Actually hydrogen is a pretty good shield. Just surrounding the crewed bits with the water tanks would probably be enough. There are several studies about this.
Are SSME and RS-68 both booster engines on LOX/LH2 or not? They are both lit on launch to provide thrust. You put your foot in your mouth. Just suck it up.
EADS Vulcain 2 and Mitsubishi LE-7 are not that old either. LE-7 is even a staged combustion engine.
Higher speeds do not make for more accidents. Accidents are usually caused by poorly executed maneuvers.
Higher speeds do, however, help ensure than when accidents do happen, the possibility for fatalities is higher. More kinetic energy means a more damaging collision. Kinetic energy increases to the square of the velocity...
If you had ever read about DARPA Have Blue (stealth technology demonstrator which paved the way for the F-117) you would know why they could have understandably stopped him from publishing. The simple fact is, you do not go public about a technology that provides enough of an edge to be a military secret. This has been done since ancient times, e.g. Greek Fire. If anything it makes me think he did get something they thought worthwhile, if the whole affair was an utter failure it would not have been necessary to make it secret.
He did point out the French for e.g. did not believe him. He said that many thought that if his tech was so good, why didn't the US Government fund it? I think when he says it will be invented somewhere if not in the USA, he is talking about it long term. I do not believe he was threatening, just that he sees the development of fusion in this way as inevitable, I think he truly believes this is the only way of doing it in a way that can prove economical.
DoD R&D budgets have been cut all over the map. E.g. David Patterson complained some time ago the CS research funding was being cut. The money is being moved towards the War on Iraq and shorter term technology that can improve the fighting ability of US troops on Iraq or fight terrorism. Whatever that is.
Not to mention Microsoft's work in Xenix, which predates OS/2.
Microsoft could have ruled UNIX on x86, but they chose to keep backwards compatibility with their cash cow, MS-DOS, as long as they could. While this seems to be an excellent choice from the financial PoV, it was terrible from a technical PoV. It left us with a crummy OS until they first version of Windows NT with mass market appeal, Windows 2000, came along.
I think Red Hat suspected Sun might open source it. But they did not even take that for granted. They did fund GCJ and AFAIK GNU Classpath to edge their bets after all.
As a programmer, it is painfully obvious to me that the people which actually wrote the software and muck with it every day will do support much better than joe average off the street. It is non-trivial to wrap your head around someone else's code.
This is one reason why the model works well not only for RedHat, but for MySQL and former JBoss, among others.
You can keep chasing the Microsoft headlights all you want Miguel, but I believe they will win at this game.
They have the initiative. You will be permanently behind the curve. One rule of warfare is you should avoid fighting in terrain picked by your opponent. Things like Samba have their place regarding interoperability, but efforts like Mono or Wine are doomed to continual obsolescence, much like OS/2 support for Windows 3.1 apps.
Ok, I'll bite. Microsoft changes their platform so often, you are better off picking a platform which actually has kept compatibility ever since version one and works in Windows, Linux, MacOS X. Like Java. Heck, you even have free high quality development tools like the Eclipse or NetBeans IDEs.
If you want to use Mono, sure. Just do not get into an hissy fit next time Microsoft decides to completely change the language dropping backwards compatibility, or even dumping it by the wayside. Like they did to QuickBASIC, VB 6.0 and so on. Oh yeah, VB.NET support in Mono sucks. Guess what, they care more about C#.
If you have free time to socialize with strangers, then you're NOT going to be the sharpest DBA on the block. If you are comfortable socializing with random strangers to begin with, then you haven't had enough screen time to be a good coder.
I used to think this way. In hindsight though, I realize I spent a whole lot of my spare time reading Slashdot (which is good on occasion since you do learn a thing or two, despite jokes to the contrary), or worse, playing RPG games, reading sci-fi or other crap like that. Which while fun at the time and making me know some people, was not something I am particularly proud of today. I know other people, good people, which just immersed themselves in their job and ended up having mental breakdowns.
If I had a chance to go back, I would trade most of my time playing computer games to socialize with people in meatspace instead. Since I cannot, I now grab any chance I have every day to socialize. Even if it is with the people next to me on public transport or the supermarket waiting line.
I think about it this way now: Software Engineering or IT should solve people's problems via information technology. It is about automating or simplifying repetitive and tiresome manual tasks. The fact is, people did those manual tasks, and those tasks are done to provide some net benefit to other people. If I cannot communicate with these fundamental entities in the problem domain, that means I am only half the solution to the problem. Incomplete. The first step to solving a problem is knowing of its existence. The next steps are knowing where you are and where you want to be. The final step is creating a solution. I cannot do the initial steps if I cannot communicate with others.
History proves you wrong. The BSD license is less successful than GPL for anything but essential infrastructure projects. BSD seems, to me, especially ill suited for applications. Which is where the next battles will be fought.
Red Hat is profitable. JBoss was profitable prior to being bought by Red Hat. MySQL is profitable. Profitable businesses can be built under the GPL. Perhaps not with the gargantuan profits a monopoly would get. I guess they shall have to settle with being millionaires instead of billionaires.
There are many 3rd party distros based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux already. CentOS is used by many telecoms operators. Scientific Linux is used at many research facilities. Yet Red Hat the company has prospered. Red Hat persists because of certifications and presumption of neutrality. Oracle has neither advantage. I suspect their distro will either prove to be an abortion, or merely used for Oracle providing their own wholly vertical software stack niche.
Why the heck should corporate clients get miffed from having extra choice in vendors? The only people with a problem here are the incumbents: Red Hat.
There will always be more users than developers : the users are the masses here. In the long term the masses will get their fair deal as usual. The present situation regarding proprietary software is insanely tilted to the developer side. Worse: I believe it hampers progress, by leading to corporate inertia and outsourcing. Quark Inc. is a caricature of this world view.
The GPL existed before Linux and I suspect it will outlive Linux in some form.
Your post makes little sense to me. I doubt Oracle will make major inroads with their version of Linux. Red Hat shall survive in some form because they add value to Linux which no one else does.
FWIW after I graduated from one of the top CS schools in my country I took several months vacation, refusing several job offers.
After that I went into the family photography business (which I already used to do part-time while studying), did some home renewal work with my parents and a contractor in our own home, all while contributing to several open source projects.
After 2 years of that, having a heck of a good time, I decided I wanted to try software programming full time.
So I went job seeking. I had all sorts of reactions. People who did not know what open source was : even questioning my sanity for programming for free on something I liked. People who asked me what open source was. People who did me standard canned blind tests on my C++ skills (which I passed with 100% correct answers, although according to them in the prior interview I had no "real world job" experience, programming on open source projects in C/C++ for 7 years including maintainer positions on projects with a dozen developers did not count for them). Then I found someone who actually knew what open source was, got me programming some latest fad language I had no prior experience with, because he trusted my skills as a programmer. The project was ambitious, used a lot of buzzwords, was for one of the top telecoms companies in the country, he payed me what I asked and we delivered the project. I had a heck of a good time, working with a superb boss, even if I had to do some unpaid overtime, but...
But the thing is, in the middle of it, I asked myself had I took the correct course for my life. The contractor my parents hired to help fix our house earned more than I earned without even going to high school, not to mention his overtime was *paid*. Probing my colleagues which started working on IT the minute they graduated, plus several other people already in the sector for a decade about their payscales, I figured...
I figured I was earning more doing photography, working on my own schedule. Not to mention I was not not stuck indoors all the time. Not to mention photography was a standing job, which did not make by back problem worse like programming full time did. Not to mention I loved photography just as well. I love programming for the challenge, and photography for the people interaction. Why the heck should I keep insisting on doing something people do not appreciate enough to pay well, while ruining my health on it?
So hey! Here I am. Quit my programming job after we delivered the project. My boss was sad that I left, but we parted ways amicably. I am back in the photography business. I am considering delivering IT courses (standing job) and doing programming on the side (have a laptop, will travel), while in the process of getting a PhD in CS of all things, but I doubt I will ever spend all my time programming again.
Actually I learned Caml Light, also from INRIA, before LISP. Cannot say I ever stressed the language though, since I never did anything with heavy memory use. There was something about the syntax, especially function declarations, that I could never put in my head.
Typical C++ programmers wouldn't know that though - they're still reimplementing reference counting on every one of their classes, when a central, optimized garbage collector would be a lot faster.
I first heard the pro garbage collecting argument some 8 years ago from someone teaching me LISP. Then I wrote a program in LISP, compiled and had to wait seconds for the garbage collecting step. It was pathetic.
The fact is all these years have passed and I am yet to see a garbage collector which isn't slow and sucks up gobs of RAM. Granted, it makes programming easier. I have programmed in Java and I like it for the ease of use. But I would not go as far as to say it is faster or more memory efficient than even reference counting.
I would love to be proven wrong of course. But I guess there is a reason the best games (high-performance apps with complex data structures) are written in C/C++.
Other countries, which cannot grow sugar cane, grow sugar beets like France or Germany. This is sucrose. I suspect you use HFCS because of lobbying, price control and perhaps GM modification of certain crops. I never quite figured out why corn and soya have such hold in the USA when in other countries they are often minor crops. Sure GM modification and agricultural methods make these more effective, but I am still unsure if that is the whole picture.
increase exercise (probably well over 200% average increase in the US - hard to do in our car dependent world)
It is not hard to increase exercise. It just takes a whole different mindset to do it. I used to go to the gym 1 hour, 5 days per week for 4 months and lost like 0.2kg (which is next to nothing). Hell, I lost more time going to and from the gym by car than actually in there! Thinking back, I think my approach to exercise was a bit like this.
So I dropped the gym, started jogging 1+1 hours per day (which only requires time and maybe tennis shoes) and lost over 10x as much weight in less than half the time. Plus I feel better, get some solar rays, and do not pay any friggin gym bills!
Here are examples of my new mindset:
Going by car? Park further away from the place you are going and WALK there.
Need to change a TV channel? Get off the sofa and change the channel on the TV set instead of using the remote.
Take the stairs instead of using the elevator. If you cannot go all the way by stairs because you are terribly out of shape, only take the elevator part of the way.
Jog instead of walking at work. Probably your co-workers will laught at you, the plus side is distracted bosses will think you are a dynamic fellow (while you are getting your exercise while he is paying you). Hah.
If you got spare time after lunch, walk or jog. Besides helping burn the calories off lunch, I find exercise clears my mind even more than resting does. Probably the endorphins from exercise. Better than Heroin, without the side effects, and its free!
Slashdot Mirror
I saw it at page 41 of the linked to PDF ("NASA's Exploration Systems Architecture Study"), but it is from November 2005. Thanks for the info.
Actually hydrogen is a pretty good shield. Just surrounding the crewed bits with the water tanks would probably be enough. There are several studies about this.
Are SSME and RS-68 both booster engines on LOX/LH2 or not? They are both lit on launch to provide thrust. You put your foot in your mouth. Just suck it up.
EADS Vulcain 2 and Mitsubishi LE-7 are not that old either. LE-7 is even a staged combustion engine.
The "stick" proposal has a SSME on the second stage.
Higher speeds do not make for more accidents. Accidents are usually caused by poorly executed maneuvers.
Higher speeds do, however, help ensure than when accidents do happen, the possibility for fatalities is higher. More kinetic energy means a more damaging collision. Kinetic energy increases to the square of the velocity...
Final products could them be dropped in aerobraking capsules to their final destination anywhere in the world.
Yes, I am dreaming.
I guess you do not use orkut. It has a "today's fortune" line in your user home page.
He did point out the French for e.g. did not believe him. He said that many thought that if his tech was so good, why didn't the US Government fund it? I think when he says it will be invented somewhere if not in the USA, he is talking about it long term. I do not believe he was threatening, just that he sees the development of fusion in this way as inevitable, I think he truly believes this is the only way of doing it in a way that can prove economical.
DoD R&D budgets have been cut all over the map. E.g. David Patterson complained some time ago the CS research funding was being cut. The money is being moved towards the War on Iraq and shorter term technology that can improve the fighting ability of US troops on Iraq or fight terrorism. Whatever that is.
Microsoft could have ruled UNIX on x86, but they chose to keep backwards compatibility with their cash cow, MS-DOS, as long as they could. While this seems to be an excellent choice from the financial PoV, it was terrible from a technical PoV. It left us with a crummy OS until they first version of Windows NT with mass market appeal, Windows 2000, came along.
I think Red Hat suspected Sun might open source it. But they did not even take that for granted. They did fund GCJ and AFAIK GNU Classpath to edge their bets after all.
This is one reason why the model works well not only for RedHat, but for MySQL and former JBoss, among others.
So I will ask, give us even one example of something that Linux is capable of that Windows is not capable of doing.
Deleting a file which is currently being used by another process, without having to painstakingly hunt down that process and killing it first.
You can keep chasing the Microsoft headlights all you want Miguel, but I believe they will win at this game.
They have the initiative. You will be permanently behind the curve. One rule of warfare is you should avoid fighting in terrain picked by your opponent. Things like Samba have their place regarding interoperability, but efforts like Mono or Wine are doomed to continual obsolescence, much like OS/2 support for Windows 3.1 apps.
Ok, I'll bite. Microsoft changes their platform so often, you are better off picking a platform which actually has kept compatibility ever since version one and works in Windows, Linux, MacOS X. Like Java. Heck, you even have free high quality development tools like the Eclipse or NetBeans IDEs.
If you want to use Mono, sure. Just do not get into an hissy fit next time Microsoft decides to completely change the language dropping backwards compatibility, or even dumping it by the wayside. Like they did to QuickBASIC, VB 6.0 and so on. Oh yeah, VB.NET support in Mono sucks. Guess what, they care more about C#.
Test 1 2 3
If you have free time to socialize with strangers, then you're NOT going to be the sharpest DBA on the block. If you are comfortable socializing with random strangers to begin with, then you haven't had enough screen time to be a good coder.
I used to think this way. In hindsight though, I realize I spent a whole lot of my spare time reading Slashdot (which is good on occasion since you do learn a thing or two, despite jokes to the contrary), or worse, playing RPG games, reading sci-fi or other crap like that. Which while fun at the time and making me know some people, was not something I am particularly proud of today. I know other people, good people, which just immersed themselves in their job and ended up having mental breakdowns.
If I had a chance to go back, I would trade most of my time playing computer games to socialize with people in meatspace instead. Since I cannot, I now grab any chance I have every day to socialize. Even if it is with the people next to me on public transport or the supermarket waiting line.
I think about it this way now: Software Engineering or IT should solve people's problems via information technology. It is about automating or simplifying repetitive and tiresome manual tasks. The fact is, people did those manual tasks, and those tasks are done to provide some net benefit to other people. If I cannot communicate with these fundamental entities in the problem domain, that means I am only half the solution to the problem. Incomplete. The first step to solving a problem is knowing of its existence. The next steps are knowing where you are and where you want to be. The final step is creating a solution. I cannot do the initial steps if I cannot communicate with others.
The original X-Com and Terror From The Deep work fine in the DOSBox emulator.
History proves you wrong. The BSD license is less successful than GPL for anything but essential infrastructure projects. BSD seems, to me, especially ill suited for applications. Which is where the next battles will be fought.
Red Hat is profitable. JBoss was profitable prior to being bought by Red Hat. MySQL is profitable. Profitable businesses can be built under the GPL. Perhaps not with the gargantuan profits a monopoly would get. I guess they shall have to settle with being millionaires instead of billionaires.
There are many 3rd party distros based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux already. CentOS is used by many telecoms operators. Scientific Linux is used at many research facilities. Yet Red Hat the company has prospered. Red Hat persists because of certifications and presumption of neutrality. Oracle has neither advantage. I suspect their distro will either prove to be an abortion, or merely used for Oracle providing their own wholly vertical software stack niche.
Why the heck should corporate clients get miffed from having extra choice in vendors? The only people with a problem here are the incumbents: Red Hat.
There will always be more users than developers : the users are the masses here. In the long term the masses will get their fair deal as usual. The present situation regarding proprietary software is insanely tilted to the developer side. Worse: I believe it hampers progress, by leading to corporate inertia and outsourcing. Quark Inc. is a caricature of this world view.
The GPL existed before Linux and I suspect it will outlive Linux in some form.
Your post makes little sense to me. I doubt Oracle will make major inroads with their version of Linux. Red Hat shall survive in some form because they add value to Linux which no one else does.
I would get calls in the middle of the night, dinner, etc, asking me if I was still working, and then providing me with lots of work.
I would solve that one easily. I simply turn off my cellphone when I do not want to be disturbed.
FWIW after I graduated from one of the top CS schools in my country I took several months vacation, refusing several job offers.
After that I went into the family photography business (which I already used to do part-time while studying), did some home renewal work with my parents and a contractor in our own home, all while contributing to several open source projects.
After 2 years of that, having a heck of a good time, I decided I wanted to try software programming full time.
So I went job seeking. I had all sorts of reactions. People who did not know what open source was : even questioning my sanity for programming for free on something I liked. People who asked me what open source was. People who did me standard canned blind tests on my C++ skills (which I passed with 100% correct answers, although according to them in the prior interview I had no "real world job" experience, programming on open source projects in C/C++ for 7 years including maintainer positions on projects with a dozen developers did not count for them). Then I found someone who actually knew what open source was, got me programming some latest fad language I had no prior experience with, because he trusted my skills as a programmer. The project was ambitious, used a lot of buzzwords, was for one of the top telecoms companies in the country, he payed me what I asked and we delivered the project. I had a heck of a good time, working with a superb boss, even if I had to do some unpaid overtime, but...
But the thing is, in the middle of it, I asked myself had I took the correct course for my life. The contractor my parents hired to help fix our house earned more than I earned without even going to high school, not to mention his overtime was *paid*. Probing my colleagues which started working on IT the minute they graduated, plus several other people already in the sector for a decade about their payscales, I figured...
I figured I was earning more doing photography, working on my own schedule. Not to mention I was not not stuck indoors all the time. Not to mention photography was a standing job, which did not make by back problem worse like programming full time did. Not to mention I loved photography just as well. I love programming for the challenge, and photography for the people interaction. Why the heck should I keep insisting on doing something people do not appreciate enough to pay well, while ruining my health on it?
So hey! Here I am. Quit my programming job after we delivered the project. My boss was sad that I left, but we parted ways amicably. I am back in the photography business. I am considering delivering IT courses (standing job) and doing programming on the side (have a laptop, will travel), while in the process of getting a PhD in CS of all things, but I doubt I will ever spend all my time programming again.
Actually I learned Caml Light, also from INRIA, before LISP. Cannot say I ever stressed the language though, since I never did anything with heavy memory use. There was something about the syntax, especially function declarations, that I could never put in my head.
Typical C++ programmers wouldn't know that though - they're still reimplementing reference counting on every one of their classes, when a central, optimized garbage collector would be a lot faster.
I first heard the pro garbage collecting argument some 8 years ago from someone teaching me LISP. Then I wrote a program in LISP, compiled and had to wait seconds for the garbage collecting step. It was pathetic.
The fact is all these years have passed and I am yet to see a garbage collector which isn't slow and sucks up gobs of RAM. Granted, it makes programming easier. I have programmed in Java and I like it for the ease of use. But I would not go as far as to say it is faster or more memory efficient than even reference counting.
I would love to be proven wrong of course. But I guess there is a reason the best games (high-performance apps with complex data structures) are written in C/C++.
Other countries, which cannot grow sugar cane, grow sugar beets like France or Germany. This is sucrose. I suspect you use HFCS because of lobbying, price control and perhaps GM modification of certain crops. I never quite figured out why corn and soya have such hold in the USA when in other countries they are often minor crops. Sure GM modification and agricultural methods make these more effective, but I am still unsure if that is the whole picture.
increase exercise (probably well over 200% average increase in the US - hard to do in our car dependent world)
It is not hard to increase exercise. It just takes a whole different mindset to do it. I used to go to the gym 1 hour, 5 days per week for 4 months and lost like 0.2kg (which is next to nothing). Hell, I lost more time going to and from the gym by car than actually in there! Thinking back, I think my approach to exercise was a bit like this.
So I dropped the gym, started jogging 1+1 hours per day (which only requires time and maybe tennis shoes) and lost over 10x as much weight in less than half the time. Plus I feel better, get some solar rays, and do not pay any friggin gym bills!
Here are examples of my new mindset:
Going by car? Park further away from the place you are going and WALK there.
Need to change a TV channel? Get off the sofa and change the channel on the TV set instead of using the remote.
Take the stairs instead of using the elevator. If you cannot go all the way by stairs because you are terribly out of shape, only take the elevator part of the way.
Jog instead of walking at work. Probably your co-workers will laught at you, the plus side is distracted bosses will think you are a dynamic fellow (while you are getting your exercise while he is paying you). Hah.
If you got spare time after lunch, walk or jog. Besides helping burn the calories off lunch, I find exercise clears my mind even more than resting does. Probably the endorphins from exercise. Better than Heroin, without the side effects, and its free!