I assume people who have hundreds of processor cores in one single box has in-house specialists that can integrate this kind of stuff into whatever distro they happen to like.
If we find water, we can pretty sure make the fuel for the return trip on site. We would have to send some hardware before the first humans arrive - the return vehicles themselves and the fuel factories. This would decrease the mass of the man-rated spacecraft (the supply craft could be less-safe, less-redundant and more numerous. They could also land less delicately than a human cargo would require.
Even if the plan is that they die on Mars, I am quite sure it would involve living for a good couple decades before dying and not dying from a freak accident and not having the means to come back in an emergency.
Think of the return vehicles as an insurance policy - if the mission goes as planned, the astronauts will live long and productive lives and eventually die on Mars and the return vehicles will never get used. If, however, they have a problem, they use the return vehicle they have and come back to Earth as soon as they can.
And what would be the profitable product of Mars? It's dead, it's cold, its gravity is lower, but not that low, it's atmosphere is so thin it resembles more a good vacuum, but it's thick enough to provide for month-long sand storms.
Lovely place. It wouldn't work even if the surface is covered by egg-sized diamonds, which it's not
What would dying in a dead planet do for humanity?
I understand you may give them the means to return (start sending return vehicles, habitats and supplies years before humans arrive) and the _option_ to schedule their return to Earth when their missions end or extend them for as long as their environment sustains them, but sending humans in a one-way trip to a dead place is remarkably stupid.
I am sorry to destroy your fantasies, but Debian is used in a lot of enterprises. The only drawback of using Debian is that pointy-haired bosses frequently will be confused because they are unable to write a check for support to a Debian Corporation or something like that and this is not what PHBs are used to do.
What creates this distorted perception is that Debian tends to appear in companies that give a little more autonomy to the tech areas than Red Hat and those companies don't have the required PHB density to appear in most "corporate IT" magazines.
That said, I have nothing against Red Hat. It's a fine distro that comes attached to hefty support fees and lots of "enterprisey" features appear in RH before they appear in Debian. And a couple things in RH really suck: For instance, I really love the way Debian organizes the Apache configuration files. I also think Debian's package management is much better than Red Hat's (and that is a critical issue to me - I want the system to be able to update itself with next to no disruption). OTOH, I would have liked Debian a lot more if it weren't for that SSH problem it had a couple years back. Recreating all the keys was not fun.
In these GPGPU/OpenCL days, I seel less and less incentive to run a computer with a Cell processor in it apart from the fact its's totally windows-proof
They could have a PS3 no-strings-attached edition that could be sold without subsidies. The catch is that it would boot off unsigned disks and you could install whatever you fancied on its bare hardware.
It would be a tad more expensive than an ordinary PS3, but I think many people would consider it, specially among Slashdot readers.
And while they are at it, is there a way to run a Cell off regular DDR2/3 memories?
Dying of cancer is slow and painful, but the end result is the same as a bullet. If there is some life after death, he would find it out sooner or later. Suicide is seldom a rational choice and, as it is, he deprived himself of the slim possibility of being cured.
Freak accidents do happen. Chemotherapy works in some cases.
Slashdot Mirror
But we are planning to send _smart_ people!
I assume people who have hundreds of processor cores in one single box has in-house specialists that can integrate this kind of stuff into whatever distro they happen to like.
The suits won't protect them from the first solar flare. I bet it will cook bacteria quickly.
OTOH, some may survive.
I, for one, welcome my flesh-eating, radiation-resistant bacterial overlords.
If you intend to profit selling something you get on Mars, wouldn't it be clever to have a return vehicle and be able to bring it back to Earth?
Actually, they would be areo-caches
Not necessarily.
If we find water, we can pretty sure make the fuel for the return trip on site. We would have to send some hardware before the first humans arrive - the return vehicles themselves and the fuel factories. This would decrease the mass of the man-rated spacecraft (the supply craft could be less-safe, less-redundant and more numerous. They could also land less delicately than a human cargo would require.
Even if the plan is that they die on Mars, I am quite sure it would involve living for a good couple decades before dying and not dying from a freak accident and not having the means to come back in an emergency.
Think of the return vehicles as an insurance policy - if the mission goes as planned, the astronauts will live long and productive lives and eventually die on Mars and the return vehicles will never get used. If, however, they have a problem, they use the return vehicle they have and come back to Earth as soon as they can.
Fine. You go first.
Well... Robots can't give their lives to the progress of science ;-)
Roanoke will look like a picnic when compared to Mars.
Heck. Building a colony on the Moon looks like camping in your backyard when compared to doing the same on Mars...
But then you would have to use thrusters instead of impulse power. The trip would take months!
And what would be the profitable product of Mars? It's dead, it's cold, its gravity is lower, but not that low, it's atmosphere is so thin it resembles more a good vacuum, but it's thick enough to provide for month-long sand storms.
Lovely place. It wouldn't work even if the surface is covered by egg-sized diamonds, which it's not
What would dying in a dead planet do for humanity?
I understand you may give them the means to return (start sending return vehicles, habitats and supplies years before humans arrive) and the _option_ to schedule their return to Earth when their missions end or extend them for as long as their environment sustains them, but sending humans in a one-way trip to a dead place is remarkably stupid.
Which will be eventually killed by the temperatures, vacuum and intense radiation
That's great. Not only you pay Red Hat for it, you also pay them to negate your excuse to do minor upgrades.
Oh boy... You will really need support when you upgrade from MySQL3 to MySQL8...
Can't they just symlink /usr/bin/python to /usr/bin/python2.4?
Why would Python 3 (or 2.6/2.5) interfere?
And no other distro has it?
Real computers don't have ports for keyboards, mice or monitors.
"It sucks, but their position is understandable."
No.
I have Python 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 and 3.0 happily living in a Debian box. 2.4 for Zope/Plone, 2.5 because it's there, 2.6 for Django and 3.0 because I can.
Just get Debian.
Or Ubuntu. And you can even pay Canonical what you would pay Red Hat.
Oh... The requirement to reinstall the whole system every time you do a major upgrade (say, from 4 to 5).
Icons with red hats?
I am sorry to destroy your fantasies, but Debian is used in a lot of enterprises. The only drawback of using Debian is that pointy-haired bosses frequently will be confused because they are unable to write a check for support to a Debian Corporation or something like that and this is not what PHBs are used to do.
What creates this distorted perception is that Debian tends to appear in companies that give a little more autonomy to the tech areas than Red Hat and those companies don't have the required PHB density to appear in most "corporate IT" magazines.
That said, I have nothing against Red Hat. It's a fine distro that comes attached to hefty support fees and lots of "enterprisey" features appear in RH before they appear in Debian. And a couple things in RH really suck: For instance, I really love the way Debian organizes the Apache configuration files. I also think Debian's package management is much better than Red Hat's (and that is a critical issue to me - I want the system to be able to update itself with next to no disruption). OTOH, I would have liked Debian a lot more if it weren't for that SSH problem it had a couple years back. Recreating all the keys was not fun.
In these GPGPU/OpenCL days, I seel less and less incentive to run a computer with a Cell processor in it apart from the fact its's totally windows-proof
They could have a PS3 no-strings-attached edition that could be sold without subsidies. The catch is that it would boot off unsigned disks and you could install whatever you fancied on its bare hardware.
It would be a tad more expensive than an ordinary PS3, but I think many people would consider it, specially among Slashdot readers.
And while they are at it, is there a way to run a Cell off regular DDR2/3 memories?
"That, is bravery."
Erm... Could be.
Dying of cancer is slow and painful, but the end result is the same as a bullet. If there is some life after death, he would find it out sooner or later. Suicide is seldom a rational choice and, as it is, he deprived himself of the slim possibility of being cured.
Freak accidents do happen. Chemotherapy works in some cases.
I know I would certainly not chose this route.
Can we call it "Slow Leopard"? ;-)