So, Rick Berman doesn't know the answer to, "Why did Star Trek do badly?
Of course not because the answer is, "Rick Berman".
Fans left in droves over the last decade because of his constant attempts to transform Star Trek into a touchy-feely franchise about emotions that occasionally had some adventure from time to time, instead of the other way around like it originally was under Roddenbery.
Look at these two ideas that *sound* like a great setting for an awesome sci-fi series, but in practice they fell flat: 1 - A federation ship on it's own stuck too far away from home to get any help has to find it's own way home and make it's own repairs by hook or by crook in a totally alien section of the universe. Great idea, right? Yeah, on paper. But in practice we got some stupid show about a crew we don't like, who we wouldn't care if they all died tomorrow because they are that annoying.
Okay, but how about this one: 2 - The adventures of the very first enterprise ship, back in the days before Earth had become powerful, back when it was just getting it's feet wet and making mistakes and learning the hard way how to make it in space. Sounds great, right? Yeah, but then Berman, putz that he is, instead gave us a show about feelings, and how humans are all stoopid, and where they actually spent an entire episode trying to learn what one crewman's favorite food was. (No, I'm not kidding!). It's like one of those terribly boring episodes in the middle of an anime series where all they do is eat and go shopping, but stretched across the entire series instead of just one episode.
The best way for Berman to save Trek would be for him to quit and give the helm back to people who know how to entertain.
Technologically, we aren't that far past the radio transmission age. That was still less than 100 years ago. It would not take a drastic catastrophe of the human race to drop technology that far. It wouldn't even need a total collapse of civilization.
Your point rests on too many assumptions. 1 - it assumes that aliens would *want* to try to contact us and therefore the abscense of such contact is evidence against them having good enough technology. That's projecting human motivation onto an abviously nonhuman species. 2 - It assumes that alien sentience exists (I'm pretty sure there's life on other worlds, but I'm not so sure it developed any sentience. After all, here on earth with all our varied animal species, only one ever developed signifigant levels of sentience.) 3 - It assumes that alien technology developed along the same track ours did and therefore MUST be using radio waves as a means of communication, as opposed to something totaly alien we've never thought of so far and haven't thought to look for. 4 - It assumes the alien sentient life would have existed somewhere within our observable zone of space (limited as it is by the speed of light and our relatively short history so far of looking for said intelligence with radio waves.) 5 - It assumes that we can't possibly be the first race to have reached this point in technology, since it assumes that if it was possible to survive this level of technology, somoene else would have already done so before us.
Science fiction often explores the notion that we meet aliens who are vastly advanced compared to us, and paints a scary picture of how humbling and dangerous that would be. I'm far more afraid of the other possiblity - that we *are* the most advanced race in our galaxy. The amount of responsibility that would dump on our shoulders would be more than we could handle, I think.
Re:I'll have to see the bandwidth tests first.
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A Sound Server For X
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· Score: 1
I am running everything off of a diskless xterm with networked sound. Give me some credit.
Then you should have said so, since that's not a typical setup these days, and is highly relevant to your point. Instead you talked about bandwith of the sound and not the gui.
Re:I'll have to see the bandwidth tests first.
on
A Sound Server For X
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· Score: 1
He was referring to the bandwith used by running XMMS's X gui remotely, not the bandwith used by XMMS's audio data.
Re:I'll have to see the bandwidth tests first.
on
A Sound Server For X
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· Score: 1
It's not X itself that is to blame. It's many of the applications written for it. All too often people get lazy and forget that calls to the X server shouldn't be needlessly repeated. If information returned by an X call isn't going to change, then get the info just once and remember it in a variable - don't repeat the same call over and over in a complex mathematical expression, for example. X *can* be efficient, but it doesn't force the applications to be effiecient, so many of them turned out not to be. (Try running the old xterm over a modem link sometime, and compare it to something like gnome-terminal or konsole over that link. Even though the programs are essentially doing the exact same amount of screen manipulation, the old xterm is very fast and responsive even over a slow link. It doesn't feel much slower than a straight telnet or ssh would over the modem connection. In the olden days of X11, people still designed X applications not to be wasteful of bandwith. Today they don't really care anymore because bandwith is cheap.
Re:What's wrong with the old ones?
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A Sound Server For X
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· Score: 4, Interesting
For one thing, I've wanted for a long time the convenience of being able, in one setting, to describe the remote-relationship for all media. I don't want to have to say, "send my $DISPLAY to this host, and then here's a command-line arg to do the same thing for this one music file I want to play." I want to be able to say, "Send all my media to $DISPLAY, both visual and audio" and then be able to have all X programs pick up on that.
Okay, on order for this program to work, you need to have an ISP that lets you upload any arbitrary CGI script you feel like. So really, how is this a change in the security level??
Before this program, you had to write a script like this (for example):
Even if I accepted the premises that your argument is built on, that still doesn't prove the point you think it does. It is not necessary to wipe out the entire population of a species in order for it to stop sending radio signals. All it takes is enough of a step backward in technology that it is no longer possible. (In other words, a fall of civilization rather than a total wipeout of the species.)
Destroying life on earth is not as easy as we make it out to be. Life has survived meteor impacts and ice ages. Although it was definately transformed by these hardships, it didn't go away. I doubt we could do it even if we actively tried, and set off every nuclear weapon in existence. Destroying humanity, on the other hand (but leaving single-celled critters, some hardy plants, rats, cockroaches and the like around to evolve into new things) is possible but difficult. It would require all-out nuclear war. Resource mismanagement has the potential to destroy cultures and nations, but not all of humanity. Our ancestors lived through ice ages.
No. My point was directly related to what you said because you made the same exact implied premise here that you did in the previous post: that if you stop funding program X that this automatically means more funding for program Y. You can't make that assumption when programs X and Y are just a few out of hundreds being funded from the same pool of money. If a government shows a propensity for not giving much funding to program Y, that attitude won't change just because program X also becomes one they no longer want to fund very much.
It's not the fact that the technology is 30 years old that's the problem, but the fact that the Shuttle itself is 30 years old. People still make military aircraft on the same design as 30 years ago in a lot of circumstances. It's the exposure to the wear and tear that's the problem, not the design.
No. Only one shuttle failed, not two. Challenger worked perfectly on January 28 of 1986. It was the solid fuel booster rocket *attached to it* that failed. Why is this relevant? Because the boosters don't get the same amount of re-use as the shuttles themselves, and the boosters are interchangable. The booster that failed on Jan 28, 1986 was not part of Challenger and may vary well have been used previously on Columbia, Discovery, or Atlantis or all of the above.
The technology for space habitats won't improve if we never excercise it. You cant just "wait for the technology to improve" and then do it. It improves *because* you are trying it and learning what works and what doesn't.
Yes, but the shuttle is still necessary for the ISS program to continue because the Russian vehicles don't carry large payloads. The Shuttle is still needed to carry the rest of the modules up to the station as they are completed. The Russians can do the routine supply runs and can send astronauts to and from the station to keep it going, but that's about it. Ideally, the system should have been designed like that all along in my opinion (use the shuttles only for the big jobs, use the Soyuz's for the routine stuff.)
The future of space travel is unmanned probes exploring every corner of the solar system.
Nah. The future of space travel is finding a cheaper way to escape the gravity well, so that we can get to the point where we no longer have to care about whether or not sending humans is wasteful. The only reason unmanned flight works better is because our launch technology makes heavy payloads very expensive. If we had better launch vehicles, we wouldn't give a flying fsck about manned vs unmanned.
You missed the relevant detail - it blew up during the re-entry phase where it normally is on fire. Missing or faulty heat tiles could also cause the breakup. A bad angle could cause the breakup. I guess it was like this: Some heat tiles failed or were missing on one spot, causing one small part of the shuttle to overheat and possibly even melt. If the failure of that part caused the shuttle to be unable to maintain its orientation, then it could tumble into an angle where the top of the craft (where there are no heat tiles) is exposed to the re-entry burn. At that point it would just get ripped to shreds since metal gets soft as it nears its melting point.
Sickening? That people are dumb enough to think money spent on space is sucking money away from whatever their favorite program is? Or that they aren't dumb but are being deceptive about it on purpose? Yes, either way it is pretty sickening. If that money wasn't being spend on NASA it wouldn't magically end up being spent on healthcare in Africa. It would end up getting spent on other things. The health care problems in Africa won't go away by foreigners spending money on it. It can only go away by getting those countries on their feet to the point where they can afford to care for their own. The poor state of health in african nations is the symptom. The cause is poverty. (Yes, *that* can be helped by the actions of rich nations, but instead we waste our money on the symptoms and not the causes.)
If you were going to sabotage the shuttle, why would you choose a method that doesn't take effect until re-entry? It would be easier to make something go wrong at liftoff, and there would be more damage on the ground that way too. And it would be far easier to just get close enough with a weapon to fire on it than it would to get close enough to sabotage it without being noticed. Just put enough holes in one of the booster rockets, or use a cheap heat seeking missle. Right at the moment when it is lifting off it wouldn't take much to make it fail catastrophically.
Astronomers have evidence that within 500 years or so, humanity on earth will be wiped out by nuculear or biological warfare. This evidence is necessarily indirect, but many find it compelling.
If you don't want to look like a looney, you're going to have to back that claim up with something. Hint: a prediction is not evidence.
You can't separate the military and NASA. One of the reasons the Shuttle is so expensive is that it has a giant payload, which was put there in the design because it is a military as well as civillian vehicle. The reason Shuttle flights are wasteful are for the same resaon it's a waste of gas to drive a bus with only 2 passengers. The vehicle was designed to be able to carry a lot more than it typically actually does. But just because you don't want to drive a bus to the grocery store and back doesn't mean you should never have any busses. For the occassions where you do fill them with a lot of people, they are worth it. And when we *do* want to send up something large, the shuttle is the only way we currently have. I do agree that it's stupid to be using it just to ferry a small number of people to the space station, but I don't agree that manned flight is a waste. I think your faith in the power of artificial intelligence is too optomistic. It does not take millions of dollars to teach a human being how to turn a wrench.
Your claim that consumers have the power to stop clear channel if they wanted to is based on the false premise that the radio station cal tell if I'm listening to them or not. The medium of radio has no feedback. There's no Neilson ratings for radio. If I drive down the street with my car radio tuned to Station X, Station Y, or nothing at all, it all looks the same to the outside observer.
The radio industry has nothing to go on but guesswork. Do you know how nationally syndicated radio shows are priced? Based on how many listeners there theoretically *could be* within the transmitter's range. That's all they have to go on. That's one reason you don't hear strange shows like Dr. Demento in many large cities - the cost is too expensive since millions of people are within the transmitter's range.
The consumer feedback that normally exists in most free market systems doesn't exist in radio.
The purpose of a corporation is to give a group of people all the rights of an individual but not all the responsibilities of one. When was the last time a corporation got thrown in prison? It isn't physically possible to visit the same punishments on a corporation for wrongdoing that can be visited upon individuals, and it is that that makes the system lopsided in favor of corporations over their consumers. If a corporation violates *YOUR* copyright it isn't possible to give them a punishment that hurts them as much as the punishment you would get if you violated THIER copyright.
Your whole point about name spaces if simply false. Its no harder to run 2 types of java than it is to run two types of spread sheets or two types of word processors./
Then you don't understand what I meant by name clash. With java you are supposed to be able to mix and match.class files from seperate sources under one instance of a JVM, just like one Windows executable can use.DLL's from many sources. The name clash is the one that prevents one JVM from having access to both the standard functionality and the MS functionality in the same run.
To avoid it you have to run an entirely different engine that uses a different library (.class file) for the main java.* classes. You cannot for example have one program using Sun's classes invoke a class from MS's classes, and visa versa in a combined way under the same JVM instance, which is the way Java was intended to work. The only way they "coexist" is as entirely seperate executables, entirely seperate JVM's. That is ONLY necessary because of the name clash between the standards-compliant versions of the classes and MS's version of the classes..class files are SUPPOSED to work under a JVM other than the one they were compiled for. That's what happens every time you download an applet and run it on a different system than the one that it was developed on. You wouldn't NEED two different JVM's running if it wasn't for the name clash in the library routines that prevents you from having both the standard version and the MS enhancements accessable to the same running VM.
Does that setting apply individually to each browser window so that some can run MS's JVM while others are running Sun's JVM? Didn't think so. So they still cannot coexist, if your business depends on an MS JVM tool for something like time tracking, you can't have that open and running while you use the real JVM from Sun for something else.
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So, Rick Berman doesn't know the answer to, "Why did Star Trek do badly?
Of course not because the answer is, "Rick Berman".
Fans left in droves over the last decade because of his constant attempts to transform Star Trek into a touchy-feely franchise about emotions that occasionally had some adventure from time to time, instead of the other way around like it originally was under Roddenbery.
Look at these two ideas that *sound* like a great setting for an awesome sci-fi series, but in practice they fell flat: 1 - A federation ship on it's own stuck too far away from home to get any help has to find it's own way home and make it's own repairs by hook or by crook in a totally alien section of the universe. Great idea, right? Yeah, on paper. But in practice we got some stupid show about a crew we don't like, who we wouldn't care if they all died tomorrow because they are that annoying.
Okay, but how about this one: 2 - The adventures of the very first enterprise ship, back in the days before Earth had become powerful, back when it was just getting it's feet wet and making mistakes and learning the hard way how to make it in space. Sounds great, right? Yeah, but then Berman, putz that he is, instead gave us a show about feelings, and how humans are all stoopid, and where they actually spent an entire episode trying to learn what one crewman's favorite food was. (No, I'm not kidding!). It's like one of those terribly boring episodes in the middle of an anime series where all they do is eat and go shopping, but stretched across the entire series instead of just one episode.
The best way for Berman to save Trek would be for him to quit and give the helm back to people who know how to entertain.
Technologically, we aren't that far past the radio transmission age. That was still less than 100 years ago. It would not take a drastic catastrophe of the human race to drop technology that far. It wouldn't even need a total collapse of civilization.
Your point rests on too many assumptions. 1 - it assumes that aliens would *want* to try to contact us and therefore the abscense of such contact is evidence against them having good enough technology. That's projecting human motivation onto an abviously nonhuman species. 2 - It assumes that alien sentience exists (I'm pretty sure there's life on other worlds, but I'm not so sure it developed any sentience. After all, here on earth with all our varied animal species, only one ever developed signifigant levels of sentience.) 3 - It assumes that alien technology developed along the same track ours did and therefore MUST be using radio waves as a means of communication, as opposed to something totaly alien we've never thought of so far and haven't thought to look for. 4 - It assumes the alien sentient life would have existed somewhere within our observable zone of space (limited as it is by the speed of light and our relatively short history so far of looking for said intelligence with radio waves.) 5 - It assumes that we can't possibly be the first race to have reached this point in technology, since it assumes that if it was possible to survive this level of technology, somoene else would have already done so before us.
Science fiction often explores the notion that we meet aliens who are vastly advanced compared to us, and paints a scary picture of how humbling and dangerous that would be. I'm far more afraid of the other possiblity - that we *are* the most advanced race in our galaxy. The amount of responsibility that would dump on our shoulders would be more than we could handle, I think.
Then you should have said so, since that's not a typical setup these days, and is highly relevant to your point. Instead you talked about bandwith of the sound and not the gui.
He was referring to the bandwith used by running XMMS's X gui remotely, not the bandwith used by XMMS's audio data.
It's not X itself that is to blame. It's many of the applications written for it. All too often people get lazy and forget that calls to the X server shouldn't be needlessly repeated. If information returned by an X call isn't going to change, then get the info just once and remember it in a variable - don't repeat the same call over and over in a complex mathematical expression, for example. X *can* be efficient, but it doesn't force the applications to be effiecient, so many of them turned out not to be.
(Try running the old xterm over a modem link sometime, and compare it to something like gnome-terminal or konsole over that link. Even though the programs are essentially doing the exact same amount of screen manipulation, the old xterm is very fast and responsive even over a slow link. It doesn't feel much slower than a straight telnet or ssh would over the modem connection. In the olden days of X11, people still designed X applications not to be wasteful of bandwith. Today they don't really care anymore because bandwith is cheap.
For one thing, I've wanted for a long time the convenience of being able, in one setting, to describe the remote-relationship for all media. I don't want to have to say, "send my $DISPLAY to this host, and then here's a command-line arg to do the same thing for this one music file I want to play." I want to be able to say, "Send all my media to $DISPLAY, both visual and audio" and then be able to have all X programs pick up on that.
Versus using the cgi shell program and typing "someEvilCommand -arg1 -arg2" at it's prompt?Before this program, you had to write a script like this (for example):
Wishful thinking on the part of gullable advertisers.
Even if I accepted the premises that your argument is built on, that still doesn't prove the point you think it does. It is not necessary to wipe out the entire population of a species in order for it to stop sending radio signals. All it takes is enough of a step backward in technology that it is no longer possible. (In other words, a fall of civilization rather than a total wipeout of the species.)
Destroying life on earth is not as easy as we make it out to be. Life has survived meteor impacts and ice ages. Although it was definately transformed by these hardships, it didn't go away. I doubt we could do it even if we actively tried, and set off every nuclear weapon in existence.
Destroying humanity, on the other hand (but leaving single-celled critters, some hardy plants, rats, cockroaches and the like around to evolve into new things) is possible but difficult. It would require all-out nuclear war. Resource mismanagement has the potential to destroy cultures and nations, but not all of humanity. Our ancestors lived through ice ages.
No. My point was directly related to what you said because you made the same exact implied premise here that you did in the previous post: that if you stop funding program X that this automatically means more funding for program Y. You can't make that assumption when programs X and Y are just a few out of hundreds being funded from the same pool of money. If a government shows a propensity for not giving much funding to program Y, that attitude won't change just because program X also becomes one they no longer want to fund very much.
Wouldn't the takeoff stresses be stronger than the landing ones? The re-entry burn would also be more of a problem than the bounce from landing.
It's not the fact that the technology is 30 years old that's the problem, but the fact that the Shuttle itself is 30 years old. People still make military aircraft on the same design as 30 years ago in a lot of circumstances. It's the exposure to the wear and tear that's the problem, not the design.
No. Only one shuttle failed, not two. Challenger worked perfectly on January 28 of 1986. It was the solid fuel booster rocket *attached to it* that failed. Why is this relevant? Because the boosters don't get the same amount of re-use as the shuttles themselves, and the boosters are interchangable. The booster that failed on Jan 28, 1986 was not part of Challenger and may vary well have been used previously on Columbia, Discovery, or Atlantis or all of the above.
The technology for space habitats won't improve if we never excercise it. You cant just "wait for the technology to improve" and then do it. It improves *because* you are trying it and learning what works and what doesn't.
Yes, but the shuttle is still necessary for the ISS program to continue because the Russian vehicles don't carry large payloads. The Shuttle is still needed to carry the rest of the modules up to the station as they are completed. The Russians can do the routine supply runs and can send astronauts to and from the station to keep it going, but that's about it. Ideally, the system should have been designed like that all along in my opinion (use the shuttles only for the big jobs, use the Soyuz's for the routine stuff.)
Nah. The future of space travel is finding a cheaper way to escape the gravity well, so that we can get to the point where we no longer have to care about whether or not sending humans is wasteful. The only reason unmanned flight works better is because our launch technology makes heavy payloads very expensive. If we had better launch vehicles, we wouldn't give a flying fsck about manned vs unmanned.
You missed the relevant detail - it blew up during the re-entry phase where it normally is on fire. Missing or faulty heat tiles could also cause the breakup. A bad angle could cause the breakup. I guess it was like this: Some heat tiles failed or were missing on one spot, causing one small part of the shuttle to overheat and possibly even melt. If the failure of that part caused the shuttle to be unable to maintain its orientation, then it could tumble into an angle where the top of the craft (where there are no heat tiles) is exposed to the re-entry burn. At that point it would just get ripped to shreds since metal gets soft as it nears its melting point.
Sickening? That people are dumb enough to think money spent on space is sucking money away from whatever their favorite program is? Or that they aren't dumb but are being deceptive about it on purpose? Yes, either way it is pretty sickening.
If that money wasn't being spend on NASA it wouldn't magically end up being spent on healthcare in Africa. It would end up getting spent on other things. The health care problems in Africa won't go away by foreigners spending money on it. It can only go away by getting those countries on their feet to the point where they can afford to care for their own. The poor state of health in african nations is the symptom. The cause is poverty. (Yes, *that* can be helped by the actions of rich nations, but instead we waste our money on the symptoms and not the causes.)
If you were going to sabotage the shuttle, why would you choose a method that doesn't take effect until re-entry? It would be easier to make something go wrong at liftoff, and there would be more damage
on the ground that way too. And it would be far
easier to just get close enough with a weapon to fire on it than it would to get close enough to sabotage it without being noticed. Just put enough holes in one of the booster rockets, or use a cheap heat seeking missle. Right at the moment when it is lifting off it wouldn't take much to make it fail catastrophically.
If you don't want to look like a looney, you're going to have to back that claim up with something.
Hint: a prediction is not evidence.
You can't separate the military and NASA. One of the reasons the Shuttle is so expensive is that it has a giant payload, which was put there in the design because it is a military as well as civillian vehicle. The reason Shuttle flights are wasteful are for the same resaon it's a waste of gas to drive a bus with only 2 passengers. The vehicle was designed to be able to carry a lot more than it typically actually does. But just because you don't want to drive a bus to the grocery store and back doesn't mean you should never have any busses. For the occassions where you do fill them with a lot of people, they are worth it. And when we *do* want to send up something large, the shuttle is the only way we currently have. I do agree that it's stupid to be using it just to ferry a small number of people to the space station, but I don't agree that manned flight is a waste. I think your faith in the power of artificial intelligence is too optomistic. It does not take millions of dollars to teach a human being how to turn a wrench.
Your claim that consumers have the power to stop clear channel if they wanted to is based on the false premise that the radio station cal tell if I'm listening to them or not. The medium of radio has no feedback. There's no Neilson ratings for radio. If I drive down the street with my car radio tuned to Station X, Station Y, or nothing at all, it all looks the same to the outside observer.
The radio industry has nothing to go on but guesswork. Do you know how nationally syndicated radio shows are priced? Based on how many listeners there theoretically *could be* within the transmitter's range. That's all they have to go on. That's one reason you don't hear strange shows like Dr. Demento in many large cities - the cost is too expensive since millions of people are within the transmitter's range.
The consumer feedback that normally exists in most free market systems doesn't exist in radio.
The purpose of a corporation is to give a group of people all the rights of an individual but not all the responsibilities of one. When was the last time a corporation got thrown in prison?
It isn't physically possible to visit the same punishments on a corporation for wrongdoing that can be visited upon individuals, and it is that that makes the system lopsided in favor of corporations over their consumers. If a corporation violates *YOUR* copyright it isn't possible to give them a punishment that hurts them as much as the punishment you would get if you violated THIER copyright.
Then you don't understand what I meant by name clash. With java you are supposed to be able to mix and match
To avoid it you have to run an entirely different engine that uses a different library (.class file) for the main java.* classes. You cannot for example have one program using Sun's classes invoke a class from MS's classes, and visa versa in a combined way under the same JVM instance, which is the way Java was intended to work. The only way they "coexist" is as entirely seperate executables, entirely seperate JVM's. That is ONLY necessary because of the name clash between the standards-compliant versions of the classes and MS's version of the classes.
Does that setting apply individually to each browser window so that some can run MS's JVM while others are running Sun's JVM? Didn't think so. So they still cannot coexist, if your business depends on an MS JVM tool for something like time tracking, you can't have that open and running while you use the real JVM from Sun for something else.