If it costs $450M/launch, and you presume it has a crew of 6 (some had 5, some had 7), and you suggest it costs $75/astronaut... then sending up an empty shuttle would cost $0, naught, nil, nothing, be free, etc.?
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. A shuttle launch costs $450M, Soyuz costs $55M per astronaut. You want to send 6 people to ISS. Which method is cheaper?
First in space, first satellite, first man in space, first orbit, first woman in space, first probes on Venus and Mars, first space station--not bad for a bunch of thugs, eh comrade?
That was communism, not the new thugarchy. I don't see the Russian space industry innovating quite as much lately. The US neither, by the way.
But if you just want to shuttle people to the ISS, all that extra capacity is somewhat overkill. It's like you're commuting to an office job in an 18-wheeler.
It would have been nice if the summary had mentioned that rather vital fact. Throughout the entire article I thought: how the hell can an under-age kid even sue his own mother? Isn't she his legal guardian and all that? Then, in the last line of the article, it's finally revealed that she isn't. So she's messing with her son's life after she lost custody.
In short, only a masochist would try to code a non-trivial game on Javascript.
Note that these people didn't code the game in Javscript. They coded it in Java, and compiled that to Javascript.
Javascript is still a sucky language to code in or compile to. At the very least, it should have sane scoping and not try to make everything global. A linker would help too. But it's what we've got, and turns out to work very well despite its problems.
Your issues about dynamic typing are completely irrelevant, however. A dynamic language with closures and metaprogramming (which Javascript has) turns out to be great for big projects. In fact, they tend to become a lot smaller and easier to manage. Javascript's problems are entirely related to its global variables, lack of sane scopes, and the fact that it's trying to pretend it's C or Java, when really it's mutilated Lisp.
Also: competitors? For the top spot, perhaps, but in actual use, Java and C don't compete much with each other. C is a systems language, whereas Java is an application language with a strong tendency towards enterprisey stuff.
What worries me about that chart is that Ruby is dropping. Wasn't Ruby supposed to be gaining momentum and be the Next Big Thing? Being overtaken by Objective-C I can understand, given the iPhone's popularity, but Delphi? That can't be right.
The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?
Why would you want to make a video game? How about: to make money? Instead of focusing on people who play your game without paying for it, why not focus on the people who do play it? This seems to work very well for Stardock.
Big publishers try to adapt the real world to their business model. It's much easier to adapt your business model to the real world. Of course to do that they'd need to get their head out of whatever dark place they're currently keeping it, but I expect to see more pragmatic publishers do very well in the future.
That's not a very good excuse since it assumes readability and responsiveness are mutually exclusive.
No it doesn't. They're orthogonal. But for e-readers, responsiveness isn't anywhere near as high on the list of priorities as readability. Or cost, for that matter.
Of course it's nice to have something that can do everything perfectly for a very low price, but most products, especially new technologies, are a compromise. There are plenty of products that are all about responsiveness, there are few that offer the kind of readability of eInk.
Or that people like having a slug user interface that flashes the whole page on and off and takes up to a second to do something as trivial as turn a page.
How much time does it take to turn a paper page? Yes, a second is slow, and of course faster would be nice, but I don't think it's a crippling shortcoming.
Pixel Qi demonstrates a solution which is responsive and readable.
If it's really more responsive for the same price and with the same paper-like readability, then I'm sure it'll win. If it's more expensive or less readable, then there will still be people who prefer eInk.
Unless a responsive colour E-ink turns up soon, the technology is going to find itself looking for another market.
What market other than reading books (which tend to be black & white and not particularly responsive, yet amazingly popular) did you have in mind?
Ruby, Python and Groovy are readable, but also very expressive.
Ruby is a descendant of Perl and supports all the unreadable/inexpressive stuff of the latter. Just check the "Ruby for a Perl programmer" tutorials. One can write the arcane one-liners in Ruby too.
It's true that Ruby contains some ugly Perlisms, but the plans for Ruby 2 are to kick them out and make the language prettier. The beautiful parts of Ruby are really very beautiful, but it still has some ugly legacy stuff.
The fact is,/. has always disliked Macs, simply because they are laughable little toys. They've improved recently with the move to x86,
No, they were improved sufficiently to not be "laughable little toy" when they moved to a BSD unix. OS X is very popular with many programmers because it gives them the full power of unix.
They're also popular with computer illiterates because they Just Work. It's a bit of an odd combination (especially considering the main (and more successful) competitor offers neither unixy power nor Just Workingness), but it's very effective.
Whaaaaaa? Are you in some strange bizzaro world where Apple isn't the embodiment of a closed system?
I think you're the one living in bizarro world. Apple isn't a system, it's a company. And they sell several different systems, some of which are extremely closed, others aren't.
The rest of the hardware contains an OS that is just as open ? What the hell are you talking about?
He's talking about OS X, an OS where you get root access, and where you can install anything from anyone, including tons of free open source software. Install Macports or a Gentoo library tree on it, and most linux stuff will compile with no problem at all. That is just as open (if not more so) as Windows.
There's nothing to suggest that Apple is moving "us" (why is "us" in quotes?) towards a closed environment? You mean other than the fact that every product they have is locked down and closed off?
Firstly, you're wrong. Not every product is that locked down and closed off. Secondly, they're not moving non-customers anywhere at all. They can only move us anywhere if we buy their stuff. If you're being moved by them, it's your own fault. Apple is not a monopoly. There are other choices available.
You are deluded if you think Apple wouldn't love to lock OSX users into an App store
Maybe they'd like to, but they haven't. Instead, they made OS X a platform on which you can install anything you like, including lots of free open source stuff. And they don't need to. OS X is expensive enough as it is. It'd be silly to cripple it in order to create an extra revenue stream.
The whole iPod/iPhone environment is a perfect example of exactly what Apple would do if it had the power to do so - and it's also a perfect example of why Apple should never be given enough marketshare to accomplish anything like it.
When the iPhone came out, it didn't have any market share. The reason why it got so much market share was the app store. The fact that you got a phone on which you can choose to install new stuff was a huge draw. They were the first to get that right. Now Android does the same, but in a more open way, and with phones moving closer to general purpose computers, more people are starting to notice they're unnecessarily locked down.
In MY impression there is a preponderance of Apple-hating commenters here on Slashdot.
I think it's mostly a preponderance of lockdown-hating commenters. My impression is that a lot of people actually do like OS X (I certainly do), but hate how locked down the iPhone is. OS X is way more open than that, despite coming from the same company.
Presumable those same Apple haters are not also running Windows, which is just as closed as anything Apple puts out,
Windows is just as closed as something else Apple puts out: OS X, which, like Windows, is pretty open compared to the iPhone and iPad (though not completely open, unfortunately).
It's true. And as hard as it may be to imagine, other cellphones at the time were even more locked down than the iPhone. Ironically, the attraction of the iPhone was it's openness: that anyone can write apps for it, and there's a platform for distributing those so anyone can buy it. It's very closed for a computer, but very open for a cellphone.
There is no doubt e-ink is far more readable than current LCD devices especially with bright sunlight. However devices that use e-ink pay a heavy price in terms of their unbearably sluggish unpowered UIs.
That's because they're not intended to be responsive. They're intended to be read.
The iphone's lock down is not justified until you can show a real problem with people installing problematic software on to their unrestricted device, like an Android phone.
Android isn't completely unrestricted, unfortunately. Despite the fact that it's my device, I don't have root access. It is a lot less restricted than the iPhone, but if I want to fix bugs in its open source OS, I can't.
If Microsoft did this everyone would be angry about it, but now that it's Apple its all fine and classy.
Not to me. I love OS X, but the biggest and fatal downside of the iPad is that it's locked down. If it was more open, more like a regular computer, I might get one. As it is, it's a tablet for people who wouldn't know how to install anything on a computer anyway (which admittedly is probably a big market).
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If it costs $450M/launch, and you presume it has a crew of 6 (some had 5, some had 7), and you suggest it costs $75/astronaut... then sending up an empty shuttle would cost $0, naught, nil, nothing, be free, etc.?
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. A shuttle launch costs $450M, Soyuz costs $55M per astronaut. You want to send 6 people to ISS. Which method is cheaper?
Seriously, am I the only one sitting here thinking, "Thanks, Obama for your generous budget slashing our manned space program"?
Well, do you want a balanced budget, or do you want a government-driven industry?
First in space, first satellite, first man in space, first orbit, first woman in space, first probes on Venus and Mars, first space station--not bad for a bunch of thugs, eh comrade?
That was communism, not the new thugarchy. I don't see the Russian space industry innovating quite as much lately. The US neither, by the way.
If we are manufacturing in space, we will need Shuttles (or Shuttle-like vehicles) to bring the products to Earth.
True, but as you may have noticed, at the moment we're not manufacturing in space.
But if you just want to shuttle people to the ISS, all that extra capacity is somewhat overkill. It's like you're commuting to an office job in an 18-wheeler.
A figured I'd better google some numbers. Wikipedia says $60 million or $1.3 billion per launch, depending on how you calculate it. Nasa says $450 million per launch. NASA's figure is more expensive than Soyuz for 6 astronauts. Wikipedia's low end figure is obviously a lot cheaper (and kind of hard to believe).
What does it cost with Shuttle?
Probably a lot more. I can't believe the Shuttle would be cheaper than Soyuz.
It would have been nice if the summary had mentioned that rather vital fact. Throughout the entire article I thought: how the hell can an under-age kid even sue his own mother? Isn't she his legal guardian and all that? Then, in the last line of the article, it's finally revealed that she isn't. So she's messing with her son's life after she lost custody.
Not giving kids sex education is like turning off the airbags when they go driving.
Nice car analogy. You're not supposed to crash anyway, right? If you just say no to crashes, then you'll never need an airbag.
In short, only a masochist would try to code a non-trivial game on Javascript.
Note that these people didn't code the game in Javscript. They coded it in Java, and compiled that to Javascript.
Javascript is still a sucky language to code in or compile to. At the very least, it should have sane scoping and not try to make everything global. A linker would help too. But it's what we've got, and turns out to work very well despite its problems.
Your issues about dynamic typing are completely irrelevant, however. A dynamic language with closures and metaprogramming (which Javascript has) turns out to be great for big projects. In fact, they tend to become a lot smaller and easier to manage. Javascript's problems are entirely related to its global variables, lack of sane scopes, and the fact that it's trying to pretend it's C or Java, when really it's mutilated Lisp.
Also: competitors? For the top spot, perhaps, but in actual use, Java and C don't compete much with each other. C is a systems language, whereas Java is an application language with a strong tendency towards enterprisey stuff.
What worries me about that chart is that Ruby is dropping. Wasn't Ruby supposed to be gaining momentum and be the Next Big Thing? Being overtaken by Objective-C I can understand, given the iPhone's popularity, but Delphi? That can't be right.
all types of pc games. They purposely focus on medium-graphics RTS that have a multiplayer component.
I thought their most famous success was in single player TBS.
They don't make big-budget single player games like Alan Wake which are the most vulnerable to piracy.
So they make a profit because they develop on a realistic budget, instead of wasting millions on eye candy.
From the summary:
The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?
Why would you want to make a video game? How about: to make money? Instead of focusing on people who play your game without paying for it, why not focus on the people who do play it? This seems to work very well for Stardock.
Big publishers try to adapt the real world to their business model. It's much easier to adapt your business model to the real world. Of course to do that they'd need to get their head out of whatever dark place they're currently keeping it, but I expect to see more pragmatic publishers do very well in the future.
That's not a very good excuse since it assumes readability and responsiveness are mutually exclusive.
No it doesn't. They're orthogonal. But for e-readers, responsiveness isn't anywhere near as high on the list of priorities as readability. Or cost, for that matter.
Of course it's nice to have something that can do everything perfectly for a very low price, but most products, especially new technologies, are a compromise. There are plenty of products that are all about responsiveness, there are few that offer the kind of readability of eInk.
Or that people like having a slug user interface that flashes the whole page on and off and takes up to a second to do something as trivial as turn a page.
How much time does it take to turn a paper page? Yes, a second is slow, and of course faster would be nice, but I don't think it's a crippling shortcoming.
Pixel Qi demonstrates a solution which is responsive and readable.
If it's really more responsive for the same price and with the same paper-like readability, then I'm sure it'll win. If it's more expensive or less readable, then there will still be people who prefer eInk.
Unless a responsive colour E-ink turns up soon, the technology is going to find itself looking for another market.
What market other than reading books (which tend to be black & white and not particularly responsive, yet amazingly popular) did you have in mind?
Ruby, Python and Groovy are readable, but also very expressive.
Ruby is a descendant of Perl and supports all the unreadable/inexpressive stuff of the latter. Just check the "Ruby for a Perl programmer" tutorials. One can write the arcane one-liners in Ruby too.
It's true that Ruby contains some ugly Perlisms, but the plans for Ruby 2 are to kick them out and make the language prettier. The beautiful parts of Ruby are really very beautiful, but it still has some ugly legacy stuff.
The fact is, /. has always disliked Macs, simply because they are laughable little toys. They've improved recently with the move to x86,
No, they were improved sufficiently to not be "laughable little toy" when they moved to a BSD unix. OS X is very popular with many programmers because it gives them the full power of unix.
They're also popular with computer illiterates because they Just Work. It's a bit of an odd combination (especially considering the main (and more successful) competitor offers neither unixy power nor Just Workingness), but it's very effective.
Whaaaaaa? Are you in some strange bizzaro world where Apple isn't the embodiment of a closed system?
I think you're the one living in bizarro world. Apple isn't a system, it's a company. And they sell several different systems, some of which are extremely closed, others aren't.
The rest of the hardware contains an OS that is just as open ? What the hell are you talking about?
He's talking about OS X, an OS where you get root access, and where you can install anything from anyone, including tons of free open source software. Install Macports or a Gentoo library tree on it, and most linux stuff will compile with no problem at all. That is just as open (if not more so) as Windows.
There's nothing to suggest that Apple is moving "us" (why is "us" in quotes?) towards a closed environment? You mean other than the fact that every product they have is locked down and closed off?
Firstly, you're wrong. Not every product is that locked down and closed off. Secondly, they're not moving non-customers anywhere at all. They can only move us anywhere if we buy their stuff. If you're being moved by them, it's your own fault. Apple is not a monopoly. There are other choices available.
You are deluded if you think Apple wouldn't love to lock OSX users into an App store
Maybe they'd like to, but they haven't. Instead, they made OS X a platform on which you can install anything you like, including lots of free open source stuff. And they don't need to. OS X is expensive enough as it is. It'd be silly to cripple it in order to create an extra revenue stream.
The whole iPod/iPhone environment is a perfect example of exactly what Apple would do if it had the power to do so - and it's also a perfect example of why Apple should never be given enough marketshare to accomplish anything like it.
When the iPhone came out, it didn't have any market share. The reason why it got so much market share was the app store. The fact that you got a phone on which you can choose to install new stuff was a huge draw. They were the first to get that right. Now Android does the same, but in a more open way, and with phones moving closer to general purpose computers, more people are starting to notice they're unnecessarily locked down.
In MY impression there is a preponderance of Apple-hating commenters here on Slashdot.
I think it's mostly a preponderance of lockdown-hating commenters. My impression is that a lot of people actually do like OS X (I certainly do), but hate how locked down the iPhone is. OS X is way more open than that, despite coming from the same company.
Presumable those same Apple haters are not also running Windows, which is just as closed as anything Apple puts out,
Windows is just as closed as something else Apple puts out: OS X, which, like Windows, is pretty open compared to the iPhone and iPad (though not completely open, unfortunately).
The iPhone was competing with other cellphones.
It's true. And as hard as it may be to imagine, other cellphones at the time were even more locked down than the iPhone. Ironically, the attraction of the iPhone was it's openness: that anyone can write apps for it, and there's a platform for distributing those so anyone can buy it. It's very closed for a computer, but very open for a cellphone.
What makes you think that? There is nothing inherent in the photons reflected by e-ink that make then better on the eyes than those emitted by an LCD.
It's not about the photons themselves, it's about the patterns formed by them. And sometimes, the patterns are all wrong!
There is no doubt e-ink is far more readable than current LCD devices especially with bright sunlight. However devices that use e-ink pay a heavy price in terms of their unbearably sluggish unpowered UIs.
That's because they're not intended to be responsive. They're intended to be read.
The iphone's lock down is not justified until you can show a real problem with people installing problematic software on to their unrestricted device, like an Android phone.
Android isn't completely unrestricted, unfortunately. Despite the fact that it's my device, I don't have root access. It is a lot less restricted than the iPhone, but if I want to fix bugs in its open source OS, I can't.
If Microsoft did this everyone would be angry about it, but now that it's Apple its all fine and classy.
Not to me. I love OS X, but the biggest and fatal downside of the iPad is that it's locked down. If it was more open, more like a regular computer, I might get one. As it is, it's a tablet for people who wouldn't know how to install anything on a computer anyway (which admittedly is probably a big market).
Maybe Oracle should hire Mr. T. I don't think he's doing anything much at the moment.
I think he's selling stuff on TV. Youthful, cutting edge stuff like World of Warcraft and new kinds of ovens.
The best young programmers I know don't have any piercings or tattoos that I can see.
I have a wedding tattoo. But then, I'm old.