At Ceres' current location and with the sun's current intensity ice cannot long persist on the surface of a body at this location in the solar system. It would sublimate to gas, and with a lack of gravity be blown away by the solar wind (as seen by the fine article). With infall friction, natural radioactive decay and so on, such a body would have to have formed fairly early in the history of our solar system, begun freezing from the outside in, and then accumulated on its icy crust enough dusty concretion to shield the water below from the sun. It would have to start with a lot more water than is there now - perhaps twice as much. This would have to have happened fairly quickly in geological terms, in a region where the future minor planet is being pulled this way and that by other accumulating bodies - being threatened with destruction quite frequently. Most of it would have to happen when the early system was still shrouded with the mineral dust that would become the rocky inner planets. It would have to survive the sort of pummeling that pockmarked the moon. Otherwise over billions of years the surface water would just be gone.
That it formed with this much water is remarkable. That it persists is a miracle.
Enough energy for life? Maybe, maybe not. But certainly a far stronger argument for the presence of life than anyone's "suspicions" against it, which only include information about the person in question and tell us exactly nothing about the world at large.
Enough energy for life? Maybe, maybe not now.
Ceres may have had a warm enough ocean for much more than the time it took for life to arise on Earth. If life got a start there the evidence will still be there, trapped in the ice for billions of years. Was it energy enough, was it time enough? Certainly it has all the right "stuff". We should go see.
The ice supposed to compose most of Ceres is thought to come from the formation of the solar system. Ceres is thought to have much of the water left in the asteroid belt, as it weight about one third as much as all the objects in the belt. It is believed to have a crust of muddy rock from late asteroid impacts and concretion which protects the inner ice core from the solar energy which would have long ago caused the ice to sublimate away on a smaller body in this region of the solar system. Since it is in the asteroid belt it is also believed to be impacted periodically, occasionally with strikes severe enough to puncture this shell, and that would result in regions of ice exposed which could cause these "plumes".
While that doesn't mean liquid water, that does mean vast quantities of exposed ice, and easy entry to the ice levels. When Dawn gets there it may find a sort of "swiss cheese" surface where instead of craters you have some holes in the crust which are open underneath to the vast icy world below, the parts in perpetual shadow still exposed ice, caverns going down whole kilometers below the surface. Imagine the sunlight as a needle poking into each crater at dawn and scraping through the ice across the longitude of Ceres until 4 hours later it is gone. It would dig a slot. The low gravity (.03 g) would prevent the slot from caving in. At the bottom of these holes would be a crystalline ice wonderland as ice subliming when exposed to the sun and the gaseous ice recrystallizing would create some of the most astonishing ice crystals you could imagine. And snow. The sides of the slot, untouched by the sun, would expose to what is supposed to be almost pure water ice.
Not liquid water, but very exciting still. If there was ever life on Ceres, that ice cannot hide the fact - and that would be a remarkable discovery.
Mining asteroids is a nifty idea but if I was going to mine asteroids I think I would want to stake a claim on this one. The shots from Dawn promise to be some of the most exciting NASA has ever produced.
No, it is not different. How people feel about your game is the freaking point. Making people care about your virtual world is the goal. You are an author not unlike all the other authors that ever were.
Your problem - and Intel and AMD have this problem also - is thinking the specifics of the device have something to do with its utility. It doesn't. What matters is how the thing enables people to do what they want to do, and we passed that level of utility in devices a decade ago. I can be telepresent with my children without resorting to either Intel or AMD technologies - all day. Compared to exclusively special uses of spreadsheets and slideshow programs, compatibility differentials of Office suites, that is a win.
It's about the people, not the thing. Wrap your head around that. Make it your religion.
No, AMD's issue is that they underestimate what is required to take the desktop, and they underestimate tech Intel has in reserve. They have management control issues, partner communication issues, and their recent layoffs have left their message garbled. I'd love to be able to unleash AMD's potential on an unsuspecting world, but I'm unlikely to be given the chance. I would call a press conference and say "Hey, Krzanich: bite me!" and unleash a 16 core desktop CPU with 192 core GPU. I would open a division in Valve and open the tap: what do you need?.
And If I was Intel and trying to compete I would quit with the herpaderp Windows crap, since obviously that isn't moving units.
They don't care to because it would cut into their server revenue where margins are higher. Personally I think that really sucks. Intel is the same way. Maybe the migration to mobile where we don't have these margin protection issues is a good thing.
That's the history they started with, not the current story. The current story is that if you want to be Android 4.x compatible, you have to support VP8 in hardware. Since Android is moving over a billion units this year, the battle is over.
I like what you're trying to say, really I do, and I get it. But your audience is not going to hear you and benefit from your brilliance unless you simplify it for them. They are really dumb. I would translate it for them, but I dare not compromise your artful expression.
This course of derision has not worked out well for fans of MPEG-LA so far. So by all means keep it up. God forbid you people take a civil, persuasive tack to win friends and influence people - you might somewhere.
My Nexus 5 smartphone is a computer. Its specs are right up there with a laptop in every way. It has 2 office suites installed on it, and I can and do use external displays, Bluetooth mouse and keyboard with it. It also goes with me everywhere. A computer can't get much more personal than that until they start implanting them. It is a personal computer and I would have no problem using this setup to work all day.
These are sales, not installed base. With sales at 1:1 it will take a long time for Apple to catch up on installed devices. At 3:1 or 4:1 though, Android will handle that by the end of this year.
Slashdot Mirror
At Ceres' current location and with the sun's current intensity ice cannot long persist on the surface of a body at this location in the solar system. It would sublimate to gas, and with a lack of gravity be blown away by the solar wind (as seen by the fine article). With infall friction, natural radioactive decay and so on, such a body would have to have formed fairly early in the history of our solar system, begun freezing from the outside in, and then accumulated on its icy crust enough dusty concretion to shield the water below from the sun. It would have to start with a lot more water than is there now - perhaps twice as much. This would have to have happened fairly quickly in geological terms, in a region where the future minor planet is being pulled this way and that by other accumulating bodies - being threatened with destruction quite frequently. Most of it would have to happen when the early system was still shrouded with the mineral dust that would become the rocky inner planets. It would have to survive the sort of pummeling that pockmarked the moon. Otherwise over billions of years the surface water would just be gone.
That it formed with this much water is remarkable. That it persists is a miracle.
Enough energy for life? Maybe, maybe not. But certainly a far stronger argument for the presence of life than anyone's "suspicions" against it, which only include information about the person in question and tell us exactly nothing about the world at large.
Enough energy for life? Maybe, maybe not now.
Ceres may have had a warm enough ocean for much more than the time it took for life to arise on Earth. If life got a start there the evidence will still be there, trapped in the ice for billions of years. Was it energy enough, was it time enough? Certainly it has all the right "stuff". We should go see.
The ice supposed to compose most of Ceres is thought to come from the formation of the solar system. Ceres is thought to have much of the water left in the asteroid belt, as it weight about one third as much as all the objects in the belt. It is believed to have a crust of muddy rock from late asteroid impacts and concretion which protects the inner ice core from the solar energy which would have long ago caused the ice to sublimate away on a smaller body in this region of the solar system. Since it is in the asteroid belt it is also believed to be impacted periodically, occasionally with strikes severe enough to puncture this shell, and that would result in regions of ice exposed which could cause these "plumes".
While that doesn't mean liquid water, that does mean vast quantities of exposed ice, and easy entry to the ice levels. When Dawn gets there it may find a sort of "swiss cheese" surface where instead of craters you have some holes in the crust which are open underneath to the vast icy world below, the parts in perpetual shadow still exposed ice, caverns going down whole kilometers below the surface. Imagine the sunlight as a needle poking into each crater at dawn and scraping through the ice across the longitude of Ceres until 4 hours later it is gone. It would dig a slot. The low gravity (.03 g) would prevent the slot from caving in. At the bottom of these holes would be a crystalline ice wonderland as ice subliming when exposed to the sun and the gaseous ice recrystallizing would create some of the most astonishing ice crystals you could imagine. And snow. The sides of the slot, untouched by the sun, would expose to what is supposed to be almost pure water ice.
Not liquid water, but very exciting still. If there was ever life on Ceres, that ice cannot hide the fact - and that would be a remarkable discovery.
Mining asteroids is a nifty idea but if I was going to mine asteroids I think I would want to stake a claim on this one. The shots from Dawn promise to be some of the most exciting NASA has ever produced.
Steam has a bunch of games that work in Linux
That is going wrong for all the right reasons. It still ends in death.
No, it is not different. How people feel about your game is the freaking point. Making people care about your virtual world is the goal. You are an author not unlike all the other authors that ever were.
Your problem - and Intel and AMD have this problem also - is thinking the specifics of the device have something to do with its utility. It doesn't. What matters is how the thing enables people to do what they want to do, and we passed that level of utility in devices a decade ago. I can be telepresent with my children without resorting to either Intel or AMD technologies - all day. Compared to exclusively special uses of spreadsheets and slideshow programs, compatibility differentials of Office suites, that is a win.
It's about the people, not the thing. Wrap your head around that. Make it your religion.
Fine. You do it your way. I want this technological achievement so I can do it mine.
/. is a user supported blog. That means that you can submit any link you like. In case you missed the link present on every page, here it is again.
No, AMD's issue is that they underestimate what is required to take the desktop, and they underestimate tech Intel has in reserve. They have management control issues, partner communication issues, and their recent layoffs have left their message garbled. I'd love to be able to unleash AMD's potential on an unsuspecting world, but I'm unlikely to be given the chance. I would call a press conference and say "Hey, Krzanich: bite me!" and unleash a 16 core desktop CPU with 192 core GPU. I would open a division in Valve and open the tap: what do you need?.
And If I was Intel and trying to compete I would quit with the herpaderp Windows crap, since obviously that isn't moving units.
We're about 10 years past that argument, and we keep buying more. Stop giving us more and we stop buying your stuff.
No, they do it because it would compete with their $1000 server chips. ARM is about to give them some correction.
I've been an AMD booster from way back, but they think they're still competing with Intel and that is a serious mistake.
I like to use Blender to compose my videos.
We had this argument long ago, and decided we don't like Rambus not because they don't have some good tech, but because they are fucktards.
They don't care to because it would cut into their server revenue where margins are higher. Personally I think that really sucks. Intel is the same way. Maybe the migration to mobile where we don't have these margin protection issues is a good thing.
Not really. For some monitoring and influencing social media - including /. - is their work.
How about we be a little more careful with twitter links, K?
That's the history they started with, not the current story. The current story is that if you want to be Android 4.x compatible, you have to support VP8 in hardware. Since Android is moving over a billion units this year, the battle is over.
I like what you're trying to say, really I do, and I get it. But your audience is not going to hear you and benefit from your brilliance unless you simplify it for them. They are really dumb. I would translate it for them, but I dare not compromise your artful expression.
This course of derision has not worked out well for fans of MPEG-LA so far. So by all means keep it up. God forbid you people take a civil, persuasive tack to win friends and influence people - you might somewhere.
My first reaction was "how much is MPEG-LA offering to pay?"
My Nexus 5 smartphone is a computer. Its specs are right up there with a laptop in every way. It has 2 office suites installed on it, and I can and do use external displays, Bluetooth mouse and keyboard with it. It also goes with me everywhere. A computer can't get much more personal than that until they start implanting them. It is a personal computer and I would have no problem using this setup to work all day.
Why would someone pay $700 for a phone? An unlocked off-contract Nexus 5 costs only half that much.
Exactly this. Google is showing the power of open. All your stuff works with all your other stuff. Amazing.
These are sales, not installed base. With sales at 1:1 it will take a long time for Apple to catch up on installed devices. At 3:1 or 4:1 though, Android will handle that by the end of this year.