The first priority is to find a way to transport stuff, ANY stuff, doesn't matter what, off of the earth with less cost, and more reliability. The reason manned flight is a drain on the program is because manned flight means sending more Kg's to do the same job as a robot, and the current cost to get a single Kg off the earth is horribly expensive. Most of us know enough about programming an untestable system to know that the cost of making a robotic system to do a space esperiment is terribly expensive and a huge undertaking, and yet even so it's STILL cheaper than sending humans. This does NOT mean, as the pro-unmanned pundits claim, that manned flight should be abandoned forever. It means that there is something horribly wrong with the current launch technology. When it is so expensive that the cost of sending the extra weight of a human and his life support is orders of magnitude more expensive than the cost of building a one-use throwaway remote robot with one-use throwaway software controlling it, that means the cost to get a kilogram of *stuff* into space is too expensive to be practical, no matter what that stuff is.
I'd like to see Nasa spend most of its budget on experimenting with various better space launch methods (And more than just one - develop only one design to completion and that's the design you end up using when it's any good or not (like in the case of the space shuttle).)
Get a cheaper method of putting stuff in space, and the whole manned/unmanned argument becomes moot. It takes more resources to move a truckload of cargo with a driver than it does to move a truckload of cargo without a driver, but nobody's wasting their effort arguing in favor of unmanned trucks to solve this "problem". Why? Because the difference in the cost isn't that important when it's not that expensive. It's cheap enough that the cost of building and maintaining the automated robot driver isn't worth it. I'd like to see the space program concentrate on trying to make *that* happen to space travel.
If that means temporarily suspending manned flight for now, then so be it. But don't throw away the idea for all time just because current technology isn't up to the task.
Actually, the bigger problem would be making it impossible to keep track of garbage in space so random debris keeps destroying things you launch. The girder you mention would be harmless on re-entry. Leave it in orbit, along with 100,000 other bits of metal, and the US would be unable to track all of it.
The comprimise: Use a re-usable vehicle for re-usable cargo you mean to bring back (like people, for example), and an expendable vehicle for cargo that's taking a one-way trip (space probes, pushing a satellite or space station into orbit, etc.
No, the problem is that they are under the control of alternating beancounters with different goals. It takes more than 6 years to complete a major new space project, but in that time the congress changes, and thus the beancounters change their objectives. What makes Nasa so inefficient is the inability to stick with the program. The original shuttle design would have cost twice as much to build, but have been less expensive to operate on each individual launch, and thus have been cheaper in the long run (not to mention safer). But congress slashed the budget before it got that far, leading to the messy white elephant we have today.
Not only that, but he repeated the lie that MS is not allowed to ship Java. Not true. They just can't lie by shipping something that IS NOT JAVA and calling it Java. They decided to pull out of Java if those were the conditions.
But the big difference is that everything Google does runs on open protocols that are public knowlege. Thus it is possible for someone else to replace their service in every way with some new algorithm of their own. To make the analogy with Microsoft closer, you'd have to have a world where HTTP is a proprietary standard that only Google knows how to talk with, so other people would have the hurdle of reverse engineering to overcome first before building their own search engines.
Actually, all the examples you gave occurred earlier in the article than the point they said they stopped reading. (I also stopped reading at that point, since anyone who actually believes Microsoft would shoot themselves in the foot by making their next version of Windows be incapable of running old Windows software is clearly in fantasy land. Doing that would kill them, and they know it. Most likely the new system would still run the old software, but through an emulation layer of some sort.
It was that british money thing - that curvy 'L' with the slash through it used to represent Pounds. It probably didn't come across in the default font you use.
And when that hypothetical file isn't the only one with attributes "nature" and "trips", then what? Even in databases with searchable attributes, having a unique ID is handy.
Rememeber that the context was about human editability of the config files. In which case having to type twice as much to say the same thing is very relevant, even if you have all the disk space in the world.
The problem that people who believe usability studies doen't see is that ease of learning and ease of use are seperate things. Sometimes the method that's easiest to learn is slowest to actually use. Take menus versus hotkeys for example. The easiest way to learn the options available in an application is to see them arrayed out in front of you visually, and pick them with the mouse - like off a menu. But that is an inherently slow process compared to hitting a key. So an ideal interface should do BOTH, and most these days have learned that. But that's NOT the sort of thing you learn in a usability test that ONLY tests people who have no previous exposure.
Test usability only against newbies and you end up developing an interface that only newbies like, like Windows.
All usability studies are flawed because they contain the implicit assumption that the needs of a user with only a week's exposure are identical to the needs of a user with years of exposure. That's not true, and it's one of the reasons I preferred the Unix way over the Windows way. The Windows way is to state that in order to gain the largest marketshare, you have to err on the side of the newbies even if that makes things painful for the experienced users. Too bad - making newbies like it is how you sell more copies. I used to prefer Gnome over KDE precisely because it was more configurable. Now that that's going away I'll have to reconsider.
I read Card's "Ships of Earth" series. In it, the reader learns that humans on an alien world are the descendants of earthlings who moved there to escape some unspecified worldwide disaster. The world they moved to was meant to be temporary home until enough generations had passed to make earth livable again, and then they would return. The series follows the main characters' journey to find the means to get back home to earth, by chasing historical clues.
That would have been a good story. But Card decided to add elements that made it unenjoyable to read for anyone who isn't a big fan of fundamentalism. (No, not just religion, but fundamentalism.) The colonists who set up this world in the first place decided to set up an overmind satellite around the world, and genetically alter themselves so that their own minds were receptive to this overmind satellite, and the minds of their descendants would be as well. The overmind's job was to keep people from ever thinking of inventions that could be used for warlike purpose, and thus the technology of the world was quite stagnant because many things were forbidden, such as the wheel. That wouldn't have been so bad, except that Card portrayed this as a GOOD thing, as if the reader was supposed to think that's a great idea.
In the end of the series, when the colonists get back to earth to repopulate it, they find a presence in their minds that is even bigger than the overmind satellite was, that they call the oversoul, that they decide to subjugate themselves to. It's obvious that Card meant for the reader to think of this as the real god, and the satellite from the colony before as a human-made god substitute.
That wouldn't have been so bad, except that a main character of the series is portrayed as the hubris-addled unbeliever who won't let the oversoul's thoughts into his head, and as a consequence does criminal things that others aren't capable of thinking of, and how everything is so much nicer when he finally gives in in the end and realizes the error of his ways.
I found the books' moral message so offensive and opposite from actual ethics that it ruined the enjoyment of the series.
It turned me off from reading any other Card novels after that. Everyone tells me that the Ender books are great, but I no longer trust Card to be capable of producing a story I'd enjoy, after reading his anti-thinker, anti-individualist propaganda in the Ships of Earth series. The interview linked to in this article doesn't serve to change my opinion of him.
The new Fantasy Island died mostly because people's memory of the old show was so filled with Ricardo "Rich Corinthian Leather" Monteblan that there's just no way anyone else could ever fill the suit properly.
What I'm about to say will probably anger you, but I need to say it: Just like the Bible, the Qur'an has been used by leaders to justify completely opposite points of view, with enough people believing it for the claim to stand, at least among a subset of the population. The key root problem is when people assume that morality is defined by a book instead of the real world, and seek to justify whatever their morals are (crooked or just) by referring back to that book. It currupts both the book and the government. Separation of religion from government is beneficial to both religion and government.
Perhaps my dislike of Islam is a bit personal. I was brought up as a Bah'ii. (I'm not one now.) Crimes against Bah'ii are often justified in the Muslim world because the Bah'ii faith is a major alteration of Islam - changing it into an almost unrecognizable form. This is viewed as blasphemous, and thus severe punishment against Bah'iis seen as justified because they are corrupting Islam. But that is no way to build a peaceful and polite society. Dissenting opinion MUST be allowed on any topic, including religion. If it is not, peace cannot be had.
The Christians also claim to be a religion of peace. Their history shows this is not the case. Thankfully, the faith of Christians is weaker now, much more tempered by sane comparasin to the real world than it was in the days of the Crusades. I see this as an improvement. Unfortunately I don't see Islam getting there for several centuries to come.
His point is also false. The original poster accused the OS of doing something wrong by not clearing memory from one program when alloced by another. This idiot then went on a rant about how malloc() isn't supposed to do that. I, and another, agreed that malloc doesn't do that, but that this is irrelevant to the original point since it's the OS routines beneath malloc that are the ones in question. He then not only decided to be insulting, but apparently ignored the fact that this was said, and couched his reply under the assumption that I don't know how malloc works with regard to not clearing memory.
The fact of the matter is malloc() is not expected to zero the memory, where as calloc() is.
No. The fact of the matter is that that wasn't the type of memory allocation the original poster was referring to. It's irrelevant what the standard has to say about what libc is supposed to do, since the OS itself is what the poster was complaining about, and the libc is at a level above that. (For example, what if the language being used is assembly language, not C, and therefore malloc and calloc aren't even there?)
Whether the OS clears ram or not has nothing to do with whether or not the C library calls calloc and malloc do so. Calloc and malloc are more high-level than the OS, operating within the memory space given to a single process by the OS. The decision of what appaers in that memory space is made before calloc and malloc are involved. That decision is the providence of the memory pager. If page 1234 belonged to pid 100 before and now you are giving it to pid 101 instead, do you clear it or not? That is something that happens beneath the level of libc.
In this case it's Microsoft's fault either way, since they coded BOTH the OS and the application.
- Serious Islamic leaders (e.g. the King of Jordan, the Prime Minster of Malaysia, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia) believe that the Islamic world must recapture the glory days of 12-13th C Islam. That means finding tolerance and building great education institutions and places of learning. The King was passionate on the subject. It also means freedom of movement and speech within and among the Islamic nations.
Someone leading Jordan has no right to preach about freedom and fairness, especially with the claim that the islamic religion will help bring it. In Jordan, specifically because Islamic laws are in place, women can be legally murdered by their families for bringing shame to the family through infedelity. This is called "Honor killing". And the family doesn't even need proof. Merely suspecting a woman is sufficient.
Other religions were just as bad once, but Islam is younger, and still at the state of maturity Christianity was during the Crusades - any attrocity is justified provided it results in more devout believers in the one correct religion.
No, I don't have much respect for Islam. So sue me. I also don't have respect for any other religion.
First you claim he was mistaken, then proceed to post the "correction" - which consisted of something that agrees perfectly with what he described happening. Make up your mind.
I can't look at an mp3 file and tell whether or not it is a legal copy. I don't expect universities can either.
Which is exactly what the problem is. If you put out a mandate that says, "X is illegal and you must stop X from happening", and X is indistinguishable from something else totally legal, say "Y", then the only thing you can do is ban BOTH X and Y. So the response the Universities will do is to ban file sharing in general. And that's why this is a bad law. YES enforcability should be taken into account when making new laws. If there is no way to distinguish the law makes illegal from what is legal in a fair way, it shouldn't be a law.
Democrats and Republicans have flip-flopped a few times on the issue of local versus federal government. When the parties began, the Democrats preferred state power over federal, and the Republicans favored federal over state, hence the civil war. By the 1990's it was the opposite way around. Now it's turning again. Really I think they both use that state vs federal thing as a cover for whatever their real intentions are at the time. If your party is weak federally but strong locally, you pretend to be in favor of state power. If your party is weak locally and strong federally, you pretend to be in favor of federal power. Really you're just trying to put the power wherever your party is strongest. (This is the hypothetical "you", not you specificly.)
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The first priority is to find a way to transport stuff, ANY stuff, doesn't matter what, off of the earth with less cost, and more reliability. The reason manned flight is a drain on the program is because manned flight means sending more Kg's to do the same job as a robot, and the current cost to get a single Kg off the earth is horribly expensive. Most of us know enough about programming an untestable system to know that the cost of making a robotic system to do a space esperiment is terribly expensive and a huge undertaking, and yet even so it's STILL cheaper than sending humans. This does NOT mean, as the pro-unmanned pundits claim, that manned flight should be abandoned forever. It means that there is something horribly wrong with the current launch technology. When it is so expensive that the cost of sending the extra weight of a human and his life support is orders of magnitude more expensive than the cost of building a one-use throwaway remote robot with one-use throwaway software controlling it, that means the cost to get a kilogram of *stuff* into space is too expensive to be practical, no matter what that stuff is.
I'd like to see Nasa spend most of its budget on experimenting with various better space launch methods (And more than just one - develop only one design to completion and that's the design you end up using when it's any good or not (like in the case of the space shuttle).)
Get a cheaper method of putting stuff in space, and the whole manned/unmanned argument becomes moot. It takes more resources to move a truckload of cargo with a driver than it does to move a truckload of cargo without a driver, but nobody's wasting their effort arguing in favor of unmanned trucks to solve this "problem". Why? Because the difference in the cost isn't that important when it's not that expensive. It's cheap enough that the cost of building and maintaining the automated robot driver isn't worth it. I'd like to see the space program concentrate on trying to make *that* happen to space travel.
If that means temporarily suspending manned flight for now, then so be it. But don't throw away the idea for all time just because current technology isn't up to the task.
Actually, the bigger problem would be making it impossible to keep track of garbage in space so random debris keeps destroying things you launch. The girder you mention would be harmless on re-entry. Leave it in orbit, along with 100,000 other bits of metal, and the US would be unable to track all of it.
The comprimise: Use a re-usable vehicle for re-usable cargo you mean to bring back (like people, for example), and an expendable vehicle for cargo that's taking a one-way trip (space probes, pushing a satellite or space station into orbit, etc.
Nuclear power != Nuclear propulsion, unless the propulsion was somehow based on electricity, and I'm not even sure how you could do that.
The four missions you mention used nuclear for electricity, not to move the vehicle.
No, the problem is that they are under the control of alternating beancounters with different goals. It takes more than 6 years to complete a major new space project, but in that time the congress changes, and thus the beancounters change their objectives. What makes Nasa so inefficient is the inability to stick with the program. The original shuttle design would have cost twice as much to build, but have been less expensive to operate on each individual launch, and thus have been cheaper in the long run (not to mention safer). But congress slashed the budget before it got that far, leading to the messy white elephant we have today.
Not only that, but he repeated the lie that MS is not allowed to ship Java. Not true. They just can't lie by shipping something that IS NOT JAVA and calling it Java. They decided to pull out of Java if those were the conditions.
But the big difference is that everything Google does runs on open protocols that are public knowlege. Thus it is possible for someone else to replace their service in every way with some new algorithm of their own. To make the analogy with Microsoft closer, you'd have to have a world where HTTP is a proprietary standard that only Google knows how to talk with, so other people would have the hurdle of reverse engineering to overcome first before building their own search engines.
I doubt even Microsoft would be stupid enough to design an operating system that is unusable when offline. It can't possibly work like he suggested.
Actually, all the examples you gave occurred earlier in the article than the point they said they stopped reading. (I also stopped reading at that point, since anyone who actually believes Microsoft would shoot themselves in the foot by making their next version of Windows be incapable of running old Windows software is clearly in fantasy land. Doing that would kill them, and they know it. Most likely the new system would still run the old software, but through an emulation layer of some sort.
It was that british money thing - that curvy 'L' with the slash through it used to represent Pounds. It probably didn't come across in the default font you use.
And when that hypothetical file isn't the only one with attributes "nature" and "trips", then what? Even in databases with searchable attributes, having a unique ID is handy.
Rememeber that the context was about human editability of the config files. In which case having to type twice as much to say the same thing is very relevant, even if you have all the disk space in the world.
The problem that people who believe usability studies doen't see is that ease of learning and ease of use are seperate things. Sometimes the method that's easiest to learn is slowest to actually use. Take menus versus hotkeys for example. The easiest way to learn the options available in an application is to see them arrayed out in front of you visually, and pick them with the mouse - like off a menu. But that is an inherently slow process compared to hitting a key. So an ideal interface should do BOTH, and most these days have learned that. But that's NOT the sort of thing you learn in a usability test that ONLY tests people who have no previous exposure.
Test usability only against newbies and you end up developing an interface that only newbies like, like Windows.
All usability studies are flawed because they contain the implicit assumption that the needs of a user with only a week's exposure are identical to the needs of a user with years of exposure. That's not true, and it's one of the reasons I preferred the Unix way over the Windows way. The Windows way is to state that in order to gain the largest marketshare, you have to err on the side of the newbies even if that makes things painful for the experienced users. Too bad - making newbies like it is how you sell more copies. I used to prefer Gnome over KDE precisely because it was more configurable. Now that that's going away I'll have to reconsider.
I read Card's "Ships of Earth" series. In it, the reader learns that humans on an alien world are the descendants of earthlings who moved there to escape some unspecified worldwide disaster. The world they moved to was meant to be temporary home until enough generations had passed to make earth livable again, and then they would return. The series follows the main characters' journey to find the means to get back home to earth, by chasing historical clues.
That would have been a good story. But Card decided to add elements that made it unenjoyable to read for anyone who isn't a big fan of fundamentalism. (No, not just religion, but fundamentalism.) The colonists who set up this world in the first place decided to set up an overmind satellite around the world, and genetically alter themselves so that their own minds were receptive to this overmind satellite, and the minds of their descendants would be as well. The overmind's job was to keep people from ever thinking of inventions that could be used for warlike purpose, and thus the technology of the world was quite stagnant because many things were forbidden, such as the wheel. That wouldn't have been so bad, except that Card portrayed this as a GOOD thing, as if the reader was supposed to think that's a great idea.
In the end of the series, when the colonists get back to earth to repopulate it, they find a presence in their minds that is even bigger than the overmind satellite was, that they call the oversoul, that they decide to subjugate themselves to. It's obvious that Card meant for the reader to think of this as the real god, and the satellite from the colony before as a human-made god substitute.
That wouldn't have been so bad, except that a main character of the series is portrayed as the hubris-addled unbeliever who won't let the oversoul's thoughts into his head, and as a consequence does criminal things that others aren't capable of thinking of, and how everything is so much nicer when he finally gives in in the end and realizes the error of his ways.
I found the books' moral message so offensive and opposite from actual ethics that it ruined the enjoyment of the series.
It turned me off from reading any other Card novels after that. Everyone tells me that the Ender books are great, but I no longer trust Card to be capable of producing a story I'd enjoy, after reading his anti-thinker, anti-individualist propaganda in the Ships of Earth series. The interview linked to in this article doesn't serve to change my opinion of him.
Plege of allegience, original form: One nation, with liberty and justice for all.
Note what's missing, that got added in the 1950's.
The new Fantasy Island died mostly because people's memory of the old show was so filled with Ricardo "Rich Corinthian Leather" Monteblan that there's just no way anyone else could ever fill the suit properly.
What I'm about to say will probably anger you, but I need to say it: Just like the Bible, the Qur'an has been used by leaders to justify completely opposite points of view, with enough people believing it for the claim to stand, at least among a subset of the population. The key root problem is when people assume that morality is defined by a book instead of the real world, and seek to justify whatever their morals are (crooked or just) by referring back to that book. It currupts both the book and the government. Separation of religion from government is beneficial to both religion and government.
Perhaps my dislike of Islam is a bit personal. I was brought up as a Bah'ii. (I'm not one now.) Crimes against Bah'ii are often justified in the Muslim world because the Bah'ii faith is a major alteration of Islam - changing it into an almost unrecognizable form. This is viewed as blasphemous, and thus severe punishment against Bah'iis seen as justified because they are corrupting Islam. But that is no way to build a peaceful and polite society. Dissenting opinion MUST be allowed on any topic, including religion. If it is not, peace cannot be had.
The Christians also claim to be a religion of peace. Their history shows this is not the case. Thankfully, the faith of Christians is weaker now, much more tempered by sane comparasin to the real world than it was in the days of the Crusades. I see this as an improvement. Unfortunately I don't see Islam getting there for several centuries to come.
His point is also false. The original poster accused the OS of doing something wrong by not clearing memory from one program when alloced by another. This idiot then went on a rant about how malloc() isn't supposed to do that. I, and another, agreed that malloc doesn't do that, but that this is irrelevant to the original point since it's the OS routines beneath malloc that are the ones in question. He then not only decided to be insulting, but apparently ignored the fact that this was said, and couched his reply under the assumption that I don't know how malloc works with regard to not clearing memory.
No. The fact of the matter is that that wasn't the type of memory allocation the original poster was referring to. It's irrelevant what the standard has to say about what libc is supposed to do, since the OS itself is what the poster was complaining about, and the libc is at a level above that. (For example, what if the language being used is assembly language, not C, and therefore malloc and calloc aren't even there?)
[deleting the rest of your idiocy]
Whether the OS clears ram or not has nothing to do with whether or not the C library calls calloc and malloc do so. Calloc and malloc are more high-level than the OS, operating within the memory space given to a single process by the OS. The decision of what appaers in that memory space is made before calloc and malloc are involved. That decision is the providence of the memory pager. If page 1234 belonged to pid 100 before and now you are giving it to pid 101 instead, do you clear it or not? That is something that happens beneath the level of libc.
In this case it's Microsoft's fault either way, since they coded BOTH the OS and the application.
Someone leading Jordan has no right to preach about freedom and fairness, especially with the claim that the islamic religion will help bring it. In Jordan, specifically because Islamic laws are in place, women can be legally murdered by their families for bringing shame to the family through infedelity. This is called "Honor killing". And the family doesn't even need proof. Merely suspecting a woman is sufficient.
Other religions were just as bad once, but Islam is younger, and still at the state of maturity Christianity was during the Crusades - any attrocity is justified provided it results in more devout believers in the one correct religion.
No, I don't have much respect for Islam. So sue me. I also don't have respect for any other religion.
First you claim he was mistaken, then proceed to post the "correction" - which consisted of something that agrees perfectly with what he described happening. Make up your mind.
Which is exactly what the problem is. If you put out a mandate that says, "X is illegal and you must stop X from happening", and X is indistinguishable from something else totally legal, say "Y", then the only thing you can do is ban BOTH X and Y. So the response the Universities will do is to ban file sharing in general. And that's why this is a bad law. YES enforcability should be taken into account when making new laws. If there is no way to distinguish the law makes illegal from what is legal in a fair way, it shouldn't be a law.
Democrats and Republicans have flip-flopped a few times on the issue of local versus federal government. When the parties began, the Democrats preferred state power over federal, and the Republicans favored federal over state, hence the civil war. By the 1990's it was the opposite way around. Now it's turning again. Really I think they both use that state vs federal thing as a cover for whatever their real intentions are at the time. If your party is weak federally but strong locally, you pretend to be in favor of state power. If your party is weak locally and strong federally, you pretend to be in favor of federal power. Really you're just trying to put the power wherever your party is strongest.
(This is the hypothetical "you", not you specificly.)