I think it takes more than a good processor to win over the portable market. Intel sells a mobile platform. Centrino is a winner; video, PCI express, audio, SATA, wireless... The vendors are buying far more than a processor. It requires a lot less effort (read; money) to erect a laptop design around Intel's mobile platform.
Got to give Intel some credit; they hit the sweet spot in mobile computing. That's crucial now that laptops outsell desktops, and provide better margins to the vendors.
No, seriously. If you don't know this, they have a utility called "Process Explorer" for Win32. It's like top on steroids. Actually, its vastly better than top, or any other process monitor I've ever seen. It will show you pretty much everything there is to know about a running Windows process; file handles, TCP connections, you name it. Its small, fast, mercifully lacking a "setup" and free.
They've got a bunch of other stuff for Windows I now consider essential. Check them out.
sure that you're not suggesting that you buy things from websites that you dont trust....
Contemporary life does not provide us with the option of trusting every entity with whom we interact. Do you trust your electric utility and their outsourced billing department? What about the clerk behind the counter at the gas station who now has your credit card number, license plate and photograph? What about that cable company and their computing hardware embedded in your home?
The parent recognizes that some power is left to him in the form controlling cookies. He is well aware of the fact that his business on the Internet isn't truly anonymous, but why make it easy? Controlling cookies raises the bar, usually above the level of nefarious bastards that use collected information to their own ends. Calling this "paranoia" is dismissive exaggeration.
Complaining about the ineffectiveness of cookies is foolish. If you're really providing so much value to your customer that tracking their activity is going to provide real benefits, the customer won't mind maintaining an account with you. Otherwise you're just providing some marketing slug with ammunition.
...corporations threatened by this new development will instead try to buy laws...
Will? They are. For better or worse, people defend their livelihood. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. The victor is always "Better and cheaper."
So it won't matter that the newer technology is better, we'll keep using oil anyway.
No we won't. The moment something better and cheaper* appears we'll jump in with both feet. GM will just stop trying, shed the last remnants of it vehicle manufacturing operation and evolve into a pure finance operation. You know who will buy the assets? Whoever can build "better and cheaper." Then we'll all have a new gang of mega-corps to complain about.
Have some faith.
* "Better and cheaper" does not yet exist. It will, one way or the other. Those with preconceived ideas find either case hard to accept.
If you accelerate a bunch of nuclei fast enough at a bunch of target nuclei, all sort of stuff tumbles out of the rubble, including free neutrons, positrons and other alphabet particles (alpha, beta, gamma, etc.) This has been done and done again for decades in various labs and facilities around the world. This is a low cost particle accelerator you can fire up in your garage. Cool, but not novel.
It is very cool to see researchers hacking atoms any way they can. Don't listen to the "experts". The people with names we remember didn't.
Note. Electrical System Energy Losses. Electrical system energy losses are calculated as the difference between total primary consumption by the electric power sector and the total energy content of electricity retail sales. Most of these losses occur at steam-electric power plants (conventional and nuclear) in the conversion of heat energy into mechanical energy to turn electric generators. The loss is a thermodynamically necessary feature of the steam-electric cycle....In addition to conversion losses, other losses include power plant use of electricity, transmission and distribution of electricity from power plants to end-use consumers (also called "line losses"), and unaccounted for electricity....Overall, approximately 67 percent of total energy input is lost in conversion; of electricity generated, approximately 5 percent is lost in plant use and 9 percent is lost in transmission and distribution.
Electricity is a staggeringly extravagant means of supplying power. No, I'm not offering an alternative. Unlike battery powered vehicle advocates, I choose not to pretend electricity is "efficient" just because my computer doesn't have a gas tank and tail pipe. The power plants do!
The accuracy problem is caused by the US military screwing with the clocks.
Selective Availability was turned off half a decade ago. Whatever clock drift exists is just normal, unavoidable error inherent in trying to keep multiple spacecraft clocks synchronized.
Most of the inaccuracy of GPS is caused by normal clock drift (both in your GPS device and the satellites,) and signal problems caused by the ionosphere or multipath. A good GPS receiver can mitigate clock error anywhere on the planet if enough satellites are visible simultaneously. Multipath signals and ionosphere problems are just a fact of life with radio signals. Africa doesn't have WAAS so these errors can't be mitigated.
...and no, the "US military" isn't distorting the ionosphere over Africa to make GPS less accurate.
Why do you assume that humans will stop recording and being interested in history?
I assume no such thing. Humans don't need anything as profound as astronomical distances or geologic time scales to forget. Cement is a good example; the West rediscovered cement by examining Roman structures. It had been forgotten for hundreds of years. People with the ability to read Egyptian hieroglyphs did not exist for more than 1300 years. That's a lot of human generations that had absolutely no means of understanding the written record of an entire civilization.
The universe places no upper-bound on our species. Consider the probabilities involved when hundreds of thousands of years pass. Imagine the possibilities of loss and regression that could occur when pockets of humans are separated by tens or hundreds of light years. Aside from the radio emissions we've recently broadcast into the universe, today, one large rock is all that would be necessary to obliterate nearly all evidence that we exist.
Seems like an illogical position for you to take.
Given enough time and space in which to invent new tragedies and triumphs, it seems to me that the only "logical position" is to assume that eventually some of our progeny will not remember from whence they came. To fill in the gaps they, like us, will invent a history. Occasionally a Rosetta stone will appear and they will stand in awe as they consider what has been lost.
...saying that we shouldn't even be having these rivalries here on the ground. He is correct...
Can you provide any evidence to support that assertion? At the heart of this "story" is rivalry. Inevitably, rivalry will be the very reason our species manages to get beyond this planet.
Space colonization is going to be like any other form of colonization in history, only with less killing of the natives.
You're not thinking long term here. The great great great grandchild of Hyatt will probably figure some sparsely populated rock would be a nice place to terra-form into a resort. Shortly thereafter we'll have mass graves, bombings and all the rest. "Sparsely" will probably be measured in tens of millions.
...and for each country to seize resources for themselves so that they can dominate their rivals close to home. The fact that it's in space instead of across the sea is irrelevant.
Napoleon understood this; the only motivation of man is self interest. When individuals believe that their self interest is best served by participating is some collective you get nations, wars, etc. Space isn't going to change this.
As for seizing resources; our space faring descendents will eventually decide they'd rather be independent and they'll have to fight for it. They'll eventually win, because they'll have the knowledge, resources and will.
One "day" someplace far, far away a human will be born, live a long life we fools can not even fathom, and die. It will have never even been aware of the existence of a "Bible", "Quran" or Arthur C. Clarke. The warmongers in the "U.S. Space Command" that contributed to making such a thing possible won't be credited for this.
It was possible to play at least one MMOG casually. In Planetside, player skills were effectively capped after roughly 1 month (level 20 or something) at which point it came down to skill and teamwork.
It was fun and I had a blast playing the first year. Then they introduced so-called "command" skills which required lengthy accumulation of "points" eventually resulting in special "command" powers like evoking god beams from space to annihilate a few acres of players. Within a few months every non-casual player had this and satellites were going off every few seconds. Then came "mechs"; another lengthy point accumulation resulting in practically unkillable casual player eating monsters. At that point I quit.
Had Planetside not changed into a game of point accumulation I would still be playing. They could have introduced new environments (sea combat, air combat with more depth, hacking that wasn't merely watching a progress bar, buildable structures, customizable vehicles, elaborate sensor and trap systems, etc.) Instead they introduced things that stratified players into those who had 10 hours a day to play and those that didn't.
Making a causal player friendly MMOG is easy. There is basically one rule; if a player must play more than 1-2 hour every other day to stay on par with the hardcore players (in terms of "stuff") it's not going to work for casual players. The game must rely on skill and knowledge rather than accumulation of wealth and rank. End of casual player requirements.
1.) SCO sues people for infringing their copyrights
2.) Novell publicly claims SCO doesn't actually own the copyrights.
3.) SCO sues Novell for, erm... "slander of copyright"
4.) Novell files a motion to get the case dismissed. Judge denies but drops hints that it could work...
5.) Novell files another motion to dismiss.
6.) (You are here) The judge says quit trying for a dismissal, it all must to go to trial, presumably to resolve who actually owns the copywrites.
7.) circa 2009, trial begins.
8.) The sun expands and engulfs the Earth in plasma. Utah slagged into a molten puddle.
9.) UT&T, corporate descendent of AT&T, publicly claims Novell does not actually own the copyrights.
10.) An Ixian investment group buys majority shares of GBM, UT&T, Novell and enslaves the entire population inhabiting the artificial planets orbiting Betelgeuse, where the descendents of Darl McBride are rumored to have migrated after Earth was no longer tolerable.
11.) Zarthon declares war on Ix, pointing out that Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy were all genetic plants sent to humanity to promulgate rational computation throughout the universe.
12.) Heat Death overcomes the universe as the Zath-Ix war consumes all Baryonic matter 18.3E21 Earth years early.
most likely because this option breaks most applications
This is why most people don't know about it; developers and vendors barely understand Windows security, so it's ignored. The users instinctively know this and they play along, ignoring the existing capabilities.
The Microsoft platform is closed, poorly designed, obscure and ambiguous. Side effects are common and difficult to prevent or correct. Frobbing things that vendors aren't paying close attention to is a good way to invent new breakage.
Go ahead, be the first on your block to harden Windows with naive LUA. Spend the next two years chasing down truly arcane breakage. Teach Microsoft and third party vendors how to promulgate securable products. Meanwhile, I'll be using software on platforms that figured out most of this stuff a decade ago.
We're gonna have Ajax and we're gonna put it on Rails...
RoR already does Ajax. There's a nice JavaScript library called Prototype that's integrated with RoR out of the box.
I remember this level of hype surrounding many other things in the last 15 years; Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Python, Java, JBoss, etc. The thing is most of them have lived up to the hype to some degree and now they're taken for granted.
RoR is worthy of the hype. It eliminates bullshit in the web app stack. That means you, the designer/coder/maintainer scale better. Being more productive is always a win, every single time it's tried.
El Cabri: France's bid to build ITER is the backed by the EU
rsynnott: Erm, that was Europe...
Abject, unmitigated bullshit.
Only after the debate became protracted did "France" morph into "EU". This became "EU" vs. Japan only after France figured it needed more pull. The early press releases were all about "France" and the "fench technology minister". France expected this built on French soil by the French nuclear industry.
Now go read the MSNBC article about the new jet development. Not one cotten picking mention of "EU". Big, bold letters: "France", period.
Now if they could only figure out a way to resolve this.
Japan is 127 mega-people with 4 giga-dollars of GDP. France is just over 60 mega-people with 1.6 giga-dollars of GDP. Yet, somehow, France has concluded that Japan must "concede" to France's desire to build ITER in France, as if the conclusion is preordained and we're all just waiting for Japan to figure this out. Almost four years have gone by while we wait for this "decision."
Thankfully, a controversial US leader had decided that should this stalemate continue, the US will pursue a similar project domestically. The Western world treats France as damage and routes around it.
Unknown and irrelevant. Building a base there is inevitable. Sooner or later, one way or another, people will live on the moon. It's a given.
lunar dust is incredibly hard on mechanical things (gears, seals, etc)
Let your grandkids worry about it; that's what they're for.
that would make maintenance of any lunar base very difficult, and prohibitively expensive.
Yeah, ok. We'll do it anyhow. "Expensive" is relative. Discover things of immense value and what was once "expensive" becomes another cost in a ledger, even if whomever is paying goes bankrupt in the process.
For all of that effort (both in the initial build, and in the launch/materials costs for maintenance)...what do we get? Not much, even in terms of science.
How, precisely, do you know what we're going to get? Did Europeans know they would get a nuclear superpower when they invaded North and South America?
I'd love for us to do more space exploration, but honestly, I think a really big station at L4 or L5 would be a much better idea.
L4, L5... eventually we'll have thousands of people at both, and on the moon.
Locally stable gravitiational point, but not a deep gravity well, far less dust, very low g environment, etc.
Empty, too.
It's not as sexy as the moon, but really...L5's the place to be, not the moon.
That sounds like a real estate add. Ironic, really. One day members of our species will make such choices...
Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
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In the case of CEV Spiral Two, the engines would be used for pure orbital work, so there would be little to no concern of any materials reaching Earth.
No concern? With respect, that is either a poor choice of words or profoundly naive.
There will be no end of concern. The vitriol from the anti-nukes will be deafening. All manner of plots will be imagined and every conceivable evil will be attributed to anyone involved with attempting to deploy anything remotely similar to a nuclear rocket, regardless of how far from Earth it is supposed to be used. The populist media will lap it up and regurgitate the mess relentlessly for years and years until there isn't a politician or institution anywhere on the planet willing to be connected to it.
Such things will only be permitted when circumstances change so dramatically that the people of that time discover other, more important imperatives. Be careful what you wish for; historically nothing less than immediate survival is required to dismiss these sort of ideological differences. Aside from an odd space rock or infrequent caldera explosions, the only force available today to provide the necessary stimulus is ourselves. War, in other worlds. Full scale, total war, as opposed to some limited, conventional squabble in the middle east.
I doubt very much that we'll see very many applications get a boost from dual/many core processers, and it's not just a matter of "re-writing legacy apps".
I think this is a foolish thing to doubt. As supercomputing evolved into parallelism the same thing was said; it's too hard, some things can't be done in parallel. Yet solutions have been found for most cases and there is no lack of desire for more parallel capacity today.
Put enough cores in front of a twenty something Carmack wannabe and he'll figure out how to parallelize so many spinning triangles we'll all be breathlessly waiting to pay for even more cores. Put eight cores in the hands of a video encoding programmer and he'll refractor, tune and rethink the whole process until those cores stay 99% full and he invents an entirely new paradigm for the practice.
Perhaps there is something deeper here; isn't the universe fundamentally parallel? So it isn't possible to parallelize the calculation of the next digit of pi; the universe has a way of ultimately requiring you to perform the damn calculation with thousands of pi simultaneously. Determinism gets lost somewhere and parallel computation becomes viable.
Apple is actually switching to Intel to smooth the way for a merger with Sun.
You're out of your mind. Intel isn't interested in merging with Apple. Intel is buying HP to resurrect Alpha, which is "the Intel chip" to which Apple is actually porting OS-X.
Besides, when a company with 30B USD market cap becomes a part of a company with 170B USD market cap it's called an acquisition, not a "merger."
Sun's fate is to be purchased by NVidia. They plan to base their "next gen" graphics processors on duel core SPARC technology, obviously.
Meanwhile, RedHat is looking at SGI; the MIPS architecture will play host to yet another port of OS-X licensed from Apple by RedHat.
The problem is that you have to make sure that the filesystem on disk is consistent when the media is removed --- but by the time you know that the media is being removed, it's too late to do anything!
There are two parts to the problem.
1.) The robustness of the OS; does the OS account for the possibility of a device vanishing at some arbitrary moment?
2.) The integrity of the filesystem; Is the possibility of metadata corruption permitted to exist?
The answer to this first question is obviously no or Sony would have had nothing to do. The historical problems with NFS that I mentioned are also cases of this problem. There are no valid reasons why a kernel should panic in the face of transient filesystems and hot pluggable devices. The fact is that *nix kernels take storage devices for granted and assumptions continue to be made in critical places. Today those assumptions are simply not valid.
The second problem isn't as difficult as some postulate. Logging filesystems (XFS, JFS, EXT3, etc.) are all capable of surviving power loss without corruption. This is not substantially different than being disconnected arbitrarily. A log is one means of implementing a subset of ACID properties; the system transitions from one valid state to another instantaneously. There is no "in between" moment where the system is in an invalid state that would persist after being disconnected. Thus, there is no possibility of corruption [1].
Solutions to both problems involve making conceptually simple things more complicated and less efficient. To what degree does optimization prevent solving either or both? You need both to exist sanely with hot pluggable or otherwise transient filesystems.
Unix deals with this problem by simply refusing to deal with it: it requires you to dismount all filesystems before disconnecting the media. Which is fine if you're dealing with hard disks, but less fine on USB devices and floppies
My point is that this must change. The problem has been ignored too long and it's high time to deal with it. This is a very hard thing; defining a policy that is supposed to apply generally to all implementations.
(There's a good reason why most serious Unix hardware have software floppy drive eject mechanisms.)
While there certainly are reasons, I remain unconvinced any of them are actually good. Making removable storage devices without a physical means to remove this media is a cop-out and always has been.
My apologies if my critical and unbending positions on this are unpleasant. It's 2005; filesystems exist in all sorts of ephemeral places and every kind of media and I'm sick and tired of operating systems in general and *nix in particular pretending otherwise. It is not too early to expect better. Just ask Sony.
[1] Corruption relevant to filesystem metadata only. The OS can make no guarantees about application data, although an application can a.) leverage the OS transactional capabilities or b.) implement it's own form of ACID behavior, as many DBMSes do.
Creepy Crawler: Why cant you prevent Panics from removing vFat utilizing devices? Shouldnt have Linux came up with a way to gracefully determine 'dirtiness' and then dump the kmod gracefully?
Foolhardy: What does the filesystem have to do with crashing, other than the quaility of the driver? i.e. what do the on-disk file structures have to do with having a kernel panic?
Good questions. You've just stumbled into a significant flaw in *nix generally.
Linux, begotten of Unix, does not subscribe to the notion of transient filesystems. Behavior is undefined when filesystems vanish suddenly. It seems obvious enough; the kernel should block IO activity, flush buffers, unmount and return errors to users that are attempting IO to the now missing filesystem. Whatever "damage" occurs to the data (as opposed to filesystem metadata) is, rightly, the users problem. Unfortunately, this is not what happens.
What does happen falls under the euphemism "implementation defined." A good example is evident with NFS; *nix admins have been independently discovering this for years. If an NFS mount vanishes, *nix processes often hang indefinitely with no means of recovery. Various "soft mount" hacks appeared to accommodate the real world where network problems exist. Again, the actual behavior is not consistent; "soft mounts" are not always honored and obscure things like NFS versions or various "modes" of IO factor into why or why not.
I believe that in the early days the need to optimize IO led to designs that made no allowance for transient filesystems. This design propagated itself into POSIX, where behavior was left undefined. Even today you find crazy things like kernel panics when a FAT filesystem does something other than remain perpetually mounted. There is no "correct" thing to do and developers, hesitant to start inventing policy where none exists, go on being oblivious to the problem.
The fact is that a large percentage of "important" filesystems are transient. Remote storage, removable storage, etc. host valuable data, while permanently attached storage provides only basic machinery.
Sony, stuck trying to make transient vFAT filesystem hosting devices play nice with Linux, has stepped in and attempted to address the problem. *nix will be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era of transient filesystems. Unfortunately, Sony's pragmatic, special case solution does nothing to address the larger problem, and whatever solutions emerge for all the other possible cases probably will be/are inconsistent in both implementation and behavior.
Blame the *nix folks who, 30 years ago, failed to anticipate hot pluggable keychains with hundreds of megabytes of storage.
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I think it takes more than a good processor to win over the portable market. Intel sells a mobile platform. Centrino is a winner; video, PCI express, audio, SATA, wireless... The vendors are buying far more than a processor. It requires a lot less effort (read; money) to erect a laptop design around Intel's mobile platform.
Got to give Intel some credit; they hit the sweet spot in mobile computing. That's crucial now that laptops outsell desktops, and provide better margins to the vendors.
Sysinternals is teh r0ks0rz!
No, seriously. If you don't know this, they have a utility called "Process Explorer" for Win32. It's like top on steroids. Actually, its vastly better than top, or any other process monitor I've ever seen. It will show you pretty much everything there is to know about a running Windows process; file handles, TCP connections, you name it. Its small, fast, mercifully lacking a "setup" and free.
They've got a bunch of other stuff for Windows I now consider essential. Check them out.
Thanks. That made my Friday afternoon.
Q: How many users prefer Beta Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox over Google Toolbar for Firefox?
A: Both.
sure that you're not suggesting that you buy things from websites that you dont trust....
Contemporary life does not provide us with the option of trusting every entity with whom we interact. Do you trust your electric utility and their outsourced billing department? What about the clerk behind the counter at the gas station who now has your credit card number, license plate and photograph? What about that cable company and their computing hardware embedded in your home?
The parent recognizes that some power is left to him in the form controlling cookies. He is well aware of the fact that his business on the Internet isn't truly anonymous, but why make it easy? Controlling cookies raises the bar, usually above the level of nefarious bastards that use collected information to their own ends. Calling this "paranoia" is dismissive exaggeration.
Complaining about the ineffectiveness of cookies is foolish. If you're really providing so much value to your customer that tracking their activity is going to provide real benefits, the customer won't mind maintaining an account with you. Otherwise you're just providing some marketing slug with ammunition.
...corporations threatened by this new development will instead try to buy laws...
Will? They are. For better or worse, people defend their livelihood. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. The victor is always "Better and cheaper."
So it won't matter that the newer technology is better, we'll keep using oil anyway.
No we won't. The moment something better and cheaper* appears we'll jump in with both feet. GM will just stop trying, shed the last remnants of it vehicle manufacturing operation and evolve into a pure finance operation. You know who will buy the assets? Whoever can build "better and cheaper." Then we'll all have a new gang of mega-corps to complain about.
Have some faith.
* "Better and cheaper" does not yet exist. It will, one way or the other. Those with preconceived ideas find either case hard to accept.
If you accelerate a bunch of nuclei fast enough at a bunch of target nuclei, all sort of stuff tumbles out of the rubble, including free neutrons, positrons and other alphabet particles (alpha, beta, gamma, etc.) This has been done and done again for decades in various labs and facilities around the world. This is a low cost particle accelerator you can fire up in your garage. Cool, but not novel.
It is very cool to see researchers hacking atoms any way they can. Don't listen to the "experts". The people with names we remember didn't.
You are taking a highly efficient easy to transport form of energy (electricity) and...
Electric power is not "highly efficient". According to the DOE, 2/3 of all energy input into electrical power generation is lost as heat.
From the DOE Annual Energy Review: 2003, page 64 (PDF)
Note. Electrical System Energy Losses. Electrical system energy losses are calculated as the difference between total primary consumption by the electric power sector and the total energy content of electricity retail sales. Most of these losses occur at steam-electric power plants (conventional and nuclear) in the conversion of heat energy into mechanical energy to turn electric generators. The loss is a thermodynamically necessary feature of the steam-electric cycle....In addition to conversion losses, other losses include power plant use of electricity, transmission and distribution of electricity from power plants to end-use consumers (also called "line losses"), and unaccounted for electricity....Overall, approximately 67 percent of total energy input is lost in conversion; of electricity generated, approximately 5 percent is lost in plant use and 9 percent is lost in transmission and distribution.
Electricity is a staggeringly extravagant means of supplying power. No, I'm not offering an alternative. Unlike battery powered vehicle advocates, I choose not to pretend electricity is "efficient" just because my computer doesn't have a gas tank and tail pipe. The power plants do!
The accuracy problem is caused by the US military screwing with the clocks.
...and no, the "US military" isn't distorting the ionosphere over Africa to make GPS less accurate.
Selective Availability was turned off half a decade ago. Whatever clock drift exists is just normal, unavoidable error inherent in trying to keep multiple spacecraft clocks synchronized.
Most of the inaccuracy of GPS is caused by normal clock drift (both in your GPS device and the satellites,) and signal problems caused by the ionosphere or multipath. A good GPS receiver can mitigate clock error anywhere on the planet if enough satellites are visible simultaneously. Multipath signals and ionosphere problems are just a fact of life with radio signals. Africa doesn't have WAAS so these errors can't be mitigated.
Why do you assume that humans will stop recording and being interested in history?
I assume no such thing. Humans don't need anything as profound as astronomical distances or geologic time scales to forget. Cement is a good example; the West rediscovered cement by examining Roman structures. It had been forgotten for hundreds of years. People with the ability to read Egyptian hieroglyphs did not exist for more than 1300 years. That's a lot of human generations that had absolutely no means of understanding the written record of an entire civilization.
The universe places no upper-bound on our species. Consider the probabilities involved when hundreds of thousands of years pass. Imagine the possibilities of loss and regression that could occur when pockets of humans are separated by tens or hundreds of light years. Aside from the radio emissions we've recently broadcast into the universe, today, one large rock is all that would be necessary to obliterate nearly all evidence that we exist.
Seems like an illogical position for you to take.
Given enough time and space in which to invent new tragedies and triumphs, it seems to me that the only "logical position" is to assume that eventually some of our progeny will not remember from whence they came. To fill in the gaps they, like us, will invent a history. Occasionally a Rosetta stone will appear and they will stand in awe as they consider what has been lost.
...saying that we shouldn't even be having these rivalries here on the ground. He is correct...
...and for each country to seize resources for themselves so that they can dominate their rivals close to home. The fact that it's in space instead of across the sea is irrelevant.
Can you provide any evidence to support that assertion? At the heart of this "story" is rivalry. Inevitably, rivalry will be the very reason our species manages to get beyond this planet.
Space colonization is going to be like any other form of colonization in history, only with less killing of the natives.
You're not thinking long term here. The great great great grandchild of Hyatt will probably figure some sparsely populated rock would be a nice place to terra-form into a resort. Shortly thereafter we'll have mass graves, bombings and all the rest. "Sparsely" will probably be measured in tens of millions.
Napoleon understood this; the only motivation of man is self interest. When individuals believe that their self interest is best served by participating is some collective you get nations, wars, etc. Space isn't going to change this.
As for seizing resources; our space faring descendents will eventually decide they'd rather be independent and they'll have to fight for it. They'll eventually win, because they'll have the knowledge, resources and will.
One "day" someplace far, far away a human will be born, live a long life we fools can not even fathom, and die. It will have never even been aware of the existence of a "Bible", "Quran" or Arthur C. Clarke. The warmongers in the "U.S. Space Command" that contributed to making such a thing possible won't be credited for this.
Will there be churches on Mars?
It was possible to play at least one MMOG casually. In Planetside, player skills were effectively capped after roughly 1 month (level 20 or something) at which point it came down to skill and teamwork.
It was fun and I had a blast playing the first year. Then they introduced so-called "command" skills which required lengthy accumulation of "points" eventually resulting in special "command" powers like evoking god beams from space to annihilate a few acres of players. Within a few months every non-casual player had this and satellites were going off every few seconds. Then came "mechs"; another lengthy point accumulation resulting in practically unkillable casual player eating monsters. At that point I quit.
Had Planetside not changed into a game of point accumulation I would still be playing. They could have introduced new environments (sea combat, air combat with more depth, hacking that wasn't merely watching a progress bar, buildable structures, customizable vehicles, elaborate sensor and trap systems, etc.) Instead they introduced things that stratified players into those who had 10 hours a day to play and those that didn't.
Making a causal player friendly MMOG is easy. There is basically one rule; if a player must play more than 1-2 hour every other day to stay on par with the hardcore players (in terms of "stuff") it's not going to work for casual players. The game must rely on skill and knowledge rather than accumulation of wealth and rank. End of casual player requirements.
1.) SCO sues people for infringing their copyrights
2.) Novell publicly claims SCO doesn't actually own the copyrights.
3.) SCO sues Novell for, erm... "slander of copyright"
4.) Novell files a motion to get the case dismissed. Judge denies but drops hints that it could work...
5.) Novell files another motion to dismiss.
6.) (You are here) The judge says quit trying for a dismissal, it all must to go to trial, presumably to resolve who actually owns the copywrites.
7.) circa 2009, trial begins.
8.) The sun expands and engulfs the Earth in plasma. Utah slagged into a molten puddle.
9.) UT&T, corporate descendent of AT&T, publicly claims Novell does not actually own the copyrights.
10.) An Ixian investment group buys majority shares of GBM, UT&T, Novell and enslaves the entire population inhabiting the artificial planets orbiting Betelgeuse, where the descendents of Darl McBride are rumored to have migrated after Earth was no longer tolerable.
11.) Zarthon declares war on Ix, pointing out that Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy were all genetic plants sent to humanity to promulgate rational computation throughout the universe.
12.) Heat Death overcomes the universe as the Zath-Ix war consumes all Baryonic matter 18.3E21 Earth years early.
most likely because this option breaks most applications
This is why most people don't know about it; developers and vendors barely understand Windows security, so it's ignored. The users instinctively know this and they play along, ignoring the existing capabilities.
The Microsoft platform is closed, poorly designed, obscure and ambiguous. Side effects are common and difficult to prevent or correct. Frobbing things that vendors aren't paying close attention to is a good way to invent new breakage.
Go ahead, be the first on your block to harden Windows with naive LUA. Spend the next two years chasing down truly arcane breakage. Teach Microsoft and third party vendors how to promulgate securable products. Meanwhile, I'll be using software on platforms that figured out most of this stuff a decade ago.
We're gonna have Ajax and we're gonna put it on Rails...
RoR already does Ajax. There's a nice JavaScript library called Prototype that's integrated with RoR out of the box.
I remember this level of hype surrounding many other things in the last 15 years; Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Python, Java, JBoss, etc. The thing is most of them have lived up to the hype to some degree and now they're taken for granted.
RoR is worthy of the hype. It eliminates bullshit in the web app stack. That means you, the designer/coder/maintainer scale better. Being more productive is always a win, every single time it's tried.
El Cabri: France's bid to build ITER is the backed by the EU
rsynnott: Erm, that was Europe...
Abject, unmitigated bullshit.
Only after the debate became protracted did "France" morph into "EU". This became "EU" vs. Japan only after France figured it needed more pull. The early press releases were all about "France" and the "fench technology minister". France expected this built on French soil by the French nuclear industry.
Now go read the MSNBC article about the new jet development. Not one cotten picking mention of "EU". Big, bold letters: "France", period.
I failed to link something: this
Now if they could only figure out a way to resolve this.
Japan is 127 mega-people with 4 giga-dollars of GDP. France is just over 60 mega-people with 1.6 giga-dollars of GDP. Yet, somehow, France has concluded that Japan must "concede" to France's desire to build ITER in France, as if the conclusion is preordained and we're all just waiting for Japan to figure this out. Almost four years have gone by while we wait for this "decision."
Thankfully, a controversial US leader had decided that should this stalemate continue, the US will pursue a similar project domestically. The Western world treats France as damage and routes around it.
is building a base there really a good idea?
Unknown and irrelevant. Building a base there is inevitable. Sooner or later, one way or another, people will live on the moon. It's a given.
lunar dust is incredibly hard on mechanical things (gears, seals, etc)
Let your grandkids worry about it; that's what they're for.
that would make maintenance of any lunar base very difficult, and prohibitively expensive.
Yeah, ok. We'll do it anyhow. "Expensive" is relative. Discover things of immense value and what was once "expensive" becomes another cost in a ledger, even if whomever is paying goes bankrupt in the process.
For all of that effort (both in the initial build, and in the launch/materials costs for maintenance)...what do we get? Not much, even in terms of science.
How, precisely, do you know what we're going to get? Did Europeans know they would get a nuclear superpower when they invaded North and South America?
I'd love for us to do more space exploration, but honestly, I think a really big station at L4 or L5 would be a much better idea.
L4, L5... eventually we'll have thousands of people at both, and on the moon.
Locally stable gravitiational point, but not a deep gravity well, far less dust, very low g environment, etc.
Empty, too.
It's not as sexy as the moon, but really...L5's the place to be, not the moon.
That sounds like a real estate add. Ironic, really. One day members of our species will make such choices...
In the case of CEV Spiral Two, the engines would be used for pure orbital work, so there would be little to no concern of any materials reaching Earth.
No concern? With respect, that is either a poor choice of words or profoundly naive.
There will be no end of concern. The vitriol from the anti-nukes will be deafening. All manner of plots will be imagined and every conceivable evil will be attributed to anyone involved with attempting to deploy anything remotely similar to a nuclear rocket, regardless of how far from Earth it is supposed to be used. The populist media will lap it up and regurgitate the mess relentlessly for years and years until there isn't a politician or institution anywhere on the planet willing to be connected to it.
Such things will only be permitted when circumstances change so dramatically that the people of that time discover other, more important imperatives. Be careful what you wish for; historically nothing less than immediate survival is required to dismiss these sort of ideological differences. Aside from an odd space rock or infrequent caldera explosions, the only force available today to provide the necessary stimulus is ourselves. War, in other worlds. Full scale, total war, as opposed to some limited, conventional squabble in the middle east.
I doubt very much that we'll see very many applications get a boost from dual/many core processers, and it's not just a matter of "re-writing legacy apps".
I think this is a foolish thing to doubt. As supercomputing evolved into parallelism the same thing was said; it's too hard, some things can't be done in parallel. Yet solutions have been found for most cases and there is no lack of desire for more parallel capacity today.
Put enough cores in front of a twenty something Carmack wannabe and he'll figure out how to parallelize so many spinning triangles we'll all be breathlessly waiting to pay for even more cores. Put eight cores in the hands of a video encoding programmer and he'll refractor, tune and rethink the whole process until those cores stay 99% full and he invents an entirely new paradigm for the practice.
Perhaps there is something deeper here; isn't the universe fundamentally parallel? So it isn't possible to parallelize the calculation of the next digit of pi; the universe has a way of ultimately requiring you to perform the damn calculation with thousands of pi simultaneously. Determinism gets lost somewhere and parallel computation becomes viable.
Apple is actually switching to Intel to smooth the way for a merger with Sun.
You're out of your mind. Intel isn't interested in merging with Apple. Intel is buying HP to resurrect Alpha, which is "the Intel chip" to which Apple is actually porting OS-X.
Besides, when a company with 30B USD market cap becomes a part of a company with 170B USD market cap it's called an acquisition, not a "merger."
Sun's fate is to be purchased by NVidia. They plan to base their "next gen" graphics processors on duel core SPARC technology, obviously.
Meanwhile, RedHat is looking at SGI; the MIPS architecture will play host to yet another port of OS-X licensed from Apple by RedHat.
The problem is that you have to make sure that the filesystem on disk is consistent when the media is removed --- but by the time you know that the media is being removed, it's too late to do anything!
There are two parts to the problem.
1.) The robustness of the OS; does the OS account for the possibility of a device vanishing at some arbitrary moment?
2.) The integrity of the filesystem; Is the possibility of metadata corruption permitted to exist?
The answer to this first question is obviously no or Sony would have had nothing to do. The historical problems with NFS that I mentioned are also cases of this problem. There are no valid reasons why a kernel should panic in the face of transient filesystems and hot pluggable devices. The fact is that *nix kernels take storage devices for granted and assumptions continue to be made in critical places. Today those assumptions are simply not valid.
The second problem isn't as difficult as some postulate. Logging filesystems (XFS, JFS, EXT3, etc.) are all capable of surviving power loss without corruption. This is not substantially different than being disconnected arbitrarily. A log is one means of implementing a subset of ACID properties; the system transitions from one valid state to another instantaneously. There is no "in between" moment where the system is in an invalid state that would persist after being disconnected. Thus, there is no possibility of corruption [1].
Solutions to both problems involve making conceptually simple things more complicated and less efficient. To what degree does optimization prevent solving either or both? You need both to exist sanely with hot pluggable or otherwise transient filesystems.
Unix deals with this problem by simply refusing to deal with it: it requires you to dismount all filesystems before disconnecting the media. Which is fine if you're dealing with hard disks, but less fine on USB devices and floppies
My point is that this must change. The problem has been ignored too long and it's high time to deal with it. This is a very hard thing; defining a policy that is supposed to apply generally to all implementations.
(There's a good reason why most serious Unix hardware have software floppy drive eject mechanisms.)
While there certainly are reasons, I remain unconvinced any of them are actually good. Making removable storage devices without a physical means to remove this media is a cop-out and always has been.
My apologies if my critical and unbending positions on this are unpleasant. It's 2005; filesystems exist in all sorts of ephemeral places and every kind of media and I'm sick and tired of operating systems in general and *nix in particular pretending otherwise. It is not too early to expect better. Just ask Sony.
[1] Corruption relevant to filesystem metadata only. The OS can make no guarantees about application data, although an application can a.) leverage the OS transactional capabilities or b.) implement it's own form of ACID behavior, as many DBMSes do.
Creepy Crawler:
Why cant you prevent Panics from removing vFat utilizing devices? Shouldnt have Linux came up with a way to gracefully determine 'dirtiness' and then dump the kmod gracefully?
Foolhardy:
What does the filesystem have to do with crashing, other than the quaility of the driver? i.e. what do the on-disk file structures have to do with having a kernel panic?
Good questions. You've just stumbled into a significant flaw in *nix generally.
Linux, begotten of Unix, does not subscribe to the notion of transient filesystems. Behavior is undefined when filesystems vanish suddenly. It seems obvious enough; the kernel should block IO activity, flush buffers, unmount and return errors to users that are attempting IO to the now missing filesystem. Whatever "damage" occurs to the data (as opposed to filesystem metadata) is, rightly, the users problem. Unfortunately, this is not what happens.
What does happen falls under the euphemism "implementation defined." A good example is evident with NFS; *nix admins have been independently discovering this for years. If an NFS mount vanishes, *nix processes often hang indefinitely with no means of recovery. Various "soft mount" hacks appeared to accommodate the real world where network problems exist. Again, the actual behavior is not consistent; "soft mounts" are not always honored and obscure things like NFS versions or various "modes" of IO factor into why or why not.
I believe that in the early days the need to optimize IO led to designs that made no allowance for transient filesystems. This design propagated itself into POSIX, where behavior was left undefined. Even today you find crazy things like kernel panics when a FAT filesystem does something other than remain perpetually mounted. There is no "correct" thing to do and developers, hesitant to start inventing policy where none exists, go on being oblivious to the problem.
The fact is that a large percentage of "important" filesystems are transient. Remote storage, removable storage, etc. host valuable data, while permanently attached storage provides only basic machinery.
Sony, stuck trying to make transient vFAT filesystem hosting devices play nice with Linux, has stepped in and attempted to address the problem. *nix will be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era of transient filesystems. Unfortunately, Sony's pragmatic, special case solution does nothing to address the larger problem, and whatever solutions emerge for all the other possible cases probably will be/are inconsistent in both implementation and behavior.
Blame the *nix folks who, 30 years ago, failed to anticipate hot pluggable keychains with hundreds of megabytes of storage.