Trouble is I hear that pretty much every time theres a new Pentium - ie, the internal de-x86-ifier is sooo clever it runs x86 code as well as if it were coded for a RISC processor. But it never holds out in real life..
Osama Bin Laden gets hold of one of those suitcase nuclear bombs that the Russians mislaid at the end of the Cold War.
He *could* build/buy an ICBM, put it on top, find somewhere to launch it, etc.
Or he *could* (for instance) get hold of an old cargo ship, get some phoney pretext to deliver goods to the US, kit it out with suicide bombers, and just sail right in. Or one of another 100 similar possibilities..
Could this mean that we could evolve a "Back-door" way to dump the disgusting x86 achitecture? Think about it - we devise a universal OS way in both Linux/Windows of allocating tasks/threads to "external" RISC processors. At some stage, these can be the "main" processors, able to run the host/boot-up/old code under emulation. Then, dump the 386!
When I first started I wrote a "Compiler" for the 8K PET BASIC - that removed all unneeded whitespace, automatically put lots of statements on 1 line, used short var names, etc. It did speed up a program a little, saved some RAM, and also protected the code a bit, since the result was unreadable.. Needless to say this is a final "before publication" step..
Colonisation is a real possibility, even if very long term. Look at it this way - think of the wars waged or prices paid for land in recent years that originally was considered worthless & passed hands (hundreds of year back) for next to nothing.. (think new york 4 instance)
The early nations that stake their claim to real estate on mars/moon will have strong claims to own the land a few hundred years later..
There are real things humans can do too that robots cant, or can only do slowly.
Zubrin has said before that the $trillion price-tags for a mars mission were wildly overinflated, and suggests a way that it can be done for around $20 billion/mission.
Off the rop of my head, each Soyuz mission costs Russia about $60 million - compare that to the $500 million/shuttle-mission cost ("cheap reusable"), or the sky high costs proposed for the possible replacements..
So yes, I think it could be possible that the Russians could do it all for a few $Billion - they dont mind taking a few more risks too. Whether these particular people are the right people to do it - that is another issue - a few Billion is still a lot of doe to hand over to someone.
As for the USA, I say if they dont want to give the money to Russia, let people like Rutan have some & see what comes out of it.
NASA seem to have lost the ability to effectively stage such a project, at least at an affordable cost. The whole question arises as to whether government agencys are the best way to exploit a technology, once it has reached a certain level of maturity. Zubrin wrote an excellent article comparing NASA productivity 61-73 (Apollo motivated) vs the Shuttle years - NASA were so much more productive, for much the same cash when focused on Apollo..
Its not right to say Chess is of no value to AI - the best programs combine brute-force extentions with a variety of auto-learning methods from the leading edge of AI. However a strong Chess program is not quite the big thing that some thought it would be, thats true..
Ok, but I think even up to XP the view-pane is on by default - and it displays every message in glorious full rich text/html/virus-buffer-overflow format!
If you look at the technical steps that the average novice is expected to take to protect themselves from attack.. Its just a joke! I just want to recieve messages in basic text format - maybe with the odd clickable link. I dont want bitmaps, animations, movies, music..
I have a thing about bloatware too - ok sure, make features available as extras, but otherwise keep the basic setup small, fast and simple. (see my www pages for my code..) Small, lean apps have less vulnerabilities too. You know at one time, Windows 3.1 was distributed on 6 floppies - add an extra floppy or 2 for Win32s, thats the complete basic 32 bit Windows API! The reason why MSDOS caught on originally was that it was actually fast and lean, at least in version 2.0-3.0..
Why did you make it so bloody difficult to switch off html content in recieved Email text? AT best, it meant bandwidth guzzling spam, at worst viruses you didnt even have to open to catch..
As to browser/plug-in vulnerabilities, it may never be possible to eliminate them all, there are just too many niches for a virus to gain foothold.
Galileo still had propellent in the tanks, and in my view should have been left in orbit until failure. It was still working, hence the word prematurely. Look at Voyager - that is going on way beyond its operational lifespan, thanks to measures that conserve its resources. There would have been plenty to gain from another year or so of orbits - particularly some more infomation on Europa.. As it is, there probably will be at least a 20 year gap before JIMO gets to Jupiter again in 2023, or there abouts.
Its true that Bushs plan is about self-promotion but if we can acheieve low-cost space access, then all sorts of things become possible/worthwhile/economic to do, manned and unmanned. Smaller military budgets and bigger space ones would be a start too..
Gives the tourists something to see when they visit..
Seriously though, apart from the possibility of earth microbes messing things up (also exagerrated, I believe) its no problem - this is a PLANET people, its a pretty big area..
In the meantime we are becoming afraid of our own shadows, when it comes to space travel. For instance they decided to prematurely end the Galileo-Jupiter mission, even though the satellite was still operational (albeit low on fuel) for fear of loosing control of it and having it "contaminate" one of the moons. By all means, lets do some initial robot landings to check for microbes, but we should not be afraid to ultimately make human footprints in some of these places..
Orbital mechanics is a weird game - especially with old-fashioned rockets with limited fuel/thrust, so you have to use various tricks like gravitational boosts/brakes by flying by other planets, in a sort of celestial game of pool. Sure, you could fly straight to mercury, if you use a big enough rocket - but then you would be flying by at such a huge speed you would need an even bigger rocket to carry fuel to allow you to slow down enough to make orbit. Mercury does not have a huge gravity, so to make orbit and get into its small gravity-well requires a huge amount of thrust.
The ESA bepi-columbo mission to mercury will use ion drives, which makes a lot of sense when you see how much free power would be available to a solar craft near mercury.. We are probably seeing the last of the old fashioned rocket-only planetary missions, ion drives will take over more and more in the future.
One thing that strikes me - this area is a sort of Soviet-era time-capsule - some things are left as they were on the day of evacuation. When the radiation dies down, someone will buy it up and turn it into a theme park..
Will NASA allow money to be allocated from the ISS budget to build this? If they do, then maybe they can scrap the Shuttle, not worry about the ISS & pay the Russians to keep it going, and concentrate on pushing boundaries with things like the Hubble, Deep space probes, Manned colonies on Moon, Mars, etc..
But they need to swallow thier pride & allow someone else to do some of the work at a cheaper price..
If they did by chance encounter a large object like Sedna, useful science could be done. Things like the old Vidicon cameras onboard Voyager are not worth keeping on, since they are nowhere near anything that can be usefully filmed, they take a lot of power, are not good in low light, and I think need power to prevent them from freezing. I would guess the new Pluto missions would have much more efficient modern CCD cams, that could more readily be revived even after a long dormancy.
Pioneer 10/11 are now lost, they no longer respond to commands..
You may be right, but then again, they probably didnt think that Voyager 2 would still be around and in use today when they launched it in 1977.. But yes Sedna is a long way out, and if the line up with Pluto isnt right, forget it..
I understand that the "pluto - new horizons" mission, due hopefully for launch in 2006 (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission.htm) is looking for possible KB targets after getting to Pluto in 2015. I wonder if the planetary line-up would allow one of those targets to be Sedna? (prob not, but you could be lucky..)
Is there a chart anywhere that gives the location of all these various objects in relation to the solar system, at any given time?
There is another deep-space mission in the pipeline (ion-drive) to the heliopause and beyond - is Sedna positioned toward the heliopause?
By the way, Sedna is another good reason to upgrade and keep Hubble going..
Slashdot Mirror
Trouble is I hear that pretty much every time theres a new Pentium - ie, the internal de-x86-ifier is sooo clever it runs x86 code as well as if it were coded for a RISC processor. But it never holds out in real life..
Lets all go back to asm..
Ok, lets ride with this..
Osama Bin Laden gets hold of one of those suitcase nuclear bombs that the Russians mislaid at the end of the Cold War.
He *could* build/buy an ICBM, put it on top, find somewhere to launch it, etc.
Or he *could* (for instance) get hold of an old cargo ship, get some phoney pretext to deliver goods to the US, kit it out with suicide bombers, and just sail right in. Or one of another 100 similar possibilities..
Now which scenario is currently most likely?
Could this mean that we could evolve a "Back-door" way to dump the disgusting x86 achitecture? Think about it - we devise a universal OS way in both Linux/Windows of allocating tasks/threads to "external" RISC processors. At some stage, these can be the "main" processors, able to run the host/boot-up/old code under emulation. Then, dump the 386!
Think about it..
..but the ease and power of photoshop and such is something to keep in mind..
True. Just ask Kerry & Fonda how easy it is to fake a photo these days..
When I first started I wrote a "Compiler" for the 8K PET BASIC - that removed all unneeded whitespace, automatically put lots of statements on 1 line, used short var names, etc. It did speed up a program a little, saved some RAM, and also protected the code a bit, since the result was unreadable.. Needless to say this is a final "before publication" step..
No there is more to it that that..
Colonisation is a real possibility, even if very long term. Look at it this way - think of the wars waged or prices paid for land in recent years that originally was considered worthless & passed hands (hundreds of year back) for next to nothing.. (think new york 4 instance)
The early nations that stake their claim to real estate on mars/moon will have strong claims to own the land a few hundred years later..
There are real things humans can do too that robots cant, or can only do slowly.
And it would be cool..
Upload my song, it could make no 1!
its the ISS thats the giant 419 scam..
Where did I put that piece of sky..
Zubrin has said before that the $trillion price-tags for a mars mission were wildly overinflated, and suggests a way that it can be done for around $20 billion/mission.
Off the rop of my head, each Soyuz mission costs Russia about $60 million - compare that to the $500 million/shuttle-mission cost ("cheap reusable"), or the sky high costs proposed for the possible replacements..
So yes, I think it could be possible that the Russians could do it all for a few $Billion - they dont mind taking a few more risks too. Whether these particular people are the right people to do it - that is another issue - a few Billion is still a lot of doe to hand over to someone.
As for the USA, I say if they dont want to give the money to Russia, let people like Rutan have some & see what comes out of it.
NASA seem to have lost the ability to effectively stage such a project, at least at an affordable cost. The whole question arises as to whether government agencys are the best way to exploit a technology, once it has reached a certain level of maturity. Zubrin wrote an excellent article comparing NASA productivity 61-73 (Apollo motivated) vs the Shuttle years - NASA were so much more productive, for much the same cash when focused on Apollo..
Its not right to say Chess is of no value to AI - the best programs combine brute-force extentions with a variety of auto-learning methods from the leading edge of AI. However a strong Chess program is not quite the big thing that some thought it would be, thats true..
Ok, but I think even up to XP the view-pane is on by default - and it displays every message in glorious full rich text/html/virus-buffer-overflow format!
If you look at the technical steps that the average novice is expected to take to protect themselves from attack.. Its just a joke! I just want to recieve messages in basic text format - maybe with the odd clickable link. I dont want bitmaps, animations, movies, music..
I have a thing about bloatware too - ok sure, make features available as extras, but otherwise keep the basic setup small, fast and simple. (see my www pages for my code..) Small, lean apps have less vulnerabilities too. You know at one time, Windows 3.1 was distributed on 6 floppies - add an extra floppy or 2 for Win32s, thats the complete basic 32 bit Windows API! The reason why MSDOS caught on originally was that it was actually fast and lean, at least in version 2.0-3.0..
Even Linux suffers in this regard these days..
Why did you make it so bloody difficult to switch off html content in recieved Email text? AT best, it meant bandwidth guzzling spam, at worst viruses you didnt even have to open to catch..
As to browser/plug-in vulnerabilities, it may never be possible to eliminate them all, there are just too many niches for a virus to gain foothold.
Galileo still had propellent in the tanks, and in my view should have been left in orbit until failure. It was still working, hence the word prematurely. Look at Voyager - that is going on way beyond its operational lifespan, thanks to measures that conserve its resources. There would have been plenty to gain from another year or so of orbits - particularly some more infomation on Europa.. As it is, there probably will be at least a 20 year gap before JIMO gets to Jupiter again in 2023, or there abouts.
Its true that Bushs plan is about self-promotion but if we can acheieve low-cost space access, then all sorts of things become possible/worthwhile/economic to do, manned and unmanned. Smaller military budgets and bigger space ones would be a start too..
Gives the tourists something to see when they visit..
Seriously though, apart from the possibility of earth microbes messing things up (also exagerrated, I believe) its no problem - this is a PLANET people, its a pretty big area..
In the meantime we are becoming afraid of our own shadows, when it comes to space travel. For instance they decided to prematurely end the Galileo-Jupiter mission, even though the satellite was still operational (albeit low on fuel) for fear of loosing control of it and having it "contaminate" one of the moons. By all means, lets do some initial robot landings to check for microbes, but we should not be afraid to ultimately make human footprints in some of these places..
What am I missing here?
Orbital mechanics is a weird game - especially with old-fashioned rockets with limited fuel/thrust, so you have to use various tricks like gravitational boosts/brakes by flying by other planets, in a sort of celestial game of pool. Sure, you could fly straight to mercury, if you use a big enough rocket - but then you would be flying by at such a huge speed you would need an even bigger rocket to carry fuel to allow you to slow down enough to make orbit. Mercury does not have a huge gravity, so to make orbit and get into its small gravity-well requires a huge amount of thrust.
The ESA bepi-columbo mission to mercury will use ion drives, which makes a lot of sense when you see how much free power would be available to a solar craft near mercury.. We are probably seeing the last of the old fashioned rocket-only planetary missions, ion drives will take over more and more in the future.
One thing that strikes me - this area is a sort of Soviet-era time-capsule - some things are left as they were on the day of evacuation. When the radiation dies down, someone will buy it up and turn it into a theme park..
Will NASA allow money to be allocated from the ISS budget to build this? If they do, then maybe they can scrap the Shuttle, not worry about the ISS & pay the Russians to keep it going, and concentrate on pushing boundaries with things like the Hubble, Deep space probes, Manned colonies on Moon, Mars, etc..
But they need to swallow thier pride & allow someone else to do some of the work at a cheaper price..
To answer my own question, there is a solar system emulator at:
http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/
But alas, no sedna, yet..
Well, Voyagers 1 & 2 are still alive, albeit with some instruments shut down to conserve power. Here is this weeks activity report
r ts /index.htm
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-repo
If they did by chance encounter a large object like Sedna, useful science could be done. Things like the old Vidicon cameras onboard Voyager are not worth keeping on, since they are nowhere near anything that can be usefully filmed, they take a lot of power, are not good in low light, and I think need power to prevent them from freezing. I would guess the new Pluto missions would have much more efficient modern CCD cams, that could more readily be revived even after a long dormancy.
Pioneer 10/11 are now lost, they no longer respond to commands..
{whingemode++} That gets +5, and mine gets -1 for exactly the same joke (only mine being first)? Go figure.. {whingemode--}
Let us know when they find the Stargate thats buried there..
FP by the way..
You may be right, but then again, they probably didnt think that Voyager 2 would still be around and in use today when they launched it in 1977.. But yes Sedna is a long way out, and if the line up with Pluto isnt right, forget it..
I understand that the "pluto - new horizons" mission, due hopefully for launch in 2006 (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission.htm) is looking for possible KB targets after getting to Pluto in 2015. I wonder if the planetary line-up would allow one of those targets to be Sedna? (prob not, but you could be lucky..)
Is there a chart anywhere that gives the location of all these various objects in relation to the solar system, at any given time?
There is another deep-space mission in the pipeline (ion-drive) to the heliopause and beyond - is Sedna positioned toward the heliopause?
By the way, Sedna is another good reason to upgrade and keep Hubble going..