Moon shot AITHOUT Ares I or V, using existing rockets will more realistically get there and be sustainable over long time, with opportunities for more private sector involvement.
JFK did not start the space program and he didnt give a jack about space per se, to him it was beating the commies and extension of arms race.
Plus, all things considered Apollo was probably the worst thing that ever happened wrt to our prospects of conquering the solar system. Because it created the widespread perception of space being inherently expensive, government uberproject domain.
This is only now beginning to wane with the new generation of space enterpreneurs stepping up.
This is the best thing that can happen to a space program. NASA should not duplicate already existing capabilities, in this case earth to LEO launch.
LEO launch is a commercially available service, there is no need for government-operated launch business.
NASA lunar architecture should be built around existing launch capabilities, its perfectly feasible to mount big lunar, martian and other exploration efforts with our currently existing 20MT class launchers, and it will work out cheaper, more robust and future proof
Government sponsored R&D should happen on frontiers, not recreating exising services.
DarkTree's model ( essentially storing meshes of functions and filters as a texture ) is entirely applicable at runtime, especially with GPUs getting more and more sophisticated.
Its already being done too in simpler forms, to add modulated detail to texture etc. with fragment shaders essentially becoming part texture generators. There are different balance point on how much you want to let be pregenerated by CPU and cached, how much of it always recalculated on the fly, and how much simply streamed from the storage.
Baking in texture in advance has fairly obvious limitations. Finite detail, finite variations. Baking in lightmaps used to be popular too because there wasnt enough horsepower to do enough believable dynamic lighting, still everything is moving away from lightmaps. People are already trying to to full global illumination models at runtime.
Lots and lots of titles are doing procedural art at runtime already without people even noticing its procedural. Vegetation being the most obvious example.
Infinity Universe essentially tries to go Elite 42 on us and and basically generate 95% of the universe procedurally.
You are one of the people that sees an elephant and refuses to believe it exists, just because you think it cant be possible ?
You have _clearly_ not used the program, you are _clearly_ misinterpreting the user interface screenshot, and you _clearly_ dont work as a 3D texture artist ( neither do i but i know a few of them who all consider procedural texture generators like DarkTree and Genetica valuable tools ).
A small clue: Just because something is on the left side of the screen in the user interface doesnt mean its an input.
Uh, you are awfully wrong. It is combining various outputs of various functions to generate other more complex functions, passed through filters, which results in a 3D bitmap, which in turn can be used either as gloss, specular, bump or whatever other maps you want for your shader.
KKrieger btw used a similar techique with their own function mesh editor, its nothing too novel. There is even one open-source program doing similar function but im too lazy to dig it out on sourceforge now.
The rough rule of thumb for any recent serious title has been around 10% or less of budget for programming, some 10% for middleware and around 60% for content generation.
The ISS was the first space construction project
No it was not. Please, go read the history books.
As for your "engineering feat", you would apparently be willing to spend 50-100 billion to build a world biggest phallic monument, as long as its an engineering feat and teaches you how to build phallic monuments ?
The ISS has been pioneer on how _NOT_ to do space construction, its weakest point being dependence of one single launcher, which is soon to be decommissioned.
I admire your breathless optimism, but i must point out that we learned how to get stuff to space on 4th of October, 1957, we put our first crewed space station up and kept it there in 1973 and believe it or not, twelve men have walked and ran around on moon, rather than crawled. The ISS is anything but useful indeed.
Now, go read some history books, learn a bit about what is actually being done in space today and then come back with even just one accomplishment on ISS that would be even remotely worth the money spent.
I'm not saying the ISS is cheap, but it's not bad in the grand scheme of things.
Whether its bad or not can only be measured against the results it has delivered for the money or will deliver. Can you outline those in a concise manner for us ?
So for these several tens of billions sunk, and the "World class science facility" still not being really operational, what does it have to show for this cash and ten years ?
How much technology advancement really has happened and what scientific goals have been accomplished ?
There has been some useful stuff, but wouldnt it be nice to see it all these shortly summarized in a table with the bottomline dollar drawn under it ?
Well, men should take as much time off as women do.
Huh, why ?
You yourself stated that women are better at taking care for the kids. Thats my subjective observation too, and i believe of bazillion of people throughout the history.
What is the problem of stating and accepting that two sexes indeed have a bit different roles in lives, like they have had for millenias ?
Are you familiar with the Parable of the broken window ?
Because thats where your "puts money back in the economy" is going.
You see, if you are just circulating money through these guys, you arent creating any value. There has to be a tangible benefit. And for about past 30 years, human spaceflight part of NASA has very little value for the money spent. Over a half of its 16 Billion a year budget is poured into manned spaceflight each year, and what do we have to show for it ?
International Space Station of microimportance which was put there just to give Shuttle something to do, and will be decommissioned shortly after it reaches operational capability ? Constellation program that has flight deadlines receding faster into the future than program milestones actually approach ?
NASA needs to be reorganized. Pity that Chapter 11 is not an option for government agencies. Otherwise it could file for bankruptcy and only the valuable parts ( JPL, Dryden and couple others ) would be bought up.
Distros like Familiar, Angstrom, Mamona etc are built from scratch for embedded CPUs. Debian is nice, but to get Debian on my old IPaq with internal 16MB flash is next to impossible, while Familiar builds the entire 12MB image with GPE and everything from scratch in a short evening.
I like the packaging policies of Debian, but embedded usually needs a bit different approach. I'td be nice if Ubuntu/Canonical worked with OpenEmbedded on this.
I recommend taking a look at existing embedded distros that target ARM, MIPS and PPC cores, there are several that do quite a few things better than debian.
http://lwn.net/Distributions/#embedhttp://lwn.net/Distributions/#pda
"32-bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor, written by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1-bit of competition"
Still stands strong. Now with a 64-bit patch on top.
Slashdot Mirror
Nevermind the Minesweeper, i hear it runs all variants of Code Red with no installation hassles too.
Just an idle thought, but i dont recall any of the old cultures having monotheisms back then ?
I wonder if theres a connection.
"Even the most retarded religious fundamentalist understands"
Whoa, you are _severely_ overestimating human capability to act on logical reasoning. Common sense isnt all that common as its made out to be.
I did a coat to coast roadtrip last year and Sirius in a rental car was basically the only thing there was to listen to. Sad if that goes away.
Moon shot AITHOUT Ares I or V, using existing rockets will more realistically get there and be sustainable over long time, with opportunities for more private sector involvement.
Cutting a duplicative and useless rocket does not mean cutting the space program. Canning Ares I is the best thing that can happen to NASA right now.
JFK did not start the space program and he didnt give a jack about space per se, to him it was beating the commies and extension of arms race.
Plus, all things considered Apollo was probably the worst thing that ever happened wrt to our prospects of conquering the solar system. Because it created the widespread perception of space being inherently expensive, government uberproject domain.
This is only now beginning to wane with the new generation of space enterpreneurs stepping up.
This is the best thing that can happen to a space program. NASA should not duplicate already existing capabilities, in this case earth to LEO launch. LEO launch is a commercially available service, there is no need for government-operated launch business. NASA lunar architecture should be built around existing launch capabilities, its perfectly feasible to mount big lunar, martian and other exploration efforts with our currently existing 20MT class launchers, and it will work out cheaper, more robust and future proof Government sponsored R&D should happen on frontiers, not recreating exising services.
DarkTree's model ( essentially storing meshes of functions and filters as a texture ) is entirely applicable at runtime, especially with GPUs getting more and more sophisticated.
Its already being done too in simpler forms, to add modulated detail to texture etc. with fragment shaders essentially becoming part texture generators. There are different balance point on how much you want to let be pregenerated by CPU and cached, how much of it always recalculated on the fly, and how much simply streamed from the storage.
Baking in texture in advance has fairly obvious limitations. Finite detail, finite variations. Baking in lightmaps used to be popular too because there wasnt enough horsepower to do enough believable dynamic lighting, still everything is moving away from lightmaps. People are already trying to to full global illumination models at runtime.
Lots and lots of titles are doing procedural art at runtime already without people even noticing its procedural. Vegetation being the most obvious example.
Infinity Universe essentially tries to go Elite 42 on us and and basically generate 95% of the universe procedurally.
You are one of the people that sees an elephant and refuses to believe it exists, just because you think it cant be possible ?
You have _clearly_ not used the program, you are _clearly_ misinterpreting the user interface screenshot, and you _clearly_ dont work as a 3D texture artist ( neither do i but i know a few of them who all consider procedural texture generators like DarkTree and Genetica valuable tools ).
A small clue: Just because something is on the left side of the screen in the user interface doesnt mean its an input.
Um this footage ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flZRps0pBEo
Or, er, ragtime music ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6xJzAYYrX8
Uh, you are awfully wrong. It is combining various outputs of various functions to generate other more complex functions, passed through filters, which results in a 3D bitmap, which in turn can be used either as gloss, specular, bump or whatever other maps you want for your shader. KKrieger btw used a similar techique with their own function mesh editor, its nothing too novel. There is even one open-source program doing similar function but im too lazy to dig it out on sourceforge now.
Actually, scratch the Darktree comment, there are apparently quite a bit more procedural texture generation tools around http://www.modwiki.net/wiki/Texturing#Seamless_texture_creation_tools
not so much for the generation of textures.
You are aware of DarkTree, right ?
The rough rule of thumb for any recent serious title has been around 10% or less of budget for programming, some 10% for middleware and around 60% for content generation.
The ISS was the first space construction project
No it was not. Please, go read the history books.
As for your "engineering feat", you would apparently be willing to spend 50-100 billion to build a world biggest phallic monument, as long as its an engineering feat and teaches you how to build phallic monuments ?
The ISS has been pioneer on how _NOT_ to do space construction, its weakest point being dependence of one single launcher, which is soon to be decommissioned.
I admire your breathless optimism, but i must point out that we learned how to get stuff to space on 4th of October, 1957, we put our first crewed space station up and kept it there in 1973 and believe it or not, twelve men have walked and ran around on moon, rather than crawled.
The ISS is anything but useful indeed.
Now, go read some history books, learn a bit about what is actually being done in space today and then come back with even just one accomplishment on ISS that would be even remotely worth the money spent.
I'm not saying the ISS is cheap, but it's not bad in the grand scheme of things.
Whether its bad or not can only be measured against the results it has delivered for the money or will deliver. Can you outline those in a concise manner for us ?
So for these several tens of billions sunk, and the "World class science facility" still not being really operational, what does it have to show for this cash and ten years ?
How much technology advancement really has happened and what scientific goals have been accomplished ?
There has been some useful stuff, but wouldnt it be nice to see it all these shortly summarized in a table with the bottomline dollar drawn under it ?
It was also horribly impractical and ineffective. Large yield nuclear weapons are now normally regarded superseded by MIRV-type warheads.
Well, men should take as much time off as women do.
Huh, why ?
You yourself stated that women are better at taking care for the kids. Thats my subjective observation too, and i believe of bazillion of people throughout the history.
What is the problem of stating and accepting that two sexes indeed have a bit different roles in lives, like they have had for millenias ?
Are you familiar with the Parable of the broken window ?
Because thats where your "puts money back in the economy" is going.
You see, if you are just circulating money through these guys, you arent creating any value. There has to be a tangible benefit. And for about past 30 years, human spaceflight part of NASA has very little value for the money spent. Over a half of its 16 Billion a year budget is poured into manned spaceflight each year, and what do we have to show for it ?
International Space Station of microimportance which was put there just to give Shuttle something to do, and will be decommissioned shortly after it reaches operational capability ? Constellation program that has flight deadlines receding faster into the future than program milestones actually approach ?
NASA needs to be reorganized. Pity that Chapter 11 is not an option for government agencies. Otherwise it could file for bankruptcy and only the valuable parts ( JPL, Dryden and couple others ) would be bought up.
Distros like Familiar, Angstrom, Mamona etc are built from scratch for embedded CPUs. Debian is nice, but to get Debian on my old IPaq with internal 16MB flash is next to impossible, while Familiar builds the entire 12MB image with GPE and everything from scratch in a short evening. I like the packaging policies of Debian, but embedded usually needs a bit different approach. I'td be nice if Ubuntu/Canonical worked with OpenEmbedded on this. I recommend taking a look at existing embedded distros that target ARM, MIPS and PPC cores, there are several that do quite a few things better than debian. http://lwn.net/Distributions/#embed http://lwn.net/Distributions/#pda
"32-bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor, written by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1-bit of competition" Still stands strong. Now with a 64-bit patch on top.
This is actually a patch that they tried to roll out to fix Ubuntu bug #1, a great stride forward too.