I hate to disagree with this sort of idea -- going back to the Moon and everything sounds like so much fun -- but this is obviously all going to go nowhere. When push comes to shove, economic realities (not to mention Congress) simply won't allow Bush's grandiose Moon-Mars plan to get off the ground, or maybe LEO at best. It's all far too expensive and Dubya knows it, but he'll be long gone by the time NASA comes asking for the really big bucks. Then it'll be the next guy's fault for shooting it down.
Oh, the government could pay for it easily if they decided to shrink military spending by something like only 10 or 15%, but you know that isn't going to happen. There are way too many terrorists out there who are just be waiting to pounce at the first sign of weakness, so we'd better not give them the impression that our new fleet of F-22 Raptor's won't be ready on time! (haw).
I say NASA should concentrate on doing more with less and stick to stuff like Mars rovers and Titan landers. Hell, really great science projects like the JIMO mission and the Terrestrial Planet Finder have been scrapped, and for what? In the end, it'll turn out to be for nothing. We'll just be left with a bunch of expensive plans that are never going to fly outside of a computer.
Agreed. They know that admitting their mistake and making an honest effort to rectify it is going to cost them a lot of money. Worse, they may end up loosing market share to nVidia! Unfortunately, it looks like their CEO has decided instead that the company should simply pretend as though nothing happened. "Hey, what the hell is HDCP anyway? Nobody'll notice the difference if we act as though we never supported it, right?" Truly infantile behaviour.
Newton and Einstein's theories of gravity don't always work, so cosmologists decided to make up some new and coincidentally undetectable stuff -- Dark Matter and Dark Energy -- to help them out. The more I read about these ideas, the more they look like fantasy as opposed to science. It's almost as bad as String theory! Why don't the theorists stick to explaining what can actually be observed and measured, instead of making up stuff in order to prop up theories that have more likely found their limits. I can just feel which way Occam's Razor is eventually going to cut on this one. Besides, all my life I've been hearing that gravity is the least understood of the four fundamental forces of nature, so perhaps it's about time it got a tune-up.
You misinterpret MikeFM's statement: he said he would "produce [his] own technology and content", not decode somebody else's DRM-protected content. Nothing wrong with that. Having said that, I don't think he knows what he's talking about: producing your own DRM proof content?
... to keep track of. Great. Perhaps in the future we should be more careful with the things we put into orbit. Every time we do something trivial like this, it means cleaning it all up later is going to be that much more difficult.
... bows to no one, including the lesser God of Free Speech.
You'd think that, of all places, they'd know this by now in Washinton D.C.; a city in which monopolists have nothing to fear and lobbyists have everything to gain (especially during the last five years).
Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot could arrange for us to have a quick vote on issues like this? In this case it would be something like:
Twenty years from now, which do you think
will be your car's main source of energy?
O Petroleum
O Hydrogen
O Biodiesel
O Ethanol
O Batteries
This would not only make it easier to gauge opinion among the readers, it would more often include the opinions of those who would otherwise have said nothing.
Currently, I have the misfortune of having to deal with a moron who'd rather configure everything with IP addresses, because he can't wrap his mind around DNS. Maybe this website is for him.
"You solve spam when it stops being sent, not when you stop recieving it."
I don't see how you can stop the spammers from trying as long as they figure they have nothing to loose or the risks are acceptable. As I see it, this problem can only be solved once it becomes illegal everywhere to send spam from anywhere to anyone, and it becomes impossible for the senders to obfuscate their identities. This way, no one would ever want to send any spam. If they did anyway, they would risk being reported, following which some sort of fine or punishment would be a certainty. In this scenario, the only form of email-advertising left would be opt-in.
As for the bandwidth issue, as long as your mail server is properly configured and set to reject obvious spam messages (based on header info) as opposed to bouncing them, you won't be wasting nearly as much of your resources.
RAID 6 with only five disks? What's the point? RAID 6 requires two disks for parity, so two out of five is pretty expensive. For such a limited number of disks RAID 5 would be a better solution, since it requires only one for parity.
So, if your friend has actually used those five disks to build a RAID 6 array, his efforts can never have resulted in more than 750 GB of useable storage space (3 x 250 GB).
As a side note, the only reason you might want to opt for RAID 6 as opposed to RAID 5, is because the larger the number of disks you have in a RAID 5 array, the shorter the MTBF becomes for the total number of disks minus one. In other words, if you have too many disks in your RAID 5 array, the risk becomes too great that a second disk will fail before you can replace and rebuild the first one. RAID 6 can be a solution to this problem, since it uses two disks for parity where RAID 5 uses only one. Thus, your MTBF is increased once again.
However, unless you have some really important data that just has to be available all the time, in my opinion RAID 5 and above isn't worth bothering with outside of a business environment. RAID 5/6 is expensive, it's noisy and if your controller breaks down, you'll wish you'd settled for something simpler, like a good backup system, possibly combined with mirroring (RAID 1).
Me? I don't even bother with mirroring. I just make regular backups (to disks on other machines, sometimes across the Internet) and always replace the disks within about three years.
Perhaps, but looking back over the years, IMO names like this don't make it very easy for people to see how the different products relate to one another -- which ones proceeded or succeeded the others. In fact, it's a good way to obfuscate a range of products. I think the old pre-Pentium names were much more descriptive. Besides, Intel have been using 'Pentium' for far too long. They could never bring themselves move on to Sextium (har-har), Septium, Octium or anything else; nothing seemed to be as catchy as 'Pentium'. So now they've been stuck on 'Number Five' (586?.. no) ever since. Perhaps you could say that the name has long since become a victim of its own success.
If you continuously backup all of your data to other hard disks, always replacing your running disks before they get too old, then you never have these problems. So, who cares about tapes v. CDs?!
Besides, when I hear someone complaining about the shelf-life of CDs and advocating the use of tapes instead -- especially for backup purposes -- I begin to suspect that they're actually speaking on behalf of the tape industry. Anyway, tapes just remind me of nasty stuff like ARCserve, which makes me want to throw up.
That's simply outrageous!! How dare the set such ridiculously high hardware requirements! Why, I'm sure that because of this, at least half of all readers who would have been will to try this out are now not even going to bother. The fools!
Okay, thanks to ADSL I've got my fixed IP address, so I can host my own domain. I've got enough download speed -- 8 Mbps -- so I never have to wait that long for my data to arrive. If I wanted to play games over the net, I suppose latency wouldn't really be a problem either. However, the problem now seems to be that my upload speed is stuck at 1 Mbps.
As far as I can see, this is due to supply and demand. Most people who want an ADSL connection only want to download stuff: they choose only to consume content and not to provide it. This is unfortunate, as providing content for each other is really what the Internet is all about. As time goes by, perhaps more people will begin to see things differently, but if most ISPs continue to limit our upload speeds, they are in effect fostering this culture of consumerism.
However, perhaps there is some light at the end of the tunnel. I figure that demand for greater upload speeds will begin grow as soon as more people start to add video to their VOIP.
That means your mail server is still accepting all that spam for you. I don't like to give them that satisfaction. I now use a mail sever (Exim 4.50) that rejects spam messages as soon as they are detected. Often enough, this happens after only the headers have been downloaded, so it also saves me bandwidth when Exim doesn't have to download the rest of the message, attachments and all.
Hydrogen may sound nice, but that depends on how it's made. If we use fossil fuel to make it, hydrogen cars will still add CO2 to the atmosphere, only indirectly.
If we have to use fossil fuels, this steam gadget is at least a step in the right direction, but overall the car sounds like a gas-guzzler anyway.
What we really need is for cars like this to run on biodiesel -- cheap biodiesel. Preferably BD100. Only then can we really have our cake and eat it.
15 years ago, I was working on an automatic translation program together with a company in Florida. I wasn't a programmer on the project, just a translator, but it did give me some idea of how hard it is for a computer to produce an accurate translation. It's not always that hard to translate individual words, but in a sentence those words can have different meanings depending on their context. Essentially you have to know what the story is about in order to produce the correct translation. Many have always considered this is an impossible problem that cannot be solved with a simple piece of software. Intelligence is required. Anybody who's read a few Babelfish translations will know what I'm taking about.
If the folks over at GTX Global really have developed a computer program that is capable of some level of understanding -- something that would be evident in the quality of its translations and its responses to various questions -- then many would regard their product as a kind of artificial intelligence. However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so until then I will remain very sceptical.
Even if you're right, it's not as if the Mozilla Foundation is asking any money for their software. It's free, so don't complain. What's more, if you really, *really* wanted to, you could download the source code for Mozilla and fix it (for) yourself. M$, on the other hand, does not give anyone that option, and they expect us to pay for their products as well.
Don't be such a smart-ass. Here's where I got my information .
From the article:
"Lacking a planet-wide magnetic field, most of the Red Planet is exposed to the full force of the incoming solar wind. "The Martian atmosphere extends hundreds of kilometers above the surface where it's ionized by solar ultraviolet radiation," says Dave Mitchell, a space scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. "The magnetized solar wind simply picks up these ions and sweeps them away."
"In 1989 the Soviet Phobos probe made direct measurements of the atmospheric erosion," he continued. When the spacecraft passed through the solar wind wake behind Mars, onboard instruments detected ions that had been stripped from Mars's atmosphere and were flowing downstream with the solar wind. "If we extrapolate those Phobos measurements 4 billion years backwards in time, solar wind erosion can account for most of the planet's lost atmosphere.""
I can't be sure why Venus still has such a thick atmosphere compared to Mars (probably because it has more mass and/or had more atmosphere to begin with), but I have no doubt that it is also subject to some degree of atmospheric erosion due to its lack of a magnetic field.
You have a good point, but it takes a lot less than a substantially different genome for people to start dehumanizing each another (just think of the Nazi's). Besides, the first people to be born and grow up on the Moon, for example, may end up looking different anyway. And even if they don't look different, given enough time there's no way to change what people back here on Earth are going to think of them -- their genes probably won't make a difference.
Then there's the question of whether it's at all possible for us to survive indefinitely off-planet. Gravity on Mars is one-third of what it is on Earth, and on the Moon only one-sixth. We may yet discover that children growing up in such low gravity environments are doomed to develop all kinds of health problems and die at an early age as a result. The colonists may be forced to conclude that altering their children's genes is the only way to allow them to survive. Such alterations may not even make them look different.
Actually, I think it would be a lot harder to terraform a planet or engineer anything on that scale than it would to genetically adapt the bodies of a number of colonists to a new and very different world.
The way we are today, we're pretty well adapted to living life here on Earth, but not at all well suited to living life in orbit or on the moon, for instance. I'm all for setting up colonies off-world (so as to not have all our eggs in the same basket), but in that case, what's the point of hanging on to a body design that is not suited to that environment? Think of what it would mean to the colonists if their bodies were hardened against radiation, or they were able to survive low temperatures or lower atmospheric pressures. That way, maybe they wouldn't have to go to quite the same lengths, over and over again, to adapt their living environments as closely to that of Earth as we have to today when we go into space.
Also, since Mars has no magnetic field to speak of, any bulked-up the atmosphere would be lost even faster. Forget terraforming. We might some day figure out how to live there, but it'll never look like home. Then again, home is what you make it, right?
"Next, an imaginary audience that actually applauds."
You know, this shouldn't be too hard to do. You could to write some software to simulate different types of concert crowds, at different levels of enthusiasm.
You could, for instance, have it react to the signal from your electric guitar or microphone to fill in the quite moments of your jam session. You could also it produce a roar of recognition from a virtual crowd for whatever piece of shit you start practicing on your favorite instrument. Whenever you're finished, lots of more applause!!
Something like this could be really, really funny! Your own little automatic, Hollywood applause machine. Hey, you could have it do laugh-tracks too, although this would be more difficult to trigger automatically.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to disagree with this sort of idea -- going back to the Moon and everything sounds like so much fun -- but this is obviously all going to go nowhere. When push comes to shove, economic realities (not to mention Congress) simply won't allow Bush's grandiose Moon-Mars plan to get off the ground, or maybe LEO at best. It's all far too expensive and Dubya knows it, but he'll be long gone by the time NASA comes asking for the really big bucks. Then it'll be the next guy's fault for shooting it down.
Oh, the government could pay for it easily if they decided to shrink military spending by something like only 10 or 15%, but you know that isn't going to happen. There are way too many terrorists out there who are just be waiting to pounce at the first sign of weakness, so we'd better not give them the impression that our new fleet of F-22 Raptor's won't be ready on time! (haw).
I say NASA should concentrate on doing more with less and stick to stuff like Mars rovers and Titan landers. Hell, really great science projects like the JIMO mission and the Terrestrial Planet Finder have been scrapped, and for what? In the end, it'll turn out to be for nothing. We'll just be left with a bunch of expensive plans that are never going to fly outside of a computer.
Agreed. They know that admitting their mistake and making an honest effort to rectify it is going to cost them a lot of money. Worse, they may end up loosing market share to nVidia! Unfortunately, it looks like their CEO has decided instead that the company should simply pretend as though nothing happened. "Hey, what the hell is HDCP anyway? Nobody'll notice the difference if we act as though we never supported it, right?" Truly infantile behaviour.
Newton and Einstein's theories of gravity don't always work, so cosmologists decided to make up some new and coincidentally undetectable stuff -- Dark Matter and Dark Energy -- to help them out. The more I read about these ideas, the more they look like fantasy as opposed to science. It's almost as bad as String theory! Why don't the theorists stick to explaining what can actually be observed and measured, instead of making up stuff in order to prop up theories that have more likely found their limits. I can just feel which way Occam's Razor is eventually going to cut on this one. Besides, all my life I've been hearing that gravity is the least understood of the four fundamental forces of nature, so perhaps it's about time it got a tune-up.
You misinterpret MikeFM's statement: he said he would "produce [his] own technology and content", not decode somebody else's DRM-protected content. Nothing wrong with that. Having said that, I don't think he knows what he's talking about: producing your own DRM proof content?
... to keep track of. Great. Perhaps in the future we should be more careful with the things we put into orbit. Every time we do something trivial like this, it means cleaning it all up later is going to be that much more difficult.
... bows to no one, including the lesser God of Free Speech.
You'd think that, of all places, they'd know this by now in Washinton D.C.; a city in which monopolists have nothing to fear and lobbyists have everything to gain (especially during the last five years).
Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot could arrange for us to have a quick vote on issues like this? In this case it would be something like:
Twenty years from now, which do you think
will be your car's main source of energy?
O Petroleum
O Hydrogen
O Biodiesel
O Ethanol
O Batteries
This would not only make it easier to gauge opinion among the readers, it would more often include the opinions of those who would otherwise have said nothing.
Currently, I have the misfortune of having to deal with a moron who'd rather configure everything with IP addresses, because he can't wrap his mind around DNS. Maybe this website is for him.
"You solve spam when it stops being sent, not when you stop recieving it."
I don't see how you can stop the spammers from trying as long as they figure they have nothing to loose or the risks are acceptable. As I see it, this problem can only be solved once it becomes illegal everywhere to send spam from anywhere to anyone, and it becomes impossible for the senders to obfuscate their identities. This way, no one would ever want to send any spam. If they did anyway, they would risk being reported, following which some sort of fine or punishment would be a certainty. In this scenario, the only form of email-advertising left would be opt-in.
As for the bandwidth issue, as long as your mail server is properly configured and set to reject obvious spam messages (based on header info) as opposed to bouncing them, you won't be wasting nearly as much of your resources.
RAID 6 with only five disks? What's the point? RAID 6 requires two disks for parity, so two out of five is pretty expensive. For such a limited number of disks RAID 5 would be a better solution, since it requires only one for parity.
So, if your friend has actually used those five disks to build a RAID 6 array, his efforts can never have resulted in more than 750 GB of useable storage space (3 x 250 GB).
As a side note, the only reason you might want to opt for RAID 6 as opposed to RAID 5, is because the larger the number of disks you have in a RAID 5 array, the shorter the MTBF becomes for the total number of disks minus one. In other words, if you have too many disks in your RAID 5 array, the risk becomes too great that a second disk will fail before you can replace and rebuild the first one. RAID 6 can be a solution to this problem, since it uses two disks for parity where RAID 5 uses only one. Thus, your MTBF is increased once again.
However, unless you have some really important data that just has to be available all the time, in my opinion RAID 5 and above isn't worth bothering with outside of a business environment. RAID 5/6 is expensive, it's noisy and if your controller breaks down, you'll wish you'd settled for something simpler, like a good backup system, possibly combined with mirroring (RAID 1).
Me? I don't even bother with mirroring. I just make regular backups (to disks on other machines, sometimes across the Internet) and always replace the disks within about three years.
... Computer users are all the same. They just want something that works. ...
Correction:
Computer users are all the same: they just want the one system that they're familiar with to work (the way they want).
Perhaps, but looking back over the years, IMO names like this don't make it very easy for people to see how the different products relate to one another -- which ones proceeded or succeeded the others. In fact, it's a good way to obfuscate a range of products. I think the old pre-Pentium names were much more descriptive. Besides, Intel have been using 'Pentium' for far too long. They could never bring themselves move on to Sextium (har-har), Septium, Octium or anything else; nothing seemed to be as catchy as 'Pentium'. So now they've been stuck on 'Number Five' (586?.. no) ever since. Perhaps you could say that the name has long since become a victim of its own success.
If you continuously backup all of your data to other hard disks, always replacing your running disks before they get too old, then you never have these problems. So, who cares about tapes v. CDs?!
Besides, when I hear someone complaining about the shelf-life of CDs and advocating the use of tapes instead -- especially for backup purposes -- I begin to suspect that they're actually speaking on behalf of the tape industry. Anyway, tapes just remind me of nasty stuff like ARCserve, which makes me want to throw up.
That's simply outrageous!! How dare the set such ridiculously high hardware requirements! Why, I'm sure that because of this, at least half of all readers who would have been will to try this out are now not even going to bother. The fools!
Okay, thanks to ADSL I've got my fixed IP address, so I can host my own domain. I've got enough download speed -- 8 Mbps -- so I never have to wait that long for my data to arrive. If I wanted to play games over the net, I suppose latency wouldn't really be a problem either. However, the problem now seems to be that my upload speed is stuck at 1 Mbps.
As far as I can see, this is due to supply and demand. Most people who want an ADSL connection only want to download stuff: they choose only to consume content and not to provide it. This is unfortunate, as providing content for each other is really what the Internet is all about. As time goes by, perhaps more people will begin to see things differently, but if most ISPs continue to limit our upload speeds, they are in effect fostering this culture of consumerism.
However, perhaps there is some light at the end of the tunnel. I figure that demand for greater upload speeds will begin grow as soon as more people start to add video to their VOIP.
That means your mail server is still accepting all that spam for you. I don't like to give them that satisfaction. I now use a mail sever (Exim 4.50) that rejects spam messages as soon as they are detected. Often enough, this happens after only the headers have been downloaded, so it also saves me bandwidth when Exim doesn't have to download the rest of the message, attachments and all.
Hydrogen may sound nice, but that depends on how it's made. If we use fossil fuel to make it, hydrogen cars will still add CO2 to the atmosphere, only indirectly.
If we have to use fossil fuels, this steam gadget is at least a step in the right direction, but overall the car sounds like a gas-guzzler anyway.
What we really need is for cars like this to run on biodiesel -- cheap biodiesel. Preferably BD100. Only then can we really have our cake and eat it.
15 years ago, I was working on an automatic translation program together with a company in Florida. I wasn't a programmer on the project, just a translator, but it did give me some idea of how hard it is for a computer to produce an accurate translation. It's not always that hard to translate individual words, but in a sentence those words can have different meanings depending on their context. Essentially you have to know what the story is about in order to produce the correct translation. Many have always considered this is an impossible problem that cannot be solved with a simple piece of software. Intelligence is required. Anybody who's read a few Babelfish translations will know what I'm taking about.
If the folks over at GTX Global really have developed a computer program that is capable of some level of understanding -- something that would be evident in the quality of its translations and its responses to various questions -- then many would regard their product as a kind of artificial intelligence. However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so until then I will remain very sceptical.
Even if you're right, it's not as if the Mozilla Foundation is asking any money for their software. It's free, so don't complain. What's more, if you really, *really* wanted to, you could download the source code for Mozilla and fix it (for) yourself. M$, on the other hand, does not give anyone that option, and they expect us to pay for their products as well.
Don't be such a smart-ass. Here's where I got my information .
From the article:
"Lacking a planet-wide magnetic field, most of the Red Planet is exposed to the full force of the incoming solar wind. "The Martian atmosphere extends hundreds of kilometers above the surface where it's ionized by solar ultraviolet radiation," says Dave Mitchell, a space scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. "The magnetized solar wind simply picks up these ions and sweeps them away."
"In 1989 the Soviet Phobos probe made direct measurements of the atmospheric erosion," he continued. When the spacecraft passed through the solar wind wake behind Mars, onboard instruments detected ions that had been stripped from Mars's atmosphere and were flowing downstream with the solar wind. "If we extrapolate those Phobos measurements 4 billion years backwards in time, solar wind erosion can account for most of the planet's lost atmosphere.""
I can't be sure why Venus still has such a thick atmosphere compared to Mars (probably because it has more mass and/or had more atmosphere to begin with), but I have no doubt that it is also subject to some degree of atmospheric erosion due to its lack of a magnetic field.
You have a good point, but it takes a lot less than a substantially different genome for people to start dehumanizing each another (just think of the Nazi's). Besides, the first people to be born and grow up on the Moon, for example, may end up looking different anyway. And even if they don't look different, given enough time there's no way to change what people back here on Earth are going to think of them -- their genes probably won't make a difference.
Then there's the question of whether it's at all possible for us to survive indefinitely off-planet. Gravity on Mars is one-third of what it is on Earth, and on the Moon only one-sixth. We may yet discover that children growing up in such low gravity environments are doomed to develop all kinds of health problems and die at an early age as a result. The colonists may be forced to conclude that altering their children's genes is the only way to allow them to survive. Such alterations may not even make them look different.
Actually, I think it would be a lot harder to terraform a planet or engineer anything on that scale than it would to genetically adapt the bodies of a number of colonists to a new and very different world.
The way we are today, we're pretty well adapted to living life here on Earth, but not at all well suited to living life in orbit or on the moon, for instance. I'm all for setting up colonies off-world (so as to not have all our eggs in the same basket), but in that case, what's the point of hanging on to a body design that is not suited to that environment? Think of what it would mean to the colonists if their bodies were hardened against radiation, or they were able to survive low temperatures or lower atmospheric pressures. That way, maybe they wouldn't have to go to quite the same lengths, over and over again, to adapt their living environments as closely to that of Earth as we have to today when we go into space.
Also, since Mars has no magnetic field to speak of, any bulked-up the atmosphere would be lost even faster. Forget terraforming. We might some day figure out how to live there, but it'll never look like home. Then again, home is what you make it, right?
Obviously the guy who invented this thing is not a dog owner. If teens can hear it, then dogs, cats and birds will be affected by it as well.
"Next, an imaginary audience that actually applauds."
You know, this shouldn't be too hard to do. You could to write some software to simulate different types of concert crowds, at different levels of enthusiasm.
You could, for instance, have it react to the signal from your electric guitar or microphone to fill in the quite moments of your jam session. You could also it produce a roar of recognition from a virtual crowd for whatever piece of shit you start practicing on your favorite instrument. Whenever you're finished, lots of more applause!!
Something like this could be really, really funny! Your own little automatic, Hollywood applause machine. Hey, you could have it do laugh-tracks too, although this would be more difficult to trigger automatically.