"Your type of thinking is what is killing manned space exploration. Yea, I think I'll stick to being considered a "would-be space-cadet", thank you. Where's your sense of vision, and exploration, or even science for that matter? "
I'll answer the last first. Part of my objections to a PREMATURE Manned Mars mission had to do since of science. Manned missions to date generally have yielded poor scientific returns per capita save for extended stays in proven ground such as Skylab. For obvious reasons the Mars mission wouldn't be one of them. For the a fraction of the price of a manned mission that could easily approach several hundred billion dollars we could conduct a through multi-pronged survey of the planet in ways no single mission could do. Given the difficulties and restrictions of such a mission, it's doubtful that we'd get much more scientific return that we did from Apollo. And if you read your history a bit more closely, apart from Skylab and Mir for the reasons I gave above, manned space missions to date have had little to do with "real" science.
As for my sense of exploration, I employ it here on Earth just like the multitudes of us who won't have such an opportunity no matter what. Given that space travel will never be as cheap as foot, air, ocean, etc. the parralells frequently drawn between Earth and space exploration don't apply.
I'm not saying that a time won't come when a manned mars mission should be launched. I'm just saying that the time isn't right now and probably won't be for another generation.
Initial NASA reports are literally becoming less worthwhile than the electrons used to broadcast them. I've been reading some articles coming after the fact in the NY Times and other areas. The indications are not that of an active spring or gushing water, only signs that water flow has occured in a more recent time frame than that of the water channels discovered by Mariner 9.
In short, the rivers discovered by Mariner 9 are thought to have stood dry for billions of years. (it being that long since the primordial Martian atmosphere went to near-vacum.) What NASA has reported are signs of water flow in either the last few thousand or few million years, not neccessarily signs of present-day flow.
Yes, we've been finding life in lots of strange places, but none of them are nearly as hostile as the environment on Mars today. I'm getting the feeling that this announcement is going to pan out in a simmilar fashion as the "Martian bacteria" report last year.
icer says among other thigs "we have the ability, for about 30 years."
This ranks among one of the top ten simplistic statements made by would-be space cadets. (The top idiotic statement has to go to that Trekkie at a Space politics forum who responded when told how long a space probe with present day tech would take to get to Alpha Centauri. "We should launch it now them!.") Space Travel technology is not just about rockets!
To send one-way robots yes, but people, that's another story. You're talking about a 2-3 year mission minimum and the requirement to make a landing on an off on a planet with just enough atmossphere to complicate matters. This is no simple Apollo project which was bascically done ahead of it's time with basic brute force. We still have to perfect the ability to send Housing, Lifesupport and supplies, and quite probably the return vehicle ahead of our manned explorers with some level of confidence that things will actually work when they get there.
You're talking about boosting some major mass amounts and complicated equipment that's going to have to survive and remain functional in a hostile environment. There's also the matter of long-term survival in space that's not protected by the Earth's Van Allen Belts. (Yes if anyone has ever read Michner's "Space" the Apollo astronauts ran a non-trivial risk of being irradiated by a solar flares if any had come up during certain phases of the lunar missions.
There's also the simple matter of maintaining a biosphere without resupply over the long haul. I would recomend anyone interested research the story of Biosphere 2 for an object lesson in just how hard such a task can be.
One problem with many ill-thought manned stunts in space is that historically too many good unmanned programs get shafted to fund one big manned stunt that gives a bare fraction of the return from the cancelled work.
There may be a spring on the bottom of Mariner Valley and there may be not. But much more should be done on the unmanned front (a super version of Sojurner perhaps?) before we mortgage the house to send people there.
Actually they were Saturn Vs. With the moon race won, support for further moon missions eroded so fast that Apollo's 18-20 were cancelled. However one of the Saturns was used to loft SkyLab, the station itself being the converted SIVB third stage. One is on display at the Houston center, I don't recall the fate of the third. Not that it matter too much anyway. The Saturn could only boost 50 tons to escape velocity, not exactly enough for a manned Mars mission, and way too big for anything else.
Mars has basically two temperature settings. Either chilly-temperate or damm freezing cold. If there was water on the bottom of Mariner valley exposed to sunlight it'd evaporate. If it's not exposed to sunlight, it's ice. The Hellas depression is the only place low enough in elevation for liquid water to exist for any period of time and as far as I know, not even ice has been detected.
It's the height of idiocy to use this as a basis for a mannned mission at this point. If despite what I said liquid water does exist, it'd make more sense to plan a Martian "Landsat" type program. Unlike the Moon, Mars is too far away and too expensive to actually send people without a very good reason to expect something other than what the Mariners, Viking, and Pathfinder have found to date. Not too mention that we've never landed spacecraft in territory that will present the kind of difficulties that Mariner Valley poses.
If it makes a case for Mars, it's for stepped up planetary science, not a monetary debacle of a manned mission with no more scientific merit than Apollo.
Re:Call me when they can fix the screen size too.
on
Power Up That iMac
·
· Score: 1
YellowDog runs fine on most iMacs. The DV's need some tweaking with yaboot! but that's also true for LinuxPPC as well. Now that you mention it there's a rather interesting list of non-Mac PPC machines that LinuxPPC has been run on.
Amiga PowerUP PPC upgrade IBM Bright Engineering Embedded Planet Synergy Microsystems and various Mac clones.
Many of these require jumping though a lot of hoops, especially the machines that won't support X off the bat. (LPC uses a X-based installer) The LinuxPPC.com site has the details.
No current shipping Macintosh has built-in SCSI. You can get a BTO which has a LVD SCSI controller which costs you a PCI slot. (or a cheap 50 buck grappler if all you want to do is hook up your old CD Burner, scanner etc.)
The G4 and G3 are 64 bit processors The Velocity Engine however is 128 bit. It's integrated the same way in which the ATI Rage which is also 128 bit in it's video CPU. (Those interested should look up AtiVec and the 7400on the Motorola site.)
The corrollary to this is the transition of Linux from being almost exclusively a gearhead playground to an inclusion of a more general class of user. Lots of us tend to forget the kind of idiot mistakes and assumptions that anyone makes when starting out, much less those of people who don't have that way of modeling things that got us into this buisness in the first place.
There also seems to be a belief that such conflicts are a problem. Conflict is one of the primary jumpstarts of evolution, in this case that of KDE (and it's cousins like GNOME). What we do seem to be lacking as a community are the patience and wilingness to be civil to each other. It's not as trivial a concern as you think either. Somone once said one measure of a society is the upkeep of it's public bathrooms which depend on the civility of those use them.
Civics used to be a fundamental part of beginning education. Sometimes even I need a refresher course every now and then.
People do frequently pay for corporate screwups, it's just billed differently.
Cases in point:
1. The Savings and Loan collapse thanks to the de-regulation of the '80's. The required bailouts went into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and it came mostly out of the pockets of the middle-class.
2. The Exon Valdez, Love Canal,Three Mile Island, Hinckley, Union Carbide's plant in India.; Cancer clusters, closed wells, and at least one case the deaths of thousands of people due to a poisonous toxic cloud. The costs of doing buisness frequently ignore the costs to the communities that are impacted by them.
Also it's one thing to claim a profit space mission when all you're doing is sending a camera to orbit on a spacecraft covered with product endorsement. But after the novelty stunt flights, putting live people on a mission that generates profit on it's own merits is another world altogether. I've yet to see someone in the commercial sphere who's got a chance at pulling anything other than a high-profile stunt. Most that's been accomplished so far has been lofting satelites into low Earth orbit AFAIK.
There are things we can't run away from. We do not have the means and quite possibly won't have them in the lifetimes of our grandchildren to create self-sustaining communities beyond Earth's atmosphere. Space travel isn't something that's going to become cheap unitl physics is rewritten to give us an option beyond impulse-driven craft.
Above and beyond that are the inherent difficulties in maintaing an ecosphere and viable genetic pools. Just as putting animals in zoos will not do anything but slow an inevitable extinction, it is no more possible for us to "backup" Earth's biosphere.
In short it comes dow to this. Humanity's future as a species is inextricably tied to this planet. Our test is to overcome the inheret eco-destructive nature we've had since going beyond the hunter-gatherer days.
The mailorder catalog Publisher's Toolkit lists a Pioneer DVD burner for about 4 grand now, advertising it as a 70% price reduction. It comes with Windows software. Mac people can use it with an additional purchase of Toast for DVD for about $170 more. Wasn't that long ago that CDR drives cost about that much.
Arecibo was originally built by the Air Force to study the effects of ionosphere on radio waves. It's conversion to a functiona radiotelescope involved massive amounts of modification. Since then the entire dish has undergone a bit by bit replacement to finetune it's resolution. Cornell operates the scope, but I believe NASA still picks up a sginificant chunk of the bills.
There's Opera, iCab for both Mac OS and Windows, A little cruddy browser that Gnome uses for help manuals but I've actually used on Slashdot, the DreamCast browser, iBrowse and AWeb for the Amiga fanatics..... The Choice IS Out There.
In the much shorter run, your digital media will either 1) decay or 2)become outmoded. Actually given the short longevity of data formats with the tech curve these days Your acid paperback book will probably outlast any of today's digital formats. Books don't crash. And they yield more readily to my personal modes of sorting and classifying information than most web search engines. There is merit to what Billington says, (hint:READ THE ARTICLE ITSELF), he just chose possibly the worst choice of phrasing that anyone could think of. I keep a small shelf of books and magazines in my bathroom. When I go to the can, I pick out one randomly and read from it until I leave. The best of today's and tomorrow's tech is too much of a timewaster by comparison. It's the same reason I keep a reading nook in the same room as my computers.
I don't know if Hubbard talked to aliens, but he's gotten more books out dead than alive.:)
As far as Jobs is concerned The Truth Is Out There. It's in the form of Apple's balances. Apple was bleeding red and the coffin was being nailed on the door when the NeXT purchase brought Jobs back into the company. For the last couple of years, Apple is back in the black with a very helathy cash balance and the iMac has launced it's own culture fashion wave. (last time I was in Software Etc. there wre Nintendo N64's selling in 5 very iMaclike translucent cases. ) As it says in the Book of Lazar, Imitation is a good indicator of success.
MacOS itself (at least the current Classic) will run without Quicktime. It's that a lot of graphics apps (and games like Myst, Crystal Key, and Riven) use Quicktime for some or all of their functionality. I stripeed Quicktime from my Filemaker Pro server under the (if the server doesn't need it it goes) motif and it doesn't notice the difference.
And it's not like the Microsoft saw, Apple's Quicktime does include a slew of codecs like Sorensen, that are paid liceneses from outside companies. There're even Amiga Quicktime players, however there usefulness is extremely limited as they do not include the licensed codecs.
Succinct analysis that overlooks a critical point. Red Hat's stocks are held mostly by people who do only have one interest; they want their stock values to go up and profit to be made. Red Hat now has to balance two masters, their shareholders and the "community" which put them on the map.
VA Linux on the other hand has always been a more conventionally modeled company (if originally selling a slightly unconventional product) doesn't have quite the same baggage to deal with.
SGI didn't switch to x86, they simply developed a separate Pentium NT line along with some fancy LCD monitors to go with them. Now they're dropping the NT boxes like hot potatoes and firesaling the LCD screens. (they have Mac drivers for the PCI cards so they marketed them to that crowd as well.)
If Apple were to make that switch now, just on the verge of releasing OS X, they might as well just order that corporate coffin.
You've probably read Gibosn, haven't you? There's a point to Dyson's irritation about "tech toys for the rich". Right now, I have more computing power in my apartment than NASA would have dreamed about during Apollo. I consume more electricity and resources than a whole swath of Egyptian villages. I've lived my entire life in the New York/NJ urban zone, and now with technology advanced 30 years later, the poor are more evident out in the streets, and the middle class are being squeezed several sides at once while Wall Street brags about the economic upsurge.
From all vantage points, we're headed for Bladerunner, or Snowcrash, not Star Trek. At some point we as a civilisation, a nation, a society have to ask ourselves, with all we know, with all we learned, why HAVEN'T we made the world a better place.
A biographical book I highly recommend if you can find it, is a title called "The Starship and the Canoe", a work on the evolving relationship between Freeman Dyson, the up and coming theorectical physicist, and his son who settles in Alaska to live off the land. I don't remember the author's name, but I first read this in the Paterson Public Library in the late 70's during high school, and it's never left me.
Most urban communities fall into one of two types.
1. Mine where people two doors down from me don't know me, and I don't know them.
2. Close knit small subsets of people who know each other and can get together in massivd areas.
What Dyson's point was is that churches are a frequent ingredient in creating #2. Case in point: East end of Paterson, New Jersey, a nowhere, rundown area if there ever was one. In the last few years, an Islamic church set up shop and actively recruited the locals into an ongoing program of social change. The area's not paradise, but it's considerably, noticeably better from where they started.
Does anyone remember a Babylon 5 episode called "Gethsemene" or somesuch? The central character was a serial killer that had been subjected to the 24th century's ultimate punishment; mindwipe and a new personality wired in, and committed to a monastery to spend his life bringing service to the community. He's a character who comes across as a nice guy, evoking honest sympathy when forcibly brought up to face his past by a vengeful relatives of his victims who hires a telepath to revive ghosts of his memories. Despite Sheridan's efforts the vengeance seeksers kill the monk. At the closing scene, Sheridan is introduced to the monk's newest brother, the killer from the last scene who's been tried, convicted, and sentenced, now also a monk earnestly working to serve.
The episode brought up questions of punishment and forgiveness which aren't easily answered. There are religions, including Christianity which don't close the possibility of forgiveness to ANYONE, given honest and sincere repentence.
There are lots of things and issues which go beyond the model of scientific logic. When it comes to the thorny issues of human cloning and designer genes? How are you going to view the "products" of these new technologies? The cloning of the sheep Dolly involved some 300 or more "failures". What are our responsiblities to the "failures" incurred when we try this with people?
Religion and science are tools in our individual searches for truth. But the truths we discover will reflect the effort we put into doing so. Sunday churches, Saturday temples, Discover magazine, serve those who aren't able or willing to make that effort and we should place them in proper context when judging.
Slashdot Mirror
icer1024 ask me:
"Your type of thinking is what is killing manned space exploration. Yea, I think I'll stick to being considered a "would-be space-cadet", thank you. Where's your sense of vision, and exploration, or even science for that matter? "
I'll answer the last first. Part of my objections to a PREMATURE Manned Mars mission had to do since of science. Manned missions to date generally have yielded poor scientific returns per capita save for extended stays in proven ground such as Skylab. For obvious reasons the Mars mission wouldn't be one of them. For the a fraction of the price of a manned mission that could easily approach several hundred billion dollars we could conduct a through multi-pronged survey of the planet in ways no single mission could do. Given the difficulties and restrictions of such a mission, it's doubtful that we'd get much more scientific return that we did from Apollo. And if you read your history a bit more closely, apart from Skylab and Mir for the reasons I gave above, manned space missions to date have had little to do with "real" science.
As for my sense of exploration, I employ it here on Earth just like the multitudes of us who won't have such an opportunity no matter what. Given that space travel will never be as cheap as foot, air, ocean, etc. the parralells frequently drawn between Earth and space exploration don't apply.
I'm not saying that a time won't come when a manned mars mission should be launched. I'm just saying that the time isn't right now and probably won't be for another generation.
Initial NASA reports are literally becoming less worthwhile than the electrons used to broadcast them. I've been reading some articles coming after the fact in the NY Times and other areas. The indications are not that of an active spring or gushing water, only signs that water flow has occured in a more recent time frame than that of the water channels discovered by Mariner 9.
In short, the rivers discovered by Mariner 9 are thought to have stood dry for billions of years. (it being that long since the primordial Martian atmosphere went to near-vacum.) What NASA has reported are signs of water flow in either the last few thousand or few million years, not neccessarily signs of present-day flow.
Yes, we've been finding life in lots of strange places, but none of them are nearly as hostile as the environment on Mars today. I'm getting the feeling that this announcement is going to pan out in a simmilar fashion as the "Martian bacteria" report last year.
icer says among other thigs "we have the ability, for about 30 years."
This ranks among one of the top ten simplistic statements made by would-be space cadets. (The top idiotic statement has to go to that Trekkie at a Space politics forum who responded when told how long a space probe with present day tech would take to get to Alpha Centauri. "We should launch it now them!.") Space Travel technology is not just about rockets!
To send one-way robots yes, but people, that's another story. You're talking about a 2-3 year mission minimum and the requirement to make a landing on an off on a planet with just enough atmossphere to complicate matters. This is no simple Apollo project which was bascically done ahead of it's time with basic brute force. We still have to perfect the ability to send Housing, Lifesupport and supplies, and quite probably the return vehicle ahead of our manned explorers with some level of confidence that things will actually work when they get there.
You're talking about boosting some major mass amounts and complicated equipment that's going to have to survive and remain functional in a hostile environment. There's also the matter of long-term survival in space that's not protected by the Earth's Van Allen Belts. (Yes if anyone has ever read Michner's "Space" the Apollo astronauts ran a non-trivial risk of being irradiated by a solar flares if any had come up during certain phases of the lunar missions.
There's also the simple matter of maintaining a biosphere without resupply over the long haul. I would recomend anyone interested research the story of Biosphere 2 for an object lesson in just how hard such a task can be.
One problem with many ill-thought manned stunts in space is that historically too many good unmanned programs get shafted to fund one big manned stunt that gives a bare fraction of the return from the cancelled work.
There may be a spring on the bottom of Mariner Valley and there may be not. But much more should be done on the unmanned front (a super version of Sojurner perhaps?) before we mortgage the house to send people there.
Actually they were Saturn Vs. With the moon race won, support for further moon missions eroded so fast that Apollo's 18-20 were cancelled. However one of the Saturns was used to loft SkyLab, the station itself being the converted SIVB third stage. One is on display at the Houston center, I don't recall the fate of the third. Not that it matter too much anyway. The Saturn could only boost 50 tons to escape velocity, not exactly enough for a manned Mars mission, and way too big for anything else.
Mars has basically two temperature settings. Either chilly-temperate or damm freezing cold. If there was water on the bottom of Mariner valley exposed to sunlight it'd evaporate. If it's not exposed to sunlight, it's ice. The Hellas depression is the only place low enough in elevation for liquid water to exist for any period of time and as far as I know, not even ice has been detected.
It's the height of idiocy to use this as a basis for a mannned mission at this point. If despite what I said liquid water does exist, it'd make more sense to plan a Martian "Landsat" type program. Unlike the Moon, Mars is too far away and too expensive to actually send people without a very good reason to expect something other than what the Mariners, Viking, and Pathfinder have found to date. Not too mention that we've never landed spacecraft in territory that will present the kind of difficulties that Mariner Valley poses.
If it makes a case for Mars, it's for stepped up planetary science, not a monetary debacle of a manned mission with no more scientific merit than Apollo.
YellowDog runs fine on most iMacs. The DV's need some tweaking with yaboot! but that's also true for LinuxPPC as well. Now that you mention it there's a rather interesting list of non-Mac PPC machines that LinuxPPC has been run on.
Amiga PowerUP PPC upgrade
IBM
Bright Engineering
Embedded Planet
Synergy Microsystems
and various Mac clones.
Many of these require jumping though a lot of hoops, especially the machines that won't support X off the bat. (LPC uses a X-based installer) The LinuxPPC.com site has the details.
No current shipping Macintosh has built-in SCSI. You can get a BTO which has a LVD SCSI controller which costs you a PCI slot. (or a cheap 50 buck grappler if all you want to do is hook up your old CD Burner, scanner etc.)
The G4 and G3 are 64 bit processors The Velocity Engine however is 128 bit. It's integrated the same way in which the ATI Rage which is also 128 bit in it's video CPU. (Those interested should look up AtiVec and the 7400on the Motorola site.)
The corrollary to this is the transition of Linux from being almost exclusively a gearhead playground to an inclusion of a more general class of user. Lots of us tend to forget the kind of idiot mistakes and assumptions that anyone makes when starting out, much less those of people who don't have that way of modeling things that got us into this buisness in the first place.
There also seems to be a belief that such conflicts are a problem. Conflict is one of the primary jumpstarts of evolution, in this case that of KDE (and it's cousins like GNOME). What we do seem to be lacking as a community are the patience and wilingness to be civil to each other. It's not as trivial a concern as you think either. Somone once said one measure of a society is the upkeep of it's public bathrooms which depend on the civility of those use them.
Civics used to be a fundamental part of beginning education. Sometimes even I need a refresher course every now and then.
Nope, no matter how cynical I become, I can still find someone stupid enough to amaze me.
People do frequently pay for corporate screwups, it's just billed differently.
Cases in point:
1. The Savings and Loan collapse thanks to the de-regulation of the '80's. The required bailouts went into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and it came mostly out of the pockets of the middle-class.
2. The Exon Valdez, Love Canal,Three Mile Island, Hinckley, Union Carbide's plant in India.; Cancer clusters, closed wells, and at least one case the deaths of thousands of people due to a poisonous toxic cloud. The costs of doing buisness frequently ignore the costs to the communities that are impacted by them.
Also it's one thing to claim a profit space mission when all you're doing is sending a camera to orbit on a spacecraft covered with product endorsement. But after the novelty stunt flights, putting live people on a mission that generates profit on it's own merits is another world altogether. I've yet to see someone in the commercial sphere who's got a chance at pulling anything other than a high-profile stunt. Most that's been accomplished so far has been lofting satelites into low Earth orbit AFAIK.
There are things we can't run away from. We do not have the means and quite possibly won't have them in the lifetimes of our grandchildren to create self-sustaining communities beyond Earth's atmosphere. Space travel isn't something that's going to become cheap unitl physics is rewritten to give us an option beyond impulse-driven craft.
Above and beyond that are the inherent difficulties in maintaing an ecosphere and viable genetic pools. Just as putting animals in zoos will not do anything but slow an inevitable extinction, it is no more possible for us to "backup" Earth's biosphere.
In short it comes dow to this. Humanity's future as a species is inextricably tied to this planet. Our test is to overcome the inheret eco-destructive nature we've had since going beyond the hunter-gatherer days.
Failure is simply not an option.
The mailorder catalog Publisher's Toolkit lists a Pioneer DVD burner for about 4 grand now, advertising it as a 70% price reduction. It comes with Windows software. Mac people can use it with an additional purchase of Toast for DVD for about $170 more. Wasn't that long ago that CDR drives cost about that much.
Arecibo was originally built by the Air Force to study the effects of ionosphere on radio waves. It's conversion to a functiona radiotelescope involved massive amounts of modification. Since then the entire dish has undergone a bit by bit replacement to finetune it's resolution. Cornell operates the scope, but I believe NASA still picks up a sginificant chunk of the bills.
There's Opera, iCab for both Mac OS and Windows, A little cruddy browser that Gnome uses for help manuals but I've actually used on Slashdot, the DreamCast browser, iBrowse and AWeb for the Amiga fanatics..... The Choice IS Out There.
And if you really want fast Slashdot, try Lynx!
In the much shorter run, your digital media will either 1) decay or 2)become outmoded. Actually given the short longevity of data formats with the tech curve these days Your acid paperback book will probably outlast any of today's digital formats. Books don't crash. And they yield more readily to my personal modes of sorting and classifying information than most web search engines. There is merit to what Billington says, (hint:READ THE ARTICLE ITSELF), he just chose possibly the worst choice of phrasing that anyone could think of. I keep a small shelf of books and magazines in my bathroom. When I go to the can, I pick out one randomly and read from it until I leave. The best of today's and tomorrow's tech is too much of a timewaster by comparison. It's the same reason I keep a reading nook in the same room as my computers.
I don't know if Hubbard talked to aliens, but he's gotten more books out dead than alive. :)
As far as Jobs is concerned The Truth Is Out There. It's in the form of Apple's balances. Apple was bleeding red and the coffin was being nailed on the door when the NeXT purchase brought Jobs back into the company. For the last couple of years, Apple is back in the black with a very helathy cash balance and the iMac has launced it's own culture fashion wave. (last time I was in Software Etc. there wre Nintendo N64's selling in 5 very iMaclike translucent cases. ) As it says in the Book of Lazar, Imitation is a good indicator of success.
MacOS itself (at least the current Classic) will run without Quicktime. It's that a lot of graphics apps (and games like Myst, Crystal Key, and Riven) use Quicktime for some or all of their functionality. I stripeed Quicktime from my Filemaker Pro server under the (if the server doesn't need it it goes) motif and it doesn't notice the difference.
And it's not like the Microsoft saw, Apple's Quicktime does include a slew of codecs like Sorensen, that are paid liceneses from outside companies. There're even Amiga Quicktime players, however there usefulness is extremely limited as they do not include the licensed codecs.
I remember that article. It said that only since 1985 have there been hard drives large enough to contain the virus.
:)
So I guess you floppy using Mac Plusers and Amiga 500's are safe then.
Here's a snip from the Internet Explorer support splash window:
Explorer Version: 4.5 (0408)
Encryption: 40 Bit International/Export Version
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.5; Mac_PowerPC)
Succinct analysis that overlooks a critical point. Red Hat's stocks are held mostly by people who do only have one interest; they want their stock values to go up and profit to be made. Red Hat now has to balance two masters, their shareholders and the "community" which put them on the map.
VA Linux on the other hand has always been a more conventionally modeled company (if originally selling a slightly unconventional product) doesn't have quite the same baggage to deal with.
SGI didn't switch to x86, they simply developed a separate Pentium NT line along with some fancy LCD monitors to go with them. Now they're dropping the NT boxes like hot potatoes and firesaling the LCD screens. (they have Mac drivers for the PCI cards so they marketed them to that crowd as well.)
If Apple were to make that switch now, just on the verge of releasing OS X, they might as well just order that corporate coffin.
You've probably read Gibosn, haven't you? There's a point to Dyson's irritation about "tech toys for the rich". Right now, I have more computing power in my apartment than NASA would have dreamed about during Apollo. I consume more electricity and resources than a whole swath of Egyptian villages. I've lived my entire life in the New York/NJ urban zone, and now with technology advanced 30 years later, the poor are more evident out in the streets, and the middle class are being squeezed several sides at once while Wall Street brags about the economic upsurge.
From all vantage points, we're headed for Bladerunner, or Snowcrash, not Star Trek. At some point we as a civilisation, a nation, a society have to ask ourselves, with all we know, with all we learned, why HAVEN'T we made the world a better place.
A biographical book I highly recommend if you can find it, is a title called "The Starship and the Canoe", a work on the evolving relationship between Freeman Dyson, the up and coming theorectical physicist, and his son who settles in Alaska to live off the land. I don't remember the author's name, but I first read this in the Paterson Public Library in the late 70's during high school, and it's never left me.
Most urban communities fall into one of two types.
1. Mine where people two doors down from me don't know me, and I don't know them.
2. Close knit small subsets of people who know each other and can get together in massivd areas.
What Dyson's point was is that churches are a frequent ingredient in creating #2. Case in point: East end of Paterson, New Jersey, a nowhere, rundown area if there ever was one. In the last few years, an Islamic church set up shop and actively recruited the locals into an ongoing program of social change. The area's not paradise, but it's considerably, noticeably better from where they started.
Does anyone remember a Babylon 5 episode called "Gethsemene" or somesuch? The central character was a serial killer that had been subjected to the 24th century's ultimate punishment; mindwipe and a new personality wired in, and committed to a monastery to spend his life bringing service to the community. He's a character who comes across as a nice guy, evoking honest sympathy when forcibly brought up to face his past by a vengeful relatives of his victims who hires a telepath to revive ghosts of his memories. Despite Sheridan's efforts the vengeance seeksers kill the monk. At the closing scene, Sheridan is introduced to the monk's newest brother, the killer from the last scene who's been tried, convicted, and sentenced, now also a monk earnestly working to serve.
The episode brought up questions of punishment and forgiveness which aren't easily answered. There are religions, including Christianity which don't close the possibility of forgiveness to ANYONE, given honest and sincere repentence.
There are lots of things and issues which go beyond the model of scientific logic. When it comes to the thorny issues of human cloning and designer genes? How are you going to view the "products" of these new technologies? The cloning of the sheep Dolly involved some 300 or more "failures". What are our responsiblities to the "failures" incurred when we try this with people?
Religion and science are tools in our individual searches for truth. But the truths we discover will reflect the effort we put into doing so. Sunday churches, Saturday temples, Discover magazine, serve those who aren't able or willing to make that effort and we should place them in proper context when judging.