1. Bush tried the inpiring goal bit with his announcement of a "Mission to Mars." Which lasted until he was presented with the price tag on the order of $450 billion dollars. The Mission to Mars did not survive the ongoing crusade of "Tax Freedom", not to mention the expense of the war of Iraq and new military adventures in a "War on Terrorism" which has no forseeable end.
2. NASA's separation from the military is nothing more than a relic of Cold-War propaganda. If you check much of the pre-60's literature, you'll notice a prevailing assumption that the first craft on the moon would bear a USAF emblazon. (all of the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo commanders were Air Force.) For a long time there was government sentiment to simply fold NASA into the Air Force and be done with it. The main reason this was not done was as a PR counter to the Soviets' space program which made no pretense about it being anything but an arm of it's military.
3.What's adequate? The big question is what are you willing to pay for and what do cut? The Apollo and Shuttle programs are chump change compared to the kind of bill a Manned Mars program will run up. And contrary to popular belief, the orginal space program did not return it's monetary value in spinoffs. It paid for itself in delivering our greatest symbolic victory over the Soviets, but not much beyond that. The United States is awash in red ink, trade deficits and social and physical infrastructures which are going to pot, and we have severe energy and economic issues which continue to be deferred. Can you honestly tell the American people that we have a half trillion dollars to throw away on a Mars program with no expectation of significant return?
4.One of the best comments I ever heard about the moon shot was one describing it as a "21st century feat done with 20th century technology." The Shuttle is very much like that. The problem with the Shuttle is very much that of the International Space Station, both very high tech expensive projects looking for missions to solve. ISS was fought by critics that new it would become an orbital White Elephant. What does the Shuttle do that an expendable rocket can't? Ferry large parts up for ISS assembly. What does the ISS do? No one really seems to have come up with an answer that justifies the price tag.
In the end, NASA's mission needs to be defined, or better yet, redefined in today's terms, in realistic manageable goals, based on the pot we're willing to bring to the table. Where we can, we should take advantage of the work of other parties to avoid needless duplication. Invite the China, Japan, and India to participate as partners as we already have with the Russians and the European Space Agency. And maybe recognise that some goals should be left to our children or grand children and devote the resources and leadership to ensure that they have the means to work on their aspirations when they inherit what we leave behind.
Our foremost responsibility as a civilisation and a species is to leave an inheritance worthy of the future. The scorn that we otherwise deserve shall not lighten the consequences if we come up short in this.
The boosters are solid rocket engines, very much like giant roman candles. They're recovered and refurbished for each launch. The only "turbopumps" are within the orbiter itself, the expendable component is literally a large fuel tank.
Then again, Bush who like his father campaigned on "small government" has engineered the largest expansion of government structure since the New Deal in the form of mega-Cabinet Department of Homeland Security.
And no, you don't have much reason to have faith in any of the major parties, Democrat, Republican, or the so-called Libertarians.
Just because the technology isn't common today doesn't mean it isn't feasible. There are many unusual technologies involved in a mission to Mars that aren't attracting your derision.
Logically speaking it's not a truism that was isn't feasible today will be feasible tomorrow, next week, or ever. Yes, I've heard of microwave power satelites, horribly inefficient way to beam energy considering that less than one percent of the energy produced would actually wind up in the receptors. There's also rather unknown environmental and climate effects of effectively "nuking the planet from orbit."
It's one thing for a brilliant mind like Tesla to demonstrate beaming power, making it practical is another trick altogether. So it'd take more than a slight difference, not only in the politics of Con Edison, but the physics of the universe itself.
I'm not sure Harley Davidson is a good example. They don't really compete in the same market they used to. Originally they sold motorcycles competing with foreign makers the way Detroit does with Japan and Europe. But you don't buy a Harley these days unless you long to be a mechanic and have the urgent need to buy an American symbol of machismo. If you view a motorcycle the way others view cars and bicycles as a pratical means of transportation, and don't want a second life as a literal gearhead, you buy anything but a Harley.
It wasn't a switch, we're not mainly creators but outputters and it wasn't that we abandoned Quark we bought InDesign to support InDesign documents by our customers in particular one customer who was going to switch to InDesign for all in-house work and was getting a lot of help from Adobe to do it. However apparantly the product wasn't up to the industrial workload expected from it as the project never got anywhere and the customer instead laid off the majority of their creative workforce.
We still have InDesign, we've had it from 1.0 to the present 2.0.2 versions and we'll keep them updated. But anyone who is used to the level of fine level of editing control that Quark offers could not possibly be happy with InDesign. For that matter Quark running under Classic has worked better for me than InDesign under OS X, but some blame for that does fall to OS X Print Center but that's another thread entirely.
I work at a major pre-press service bureau in Manhattan. We bought InDesign to support any of our customers who switched over or decided to try it out. We used to be 90 percent Quark and 15 percent Pagemaker in regards as files sent to us by clients counting both Mac 90% and Windows users (10)
Now the work is 99+% Macintosh and virtually all Quark with Pagemaker practically extinct. Since we bought our first Indesign license we've had less then 10 documents total sent to us.
InDesign may be doing well at your school but in the real world here in Manhattan it's been virtually a total no-show. And it's no surprise, aside from the fact it's even slower due to being nothing but plug-ins and container and really bites in the print department, InDesign is little more than a bad reincarnation of PageMaker.
Or at least the way it's presented on media. What's packaged as science fiction (particurlarly on a lot of Trek) is essentially wish fulfillment magic dressed up in plastic and silicon. (or just plastic). "The Truman Show" was a better example of Analog style science fiction than virtually any movie broadcast to date.
Science Fiction has always been in the main an outgrowth of fantasy even the so-called "hard" variety. Which is not a criticism of either, just the way I see it.
But you are right, the Buffster was not SF, but then again it was never billed as such.
A price high enough to make such a compensation would essentially doom the product to start. Apple unlike MS is simply NOT a software vender, they make software to sell hardware, much of it like the iLife apps given away to sweeten the appeal of the gadgets. People gripe enough about the price of OS X as it is. Who would buy it at double or triple the price? (and that is a very conservative estimate)
Apple is simply not just set up to do the MS thing at this time. Maybe at some point far down the road, but not now.
As to the first part, it's an open secret that Apple has maintained an unreleased port of OS X that runs on the '86 chip. What may be a possible scenario would be the hybrid machine I mentioned, but OS X on commodity hardware? It's not going to happen for the reasons I stated above.
Apple has been working on an '86 port for quite sometime. In fact the original demonstrations of Rhaposdy, the early version of OS S server were done on Intel boxes. A major sticking point would be the Classic and Carbon applications which are extremely PPC dependent. There were Intel-based emulators that ran Mac OS but were restricted to 8.1 because they only emulated 68k code. The only applications that would make it across easily would be Cocoa-based applications and the big numbers like Photoshop and presumably Quark were/will be done in Carbon. Realistically the only possibility for an '86 port would be on a custom built logic board that would include a PPC chip and support to run Apple's bread and butter apps.
The majority of Apple's revenue is in hardware sales. They lose that, they lose the shirt. It also puts them square in the target sights of the Beast from Redmond, and Apple simply can't play the Microsoft game.
The important major difference here is lack of hardware video support for OS X which would account for much of the drag. OS X on a 233mhz rev A Bondi would probably run circles around an MOL implementation but that should not be any real surprise.
MorphOS is an old name from the latter dregs of the Amiga era, along with the infamous "A-Box". The A-Box was a promised Super-Amiga with all sorts of gee-whiz features for the time that sounded great. Trouble was it was nothing other than vaporware.
The Chuck Jones toons. which included my introductions to classical music; Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig in "Ride of the Valkyries" and Donald Duck in "Swan Lake".
The original Pink Panther SILENT cartoon, which never needed no stinking dialogue!
The badly animated but nicely written Filmation cartoons which included a superior version of Star Trek.
And while not toons, these were part of my weekend staple.
The weekly Abbott and Costello movies on WPIX New York and the Toho Japanese monster flicks with Chiller Theater at night.
.... perhaps. But the Apple Macintosh was founded from day one on the premise of making things easier and more elegant for the user, not three-button hell. Mac apps were designed from the ground up to function with one just one button, with a command key for modifier or the option of keyboard shortcuts for power users. For many this can work a good deal faster and more accurate than a popup right-click.
Also keep in mind that the main reason Apple is not only still on the map but the most talked about comp company today is that they make it a point to do something different instead of sticking to the "long-established"
It was Apple who did the bold and different by chucking out outdated I/0 such as parralel, serial, and floppy. It took the iMac to make the USB something other than a pair of unused ports in the back of your machine. It was Apple that created the MP3 player that not only had the most elegant user interface, fastest transfer rate, but could even boot up your Mac in a pinch!
If Apple were to do as you suggest and stick to "the already long-established" they might as well be Microsoft.. or IBM.
Actually it does browse ftp, only it does it differently. It opens an ftp site as a disk volume on the Desktop. (took me a while to figure that out too.) You can then go through the folders and manipulate things just like a disk volume.
Actually using the ISP's smtp server does not ban you from having your own mail address. Both me and my wife have about a dozen between us including two addresses based on my own domain. (we use different addresses for personal, buisness, gaming, etc.) and we just our ISP smtp server (Earthlink/Mindspring) for outgoing mail.
Heck I rember the real old days on the Internet when we used our floppies to transfer IP packets to each other. (yes someone once actually wrote a driver for floppies to do that. I think it was an Amiga hacker with way too much time on his hands.)
The space ladder is an engaging idea, but it really is a pipe dream, almost in the Ringworld class. When it's still a massive struggle to build a 400 ft weightless framework, how can you seriously consider building something whose length is three times the diameter of the Earth itself? Not to mention that while we can understand how a space ladder will keep itself aloft, we haven't the beginnings of an idea to fulfill these two big blocks.
1, Grounding the ladder in the first place.
2. What kind of material we can use that can hold the thing together.
Space Ladders today are almost as much of the product of fiction as Ringworld. Maybe, someday, our distant ancestors will figure out ways we can't even think of right now. But that is far enough into the future that a Kuiper Express project isn't going to put a significant delay on it. Spending such money on space ladder research will do nothing but throw money down an unproductive hole.
Re:Xerox PARC is not the most friendly place.
on
Dealers of Lightning
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· Score: 1
Well bully for them. Unlike Stanford, PARC is not a college campus, nor it is it a tourist attraction. If Steve Jobs himself couldn't walk in for free, what makes you think you should? And yes, PARC does have company assets that they can't just show any Joe Blow who walks in the street. Not to mention the hordes of geeks that would show up if the idea got around that they could just waltz in the door and be given the grand tour.
On the other hand, writing to them can be productive if you do right.
Indesign has all the feautures that made Pagemaker 6 the success that it is today, such as lack of fine control and an interface that should be sent to the showers. I really wanted something that would be a useful alternative to Quark. InDesign ain't it.
Also to note that unless Apple gets Heisenberg and the other high-end pre-press equipment makers to update their stuff to OS X, and make a vast improvement in OS X network printing, they stand a very good chance of kissing the DTP market goodbye, the last professional sector in which they still have dominance.
As I recall, MS has already sold the bulk of that stock when Apple's stock was at it's peak for about 3x of what they paid for it. Reason that it didn't make a big confidence-killing splash was that they had already announced working on the next versions of Office and had committed to OS X support in the (then) future.
There was a palette of the old pizzabox 6100's at the flea market behind the Trenton Computer Fair (which is now in Edison, NJ in case you went looking:) That palette was more than half way empty on the first day. Wasn't there for Sunday so I don't know how many more went for the price of twenty bucks or so each.
They were right next to the Sun Pizzaboxes which went for as little as 5 bucks each if you bought in quantity.
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1. Bush tried the inpiring goal bit with his announcement of a "Mission to Mars." Which lasted until he was presented with the price tag on the order of $450 billion dollars. The Mission to Mars did not survive the ongoing crusade of "Tax Freedom", not to mention the expense of the war of Iraq and new military adventures in a "War on Terrorism" which has no forseeable end.
2. NASA's separation from the military is nothing more than a relic of Cold-War propaganda. If you check much of the pre-60's literature, you'll notice a prevailing assumption that the first craft on the moon would bear a USAF emblazon. (all of the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo commanders were Air Force.) For a long time there was government sentiment to simply fold NASA into the Air Force and be done with it. The main reason this was not done was as a PR counter to the Soviets' space program which made no pretense about it being anything but an arm of it's military.
3.What's adequate? The big question is what are you willing to pay for and what do cut? The Apollo and Shuttle programs are chump change compared to the kind of bill a Manned Mars program will run up. And contrary to popular belief, the orginal space program did not return it's monetary value in spinoffs. It paid for itself in delivering our greatest symbolic victory over the Soviets, but not much beyond that. The United States is awash in red ink, trade deficits and social and physical infrastructures which are going to pot, and we have severe energy and economic issues which continue to be deferred. Can you honestly tell the American people that we have a half trillion dollars to throw away on a Mars program with no expectation of significant return?
4.One of the best comments I ever heard about the moon shot was one describing it as a "21st century feat done with 20th century technology." The Shuttle is very much like that. The problem with the Shuttle is very much that of the International Space Station, both very high tech expensive projects looking for missions to solve. ISS was fought by critics that new it would become an orbital White Elephant. What does the Shuttle do that an expendable rocket can't? Ferry large parts up for ISS assembly. What does the ISS do? No one really seems to have come up with an answer that justifies the price tag.
In the end, NASA's mission needs to be defined, or better yet, redefined in today's terms, in realistic manageable goals, based on the pot we're willing to bring to the table. Where we can, we should take advantage of the work of other parties to avoid needless duplication. Invite the China, Japan, and India to participate as partners as we already have with the Russians and the European Space Agency. And maybe recognise that some goals should be left to our children or grand children and devote the resources and leadership to ensure that they have the means to work on their aspirations when they inherit what we leave behind.
Our foremost responsibility as a civilisation and a species is to leave an inheritance worthy of the future. The scorn that we otherwise deserve shall not lighten the consequences if we come up short in this.
The boosters are solid rocket engines, very much like giant roman candles. They're recovered and refurbished for each launch. The only "turbopumps" are within the orbiter itself, the expendable component is literally a large fuel tank.
Then again, Bush who like his father campaigned on "small government" has engineered the largest expansion of government structure since the New Deal in the form of mega-Cabinet Department of Homeland Security.
And no, you don't have much reason to have faith in any of the major parties, Democrat, Republican, or the so-called Libertarians.
Chris Burke writes:
Just because the technology isn't common today doesn't mean it isn't feasible. There are many unusual technologies involved in a mission to Mars that aren't attracting your derision.
Logically speaking it's not a truism that was isn't feasible today will be feasible tomorrow, next week, or ever. Yes, I've heard of microwave power satelites, horribly inefficient way to beam energy considering that less than one percent of the energy produced would actually wind up in the receptors. There's also rather unknown environmental and climate effects of effectively "nuking the planet from orbit."
It's one thing for a brilliant mind like Tesla to demonstrate beaming power, making it practical is another trick altogether. So it'd take more than a slight difference, not only in the politics of Con Edison, but the physics of the universe itself.
I'm not sure Harley Davidson is a good example. They don't really compete in the same market they used to. Originally they sold motorcycles competing with foreign makers the way Detroit does with Japan and Europe. But you don't buy a Harley these days unless you long to be a mechanic and have the urgent need to buy an American symbol of machismo. If you view a motorcycle the way others view cars and bicycles as a pratical means of transportation, and don't want a second life as a literal gearhead, you buy anything but a Harley.
It wasn't a switch, we're not mainly creators but outputters and it wasn't that we abandoned Quark we bought InDesign to support InDesign documents by our customers in particular one customer who was going to switch to InDesign for all in-house work and was getting a lot of help from Adobe to do it. However apparantly the product wasn't up to the industrial workload expected from it as the project never got anywhere and the customer instead laid off the majority of their creative workforce.
We still have InDesign, we've had it from 1.0 to the present 2.0.2 versions and we'll keep them updated. But anyone who is used to the level of fine level of editing control that Quark offers could not possibly be happy with InDesign. For that matter Quark running under Classic has worked better for me than InDesign under OS X, but some blame for that does fall to OS X Print Center but that's another thread entirely.
I work at a major pre-press service bureau in Manhattan. We bought InDesign to support any of our customers who switched over or decided to try it out. We used to be 90 percent Quark and 15 percent Pagemaker in regards as files sent to us by clients counting both Mac 90% and Windows users (10)
Now the work is 99+% Macintosh and virtually all Quark with Pagemaker practically extinct. Since we bought our first Indesign license we've had less then 10 documents total sent to us.
InDesign may be doing well at your school but in the real world here in Manhattan it's been virtually a total no-show. And it's no surprise, aside from the fact it's even slower due to being nothing but plug-ins and container and really bites in the print department, InDesign is little more than a bad reincarnation of PageMaker.
Or at least the way it's presented on media. What's packaged as science fiction (particurlarly on a lot of Trek) is essentially wish fulfillment magic dressed up in plastic and silicon. (or just plastic). "The Truman Show" was a better example of Analog style science fiction than virtually any movie broadcast to date.
Science Fiction has always been in the main an outgrowth of fantasy even the so-called "hard" variety. Which is not a criticism of either, just the way I see it.
But you are right, the Buffster was not SF, but then again it was never billed as such.
A price high enough to make such a compensation would essentially doom the product to start. Apple unlike MS is simply NOT a software vender, they make software to sell hardware, much of it like the iLife apps given away to sweeten the appeal of the gadgets. People gripe enough about the price of OS X as it is. Who would buy it at double or triple the price? (and that is a very conservative estimate)
Apple is simply not just set up to do the MS thing at this time. Maybe at some point far down the road, but not now.
As to the first part, it's an open secret that Apple has maintained an unreleased port of OS X that runs on the '86 chip. What may be a possible scenario would be the hybrid machine I mentioned, but OS X on commodity hardware? It's not going to happen for the reasons I stated above.
Apple has been working on an '86 port for quite sometime. In fact the original demonstrations of Rhaposdy, the early version of OS S server were done on Intel boxes. A major sticking point would be the Classic and Carbon applications which are extremely PPC dependent. There were Intel-based emulators that ran Mac OS but were restricted to 8.1 because they only emulated 68k code. The only applications that would make it across easily would be Cocoa-based applications and the big numbers like Photoshop and presumably Quark were/will be done in Carbon. Realistically the only possibility for an '86 port would be on a custom built logic board that would include a PPC chip and support to run Apple's bread and butter apps.
The majority of Apple's revenue is in hardware sales. They lose that, they lose the shirt. It also puts them square in the target sights of the Beast from Redmond, and Apple simply can't play the Microsoft game.
The important major difference here is lack of hardware video support for OS X which would account for much of the drag. OS X on a 233mhz rev A Bondi would probably run circles around an MOL implementation but that should not be any real surprise.
MorphOS is an old name from the latter dregs of the Amiga era, along with the infamous "A-Box". The A-Box was a promised Super-Amiga with all sorts of gee-whiz features for the time that sounded great. Trouble was it was nothing other than vaporware.
The flaw is that once personal data is collected, there is no assurance that it ever goes away.
The Chuck Jones toons. which included my introductions to classical music; Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig in "Ride of the Valkyries" and Donald Duck in "Swan Lake".
The original Pink Panther SILENT cartoon, which never needed no stinking dialogue!
The badly animated but nicely written Filmation cartoons which included a superior version of Star Trek.
And while not toons, these were part of my weekend staple.
The weekly Abbott and Costello movies on WPIX New York and the Toho Japanese monster flicks with Chiller Theater at night.
.... perhaps. But the Apple Macintosh was founded from day one on the premise of making things easier and more elegant for the user, not three-button hell. Mac apps were designed from the ground up to function with one just one button, with a command key for modifier or the option of keyboard shortcuts for power users. For many this can work a good deal faster and more accurate than a popup right-click.
Also keep in mind that the main reason Apple is not only still on the map but the most talked about comp company today is that they make it a point to do something different instead of sticking to the "long-established"
It was Apple who did the bold and different by chucking out outdated I/0 such as parralel, serial, and floppy. It took the iMac to make the USB something other than a pair of unused ports in the back of your machine. It was Apple that created the MP3 player that not only had the most elegant user interface, fastest transfer rate, but could even boot up your Mac in a pinch!
If Apple were to do as you suggest and stick to "the already long-established" they might as well be Microsoft.. or IBM.
Actually it does browse ftp, only it does it differently. It opens an ftp site as a disk volume on the Desktop. (took me a while to figure that out too.) You can then go through the folders and manipulate things just like a disk volume.
Actually using the ISP's smtp server does not ban you from having your own mail address. Both me and my wife have about a dozen between us including two addresses based on my own domain. (we use different addresses for personal, buisness, gaming, etc.) and we just our ISP smtp server (Earthlink/Mindspring) for outgoing mail.
Heck I rember the real old days on the Internet when we used our floppies to transfer IP packets to each other. (yes someone once actually wrote a driver for floppies to do that. I think it was an Amiga hacker with way too much time on his hands.)
The space ladder is an engaging idea, but it really is a pipe dream, almost in the Ringworld class. When it's still a massive struggle to build a 400 ft weightless framework, how can you seriously consider building something whose length is three times the diameter of the Earth itself? Not to mention that while we can understand how a space ladder will keep itself aloft, we haven't the beginnings of an idea to fulfill these two big blocks.
1, Grounding the ladder in the first place.
2. What kind of material we can use that can hold the thing together.
Space Ladders today are almost as much of the product of fiction as Ringworld. Maybe, someday, our distant ancestors will figure out ways we can't even think of right now. But that is far enough into the future that a Kuiper Express project isn't going to put a significant delay on it. Spending such money on space ladder research will do nothing but throw money down an unproductive hole.
Well bully for them. Unlike Stanford, PARC is not a college campus, nor it is it a tourist attraction. If Steve Jobs himself couldn't walk in for free, what makes you think you should? And yes, PARC does have company assets that they can't just show any Joe Blow who walks in the street. Not to mention the hordes of geeks that would show up if the idea got around that they could just waltz in the door and be given the grand tour.
On the other hand, writing to them can be productive if you do right.
Also hardware interface software like LinoColor for the high-end Heisenberg scanners, who've only just acknoweledged System 8 this year.
Indesign has all the feautures that made Pagemaker 6 the success that it is today, such as lack of fine control and an interface that should be sent to the showers. I really wanted something that would be a useful alternative to Quark. InDesign ain't it.
Also to note that unless Apple gets Heisenberg and the other high-end pre-press equipment makers to update their stuff to OS X, and make a vast improvement in OS X network printing, they stand a very good chance of kissing the DTP market goodbye, the last professional sector in which they still have dominance.
If you already have an iTools account the first year membership is only going to be fifty bucks.
As I recall, MS has already sold the bulk of that stock when Apple's stock was at it's peak for about 3x of what they paid for it. Reason that it didn't make a big confidence-killing splash was that they had already announced working on the next versions of Office and had committed to OS X support in the (then) future.
I'm suspecting that Apple is promoting the heck on this relese for a very good reason. It probably will not be released as 10.2 instead, sold as 10.5.
Tradiitionally.5 OS upgrades from Apple have never been free. (7.5, 8.5, etc.)
There was a palette of the old pizzabox 6100's at the flea market behind the Trenton Computer Fair (which is now in Edison, NJ in case you went looking
They were right next to the Sun Pizzaboxes which went for as little as 5 bucks each if you bought in quantity.