Last I used Outlook, having two events with conflicting times was quite difficult to understand, if it was even understandable at all. Besides, with iCal, I can have hundreds of calender events that all coincide at the same time, and still pick them apart simply by color. Of course, I haven't used Outlook 2k3 (Why would I? I'm on a Mac and I like having free space in my ram.) but this was one of my bigger concerns.
At the same time, I feel it really unnessicary to have a calendar and an address book overlap, which is one issue people might have problems with in iCal; the integration for people at events is still very young. I think this may change, but very slowly; introducing bloat is the last thing they want to do over at Apple these days.
iCal is not only 100% less bloated, it's also much easier to track things like to-do lists, and have multiple, overlapping schedules. In combination with using an open standard, it's easy to publish your calenders and keep track of everything. And it integrates into open source like a mug.
If you're ever at a Mac store, try it out. You might find you like it.
You're completely right, but I want to add a point;
as with most other engineering professions, there is a group of people who design, and there's a group of people who implement.
So far in my Computer Engineering teachings and research into those teachings, we have not been (and will not be) taught to design a single thing. We are taught to be code monkeys, but with all of mathematics and physics and such of a typical engineer.
Some way Computer Scientists should be the ones designing the software, and we should be the ones implementing it. I believe it should be the Computer Scientists job to invent algorithms and tell us why things work, then Engineers should use it to *design* the way it should work, and then the Programmers should write it. This would be laid out in the same way a physist derives the formulas for what makes a bridge stand, (the archetect is a step left out- interface design is an art, and I believe it should be taught as such), engineers decide where to put the rivets, and general contractors put the rivets in the holes, thus completing the bridge.
Microsoft really can't do anything to upset this archetectural switch.
Microsoft recently shot themselves in the foot by putting their money and operating system behind AMD (Athlon XP, Windows XP.. hmm coincidence? I don't think so). So Intel goes shopping for a new OS contender. Linux is free, so that's out of the question. The BSD's are all good candidates, but someone's gotta develop a good GUI system... Bingo, Apple Computers is there and waiting. And since IBM pissed Apple off so much by not producing the G5's they promised, Intel was ready to sell to them.
Game developers would, at this point, be retarded not to quickly shift game development to the x86 Mac platform. The only thing most game developers would lose entirely is DirectX, and with OpenGL being just as good as an option, entirely free, (and in some opinions, faster), it wouldn't be that bad of a loss in time or momentum.
Why else do you think Microsoft would try to buy into the gaming world with a PPC chip? If your gaming archetecture requires coding on a platform that nobody else can use, you've locked your developers in. Their moves are just one more strategic step towards it. Apple's, ironically, was a step away from vendor lock-in (which Apple has fought so hard to attain and maintain).
AFAIK, Apple writes all the drivers for OS X in the video department. How they do this, I'm not exactly sure, whether they get the specs from the manufacturers or what.
That being said, OpenGL on OS X is still blazing fast. Porting a game engine that's OpenGL-friendly shouldn't take very long at all.
Mac hardware has always been expensive partly due to the CPUs (they aren't anywhere near as cheap as the super-massively produced Intel hardware). When we see the shift to Intel, their prices will initially be high (due to the hardware change), but will quite quickly drop back down to below the baseline for PPC hardware. This means that $500 Mac Mini will probably be a $300 Mac Mini (with a Celeron M).
Secondly, Apple always has something that everyone else doesn't; the Operating System, and the design of the computer. The OS is technically superior, better looking, and more effecient than any of the alternatives (Linux may have the performace crown, but even that's disputable, but I find Linux to be about as useful as a blind seeing eye dog). Put a Mac in front of people, tell them that they can run all of their Windows apps using Wine, and they'll fly off the shelves.
Thirdly, the Mac is 100x more likely to come with a monitor, and at that, an LCD monitor. This, in combination with everything else, easily makes up the price difference. And if a consumer can't see that, then they aren't really paying attention when buying a computer.
The Pentium 3 does not equal the Pentium M. I don't know what it'll take to get that into your head, but I'm going to stop trying after this post.
The Pentium M is actually a whole, different chip, just as the Pentium Pro and the Pentium 2 are whole, different chips (Pentium 2 and Pentium 3, on the other hand, have so much similar that it's almost a bad example). The Pentium 2 introduced to P6 (Pentium Pro) MMX. The Pentium 3 introduced to the Pentium 2 SSE(1/2). The Pentium M introduced to the Pentium 3 Micro-op fusion, Netburst-style bussing, and a bunch of other blessings that it inheirited from the P4.
So your statement "Saying the P3 was green lighted before the P4 is a pretty stupid statement", is in itself a stupid statement. The Pentium 4 project (Williamette) actually started in the mid-90's as a replacement for P6, so I'm sure plenty of cross-pollenation happened as P6 grew older, just as it did with the Pentium M.
I didn't say the Pentium 3 was greenlighted before the Pentium 4. I said the Pentium M was probably in development and minimal production long before they decided to greenlight and produce the P4.
I'm gonna say this for one, last, time. The Pentium-M is the Next Logical Evolution in the P6 archetectural line. This iteration brought micro-op fusion (more RISCy behavior), more cache room, smaller chips (reduced size, which in turn reduced the power demands), and a faster bus speed. For all purposes. With better versions and designs of SpeedStep, Intel *designed* it to bring the mobile revoltion to the forefront.
The only problem is, their savior for the Server machine (Itanium), failed to catch on. So they regeared their systems, and we have the hideous P4 we all hate. A few years later, the Pentium M is now perfectly able to take over the role of desktop processor, and all is happy.
Go back and read my post again if you're still confused.
Why would Intel do that? If Intel won't give up on Itanic, the processor that could..n't make it into enough server rooms to break even on its development, then why, why oh why would they drop a platform that's got such great market saturation????
Not only will providing Pentium 4's for existing desktops produce some income for a couple of years to go, the Xeon line is still *dependent* on it. In environmentally controlled rooms, these machines can produce all the heat they want and nobody's gonna give a damn. Couple that with more thermal work, bigger caches (hah, no surprise), and a few reworkings of internal components, and the Netburst Arch can live on, finally driving the wedge between their Desktop and Midrange Server class machines, like they've been trying to do for YEARS with the Xeon branding.
[AMD did this easily with Opteron vs Athlon 64. (Sledge/Clawhammer).]
Now if they'd just hurry up with their damned productions instead of sitting on their arseloads of technologies.. I guess that's the problem when you control all of the aspects of production; too hard to get the wheels greased and in motion.
Most likely this was an Apple request/terms of the deal.
Apple's core infrastructure's been developed on Intel machines for quite a while, and I'm sure the developers have spent every waking moment for optimizing Mac OS X for the Pentium 4. Now that they have to move to the Pentium M (as it is a much more stable, longer lasting platform), they need the instruction set to be complete. Applications like CoreImage/QuickTime thrive off of vector code, and with Altivec out of the picture (*CRIES*), SSE3/2/1+MMX is the only viable alternative.
While I'm sure there are hundreds of technologies Intel could possibly use to get a lead, they don't need to. Intel is refactoring for the Pentium M to take over the general computing market, the Xeon line to inheirit the Pentium 4 and all of its mess (hey, it's not too bad if you're gonna run it in an environmentally controlled room eh?), and the Itanium line is still continuing for the extreme high end (how the fuck??) and is soon to see its third iteration.
Besides, I'm sure Intel has a great memory for trying rash proceedures. I'm sure the Pentium M was long on the table before they greenlighted the Pentium 4; it was the next logical progression of the P6 family tree. The Pentium 4 was probably someone's pet project used to drive the industry to a frenzy, feeding off of increased clock cycles. And it worked.
Now that IPC is important again, Intel's baby P6 has grown up to a working man.
Get over it. Apple has said time and again in their documentation of the move that they are going to IA-32; not x86-64, not Itanium, not Intel's own version of PPC, IA-32.
While it remains to be argued whether or not this is a good thing, at least the Mac OS will now run on commodity hardware, meaning it should be more available to people. This will drive down the costs of manufacturing a Mac, increasing the ROI of the Mac hardware (assuming they keep the same price; why not when the selling point is so great?)
Their one platform that shows the most promise, the Mini Mac, will enjoy huge benifits from this move. Celeron-M laptop boards should drive the cost of this gem down into the Dell-cheap-as-dirt range, meaning more Macs on the market. Hell, if I were Dell I'd be doing all I could to get in with Apple and get the Mac OS X because the Mac Mini IA-32 edition will be such a great seller for the company.
While this isn't the end of Microsoft, I think they're about to see large cuts in their marketshare. If everyone out there who's even *looked* at an iPod starts looking at Apple computers as a viable, non-hobbiest machine, then they could sell millions.
The forecast is cloudy, but the sun's behind all of those clouds.
Compression would add to the need for a) greater data redundancy (because compression errors DO happen from time to time), b) more computational time (unless someone made a Gzip chip and stuck it on an HD controller.. *ponders*), and c) would be terribly cost-inefficient.
HD's are a dime a dozen. CPUs are not. If you have to have more costly CPUs running your File servers, that means less costly CPUs to run your Genetic Algorithms (pardon the pun).
It's simple really. They have to power more stuff than your house does.
Whereas one computer doesn't really produce enough heat to cause a problem in the house (well, dependingly...), 2000 do. This requires an inbuilding airconditioning system to vent the heat, which adds a LOT to the energy bill.
The computers themselves are usually a small load when it comes to the utilites of the building. Oh, of course there are monitors, and things you'd find in an ordinary home (well, probably microwaves, coffee pots, crew comforts, florescent lighting..).
If we want this thing to reach relevistic speeds, then every second it wastes not accellerating is a second you can't get back. Take that with the fact this thing is shedding weight (and therefore momentus potential) and you end up with a seriously inefficient vehicle.
Ramjets, as they are currently designed, require input medium, a way to accellerate it (ala, adding energy), and a way to output it.
In our solar system, there aren't too many fields of gas we can use to accellerate our device, so we end up carrying a good portion of it onboard, or saturating a field before hand in preperation. Then, we have to be able to add energy to the material as we pass through it, which requires us carrying the ability to produce massive quantities of it onboard (fusion would be nice, but fissables are all we've got now).
Now, I'm not saying this wouldn't work on the best of circumstances, but ion engines are really the best alternative to Ramjets. Hell, you could probably build an ion engine with a collector for use like a Ramjet.
A sail encompasses a LOT of surface area, which means that as the sail scales to larger sizes, it becomes a much more attractive target to whatever strikes it.
Now, granted a sail in space with a hole doesn't "lose pressure" like it would here on earth, but after a while, the strikes would render the sail uneffective, and the sail would need to be replaced.
Couple this with traditional space craft design and it means you have to do a lot of discarding along the way, which is something NASA and other Space Agencies should be against. Discarding material makes for more debris on the next launch, making solar sails an even less effective solution to the problem.
The problem with the parent's post is the sail itself. Our solar system is a rocky and dangerous space, and so far, we have no idea what the area outside of it is like either.
The sail would quickly break apart as it gets struck by all kinds of space debris, some left by us, others by more natural occurances. Thus, for an effective craft, multiple sails would be kept on board, being deployed stratigically when the previous sails are no longer providing maximal thrust, and when the coast is clear.
Next, between those times when the sails are not up, the ship will probably want to keep thrust, so it will have to carry onboard some propellant to keep its thrust up during the times it is without sails. Thus, the ship will lose a significant portion of weight during its travel.
Lastly, unless we align everything like we did with the Voyager launches, gravity will not be so forth coming for this space craft. This will probably mean multiple near-sun passes to build up the speed nessicary to exit the solar system and continue on to the next star. This means some clever routing by computer simulations, along with a computer figuring when to discard and open new sails along the way.
Not only will all of this cost a lot, it will likely make it take much longer to get out of the solar system. Lucky for us, as we can pile on the goodies like cameras, radio antenna, and do some exploration as it passes through the planets building up gravitational accelleration.
Solar sails are (in theory) the maximum way to effeciently propell yourself. They simply sit out in space, speeding you up, verses having to provide your own thrust, thus keeping more fuel onboard, thus building momentum faster.
Voyager and the gang took a good twenty-thirty years getting to where they're going. A sailed ship could spend that same twenty years, get to the same place, and still have a full load of fuel left.
I'd say the most classic problem is interstellar travel itself; since our most far-out space craft are just now breaching what we know to be the end of our solar system, we have no idea about any of the dangers of interstellar travel. And my guess is that we won't for another two hundred or so years, once everything in our solar system has been "decently" explored and the technology exists to cheaply put things into space.
Besides, slowing down isn't as difficult as speeding up; use the slingshot effect in reverse. Steer around the orbits of other, high-mass planets, using their gravity wells to slow your momentum until it's possible to chemically control. That in combination with shedding weight (mass driver would probably have to be installed in front of the craft to soak up radiation/protect against high speed collisions) should help a great deal. But who knows. Cross a bridge when we get to it.
Build a PearPC-like virtual machine to emulate the Intel hardware, and you'll have no problem. Since there's no archetectural switch, it should scream and the user should be none the wiser.
More likely, I see Apple doing the same thing they do now; OpenFirmware on Intel, make sure that OS X doesn't run when certain signatures aren't in the firmware, etc. etc. More difficult to hack around, but still can be done.
But the problem with that is, you end up keeping very old, stagnant material, along with very old, very useful material.
With the web designed as an ad-hoc, mindless data drop system, it's virtually guarenteed we'll be holding on to those pathetic GeoCities websites until long past the days of our deaths.
This brings up a bunch of problems with the web in general. Dead links being a huge problem; if PageRank or anything like it is supposed to chug through all of the links on old websites, along with the new, fresh sites, you end up wasting millions upon millions of cycles, which in Google terms, amounts to money.
Perhaps we should design a better versioning system for the internet, or just drop dead content all together. Who knows, we're barely seeing the horizion of dead content.
Well, I think there are significant other legal standings saying the ISPs don't have to turn over those kinds of log files, and even if they did have to, all anyone would have to do is use a damned encrypting P2P system.
Besides, the ISPs couldn't POSSIBLY keep a log of every bit that went through their networks, and it's probably very hard to keep logs of just where those packets were going, though not impossible. Maybe we as consumers should start asking for guarenteed anonymity or move on to greener pastures.
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Last I used Outlook, having two events with conflicting times was quite difficult to understand, if it was even understandable at all. Besides, with iCal, I can have hundreds of calender events that all coincide at the same time, and still pick them apart simply by color. Of course, I haven't used Outlook 2k3 (Why would I? I'm on a Mac and I like having free space in my ram.) but this was one of my bigger concerns.
At the same time, I feel it really unnessicary to have a calendar and an address book overlap, which is one issue people might have problems with in iCal; the integration for people at events is still very young. I think this may change, but very slowly; introducing bloat is the last thing they want to do over at Apple these days.
I'd have to argue.
iCal is not only 100% less bloated, it's also much easier to track things like to-do lists, and have multiple, overlapping schedules. In combination with using an open standard, it's easy to publish your calenders and keep track of everything. And it integrates into open source like a mug.
If you're ever at a Mac store, try it out. You might find you like it.
You're completely right, but I want to add a point; as with most other engineering professions, there is a group of people who design, and there's a group of people who implement.
So far in my Computer Engineering teachings and research into those teachings, we have not been (and will not be) taught to design a single thing. We are taught to be code monkeys, but with all of mathematics and physics and such of a typical engineer.
Some way Computer Scientists should be the ones designing the software, and we should be the ones implementing it. I believe it should be the Computer Scientists job to invent algorithms and tell us why things work, then Engineers should use it to *design* the way it should work, and then the Programmers should write it. This would be laid out in the same way a physist derives the formulas for what makes a bridge stand, (the archetect is a step left out- interface design is an art, and I believe it should be taught as such), engineers decide where to put the rivets, and general contractors put the rivets in the holes, thus completing the bridge.
Microsoft really can't do anything to upset this archetectural switch.
Microsoft recently shot themselves in the foot by putting their money and operating system behind AMD (Athlon XP, Windows XP.. hmm coincidence? I don't think so). So Intel goes shopping for a new OS contender. Linux is free, so that's out of the question. The BSD's are all good candidates, but someone's gotta develop a good GUI system... Bingo, Apple Computers is there and waiting. And since IBM pissed Apple off so much by not producing the G5's they promised, Intel was ready to sell to them.
Game developers would, at this point, be retarded not to quickly shift game development to the x86 Mac platform. The only thing most game developers would lose entirely is DirectX, and with OpenGL being just as good as an option, entirely free, (and in some opinions, faster), it wouldn't be that bad of a loss in time or momentum.
Why else do you think Microsoft would try to buy into the gaming world with a PPC chip? If your gaming archetecture requires coding on a platform that nobody else can use, you've locked your developers in. Their moves are just one more strategic step towards it. Apple's, ironically, was a step away from vendor lock-in (which Apple has fought so hard to attain and maintain).
AFAIK, Apple writes all the drivers for OS X in the video department. How they do this, I'm not exactly sure, whether they get the specs from the manufacturers or what.
That being said, OpenGL on OS X is still blazing fast. Porting a game engine that's OpenGL-friendly shouldn't take very long at all.
Two points;
Mac hardware has always been expensive partly due to the CPUs (they aren't anywhere near as cheap as the super-massively produced Intel hardware). When we see the shift to Intel, their prices will initially be high (due to the hardware change), but will quite quickly drop back down to below the baseline for PPC hardware. This means that $500 Mac Mini will probably be a $300 Mac Mini (with a Celeron M).
Secondly, Apple always has something that everyone else doesn't; the Operating System, and the design of the computer. The OS is technically superior, better looking, and more effecient than any of the alternatives (Linux may have the performace crown, but even that's disputable, but I find Linux to be about as useful as a blind seeing eye dog). Put a Mac in front of people, tell them that they can run all of their Windows apps using Wine, and they'll fly off the shelves.
Thirdly, the Mac is 100x more likely to come with a monitor, and at that, an LCD monitor. This, in combination with everything else, easily makes up the price difference. And if a consumer can't see that, then they aren't really paying attention when buying a computer.
..And an hour and a half away from being thrown in the slammer for violating the DMCA ;)
The Pentium 3 does not equal the Pentium M. I don't know what it'll take to get that into your head, but I'm going to stop trying after this post.
The Pentium M is actually a whole, different chip, just as the Pentium Pro and the Pentium 2 are whole, different chips (Pentium 2 and Pentium 3, on the other hand, have so much similar that it's almost a bad example). The Pentium 2 introduced to P6 (Pentium Pro) MMX. The Pentium 3 introduced to the Pentium 2 SSE(1/2). The Pentium M introduced to the Pentium 3 Micro-op fusion, Netburst-style bussing, and a bunch of other blessings that it inheirited from the P4.
So your statement "Saying the P3 was green lighted before the P4 is a pretty stupid statement", is in itself a stupid statement. The Pentium 4 project (Williamette) actually started in the mid-90's as a replacement for P6, so I'm sure plenty of cross-pollenation happened as P6 grew older, just as it did with the Pentium M.
I didn't say the Pentium 3 was greenlighted before the Pentium 4. I said the Pentium M was probably in development and minimal production long before they decided to greenlight and produce the P4.
I'm guessing you didn't even read my post?
I'm gonna say this for one, last, time. The Pentium-M is the Next Logical Evolution in the P6 archetectural line. This iteration brought micro-op fusion (more RISCy behavior), more cache room, smaller chips (reduced size, which in turn reduced the power demands), and a faster bus speed. For all purposes. With better versions and designs of SpeedStep, Intel *designed* it to bring the mobile revoltion to the forefront.
The only problem is, their savior for the Server machine (Itanium), failed to catch on. So they regeared their systems, and we have the hideous P4 we all hate. A few years later, the Pentium M is now perfectly able to take over the role of desktop processor, and all is happy.
Go back and read my post again if you're still confused.
Why would Intel do that? If Intel won't give up on Itanic, the processor that could..n't make it into enough server rooms to break even on its development, then why, why oh why would they drop a platform that's got such great market saturation????
Not only will providing Pentium 4's for existing desktops produce some income for a couple of years to go, the Xeon line is still *dependent* on it. In environmentally controlled rooms, these machines can produce all the heat they want and nobody's gonna give a damn. Couple that with more thermal work, bigger caches (hah, no surprise), and a few reworkings of internal components, and the Netburst Arch can live on, finally driving the wedge between their Desktop and Midrange Server class machines, like they've been trying to do for YEARS with the Xeon branding.
[AMD did this easily with Opteron vs Athlon 64. (Sledge/Clawhammer).]
Now if they'd just hurry up with their damned productions instead of sitting on their arseloads of technologies.. I guess that's the problem when you control all of the aspects of production; too hard to get the wheels greased and in motion.
Most likely this was an Apple request/terms of the deal.
Apple's core infrastructure's been developed on Intel machines for quite a while, and I'm sure the developers have spent every waking moment for optimizing Mac OS X for the Pentium 4. Now that they have to move to the Pentium M (as it is a much more stable, longer lasting platform), they need the instruction set to be complete. Applications like CoreImage/QuickTime thrive off of vector code, and with Altivec out of the picture (*CRIES*), SSE3/2/1+MMX is the only viable alternative.
While I'm sure there are hundreds of technologies Intel could possibly use to get a lead, they don't need to. Intel is refactoring for the Pentium M to take over the general computing market, the Xeon line to inheirit the Pentium 4 and all of its mess (hey, it's not too bad if you're gonna run it in an environmentally controlled room eh?), and the Itanium line is still continuing for the extreme high end (how the fuck??) and is soon to see its third iteration.
Besides, I'm sure Intel has a great memory for trying rash proceedures. I'm sure the Pentium M was long on the table before they greenlighted the Pentium 4; it was the next logical progression of the P6 family tree. The Pentium 4 was probably someone's pet project used to drive the industry to a frenzy, feeding off of increased clock cycles. And it worked.
Now that IPC is important again, Intel's baby P6 has grown up to a working man.
Get over it. Apple has said time and again in their documentation of the move that they are going to IA-32; not x86-64, not Itanium, not Intel's own version of PPC, IA-32.
While it remains to be argued whether or not this is a good thing, at least the Mac OS will now run on commodity hardware, meaning it should be more available to people. This will drive down the costs of manufacturing a Mac, increasing the ROI of the Mac hardware (assuming they keep the same price; why not when the selling point is so great?)
Their one platform that shows the most promise, the Mini Mac, will enjoy huge benifits from this move. Celeron-M laptop boards should drive the cost of this gem down into the Dell-cheap-as-dirt range, meaning more Macs on the market. Hell, if I were Dell I'd be doing all I could to get in with Apple and get the Mac OS X because the Mac Mini IA-32 edition will be such a great seller for the company.
While this isn't the end of Microsoft, I think they're about to see large cuts in their marketshare. If everyone out there who's even *looked* at an iPod starts looking at Apple computers as a viable, non-hobbiest machine, then they could sell millions.
The forecast is cloudy, but the sun's behind all of those clouds.
Compression would add to the need for a) greater data redundancy (because compression errors DO happen from time to time), b) more computational time (unless someone made a Gzip chip and stuck it on an HD controller.. *ponders*), and c) would be terribly cost-inefficient.
HD's are a dime a dozen. CPUs are not. If you have to have more costly CPUs running your File servers, that means less costly CPUs to run your Genetic Algorithms (pardon the pun).
It's simple really. They have to power more stuff than your house does.
Whereas one computer doesn't really produce enough heat to cause a problem in the house (well, dependingly...), 2000 do. This requires an inbuilding airconditioning system to vent the heat, which adds a LOT to the energy bill.
The computers themselves are usually a small load when it comes to the utilites of the building. Oh, of course there are monitors, and things you'd find in an ordinary home (well, probably microwaves, coffee pots, crew comforts, florescent lighting..).
If we want this thing to reach relevistic speeds, then every second it wastes not accellerating is a second you can't get back. Take that with the fact this thing is shedding weight (and therefore momentus potential) and you end up with a seriously inefficient vehicle.
Okay, I have to question Slashdot Reader Sanity when I see this one. Lemme answer your question.
NO.
The DMCA protects copyrighted works; if anything this work is an invention and therefore subject to Patent law, but not copyright.
Ramjets are no better than sails really.
Ramjets, as they are currently designed, require input medium, a way to accellerate it (ala, adding energy), and a way to output it.
In our solar system, there aren't too many fields of gas we can use to accellerate our device, so we end up carrying a good portion of it onboard, or saturating a field before hand in preperation. Then, we have to be able to add energy to the material as we pass through it, which requires us carrying the ability to produce massive quantities of it onboard (fusion would be nice, but fissables are all we've got now).
Now, I'm not saying this wouldn't work on the best of circumstances, but ion engines are really the best alternative to Ramjets. Hell, you could probably build an ion engine with a collector for use like a Ramjet.
It's obvious; surface area.
A sail encompasses a LOT of surface area, which means that as the sail scales to larger sizes, it becomes a much more attractive target to whatever strikes it.
Now, granted a sail in space with a hole doesn't "lose pressure" like it would here on earth, but after a while, the strikes would render the sail uneffective, and the sail would need to be replaced.
Couple this with traditional space craft design and it means you have to do a lot of discarding along the way, which is something NASA and other Space Agencies should be against. Discarding material makes for more debris on the next launch, making solar sails an even less effective solution to the problem.
The problem with the parent's post is the sail itself. Our solar system is a rocky and dangerous space, and so far, we have no idea what the area outside of it is like either.
The sail would quickly break apart as it gets struck by all kinds of space debris, some left by us, others by more natural occurances. Thus, for an effective craft, multiple sails would be kept on board, being deployed stratigically when the previous sails are no longer providing maximal thrust, and when the coast is clear.
Next, between those times when the sails are not up, the ship will probably want to keep thrust, so it will have to carry onboard some propellant to keep its thrust up during the times it is without sails. Thus, the ship will lose a significant portion of weight during its travel.
Lastly, unless we align everything like we did with the Voyager launches, gravity will not be so forth coming for this space craft. This will probably mean multiple near-sun passes to build up the speed nessicary to exit the solar system and continue on to the next star. This means some clever routing by computer simulations, along with a computer figuring when to discard and open new sails along the way.
Not only will all of this cost a lot, it will likely make it take much longer to get out of the solar system. Lucky for us, as we can pile on the goodies like cameras, radio antenna, and do some exploration as it passes through the planets building up gravitational accelleration.
Solar sails are (in theory) the maximum way to effeciently propell yourself. They simply sit out in space, speeding you up, verses having to provide your own thrust, thus keeping more fuel onboard, thus building momentum faster.
Voyager and the gang took a good twenty-thirty years getting to where they're going. A sailed ship could spend that same twenty years, get to the same place, and still have a full load of fuel left.
I'd say the most classic problem is interstellar travel itself; since our most far-out space craft are just now breaching what we know to be the end of our solar system, we have no idea about any of the dangers of interstellar travel. And my guess is that we won't for another two hundred or so years, once everything in our solar system has been "decently" explored and the technology exists to cheaply put things into space.
Besides, slowing down isn't as difficult as speeding up; use the slingshot effect in reverse. Steer around the orbits of other, high-mass planets, using their gravity wells to slow your momentum until it's possible to chemically control. That in combination with shedding weight (mass driver would probably have to be installed in front of the craft to soak up radiation/protect against high speed collisions) should help a great deal. But who knows. Cross a bridge when we get to it.
Exactly, it's only a virtual machine away.
Build a PearPC-like virtual machine to emulate the Intel hardware, and you'll have no problem. Since there's no archetectural switch, it should scream and the user should be none the wiser.
More likely, I see Apple doing the same thing they do now; OpenFirmware on Intel, make sure that OS X doesn't run when certain signatures aren't in the firmware, etc. etc. More difficult to hack around, but still can be done.
But the problem with that is, you end up keeping very old, stagnant material, along with very old, very useful material.
With the web designed as an ad-hoc, mindless data drop system, it's virtually guarenteed we'll be holding on to those pathetic GeoCities websites until long past the days of our deaths.
This brings up a bunch of problems with the web in general. Dead links being a huge problem; if PageRank or anything like it is supposed to chug through all of the links on old websites, along with the new, fresh sites, you end up wasting millions upon millions of cycles, which in Google terms, amounts to money.
Perhaps we should design a better versioning system for the internet, or just drop dead content all together. Who knows, we're barely seeing the horizion of dead content.
Well, I think there are significant other legal standings saying the ISPs don't have to turn over those kinds of log files, and even if they did have to, all anyone would have to do is use a damned encrypting P2P system.
Besides, the ISPs couldn't POSSIBLY keep a log of every bit that went through their networks, and it's probably very hard to keep logs of just where those packets were going, though not impossible. Maybe we as consumers should start asking for guarenteed anonymity or move on to greener pastures.