-x, ctrl-v, shift-zz: All of these were chosen to be quick and easy on a qwerty keyboard. Under Dvorak they get mapped into inconvenient locations. Yes you can define a keymap that maps back to qwerty when you press the control key, but after a while you forget the qwerty layout and you get lost. I never found a good solution to this problem, which was annoying because I found myself using keyboard shortcuts less frequently than I otherwise would.
There may be ergonomic reasons for Dvorak (I don't know), but it sounds like that's not your issue.
Ok, I give. You're right, there is no one perfect hardware for everyone. About the display, the N1 has better contrast (OLED generally gives blacker blacks), 2x the resolution (pretty useful for web browsing), and lower power consumption.
Looking around, I found a recent technical performance comparison of the N1 and iPhone 3GS displays, which is quite critical of the N1. I have both phones and I don't perceive the flaws they find in the N1's display, but I know it's hard to see many of these flaws under normal use. To an iPhone user the resolution and contrast certainly pop out at you when you see the N1 display.