His estimate was way off. While it is believed that there's water vapor in Jupiter's atmosphere, it's a trace amount, way too small as a fraction of the total composition to be measured from a distance.
Basically there's about as much water vapor in Jupiter's atmosphere, in terms of partial pressure, as there is phosphine in ours.
I don't know where you're getting your information. We have yet to find water (or water ice) anywhere in the universe that's not on Earth.
Yes, spectrographic studies have implied that molecular water may be highly abundant in the universe, but that's obviously not the same thing.
And there's a theory that Europe might have a highly saline liquid sea beneath its surface (there's electromagnetic evidence to that effect), but it's never been observed.
There's a huge difference between thinking that water might be possible on other planets and actually finding it there. So far we have many (mutually contradictory, ill-supported) theories, but absolutely no actual observation.
You're absolutely right. I should have been more clear. The force per unit time you get out of a solar sail is bounded. Once the "sail" is perpendicular to the sun, the force is as high as it's going to get. And it's not high enough.
As for citing a science-fiction novel as a source of actual science...I dunno, dude. I probably wouldn't have gone down that path. Because now, you know, you've got me laughing uproariously and all that.
It sounds like you didn't quite understand my point.
What we're talking about here is a minimum-energy or Hohmann transfer orbit. To enter a transfer orbit from outside the Earth's orbit, you'd apply a retrograde acceleration to slow down, causing your orbit to bend inward toward the sun. Along the way, you accelerate because you're heading "downhill," gravitationally speaking. When you intersect Earth's orbit you're just ahead of the planet (because you timed it that way), so you have to conduct another retrograde acceleration, reducing your speed to Earth-orbital velocity.
The first application of acceleration can be applied slowly if necessary. It makes the math more complicated, but it can be done, especially if you have the ability to correct your orbit as the acceleration happens. But the second acceleration has to be applied quickly, because you're basically transiting Earth at that point. You're on a hyperbolic path around the Earth, so you need to slow down, and quickly, like as in hours. Changing a body's motion in a short amount of time requires more force than changing a body's motion in a long amount of time. That's why a solar sail could never be used for something like this. It can only apply a constant amount of force, and the amount of force applied could never be sufficient to change an asteroid's motion so drastically in such a short time.
It's not just impractical, though it is impractical. It's also mathematically impossible because the force per unit time you get out of a solar sail is constant.
Use a solar sail with size proportional to the mass of your geographical feature.
What proportion, exactly? Given that we're talking about a body in an orbit considerably outside that of the Earth, it would first have to be slowed to fall in toward the sun. Doing that would require a massive amount of energy. Then, once it intersects Earth's orbit, it would be necessary to slow the body again, dumping all the kinetic energy it accumulated during its long fall toward the sun, and then again during its translation toward Earth. That would require an even greater amount of energy, but more importantly, it would have to be delivered in a relatively short amount of time -- hours at the very most.
Sorry, but a "solar sail" could never do the job, even it were possible to manufacture and erect one, say, ten million miles across.
I wouldn't even know where to begin to do the math on that one. To transfer even a tiny space capsule the size of a Volkswagen from Earth-orbital velocity to Solar-orbital velocity requires a huge expenditure of energy. I can't imagine what it would take to change the orbit of an object the size of a geographical feature.
Those hotels could be shielded by enormous masses of material from a captured asteroid.
That sound you hear is the author's credibility flying right out the window. "Captured asteroid?" Is this guy out of his mind? Does he have the foggiest idea of the delta vees involved in such a fantasy?
Thanks for reminding me. The slide said, and I quote,
Quartz 2D Goes "Extreme"
That's where the misnomer came from. And yes, Quartz Debug does refer to "Quartz 2D Extreme," so maybe it is an internal name. But it's not one I've ever heard before.
And what I have seen is instance after instance in message boards like this one where people get completely befuddled about the difference between Quartz, Quartz Extreme, Quartz 2D and "Quartz 2D Extreme." It's really confusing. So if everybody stopped calling Quartz 2D "Quartz 2D Extreme," that'd be fine by me.
Um. That answer would be incorrect. We ship iMacs with 512 MB. We ship the single 1.8 GHz Power Mac G4 with 256 MB of RAM. I'm pretty sure just out-and-out lying isn't the right answer.
Um. Yeah. I know. But I've never heard the name "Quartz 2D Extreme" inside the company. It's possible that it's just a new name that never made it over this way.
In any case, it doesn't really matter one way or the other. Because Adobe doesn't use Quartz 2D at all. They use QuickDraw. And we're hardly going to stop supporting QuickDraw. We've deprecated it, sure, but it's not going away, specifically because there are thousands of applications out there that depend on it.
Long story short, a fancy-ass graphics card is not going to make Illustrator any faster.
(On a sidebar, I'd be careful about taking things that Siracusa says as gospel. He's certainly one smart cookie, but there are some things he's written lately that are just plain wrong. His fascination with extended attributes is an example. He concluded that it was part of some bizarre filesystem-dependent metadata scheme. It's not. It's something we added at the API level to support POSIX ACLs. So just let the buyer beware regarding his stuff, okay?)
Here's a lesson in economics for you, free of charge.
Every retailer buys RAM from a manufacturer. For sake of argument, let's say that manufacturer is RAMCO. If you go to RAMCO and ask to buy RAM, they're going to say no, because they're not a retailer. They're a wholesaler. They only sell to people who intend to re-sell their RAM.
So instead you go to a retailer. You have two choices. One, BIGCO, does sixty-five skrillion box tops a year in business with RAMCO. The other, LITTLECO, only does ten thousand box tops a year in business. So BIGCO is able to negotiate a lower price per unit with RAMCO, while LITTLECO has to pay more.
Consequently, BIGCO sells RAM cheaper than LITTLECO can.
We're LITTLECO. Somebody like Crucial is BIGCO. See?
Quartz 2D hardware acceleration (no idea where this "Quartz 2D Extreme" name came from) only applies to programs that actually use Quartz. Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign are all QuickDraw applications. They would receive no performance boost from hardware-accelerated Quartz 2D.
Obviously it makes more sense to ship more base RAM in a machine that the average buyer will never open than in the machine that is designed (and priced) to be expanded internally.
Besides, the RAM thing is always a tightrope for us. Yes, the iMacs need to have more RAM in their base configurations than the Power Macs do because market research tells us that only something like one iMac owner in 10 ever opens his computer, while five out of six Power Macs get upgraded in some way during the first year of ownership. Our iMac customers want more RAM in the Mac, while our Power Mac customers want less RAM in the G5 (because our RAM is naturally more expensive than third-party RAM; it's a volume issue). But at the same time they don't want the iMac to ship with more RAM than the Power Mac because then Power Mac buyers feel ripped off. "This expensive computer only came with 256 MB of RAM! Cheapskates!"
So it's a tightrope. Bottom line is, no matter how we configure the RAM in our SKUs, a third of our customers are gonna complain about it. And 100% of Slashdotters.
Coffee first, then Internet. Coffee first, then Internet.
I left out an important word from the above comment, obviously. The third sentence should read, "Is the difference significant?" I think that's clear from context, but you never know.
Is the difference an upgrade? Yes. Is the difference? Arguable, but I think the objective answer is yes. Therefore it's a significant upgrade.
There is zero need to put the latest, and most expensive, 3D graphics processor in a mid-range computer like the iMac. Doing so would accomplish nothing but driving up the cost.
I think there's a syntax error in there somewhere.
Is the output easy to parse so I can get it into the form I want?
What form do you want? I'm fairly certain, based on your comments so far, that your answer is going to be something ridiculous, so before I even go down that road, what form do you want?
I didn't way the propertly list xml was unable to do the job
Have you been drinking? You shouldn't post while you've been drinking.
My issue here is that while it's previous scope was limited to application manifests, preferences, etc, the issues were limited, but as part of a bold new platform for process launching
"Bold new platform?" You do know that we've been using property lists everywhere since 1999, right? Including as SystemStarter configuration files. Using them in launchd is neither bold or new.
If I want to write a web service using PHP that wants to access config data
On what planet would you ever write a PHP application that gives any random Web user access to your computer's system configuration? No, that's (as I predicted) a ridiculous example.
If I'm writing something with Java under Linux, where's my CFDictionary interface?
In the Core Foundation bindings for Java.
If you want something closer to home, where's my CFDictionary interface in RealBasic?
Because that's a third-party application I can't speak authoritatively, but if it doesn't provide access to Core Foundation, it's not a very useful tool, is it? Seeing as how every Mac OS X application uses Core Foundation and all.
The fact that you can obviously spend so much time posting to slashdot indicates that you don't do much of importance. I do.
Are you also going to tell me that I'm ugly and that my mother wears army boots? Is that the point we've reached?
Just a possibility here, but maybe a constant state of depression isn't the norm for most people? Maybe most people don't enjoy wallowing in "the dark shit" that you seem to hold so dear?
Of course cameras can do 1080p/60. But there's no need to. For live events, either 1080i or 720p work spectacularly, and 24 frames per second is the rate for scripted content. The 1080p/60 pseudo-format is just wasted data.
The topic is my ability to write a tool that can read property lists without using a new API.
You never would. Read on.
Is there somehow one magic configuration tool that performs every operation that one would every desire, every reporting capability you would desire?
I feel that you have lost sight of the ball. We are talking about configuration files here, specifically configuration files for launchd. There are no operations to be performed on them, no reports to be generated that launchctl doesn't do for you already.
I propose that somebody might want to write a utility that lets them easily display the current set of tasks that launchd has been tasked with
You mean "launchctl list?"
Somebody wants to write a system-wide policy tool that will disable a particular daemon, but only if it isn't depended on by any other service.
You mean "launchctl stop (servicename)?"
I'm writing a configuration tool for a daemon that I've written and I want to edit the property list for my tool to configure the parameters.
Groovy. Core Foundation is your friend.
The current property list mechanism does not use good XML.
Sorry, but "Some guy on Slashdot would like it to be different" isn't that convincing. Remember, please, that we've been using XML property lists for six years now. Somehow the Earth has continued to orbit the sun.
I'm sorry, but your argument that nobody could ever want to check how launchd is currently configured and so it's fine that the configuration data is poorly encoded is just silly.
And your authoring a lengthy and multi-part excoriation of the launchd configuration file format without ever stumbling upon awareness of launchctl, which does precisely what you insist can only be done by examining configuration files, is at least as silly.
Slashdot Mirror
Your dictionary is broken. Facile means "appearing neat and comprehensive only by ignoring the true complexities of an issue; superficial."
His estimate was way off. While it is believed that there's water vapor in Jupiter's atmosphere, it's a trace amount, way too small as a fraction of the total composition to be measured from a distance.
Basically there's about as much water vapor in Jupiter's atmosphere, in terms of partial pressure, as there is phosphine in ours.
I don't know where you're getting your information. We have yet to find water (or water ice) anywhere in the universe that's not on Earth.
Yes, spectrographic studies have implied that molecular water may be highly abundant in the universe, but that's obviously not the same thing.
And there's a theory that Europe might have a highly saline liquid sea beneath its surface (there's electromagnetic evidence to that effect), but it's never been observed.
There's a huge difference between thinking that water might be possible on other planets and actually finding it there. So far we have many (mutually contradictory, ill-supported) theories, but absolutely no actual observation.
There's too much science fiction in your science.
You're absolutely right. I should have been more clear. The force per unit time you get out of a solar sail is bounded. Once the "sail" is perpendicular to the sun, the force is as high as it's going to get. And it's not high enough.
...I dunno, dude. I probably wouldn't have gone down that path. Because now, you know, you've got me laughing uproariously and all that.
As for citing a science-fiction novel as a source of actual science
It sounds like you didn't quite understand my point.
What we're talking about here is a minimum-energy or Hohmann transfer orbit. To enter a transfer orbit from outside the Earth's orbit, you'd apply a retrograde acceleration to slow down, causing your orbit to bend inward toward the sun. Along the way, you accelerate because you're heading "downhill," gravitationally speaking. When you intersect Earth's orbit you're just ahead of the planet (because you timed it that way), so you have to conduct another retrograde acceleration, reducing your speed to Earth-orbital velocity.
The first application of acceleration can be applied slowly if necessary. It makes the math more complicated, but it can be done, especially if you have the ability to correct your orbit as the acceleration happens. But the second acceleration has to be applied quickly, because you're basically transiting Earth at that point. You're on a hyperbolic path around the Earth, so you need to slow down, and quickly, like as in hours. Changing a body's motion in a short amount of time requires more force than changing a body's motion in a long amount of time. That's why a solar sail could never be used for something like this. It can only apply a constant amount of force, and the amount of force applied could never be sufficient to change an asteroid's motion so drastically in such a short time.
It's not just impractical, though it is impractical. It's also mathematically impossible because the force per unit time you get out of a solar sail is constant.
Use a solar sail with size proportional to the mass of your geographical feature.
What proportion, exactly? Given that we're talking about a body in an orbit considerably outside that of the Earth, it would first have to be slowed to fall in toward the sun. Doing that would require a massive amount of energy. Then, once it intersects Earth's orbit, it would be necessary to slow the body again, dumping all the kinetic energy it accumulated during its long fall toward the sun, and then again during its translation toward Earth. That would require an even greater amount of energy, but more importantly, it would have to be delivered in a relatively short amount of time -- hours at the very most.
Sorry, but a "solar sail" could never do the job, even it were possible to manufacture and erect one, say, ten million miles across.
Sounds like a great plot for a science-fiction novel. Terrible science, though.
Why, yes, I would. My comment is: "Hey, cute. Swimfans."
I wouldn't even know where to begin to do the math on that one. To transfer even a tiny space capsule the size of a Volkswagen from Earth-orbital velocity to Solar-orbital velocity requires a huge expenditure of energy. I can't imagine what it would take to change the orbit of an object the size of a geographical feature.
Thanks for reminding me. The slide said, and I quote,
Quartz 2D Goes "Extreme"
That's where the misnomer came from. And yes, Quartz Debug does refer to "Quartz 2D Extreme," so maybe it is an internal name. But it's not one I've ever heard before.
And what I have seen is instance after instance in message boards like this one where people get completely befuddled about the difference between Quartz, Quartz Extreme, Quartz 2D and "Quartz 2D Extreme." It's really confusing. So if everybody stopped calling Quartz 2D "Quartz 2D Extreme," that'd be fine by me.
Um. That answer would be incorrect. We ship iMacs with 512 MB. We ship the single 1.8 GHz Power Mac G4 with 256 MB of RAM. I'm pretty sure just out-and-out lying isn't the right answer.
Um. Yeah. I know. But I've never heard the name "Quartz 2D Extreme" inside the company. It's possible that it's just a new name that never made it over this way.
In any case, it doesn't really matter one way or the other. Because Adobe doesn't use Quartz 2D at all. They use QuickDraw. And we're hardly going to stop supporting QuickDraw. We've deprecated it, sure, but it's not going away, specifically because there are thousands of applications out there that depend on it.
Long story short, a fancy-ass graphics card is not going to make Illustrator any faster.
(On a sidebar, I'd be careful about taking things that Siracusa says as gospel. He's certainly one smart cookie, but there are some things he's written lately that are just plain wrong. His fascination with extended attributes is an example. He concluded that it was part of some bizarre filesystem-dependent metadata scheme. It's not. It's something we added at the API level to support POSIX ACLs. So just let the buyer beware regarding his stuff, okay?)
Here's a lesson in economics for you, free of charge.
Every retailer buys RAM from a manufacturer. For sake of argument, let's say that manufacturer is RAMCO. If you go to RAMCO and ask to buy RAM, they're going to say no, because they're not a retailer. They're a wholesaler. They only sell to people who intend to re-sell their RAM.
So instead you go to a retailer. You have two choices. One, BIGCO, does sixty-five skrillion box tops a year in business with RAMCO. The other, LITTLECO, only does ten thousand box tops a year in business. So BIGCO is able to negotiate a lower price per unit with RAMCO, while LITTLECO has to pay more.
Consequently, BIGCO sells RAM cheaper than LITTLECO can.
We're LITTLECO. Somebody like Crucial is BIGCO. See?
Quartz 2D hardware acceleration (no idea where this "Quartz 2D Extreme" name came from) only applies to programs that actually use Quartz. Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign are all QuickDraw applications. They would receive no performance boost from hardware-accelerated Quartz 2D.
Obviously it makes more sense to ship more base RAM in a machine that the average buyer will never open than in the machine that is designed (and priced) to be expanded internally.
Besides, the RAM thing is always a tightrope for us. Yes, the iMacs need to have more RAM in their base configurations than the Power Macs do because market research tells us that only something like one iMac owner in 10 ever opens his computer, while five out of six Power Macs get upgraded in some way during the first year of ownership. Our iMac customers want more RAM in the Mac, while our Power Mac customers want less RAM in the G5 (because our RAM is naturally more expensive than third-party RAM; it's a volume issue). But at the same time they don't want the iMac to ship with more RAM than the Power Mac because then Power Mac buyers feel ripped off. "This expensive computer only came with 256 MB of RAM! Cheapskates!"
So it's a tightrope. Bottom line is, no matter how we configure the RAM in our SKUs, a third of our customers are gonna complain about it. And 100% of Slashdotters.
Steak dinner $29.76
- eight ounces USDA prime beef
- one teaspoon safflower oil
- one quarter teaspoon salt
- one quarter teaspoon black pepper
- twelve spears of asparagus
- eight ounces fingerling potatoes
- four ounces butter
- four cloves garlic
That $60 bill they handed me in the restaurant last night was completely unreasonable.Coffee first, then Internet. Coffee first, then Internet.
I left out an important word from the above comment, obviously. The third sentence should read, "Is the difference significant?" I think that's clear from context, but you never know.
Coffee first, then Internet.
Is the difference an upgrade? Yes. Is the difference? Arguable, but I think the objective answer is yes. Therefore it's a significant upgrade.
There is zero need to put the latest, and most expensive, 3D graphics processor in a mid-range computer like the iMac. Doing so would accomplish nothing but driving up the cost.
It leaves me puzzled why they are still shipping 256 Mb on the Power Macs
We ship 256 MB only in the economy model, the single-processor 1.8 GHz configuration. The other three SKUs come with 512.
Sadly my previous generation iMac, which is now 4 years old, is still running perfectly, especially now it has Tiger
While a flat-panel G4 iMac certainly should run Tiger well, we first shipped them in January 2002. Your iMac can't be more than just over 3 years old.
Yes, with that video card. You don't need an X800 to run Photoshop and InDesign. They won't even take advantage of it if you have one.
Does launctl be run as a web service?
I think there's a syntax error in there somewhere.
Is the output easy to parse so I can get it into the form I want?
What form do you want? I'm fairly certain, based on your comments so far, that your answer is going to be something ridiculous, so before I even go down that road, what form do you want?
I didn't way the propertly list xml was unable to do the job
Have you been drinking? You shouldn't post while you've been drinking.
My issue here is that while it's previous scope was limited to application manifests, preferences, etc, the issues were limited, but as part of a bold new platform for process launching
"Bold new platform?" You do know that we've been using property lists everywhere since 1999, right? Including as SystemStarter configuration files. Using them in launchd is neither bold or new.
If I want to write a web service using PHP that wants to access config data
On what planet would you ever write a PHP application that gives any random Web user access to your computer's system configuration? No, that's (as I predicted) a ridiculous example.
If I'm writing something with Java under Linux, where's my CFDictionary interface?
In the Core Foundation bindings for Java.
If you want something closer to home, where's my CFDictionary interface in RealBasic?
Because that's a third-party application I can't speak authoritatively, but if it doesn't provide access to Core Foundation, it's not a very useful tool, is it? Seeing as how every Mac OS X application uses Core Foundation and all.
The fact that you can obviously spend so much time posting to slashdot indicates that you don't do much of importance. I do.
Are you also going to tell me that I'm ugly and that my mother wears army boots? Is that the point we've reached?
Just a possibility here, but maybe a constant state of depression isn't the norm for most people? Maybe most people don't enjoy wallowing in "the dark shit" that you seem to hold so dear?
Of course cameras can do 1080p/60. But there's no need to. For live events, either 1080i or 720p work spectacularly, and 24 frames per second is the rate for scripted content. The 1080p/60 pseudo-format is just wasted data.
The topic is my ability to write a tool that can read property lists without using a new API.
You never would. Read on.
Is there somehow one magic configuration tool that performs every operation that one would every desire, every reporting capability you would desire?
I feel that you have lost sight of the ball. We are talking about configuration files here, specifically configuration files for launchd. There are no operations to be performed on them, no reports to be generated that launchctl doesn't do for you already.
I propose that somebody might want to write a utility that lets them easily display the current set of tasks that launchd has been tasked with
You mean "launchctl list?"
Somebody wants to write a system-wide policy tool that will disable a particular daemon, but only if it isn't depended on by any other service.
You mean "launchctl stop (servicename)?"
I'm writing a configuration tool for a daemon that I've written and I want to edit the property list for my tool to configure the parameters.
Groovy. Core Foundation is your friend.
The current property list mechanism does not use good XML.
Sorry, but "Some guy on Slashdot would like it to be different" isn't that convincing. Remember, please, that we've been using XML property lists for six years now. Somehow the Earth has continued to orbit the sun.
I'm sorry, but your argument that nobody could ever want to check how launchd is currently configured and so it's fine that the configuration data is poorly encoded is just silly.
And your authoring a lengthy and multi-part excoriation of the launchd configuration file format without ever stumbling upon awareness of launchctl, which does precisely what you insist can only be done by examining configuration files, is at least as silly.