And do they really let you order $2K software just because you say so? For me it takes several month to get "non-standard" software and if my purchase order has 4 digits it will likely be rejected. I tried to order $5K ARM BREW builder once and could never get any response.
Maybe it makes sense for the company to license Qt, but it doesn't make sense for me, as an individual developer, to fight for it. Easier to just suck it up and write a Java UI with JNI plugins for the existing C++ code. This way I still get an application that runs everywhere, modern OO toolkit and a profusion of RAD tools.
On the other hand, I would use LGPLed GTK+ if it was a nice programming interface. But both GTK+ and Qt suck compared to Cocoa.
Well, personally I didn't know that it's possible for a person to make an airplane at home and fly it over the South Pole if winds permit. Maybe one day I'll try to solve a programming problem, realize that it requires artifical intelligence and then, instead of writting it off as hopeless, just think "What the hell..."
Well, first of all I had a good laugh, because I came from Russia and my girlfriend is from China. Believe me, software engineers do eat out as well as buy music and cloth in both places. I should also note that I am driving a New Beetle which is not an SUV, don't have cable or satelite and buy cloth in Costo whenever I can.
Now, my rent fee is $1175, for a smaller appartment that I had almost for free in Russia. But what can I do about that? Not many appartments allow cats and if I pay $700 anywhere in Bay Area I would probably need to buy a gun for self defence. Should I really worry about 4 PS2 games per year for a total of $200 then?
I should also mention that I was severly harassed by government and high crime level in Russia and will not go back just to keep a programming job. But I also would love to keep the line of work that I enjoy. Any more tips to trim my bloated lifestyle so that I can compete with Indians?
Flying over South Pole in a home-built small airplane is an achivement of sorts for humanity, because people haven't been able to do this before. Also, the guy landed safely and didn't risk anyone's life for rescue.
Give the guy a break and someday you might see a team of entusiasts launching a manned spaceflight into orbit from a home-made high-altitude baloon. Do you think Columbus would discover America without some risk and even reclessness?
Can you please explain to me how I am having a bloated lifestyle with a technical lead job in Silicon Valley. I have an appartment, a car and Ok a couple of luxary items (a Mac, an iPod and a PS2 - Microsoft Free Home (TM)). I would be willing to give up all but the first one if I lived in a city with a decent subway, low crime and good night life. Say, like Taipei from what I saw when I visited.
You might want to try again. Blame a screwed currency exchange rate for example.
Should be allowed, encouraged, kept working by stabalizing kernel interfaces and not harassed by any type of intellectual property.
Linux is not so hot on the desktop, where lots of drivers are needed and I suspect most vendors write a Linux driver to make a small minority of users happy, not because it makes them a lot of money. This could be improved perhaps if they only need to update their driver once a year, not for every kernel patch and distribution.
As for releasing the source code, well sometimes they don't own it all in the first place and getting/buing permissions from everyone would be too expensive. Or in case of NVIDIA, driver optimizations could be easily used by competitors. Again, they don't have a huge market to look forward to as a compensation.
I think this is one case where Linus and a few other kernel developers care more about having fun - freedom to change interfaces to do something cool - then the end users of their work. Nothing wrong there too - it's their code and thanks to GPL other people can even make other versions more to their taste. The thing is, someone might do just that with Linux or BSD one of these days.
I would guess people in China have *certain* civil rights that are commonly violated in US. For example, the right to have an abortion. Or the right to walk on the street of a major city without worrying too much about violent crime. Or the right to share music and software with your friends.
Granted, some of it is just culture or lack of enforcement and some of it might go away soon. But at the same time, maybe we should demand some of those rights from our government.
A "reasonable" sysadmin monitoring porn is like a reasonable janitor searching your drawyers for copies of your resume.
Your job should be to ensure performance and security of the network. Keep a log of URLs for investigation purposes, but don't go snooping "just because" and delete after a week. If anyone is causing technical problems with their use, approach them on these grounds. If there is a complaint about employee X offended because employee Y is browsing porn, tell Y you expect him to be an adult and stop without any technological measures and tell X to let you know if there is still a problem.
If you get another complaint, then yes pull the log and this time Y should be really in hot water because he ignored a warning which is so easy to follow. On the other hand, if Y has an office and people don't automatically see his screen, inquire about the length X went through to get offended.
Honestly though - we have some socially conservative female employees from Asian countries and they are just snickering if they catch someone looking at pr0n. Did you hire some nut cases or are they really complaining about some more serious harassment and pr0n is just easier to define/prove?
You mean it's not a portable player with 802.11 for wireless P2P when several users ride the same subway? Damn! Any HK company developing a plugin for iPOD yet?
Do you really want insurance companies to get your money in one more way or snoop on your computer? You must really love your car and health insurance bills. Given only two choices, I would rather tolerate some spam. My company's and yahoo filters are doing an excellent job recently.
I think we all heard about social stability in Ireland. In Tom Clancy novels for example. And if you believe that, I have some beachfront Linux licenses from SCO to sell you.
Cars are sold primarily for the purpose of driving. Computers are sold primarily for the purpose of running user's software. If you say you provide "support", it better cover what an average person would do with a product. Besides solving a software problem, assuming reinstall is a fallback option, is way easier than fixing an engine. I think Dell should hire some of the unemployed bay area engineers instead of a call center in IDC and start providing some decent service.
Do you mean that Dell sells computers on which you are not supposed to install extra software or that they sell computers without support? This is like selling cars that you don't support if they are driven.
Actually after all the fuzz the article just mentions making 3D chips. Remember that the current limit only affects a single-layer chip of a fixed size.
I bet Intel or will spend billions of dollars on research and then we'll have cubical (or spherical? chips and a lot more computing power than we currently need on a desktop computer.
Religion generally means that some facts/rules of human behaviour and so on are absolute and not to be questioned. For example, you won't find many christians that think God approves casual sex and use of abortion as birth control.
An atheist doesn't necessarily think that christians are stupid, he/she just doesn't share their beliefs. As for meaning of life, atheists follow their gut feeling, advice of other humans or desire to make people happy to decide how to live. It may lead him/her in the same direction as religious people or it might not. Anyhow I haven't met anyone who uses science to make significant moral decisions. Or who is actively proud of being an atheist rather than just not feeling necessity of religion in their world view.
I think you have just as many stereotypes about atheists as we have about christians. You should hang around more. You might find people who qualify for the best accomodations in your favourite afterlife. At least if they came to your chirch.
Wow, I was actually going to post "Mod parent up" until I got to paragraph about copyright law. Why do you think it's any better for humanity than DRM?
Take the abandonware. There used to be a lot great, unique games (and I guess apps) for old IBM PCs. But just trying buying a copy of Space Quest 5 these days. If the company is no longer producing the game, or no longer selling a particular song, why not let people get those things from P2P? But no, abandonware sites keep getting cease and desist notices.
Would you care to elaborate? Some bugs (like mounted device files and mistakenly inherited resources) could cause an chroot()ed environment to be vunerable, but I haven't heard of any *general* reasons why they are not safe in general.
Of course you might need kernel patches to restrict network access for some user ids, but someone must have done it already.
Low end digital cameras are cheap. How many people will bother to hack a disposable one and be stuck with tape to close it after connecting to a PC and changing the non-rechargable battery when it dies?
There are too many things that are protected unnecessarily and at the cost to the company's profit margin or far more often the end user. Microsoft should just ship xbox with Linux preinstalled. You can't really use it for regular applicarions without a second PC, since you can't use a regular monitor. Sure there are some Linux games, but how many geeks who managed to run them will resist a nice copy of Matrix revolution in fry's?
But it could be, with a little work. Basically, higher speed at close range and bigger maximum range. As it is, I can't really download mp3 by putting a player on the same table as my PC or walk around my appartment with bluetooth headphones.I know about 802.11* but it would be nice if power consumption was only high when needed, not constantly.
Whose university is wheening off Sun boxes. Either you have desktop machine, then you already have root access or you have an account on a corporate server, then you are probably supposed to manage it. You can go and hack your own ISP, but these are the people in the best position to monitor you and they know exactly which billing address to show up at and kick your ass *shudder*.
Why not hack NFS code instead - or better yet SSH, Apache, gcc and so on? This exploit is so ineffective that I wonder if it's a bug after all.
Man, you have it easy. Grab a Palm, go to this link and enjoy. Now what I would like to see is J2SE (or a large subset that includes AWT) on high end Palm devices. Yes, there is Zaurus, but Palm or CE are so much more popular.
Actually, this might get them some new business. First of all, which big company you know doesn't already buy Windows separately and just wipe out the OEM version? Then, how many people you know that haven't already bought an OS for their previous PC and can install it on the next one, as a matter of fair use?
I've developed for EPOC/Symbian. The OS is targeted (of course) at embedded devices. When I was developing software for the platform, a modified GCC was used as the cross-compiler. It's one of the most standards-compliant C/C++ going!
How is that? ANSI C specifies global variables and well ANSI C library. Standard C++ specifies exceptions. Which standards are you talking about?
Having an on-device debugger would be nice, but is often not possible with embedded devices due to memory restrictions etc. Most development is done using a PC-based emulator, which works very well.
So, a Palm with 2M RAM doesn't have memory restrictions to run a debugger stub and 8M+ EPOC devices do? I say it's lack of desire to provide high-quality tools, plain and simple.
It is slightly ridiculous to demand ANSI C and POSIX libraries: EPOC/Symbian has its own very well defined programming model. This model was designed to deliver (among other things) outstanding OS stability and OS-wide object-orientation. So, you should not use C paradigms (or C code), but the OO paradigms defined by their programming model (and C++ code). Just because they have made design decisions that you don't like doesn't mean the platform is bad. It means you dont understand it.
No, it means I want to use the same code on multiple platforms. Say, I have a math library that supports my graphics drawing. I port it to EPOC and I have to call TLS to retrieve a pointer to global table that is initialized on the first call in front of every function. I have to rewrite all the exception code with "if (e) goto cleanup" and change all my interfaces to return an error. I'll probably cheat and provide my own memcpy, but I will have to scrap around to find BSD sprintf.
Now say I want the resulting code to also work on Palm. I have to write EPOC memory cleanup functions for Palm (although it supports exception). I have to break up big functions into 32K chunks to fit into segments.
Now I want to port it to BREW. It requires you to use macros like FADD(a,b) to do floating point arithmetics. How is that for a math library?
We don't have to debate the merits of global variables. We (should) all know that they are a bad idea except in a few restricted situations. For these situations, EPOC/Symbian provides thread-local storage (TLS) which can be used to create a singleton object; this can provide an OO interface to any global variables needed.
Yes, we don't have to debate. Global variables are for data that is meant to be shared between all calls and all threads, which TLS doesn't even provide. How does your argument prevent EPOC from implementing them for legacy code or for cases where they are approporiate?
MS have improved Win CE since I was developing for EPOC, but at that stage, MS had no programming model to ensure good memory management, and the robustness of the platform was a joke. Maybe they've solved this problem now?
There is a good, standard memory management model already. It's called C++ destructors and people who don't support exceptions (like EPOC and well CE) are breaking it. EPOC model (just adding a memory block to a cleanup list and then a call to free the list) is primitive compared to that. Again, why does a 2M PalmV support the good stuff?
And finally:
Yes, there is a price to pay for using EPOC/Symbian. But what you get for paying that price is a very robust and efficient OS that allows developers to use elegant OO design and C++ (albeit with some reasonable design decision imposed on the developer).
Yes, and the price is that you can not reuse your existing code, even the platform-indepenent portion that should by all rights be reused. My company can afford to hire 2 people to port from Win32 to one platform, but can not afford 20 people to port to 10 platforms. As a result, our EPOC port is 5 year old and unmaintained.
OS companies need to suck it up and support ANSI C/C++ and then provide their cute APIs as an alternative. All the arguments about overhead of, say, C++ exceptions on embedded platform don't hold water (well, except on devices with 100K RAM) because the overhead is only present when the feature is used and then it might be justified.
People risk their lives for much less noble things than space travel, which in some sense is the most fundamental, if uncertain future of humanity. Like going to a war in a foreign country without being told the real reason why it was started. Or extreme sports. Or smoking and eating junk food.
Sure, we should use the best technology available today to keep cosmonauts safe. But say, we develop the technology to send people to Mars but they only have 75% chance to get back alive. Perhaps, 20 years later it will be 95%. But we should still go today, because this is one of the best ways to risk one's life.
If I had $10M to go to space, I would go today. I don't care if it's a space shuttle with nice ceramic tiles, Mir or the new chinese rocket. There are just some things bigger than one life and it's worth risking the same to get closer to them. I wish NASA or russian space agency held lotteries for civilian space flights.
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And do they really let you order $2K software just because you say so? For me it takes several month to get "non-standard" software and if my purchase order has 4 digits it will likely be rejected. I tried to order $5K ARM BREW builder once and could never get any response.
Maybe it makes sense for the company to license Qt, but it doesn't make sense for me, as an individual developer, to fight for it. Easier to just suck it up and write a Java UI with JNI plugins for the existing C++ code. This way I still get an application that runs everywhere, modern OO toolkit and a profusion of RAD tools.
On the other hand, I would use LGPLed GTK+ if it was a nice programming interface. But both GTK+ and Qt suck compared to Cocoa.
Well, personally I didn't know that it's possible for a person to make an airplane at home and fly it over the South Pole if winds permit. Maybe one day I'll try to solve a programming problem, realize that it requires artifical intelligence and then, instead of writting it off as hopeless, just think "What the hell..."
Well, first of all I had a good laugh, because I came from Russia and my girlfriend is from China. Believe me, software engineers do eat out as well as buy music and cloth in both places. I should also note that I am driving a New Beetle which is not an SUV, don't have cable or satelite and buy cloth in Costo whenever I can.
Now, my rent fee is $1175, for a smaller appartment that I had almost for free in Russia. But what can I do about that? Not many appartments allow cats and if I pay $700 anywhere in Bay Area I would probably need to buy a gun for self defence. Should I really worry about 4 PS2 games per year for a total of $200 then?
I should also mention that I was severly harassed by government and high crime level in Russia and will not go back just to keep a programming job. But I also would love to keep the line of work that I enjoy. Any more tips to trim my bloated lifestyle so that I can compete with Indians?
Flying over South Pole in a home-built small airplane is an achivement of sorts for humanity, because people haven't been able to do this before. Also, the guy landed safely and didn't risk anyone's life for rescue.
Give the guy a break and someday you might see a team of entusiasts launching a manned spaceflight into orbit from a home-made high-altitude baloon. Do you think Columbus would discover America without some risk and even reclessness?
Can you please explain to me how I am having a bloated lifestyle with a technical lead job in Silicon Valley. I have an appartment, a car and Ok a couple of luxary items (a Mac, an iPod and a PS2 - Microsoft Free Home (TM)). I would be willing to give up all but the first one if I lived in a city with a decent subway, low crime and good night life. Say, like Taipei from what I saw when I visited.
You might want to try again. Blame a screwed currency exchange rate for example.
Should be allowed, encouraged, kept working by stabalizing kernel interfaces and not harassed by any type of intellectual property.
Linux is not so hot on the desktop, where lots of drivers are needed and I suspect most vendors write a Linux driver to make a small minority of users happy, not because it makes them a lot of money. This could be improved perhaps if they only need to update their driver once a year, not for every kernel patch and distribution.
As for releasing the source code, well sometimes they don't own it all in the first place and getting/buing permissions from everyone would be too expensive. Or in case of NVIDIA, driver optimizations could be easily used by competitors. Again, they don't have a huge market to look forward to as a compensation.
I think this is one case where Linus and a few other kernel developers care more about having fun - freedom to change interfaces to do something cool - then the end users of their work. Nothing wrong there too - it's their code and thanks to GPL other people can even make other versions more to their taste. The thing is, someone might do just that with Linux or BSD one of these days.
I would guess people in China have *certain* civil rights that are commonly violated in US. For example, the right to have an abortion. Or the right to walk on the street of a major city without worrying too much about violent crime. Or the right to share music and software with your friends.
Granted, some of it is just culture or lack of enforcement and some of it might go away soon. But at the same time, maybe we should demand some of those rights from our government.
A "reasonable" sysadmin monitoring porn is like a reasonable janitor searching your drawyers for copies of your resume.
Your job should be to ensure performance and security of the network. Keep a log of URLs for investigation purposes, but don't go snooping "just because" and delete after a week. If anyone is causing technical problems with their use, approach them on these grounds. If there is a complaint about employee X offended because employee Y is browsing porn, tell Y you expect him to be an adult and stop without any technological measures and tell X to let you know if there is still a problem.
If you get another complaint, then yes pull the log and this time Y should be really in hot water because he ignored a warning which is so easy to follow. On the other hand, if Y has an office and people don't automatically see his screen, inquire about the length X went through to get offended.
Honestly though - we have some socially conservative female employees from Asian countries and they are just snickering if they catch someone looking at pr0n. Did you hire some nut cases or are they really complaining about some more serious harassment and pr0n is just easier to define/prove?
You mean it's not a portable player with 802.11 for wireless P2P when several users ride the same subway? Damn! Any HK company developing a plugin for iPOD yet?
Do you really want insurance companies to get your money in one more way or snoop on your computer? You must really love your car and health insurance bills. Given only two choices, I would rather tolerate some spam. My company's and yahoo filters are doing an excellent job recently.
I think we all heard about social stability in Ireland. In Tom Clancy novels for example. And if you believe that, I have some beachfront Linux licenses from SCO to sell you.
Cars are sold primarily for the purpose of driving. Computers are sold primarily for the purpose of running user's software. If you say you provide "support", it better cover what an average person would do with a product. Besides solving a software problem, assuming reinstall is a fallback option, is way easier than fixing an engine. I think Dell should hire some of the unemployed bay area engineers instead of a call center in IDC and start providing some decent service.
Do you mean that Dell sells computers on which you are not supposed to install extra software or that they sell computers without support? This is like selling cars that you don't support if they are driven.
Actually after all the fuzz the article just mentions making 3D chips. Remember that the current limit only affects a single-layer chip of a fixed size.
I bet Intel or will spend billions of dollars on research and then we'll have cubical (or spherical? chips and a lot more computing power than we currently need on a desktop computer.
The Karma can be purchased for $290 on amazon.com, with another $20 off with a rebate. That's $270 versus $400.
I heard about EverQuest items sold on e-Bay, but $270 for karma?? No way! I think some people take slashdot way too seriously.
Religion generally means that some facts/rules of human behaviour and so on are absolute and not to be questioned. For example, you won't find many christians that think God approves casual sex and use of abortion as birth control.
An atheist doesn't necessarily think that christians are stupid, he/she just doesn't share their beliefs. As for meaning of life, atheists follow their gut feeling, advice of other humans or desire to make people happy to decide how to live. It may lead him/her in the same direction as religious people or it might not. Anyhow I haven't met anyone who uses science to make significant moral decisions. Or who is actively proud of being an atheist rather than just not feeling necessity of religion in their world view.
I think you have just as many stereotypes about atheists as we have about christians. You should hang around more. You might find people who qualify for the best accomodations in your favourite afterlife. At least if they came to your chirch.
Wow, I was actually going to post "Mod parent up" until I got to paragraph about copyright law. Why do you think it's any better for humanity than DRM?
Take the abandonware. There used to be a lot great, unique games (and I guess apps) for old IBM PCs. But just trying buying a copy of Space Quest 5 these days. If the company is no longer producing the game, or no longer selling a particular song, why not let people get those things from P2P? But no, abandonware sites keep getting cease and desist notices.
Would you care to elaborate? Some bugs (like mounted device files and mistakenly inherited resources) could cause an chroot()ed environment to be vunerable, but I haven't heard of any *general* reasons why they are not safe in general.
Of course you might need kernel patches to restrict network access for some user ids, but someone must have done it already.
Low end digital cameras are cheap. How many people will bother to hack a disposable one and be stuck with tape to close it after connecting to a PC and changing the non-rechargable battery when it dies?
There are too many things that are protected unnecessarily and at the cost to the company's profit margin or far more often the end user. Microsoft should just ship xbox with Linux preinstalled. You can't really use it for regular applicarions without a second PC, since you can't use a regular monitor. Sure there are some Linux games, but how many geeks who managed to run them will resist a nice copy of Matrix revolution in fry's?
But it could be, with a little work. Basically, higher speed at close range and bigger maximum range. As it is, I can't really download mp3 by putting a player on the same table as my PC or walk around my appartment with bluetooth headphones.I know about 802.11* but it would be nice if power consumption was only high when needed, not constantly.
Whose university is wheening off Sun boxes. Either you have desktop machine, then you already have root access or you have an account on a corporate server, then you are probably supposed to manage it. You can go and hack your own ISP, but these are the people in the best position to monitor you and they know exactly which billing address to show up at and kick your ass *shudder*.
Why not hack NFS code instead - or better yet SSH, Apache, gcc and so on? This exploit is so ineffective that I wonder if it's a bug after all.
Man, you have it easy. Grab a Palm, go to this link and enjoy. Now what I would like to see is J2SE (or a large subset that includes AWT) on high end Palm devices. Yes, there is Zaurus, but Palm or CE are so much more popular.
Actually, this might get them some new business. First of all, which big company you know doesn't already buy Windows separately and just wipe out the OEM version? Then, how many people you know that haven't already bought an OS for their previous PC and can install it on the next one, as a matter of fair use?
I've developed for EPOC/Symbian. The OS is targeted (of course) at embedded devices. When I was developing software for the platform, a modified GCC was used as the cross-compiler. It's one of the most standards-compliant C/C++ going!
How is that? ANSI C specifies global variables and well ANSI C library. Standard C++ specifies exceptions. Which standards are you talking about?
Having an on-device debugger would be nice, but is often not possible with embedded devices due to memory restrictions etc. Most development is done using a PC-based emulator, which works very well.
So, a Palm with 2M RAM doesn't have memory restrictions to run a debugger stub and 8M+ EPOC devices do? I say it's lack of desire to provide high-quality tools, plain and simple.
It is slightly ridiculous to demand ANSI C and POSIX libraries: EPOC/Symbian has its own very well defined programming model. This model was designed to deliver (among other things) outstanding OS stability and OS-wide object-orientation. So, you should not use C paradigms (or C code), but the OO paradigms defined by their programming model (and C++ code). Just because they have made design decisions that you don't like doesn't mean the platform is bad. It means you dont understand it.
No, it means I want to use the same code on multiple platforms. Say, I have a math library that supports my graphics drawing. I port it to EPOC and I have to call TLS to retrieve a pointer to global table that is initialized on the first call in front of every function. I have to rewrite all the exception code with "if (e) goto cleanup" and change all my interfaces to return an error. I'll probably cheat and provide my own memcpy, but I will have to scrap around to find BSD sprintf.
Now say I want the resulting code to also work on Palm. I have to write EPOC memory cleanup functions for Palm (although it supports exception). I have to break up big functions into 32K chunks to fit into segments.
Now I want to port it to BREW. It requires you to use macros like FADD(a,b) to do floating point arithmetics. How is that for a math library?
We don't have to debate the merits of global variables. We (should) all know that they are a bad idea except in a few restricted situations. For these situations, EPOC/Symbian provides thread-local storage (TLS) which can be used to create a singleton object; this can provide an OO interface to any global variables needed.
Yes, we don't have to debate. Global variables are for data that is meant to be shared between all calls and all threads, which TLS doesn't even provide. How does your argument prevent EPOC from implementing them for legacy code or for cases where they are approporiate?
MS have improved Win CE since I was developing for EPOC, but at that stage, MS had no programming model to ensure good memory management, and the robustness of the platform was a joke. Maybe they've solved this problem now?
There is a good, standard memory management model already. It's called C++ destructors and people who don't support exceptions (like EPOC and well CE) are breaking it. EPOC model (just adding a memory block to a cleanup list and then a call to free the list) is primitive compared to that. Again, why does a 2M PalmV support the good stuff?
And finally:
Yes, there is a price to pay for using EPOC/Symbian. But what you get for paying that price is a very robust and efficient OS that allows developers to use elegant OO design and C++ (albeit with some reasonable design decision imposed on the developer).
Yes, and the price is that you can not reuse your existing code, even the platform-indepenent portion that should by all rights be reused. My company can afford to hire 2 people to port from Win32 to one platform, but can not afford 20 people to port to 10 platforms. As a result, our EPOC port is 5 year old and unmaintained.
OS companies need to suck it up and support ANSI C/C++ and then provide their cute APIs as an alternative. All the arguments about overhead of, say, C++ exceptions on embedded platform don't hold water (well, except on devices with 100K RAM) because the overhead is only present when the feature is used and then it might be justified.
People risk their lives for much less noble things than space travel, which in some sense is the most fundamental, if uncertain future of humanity. Like going to a war in a foreign country without being told the real reason why it was started. Or extreme sports. Or smoking and eating junk food.
Sure, we should use the best technology available today to keep cosmonauts safe. But say, we develop the technology to send people to Mars but they only have 75% chance to get back alive. Perhaps, 20 years later it will be 95%. But we should still go today, because this is one of the best ways to risk one's life.
If I had $10M to go to space, I would go today. I don't care if it's a space shuttle with nice ceramic tiles, Mir or the new chinese rocket. There are just some things bigger than one life and it's worth risking the same to get closer to them. I wish NASA or russian space agency held lotteries for civilian space flights.