> One comment: I don't know how old you are, but I'm 43, and to me it looks like people my age are the ones who should be sent first on any one-way space trips.
I'm 42, a fellow member of the generation that reveled in grainy black and white pictures of men walking and driving on the moon. I figure much of that magic is lost on the generations that followed for which it is just old news.
I'm afraid we are too old for Mars. Take a 40 something and tack on 10 years before there is any chance of getting there and we would have too many potential health problems and you don't want old, sick colonists in a difficult, hostile environment. You also dont want colonists that are past their child bearing days. You want people that will raise children there. Its a lot cheaper and more fun to raise future martians on site instead of shipping them in. Thats what colonists do.
> BTW, are you a member of any group that advocates the views you espouse, or is this just your own (well-thought-out) opinion?
No. I worked at NASA in my youth. I was just beginning work on the X-33 when I figured out the hard way NASA wasn't structured to do anything worthwhile any more and that the X-33 would never fly.
If I were still an idealist I could join one of the various Mars advocacy groups and pretend that lobbying NASA or assorted politicians would make a difference but it wont. It would take a JFK, a real leader with a vision and the guts to throw down the gauntlet. We just don't make that kind of politican anymore or if we do they don't get elected. It would also help to have an advesary to race there which is the only reason Apollo happened. Instead we just waste billions on wars and weapons, the ISS, the space shuttle etc. We don't progress.
If there is anything I would attribute my passion for Mars to its Kim Stanley Robinson and his great books, "Red Mars", "Green Mars" etc.
In reading that NASA is going to spend 10 years and billions of dollars to build a new space shuttle that does even less than the current space shuttle I'm left shaking my head. Is this all NASA can manage, spending more and more money to do less and less. I appreciate the new mini space shuttle may be cheaper, simpler and safer than the space shuttle but it also can't carry any cargo and all it will do is ferry people to and from the ISS which is already recognized as a dead end a giant waste of money in space.
NASA may as well pack it in if this space plane and the ISS is their vision of manned space flight for the next decade. They talk about the ISS as crucial to the trip to Mars but I just don't see it.
If NASA wants to do something to stay relevent they need to pour their resources into:
- Cheap heavy lift launchers to get big cargos in to low earth orbit - Innovative interplanetary propulsion like the ion drive starting initial tests - Innovative means to protect againt radiation on interplanetary space flight, cowering in low earth orbit in the ISS wont help. - Serious closed biosystem research. The ISS is a joke because it requires constant resupply of water and food. - Continued discovery of the resources available on Mars and figure out smart ways for colonists to tap them when they get there.
If we want to get to Mars stop planning for a round trip. Round trips make the mission MUCH harder and make it in to the same dead end that was Apollo. We need to start designing one way missions that send people to Mars as colonists and not visitors. There would be no shortage of volunteers for a one way trip as long as they have a fair shot at long term survival. If I were a little younger I would be at the head of the line. Throughout history there have always been exceptional individuals that want to explore new frontiers. At this point, short of exploring the oceans, there simply aren't any frontiers left here to explore. Spinning around in low earth orbit sure isn't a new frontier any more. Create a new frontier to explore on Mars and will capture the imagination of the world again and NASA you really, desperately need that if you dont want to wither away as poinless bureaucracy.
Its an absurd waste to have to try to get a ship to Mars that has to get back to earth. The round trip scenario has led to the massive NASA fixation on long duration zero gravity research which is about all the ISS is good for.
A far more rational apporach is a fast one way trip for colonists with periodic cargo flights before and after they arrive to insure the colonists have the resources and equipment to create permenent habitats, raise food, find water and survive.
We should be doing research on how people cope with 6-9 months in zero G en route to indefinite periods at the %38 Martian gravity. Going from zero G to %38 is a lot less of a problem than spending years in zero G on a round trip and ending up back in Earth's gravity.
Please NASA, start designing fast propulsion, biospheres and Mars colonization missions. Please stop reinventing the space shuttle and wasting money on dead ends that are relatively easy for you to do but pointless. Please do things that are hard but worth it.
The key point about Itanium is that it is a horrible general purpose processor but it is a serious contender to be very good processor for supercomputing. It has very good floating point performance and the EPIC architecture is designed to be very good on Fortran, especially vectorizable Fortran which is very prevelent in HPC applications. What Linus said is correct in the context of Itanium as a general purpose processor, but its doesn't give Itanium the credit its due as a floating point supercomputer which is the only place its going to sell and is what it was designed for.
It will probably never be very good for most C and C++ apps. Pointer aliasing in particular will give the Itanium compiler fits. Unless you manually tell the compiler there are no two pointers accessing the same memory the compiler can't safely or effectively pack the parallel instructions in the VLIW and that is the essential to good performance in VLIW.
You do have to really question the sanity of some execs at Intel and HP for spending the staggering sums they've spent on Itanium. Supercomputing just isn't big enough a market for them to have any chance to recoup their investment in our lifetime and they aren't going to sell it in to the mass market as Linus said.
For a general purpose 64 bit processor to run existing C and C++ applications AMD is going to win hands down. But as many have noted its not likely most people are going to really need a 64 bit processor anytime soon so Intel will probably do just fine selling 32 bit x86 processors for a while.
Maybe you should try the Flash 6 Linux player. It was released a week or so ago and fixes all of the bugs that have been filed in the Mozilla bug database against the Flash5 Linux player.
...or we would be able to go there today. If it had been real after 30 years of technical progress it would obviously be easy and cheap to go to the moon, it would be covered with bases and people, and we would be on our way to Mars. Since NASA is incapable to do it now they must have been incapable the first time.
Actionscript performance has improved some in the current beta, though it still has a ways to go. Its noteworthy this is the first Flash Beta to ship on Linux simultaneously with Mac and Windows.
Most operating systems, Mac and Windows in particular, only support one flavor of desktop. Linux currently supports at least two, GNOME and KDE. Some contend the competition is good. I contend it is the single factor most likely to cause Linux to fail on the desktop. Not only does it causes massive duplication of effort, but more importantly it fragments application development and support. You get applications that integrate properly with only of the two desktops, or neither, or developers who have to build two applications which is wasted effort. How do we justify two competing desktops. Would the Linux desktop be more likely to succeed if someone like IBM bought Qt, open sourced it, and we move to a single standardized desktop where all applications ran properly out of the box?
This is a driving market for 3D workstations
on
Linux and Shrek
·
· Score: 1
<B>"This is a market where Linux is absolutely perfect," says Linus Torvalds, the Finnish programmer credited with starting the Linux movement. "But it's not a driving market." </B>
<P>
Linus is right in saying this in the context of the whole OS market, but this statement should be refined. This market, along with CAD, is and always has been a driving market for 3D workstations. Having these leading edge graphics and art fanatics on Linux workstations will have a major, positive impact on the quality of OpenGL drivers, application software, desktops and all things visual available on Linux.
Last I heard A|W no longer charges for rendering licenses so you can build render farms as large as you like. Only the interactive seats are expensive.
Flash is a vector based animation tool. It is ideally suited to displaying flat 2D animation with modest download times for the poor souls still stuck with 56K modems. South Parks animation style is ideally suited to the tools around which shockwave.com is focused.
For shockwave to show something flashy, 3D and Toy Story like would mean a bunch of big movie file downloads which don't work very well unless you have high speed net access. I wager they will offer higher quality content but not untile high speed net access is more widely available.
In reading the article on nanotech I was dismayed about the potential uses attributed to the research at NASA Ames. Are they really thinking that small and are only working on robotic sensors. They should be thinking big and thinking about the logical use for nanotech on a hostile world like Mars. Gray Goo could in fact be green goo and would be the the most obvious approach for terraforming Mars into a habitable planet. Assuming the atomic components are present they could presumably produce water and oxygen and dispose of the the toxic components of the atomosphere. They could produce a green house effect to warm the environment. They could potentially produce a habitable world. Hopefully they would also design in safe gaurds to kill the nanobots once the work was done. I've always thought the "Genesis Effect" in Star Trek was simply a wave of nanobots.
You don't know what your talking about and it shows. IRIX scales vastly better than Linux and as good or better than the other proprietary Unices. If it didn't it wouldn't be routinely running on 16-256 CPU machines. Linux is jus tnow getting a threaded TCP/IP stack for example. Linux lost the Mindcraft benchmarks for a good reason, 2.2.x doesn't scale well.
You must have really botched something if your getting 2 hours uptime, or more likely you just made that number up to add drama to your lame post.
As for Linux blowing SGI away on the desktop, I don't see it and neither did Linux in his Comdex speach where he expressed disappointment with the Linux desktop. Linux has no serious commercial applications in key desktop areas like CAD and Animation. I hope this will be changing soon but right now Linux just isn't flying on the desktop outside of Netscape, Star Office, Gimp and a few other free or open source apps like Blender which just don't stack up against commercial apps.
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> One comment: I don't know how old you are, but I'm 43, and to me it looks like people my age are the ones who should be sent first on any one-way space trips.
I'm 42, a fellow member of the generation that reveled in grainy black and white pictures of men walking and driving on the moon. I figure much of that magic is lost on the generations that followed for which it is just old news.
I'm afraid we are too old for Mars. Take a 40 something and tack on 10 years before there is any chance of getting there and we would have too many potential health problems and you don't want old, sick colonists in a difficult, hostile environment. You also dont want colonists that are past their child bearing days. You want people that will raise children there. Its a lot cheaper and more fun to raise future martians on site instead of shipping them in. Thats what colonists do.
> BTW, are you a member of any group that advocates the views you espouse, or is this just your own (well-thought-out) opinion?
No. I worked at NASA in my youth. I was just beginning work on the X-33 when I figured out the hard way NASA wasn't structured to do anything worthwhile any more and that the X-33 would never fly.
If I were still an idealist I could join one of the various Mars advocacy groups and pretend that lobbying NASA or assorted politicians would make a difference but it wont. It would take a JFK, a real leader with a vision and the guts to throw down the gauntlet. We just don't make that kind of politican anymore or if we do they don't get elected. It would also help to have an advesary to race there which is the only reason Apollo happened. Instead we just waste billions on wars and weapons, the ISS, the space shuttle etc. We don't progress.
If there is anything I would attribute my passion for Mars to its Kim Stanley Robinson and his great books, "Red Mars", "Green Mars" etc.
In reading that NASA is going to spend 10 years and billions of dollars to build a new space shuttle that does even less than the current space shuttle I'm left shaking my head. Is this all NASA can manage, spending more and more money to do less and less. I appreciate the new mini space shuttle may be cheaper, simpler and safer than the space shuttle but it also can't carry any cargo and all it will do is ferry people to and from the ISS which is already recognized as a dead end a giant waste of money in space.
NASA may as well pack it in if this space plane and the ISS is their vision of manned space flight for the next decade. They talk about the ISS as crucial to the trip to Mars but I just don't see it.
If NASA wants to do something to stay relevent they need to pour their resources into:
- Cheap heavy lift launchers to get big cargos in to low earth orbit
- Innovative interplanetary propulsion like the ion drive starting initial tests
- Innovative means to protect againt radiation on interplanetary space flight, cowering in low earth orbit in the ISS wont help.
- Serious closed biosystem research. The ISS is a joke because it requires constant resupply of water and food.
- Continued discovery of the resources available on Mars and figure out smart ways for colonists to tap them when they get there.
If we want to get to Mars stop planning for a round trip. Round trips make the mission MUCH harder and make it in to the same dead end that was Apollo. We need to start designing one way missions that send people to Mars as colonists and not visitors. There would be no shortage of volunteers for a one way trip as long as they have a fair shot at long term survival. If I were a little younger I would be at the head of the line. Throughout history there have always been exceptional individuals that want to explore new frontiers. At this point, short of exploring the oceans, there simply aren't any frontiers left here to explore. Spinning around in low earth orbit sure isn't a new frontier any more. Create a new frontier to explore on Mars and will capture the imagination of the world again and NASA you really, desperately need that if you dont want to wither away as poinless bureaucracy.
Its an absurd waste to have to try to get a ship to Mars that has to get back to earth. The round trip scenario has led to the massive NASA fixation on long duration zero gravity research which is about all the ISS is good for.
A far more rational apporach is a fast one way trip for colonists with periodic cargo flights before and after they arrive to insure the colonists have the resources and equipment to create permenent habitats, raise food, find water and survive.
We should be doing research on how people cope with 6-9 months in zero G en route to indefinite periods at the %38 Martian gravity. Going from zero G to %38 is a lot less of a problem than spending years in zero G on a round trip and ending up back in Earth's gravity.
Please NASA, start designing fast propulsion, biospheres and Mars colonization missions. Please stop reinventing the space shuttle and wasting money on dead ends that are relatively easy for you to do but pointless. Please do things that are hard but worth it.
The key point about Itanium is that it is a horrible general purpose processor but it is a serious contender to be very good processor for supercomputing. It has very good floating point performance and the EPIC architecture is designed to be very good on Fortran, especially vectorizable Fortran which is very prevelent in HPC applications. What Linus said is correct in the context of Itanium as a general purpose processor, but its doesn't give Itanium the credit its due as a floating point supercomputer which is the only place its going to sell and is what it was designed for.
It will probably never be very good for most C and C++ apps. Pointer aliasing in particular will give the Itanium compiler fits. Unless you manually tell the compiler there are no two pointers accessing the same memory the compiler can't safely or effectively pack the parallel instructions in the VLIW and that is the essential to good performance in VLIW.
You do have to really question the sanity of some execs at Intel and HP for spending the staggering sums they've spent on Itanium. Supercomputing just isn't big enough a market for them to have any chance to recoup their investment in our lifetime and they aren't going to sell it in to the mass market as Linus said.
For a general purpose 64 bit processor to run existing C and C++ applications AMD is going to win hands down. But as many have noted its not likely most people are going to really need a 64 bit processor anytime soon so Intel will probably do just fine selling 32 bit x86 processors for a while.
Maybe you should try the Flash 6 Linux player. It was released a week or so ago and fixes all of the bugs that have been filed in the Mozilla bug database against the Flash5 Linux player.
...or we would be able to go there today. If it had been real after 30 years of technical progress it would obviously be easy and cheap to go to the moon, it would be covered with bases and people, and we would be on our way to Mars. Since NASA is incapable to do it now they must have been incapable the first time.
Actionscript performance has improved some in the current beta, though it still has a ways to go. Its noteworthy this is the first Flash Beta to ship on Linux simultaneously with Mac and Windows.
A Flash 6 Linux Player, beta to watch the final match on www.brainsinbahrain.com is available here
Most operating systems, Mac and Windows in particular, only support one flavor of desktop. Linux currently supports at least two, GNOME and KDE. Some contend the competition is good. I contend it is the single factor most likely to cause Linux to fail on the desktop. Not only does it causes massive duplication of effort, but more importantly it fragments application development and support. You get applications that integrate properly with only of the two desktops, or neither, or developers who have to build two applications which is wasted effort. How do we justify two competing desktops. Would the Linux desktop be more likely to succeed if someone like IBM bought Qt, open sourced it, and we move to a single standardized desktop where all applications ran properly out of the box?
<B>"This is a market where Linux is absolutely perfect," says Linus Torvalds, the Finnish programmer credited with starting the Linux movement. "But it's not a driving market." </B>
<P>
Linus is right in saying this in the context of the whole OS market, but this statement should be refined. This market, along with CAD, is and always has been a driving market for 3D workstations. Having these leading edge graphics and art fanatics on Linux workstations will have a major, positive impact on the quality of OpenGL drivers, application software, desktops and all things visual available on Linux.
Last I heard A|W no longer charges for rendering licenses so you can build render farms as large as you like. Only the interactive seats are expensive.
Flash is a vector based animation tool. It is ideally suited to displaying flat 2D animation with modest download times for the poor souls still stuck with 56K modems. South Parks animation style is ideally suited to the tools around which shockwave.com is focused.
For shockwave to show something flashy, 3D and Toy Story like would mean a bunch of big movie file downloads which don't work very well unless you have high speed net access. I wager they will offer higher quality content but not untile high speed net access is more widely available.
In reading the article on nanotech I was dismayed about the potential uses attributed to the research at NASA Ames. Are they really thinking that small and are only working on robotic sensors. They should be thinking big and thinking about the logical use for nanotech on a hostile world like Mars. Gray Goo could in fact be green goo and would be the the most obvious approach for terraforming Mars into a habitable planet. Assuming the atomic components are present they could presumably produce water and oxygen and dispose of the the toxic components of the atomosphere. They could produce a green house effect to warm the environment. They could potentially produce a habitable world. Hopefully they would also design in safe gaurds to kill the nanobots once the work was done. I've always thought the "Genesis Effect" in Star Trek was simply a wave of nanobots.
You don't know what your talking about and it shows. IRIX scales vastly better than Linux and as good or better than the other proprietary Unices. If it didn't it wouldn't be routinely running on 16-256 CPU machines. Linux is jus tnow getting a threaded TCP/IP stack for example. Linux lost the Mindcraft benchmarks for a good reason, 2.2.x doesn't scale well.
You must have really botched something if your getting 2 hours uptime, or more likely you just made that number up to add drama to your lame post.
As for Linux blowing SGI away on the desktop, I don't see it and neither did Linux in his Comdex speach where he expressed disappointment with the Linux desktop. Linux has no serious commercial applications in key desktop areas like CAD and Animation. I hope this will be changing soon but right now Linux just isn't flying on the desktop outside of Netscape, Star Office, Gimp and a few other free or open source apps like Blender which just don't stack up against commercial apps.