I used a slide rule in my Celestial Mechanics class. We were calculating some orbit to the moon (yes, orbit, since we were going to the altitude of the moon, not the actual moon... two-bodies, y'understand) but I digress. I got an A, but The Professor called me into his office.
"You did the equations correctly, but your answer was not correct. You had 60.42 (or something) and the answer was 60.4235. Why is that?"
"Well, I can only see about 4 digits on my slide rule." I produced my 12" Yellow Pickett.
"You used a slide rule?" This was the guy who used a slide-rule and non-diimensional equations to tell the Apollo 11 Tiger Team where The Eagle had landed, as they forgot to account for the thrust of the docking spring, sheesh.
He reached into his desk and produced the exact same slide rule. Needless to say we formed a camaraderie from then on.
He has recently passed away, and will not be able to see the flights of fancy he inspired in my fictional writing.:'( It's not often that an orbit is the co-star of a plotline.
May all your mechanics be celestial, Professor Harm.
The Greek root word that is translated as 'wormwood' is "apsinthos". Certainly the same root word as "absinthium" but I am neither an etymologist, a botanist or a heavy drinker of vodka OR vermouth (which is also a wormwood allusion)
But this is very moot (a wormwood pun). Yer missing the bigger picture here. The bible referred to a meteorite that made waters toxic. We have now learned that the Peruvian meteorite stirred up arsenic. Ok, so we have a meteorite that falls and releases poison in both accounts. This is pretty good science for a 1900+ year old document. We (science) didn't even know what a meteorite really WAS until the 1500's.
If you want to quibble about plant species and transliteration of Cyrillic, have at it. That's what Slashdot is for. But you might also want to ask how a ancient bible prophecy described very closely that news headline you just read, and why Revelation looks so much like astrophysics story problems set.
Several months ago, I posted the idea of setting an "R2 standard" where a computer can be connected to and useful from now until... Much like the R2 unit that both Obi-Wan and Luke used in their fighters.
This is a perfect example... an 800MHz G4 on Tiger could be one of those "droids". I was quoted as saying recently that "If this G4 Titanium with Tiger is all the computer humanity ever got, we'd be doing alright."
Specifically, Spotlight is such a boon to workflow, that it's worth the Panther to Tiger step. I'm not sure that Leopard is.
I know that with ever progressing technology, we can do things we never dreamed. But is that really a good thing? Last night I watched a YouTube video on my G3-400. I saw what I wanted. When YouTube-Holograhic edition is out, have we gained? I will have a Tiger machine, to quote the old Obi-Wan "for a long time... a long time."
"And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter." (Revelation 8:10-11 KJV)
And yes, the Russian word for "wormwood" is Chernobyl. But ironically, this is not the FIRST thing I thought... I thought of the Phantoms from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I'd rather think about Aki Ross than some stupid beast.
Ok, where did I store my bio-aetherics shield generator...
150 GB is 7 of my iPods per month (I haven't filled it once yet)
13000000 emails is more than even I get
150GB of pictures!? Pshhh.... Unles you are shooting in RAW, and using Aperture and Photoshop and creating 50MB PSDs (minimum) and using those huge pics to make DVD data files and MOV slideshows of 100MB each.
Whoa nellie... that's disk space, not bandwidth there, right? Right... until you start using an Online Backup service and you have 4 computers each with minimum of 160GB drives... and you have a 4FPS button on your 8MPixel camera.
Then, you look like a Torrential Pirate just for being vigilant with your files.
Does Comcast offer their own backup service which sidesteps these limits?
I wonder? Can you run Visual Studio? SQL Server? Can I install MS-DOS 5 on it? (Assuming I can find it on CD) ROFL!
no, seriously. I have a 24" iMac to develop web apps. Nothing like good ole BBEdit to crank code. But I'd like to use the full features of VS to do.NET. Does VS realize that there is an Apple under the HAL? I mean, it's not like I'm polling an RS-232...
Music format is a function of the audience. I first heard this in Alvin Toffler's "Third Wave". Symphony music was derived from Baroque Chamber music because the size of the audience grew. Big Band was that because the radios transmitted sax and trumpet well.
Now, with iPods, the audience is one earbuddy. Music will adapt to match this medium, sound foibles and all. Ask yerself... Do you think that Frank Valli and the Four Seasons would have been a hit on a 5.1 system? Do you think that Tom Scholz would have taken umpteen years mixing Barry Goudreau's rhythm guitar if we didn't have a midrange speaker in our $1200 cabinets?
In '94, I was discussing biometrics with a programmer. He was the owner of a software firm, and was the world's biggest skeptic. (Though he doubts that claim). I said "This mark of the beast technology is great idea, except for the downside, which you don't even believe. We should get into it."
"It will never happen here..." he said. "If someone ever did begin to develop it, the cry of 'MARK OF THE BEAST' from the Christian Right (US and abroad) would be so stigmatizing* that this whole '666' thing would become a self UN-filfilling prophecy." Ok, so where is it? If this is not precisely what all the wacko Christian right idiots (like me) have been saying all along... chips in the hand (The card is a courtesy), tracking, surveillance... If this is not it, what is? And if so, where is the hew and cry from the Christians. Or are they (ok, ok... we) just sitting back, shaking our heads saying... "We told you so..."
And what if this works? What if no "Beast" arises from the sea? What if this is really a good idea and they benefit and no evil Neo-Mao rises to enslave them? THEN what is to stop it from happening here? Anybody??? If "U.S. companies like IBM, Cisco, H.P., Dell**" are in on this, what is to stop it from happening "here"?
*He didn't realize the pun he unleashed here
**Say, we're missing a OS company in this list. Any volunteers?
Ok, but... how many rare showers are there? Do we have a dozen showers that we don't know which comet caused that may be sneaking up on us (again?)
Be honest here... how much of the sky is being watched at any one time?
I'd rather see a better effort to tracking undiscovered comets and asteroids. Or else a zillion years from now, alien archaeologists on Mars will find an AOL CD blown as ejecta from the crater that wiped out a technologically advanced race on the 3rd planet.
Yeah, man... I saw something like that on the screen over the heads of the Jefferson Airplane back in '67. At least I THINK it was on the screen... oh... WOW!
It takes a Titan IV to accelerate something as massive as an SUV into "orbit between the earth and the moon". The delta-V is about 10Km/s, ball park, plus or minus, give or take. The delta-V of an asteroid would have to be half an order of magnitude more and what... 10 orders of magnitude more mass? Picture a Saturn V which is scaled up so that the Command Module is the size of the New Jersey.
Got it? They don't call it Rocket Science fer nothing.
There is another element of a "hypothetical known impending collision (HKIC)". The orbital mechanics will give a very precise time of impact, because, if it ain't then, it ain't gonna happen. While the Ground Zero is going to vary with chaotic factors, we will know this much: "It will hit on [this] side of the planet at this time." Chances are, it would hit the Pacific Ocean. But if the groundtrack wends into heavily populated area, let's say for example, USA, then those people know that they are on the bullseye and will feel the devastation of even a Barringer Crater sized event. That is simple rocket science... But...
What is NOT simple is said locale's reaction to being on the target! WWDUBYAD? What would George Bush do? If (in this hypothetical case) the US Government knew for fact that metric oodles of its territory, including its breadbasket were going to be devastated by an asteroid, what would we do? What would China, India or Russia do?
To quote Sam Kinison: "MOOOOVE!" What we would see would be a push to move into territory that was safer than where we would be sitting then. China might move into India or the Steppes of Russia. If it were to hit the Pacific, where would Los Angeles go? Arizona? Where can you bivouac 8 million people for an indefinite period? And who will be shipping in the food?
One of the first effects of an HKIC is a directional diaspora. The blast wave of the asteroid would pale in comparison to the advancing ring of nuclear fire as one massive group clamors out of the target zone, and those already there fight for their very existence. The first HKIC will not trigger mass extinction before it triggers mass extermination.
This, more than any other reason is why planetary defense should not be handled by any one of us, but by ALL of us. A United Federation of THIS Planet!
Now, imagine that someone skied up beside you, turned your skis the way they wanted, stole your lift ticket, and finally broke your skis halfway down a black diamond run.
Then imagine that on the way up the ski lift, you are informed that in order to prevent ski theft, you will have a slope protection agent. "You are trying to turn left. Cancel or Allow?" But when you get to the top of the lift, you learn that you have to replace your favorite skis with more expensive skis. Then you need to upgrade your boots to this special limited selection. And none of them will fit into the bindings on the skis.
Now, you are realizing that the choice of an expensive-ish (not really) snowboard ready-to-ride, or a roll-your-own board shop will get you down the hill in one piece. Cancel or Allow?
Personally, while I agree that humanity should *eventually* have that sort of capability, I'm not sure it is worth pursuing at the present moment. I'd rather the money went towards basic propusion research, earth/space based telescope construction, and asteroid tracking programs than some sort of "Armageddon" boondoggle. That same logic may have been applied to other heavy lift vehicles, and that *eventually* we may have developed something similar to, if not better than the Saturn V. But I doubt that we *would* have were it not for Kennedy's boondoggle to the Moon in THAT decade.
We are at the 99.94% mark on heavy lift thrust efficiencies. Hydrogen/oxygen has the highest "specific impulse" of any practical propellant. The SRMs produce more thrust (at a lower efficiency) than anything else practically available. We're not going to get much more efficient. We need to take that and scale it up. The Saturn V could put a "Volkwagen" on the moon in 4 days. The moon's orbit was pretty well known. (And according to my orbital mechanics professor who was at Mission Control at the time of the Apollo 11 landing, they missed the target by more than the width of an asteroid.)
To get get something big enough to do anything to a smaller object which is moving in a "less well known" orbit will require MUCH MUCH more propellant than even the mighty Saturn V. (They didn't have to stop, they only had to circularize!) Are we going to wait until we only have 10 years to start developing it? (If we get a 10 year warning...)
Go ahead... mod me "Asteroid Defence Fan-boi". But the laws of orbital mechanics are less forgiving than the Laws of Trickle Down Economics.
Heavy-lift need not be manned. The "manned" part can be payload. I'll let the people in the astronaut program handle the 'fan-boy' line, and I'll let "sci-fi fanboi" Rusty Schweickart (Apollo 9) handle the "once in a million year" line.
The Goal of the B612* Foundation is to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid, in a controlled manner, by 2015.
Asteroid and comet impacts have both destroyed and shaped life on Earth since it formed.
The Earth orbits the Sun in a vast swarm of near Earth asteroids (NEAs).
The probability of an unacceptable collision in this century is ~2%.
We now have the capability to anticipate an impact and to prevent it.
* B612 is the asteroid home of the Little Prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's child's story The Little Prince.
I will also let you decide if an astronaut citing a book considers The Little Prince "sci-fi"
Shades of "With Folded Hands" if we stop exploring because someone will get killed. Tragedy mocks our every step. I know this first and second-hand, I worked with lost Challenger astronaut Greg Jarvis. I even signed up for the spot, knowing full well what might happen. And know a colleague of a lost Apollo 1 astronaut.
But how many souls lost their lives to bring tea and spices from the East? And how many will lose their lives if we are not ready to handle an asteroid impact threat?
We need to do one of two things, "AND do the other things":
Build a launch vehicle capable of lifting "asteroid mitigation" equipment, whether it be Bruce Wyllis or a massive thruster.
Build a launch vehicle capable of lifting "astronaut rescue" equipment. Why? To rescue astronauts... maybe. But having a "get there quick" to the moon or even Mars will prepare us to rendezvous with an asteroid threat.
That way, we are covered on both bases. The alternative to the above is a "Halo" in orbit around earth that the select can use while the ELE occurs beneath them.
How many times have you heard a co-worker ask the IT guy...
"I want to buy a computer. What should I get?"
"What are you going to do with it?"
"I dunno, email, surf the net, word processor... Is Dual COre 3GHz with a 500GB hard drive enough?"
"You could do that on my kids PIII-400."
A lot of great advances have shown up since '95. USB, 500GB drives, LCD monitors, Wireless networking, DVD burners. Sure, Moore's LAw has boosted CPU speeds 128 times. Hard drives and RAM has gone up nearly that much... But have our emails gotten 128X bigger? Do we send 128X more of them? Do I chat with 128X times as many people? My kids PIII can send a 10MB email attachment. It can download songs, and shove them onto his iPod. Have we aquired 500GB of music that we want to listen to? Monitors won't get much bigger. Are they 128X better resolution? I just threw out a bunch of PS/2 keyboards. We have USB, we have Bluetooth. Are we going to get a keyboard that works 128X times farther away in 10 years?
I'm saying that when the last Dell with XP rolls off the line, it will still be able to connect, produce, download, rip, burn just as well in 10 years. So why upgrade? Because Belkin doesn't produce the USB to cranial-input standard adapter? Because some iPod Killer (titter titter) requires a 3-yo or less OS? Let's take that capability, and freeze it to an "R2-Standard"
If Open Source wants to HELP, then form a standard to which code could be ported forever. Call it Windows 7734ever.
Then, when I DO buy the Chronosynclastic Infindibulum Version of Windows XII, I can give my grandkids the Dual Core-3GHz and they may still be able to use it for something. Like watch YouTubeHD3D.
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I used a slide rule in my Celestial Mechanics class. We were calculating some orbit to the moon (yes, orbit, since we were going to the altitude of the moon, not the actual moon... two-bodies, y'understand) but I digress. I got an A, but The Professor called me into his office.
:'( It's not often that an orbit is the co-star of a plotline.
"You did the equations correctly, but your answer was not correct. You had 60.42 (or something) and the answer was 60.4235. Why is that?"
"Well, I can only see about 4 digits on my slide rule." I produced my 12" Yellow Pickett.
"You used a slide rule?" This was the guy who used a slide-rule and non-diimensional equations to tell the Apollo 11 Tiger Team where The Eagle had landed, as they forgot to account for the thrust of the docking spring, sheesh.
He reached into his desk and produced the exact same slide rule. Needless to say we formed a camaraderie from then on.
He has recently passed away, and will not be able to see the flights of fancy he inspired in my fictional writing.
May all your mechanics be celestial, Professor Harm.
I'm going to push back on this one...
The Greek root word that is translated as 'wormwood' is "apsinthos". Certainly the same root word as "absinthium" but I am neither an etymologist, a botanist or a heavy drinker of vodka OR vermouth (which is also a wormwood allusion)
But this is very moot (a wormwood pun). Yer missing the bigger picture here. The bible referred to a meteorite that made waters toxic. We have now learned that the Peruvian meteorite stirred up arsenic. Ok, so we have a meteorite that falls and releases poison in both accounts. This is pretty good science for a 1900+ year old document. We (science) didn't even know what a meteorite really WAS until the 1500's.
If you want to quibble about plant species and transliteration of Cyrillic, have at it. That's what Slashdot is for. But you might also want to ask how a ancient bible prophecy described very closely that news headline you just read, and why Revelation looks so much like astrophysics story problems set.
Several months ago, I posted the idea of setting an "R2 standard" where a computer can be connected to and useful from now until... Much like the R2 unit that both Obi-Wan and Luke used in their fighters.
This is a perfect example... an 800MHz G4 on Tiger could be one of those "droids". I was quoted as saying recently that "If this G4 Titanium with Tiger is all the computer humanity ever got, we'd be doing alright."
Specifically, Spotlight is such a boon to workflow, that it's worth the Panther to Tiger step. I'm not sure that Leopard is.
I know that with ever progressing technology, we can do things we never dreamed. But is that really a good thing? Last night I watched a YouTube video on my G3-400. I saw what I wanted. When YouTube-Holograhic edition is out, have we gained? I will have a Tiger machine, to quote the old Obi-Wan "for a long time... a long time."
And yes, the Russian word for "wormwood" is Chernobyl. But ironically, this is not the FIRST thing I thought... I thought of the Phantoms from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I'd rather think about Aki Ross than some stupid beast.
Ok, where did I store my bio-aetherics shield generator...
- 150 GB is 7 of my iPods per month (I haven't filled it once yet)
- 13000000 emails is more than even I get
- 150GB of pictures!? Pshhh.... Unles you are shooting in RAW, and using Aperture and Photoshop and creating 50MB PSDs (minimum) and using those huge pics to make DVD data files and MOV slideshows of 100MB each.
Whoa nellie... that's disk space, not bandwidth there, right? Right... until you start using an Online Backup service and you have 4 computers each with minimum of 160GB drives... and you have a 4FPS button on your 8MPixel camera.Then, you look like a Torrential Pirate just for being vigilant with your files.
Does Comcast offer their own backup service which sidesteps these limits?
I wonder? Can you run Visual Studio? SQL Server? Can I install MS-DOS 5 on it? (Assuming I can find it on CD) ROFL! no, seriously. I have a 24" iMac to develop web apps. Nothing like good ole BBEdit to crank code. But I'd like to use the full features of VS to do .NET. Does VS realize that there is an Apple under the HAL? I mean, it's not like I'm polling an RS-232...
I actually use those as lessons in HOW/WHY the physics would REALLY be. Wile E. Coyote is my teaching assistant. Fan blows into sail... pure genius...
Music format is a function of the audience. I first heard this in Alvin Toffler's "Third Wave". Symphony music was derived from Baroque Chamber music because the size of the audience grew. Big Band was that because the radios transmitted sax and trumpet well.
Now, with iPods, the audience is one earbuddy. Music will adapt to match this medium, sound foibles and all. Ask yerself... Do you think that Frank Valli and the Four Seasons would have been a hit on a 5.1 system? Do you think that Tom Scholz would have taken umpteen years mixing Barry Goudreau's rhythm guitar if we didn't have a midrange speaker in our $1200 cabinets?
Besides, anything is better than a skipping CD.
Maybe he's going to oversee his pet project pilot program in Shenzhen. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/12/21 57215
He'll want to get the bugs worked out if he's going to get a job in the H. Clinton cabinet.
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"It will never happen here..." he said. "If someone ever did begin to develop it, the cry of 'MARK OF THE BEAST' from the Christian Right (US and abroad) would be so stigmatizing* that this whole '666' thing would become a self UN-filfilling prophecy." Ok, so where is it? If this is not precisely what all the wacko Christian right idiots (like me) have been saying all along... chips in the hand (The card is a courtesy), tracking, surveillance... If this is not it, what is? And if so, where is the hew and cry from the Christians. Or are they (ok, ok... we) just sitting back, shaking our heads saying... "We told you so..."
And what if this works? What if no "Beast" arises from the sea? What if this is really a good idea and they benefit and no evil Neo-Mao rises to enslave them? THEN what is to stop it from happening here? Anybody??? If "U.S. companies like IBM, Cisco, H.P., Dell**" are in on this, what is to stop it from happening "here"?
*He didn't realize the pun he unleashed here
**Say, we're missing a OS company in this list. Any volunteers?
Liquid Oxygen tank! It's not rocket science... oh, wait...
Think of what this means:
- No carbs. No intake. They can run underwater!
- No turbo. Just pour in more LOX
- Reverse thrusters for easy braking... AND you can fry the guy who pulled out in front of you with your rocket wash.
- Cold drinks
- No more A/C
Downsides? Strip mining Antarctic ice.They were found embedded in rock which was fossilized landfill. Next to the plastic bottles of Jolt.
They said the same thing about the "mark of the beast". "That no man may buy or sell without..."
It is and has been a great idea for nearly 2000 years... if you can ignore the downside.
Ok, but... how many rare showers are there? Do we have a dozen showers that we don't know which comet caused that may be sneaking up on us (again?)
Be honest here... how much of the sky is being watched at any one time?
I'd rather see a better effort to tracking undiscovered comets and asteroids. Or else a zillion years from now, alien archaeologists on Mars will find an AOL CD blown as ejecta from the crater that wiped out a technologically advanced race on the 3rd planet.
Yeah, man... I saw something like that on the screen over the heads of the Jefferson Airplane back in '67. At least I THINK it was on the screen... oh... WOW!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v
It takes a Titan IV to accelerate something as massive as an SUV into "orbit between the earth and the moon". The delta-V is about 10Km/s, ball park, plus or minus, give or take. The delta-V of an asteroid would have to be half an order of magnitude more and what... 10 orders of magnitude more mass? Picture a Saturn V which is scaled up so that the Command Module is the size of the New Jersey.
Got it? They don't call it Rocket Science fer nothing.
There is another element of a "hypothetical known impending collision (HKIC)". The orbital mechanics will give a very precise time of impact, because, if it ain't then, it ain't gonna happen. While the Ground Zero is going to vary with chaotic factors, we will know this much: "It will hit on [this] side of the planet at this time." Chances are, it would hit the Pacific Ocean. But if the groundtrack wends into heavily populated area, let's say for example, USA, then those people know that they are on the bullseye and will feel the devastation of even a Barringer Crater sized event. That is simple rocket science... But...
What is NOT simple is said locale's reaction to being on the target! WWDUBYAD? What would George Bush do? If (in this hypothetical case) the US Government knew for fact that metric oodles of its territory, including its breadbasket were going to be devastated by an asteroid, what would we do? What would China, India or Russia do?
To quote Sam Kinison: "MOOOOVE!" What we would see would be a push to move into territory that was safer than where we would be sitting then. China might move into India or the Steppes of Russia. If it were to hit the Pacific, where would Los Angeles go? Arizona? Where can you bivouac 8 million people for an indefinite period? And who will be shipping in the food?
One of the first effects of an HKIC is a directional diaspora. The blast wave of the asteroid would pale in comparison to the advancing ring of nuclear fire as one massive group clamors out of the target zone, and those already there fight for their very existence. The first HKIC will not trigger mass extinction before it triggers mass extermination.
This, more than any other reason is why planetary defense should not be handled by any one of us, but by ALL of us. A United Federation of THIS Planet!
Great analogy.
Now, imagine that someone skied up beside you, turned your skis the way they wanted, stole your lift ticket, and finally broke your skis halfway down a black diamond run.
Then imagine that on the way up the ski lift, you are informed that in order to prevent ski theft, you will have a slope protection agent. "You are trying to turn left. Cancel or Allow?" But when you get to the top of the lift, you learn that you have to replace your favorite skis with more expensive skis. Then you need to upgrade your boots to this special limited selection. And none of them will fit into the bindings on the skis.
Now, you are realizing that the choice of an expensive-ish (not really) snowboard ready-to-ride, or a roll-your-own board shop will get you down the hill in one piece. Cancel or Allow?
We are at the 99.94% mark on heavy lift thrust efficiencies. Hydrogen/oxygen has the highest "specific impulse" of any practical propellant. The SRMs produce more thrust (at a lower efficiency) than anything else practically available. We're not going to get much more efficient. We need to take that and scale it up. The Saturn V could put a "Volkwagen" on the moon in 4 days. The moon's orbit was pretty well known. (And according to my orbital mechanics professor who was at Mission Control at the time of the Apollo 11 landing, they missed the target by more than the width of an asteroid.)
To get get something big enough to do anything to a smaller object which is moving in a "less well known" orbit will require MUCH MUCH more propellant than even the mighty Saturn V. (They didn't have to stop, they only had to circularize!) Are we going to wait until we only have 10 years to start developing it? (If we get a 10 year warning...)
Go ahead... mod me "Asteroid Defence Fan-boi". But the laws of orbital mechanics are less forgiving than the Laws of Trickle Down Economics.
Heavy-lift need not be manned. The "manned" part can be payload. I'll let the people in the astronaut program handle the 'fan-boy' line, and I'll let "sci-fi fanboi" Rusty Schweickart (Apollo 9) handle the "once in a million year" line.
I will also let you decide if an astronaut citing a book considers The Little Prince "sci-fi"
Shades of "With Folded Hands" if we stop exploring because someone will get killed. Tragedy mocks our every step. I know this first and second-hand, I worked with lost Challenger astronaut Greg Jarvis. I even signed up for the spot, knowing full well what might happen. And know a colleague of a lost Apollo 1 astronaut.
But how many souls lost their lives to bring tea and spices from the East? And how many will lose their lives if we are not ready to handle an asteroid impact threat?
We need to do one of two things, "AND do the other things":
That way, we are covered on both bases. The alternative to the above is a "Halo" in orbit around earth that the select can use while the ELE occurs beneath them.
that's why I used %26lt%3BBLINK%26gt%3B... Son of a Boba Fett, this is getting convoluted!
How many times have you heard a co-worker ask the IT guy...
"I want to buy a computer. What should I get?"
"What are you going to do with it?"
"I dunno, email, surf the net, word processor... Is Dual COre 3GHz with a 500GB hard drive enough?"
"You could do that on my kids PIII-400."
A lot of great advances have shown up since '95. USB, 500GB drives, LCD monitors, Wireless networking, DVD burners. Sure, Moore's LAw has boosted CPU speeds 128 times. Hard drives and RAM has gone up nearly that much... But have our emails gotten 128X bigger? Do we send 128X more of them? Do I chat with 128X times as many people? My kids PIII can send a 10MB email attachment. It can download songs, and shove them onto his iPod. Have we aquired 500GB of music that we want to listen to? Monitors won't get much bigger. Are they 128X better resolution? I just threw out a bunch of PS/2 keyboards. We have USB, we have Bluetooth. Are we going to get a keyboard that works 128X times farther away in 10 years?
I'm saying that when the last Dell with XP rolls off the line, it will still be able to connect, produce, download, rip, burn just as well in 10 years. So why upgrade? Because Belkin doesn't produce the USB to cranial-input standard adapter? Because some iPod Killer (titter titter) requires a 3-yo or less OS? Let's take that capability, and freeze it to an "R2-Standard"
If Open Source wants to HELP, then form a standard to which code could be ported forever. Call it Windows 7734ever.
Then, when I DO buy the Chronosynclastic Infindibulum Version of Windows XII, I can give my grandkids the Dual Core-3GHz and they may still be able to use it for something. Like watch YouTubeHD3D.
Mehbee, but R2D2 was able to connect to the Death Star. So either he was still the "modern" standard, or the Death Star still used RS-232.
Did I just call R2-D2 a 'he'?