The military's association with SPAM isn't really with the stuff you commonly find on the grocery store shelf either. Hormel was one of the first meat packing companies that figured out how to package meat that did not have to be refrigerated. As can be imagined, this was a big deal to the Army, as lugging around hunks of ice across a battle field together with meat is not easy to do. Prior to SPAM (and similar meats) soldiers either had to eat jerkey or some meat that was obtained from a very local source, such as the farms they passed over during battle.
While the canning process was similar for the military processed meat served during WWII, it was according to a government recepie and packaged in larger metal boxes, although usually called SPAM by the troops.
BTW, Hormel, while not exclusively involved in the production, was part of the R&D effort to create the MREs that the U.S. Army currently uses, and developed some of the packaging processes of meat in those MREs.
This is some volcanic ash that has a chemical composition that is very similar to the samples that were brought back during the Apollo missions. You know, gas chromatigraphs and other methods to identify the chemical composition in a piece of rock. This was done quite thouroughally when the lunar samples came back, and a major effort was done to try and come up with some similar earth-based mineral ore that could be used for experimental purposes in a laboratory before breaking out the lunar rocks themselves. This search effort happened well before this challenge was ever started, and is simply some gravel from a volcanic cinder cone in Flagstaff, AZ. Chemically it seems to behave almost identically as lunar soil samples, and is much cheaper to obtain.
For something that a research team can work on after-hours and as a side project, $250,000 is something worth while to throw some minor effort into. Certainly a couple of graduate students trying to come up with a research topic, or even a couple of undergrads working under the direction of a forward-thinking professor might turn something like this into some cool little "science fair" type project. I wouldn't necessarily start a whole brand new company over this prize, however.
Yeah, but could you create such a device that has a mass of less than 25 kg?
For large-scale municipal oxygen plants of Tycho City, yeah, they might use such a system, but not likely for Ra III (assuming they use another sun god for the names of lunar missions).
The big deal is that you are going to be given a lunar soil simulant (they say that getting the real stuff is just too expensive to do anything but a final proof test with) that comes from a volcanic ash deposit near Flagstaff, AZ. For a small fee a research team can obtain samples of this simulant for experimental purposes.
It must put out at least 5 kg of oxygen (assuming that the time to produce this is limited to a short period of time... 24 hours or less), and the whole device must weight less than 25 kg. I would also guess that space considerations are also something to worry about, but that the weight of the device is a bigger deal.
I guess the Wired news article says 11 kg in 8 hours.
In short, it is something that should fit in a foot locker that astronauts could pull out and set up once another lunar mission actually occurs.
This is a bigger deal than the tether challenge, and something that has some hard short-term practical applications in the space industry. Also, the $250,000 is something you can pay a research team to do more than hold a pizza party afterward with when you win. If you already have a minerology lab, this would be worth pulling a couple of interns/lab assistants over to wrap their energies around. And potentially some very nice contracts in the future if NASA gets off their behind and gets back to the moon.
Of course Lucas said "no" to episodes I,II, and III.
There were even several interviews where Mr. Lucas said "no" to a Star Wars sequal (i.e. Empire Strikes Back), although with the success of that first movie it was almost given that 20th Century Fox was going to get that one filmed in some fashion or another.
Roger Ebert is correct on the point that eventually something will be made to continue the series (or even have prequels to episode I?) It is just a matter of when and where. It will be interesting if Star Wars becomes in the future something like "Steamboat Willie" in terms of who gets to keep the profits and royalties from the franchise when Mr. Lucas starts to push up dasies.
What is interesting is that this isn't even a new concept.
Forget about Heinlein and other authors who have talked about this before (which unfortunately was only brought up by one enlightened/. poster so far), this has already happened, but admittedly on a much smaller scale so far.
In 1993, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as part of the advertiseing for the movie "Last Action Hero", had his name put on the side of a rocket that went up to LEO.
The point here is that regulating advertisement beyond this is just a matter of scale, rather than anything that has any substance. And when the vehicles themselves get so big that they are visible from LEO? (Aka like the "mothership" in Red Dwarf?)
What about the NASA "meatball" logo that is plastered to the side of each space shuttle? What about Boeing logos on all Delta rockets? Space Ship One had a whole bunch of stuff on its side, including ads for Virgin Galactic and the X-Prize itself. Should that be banned as well?
While by itself this sort of advertising is not going to pay for activities in space, it will make a marginally profitable company be able to run in the black.
The #1 think I that is going to blow the FAA regulations out of the water is that it is going to be unenforcable, unless the U.S. Air Force is going to assert American soverignty over all LEO patterns that cross visually over U.S. territory. I wouldn't put it past the current administration to do something bold like that, but the implications to that level of enforcement would be counter productive and dangerous to America itself.
You are still beholden to your human resource manager or the will of the CEO of the company regarding your green card. This is not something that you can initiate on your own without the cooperation of the company you are working for.
As for transfering between companies, you need to have a company that is willing to go through the paperwork necessary for H1-B visas. That means it must be either a forward thinking company or a larger company that is used to doing that paperwork. If a group of developers decide to say "to hell with this company" and leave enmass to start their own company (more common than you might imagine), the one with the H1-B is left holding the bag as the one to clean up any messes left behind.
It is not exactly slavery, but from the viewpoint of an employee it is not exactly a piece of cake. I don't blame those that try to go through the process of an H1-B visa (as there are usually no other options available to them when they try). From the viewpoint of a company president, there are few downsides and a lot more control over an employee than you would normally have over a full U.S. citizen.
This is such a pile of bolvine excrement (i.e. BS) that I don't know where to start.
While there are some products and applications where you can go overseas and "outsource" some of what is going on, there is quite a bit that can't either. A good deal of designing a proper user interface (about 70%-90% of the actual work with designing software... if done properly) requires a strong cultural context in common with the projected end user. The best way to obtain this cultural understanding is to actually live near where that person is using the equipment... to go out into the field so to say. To design something that is used on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, it simply cannot be developed in Madras or Hong Kong. The same goes for a Wal-Mart inventory system in Arkansas.
The American Congress, IMHO, is totally clueless regarding what ordinary IT workers are really in need of. University level education is on the whole rather pathetic, in part because the people who are really good at developing good IT products are actually in the field and doing it. (With some notable exceptions) the ones who can't hack it in industry are the ones working in acedemia, and often doing a poor job at educating the next generation.
In addition, legislation that is coming out of congress is putting more and more handcuffs on those of us that have been in the industry. As it is, congress is trying to tell me that 1st Ammendment rights simply don't exist (amply discussed here on/.) with the software I write, and between software patents and incredibly broad interpretation of copyright laws I am severly hamstrung with what I can even write. This is squarely the kind of thing that congress does indeed control, and is doing a lousy job at helping IT workers. It may help some IT company executives, but that is not the same thing.
A very disturbing trend that I've seen lately is that a good software company should have several lawyers on staff. The real question is what should the ratio of lawyers to developer be? Unfortunately, with the current litigous nature of the computer industry right now I would have to say it could be one to one, as a good developer can generate sufficient material to keep a full-time lawyer busy (on average, over time, and across a whole development team). There are companies right now where there are more lawyers than developers and engineers. This is not a good thing.
The H1-B visas are just an excuse by companies to try and hire people at slave wages. While a few people do get to America supposedly that wouldn't be able to get here otherwise, the whole program is really quite stupid, and a terrible deal to the person who holds the H1-B visa. They can't work for another company while in the USA, and they really can't leave the USA either (or it is a very bad idea... unless you simply want to return home for good and forget about returning to the USA). On the whole immigration legislation is totally corrupt right now, and I would suggest that it would be safer and easier right now for somebody trying to work in America to simply be an illegal immigrant and forget the visas altogether. And that shouldn't be the case either. Ideally, if somebody is technically skilled, can pass a background screening to make sure they are not a terrorist or spy, and genuinely understand the cultural transition of coming to America, they should be granted a work visa that is temporary in some manner that can be eventually turned into a permanent visa (if you've proven that you are low-risk, havn't committed crimes, etc.) with the offer of citizenship. An H1-B visa does not offer any of that, and attempting to get a green card from an H1-B visa is a burecratic nightmare... just like most of the BS that comes from the U.S. State Department.
The best way for a company to get the IT workers it needs is to "grow them". In other words, go to the local university/technical college and offer scholarships and internships to their students, encourage robust com
IMHO, Eddie Murphy does one of the best jobs of protraying a white guy as I've ever seen. If you want to see this as good proof, get a copy of "Coming to America", where in addition to his title role as the African prince, he also plays a Jewish Barber. I couldn't even tell until I read the end credits and had to rewatch the movie to make sure it really was Eddie Murphy.
I think he does such a good job as a white guy (especially as a parody) in part because he is on the outside looking at just what white people take for granted. BTW, his Saturday Night Live skits as a white guy are just as funny.
Having been through this process twice already (going from 8-bit CPUs to 16-bit CPUs, and then to 32-bit CPUs) the #1 bone of contention was that the memory address range substantially increased on each progression to a larger register size, in addition to the new opcodes.
In addition, one of the things that made it difficult in the past was that whole new operating systems with completely new paradymes on their operational concepts within those operating systems accompanies these changes. Right now I don't see any big push to abandon Linux/Unix/Windows/Mac OS-X etc. as the biig leap comes in this time around. There were attempts in the past to do this (like CP/M-86 and MS-DOS v. 7.0) as the progression to a new CPU base came around, but in hind sight these were more transitional products rather than widely used platforms. BTW, MS-DOS 7.0 is also known as Windows '95, and was not marketed as a 32-bit platform independently... also adding to the mistique of the transitions from 16-bit to 32-bit archetechtures.
I may be mistaken with what is going to come in the future, but it doesn't seem to be all that big of a deal. The largest driving factor right now is that Linux is open source already, and this time around there are mature open source operating systems to help make the leap.... something that was not widely available when the computer industry went from 16-bit to 32-bit systems. If you look at what Microsoft is planning, it is clear that "Longhorn" would have been the initial 64-bit operating system from that company, and something that would have been the driving force for 64-bit computer applications. Instead, it is behind in almost every way, and will have a much harder time trying to do the transition.
One final factor with the fact that the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit programming is not going to be so painful is that memory archetechtures have been keeping up in 32-bit systems, with little need for the memory banking that was very common in 8-bit systems, and in part the source of headache with 16-bit systems (with competing extended memory manager archetechtures). Except in some advanced research systems, you don't hear of too many 32-bit CPU systems that require a memory bank switch to allow RAM access to 1 Terabyte.
The problem with VB.net is that the folks who did the extension to "BASIC" were not BASIC programmers. In almost every case I saw to the extensions of Visual Basic over things like GW-BASIC were things that made VB more like C++, and seemed to be coming from C++ programmers that were "tasked" into writing a BASIC compiler.
I'm not going to belabor this issue, but the point is that had VB.net been written by Visual Basic users instead of the C# development team, it would have turned out quite a bit different.
In regards to the extension to Pascal done under Delphi and the Turbo Pascal compilers (where many of the extensions first took place): These were done by Pascal programmers for Pascal programmers. Delphi has always self-compiling, and the core development team that put in these extensions had to put the extensions into the language by using them. And it tended to be extensions (like putting in strings as a base data type... definitely not part of ANSI Pascal) that were major irritants to what you were doing when you had to do any coding on a large project.
On the positive side of how the extensions work, if you pull in some old Turbo Pascal programs and try to compile them using the core Delphi compiler, they usually will compile very cleanly without having to change anythings except a couple of compiler switches... and even most of those will still work. You can't take a Visual Basic 2.0 program and compile it on VB.net at all. Nor especially a Dartmouth BASIC program. Something like that is a totally different language and VB.net won't even compile a very simple program.
This tends to be a problem with the Free Pascal crowd (and other "works in progress" groups of complex Free Software).
I've been guilty of having this as a problem myself.
In this case, the core development community has been doing incremental building all along with the compiler updates as they happen, and the new source code releases don't have all of the files.
The real way to test this is to do a "clean build" of the sources on a freshly reformatted machine. Unfortunately that is not always easy or possible to do (I prefer to do a test rebuild for release purposes on a virtual machine like Bochs or VMware).
The thing that I like about the:= operator is that it makes source code rather clear that it is an assignment operator as opposed to a comparison operator.
C requires the == (double equal) operator for variable comparisons as a result.
The #1 issue that I have when switching from C-like languages and Pascal is that I have to "relearn" what the assignment operator is when going back and forth. That usually takes me about an hour, but is almost always caught in the parsers anyway so it is no big deal. And a trivial bug to fix when I do switch the operators by mistake.
The same applies to the operator as opposed to the != operator. The switch is a headache to remember when you just want to churn out code.
The real advantage for going with memory-mapped files is really speed. By throwing the file into memory mapped space, you are by-passing much of the overhead that the operating system (Windows in this case) throws in regarding memory management with the file system. It is still abstracted that you don't have to deal with specific hard drive archetechtures, but it pretty much right where the operating systems deal with the disk data anyway.
When I did data flow experiments, I got up to a 3x to 5x data throughput improvement going this route as opposed to typical file I/O access routines found in the standard I/O libraries of a typical compiler.
This is a case of where if you need to get high performance, you need to tweak the operating system and use those APIs that can help your application the most. If you don't care about the maximum performance but are more interested in cross-platform issues, then you need to stick with standard I/O functions and APIs.
I'm curious about the 5GB files though... I was under the impression that NTFS in general won't allow you to create or open a file > 1GB. I'm sure you are fighting other issues in dealing with data files of that size, and you would have to, in essence, create your own internal file system just to be able to access a specific piece of data within such a huge file. That is the real issue here, and data organization when you are dealing with that much data is a huge issue. It is also something that you can easily screw up if you shove data in haphazardly.
While the MapViewOfFile function does have an impact with the problems of Windows regarding memory space, the 1GB limitation is not restricted to just this function.
It is indeed the "CreateFile" portion of what Windows NT deals with that causes the problems. I did experiment with different memory window ranges and various strategies to access the data. It didn't seem to have any effect at all regarding this absolute limit as it appears Windows does some sort of alternate mapping beyond what is formally published through the MapViewOfFile function. I hope Wine got this one right with their implementation of this.
The massively frustrating issue came up with the 1GB limit for "ALL" open files on the operating system when used under Win 95/98/ME. At the time I was doing development under Windows 98 (to simplify the distribution requirements... and at the time I wasn't as familiar with the quirks of NT). This was indeed a limitation of the file system, and was generally not documented. Your explaination regarding the shared memory space is likely the reason for this problem, but at the time I couldn't get an answer even from Microsoft itself.
Re: XP.... there are some versions of Win XP that are basically modified versions of Windows ME. I know that seems silly, but this is Microsoft. I'm not talking XP Professional, but some low consumer-grade versions that MS branded as Windows XP. This isn't that hard of a limitation to get around, but as a software developer you need to be aware of it if you have a customer with their own computer that is installing your software and you are expected to troubleshoot why it won't work.
This was the result of work that I did several years ago, and the projects I was working on were fairly high value pieces of software, where you could not only specify the operating system, but much of the computer equipment as well. (Windows was specified by folks higher up the food chain).
While I will admit that the initial release wasn't a huge success, it wasn't that difficult to break the production costs of $777,777 for TXH-1138. Even now that is considered an independent film budget. All I said was that it made back that money. Certainly Geroge Lucas was not a millionaire due to that movie.
The whole concept of when does a film make a profit is a meaty issue in Hollywood anyway, and subject to a bunch of interpretations and lawsuits.
And it is clear that American Zoetrope, through Francis Ford Coppola, was impressed enough with THX-1138 that they were willing to risk another attempt by George Lucas. Otherwise, he would never have been given the chance to try again.
I've heard people even question that accomplishment... as Bill Gates got much of the ideas behind the MS Basic interpreter (it was not a compiler) from some of the CS courses he took before he dropped out of college, including one class where the primary project was to write a BASIC interpreter.
Mr. Gates did know how to market, and Microsoft interpreters and compilers were fairly widespread well before the meeting with IBM. Indeed, the original reason why Microsoft was even going to talk to IBM was because IBM wanted to buy a BASIC interpreter for the PC, and when Gates & Co. found out they needed an operating system as well, they decided to throw that into the bid as well.
I still think that compilers and development systems is what Microsoft does best... it is just unfortunate that they muck it up with all of the rest of the Microsoft empire to make it mediocre and clunky.
TXH-1138 was the very first film that George Lucas ever made... as a film student while attending USC (University of Southern California... one of the best film schools in the world).
It was remade with a slightly larger budget, but it was still made with what would today be called an "independent film" budget and crew. It did achieve something of an "art film" following, and made a modest profit over production costs well enough that studios considered him to be worth the risk to go onto other things like "American Grafitti". It was due to the success of that film 20th Century Fox was willing to risk supporting George Lucas on Star Wars.
Mind you that 20th Century Fox got a huge stake in Star Wars, and that is why Fox Television is now showing all of the movies this spring: 20th Century Fox has the distribution rights. Still does with Episode III (although with a substantially modified contract when compared to Episode IV:ANH).
Certainly hard-core fans of Star Wars have not hurt DVD and video sales of THX-1138, but it was already a "hit" before then.
At the time I had to find out the hard way from some obscure Microsoft support line at $500 per incident that this was the case... and even then the tech support wasn't really that sure or understood why that was the case.
I may have been the reason why it got documented in the first place, and it seems like a really silly limitation.
I did some work on a DVD-Video authoring system that had some incredible file system requirments (obviously, when involving video data and the typical 4 GB data load for a single DVD disc).
The standard file API architechture just didn't hold up, so we (the development team I was working with) had to rewrite some of the file management routines ourselves and work directly with the memory mapped architechture directly. This does give you some other advantages beyond speed as well, as once you establish the file link and set it in a memory address range you can treat the data in the file as if it were RAM within your program, having fun with pointers and everything else you can imagine. Copying data to the file is simply a matter of a memory move operation, or copying from one pointer to another.
The thing to remember is that Windows (this is undocumented) won't allow you to open a memory-mapped file that is larger than 1 GB, and under FAT32 file systems (Windows 95/98/ME/and some low-end XP systems) the total of all memory mapped files on the entire operating system must be below 1 GB (this requirement really sucks the breath out of some applications).
Remember that if you are putting pointers into the file directly, that it works better if the pointers are relative offsets rather than direct memory pointers, even though direct memory pointers are in theory possible during a single session run.
As much as I want to find a counter argument to what you are saying, I would have to agree with you in just about every instance.
America has had an "open border" for almost its entire history, and bringing in immigrant labor has been a major portion of that. In the 17th and 18th centuries, getting immigrant labor was so difficult that many Americans had to resort to forced capture and enslavement of people just to get the people that they needed. At least that isn't happening too much anymore, and certainly not publicly proclaimed and legally codified and encouraged.
The outsourcing is a relatively recent development, however. While in the past raw materials and rough preliminary manufacturing did take place elsewhere and brought to America, the concept of purchasing large quantities of finished goods is relatively recent. In the past it was only luxury goods and even then foreign imports always had an exotic quality that is now gone for the most part. Few American companies are even concerned that they have no domestic suppliers for some critical components of what they use every day.
Actually, it would be quite difficult. There is already a fairly established base of companies that have used the name Linux in part of their name, and quite a few books and other uses of the name Linux that it would have been a major headache to get all of them changed to another name or term. Just the legal costs alone of changing all of those established business names, as well as all of the derived trademarks (like Redhat Linux) would have been a challenge to modify. It is not like you can do a character string change to all computers on the internet, printed boxes, fixed media (like CD-ROMs), and billboards.
When Linus first sent out Linux 0.1 back elsewhen, I agree that it would have been trivial to change the name. That is no longer the case, and hasn't been for several years.
There was quite a bit of discussion about this a few years ago (when Linus went through the legal motions to get the trademark formally registered in both the EU and the USA). Like I said, it was to avert a major legal mess if it weren't done, rather than ignore the issue. The Linux community really has grown to the size that legal issues have become a major point of contention, and this is something that all people in the computer industry should pay attention to at some point... or any other group or organization once it gets to a certain size (or rocking the boat politically).
Linus Torvalds basically trademarked the name "Linux" as a way to keep others from doing it instead. This way Linus can control what and how the name "Linux" is used, and more importantly, make sure that some legal idiot doesn't get ahold of the trademark and hold the entire F/OSS community hostage (like SCO) because they got to the USPTO first with the trademark registration.
Linus has publicly stated that he doesn't mind the community use of the term. Magazines and journals (both dead-tree and on-line) using the name Linux were around even before the trademark was formally registered, and this use of the term is generally acceptable. Just don't speak for the Linux development community unless you really are a major contributor to the kernel and what you are saying is generally acceptable by the community (like, sure, we use the GPL for our software, etc.).
If you were to start a business that had the name Linux in it, or used Linux beyond a passing reference (such as creating a new distro that has the name Linux somewhere in the distro's name), it would be a good idea to track down Linus' e-mail address and drop him a line asking him for permission to use the name Linux, even if it is only a matter of courtesy. He'll probably grant it as well, especially if you are nice about it. Linus is not a big company that is jealously guarding its trademarks.
The "legislation" that currently governs the territorial claims of extra-terrestrial objects is currently the "Moon Treaty". This specifically restricts the ability of governments of the Earth from claiming territory, however private individuals are excempted from this requirement. There are a number of legal consequences to this that will have an interesting effect on the future of mankind in outerspace.
Most importantly, you will have to actually go to the place you want to claim as your territory and physically occupy it, and use it before you can claim ownership, the Lunar Embassy not withstanding. Earth nations will retain, however, soverignty over the actual vehicles and any personnel sent up by that nation. That means criminal acts can be prosecuted under the laws of the country that owns and operates a given space colony... and especially applies to governance of artificial constructs like the ISS or an L-5 habitat.
What is not covered, however, is a method of resolving territorial disputes, or resolving the status of state-less persons in space (people who don't claim a nationality of any kind, or are not recognized by any "nation" on the Earth).
While I know there were no manned launch escape tower flights (unless you count the tower ejection points of the Apollo flights to get rid of the thing after it was no longer needed), there were a number of unmanned test flights that did prove its capability.
In addition, there were several (fortuntately unmanned) Mercury flights that proved the necessity of the system... where the rockets blew up right on the launch pad. Sometimes going up only a foot or two before the explosion.
I have no doubt that had a "launch escape tower" system, or something like it, had been available or even possible for the Challenger incident that the crew would have been saved. As it was, the Shuttle simple doesn't even have that as a possibility.
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The military's association with SPAM isn't really with the stuff you commonly find on the grocery store shelf either. Hormel was one of the first meat packing companies that figured out how to package meat that did not have to be refrigerated. As can be imagined, this was a big deal to the Army, as lugging around hunks of ice across a battle field together with meat is not easy to do. Prior to SPAM (and similar meats) soldiers either had to eat jerkey or some meat that was obtained from a very local source, such as the farms they passed over during battle.
While the canning process was similar for the military processed meat served during WWII, it was according to a government recepie and packaged in larger metal boxes, although usually called SPAM by the troops.
BTW, Hormel, while not exclusively involved in the production, was part of the R&D effort to create the MREs that the U.S. Army currently uses, and developed some of the packaging processes of meat in those MREs.
Please... read the details before you post.
This is some volcanic ash that has a chemical composition that is very similar to the samples that were brought back during the Apollo missions. You know, gas chromatigraphs and other methods to identify the chemical composition in a piece of rock. This was done quite thouroughally when the lunar samples came back, and a major effort was done to try and come up with some similar earth-based mineral ore that could be used for experimental purposes in a laboratory before breaking out the lunar rocks themselves. This search effort happened well before this challenge was ever started, and is simply some gravel from a volcanic cinder cone in Flagstaff, AZ. Chemically it seems to behave almost identically as lunar soil samples, and is much cheaper to obtain.
For something that a research team can work on after-hours and as a side project, $250,000 is something worth while to throw some minor effort into. Certainly a couple of graduate students trying to come up with a research topic, or even a couple of undergrads working under the direction of a forward-thinking professor might turn something like this into some cool little "science fair" type project. I wouldn't necessarily start a whole brand new company over this prize, however.
Yeah, but could you create such a device that has a mass of less than 25 kg?
For large-scale municipal oxygen plants of Tycho City, yeah, they might use such a system, but not likely for Ra III (assuming they use another sun god for the names of lunar missions).
I would suggest that you look more at this article from New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7403
The big deal is that you are going to be given a lunar soil simulant (they say that getting the real stuff is just too expensive to do anything but a final proof test with) that comes from a volcanic ash deposit near Flagstaff, AZ. For a small fee a research team can obtain samples of this simulant for experimental purposes.
It must put out at least 5 kg of oxygen (assuming that the time to produce this is limited to a short period of time... 24 hours or less), and the whole device must weight less than 25 kg. I would also guess that space considerations are also something to worry about, but that the weight of the device is a bigger deal.
I guess the Wired news article says 11 kg in 8 hours.
In short, it is something that should fit in a foot locker that astronauts could pull out and set up once another lunar mission actually occurs.
This is a bigger deal than the tether challenge, and something that has some hard short-term practical applications in the space industry. Also, the $250,000 is something you can pay a research team to do more than hold a pizza party afterward with when you win. If you already have a minerology lab, this would be worth pulling a couple of interns/lab assistants over to wrap their energies around. And potentially some very nice contracts in the future if NASA gets off their behind and gets back to the moon.
Of course Lucas said "no" to episodes I,II, and III.
There were even several interviews where Mr. Lucas said "no" to a Star Wars sequal (i.e. Empire Strikes Back), although with the success of that first movie it was almost given that 20th Century Fox was going to get that one filmed in some fashion or another.
Roger Ebert is correct on the point that eventually something will be made to continue the series (or even have prequels to episode I?) It is just a matter of when and where. It will be interesting if Star Wars becomes in the future something like "Steamboat Willie" in terms of who gets to keep the profits and royalties from the franchise when Mr. Lucas starts to push up dasies.
What is interesting is that this isn't even a new concept.
/. poster so far), this has already happened, but admittedly on a much smaller scale so far.
n egger+rocket+advertising+%22Last+Action+Hero%22 (Cached)
Forget about Heinlein and other authors who have talked about this before (which unfortunately was only brought up by one enlightened
In 1993, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as part of the advertiseing for the movie "Last Action Hero", had his name put on the side of a rocket that went up to LEO.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Schwarze
http://www.intouchgroup.com/press/Mar8_93-2.html
http://centaur.sstl.co.uk/SSHP/sshp_fun.htm
The point here is that regulating advertisement beyond this is just a matter of scale, rather than anything that has any substance. And when the vehicles themselves get so big that they are visible from LEO? (Aka like the "mothership" in Red Dwarf?)
What about the NASA "meatball" logo that is plastered to the side of each space shuttle? What about Boeing logos on all Delta rockets? Space Ship One had a whole bunch of stuff on its side, including ads for Virgin Galactic and the X-Prize itself. Should that be banned as well?
While by itself this sort of advertising is not going to pay for activities in space, it will make a marginally profitable company be able to run in the black.
The #1 think I that is going to blow the FAA regulations out of the water is that it is going to be unenforcable, unless the U.S. Air Force is going to assert American soverignty over all LEO patterns that cross visually over U.S. territory. I wouldn't put it past the current administration to do something bold like that, but the implications to that level of enforcement would be counter productive and dangerous to America itself.
You are still beholden to your human resource manager or the will of the CEO of the company regarding your green card. This is not something that you can initiate on your own without the cooperation of the company you are working for.
As for transfering between companies, you need to have a company that is willing to go through the paperwork necessary for H1-B visas. That means it must be either a forward thinking company or a larger company that is used to doing that paperwork. If a group of developers decide to say "to hell with this company" and leave enmass to start their own company (more common than you might imagine), the one with the H1-B is left holding the bag as the one to clean up any messes left behind.
It is not exactly slavery, but from the viewpoint of an employee it is not exactly a piece of cake. I don't blame those that try to go through the process of an H1-B visa (as there are usually no other options available to them when they try). From the viewpoint of a company president, there are few downsides and a lot more control over an employee than you would normally have over a full U.S. citizen.
This is such a pile of bolvine excrement (i.e. BS) that I don't know where to start.
/.) with the software I write, and between software patents and incredibly broad interpretation of copyright laws I am severly hamstrung with what I can even write. This is squarely the kind of thing that congress does indeed control, and is doing a lousy job at helping IT workers. It may help some IT company executives, but that is not the same thing.
While there are some products and applications where you can go overseas and "outsource" some of what is going on, there is quite a bit that can't either. A good deal of designing a proper user interface (about 70%-90% of the actual work with designing software... if done properly) requires a strong cultural context in common with the projected end user. The best way to obtain this cultural understanding is to actually live near where that person is using the equipment... to go out into the field so to say. To design something that is used on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, it simply cannot be developed in Madras or Hong Kong. The same goes for a Wal-Mart inventory system in Arkansas.
The American Congress, IMHO, is totally clueless regarding what ordinary IT workers are really in need of. University level education is on the whole rather pathetic, in part because the people who are really good at developing good IT products are actually in the field and doing it. (With some notable exceptions) the ones who can't hack it in industry are the ones working in acedemia, and often doing a poor job at educating the next generation.
In addition, legislation that is coming out of congress is putting more and more handcuffs on those of us that have been in the industry. As it is, congress is trying to tell me that 1st Ammendment rights simply don't exist (amply discussed here on
A very disturbing trend that I've seen lately is that a good software company should have several lawyers on staff. The real question is what should the ratio of lawyers to developer be? Unfortunately, with the current litigous nature of the computer industry right now I would have to say it could be one to one, as a good developer can generate sufficient material to keep a full-time lawyer busy (on average, over time, and across a whole development team). There are companies right now where there are more lawyers than developers and engineers. This is not a good thing.
The H1-B visas are just an excuse by companies to try and hire people at slave wages. While a few people do get to America supposedly that wouldn't be able to get here otherwise, the whole program is really quite stupid, and a terrible deal to the person who holds the H1-B visa. They can't work for another company while in the USA, and they really can't leave the USA either (or it is a very bad idea... unless you simply want to return home for good and forget about returning to the USA). On the whole immigration legislation is totally corrupt right now, and I would suggest that it would be safer and easier right now for somebody trying to work in America to simply be an illegal immigrant and forget the visas altogether. And that shouldn't be the case either. Ideally, if somebody is technically skilled, can pass a background screening to make sure they are not a terrorist or spy, and genuinely understand the cultural transition of coming to America, they should be granted a work visa that is temporary in some manner that can be eventually turned into a permanent visa (if you've proven that you are low-risk, havn't committed crimes, etc.) with the offer of citizenship. An H1-B visa does not offer any of that, and attempting to get a green card from an H1-B visa is a burecratic nightmare... just like most of the BS that comes from the U.S. State Department.
The best way for a company to get the IT workers it needs is to "grow them". In other words, go to the local university/technical college and offer scholarships and internships to their students, encourage robust com
IMHO, Eddie Murphy does one of the best jobs of protraying a white guy as I've ever seen. If you want to see this as good proof, get a copy of "Coming to America", where in addition to his title role as the African prince, he also plays a Jewish Barber. I couldn't even tell until I read the end credits and had to rewatch the movie to make sure it really was Eddie Murphy.
I think he does such a good job as a white guy (especially as a parody) in part because he is on the outside looking at just what white people take for granted. BTW, his Saturday Night Live skits as a white guy are just as funny.
Having been through this process twice already (going from 8-bit CPUs to 16-bit CPUs, and then to 32-bit CPUs) the #1 bone of contention was that the memory address range substantially increased on each progression to a larger register size, in addition to the new opcodes.
In addition, one of the things that made it difficult in the past was that whole new operating systems with completely new paradymes on their operational concepts within those operating systems accompanies these changes. Right now I don't see any big push to abandon Linux/Unix/Windows/Mac OS-X etc. as the biig leap comes in this time around. There were attempts in the past to do this (like CP/M-86 and MS-DOS v. 7.0) as the progression to a new CPU base came around, but in hind sight these were more transitional products rather than widely used platforms. BTW, MS-DOS 7.0 is also known as Windows '95, and was not marketed as a 32-bit platform independently... also adding to the mistique of the transitions from 16-bit to 32-bit archetechtures.
I may be mistaken with what is going to come in the future, but it doesn't seem to be all that big of a deal. The largest driving factor right now is that Linux is open source already, and this time around there are mature open source operating systems to help make the leap.... something that was not widely available when the computer industry went from 16-bit to 32-bit systems. If you look at what Microsoft is planning, it is clear that "Longhorn" would have been the initial 64-bit operating system from that company, and something that would have been the driving force for 64-bit computer applications. Instead, it is behind in almost every way, and will have a much harder time trying to do the transition.
One final factor with the fact that the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit programming is not going to be so painful is that memory archetechtures have been keeping up in 32-bit systems, with little need for the memory banking that was very common in 8-bit systems, and in part the source of headache with 16-bit systems (with competing extended memory manager archetechtures). Except in some advanced research systems, you don't hear of too many 32-bit CPU systems that require a memory bank switch to allow RAM access to 1 Terabyte.
The problem with VB.net is that the folks who did the extension to "BASIC" were not BASIC programmers. In almost every case I saw to the extensions of Visual Basic over things like GW-BASIC were things that made VB more like C++, and seemed to be coming from C++ programmers that were "tasked" into writing a BASIC compiler.
I'm not going to belabor this issue, but the point is that had VB.net been written by Visual Basic users instead of the C# development team, it would have turned out quite a bit different.
In regards to the extension to Pascal done under Delphi and the Turbo Pascal compilers (where many of the extensions first took place): These were done by Pascal programmers for Pascal programmers. Delphi has always self-compiling, and the core development team that put in these extensions had to put the extensions into the language by using them. And it tended to be extensions (like putting in strings as a base data type... definitely not part of ANSI Pascal) that were major irritants to what you were doing when you had to do any coding on a large project.
On the positive side of how the extensions work, if you pull in some old Turbo Pascal programs and try to compile them using the core Delphi compiler, they usually will compile very cleanly without having to change anythings except a couple of compiler switches... and even most of those will still work. You can't take a Visual Basic 2.0 program and compile it on VB.net at all. Nor especially a Dartmouth BASIC program. Something like that is a totally different language and VB.net won't even compile a very simple program.
This tends to be a problem with the Free Pascal crowd (and other "works in progress" groups of complex Free Software).
I've been guilty of having this as a problem myself.
In this case, the core development community has been doing incremental building all along with the compiler updates as they happen, and the new source code releases don't have all of the files.
The real way to test this is to do a "clean build" of the sources on a freshly reformatted machine. Unfortunately that is not always easy or possible to do (I prefer to do a test rebuild for release purposes on a virtual machine like Bochs or VMware).
The thing that I like about the := operator is that it makes source code rather clear that it is an assignment operator as opposed to a comparison operator.
C requires the == (double equal) operator for variable comparisons as a result.
The #1 issue that I have when switching from C-like languages and Pascal is that I have to "relearn" what the assignment operator is when going back and forth. That usually takes me about an hour, but is almost always caught in the parsers anyway so it is no big deal. And a trivial bug to fix when I do switch the operators by mistake.
The same applies to the operator as opposed to the != operator. The switch is a headache to remember when you just want to churn out code.
The real advantage for going with memory-mapped files is really speed. By throwing the file into memory mapped space, you are by-passing much of the overhead that the operating system (Windows in this case) throws in regarding memory management with the file system. It is still abstracted that you don't have to deal with specific hard drive archetechtures, but it pretty much right where the operating systems deal with the disk data anyway.
When I did data flow experiments, I got up to a 3x to 5x data throughput improvement going this route as opposed to typical file I/O access routines found in the standard I/O libraries of a typical compiler.
This is a case of where if you need to get high performance, you need to tweak the operating system and use those APIs that can help your application the most. If you don't care about the maximum performance but are more interested in cross-platform issues, then you need to stick with standard I/O functions and APIs.
I'm curious about the 5GB files though... I was under the impression that NTFS in general won't allow you to create or open a file > 1GB. I'm sure you are fighting other issues in dealing with data files of that size, and you would have to, in essence, create your own internal file system just to be able to access a specific piece of data within such a huge file. That is the real issue here, and data organization when you are dealing with that much data is a huge issue. It is also something that you can easily screw up if you shove data in haphazardly.
While the MapViewOfFile function does have an impact with the problems of Windows regarding memory space, the 1GB limitation is not restricted to just this function.
It is indeed the "CreateFile" portion of what Windows NT deals with that causes the problems. I did experiment with different memory window ranges and various strategies to access the data. It didn't seem to have any effect at all regarding this absolute limit as it appears Windows does some sort of alternate mapping beyond what is formally published through the MapViewOfFile function. I hope Wine got this one right with their implementation of this.
The massively frustrating issue came up with the 1GB limit for "ALL" open files on the operating system when used under Win 95/98/ME. At the time I was doing development under Windows 98 (to simplify the distribution requirements... and at the time I wasn't as familiar with the quirks of NT). This was indeed a limitation of the file system, and was generally not documented. Your explaination regarding the shared memory space is likely the reason for this problem, but at the time I couldn't get an answer even from Microsoft itself.
Re: XP.... there are some versions of Win XP that are basically modified versions of Windows ME. I know that seems silly, but this is Microsoft. I'm not talking XP Professional, but some low consumer-grade versions that MS branded as Windows XP. This isn't that hard of a limitation to get around, but as a software developer you need to be aware of it if you have a customer with their own computer that is installing your software and you are expected to troubleshoot why it won't work.
This was the result of work that I did several years ago, and the projects I was working on were fairly high value pieces of software, where you could not only specify the operating system, but much of the computer equipment as well. (Windows was specified by folks higher up the food chain).
I can give at least a couple of links to places that talk about THX-1138:
l ucasnofrm.html
http://www.geocities.com/drazzaia/history.html
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Bungalow/3577/
While I will admit that the initial release wasn't a huge success, it wasn't that difficult to break the production costs of $777,777 for TXH-1138. Even now that is considered an independent film budget. All I said was that it made back that money. Certainly Geroge Lucas was not a millionaire due to that movie.
The whole concept of when does a film make a profit is a meaty issue in Hollywood anyway, and subject to a bunch of interpretations and lawsuits.
And it is clear that American Zoetrope, through Francis Ford Coppola, was impressed enough with THX-1138 that they were willing to risk another attempt by George Lucas. Otherwise, he would never have been given the chance to try again.
I've heard people even question that accomplishment... as Bill Gates got much of the ideas behind the MS Basic interpreter (it was not a compiler) from some of the CS courses he took before he dropped out of college, including one class where the primary project was to write a BASIC interpreter.
Mr. Gates did know how to market, and Microsoft interpreters and compilers were fairly widespread well before the meeting with IBM. Indeed, the original reason why Microsoft was even going to talk to IBM was because IBM wanted to buy a BASIC interpreter for the PC, and when Gates & Co. found out they needed an operating system as well, they decided to throw that into the bid as well.
I still think that compilers and development systems is what Microsoft does best... it is just unfortunate that they muck it up with all of the rest of the Microsoft empire to make it mediocre and clunky.
TXH-1138 was the very first film that George Lucas ever made... as a film student while attending USC (University of Southern California... one of the best film schools in the world).
It was remade with a slightly larger budget, but it was still made with what would today be called an "independent film" budget and crew. It did achieve something of an "art film" following, and made a modest profit over production costs well enough that studios considered him to be worth the risk to go onto other things like "American Grafitti". It was due to the success of that film 20th Century Fox was willing to risk supporting George Lucas on Star Wars.
Mind you that 20th Century Fox got a huge stake in Star Wars, and that is why Fox Television is now showing all of the movies this spring: 20th Century Fox has the distribution rights. Still does with Episode III (although with a substantially modified contract when compared to Episode IV:ANH).
Certainly hard-core fans of Star Wars have not hurt DVD and video sales of THX-1138, but it was already a "hit" before then.
At the time I had to find out the hard way from some obscure Microsoft support line at $500 per incident that this was the case... and even then the tech support wasn't really that sure or understood why that was the case.
I may have been the reason why it got documented in the first place, and it seems like a really silly limitation.
I did some work on a DVD-Video authoring system that had some incredible file system requirments (obviously, when involving video data and the typical 4 GB data load for a single DVD disc).
The standard file API architechture just didn't hold up, so we (the development team I was working with) had to rewrite some of the file management routines ourselves and work directly with the memory mapped architechture directly. This does give you some other advantages beyond speed as well, as once you establish the file link and set it in a memory address range you can treat the data in the file as if it were RAM within your program, having fun with pointers and everything else you can imagine. Copying data to the file is simply a matter of a memory move operation, or copying from one pointer to another.
The thing to remember is that Windows (this is undocumented) won't allow you to open a memory-mapped file that is larger than 1 GB, and under FAT32 file systems (Windows 95/98/ME/and some low-end XP systems) the total of all memory mapped files on the entire operating system must be below 1 GB (this requirement really sucks the breath out of some applications).
Remember that if you are putting pointers into the file directly, that it works better if the pointers are relative offsets rather than direct memory pointers, even though direct memory pointers are in theory possible during a single session run.
As much as I want to find a counter argument to what you are saying, I would have to agree with you in just about every instance.
America has had an "open border" for almost its entire history, and bringing in immigrant labor has been a major portion of that. In the 17th and 18th centuries, getting immigrant labor was so difficult that many Americans had to resort to forced capture and enslavement of people just to get the people that they needed. At least that isn't happening too much anymore, and certainly not publicly proclaimed and legally codified and encouraged.
The outsourcing is a relatively recent development, however. While in the past raw materials and rough preliminary manufacturing did take place elsewhere and brought to America, the concept of purchasing large quantities of finished goods is relatively recent. In the past it was only luxury goods and even then foreign imports always had an exotic quality that is now gone for the most part. Few American companies are even concerned that they have no domestic suppliers for some critical components of what they use every day.
Actually, it would be quite difficult. There is already a fairly established base of companies that have used the name Linux in part of their name, and quite a few books and other uses of the name Linux that it would have been a major headache to get all of them changed to another name or term. Just the legal costs alone of changing all of those established business names, as well as all of the derived trademarks (like Redhat Linux) would have been a challenge to modify. It is not like you can do a character string change to all computers on the internet, printed boxes, fixed media (like CD-ROMs), and billboards.
When Linus first sent out Linux 0.1 back elsewhen, I agree that it would have been trivial to change the name. That is no longer the case, and hasn't been for several years.
There was quite a bit of discussion about this a few years ago (when Linus went through the legal motions to get the trademark formally registered in both the EU and the USA). Like I said, it was to avert a major legal mess if it weren't done, rather than ignore the issue. The Linux community really has grown to the size that legal issues have become a major point of contention, and this is something that all people in the computer industry should pay attention to at some point... or any other group or organization once it gets to a certain size (or rocking the boat politically).
Linus Torvalds basically trademarked the name "Linux" as a way to keep others from doing it instead. This way Linus can control what and how the name "Linux" is used, and more importantly, make sure that some legal idiot doesn't get ahold of the trademark and hold the entire F/OSS community hostage (like SCO) because they got to the USPTO first with the trademark registration.
Linus has publicly stated that he doesn't mind the community use of the term. Magazines and journals (both dead-tree and on-line) using the name Linux were around even before the trademark was formally registered, and this use of the term is generally acceptable. Just don't speak for the Linux development community unless you really are a major contributor to the kernel and what you are saying is generally acceptable by the community (like, sure, we use the GPL for our software, etc.).
If you were to start a business that had the name Linux in it, or used Linux beyond a passing reference (such as creating a new distro that has the name Linux somewhere in the distro's name), it would be a good idea to track down Linus' e-mail address and drop him a line asking him for permission to use the name Linux, even if it is only a matter of courtesy. He'll probably grant it as well, especially if you are nice about it. Linus is not a big company that is jealously guarding its trademarks.
The "legislation" that currently governs the territorial claims of extra-terrestrial objects is currently the "Moon Treaty". This specifically restricts the ability of governments of the Earth from claiming territory, however private individuals are excempted from this requirement. There are a number of legal consequences to this that will have an interesting effect on the future of mankind in outerspace.
Most importantly, you will have to actually go to the place you want to claim as your territory and physically occupy it, and use it before you can claim ownership, the Lunar Embassy not withstanding. Earth nations will retain, however, soverignty over the actual vehicles and any personnel sent up by that nation. That means criminal acts can be prosecuted under the laws of the country that owns and operates a given space colony... and especially applies to governance of artificial constructs like the ISS or an L-5 habitat.
What is not covered, however, is a method of resolving territorial disputes, or resolving the status of state-less persons in space (people who don't claim a nationality of any kind, or are not recognized by any "nation" on the Earth).
While I know there were no manned launch escape tower flights (unless you count the tower ejection points of the Apollo flights to get rid of the thing after it was no longer needed), there were a number of unmanned test flights that did prove its capability.
In addition, there were several (fortuntately unmanned) Mercury flights that proved the necessity of the system... where the rockets blew up right on the launch pad. Sometimes going up only a foot or two before the explosion.
I have no doubt that had a "launch escape tower" system, or something like it, had been available or even possible for the Challenger incident that the crew would have been saved. As it was, the Shuttle simple doesn't even have that as a possibility.