The idea is NOT about taking the existing ISS and strapping rockets to it. Nautilus-X IS about building something that would ride permanently in space out of technologies similar to what was used in ISS, along with inflatable modules such as Bigelow Aerospace's expandable space habitats. Separate crew modules would provide the ability to land and lift off from planets.
About the only part ISS itself would play is hosting a demonstration version of the ring centrifuge.
Pretty much the "real" interplanetary spacecraft as it has been discussed for decades, but Nautilus-X would be built with mostly known technologies.
Well before WWII women computers, including one named Elizabeth Williams were doing significant work like helping discover Pluto, using mechanical aids such as The Millionaire
That sounds disturbingly like illegal monopoly price-fixing to me. Didn't we settle the issue a long time ago that retailers can't tell their suppliers what price to charge for their goods?
How about I name a price which Amazon will pay me for each copy they sell, then let Amazon decide what to charge to retail buyers? You know, like regular goods, the maker sells it for a profit, the retailer tacks on a their profit margin, and the Holy Free Market decides if it's worth it, and both creator and seller can adjust prices for demand.
Yes, I'm fully aware Wal*Mart uses its dominant position to manipulate suppliers into setting the price to Wal*Mart's like -- in a different enforcement regime (pre-Reagan) they'd be in trouble. I doubt in this 21st world that Amazon will ever get taken to task for it, though. The acolytes of the Holy Free Market will use the argument that if the Free Market doesn't like price-fixing, it will go elsewhere to sell.
The support issue I was getting at has to do with commodity desktop support outsourcing services. Many large companies simply hire a 3rd party to handle the desktop IT and have a SLA to determine response times. There are many places that provide this service and prices are competitive. Finding a desktop support group to handle a widely-deploy thin-client environment takes you out of the realm of commodity services, at least for the time being. If the virtual desktop concept is really viable and becomes more common, you can expect to find more outside support services with the skills to manage it.
I was only thinking of in-house staff in less security-sensitive environments. You're correct that a Citrix environment along with a VPN and similar measures, while expensive, is more than worth the extra cost when a data breach is so potentially damaging. Not that such measures will prevent it or necessarily provide the most cost effective solution, but it at least can be justified at budget time.
The licensing costs end up being the key issue in companies of any size. By the time they set up and license all their people with client machines and all the applications, a company will spend about as much as just buying PCs in bulk from Dell or whoever and site licensing the corporate-standard MS Office suite. Pile on top of that the various fiddly things about virtual desktops that just don't work like having a real desktop PC raising the support costs and it's not competitive.
The central server with dumb terminals era ended long ago, except in niche applications. Desktops and laptops that a capable enough are just too cheap and standardized desktop support contracts from third-party support operations pretty much rule the budget considerations. For virtual and really thin clients to take off, the licensing would have to be notably cheaper and support for the edge cases like traveling remote access would have to be much better.
The list fails for a many reasons. Too many reasons to calculate accurately on a Pentium. On the first page, while describing the bug on said Intel CPU, the author defines floating-point numbers as "numbers too large to be represented as integers".
Pretty much this. The lawyers will make money, the scope of the patents each side holds will be refined by the legal system, and the barriers to entry will be set.
There's nothing to indicate he's changed his views. Linus has otherwise remained largely silent on the issue since this comment in 2000. Normally that would indicate no change, so the onus is really on you to show any evidence that would indicate any new opinion. Yes, various debugging facilities have made it into the mainline kernel. Show me the evidence that Linus now likes debuggers, or more to the original point, that he now thinks kernel development should be easy.
Ever since 2002 the US government has been scaring its citizens with a bizarre grand conspiracy theory concocted by DHS and TSA to convince Americans they are in mortal danger from everything from shoes to ink cartridges, and the only solution is to spend vast sums of money on security and endless war while depriving the people of more and more of their liberties.
Well, Linux IS Unix, just without the trademark, but I didn't really come here to correct your misconception on that.
What I wanted to highlight was the reality behind your statements "we have fifty times as many Windows servers as the other two combined" and "The building where I work has a ratio of about 1 production Windows server for every four employees. If you count non-production servers, we have more Windows servers than people."
This is most certainly not because Windows is so much better or more popular than the other platforms at your place of work. Any experienced sysadmin who is not a Microsoft apologist will confirm that for any typical datacenter server function, it's necessary to have more instances of Windows to get the same capacity, reliability and uptime as few instances of other server operating systems. It's just the nature of the Microsoft stack that effective load-sharing and failover are a necessity in capacity planning. Anyone who argues that a single instance of Windows is equal to a single instance of AIX or Linux has simply never been part of real world datacenter administration.
In short, your employer may have a lot more Windows servers than anything else, but that certainly doesn't mean Windows is better or more popular -- it just demonstrates how the TCO of Windows is terrible.
I was going to post that I'm a mac owner that doesn't own a Windows machine, but then I remembered I still have that 386 with Windows 3.11 sitting at the bottom of my pile of old unused hardware.
By the way, can we please stop using the term "PC" to automatically mean a computer with Windows on it? I've owned many Personal Computers, some from before Microsoft even existed as a company.
I can see why Joel would advocate Duct Tape Programming. Systems shipped by Duct Tape Programmers tend to "work" for some subset of what the users actually need or want. This results in a lot of bugs being filed, so there's a need to track, assign, fix, and verify bugs. As it happens, the main product that Joel's company makes is bug-tracking software.
On the flip side, Joel, do you REALLY want your company associated with the attitude that throwing something out there that sorta works is better than shipping a quality product?
Nine times out of ten, the correct answer to a question posted to stackoverflow is "quit your job and go back to something you're qualified for, like working the register at McDonalds".
Slashdot Mirror
Bad summary of what Nautilus-X is about, but the article itself fails in the opening paragraphs as well.
A better summary of the idea from physorg of the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle.
The idea is NOT about taking the existing ISS and strapping rockets to it. Nautilus-X IS about building something that would ride permanently in space out of technologies similar to what was used in ISS, along with inflatable modules such as Bigelow Aerospace's expandable space habitats. Separate crew modules would provide the ability to land and lift off from planets.
About the only part ISS itself would play is hosting a demonstration version of the ring centrifuge.
Pretty much the "real" interplanetary spacecraft as it has been discussed for decades, but Nautilus-X would be built with mostly known technologies.
Stay up without a reboot every 2^32 seconds?
Well before WWII women computers, including one named Elizabeth Williams were doing significant work like helping discover Pluto, using mechanical aids such as The Millionaire
Interesting that someone has found the ability for your iPad to be wiped remotely without your knowledge to be a "benefit".
That sounds disturbingly like illegal monopoly price-fixing to me. Didn't we settle the issue a long time ago that retailers can't tell their suppliers what price to charge for their goods?
How about I name a price which Amazon will pay me for each copy they sell, then let Amazon decide what to charge to retail buyers? You know, like regular goods, the maker sells it for a profit, the retailer tacks on a their profit margin, and the Holy Free Market decides if it's worth it, and both creator and seller can adjust prices for demand.
Yes, I'm fully aware Wal*Mart uses its dominant position to manipulate suppliers into setting the price to Wal*Mart's like -- in a different enforcement regime (pre-Reagan) they'd be in trouble. I doubt in this 21st world that Amazon will ever get taken to task for it, though. The acolytes of the Holy Free Market will use the argument that if the Free Market doesn't like price-fixing, it will go elsewhere to sell.
The support issue I was getting at has to do with commodity desktop support outsourcing services. Many large companies simply hire a 3rd party to handle the desktop IT and have a SLA to determine response times. There are many places that provide this service and prices are competitive. Finding a desktop support group to handle a widely-deploy thin-client environment takes you out of the realm of commodity services, at least for the time being. If the virtual desktop concept is really viable and becomes more common, you can expect to find more outside support services with the skills to manage it.
I was only thinking of in-house staff in less security-sensitive environments. You're correct that a Citrix environment along with a VPN and similar measures, while expensive, is more than worth the extra cost when a data breach is so potentially damaging. Not that such measures will prevent it or necessarily provide the most cost effective solution, but it at least can be justified at budget time.
The licensing costs end up being the key issue in companies of any size. By the time they set up and license all their people with client machines and all the applications, a company will spend about as much as just buying PCs in bulk from Dell or whoever and site licensing the corporate-standard MS Office suite. Pile on top of that the various fiddly things about virtual desktops that just don't work like having a real desktop PC raising the support costs and it's not competitive.
The central server with dumb terminals era ended long ago, except in niche applications. Desktops and laptops that a capable enough are just too cheap and standardized desktop support contracts from third-party support operations pretty much rule the budget considerations. For virtual and really thin clients to take off, the licensing would have to be notably cheaper and support for the edge cases like traveling remote access would have to be much better.
The list fails for a many reasons. Too many reasons to calculate accurately on a Pentium. On the first page, while describing the bug on said Intel CPU, the author defines floating-point numbers as "numbers too large to be represented as integers".
Pretty much this. The lawyers will make money, the scope of the patents each side holds will be refined by the legal system, and the barriers to entry will be set.
But "This is my XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System, there are many like it but this one is mine" doesn't have the same ring to it.
Could you be specific about which fallacious arguments you have in mind? Preferably, cite 3 different fallacies with multiple sources for each one.
Natalie "hot grits" Portman has to be involved there somehow, also.
There's nothing to indicate he's changed his views. Linus has otherwise remained largely silent on the issue since this comment in 2000. Normally that would indicate no change, so the onus is really on you to show any evidence that would indicate any new opinion. Yes, various debugging facilities have made it into the mainline kernel. Show me the evidence that Linus now likes debuggers, or more to the original point, that he now thinks kernel development should be easy.
So am I. Your point, exactly?
As I recall, Linus has pretty strong opinions on why it's a Good Thing that kernel development isn't "so easy a caveman could do it".
Ever since 2002 the US government has been scaring its citizens with a bizarre grand conspiracy theory concocted by DHS and TSA to convince Americans they are in mortal danger from everything from shoes to ink cartridges, and the only solution is to spend vast sums of money on security and endless war while depriving the people of more and more of their liberties.
Well, Linux IS Unix, just without the trademark, but I didn't really come here to correct your misconception on that.
What I wanted to highlight was the reality behind your statements "we have fifty times as many Windows servers as the other two combined" and "The building where I work has a ratio of about 1 production Windows server for every four employees. If you count non-production servers, we have more Windows servers than people."
This is most certainly not because Windows is so much better or more popular than the other platforms at your place of work. Any experienced sysadmin who is not a Microsoft apologist will confirm that for any typical datacenter server function, it's necessary to have more instances of Windows to get the same capacity, reliability and uptime as few instances of other server operating systems. It's just the nature of the Microsoft stack that effective load-sharing and failover are a necessity in capacity planning. Anyone who argues that a single instance of Windows is equal to a single instance of AIX or Linux has simply never been part of real world datacenter administration.
In short, your employer may have a lot more Windows servers than anything else, but that certainly doesn't mean Windows is better or more popular -- it just demonstrates how the TCO of Windows is terrible.
and the biggie: ultraviolet RADIATION!
By the way, can we please stop using the term "PC" to automatically mean a computer with Windows on it? I've owned many Personal Computers, some from before Microsoft even existed as a company.
I'm skeptical. Next they'll be telling us that titanium oxide can block sunlight!
Shouldn't this story be tagged "ruby"?
I can see why Joel would advocate Duct Tape Programming. Systems shipped by Duct Tape Programmers tend to "work" for some subset of what the users actually need or want. This results in a lot of bugs being filed, so there's a need to track, assign, fix, and verify bugs. As it happens, the main product that Joel's company makes is bug-tracking software. On the flip side, Joel, do you REALLY want your company associated with the attitude that throwing something out there that sorta works is better than shipping a quality product?
Nine times out of ten, the correct answer to a question posted to stackoverflow is "quit your job and go back to something you're qualified for, like working the register at McDonalds".
If only they were equipped with an Itanic.