Will the future of space exploration be dominated by names other than Russia and the USA?
This question implies that space exploration in the past was dominated by the two superpowers. From a manned spaceflight perspective, this implication is quite correct; but from an unmanned perspective, it is rather inaccurate. Over the last three decades, a large proportion of the activity in unmanned space exploration has been undertaken by countries other than two superpowers. And let's not forget that, unlike most unmanned misisons, the moon race was about politics, not science.
Looking towards the future, quite a bit of the exploration of our solar system involves both USA/Russia and other countries, either in collaboration or in competition. Particular missions to keep an eye on include:
Beagle 2, the probe onboard the European Space Agency'sMars Express mission. Beagle 2 is scheduled to touch down on Mars this December, and amongst its tasks it will be searching for life, using techniques far more accurate than the previous tests by the Viking Lander probes. Mars Express, the spacecraft carring Beagle 2, blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Russian-built rocket earlier this year; movies of the launch can be found here
Two Mars Exploration Rovers, which are robots based on NASA's very successful 1997 Pathfinder mission. The two rovers are due for touchdown in January 2004; they are targeted at analysing the geology of Mars.
Cassini, a NASA probe destined for Saturn. Apart from flybys by deep-space probes, we've never had a decent look at Saturn and its satellites. On-board Cassini is the Huygens probe, which will be dropped through the thick hydrocarbon atmosphere of Titan. Titan is the largest of Saturn's moons, and the only satellite in the solar system to have an atmosphere.
MESSENGER, a NASA mission to Mercury due for launch next year, which will arrive in orbit around the innermost planet in 2009. Amongst other things, MESSENGER will ascertain whether Mercury has deposits of water ice deep within high-walled impact craters near its poles.
Venus Express, the European Space Agency's sister misison to Mars Express, will depart for Venus in December 2005, arriving at the planet the following summer. It will analyse the atmosphere and the surface of the planet, and hopefully explain the anomalous chemical compositions within the atmosphere, which some have suggested are due to microbial life.
So, we can see that there is a lot going on at the moment in the field of space exploration. Over the past few days, I've been watching HBO's "From the Earth to the Moon", and its made me regret that I wasn't alive during the space race. But, on reflection, there is plenty going on right now to get excited about!
Re:Looks like a good choice for a router
on
More Cheap Linux PCs
·
· Score: 4, Informative
How about just buying a fucking router?
Because most routers I have come across have broken functionality, broken security, and don't have much scope for expandability. What if I want to use my router as a proxy web server too? Or as a DNS caching server? Or to host a website for my home network? Or as an NTP server so all my machines have their clocks in sync?
Looks like a good choice for a router
on
More Cheap Linux PCs
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm currently looking for a cheap computer to use as a router/firewall/internet gateway for my home network. This looks like a good solution; just bang in the spare wireless & ethernet cards sitting in my bits box, bridge them together, and then hook in my USB ADSL modem. Stuff on some iptables rules and some intrusion detection, and I've got just the setup I need. Best bit is, I won't be paying for the two expensive things I don't need: MS Windows and a monitor.
Having a look at one of their screenshots, I noticed that the dock icons in the top right-hand corner look suspiciously like those I remember from my KDE days a couple of years back. It appears they have stolen these icons to spiff up the appearance of Window Maker/GNUStep, which IMHO is rather sneaky.
The 21st century is not PaxAsia. It is PaxAmericana
I think "American Global Dominance" would be a better term than "Pax Americana". Recalling my Latin, "Pax" means peace, and you just have to look at Afghanistan and Iraq to see the inappropriateness of the term "peace" in this context.
AFAIK, the only open-source compiler for FORTRAN 95 is the GNU project, still yet to be completed. In fact, I understand that there are two seperate projects, one the "original" and one which forked due to personality differences. A Google search for "G95" should bring up one of the two. Both are still in (active) development.
It is currently possible to get hold of a free FORTRAN compiler; or, to be specific, a compiler for the F language, which is a clean subset of the FORTRAN 95 plus ISO 15581 language standards (the latter bit adds some missing features to FORTRAN 95). F gets rid of much of the FORTRAN 77 baggage in FORTRAN 95 (which exists for backward compatibility), with an aim towards furnishing a good educational language. Nevertheless, it contains all of the "modern" features of FORTRAN 95, and the existence of a free compiler is a bonus.
The article comes across as rather limp, not unlike overcooked pasta. To me, it seems like the author (one Jim Kerstetter) doesn't actually know that much about what he's talking about; he's a regular journalist who is covering a tech story without any decent grounding in the area. To give a few examples:
That reluctance also has made some companies slow to adopt standardized programming technologies like the Extensible Markup Language.... That would be XML
Oracle CEO Lawrence J. Ellison... That would be Larry Ellison
Problem was, it had an estimated 10,000 bugs. Customers balked, and Oracle's application revenues fell 11% by the end of 2002... Wouldn't this be due to the bursting of the Dot-Com Bubble?
Software companies also can turn to quality assurance standards such as the Capability Maturity Model... Anyone who has worked with CMM knows that it is, in reality, Masturbation by Management: temporarily relieving, but an utter willo-the-wisp when it comes to full satisfaction.
I'd find it fascinating to see a breakdown of the languages used to write the applications which are running on these beasties. High Performance Computing has rather different needs from a language than programs that are, say, focused on interaction with a user, or database access. I expect that languages which sit well with infrastructures such as MPI and Open MP would be well-favoured, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that FORTRAN puts in a respectable showing.
And before I'm bombarded with comments pointing out how ancient FORTRAN is, it's worth remembering that FORTRAN is still an evolving language; the last updade came out in 1997/98, and the new FORTRAN 200x should be arriving within the next year or so. In my experience of a number of languages, I've found that FORTRAN still continues to excel at numerical efficiency and portability, and I hope these selling points continue to be a feature of the new standard. Of course, I wouldn't want to write a compiler in FORTRAN, but for stuff like computational fluid dynamics, it still rocks; and those aspects of FORTRAN 77 which made it awkward (such as lack of dynamic array allocation) are fortunately a thing of the distant past.
From this list, would I be correct in thinking that no Microsoft products (i.e., operating systems) run on these ultra high-end machines? Or, to paraphrase what I really mean (and in the interests of honesty), does Windows suck like a Dyson when it comes to High-Performance Computing?
The Washington Post piece is flawed. Besides the fact that it exaggerates the importance of "space domination", if transporting H3 from the moon would be "economically feasible" I would think NASA had tried to do that already.
Two economists are walking down the street, and they see a 100 dollar note on the ground. One bends down to pick it up, but the other one stops her, saying "If it was worth picking up, someone else would already have done it".
IIRC, a similar-sounding device (known as the Pinwheel) appeared in "Beyond the Fall of Night", by Gregory Benford. This book was a sequel to the Arthur C. Clarke short story "Against the Fall of Night", which Clarke later re-wrote as the full-blown novel "The City and the Stars". All three tales are well worth a read!
Harware Support: Linux outshines Windows
on
Platform Evangelism
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
yes, windows outshines Linux in that it supports more commercial hardware and that most companies only make drivers for windows.
By commercial hardware, I assume you mean components and peripherals which are compatible with what we know as the "IBM PC". In terms of platforms supported, I think you will find that Linux runs on a far greater variety than does Microsoft Windows. Think SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS...
Yeah, screw them cheese-eating surrender monkeys. What good have they ever done us? Like, who apart from total lusers would uses their buttfuck-useless HTML or HTTP?
The task bar in Windows 95 was ripped off from Acorn's RiscOS, which came out in 1988, ran on 1Mb machines, and had features such as OLE, font anti-aliasing and multitasking. My blood boils whenever Microsoft introduces a new "innovation" which is no such thing.
For those who wonder why Jupiters moons are interesting, and worth visiting, I'll try to give a brief summary here. JIMO will be visiting Jupiters four Galilean moons, named after their initial discovery by Galileo Galilei (through his now-famous telescope). In order of distance from Jupiter, they are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
Io is the only moon in the solar system to show volcanic activity; plumes of gas ejected from its volcanos, rising up to 250km above the surface, have been detected from Earth. The energy to keep the interior of Io molten comes from the tidal friction generated as the moon moves through Jupiter's strong gravitation field. Io is a great laboratory for understanding volcanic activity in general.
Europa, the next moon out, is one of the most likely places for life to exist in the Solar System (excepting, of course, Earth). Images of the moon reveal a very smooth surface (in fact, the smoothest in the Solar System), criss-crossed by long, narrow, straight features. These features appear to be fissures in the surface; combined with the fact that the surface is almost pure ice (which we know from spectroscopy studies), it appears that Europa may have a large sub-surface ocean of liquid water, covered by a crust of ice.
Support for the existence of this ocean comes from the discovery of ice rafts on the surface, much like found in polar regions on Earth, and from the detection of a weak magnetic field by the Galileo spacecraft. Europa is too small to have its own magnetic field, but if it contains a large quantity of conducting fluid (such as water with a high concentration of dissolved minerals), then its motion through Jupiters magnetic field will generate a field of its own.
The significance of the sub-surface water on Europa is that liquid water is one of the principal prerequesites for life (as we know it). Speculation as to whether life does indeed exist on Europa is ongoing; to find out, a cryobot/hydrobot mission to the moon is required. The cryobot would melt its way through the icy crust, and the hydrobot would descend through this hole and explore the oceans underneath. Interest incryobot/hydrobot technology was spurred on by the discovery of Lake Vostok in Antarctica, the world's fourth-largest freshwater lake, which is trapped under 2km of ice sheet, and may contain prehistoric lifeforms.
Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, larger even than the planet Mercury. Both Ganymede and Callisto have heavily-cratered surfaces, indicative of millenia of meteorite bombardment. Both are a mixture of rock and ice, although the detection of a weak magnetic field around Callisto indicates that it may have a sub-surface ocean, like Europa. The existence of this ocean is puzzling, since Callisto is too far from Jupiter for tidal heating to be able to melt ice. Some have suggested that Calliso's ocean contains an antifreeze (maybe ammonia), which keeps the water liquid well below its normal solidification temperature.
IMHO, I think Europa is the jewel in the crown of the Galilean moons, due to the possibility that life may exist there. Unfortunately, as one can tell from JIMO's full name (Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter), there are no plans to land on this fascinating world. In "2010: Odyssey Two", Arthur C. Clarke writes about a manned landing on Europa which discovers life; it would be great for me to see this happen in my lifetime, let alone by 2010.
IIRC, cassini was not the first deep-space mission to use a radioactive pile for its energy. I think this practice may go back all the way to the early Pioneer missions.
Actually, a mixture of all three that you mention. Most of my development is done on an x86 Laptop or a six-node x86 cluster. For the big job runs, I use either Alphas or SPARCS. Nothing I do, however, requires the inter-processor communication speeds needed by CFD. People in my department who do CFD use either our SGI Origin, or a national supercomputer facility (Cray, I think, with Alpha CPUs).
Most of my problems are embarrasingly parallel, typically parameter-space searches where each problem unit can fit in a (large) cache. For instance, calculating model atmospheres for stars. Hence, the cache size becomes important
Or could it be you don't know what you are talking about?
Nope, I'll leave that to you. All computers use numbers; not all of them use numbers as part of an explicitly numerical algorithm, such as finding the eigenvalues of a large matrix. That sort of problem requires both a fast FPU, and fast memory access, which is why things run much faster when a program can sit in the L2 cache. For non-numerical algorithms, such as database manipulation, other factors may be more important than the cache size, such as disk access.
...nowadays I think that the last component of a PC which needs speeding up is the CPU. Many other components act as a brake on the real-world efficiency of systems; one particularly close to my heart is the cache size. Most computational problems which I come across are too large to fit in less than 2 Mb; therefore, on processors which have a much lower clock speed than x86 offerings, but a much larger cache, I get much better results. The Sparc III series is a good example; the clock speed is around 500Mhz (maybe higher on more recent versions), but the 4 Mb instruction cache & 4 Mb data cache (IIRC) mean that the sort of numerical problems I solve can fly. Of course, it could be argued that this is due to
the superiority of the SPARC architecture over x86, but you get my point.
I'd be interested to try out one of the new Pentium M processors (as found on Centrino platforms); I understand they have 1 Mb caches, and this may give them quite a performance boost for numerically-intenstive stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
This question implies that space exploration in the past was dominated by the two superpowers. From a manned spaceflight perspective, this implication is quite correct; but from an unmanned perspective, it is rather inaccurate. Over the last three decades, a large proportion of the activity in unmanned space exploration has been undertaken by countries other than two superpowers. And let's not forget that, unlike most unmanned misisons, the moon race was about politics, not science.
Looking towards the future, quite a bit of the exploration of our solar system involves both USA/Russia and other countries, either in collaboration or in competition. Particular missions to keep an eye on include:
So, we can see that there is a lot going on at the moment in the field of space exploration. Over the past few days, I've been watching HBO's "From the Earth to the Moon", and its made me regret that I wasn't alive during the space race. But, on reflection, there is plenty going on right now to get excited about!
How about just buying a fucking router?
Because most routers I have come across have broken functionality, broken security, and don't have much scope for expandability. What if I want to use my router as a proxy web server too? Or as a DNS caching server? Or to host a website for my home network? Or as an NTP server so all my machines have their clocks in sync?
I'm currently looking for a cheap computer to use as a router/firewall/internet gateway for my home network. This looks like a good solution; just bang in the spare wireless & ethernet cards sitting in my bits box, bridge them together, and then hook in my USB ADSL modem. Stuff on some iptables rules and some intrusion detection, and I've got just the setup I need. Best bit is, I won't be paying for the two expensive things I don't need: MS Windows and a monitor.
There's this thing called "irony". You may wish to look it up, lest you critisize those who are making your very point, but more effectively.
There's this thing called "spelling". You may wish to look it up, before you spell "criticize" incorrectly.
Having a look at one of their screenshots, I noticed that the dock icons in the top right-hand corner look suspiciously like those I remember from my KDE days a couple of years back. It appears they have stolen these icons to spiff up the appearance of Window Maker/GNUStep, which IMHO is rather sneaky.
The 21st century is not PaxAsia. It is PaxAmericana
I think "American Global Dominance" would be a better term than "Pax Americana". Recalling my Latin, "Pax" means peace, and you just have to look at Afghanistan and Iraq to see the inappropriateness of the term "peace" in this context.
AFAIK, the only open-source compiler for FORTRAN 95 is the GNU project, still yet to be completed. In fact, I understand that there are two seperate projects, one the "original" and one which forked due to personality differences. A Google search for "G95" should bring up one of the two. Both are still in (active) development.
It is currently possible to get hold of a free FORTRAN compiler; or, to be specific, a compiler for the F language, which is a clean subset of the FORTRAN 95 plus ISO 15581 language standards (the latter bit adds some missing features to FORTRAN 95). F gets rid of much of the FORTRAN 77 baggage in FORTRAN 95 (which exists for backward compatibility), with an aim towards furnishing a good educational language. Nevertheless, it contains all of the "modern" features of FORTRAN 95, and the existence of a free compiler is a bonus.
The article comes across as rather limp, not unlike overcooked pasta. To me, it seems like the author (one Jim Kerstetter) doesn't actually know that much about what he's talking about; he's a regular journalist who is covering a tech story without any decent grounding in the area. To give a few examples:
That reluctance also has made some companies slow to adopt standardized programming technologies like the Extensible Markup Language.... That would be XML
Oracle CEO Lawrence J. Ellison... That would be Larry Ellison
Problem was, it had an estimated 10,000 bugs. Customers balked, and Oracle's application revenues fell 11% by the end of 2002... Wouldn't this be due to the bursting of the Dot-Com Bubble?
Software companies also can turn to quality assurance standards such as the Capability Maturity Model... Anyone who has worked with CMM knows that it is, in reality, Masturbation by Management: temporarily relieving, but an utter willo-the-wisp when it comes to full satisfaction.
I'd find it fascinating to see a breakdown of the languages used to write the applications which are running on these beasties. High Performance Computing has rather different needs from a language than programs that are, say, focused on interaction with a user, or database access. I expect that languages which sit well with infrastructures such as MPI and Open MP would be well-favoured, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that FORTRAN puts in a respectable showing.
And before I'm bombarded with comments pointing out how ancient FORTRAN is, it's worth remembering that FORTRAN is still an evolving language; the last updade came out in 1997/98, and the new FORTRAN 200x should be arriving within the next year or so. In my experience of a number of languages, I've found that FORTRAN still continues to excel at numerical efficiency and portability, and I hope these selling points continue to be a feature of the new standard. Of course, I wouldn't want to write a compiler in FORTRAN, but for stuff like computational fluid dynamics, it still rocks; and those aspects of FORTRAN 77 which made it awkward (such as lack of dynamic array allocation) are fortunately a thing of the distant past.
From this list, would I be correct in thinking that no Microsoft products (i.e., operating systems) run on these ultra high-end machines? Or, to paraphrase what I really mean (and in the interests of honesty), does Windows suck like a Dyson when it comes to High-Performance Computing?
That'll be Hoist by your own petard maybe?
(from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary): be hoist(ed) with/by your own petard
Oh, and it's spelt "spelt" not "spellt", numbnuts.
That would be "spelled". Hoisted by your own petard!
The Washington Post piece is flawed. Besides the fact that it exaggerates the importance of "space domination", if transporting H3 from the moon would be "economically feasible" I would think NASA had tried to do that already.
Two economists are walking down the street, and they see a 100 dollar note on the ground. One bends down to pick it up, but the other one stops her, saying "If it was worth picking up, someone else would already have done it".
IIRC, a similar-sounding device (known as the Pinwheel) appeared in "Beyond the Fall of Night", by Gregory Benford. This book was a sequel to the Arthur C. Clarke short story "Against the Fall of Night", which Clarke later re-wrote as the full-blown novel "The City and the Stars". All three tales are well worth a read!
yes, windows outshines Linux in that it supports more commercial hardware and that most companies only make drivers for windows.
By commercial hardware, I assume you mean components and peripherals which are compatible with what we know as the "IBM PC". In terms of platforms supported, I think you will find that Linux runs on a far greater variety than does Microsoft Windows. Think SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS...
Yeah, screw them cheese-eating surrender monkeys. What good have they ever done us? Like, who apart from total lusers would uses their buttfuck-useless HTML or HTTP?
The task bar in Windows 95 was ripped off from Acorn's RiscOS, which came out in 1988, ran on 1Mb machines, and had features such as OLE, font anti-aliasing and multitasking. My blood boils whenever Microsoft introduces a new "innovation" which is no such thing.
Oops, JIMO wont be going to Io, since Io ain't icy. My bad...
For those who wonder why Jupiters moons are interesting, and worth visiting, I'll try to give a brief summary here. JIMO will be visiting Jupiters four Galilean moons, named after their initial discovery by Galileo Galilei (through his now-famous telescope). In order of distance from Jupiter, they are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
Io is the only moon in the solar system to show volcanic activity; plumes of gas ejected from its volcanos, rising up to 250km above the surface, have been detected from Earth. The energy to keep the interior of Io molten comes from the tidal friction generated as the moon moves through Jupiter's strong gravitation field. Io is a great laboratory for understanding volcanic activity in general.
Europa, the next moon out, is one of the most likely places for life to exist in the Solar System (excepting, of course, Earth). Images of the moon reveal a very smooth surface (in fact, the smoothest in the Solar System), criss-crossed by long, narrow, straight features. These features appear to be fissures in the surface; combined with the fact that the surface is almost pure ice (which we know from spectroscopy studies), it appears that Europa may have a large sub-surface ocean of liquid water, covered by a crust of ice.
Support for the existence of this ocean comes from the discovery of ice rafts on the surface, much like found in polar regions on Earth, and from the detection of a weak magnetic field by the Galileo spacecraft. Europa is too small to have its own magnetic field, but if it contains a large quantity of conducting fluid (such as water with a high concentration of dissolved minerals), then its motion through Jupiters magnetic field will generate a field of its own.
The significance of the sub-surface water on Europa is that liquid water is one of the principal prerequesites for life (as we know it). Speculation as to whether life does indeed exist on Europa is ongoing; to find out, a cryobot/hydrobot mission to the moon is required. The cryobot would melt its way through the icy crust, and the hydrobot would descend through this hole and explore the oceans underneath. Interest incryobot/hydrobot technology was spurred on by the discovery of Lake Vostok in Antarctica, the world's fourth-largest freshwater lake, which is trapped under 2km of ice sheet, and may contain prehistoric lifeforms.
Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, larger even than the planet Mercury. Both Ganymede and Callisto have heavily-cratered surfaces, indicative of millenia of meteorite bombardment. Both are a mixture of rock and ice, although the detection of a weak magnetic field around Callisto indicates that it may have a sub-surface ocean, like Europa. The existence of this ocean is puzzling, since Callisto is too far from Jupiter for tidal heating to be able to melt ice. Some have suggested that Calliso's ocean contains an antifreeze (maybe ammonia), which keeps the water liquid well below its normal solidification temperature.
IMHO, I think Europa is the jewel in the crown of the Galilean moons, due to the possibility that life may exist there. Unfortunately, as one can tell from JIMO's full name (Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter), there are no plans to land on this fascinating world. In "2010: Odyssey Two", Arthur C. Clarke writes about a manned landing on Europa which discovers life; it would be great for me to see this happen in my lifetime, let alone by 2010.
IIRC, cassini was not the first deep-space mission to use a radioactive pile for its energy. I think this practice may go back all the way to the early Pioneer missions.
Actually, a mixture of all three that you mention. Most of my development is done on an x86 Laptop or a six-node x86 cluster. For the big job runs, I use either Alphas or SPARCS. Nothing I do, however, requires the inter-processor communication speeds needed by CFD. People in my department who do CFD use either our SGI Origin, or a national supercomputer facility (Cray, I think, with Alpha CPUs).
Most of my problems are embarrasingly parallel, typically parameter-space searches where each problem unit can fit in a (large) cache. For instance, calculating model atmospheres for stars. Hence, the cache size becomes important
Arse, my bad. Oh well, maybe an Opteron when I upgrade my home machine...
Or could it be you don't know what you are talking about?
Nope, I'll leave that to you. All computers use numbers; not all of them use numbers as part of an explicitly numerical algorithm, such as finding the eigenvalues of a large matrix. That sort of problem requires both a fast FPU, and fast memory access, which is why things run much faster when a program can sit in the L2 cache. For non-numerical algorithms, such as database manipulation, other factors may be more important than the cache size, such as disk access.
...nowadays I think that the last component of a PC which needs speeding up is the CPU. Many other components act as a brake on the real-world efficiency of systems; one particularly close to my heart is the cache size. Most computational problems which I come across are too large to fit in less than 2 Mb; therefore, on processors which have a much lower clock speed than x86 offerings, but a much larger cache, I get much better results. The Sparc III series is a good example; the clock speed is around 500Mhz (maybe higher on more recent versions), but the 4 Mb instruction cache & 4 Mb data cache (IIRC) mean that the sort of numerical problems I solve can fly. Of course, it could be argued that this is due to the superiority of the SPARC architecture over x86, but you get my point.
I'd be interested to try out one of the new Pentium M processors (as found on Centrino platforms); I understand they have 1 Mb caches, and this may give them quite a performance boost for numerically-intenstive stuff.