....but many years ago I knew a guy who used to watch Top of the Pops (on BBC1) with the sound turned off, just to look at the Spice Girls and their ilk.
Carbine? Is that a cross between a car and a combine harvester? Maybe you can use a toe. They have prints too. They're just like fingers, only you stand on them or something.
Where I come from "liberalism" means laissez faire (sp?) free market capitalism, "small state", low taxes, economic, religious and politcal freedom, free speech etc.
I think the parent poster was exposing himself as a right-wing American biggot, the mind who thinks George W. is a lilly-livered, soft, pinko commie and carries an automatic rifle everywhere "because it says so in the Constitution" to shoot towel-heads etc. if the need arises.
This place is so entertaining. You get to insult so many different kinds of people.
No. Communism is a form of dictatorship combined with extreme socialist economic policy. Now, liberalism implies liberty. Please look up liberal in a dictionary. An American one will do at a pinch if that's all you have.
The correct answer was to build twenty-thirty of them, fly them once a week (only once in six months per shuttle), and build a real space station (52 flights per year, and ~25t per flight, for five years is a damn big station, compared to what we'll have). Then let the crew repair the station as needed while we start on the Mars/Venus missions, plus follow-on Lunar missions, Lunar base, etc.
For you noobs out there, here's how to make Linux faster.
Download yourself the latest cutting-edge gcc from the 3.5.0 branch on CVS and do a make bootstrap. Install this over your original C compiler.
Get the latest 2.6.7-preX kernel from kernel.org and configure it with no modules: everything build it. Modules slow you down.
Enable all the EXPERIMENTAL drivers. They are ususally much faster than the old ones that may have been in the kernel now for 6 or more months.
When you have saved your configuration, hack the top level Makefile to add "-O9 -fomit-instructions" in the CFLAGS macro.
time gmake -j64 bootstrap. Even if you have a single CPU system, building with lots of processes in parallel is faster because it soaks up CPU idle time when waiting on I/O operations.
You could have developed a better reusable space vehicle in 1981, could you?
By 1981 when the shuttle first flew, yes.
Even in the 1970's yes too. The problem with the shuttle is it tries to do too many jobs all at once, and it does them in the most complicated and expensive ways possible.
As for developing new craft, from what I can see projects keep getting cut for political reasons and they try to eek another few years out of the already ancient shuttles.
It's not just the space industry that this sort of thing happens in. Anything politicians get their grubbly little hands on seems to go the same way.
Now, if only they would make some robots to operate and maintain the International Space Station, they wouldn't have to risk peoples' lives going there for political reasons, and they can wait until they have developed a safer and cheaper launcher and retire the travesty of engineering unholiness that is the Space Shuttle.
Or they could just pay the Russians to launch all their astronauts...
The new highly-multithreaded chips have much shorter pipelines unlike current headless-chicken designs like Pentium 4, which operate at obscene clock frequencies but take ages to refill after a pipeline stall hence spening a lot of their clock cycles doing nothing. The idea is that the chip has several simple low-latency cores with many "thread contexts" which can be switched in with a 0-cylce delay when the current thread blocks. So, going back to your Amdahl's Law, the "unimproved fraction" (1-P) on one of these processors is proportionally smaller in many cases where your clock frequency increase on your Pentium would buy you little benefit. Or something.
Witness intel's recent change of direction regarding the future of Pentium. They've all but EOL's the Pentium 4 Netburst architecture and are now going multi-core. It took an anouncement from their competitors though, and lengthy explanations and analysis in the industry press, before they did, once it was absolutely clear that the clock frequency wars were over. Intel is well behind, but they have an absolutely astronomical R&D budget.
You run Solaris on SPARC processors. Solaris is highly multi-threaded from the ground up. It's extremely fine-grained. It also has some sophisticated algorithms for migrating threads to the most appropriate processor based on things like memory locality and load. (Forgive me if my terminology isn't terribly accurate, I'm not an OS kernel expert). The Niagra and ROCK processors are designed to execute highly multithreaded loads. Fujitsu SPARC64 is more traditional, in that it is designed for loads with fewer concurrent threads. By adopting Fujitsu's high-end gear, Sun gets performance on less thread-intesive loads too. Now Sun and Fujitsu have a horse for every course, so to speak. If I were HP trying to sell itanic boxes, and cranky old (soon to be exterminated) PA-RISC kit, I'd be very worried.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's currently the fashion around here to be sycophantic to Microsoft.
....but many years ago I knew a guy who used to watch Top of the Pops (on BBC1) with the sound turned off, just to look at the Spice Girls and their ilk.
Blimey, just as George Clinton foretold.
Yes, they were another crap manufactured 80's band.
Use a handkerchief you dirty little sod.
Carbine? Is that a cross between a car and a combine harvester? Maybe you can use a toe. They have prints too. They're just like fingers, only you stand on them or something.
I think the parent poster was exposing himself as a right-wing American biggot, the mind who thinks George W. is a lilly-livered, soft, pinko commie and carries an automatic rifle everywhere "because it says so in the Constitution" to shoot towel-heads etc. if the need arises.
This place is so entertaining. You get to insult so many different kinds of people.
No. Communism is a form of dictatorship combined with extreme socialist economic policy. Now, liberalism implies liberty. Please look up liberal in a dictionary. An American one will do at a pinch if that's all you have.
Thank you.
Since when does "exceedingly liberal"==Communist?
I know how you feel, but gcc has been able to compile Java source straight to native code for quite some time now :-)
Then you are nuts.
I need a holiday.
And look where we (the human race) are now :-(
Download yourself the latest cutting-edge gcc from the 3.5.0 branch on CVS and do a make bootstrap. Install this over your original C compiler.
Get the latest 2.6.7-preX kernel from kernel.org and configure it with no modules: everything build it. Modules slow you down.
Enable all the EXPERIMENTAL drivers. They are ususally much faster than the old ones that may have been in the kernel now for 6 or more months.
When you have saved your configuration, hack the top level Makefile to add "-O9 -fomit-instructions" in the CFLAGS macro.
time gmake -j64 bootstrap. Even if you have a single CPU system, building with lots of processes in parallel is faster because it soaks up CPU idle time when waiting on I/O operations.
Enjoy.
By 1981 when the shuttle first flew, yes.
Even in the 1970's yes too. The problem with the shuttle is it tries to do too many jobs all at once, and it does them in the most complicated and expensive ways possible.
As for developing new craft, from what I can see projects keep getting cut for political reasons and they try to eek another few years out of the already ancient shuttles.
It's not just the space industry that this sort of thing happens in. Anything politicians get their grubbly little hands on seems to go the same way.
Indeed. :-) I'm really looking forward to the X-Prize being won. People like Rutan make life interesting and fun.
Or they could just pay the Russians to launch all their astronauts...
Muhahahahahhahahahahahahah :-)
Witness intel's recent change of direction regarding the future of Pentium. They've all but EOL's the Pentium 4 Netburst architecture and are now going multi-core. It took an anouncement from their competitors though, and lengthy explanations and analysis in the industry press, before they did, once it was absolutely clear that the clock frequency wars were over. Intel is well behind, but they have an absolutely astronomical R&D budget.
That would be Occam.
How long will it be until SCO sues Sun?
Probably. I'd say so. There will probably be aliens on flying-saucers too. And spacemonkies.
So it does. There's more to life than apache though.
I dare you to look at this. Then, think for a minute about what sort of things you'd use it for.
You run Solaris on SPARC processors. Solaris is highly multi-threaded from the ground up. It's extremely fine-grained. It also has some sophisticated algorithms for migrating threads to the most appropriate processor based on things like memory locality and load. (Forgive me if my terminology isn't terribly accurate, I'm not an OS kernel expert). The Niagra and ROCK processors are designed to execute highly multithreaded loads. Fujitsu SPARC64 is more traditional, in that it is designed for loads with fewer concurrent threads. By adopting Fujitsu's high-end gear, Sun gets performance on less thread-intesive loads too. Now Sun and Fujitsu have a horse for every course, so to speak. If I were HP trying to sell itanic boxes, and cranky old (soon to be exterminated) PA-RISC kit, I'd be very worried.