None of the objectives you mention is practical and absolutely none of them can be achieved in two consecutive presidential mandates.
Solar power satellites mean burning a lot of hydrocarbons to put them in orbit (no, the liquid hydrogen that fuels some spacecraft is not made from water). It's much smarter to find more efficient uses and cleaner power generation alternatives. This is what psychologists call a "magical thinking". It's a hard problem and magic is not an option.
As for mining the Moon, it means developing fully automated mineral extraction facilities that can be built and shipped from Earth while operating on the Moon and being more or less self-sustaining. They can be used to manufacture more copies of themselves too, but this is a insanely long shot.
As for proteins, well... Find one that blocks hair-loss or can give an 80 year-old billionaire an erection and you will be in business. Apart from that, it's a colossal waste of resources.
NASA should focus on fostering easy and reliable space access - developing technologies, hiring private companies to develop them or manufacture them after development or giving other forms of incentive. Building a permanent base on the Moon is one of the ways to do it - it would require lots of resupply trips and lots of materials sent.
Once you achieve cheap access to space (be it simply by building cheaper chemical rockets or other fancy tech) all other uses for space travel can be unlocked.
But weren't them insect-like life forms living underground? To have any measurable effect on the Moon's orbit, one would have to cover parts of it with cavorite. That's way beyond our current technological capabilities for the foreseeable future.
"In dorchester and southie (Boston, MA) under-achievers became criminals or cops."
If this is happening, you have a serious social problem. Still, there are ways to prevent this. If you make police work more attractive (by paying more, by having better retirement plans or better overall working conditions - people don't shoot me in my job, no matter how badly I screw up), under-achievers will have to find other, less dangerous, niches to compete in.
"that 'ask a friendly policeman on the corner' if you need help or have a question. nice friendly guys (....)
that ship has sailed. now, the current wisdom is to never talk to cops (2) [youtube.com] never talk to cops (1) [youtube.com]"
I still find it quite safe to ask policemen for directions and other information in general.
Most of the unfortunate incidents mentioned here can be traced to those "few bad apples" in all levels of the chain of command (the guy who shot the Brazilian to the guy who gave a stupid order that resulted in a of shot first ask later attitude). Even the "don't talk to police" videos (quite good advice indeed) can be translated to "don't interfere with an ongoing police investigation, even if you think you may be helping it".
Taking back our police forces is a part of taking back our governments thing we need to do before it's too late. Far too many idiots are running the circus because too many of the smartest people decided they would have nothing to do with politics for far too long. It's the people's police as much as the people's government and the people's laws. If you pit people against the institutions of the state, you have a civil war. If you put the people against their representatives, that's democracy at work.
The integrated architecture of DirectX, encompassing graphics, input and audio, make it more adequate for games.
If what you are doing is scientific visualization, you have pretty much no need for audio and little need for input. I also think many developers find it easier to program than OpenGL.
OpenGL, from the start, was much more focused in visualization than gaming. Microsoft made DirectX because they needed a consistent API for game programmers.
Obviously, the fact that it would allow them to screw all other workstation vendors that could do OpenGL better than Windows boxes but would never be able to implement DirectX without paying through their noses or being sued into oblivion did not stop them for even a second.
Their decision more or less made sense. They did not reject the 8080, but the 8008, which was not that superior to their TTL design. They could shave about U$50 off each device for going with the microprocessor. Since they had a more advanced design under development, they, perhaps, did not think the economy was worth the cost of retooling. How many thousand 2200s would they need to sell to compensate for that? Intel was late delivering the 8008.
On the other hand, they should have foreseen that, despite this small blunder, Intel had, indeed, a future in this business;-)
Just the other day, I was considering how much PC compatibility (and, later, Windows-friendliness) hindered the development of the personal computer.
While we have faster and cheaper PCs than before, they are, basically, the same design. They employ the same processors, the same I/O architectures (down to the ISA bus buried inside the chipset).
Free (as in speech) OSs could be the best things that happened in the last couple years to personal computers. It's now possible to build a non-x86 computer that is able to run a fully functional body of software without the need to develop it again. While the PS3 may not be the best non-x86 computer around, it proves one could build a completely different PC and still have a fully functional desktop. Devices like the Nokia über-PDAs hint at what can be done and the iPhone is a nice example of what you can do when you don't have to reinvent the wheel over and over again.
Well... After observing some of their R&D results, I think they could pretty much can the Microsoft Research thing. It's not really research if you tell them "don't do anything that disrupts our market" and I can't imagine Microsoft being bold.
Quite frankly, they never were. In the beginning, they made decent languages and some unremarkable but good software. They got the DOS deal and made an unremarkable, but good, OS. they made Xenix and it was a decent, if not quite up to AT&T standards, Unix-like. They made Windows and it was, for several releases, a really sucky GUI, but that was a time when decent GUIs were beyond the reach of 8086 PCs. Then the 386 came and soon Windows 3 was there and they had an unremarkable, but good enough, GUI in their hands and it finally succeeded. Out of that success and from the ashes of OS/2, NT grew and blossomed as a barely adequate server OS. From that point on, Microsoft was all about cornering the competition and waiting for them to make a mistake while they continuously improved their existing technology without risking disrupting it.
Then came the monopoly - when they have killed most, if not all, their competition. At that very moment, Microsoft lost the little balls it once did and started to play the game they play now - the one where they "steer" "innovation" clear from their competitors and they "innovate" in ways to limit their clients ability to consider other options, if they ever materialize.
To imagine such a company could more than half-heartedly create an "innovative" division is ludicrous, at best.
They need a new NT. They probably don't have neither the balls to bet on it nor the brains to do it.
There is a small difference between flying a plane in person and flying a RC drone into combat - in the first case, it's more "personal" - the targets are often shooting back and you have to neutralize them for your own safety. It's easier to accept the responsibility to kill when your own life was in the line. You are there, fighting. It's personal.
In the case of an RC plane, the pilot's life is never in danger - it's a much more asymmetrical situation, much more like the one of a marksman than the one of a pilot.
I know how I would react to that asymmetry. I would need a ton of therapy.
Not sure about whatever processor is in this computer, but Cromemco did indeed have Cromix, a Unix-like OS, for their Z-80-based systems. It required 128K or more of memory, but it could turn the little US$12 computer into a multi-user system;-)
DS1 was powered by solar panels. They were very high-efficiency compared to other models of the time.
A nuclear reactor poses another set of problems - it's really hard to get rid of excess heat in a vacuum. Those fins you see between the yellow tanks in the YouTube video are radiators. It's interesting that the ship appears to use three very big RTGs for power placed in long structures far from the crew compartment but the main source of radiated heat seems to be the engine.
If it's about fighting IE 8 or Windows 7, we may very well fight vapor with vapor.
Considering Microsoft's huge resources, in order to minimize their effectiveness, we must send them running after their tails implementing every interface idea we can prior-art them with (like they are doing with multi-touch) while we only pursue the valid ones.
If we do it right, they will spend all their resources in futile capabilities and end up lacking on important features their business clients and OEMs require and competitive alternatives will cover those needs, effectively breaching their monopoly.
"You're not likely to have an ongoing conversation with a fictitious person through the mail to the point that you think of them as your boyfriend."
I know I wouldn't. But then I am not deranged enough to commit suicide over it.
It's really hard to picture someone who falls in love with someone else over text messages and photos as a paragon of rationality and emotional balance.
It's mainly because nobody can easily steal a heavy server. And, unless the server is physically missing, they probably won't realize the data was copied in the first place and, so, won't notify anyone.
That sort of data didn't belong to a notebook either.
That sort of data should be protected by blast-proof concrete walls of a high-security data-center, behind armed and well trained guards that shot first and that won't miss.
After all, compromises to that data would allow people to zip through security at airports with minimum security checking. That's really scary.
The price you quote is for a computer. A commodity one. Still, the burden of being Windows-friendly is felt in just about every computer - they all use more or less the same processors, the same memory architecture, the same old IO architecture of an IBM PC 5150. And only recently 64-bit and multi-cpu computers started to become mainstream. There is competition, but only to make it cheaper and faster. There is none to make it evolve because evolving out of Windows-friendliness would be fatal.
The pace of change slowed down. No more radical designs, no more radical CPUs. Only more of the same. You may call it progress, but only because you were in your diapers when real progress was made.
Who is building the next Amiga? Who is writing the next Smalltalk?
And I am sure Microsoft will play nice even without having the cross-licensing agreements that allows AMD to implement Intel's instruction set and that allowed Intel to implement AMD's 64-bit extensions.
After all, they have a long history of responsible corporate citizenship.
Slashdot Mirror
None of the objectives you mention is practical and absolutely none of them can be achieved in two consecutive presidential mandates.
Solar power satellites mean burning a lot of hydrocarbons to put them in orbit (no, the liquid hydrogen that fuels some spacecraft is not made from water). It's much smarter to find more efficient uses and cleaner power generation alternatives. This is what psychologists call a "magical thinking". It's a hard problem and magic is not an option.
As for mining the Moon, it means developing fully automated mineral extraction facilities that can be built and shipped from Earth while operating on the Moon and being more or less self-sustaining. They can be used to manufacture more copies of themselves too, but this is a insanely long shot.
As for proteins, well... Find one that blocks hair-loss or can give an 80 year-old billionaire an erection and you will be in business. Apart from that, it's a colossal waste of resources.
NASA should focus on fostering easy and reliable space access - developing technologies, hiring private companies to develop them or manufacture them after development or giving other forms of incentive. Building a permanent base on the Moon is one of the ways to do it - it would require lots of resupply trips and lots of materials sent.
Once you achieve cheap access to space (be it simply by building cheaper chemical rockets or other fancy tech) all other uses for space travel can be unlocked.
Why classes? Are they inherently superior to other approaches?
But weren't them insect-like life forms living underground? To have any measurable effect on the Moon's orbit, one would have to cover parts of it with cavorite. That's way beyond our current technological capabilities for the foreseeable future.
Well... They did that to poor H. G. Wells...
And his grandson directed the movie.
The one that can carry coconuts, I guess.
Are we still talking about a board game?
"In dorchester and southie (Boston, MA) under-achievers became criminals or cops."
If this is happening, you have a serious social problem. Still, there are ways to prevent this. If you make police work more attractive (by paying more, by having better retirement plans or better overall working conditions - people don't shoot me in my job, no matter how badly I screw up), under-achievers will have to find other, less dangerous, niches to compete in.
"that 'ask a friendly policeman on the corner' if you need help or have a question. nice friendly guys (....)
that ship has sailed. now, the current wisdom is to never talk to cops (2) [youtube.com] never talk to cops (1) [youtube.com]"
I still find it quite safe to ask policemen for directions and other information in general.
Most of the unfortunate incidents mentioned here can be traced to those "few bad apples" in all levels of the chain of command (the guy who shot the Brazilian to the guy who gave a stupid order that resulted in a of shot first ask later attitude). Even the "don't talk to police" videos (quite good advice indeed) can be translated to "don't interfere with an ongoing police investigation, even if you think you may be helping it".
Taking back our police forces is a part of taking back our governments thing we need to do before it's too late. Far too many idiots are running the circus because too many of the smartest people decided they would have nothing to do with politics for far too long. It's the people's police as much as the people's government and the people's laws. If you pit people against the institutions of the state, you have a civil war. If you put the people against their representatives, that's democracy at work.
May I correct you.
The integrated architecture of DirectX, encompassing graphics, input and audio, make it more adequate for games.
If what you are doing is scientific visualization, you have pretty much no need for audio and little need for input. I also think many developers find it easier to program than OpenGL.
OpenGL, from the start, was much more focused in visualization than gaming. Microsoft made DirectX because they needed a consistent API for game programmers.
Obviously, the fact that it would allow them to screw all other workstation vendors that could do OpenGL better than Windows boxes but would never be able to implement DirectX without paying through their noses or being sued into oblivion did not stop them for even a second.
Their decision more or less made sense. They did not reject the 8080, but the 8008, which was not that superior to their TTL design. They could shave about U$50 off each device for going with the microprocessor. Since they had a more advanced design under development, they, perhaps, did not think the economy was worth the cost of retooling. How many thousand 2200s would they need to sell to compensate for that? Intel was late delivering the 8008.
On the other hand, they should have foreseen that, despite this small blunder, Intel had, indeed, a future in this business ;-)
Just the other day, I was considering how much PC compatibility (and, later, Windows-friendliness) hindered the development of the personal computer.
While we have faster and cheaper PCs than before, they are, basically, the same design. They employ the same processors, the same I/O architectures (down to the ISA bus buried inside the chipset).
Free (as in speech) OSs could be the best things that happened in the last couple years to personal computers. It's now possible to build a non-x86 computer that is able to run a fully functional body of software without the need to develop it again. While the PS3 may not be the best non-x86 computer around, it proves one could build a completely different PC and still have a fully functional desktop. Devices like the Nokia über-PDAs hint at what can be done and the iPhone is a nice example of what you can do when you don't have to reinvent the wheel over and over again.
Well... After observing some of their R&D results, I think they could pretty much can the Microsoft Research thing. It's not really research if you tell them "don't do anything that disrupts our market" and I can't imagine Microsoft being bold.
Quite frankly, they never were. In the beginning, they made decent languages and some unremarkable but good software. They got the DOS deal and made an unremarkable, but good, OS. they made Xenix and it was a decent, if not quite up to AT&T standards, Unix-like. They made Windows and it was, for several releases, a really sucky GUI, but that was a time when decent GUIs were beyond the reach of 8086 PCs. Then the 386 came and soon Windows 3 was there and they had an unremarkable, but good enough, GUI in their hands and it finally succeeded. Out of that success and from the ashes of OS/2, NT grew and blossomed as a barely adequate server OS. From that point on, Microsoft was all about cornering the competition and waiting for them to make a mistake while they continuously improved their existing technology without risking disrupting it.
Then came the monopoly - when they have killed most, if not all, their competition. At that very moment, Microsoft lost the little balls it once did and started to play the game they play now - the one where they "steer" "innovation" clear from their competitors and they "innovate" in ways to limit their clients ability to consider other options, if they ever materialize.
To imagine such a company could more than half-heartedly create an "innovative" division is ludicrous, at best.
They need a new NT. They probably don't have neither the balls to bet on it nor the brains to do it.
I certainly won't miss them.
There is a small difference between flying a plane in person and flying a RC drone into combat - in the first case, it's more "personal" - the targets are often shooting back and you have to neutralize them for your own safety. It's easier to accept the responsibility to kill when your own life was in the line. You are there, fighting. It's personal.
In the case of an RC plane, the pilot's life is never in danger - it's a much more asymmetrical situation, much more like the one of a marksman than the one of a pilot.
I know how I would react to that asymmetry. I would need a ton of therapy.
It would be fun to watch ;-)
Not to start a platform war, but the 6502 was much more fun than the z-80 ;-)
The 8051 was "fun to drive" too. But you would probably have to build your hardware for it.
Isn't being easy a good thing?
I mean, if the harder it is to develop software the better, we would be doing it all in hardware ;-)
It's in fact possible.
Not sure about whatever processor is in this computer, but Cromemco did indeed have Cromix, a Unix-like OS, for their Z-80-based systems. It required 128K or more of memory, but it could turn the little US$12 computer into a multi-user system ;-)
DS1 was powered by solar panels. They were very high-efficiency compared to other models of the time.
A nuclear reactor poses another set of problems - it's really hard to get rid of excess heat in a vacuum. Those fins you see between the yellow tanks in the YouTube video are radiators. It's interesting that the ship appears to use three very big RTGs for power placed in long structures far from the crew compartment but the main source of radiated heat seems to be the engine.
But it's an interesting video.
"this is vapor-ware at its finest"
If it's about fighting IE 8 or Windows 7, we may very well fight vapor with vapor.
Considering Microsoft's huge resources, in order to minimize their effectiveness, we must send them running after their tails implementing every interface idea we can prior-art them with (like they are doing with multi-touch) while we only pursue the valid ones.
If we do it right, they will spend all their resources in futile capabilities and end up lacking on important features their business clients and OEMs require and competitive alternatives will cover those needs, effectively breaching their monopoly.
"You're not likely to have an ongoing conversation with a fictitious person through the mail to the point that you think of them as your boyfriend."
I know I wouldn't. But then I am not deranged enough to commit suicide over it.
It's really hard to picture someone who falls in love with someone else over text messages and photos as a paragon of rationality and emotional balance.
"Why can't people learn to look at their own issues before pointing fingers and pushing blame to everyone else so quickly?"
Because some greedy lawyer won't let them.
"It's always laptops with critical data."
It's mainly because nobody can easily steal a heavy server. And, unless the server is physically missing, they probably won't realize the data was copied in the first place and, so, won't notify anyone.
That sort of data didn't belong to a notebook either.
That sort of data should be protected by blast-proof concrete walls of a high-security data-center, behind armed and well trained guards that shot first and that won't miss.
After all, compromises to that data would allow people to zip through security at airports with minimum security checking. That's really scary.
Oh boy... Replying to AC... Here we go.
The price you quote is for a computer. A commodity one. Still, the burden of being Windows-friendly is felt in just about every computer - they all use more or less the same processors, the same memory architecture, the same old IO architecture of an IBM PC 5150. And only recently 64-bit and multi-cpu computers started to become mainstream. There is competition, but only to make it cheaper and faster. There is none to make it evolve because evolving out of Windows-friendliness would be fatal.
The pace of change slowed down. No more radical designs, no more radical CPUs. Only more of the same. You may call it progress, but only because you were in your diapers when real progress was made.
Who is building the next Amiga? Who is writing the next Smalltalk?
Most probably nobody. We will all pay for that.
And I am sure Microsoft will play nice even without having the cross-licensing agreements that allows AMD to implement Intel's instruction set and that allowed Intel to implement AMD's 64-bit extensions.
After all, they have a long history of responsible corporate citizenship.