Looking into the future, we need to ask, what scientific work can be done by astronauts on Mars? They can walk around and look at the terrain, and carry out tests on rocks, looking for signs of water or life, but all that can be done by robots. They can bring back rock samples, as the Apollo astronauts did from the moon, but that too can be done by robots.
There's a heck of a lot of stuff here on Earth that can be done by robots, but is done by humans. What I'm about to say has nothing to do with economics or science: human beings need stuff to do, whether that's an accupation, a hobby or entertainment. Actually, most people seem to thrive when they have all three. For example, we could send a million robots off to Spain every summer to lie on the beech or go to discos. We don't. We go in person. People ride bicycles for fun, play sports for fun, heck some even do crazy, expensive things like fly aeroplanes for fun. Some do aparently pointless things like write computer programs for fun.
In and of themselves, these things are pointless by conventional "rational" arguments and criteria. However, what they are is human.
What would be the point of a beer-drinking robot? What would be the point of living, for that matter?
Please, read Dirk Gently's Hollistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams and consider the Electic Monk. It is more serious concept than just a comic device in a novel.
Routine "personned" space travel is an inevitablilty. It's been military and scientific so far. Eventually it'll be commercial, ending up being recreational with routine holidays off the Earth.
Just now, it is not very feasable economically. As technology progresses, it will become safer and cheaper, and more routine.
Give it a few more years (50 or so) and things will be vastly different. I just hope we are able to build our Noah's Ark before the Flood (i.e. asteroid impact) comes.
Here's hoping we get an all-SVG desktop years before MS, and leave windows biting the dust of the now-too-small-to-see icons by way of better and better monitors.
We can dream. Most people will remain completely unaware that it can be done until Microsoft copies it. That is the way of the world.
The last time I set up Windows on my Pee Cee (1996 IIRC) it would swap stuff out to disk because of 64k segment limitations. I think it was when it had too many icons, or the colour depth was too great. You used to have to install the DOS disk cache program to try to cache the stuff in high memory that Windows insisted on swapping out to disk, even though the system maybe had 16 or 32 megabytes of RAM. I find it hard to believe they haven't fixed this yet. Maybe they have? Is that why the speed of your swap partition is so critical?
Back in the days of DOS, I got hold of FST Modula-2. Previously I'd been writing C. What an eye-opener that was. I learned so much about "good programming" from using Modula-2 for a while. Later I had to do some work in Pascal (Turbo Pascal 7). I really think that using strict, strongly-typed, well-designed languages is a very valuable experience that every programmer should have.
Could it be that meteor that is coming near to Earth today?
Absolutely. It skimmed the atmosphere of Mars and bounced off and then travelled to Earth at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, to miss Earth by a few Earth radii. Rocket Scientists call this "Vogon pin-ball." It's one of those geeky jokes.
Once every three months is about right for diesel generators. You do have redundant backup generators, don't you? Whether the workers are in a union or not, where I come from, deliberately tampering with safety equipment is a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment.
Oh, and you do test run your diesels once a week don't you?
You see, when you have lots of karma, your posts get scored +2 by default. That means you get to shout louder than everyone else, so to speak. In this manner I can impose my views upon the general populace and bring about my evil plan for world domination though planting my subversive ideas in peoples' minds. It also helps me feel less insecure to have lots of strangers agree with my petty-minded drivellings. In the Land of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king, so they say.
The backup systems should be designed to work without human intervention as much as possible. There should be proper procedures in place to make sure that everything is maintained. If not, they should shut down and not work again until safe to do so or make alternative arrangements for providing the power. This is not rockt science as they say. This is how safety-critical systems are managed in industry all the time, well at least in civillised countries.
If there's any part of.NET that is critical to.NET on Linux which is not in the ECMA standard, somebody for the love of god enlighten me and the Mono/PNET developers.
What's the point? Why should any of us waste our time? Some of us have known Microsoft long enough to have become bitter, twisted and cynical. Microsoft has done nothing but bully, lie, cheat and steal historically. Maybe they have changed now and it'll all be different. Who cares? It's too late. We've moved on. Did you ever hear the story of the little boy who cried wolf?
...is a nice C++ GUI framework. Once you have one of these, be it gtkmm, qt or wxWidgets you're set.
That's all very good if all you want to code in is C++. You see, C++ has a complicated ABI, so it is difficult to interface it to other languages. It is even very difficult to use C++ classes compiled with one compiler with code from another. This is because each vendor implements their own, proprietary C++ ABI. The gcc folks have tried to solve this problem by defining a Multi-Vendor C++ ABI. Unfortunately, gcc is the only C++ compiler that implements it just now. Some of the other vendors have pledged to implement it sometime manyana, but in the mean time, if you want to ensure that code and libraries communicate with each other, you have to stick to the good old unix C ABI.
Elvis and his rock 'n' roll buddy Roy Orbison, with help from ultra-karmic George Harrison, are rumoured to be working on a new Amiga OS. So radical is its design that it's being developed in the closely-guraded, and officially non-existant, Hangar 18 at Area 51, and incorporates innovative Aleph-1 algorithms developed bby the Greys. Bob Lazar is skeptical. "Without an abundant supply of ununpentium, I don't see how it'll get past single-user mode. And the threading model is too much like the NT kernel to be taken seriously." Jesus was unavailable for comment since he was taking his new trans-dimentional hyper-warp saucer interceptor out for a test run.
You're absolutely right. Reading between the lines, and with my basic knowledge of networking, it looks like they've invented a new protocol for high-bandwith networks (fat pipes) with much lower overhead than IP (much larger packets?), better error correction and better algorithms for determining the most efficient path through the network for delivering packets.
I doubt very much it would be of any benefit on a 56k modem or half-megabit ADSL connection. When we all get gigabit links into our homes, it may come into its own.
Don't be silly. That $161 million is to give to uncle Bill from Carly for the Windows licenses that the Canadians might possibly need to have at some point in the nest 100 years just in case all of their citezens need to use it at some point and we wouldn't want them to be pirates now would be and if there is even the remote possiblity that they may use or access any Microsoft system or software or information or anything they'd better pay for it up front just in case or Bill will get angry and all of Canada will have to go to jail for being criminals.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a heck of a lot of stuff here on Earth that can be done by robots, but is done by humans. What I'm about to say has nothing to do with economics or science: human beings need stuff to do, whether that's an accupation, a hobby or entertainment. Actually, most people seem to thrive when they have all three. For example, we could send a million robots off to Spain every summer to lie on the beech or go to discos. We don't. We go in person. People ride bicycles for fun, play sports for fun, heck some even do crazy, expensive things like fly aeroplanes for fun. Some do aparently pointless things like write computer programs for fun.
In and of themselves, these things are pointless by conventional "rational" arguments and criteria. However, what they are is human.
What would be the point of a beer-drinking robot? What would be the point of living, for that matter?
Please, read Dirk Gently's Hollistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams and consider the Electic Monk. It is more serious concept than just a comic device in a novel.
Just now, it is not very feasable economically. As technology progresses, it will become safer and cheaper, and more routine.
Give it a few more years (50 or so) and things will be vastly different. I just hope we are able to build our Noah's Ark before the Flood (i.e. asteroid impact) comes.
Does it (Linux) run under a hypervisor, or on the bare metal?
Slackware manages to ship the Sun Java stuff.
We can dream. Most people will remain completely unaware that it can be done until Microsoft copies it. That is the way of the world.
The last time I set up Windows on my Pee Cee (1996 IIRC) it would swap stuff out to disk because of 64k segment limitations. I think it was when it had too many icons, or the colour depth was too great. You used to have to install the DOS disk cache program to try to cache the stuff in high memory that Windows insisted on swapping out to disk, even though the system maybe had 16 or 32 megabytes of RAM. I find it hard to believe they haven't fixed this yet. Maybe they have? Is that why the speed of your swap partition is so critical?
Back in the days of DOS, I got hold of FST Modula-2. Previously I'd been writing C. What an eye-opener that was. I learned so much about "good programming" from using Modula-2 for a while. Later I had to do some work in Pascal (Turbo Pascal 7). I really think that using strict, strongly-typed, well-designed languages is a very valuable experience that every programmer should have.
No, it's like a fruit but with some of the vitamins taken out.
Good. We wouldn't want impared perambulatory function or to have to miss dinner.
Absolutely. It skimmed the atmosphere of Mars and bounced off and then travelled to Earth at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, to miss Earth by a few Earth radii. Rocket Scientists call this "Vogon pin-ball." It's one of those geeky jokes.
Oh, and you do test run your diesels once a week don't you?
If not, you deserve everything you get.
True, but you can mitiagte that by having regular inspections by different employees, and have it all recorded on paper and checked.
You see, when you have lots of karma, your posts get scored +2 by default. That means you get to shout louder than everyone else, so to speak. In this manner I can impose my views upon the general populace and bring about my evil plan for world domination though planting my subversive ideas in peoples' minds. It also helps me feel less insecure to have lots of strangers agree with my petty-minded drivellings. In the Land of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king, so they say.
Muhahahahahahahahahahahahah!
The backup systems should be designed to work without human intervention as much as possible. There should be proper procedures in place to make sure that everything is maintained. If not, they should shut down and not work again until safe to do so or make alternative arrangements for providing the power. This is not rockt science as they say. This is how safety-critical systems are managed in industry all the time, well at least in civillised countries.
This is slashdot. No one RsTFA. I just needed a bit more karma.
So where are the emergency batteries and diesel generators? How can you get away with that in this day and age?
What's the point? Why should any of us waste our time? Some of us have known Microsoft long enough to have become bitter, twisted and cynical. Microsoft has done nothing but bully, lie, cheat and steal historically. Maybe they have changed now and it'll all be different. Who cares? It's too late. We've moved on. Did you ever hear the story of the little boy who cried wolf?
The old-timers rave about Smalltalk. I haven't tried it myself...
So you can target x86 CPUs or the .NET CLR. Great. Now what about the people running Linux on PowerPC, ARM, SPARC, MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, 68k.....?
That's all very good if all you want to code in is C++. You see, C++ has a complicated ABI, so it is difficult to interface it to other languages. It is even very difficult to use C++ classes compiled with one compiler with code from another. This is because each vendor implements their own, proprietary C++ ABI. The gcc folks have tried to solve this problem by defining a Multi-Vendor C++ ABI. Unfortunately, gcc is the only C++ compiler that implements it just now. Some of the other vendors have pledged to implement it sometime manyana, but in the mean time, if you want to ensure that code and libraries communicate with each other, you have to stick to the good old unix C ABI.
Elvis and his rock 'n' roll buddy Roy Orbison, with help from ultra-karmic George Harrison, are rumoured to be working on a new Amiga OS. So radical is its design that it's being developed in the closely-guraded, and officially non-existant, Hangar 18 at Area 51, and incorporates innovative Aleph-1 algorithms developed bby the Greys. Bob Lazar is skeptical. "Without an abundant supply of ununpentium, I don't see how it'll get past single-user mode. And the threading model is too much like the NT kernel to be taken seriously." Jesus was unavailable for comment since he was taking his new trans-dimentional hyper-warp saucer interceptor out for a test run.
I doubt very much it would be of any benefit on a 56k modem or half-megabit ADSL connection. When we all get gigabit links into our homes, it may come into its own.
Maybe CP/M. MS-DOS, Atari TOS, RiscOS, hell, what about the Sinclair QL? That had multitasking and structured BASIC, all in ROM!
That makes a change from politicians, used car dealers and IBM salesmen...
Don't be silly. That $161 million is to give to uncle Bill from Carly for the Windows licenses that the Canadians might possibly need to have at some point in the nest 100 years just in case all of their citezens need to use it at some point and we wouldn't want them to be pirates now would be and if there is even the remote possiblity that they may use or access any Microsoft system or software or information or anything they'd better pay for it up front just in case or Bill will get angry and all of Canada will have to go to jail for being criminals.