But we do know that there is a small amount of commerce of material between Mars and Earth without the use of space probes. Well, a billion tons has moved from Mars to Earth (see here). It's much harder for stuff to move the other way but it's not completely implausible. (It would require quite a kick of energy from somewhere, not just to get it out of the earth's gravity well, but also to push it out from the Sun. But it could get that by looping around other planets - eg. Venus. The journey might take many tens of thousands of years. But it's not impossible.)
I don't see why what you say is true. Hey, it might turn out that all of the life on Mars is deep underground where it's warmer and where there might be hidden reserves of water and if we landed on Mars we still wouldn't be able to detect it. When it becomes easy to send humans to send Mars then yes, we should do it. But for the cost of one man on Mars we could probably send dozens of probes to other planets and satellites on our planet. The latter strategy seems more sensible to me.
What are you talking about? The issue of whether or not to send manned or unmanned vehicles into space is a hot topic of debate and my statement still stands whether or not I leave in the "most likely". I think you might be a bit paranoid.
I personally used to be in favor of manned exploration, but having seen the results from Mars and Titan over the last year I am a convert to unmanned space research.
OK, now I'm confused. I thought PDF was rendered using Quartz which is hardware accelerated. As I got my info from marketing blurb I may be misunderstanding...
the only way we will find out for sure is to actually go there in person
This is a patently false statement. I can name any number of scenarios that would make us sure there was life on mars without requiring a person landing there. Anything from a microscope on a Mars rover showing as a picture of a microrganism to it returning a photograph of a sign saying "KEEP OUT".
Maybe you can answer me this: I'm looking at a paper in PDF format on my 1.33GHz PowerBook G4 and it takes about 0.5s to render a page when I scroll down. It's text. Fancy text, but just text. No embedded movies or anything like that. (For tons just like it go to www.arxiv.org) It may be hardware accelerated but this is pretty close to unacceptable.
As far as I can see hardware accelerated PDF rendering is all it's cracked up to be.
so that if a suspect (...) goes within 100 meters of a school
Are you kidding? A criminal could easily dash that 100 meters before any cop who hears the alert finishes his donut and coffee. A friend of mine recently waited 45 minutes for a cop to arrive at the scene of an accident even though an ambulance arrived within a few minutes...
...a monster not to be overcome and that may not be described, Cerberus who eats raw flesh, the brazen-voiced hound of Hades, fifty-headed, relentless and strong
It's fun to demloish people's myths about historical events - but it's better to do this when what you say actually has some validity. I hardly need provide references. Pick any book on Galileo to find a wealth of description of how Galileo's belief that the Earth was not at the center of the universe was in conflict with Church doctrine and resulted in his arrest.
Maybe you are confusing Galileo with Giordano Bruno who is often described as a martyr for heliocentrism even though there are no documents proving it.
Just about every document on migration from Windows 95 and 98 to NT, 2000 or XP discusses the issue of talking directly to hardware and how this could break older software. I imagined those statements were there for a reason and not just because people wanted to talk about it for the hell of it. My mistake. I'm also guilty of stereotyping - I assumed that if people were talking to hardware, it was more likely to be developers of games who had a history of tweaking hardware and who screamed about how crap early MS graphics APIs were.
I can expect code made for the major version numbers and properly linked against the generic instead of the specific.so files to work 100% of the time
Tell that to the people at my company currently trying to migrate from RedHat (with Linux v.2.4.20) to SUSE (with v.2.6.6).
I can guarantee you with a 100% certainty that the applications I've written will run on pretty much any distribution to date.
Well you should be educating other people on how to do this. My experience with binary only applications is that they simply don't move from one version of Linux to a more recent one. Today the app pissing me off is Mathematica (seg faults).
Meanwhile every Windows application I've ever bought (including apps going back to '95) runs fine on Windows XP (apart from games, for whatever reason). These are apps like Office, Photoshop, Illustrator and totally crap things like an Xmas mailing list app (can't afford new versions). Hell, I can run apps written for 16 bit machines under Windows XP.
But you've given me renewed hope - maybe there's a chance I can get my old Loki games to run under a modern Linux distro.
As a user what do I care about these issues? I'm just happy if I can run my old applications.
Also, what MS API difficulties are you talking about? I've found many things just as hard or easy on both platforms. One thing I did have difficulty with was MFC - it seems kinda disorganised and unorthogonal compared to the X toolkits I've used. But much other stuff is the same: eg. grabbing a surface suitable for 3D rendering, without relying on an easy cross-platform library like GLUT, is just as horrible on both platforms. I don't know anything about developing things like web, database or e-commerce applications.
I can run many Windows applications from around 1995 on my Windows XP box. Games often fail because they use the hardware directly - but I have a near 100% success rate with non-game apps.
If I attempt to run a Linux application from 1995 on a modern Linux distro I generally get errors about missing libraries. In fact, trying to run apps just a few years old on a Linux box is often fraught with difficulty. I can often get it to run in the end - though not always.
Microsoft have had a fairly consistent set of APIs over the last decade. I really can't say the same about Linux - expecially the UI libraries.
Forward suggests that research needs to be carried out into materials that release gases when heated so they can be used to drive the sail. If he read the issue of New Scientist that contains this story he'd find another story that deals with precisely this issue. It turns out that The Terrorists have been doing this research for him.
...that God made the entire universe universe, impregnated some woman on a the third planet from a very insignificant star and then let the resulting offspring get killed. I'd come to the conclusion this story wasn't true but now the Turin shroud dating is in question I have to revise my view of the entire universe again. Really, can't these archaeologists get their act together. The indecision is killing me.
Next time I buy software I'll make sure I only use a product from a for-loss company. That way I'm guaranteed the software will work for years to come.
Slashdot Mirror
But we do know that there is a small amount of commerce of material between Mars and Earth without the use of space probes. Well, a billion tons has moved from Mars to Earth (see here). It's much harder for stuff to move the other way but it's not completely implausible. (It would require quite a kick of energy from somewhere, not just to get it out of the earth's gravity well, but also to push it out from the Sun. But it could get that by looping around other planets - eg. Venus. The journey might take many tens of thousands of years. But it's not impossible.)
I don't see why what you say is true. Hey, it might turn out that all of the life on Mars is deep underground where it's warmer and where there might be hidden reserves of water and if we landed on Mars we still wouldn't be able to detect it. When it becomes easy to send humans to send Mars then yes, we should do it. But for the cost of one man on Mars we could probably send dozens of probes to other planets and satellites on our planet. The latter strategy seems more sensible to me.
I personally used to be in favor of manned exploration, but having seen the results from Mars and Titan over the last year I am a convert to unmanned space research.
OK, now I'm confused. I thought PDF was rendered using Quartz which is hardware accelerated. As I got my info from marketing blurb I may be misunderstanding...
But knowing someone didn't realise that put a smile on my face... :-)
Nah! There are countless obelisks here but nobody claims there's intelligent life in Ireland. No...wait...I phrased that wrong...
Of course I meant "isn't", not "is", in that final sentence :-)
As far as I can see hardware accelerated PDF rendering is all it's cracked up to be.
But she doesn't quite weigh two tons.
Poor Roberta Pournelle. Software developers tend to get mentioned by name. But poor old Roberta is just "Jerry Pournelle's wife".
How would that work? Would you have all your source code printed really small in a pretty logo which you register with the proper authorities?
These are geological changes, not Grandma's china getting broken.
Maybe you are confusing Galileo with Giordano Bruno who is often described as a martyr for heliocentrism even though there are no documents proving it.
It's a place where you buy governments. Like the US.
Meanwhile every Windows application I've ever bought (including apps going back to '95) runs fine on Windows XP (apart from games, for whatever reason). These are apps like Office, Photoshop, Illustrator and totally crap things like an Xmas mailing list app (can't afford new versions). Hell, I can run apps written for 16 bit machines under Windows XP.
But you've given me renewed hope - maybe there's a chance I can get my old Loki games to run under a modern Linux distro.
Also, what MS API difficulties are you talking about? I've found many things just as hard or easy on both platforms. One thing I did have difficulty with was MFC - it seems kinda disorganised and unorthogonal compared to the X toolkits I've used. But much other stuff is the same: eg. grabbing a surface suitable for 3D rendering, without relying on an easy cross-platform library like GLUT, is just as horrible on both platforms. I don't know anything about developing things like web, database or e-commerce applications.
If I attempt to run a Linux application from 1995 on a modern Linux distro I generally get errors about missing libraries. In fact, trying to run apps just a few years old on a Linux box is often fraught with difficulty. I can often get it to run in the end - though not always.
Microsoft have had a fairly consistent set of APIs over the last decade. I really can't say the same about Linux - expecially the UI libraries.
Forward suggests that research needs to be carried out into materials that release gases when heated so they can be used to drive the sail. If he read the issue of New Scientist that contains this story he'd find another story that deals with precisely this issue. It turns out that The Terrorists have been doing this research for him.
You mean like sticking those splinters into people in places where they didn't already come equipped with conveniently splinter shaped holes?
...that God made the entire universe universe, impregnated some woman on a the third planet from a very insignificant star and then let the resulting offspring get killed. I'd come to the conclusion this story wasn't true but now the Turin shroud dating is in question I have to revise my view of the entire universe again. Really, can't these archaeologists get their act together. The indecision is killing me.
Next time I buy software I'll make sure I only use a product from a for-loss company. That way I'm guaranteed the software will work for years to come.