Some years ago, I had a discussion with a co-worker about the purpose of businesses. She saw it as simply, "businesses are there to make money." I took a little different stance. I suggested that maybe businesses were there to allow people to do meaningful work, and making money was just part of how that was done. And that's what our discussion boiled down to - is the money a means or an end? Is the money how you accomplish things? Or is money what you accomplish? In the end we didn't resolve anything; she was baffled by my views and I was frustrated at my inability to convey something which seemed pretty obvious to me. This article seems to dance around my argument, suggesting that the open source community have their day jobs (means) to have enough money to do what they really want to do (ends).
Another way to put this... About a decade ago, I rebuilt the deck on my house. Around the same time, upper management had decided to outsource our datacenter (ostensibly based on an internal study that concluded no such thing, but there were some honkin' big bonuses/promotions awarded to those who figured out a way to sack nearly 80 people). When it came time to decide what to do when the axe fell, I realized that my then 14 year career in IT had not generated even a fraction of the satisfaction that I'd gotten from the two months I spent after work rebuilding the deck. Long story short, I found a low-pressure 2nd shift job and went back to school. Now I have a BS and MS under my belt and work that involves building prototype instrumentation systems for wind tunnel testing. Even without adjusting for inflation, I'm earning less money than I was in IT, but no amount of money could convince me to go back. I can't really say whether my work has improved in quality since the switch; I think it has, but the work itself is pretty apples and oranges.
“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” - Douglas Adams
In his book, The Moral Animal, Robert Wright used evolutionary psychology to explain how morality developed and why, back in 1995. It's an excellent read up until the end when he tried to close on an optimistic note. Up to that point, he presented a pretty cynical view of human motivation...
Definitely a fascinating read and an interesting topic. Combined with Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained, one could end up feeling the urge to find a remote cabin in Idaho and stockpile it with food and guns, and withdraw from the world.
I "gave up" on my PC a couple years ago (for the same reasons as the writer in the original article) and bought a PS2. I found that, for the Japanese RPG's I like, the console is near perfect. But I've also tried shooters and found that, well, I suck at the console versions. It's very discouraging to consistantly miss the proverbial broad side of the barn on console games when I was getting 90% head shots on the PC version. RTS games have similar control problems.
OTOH, I miss the "save anywhere" option on most of my PC games. And the simplicity of setup; for most console games, setup consists of me turning off the useless controller vibration option. And maybe dailing the BGM down a notch or two. Period.
The end result is that I do both, though I often wait for at least a couple new games of worth before doing any upgrading on my PC. And I'm hoping that the Wii controller will address a lot of my interface limitations issues.
All right, competition can, and often is, a good thing for the consumer. But usually, it's only good if the market/consumer drives the competition. The current next-generation console competition is not a response to consumers; it's being rammed down the consumers' throats.
I read the article and never really bought his analogy. I think the Dreamcast died for much the same reason as the Atari Jaguar died and that I think the PS3 will die; we game consumers don't really want or need that much power, at least not at that price. One of the reasons that I picked up my PS2 (after not owning a console since my Genesis) was because PC games were starting to focus on pretty (and expensive, in terms of video cards) graphics at the expense of story, playability, and entertainment value. Specifically, when I found that the latest entry in a franchise that I'd been playing for years required a video card that cost, at a minimum, half again as much as a PS2, I bailed on PC games for a while.
If we really want competition to serve the consumer (rather than settle a "bet" over which unnecessary new DVD format will be forced down our throats), we need another player. Nintendo might play that role, but I realy think what we need is a good console (not a spectacularly extravegant one) that plays cheap games. In my dreams, this system an open source, both hardware and software, but it doesn't have to be. Keep the graphics around the same level as the current gen to force the developers to think in terms of gameplay instead of flashy crap. Avoid the licensing fees and marketing BS that drives prices up. Is an offical NFL lisence necessary for a good football game? Does a movie tie-in improve a platformer?
I'm looking forward to the unfortunately named Wii far more than the PS3 (both for its lower price tag and all the potential wrapped up in that weird controller), and so far I have not seen anything on the X-Box 360 that justifies its price. Either way, it feels like this iteration of "competition" is not doing anything for the consumer except digging deeper into our pockets for the gaming equivalent of bloatware.
Won't there be negative impact to launching from a high latitude?
There is an impact, though how much of one depends on what sort of orbit you're shooting for. The ISS is in low earth orbit, so you need around 8000 meters/second for a nice circular orbit at that altitude. Launching into an equitorial orbit from the equator gives you a 460 m/s start on that. By the time you reach Nova Scotia, you're down to 320 m/s boost. OTOH, the empty mass to fueled mass ratio is a log function (IIRC), so that 140 m/s can make a difference. However, a pole-to-pole orbit doesn't take advantage of Earth's spin at all, so it doesn't matter what latitude you launch from.
Why is it that the only use I get out of my graduate level orbital mechanics course is on Slashdot?
My own experience with Daggerfall was that of disappointment. I had played Arena way back when, and looked forward to the "immersive 3-D experience" followup, but the huge, sprawling and randomly generated dungeons were way too easy to get lost in (even with the auto-map) and even after three system upgrades, including faster and more capable videos cards each time, I still fell through stairs on an alarmingly regular basis.
Daggerfall had a far more sophisticated story than anything else available at the time, unfortunately (IMHO at least), it suffered from iffy gameplay. Morrowind was far more entertaining, both in the even richer story, and in the far more robust gameplay.
The real question is, "Why no mention of Battlespire?"
Back when the 2600 was still new, a friend of mine ended up with an alternative system called (I think) the Fairchild Game System. It had the worst controller I've ever encountered. Start with a handle (just a handle, no buttons) and place a rounded triangular knobby thing on top. The knob could be pushed forward, back, left, right, pulled up, and pushed down, plus it could be twisted clockwise or counterclockwise a little ways to trigger two more switches. That's eight toggles on one joystick, while the other hand just held it in place. This wasn't just a gimmick that didn't work; someone thought consolidating all the controls into single point of failure was a good thing (oh, and they also thought that it would last for more than ten minutes of energetic gameplay). The system never caught on, mostly because the 2600 was pretty well established by the time it was rolled out, but that controller would have killed it just as effectively...
...the easiest, cheapest way to mass-produce hydrogen is through, yep, fossil fuels...
True and damn near always overlooked. Pure hydrogen doesn't just get pumped out of the ground; it must be made. Most industrial use H2 comes from a process called "steam reformation" or something like that which uses methane (natural gas, CH4) and steam (H2O) to generate hydrogen and, oh hey, carbon dioxide. Worse, the end result is slightly less H2 than you need to create the same amount of usable energy by burning the methane directly. Various alternative methods are even more wasteful; it takes twice as much energy to generate H2 by electrolysis as the H2 can generate. Admittedly, there are "green" ways to generate electricity, but limitations like clouds, night-time, real estate, manufacturing and infrastructure costs, etc. are what's kept us from switching over.
Once upon a time, there was a TV show that was very popular with the geek crowd. It was cancelled two seasons in, then resurrected for one final season (in the worst time slot possible). The fans refused to keep quiet, so four years later the studio created a really bland animated version of the show. That didn't shut them up either; fans still demanded more. Ten years after the show went off the air, a theatrical movie was released. Even though it was a special effects showcase loosely held together with an unlikely plot and really wooden acting, it was financially successful enough that Paramount studios finally gave in and decided that they'd let the fans shower them with money for the next twenty-five years.
I think it's great that Joss found a way to bring back Firefly, but I wonder if the press is taking this serisously is because they've burnt themselves out from thirty-five years of mocking the people who kept Star Trek alive (after a fashion).
I managed to avoid EXEC (I started off on MVS systems, so I did C-List instead), but in '89 I ended up learning the CMS version of REXX. A year later, I was roped into an automated operations project on our MVS/XA system and, over the next three years or so, coded thousands of lines of REXX (under NetView) for that project. While none of the individual "scripts" were more than 500 or so lines, some of the more complicated ones (like the system shutdown and startup routines) involved dozens of scripts interacting and being triggered by system messages. After that, I ended up writing still more REXX code for migrating people from VM/CMS (which we were phasing out) to TSO. I followed this with ISPF dialogs and OS/2 routines. Then I left IT to finish my degree and pursue a masters, and still found REXX too useful to abandon. I ran it on Windows until I switched Linux 3 years ago and, after a brief attempt to learn Perl, I downloaded ObjectRexx from IBM and am currently building a REXX-based interface to my PostgreSQL inventory database, or at least I would be if I could get the fscking API to work...
As for your questions:
Perfomance: every implementation I've run across (save one) is interpreted, so there will some performance hit for larger apps. Not necessarily a big one...
Self contained: actually, REXX really isn't very self-contained. REXX has a number of basic coding structures of its own, but everything that happens outside of the code tends to be specific to a system. For instance, any file I/O on an MVS system is done with the EXECIO command, which is a lame and far less powerful port of the CMS version, while OS/2, Windows and Linux (and probably others) use the lines(), linein() and lineout() functions which may have different capabilities on different platforms.
Strictness: only when it is self-inflicted. Personally, my coding style has gotten more and more anal over the years because, somehwere along the line, I found that people expected me to be able to read my own code. I do not know of any systematic way to enfore sctrictness though.
Popularity: well, I still like it. But it's very rare that I run across anyone outside of the mainframe world who's even heard of it. Come to think of it, rare is not the right word. The only place I've seen REXX come up outside of work is, well, right here on/..
Case sensitivity: tough call. I started out coding BASIC and FORTRAN way back when, so case sensitivity meant everything was done in CAPS. I then learned C and got bit by case sensitiivity, a lot. Soon there after, a learned REXX and found it far more forgiving of my sloppy coding style and weak typing skills.
To be fair, REXX is an excellent scripting language, but it does have some serious limitiations as a pure programming language. The first (and biggest IMHO) is in the math department; if you want to raise a number to an irrational power, you're out of luck, and if you need trig or exponential or log functions, you'll have to write them yourself. Second problem is the "compound variable" mistakenly referred to as an "array" in the article. REXX does not do arrays. The compound variable can be used like an array, but its contents are stored as they are assigned, rather than placed in a contiguous chunk of memory. This is not a big problem, if you are aware of the difference, but can cause confusion and faulty code if not careful.
So, I still use REXX, though not nearly as often as when it was my source of income. I have investigated alternatives, but I'm too weak to learn Perl and too lazy to learn Python...
Actually, the challenge is for 5kg (mass) of O2, but the units just got dumbed down for those who don't to metric. Extracting O2 from soil is done all the time on Earth, we just tend to treat the oxygen as an unnecessary byproduct while we keep the useful things (e.g. most metals); this will probbably not be "the biggest invention in human history"...
Okay, that was a bit flippant, but I think I can justify my cynicism. When I was groing up, TV science fiction meant Irwin Allen productions ("Lost in Space", "Land of the Giants", "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea") until "Star Trek" came along (that's right, just "Star Trek" without subheadings). Naturally, NBC did their best to kill it and succeeded in three seasons. The next high point in TV science fiction was over ten years later in Battlestar Galactica. Note that I said high point; BSG was so-so science fiction, more of a brainless action show painted in SF colors. And so it went. Years of dry spells until the Star Trek franchise was resurrected. Too bad that Berman and Braga have no clue as to what made Star Trek "good science fiction". They've been feeding on the franchise's desicated husk for a decade now.
I've been a Star Trek fan for 39 years, but I won't mourn the loss of Enterprise. Watching the series' continuity getted fscked up worse than Star Wars for the sake of mindless action and CGI was too much for me and I stopped watching it after the second season. "Good sci-fi?" I don't think so. "Too much to ask?" Yeah, pretty much.
It's also about the dearth of ideas in Hollywood. Last time I went to see a movie, the eight previews were for four sequels, two remakes, one comic adaptation and only one "new" film which sounded more like a pilot for a new Fox network sitcom. Hollywood is running out of 70's shows and old movies to remake, they have (with rare exception) done terrible things to books they've adapted, but comic book fans will pretty much watch anything ("Catwoman" and "Elektra" leap to mind).
This is sort of scam is used on pricing for mainframes all the time. One place where I worked used this as an excuse to (finally!) dump some crappy and archaic Computer Associates products when they started charging us double for a dual processor, even though one processor was partitioned to another OS that didn't run any of their products.
Actually, I think that the Psychopathic CEO's study (and the associated test) might have a further application; politicians. Imagine a world where "subcriminal" nutjobs could be kept out of public office in stead of the reverse that seems to be happening these days...
...it would most likely thrive in out environment.
Maybe, maybe not. Terrestrial microbial life-forms have had millenia of evolution and competition to fill every available niche in their available environment; how will Martian microbes compete, let alone thrive? How many extremophiles have been dredged up from their remote terrestrial locations and then caused terrible plagues?
Caution is appropriate here, but the article seems to be hinting at a "let's just stay home and lock the door and hope no one bothers us" attitude that would have kept mankind safely ensconced in the Olduvai Gorge.
Gartner aside, this has been a slow but steady trend for years now. I was working in a mainframe shop that went from fourteen operators working 24/7 to eight ops working 20/6 due to automation. The nice thing was, since the "conversion" was done over a period of a couple years, no-one was fired; we relied on attrition and promotion to thin the herd. The expectation for operators is that they will be able to handle the mind-numbingly dull routine of running the same batch jobs night after night after night, but, at the same time, they are expected to be able to deal with a variety of problems quickly, efficiently, and (best-case) autonomously. Finding operators that can do both is pretty much impossible. Automation can minimize the tedious aspects of the job; I've been in shops where one person would spend the whole shift doing little more than keying in, "REPLY nn, WAIT" and "REPLY nn,NOHOLD" over and over and over again, when two simple scripts can do that automatically.
It makes me frustrated and sort of angry that this sloppy product was foisted off on us.
Back at the dawn of time, my first exposure to D&D was the original pamphlet-style books, and boy were they sloppy. And the knock-offs were even worse; typos in the D&D books ended up replicated in things like the Arduin Grimoire (sp?) series. There's a Murphy's Rules strip that describes a "% in liar" typo (note spelling) that propogated from the original rules into one of the AG books. So maybe the bad publication values are actually a twisted sort of homage...
I managed to miss this book (series?), but I still have my handbook for my "Computer Merit Badge" kicking around, complete with the then obligatory explanation/illustration of core memory, and the picture of the latest and greatest IBM mainframe (I think it's whatever preceeded the S/360). Now I have two resources to refer to when my nephew askes, "What were computers like when you were my age?"
Actually, this is one of those DOS things that the author may have missed. You can't format c: if you're accessing it at the time. I don't know how XP would handle it, but you can format c: simply by switching to another drive, at least on older versions. All that trouble he had with c: being mounted etc. was because he was "on" the c: drive, not because he'd booted from it. He could have inserted a floppy disk, switched to a:, then formatted c: from there no problem.
OTOH, I haven't run anything more recent that Win98, and I haven't actually tried this stunt since running Win95. Maybe XP has been cleaned up... And maybe when they're done counting and recounting, Badnarick will be president.;p
I'm sure the site will be up just as soon as they present some actual evidence of how IBM done them wrong...
Re:Don't hold your breath...
on
Hibernating to Mars
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· Score: 5, Insightful
By "the hard way" I meant going to Mars with existing tech. 15 years is a long time in "computer years", but something like long-term hibernation is going to take at least a decade to to work out the bugs because every test is going to have to run at least a few months in order to have meaning. Even if they were to come up with something that works tomorrow, it would be pushing to make it practical by 2020. Sleeping in shifts might help (a la 2001), but that would further complicate things.
Lots of things need to be done before we go to Mars; we need far more durable, reliable and usable pressure suits, a life-support system that can run for three (minimum) years without spare parts from Earth, some sort of rover that can go more than a couple klicks, actual studies of the effects of long term exposure to low-gravity, etc. etc. Suspended animation will be useful, someday, but...
Yes, computers, robotics, medicine, and other technologies have come a long way in a short time, but there's no gaurantee that the growth will continue; aircraft technology went from none 100 years ago to jets in the 50's, but it took another 50 years (and the X-prize) to kick things up a notch... Progress can be linear, but it doesn't have to be.
A bit cynical, I know, but I've been disappointed by NASA for 30 years now; I watched Armstrong set foot on the moon when I was eight and was told that we'd be on Mars by the mid-80's. By the time I got out of high school, we were trapped in LEO by the shuttle. Things like this worry me because they can keep us waiting for a "perfect" solution for a loooong time...
This strikes me as having two BIG problems right from the start:
Reliability - ISS crewpeople spend the bulk of their time doing housekeeping/maintenance chores. How are they gonna get a brand-new, untried vehicle to run for a six-month trip each way, without multiple someones keeping an eye on things?
Reality - This study is still in the "maybe we can get this to work" stage. But I've been hearing about serious studies like this since the 70's and so far no useful results. Will they have something tested and reliable in 15 years?
This would be great, if it works, but I bet we end up doing it the hard way...
Actually, the advantages are there, but not huge... In order to achieve a typical LEO, you need (ideally) a delta-v of not quite 8000 m/s. Launching from the equator provides ~470 m/s of that delta-v, if you're shooting for an equatorial orbit, rather than pole-to-pole. Launching from Florida means you only get ~400 m/s plus the sinusoidal trajectory relative to the surface (the orbit is circular, but the axis is not the same as the Earth's). The dry-mass (empty) to wet-mass (fully fueled) ratio is a logarithmic function, so that 70 m/s translates to a percent or two of additional payload mass, but that's all.
Caveat: the actual delta-v needed is closer to 10000 m/s because of various factors. Atmospheric drag and other stuff contribute, but mostly launching straight up then kicking over means a highly eccentric orbit and the extra delta-v means not hitting the atmosphere at perigee.
Hey, I finally got some use out of my graduate level orbital mechanics class!
After all it's only used on Mainframes these days..
Not true! I use REXX on my home machine to update an inventory DB I've got in MySQL, and I used it extensively on my school machine for my work on my thesis (mostly data extraction 'cause the CFD software I was using, WIND, does damn near nothing in post-processing). I've looked at Perl and Python for scripting since I transitioned to Linux 2 years ago, but I still haven't found anything to rival the REXX "parse" instruction...
Slashdot Mirror
Some years ago, I had a discussion with a co-worker about the purpose of businesses. She saw it as simply, "businesses are there to make money." I took a little different stance. I suggested that maybe businesses were there to allow people to do meaningful work, and making money was just part of how that was done. And that's what our discussion boiled down to - is the money a means or an end? Is the money how you accomplish things? Or is money what you accomplish? In the end we didn't resolve anything; she was baffled by my views and I was frustrated at my inability to convey something which seemed pretty obvious to me. This article seems to dance around my argument, suggesting that the open source community have their day jobs (means) to have enough money to do what they really want to do (ends).
Another way to put this... About a decade ago, I rebuilt the deck on my house. Around the same time, upper management had decided to outsource our datacenter (ostensibly based on an internal study that concluded no such thing, but there were some honkin' big bonuses/promotions awarded to those who figured out a way to sack nearly 80 people). When it came time to decide what to do when the axe fell, I realized that my then 14 year career in IT had not generated even a fraction of the satisfaction that I'd gotten from the two months I spent after work rebuilding the deck. Long story short, I found a low-pressure 2nd shift job and went back to school. Now I have a BS and MS under my belt and work that involves building prototype instrumentation systems for wind tunnel testing. Even without adjusting for inflation, I'm earning less money than I was in IT, but no amount of money could convince me to go back. I can't really say whether my work has improved in quality since the switch; I think it has, but the work itself is pretty apples and oranges.
In his book, The Moral Animal, Robert Wright used evolutionary psychology to explain how morality developed and why, back in 1995. It's an excellent read up until the end when he tried to close on an optimistic note. Up to that point, he presented a pretty cynical view of human motivation...
Definitely a fascinating read and an interesting topic. Combined with Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained, one could end up feeling the urge to find a remote cabin in Idaho and stockpile it with food and guns, and withdraw from the world.
true.dat
I "gave up" on my PC a couple years ago (for the same reasons as the writer in the original article) and bought a PS2. I found that, for the Japanese RPG's I like, the console is near perfect. But I've also tried shooters and found that, well, I suck at the console versions. It's very discouraging to consistantly miss the proverbial broad side of the barn on console games when I was getting 90% head shots on the PC version. RTS games have similar control problems.
OTOH, I miss the "save anywhere" option on most of my PC games. And the simplicity of setup; for most console games, setup consists of me turning off the useless controller vibration option. And maybe dailing the BGM down a notch or two. Period.
The end result is that I do both, though I often wait for at least a couple new games of worth before doing any upgrading on my PC. And I'm hoping that the Wii controller will address a lot of my interface limitations issues.
All right, competition can, and often is, a good thing for the consumer. But usually, it's only good if the market/consumer drives the competition. The current next-generation console competition is not a response to consumers; it's being rammed down the consumers' throats.
I read the article and never really bought his analogy. I think the Dreamcast died for much the same reason as the Atari Jaguar died and that I think the PS3 will die; we game consumers don't really want or need that much power, at least not at that price. One of the reasons that I picked up my PS2 (after not owning a console since my Genesis) was because PC games were starting to focus on pretty (and expensive, in terms of video cards) graphics at the expense of story, playability, and entertainment value. Specifically, when I found that the latest entry in a franchise that I'd been playing for years required a video card that cost, at a minimum, half again as much as a PS2, I bailed on PC games for a while.
If we really want competition to serve the consumer (rather than settle a "bet" over which unnecessary new DVD format will be forced down our throats), we need another player. Nintendo might play that role, but I realy think what we need is a good console (not a spectacularly extravegant one) that plays cheap games. In my dreams, this system an open source, both hardware and software, but it doesn't have to be. Keep the graphics around the same level as the current gen to force the developers to think in terms of gameplay instead of flashy crap. Avoid the licensing fees and marketing BS that drives prices up. Is an offical NFL lisence necessary for a good football game? Does a movie tie-in improve a platformer?
I'm looking forward to the unfortunately named Wii far more than the PS3 (both for its lower price tag and all the potential wrapped up in that weird controller), and so far I have not seen anything on the X-Box 360 that justifies its price. Either way, it feels like this iteration of "competition" is not doing anything for the consumer except digging deeper into our pockets for the gaming equivalent of bloatware.
There is an impact, though how much of one depends on what sort of orbit you're shooting for. The ISS is in low earth orbit, so you need around 8000 meters/second for a nice circular orbit at that altitude. Launching into an equitorial orbit from the equator gives you a 460 m/s start on that. By the time you reach Nova Scotia, you're down to 320 m/s boost. OTOH, the empty mass to fueled mass ratio is a log function (IIRC), so that 140 m/s can make a difference. However, a pole-to-pole orbit doesn't take advantage of Earth's spin at all, so it doesn't matter what latitude you launch from.
Why is it that the only use I get out of my graduate level orbital mechanics course is on Slashdot?
My own experience with Daggerfall was that of disappointment. I had played Arena way back when, and looked forward to the "immersive 3-D experience" followup, but the huge, sprawling and randomly generated dungeons were way too easy to get lost in (even with the auto-map) and even after three system upgrades, including faster and more capable videos cards each time, I still fell through stairs on an alarmingly regular basis.
Daggerfall had a far more sophisticated story than anything else available at the time, unfortunately (IMHO at least), it suffered from iffy gameplay. Morrowind was far more entertaining, both in the even richer story, and in the far more robust gameplay.
The real question is, "Why no mention of Battlespire?"
Back when the 2600 was still new, a friend of mine ended up with an alternative system called (I think) the Fairchild Game System. It had the worst controller I've ever encountered. Start with a handle (just a handle, no buttons) and place a rounded triangular knobby thing on top. The knob could be pushed forward, back, left, right, pulled up, and pushed down, plus it could be twisted clockwise or counterclockwise a little ways to trigger two more switches. That's eight toggles on one joystick, while the other hand just held it in place. This wasn't just a gimmick that didn't work; someone thought consolidating all the controls into single point of failure was a good thing (oh, and they also thought that it would last for more than ten minutes of energetic gameplay). The system never caught on, mostly because the 2600 was pretty well established by the time it was rolled out, but that controller would have killed it just as effectively...
True and damn near always overlooked. Pure hydrogen doesn't just get pumped out of the ground; it must be made. Most industrial use H2 comes from a process called "steam reformation" or something like that which uses methane (natural gas, CH4) and steam (H2O) to generate hydrogen and, oh hey, carbon dioxide. Worse, the end result is slightly less H2 than you need to create the same amount of usable energy by burning the methane directly. Various alternative methods are even more wasteful; it takes twice as much energy to generate H2 by electrolysis as the H2 can generate. Admittedly, there are "green" ways to generate electricity, but limitations like clouds, night-time, real estate, manufacturing and infrastructure costs, etc. are what's kept us from switching over.
Once upon a time, there was a TV show that was very popular with the geek crowd. It was cancelled two seasons in, then resurrected for one final season (in the worst time slot possible). The fans refused to keep quiet, so four years later the studio created a really bland animated version of the show. That didn't shut them up either; fans still demanded more. Ten years after the show went off the air, a theatrical movie was released. Even though it was a special effects showcase loosely held together with an unlikely plot and really wooden acting, it was financially successful enough that Paramount studios finally gave in and decided that they'd let the fans shower them with money for the next twenty-five years.
I think it's great that Joss found a way to bring back Firefly, but I wonder if the press is taking this serisously is because they've burnt themselves out from thirty-five years of mocking the people who kept Star Trek alive (after a fashion).
I managed to avoid EXEC (I started off on MVS systems, so I did C-List instead), but in '89 I ended up learning the CMS version of REXX. A year later, I was roped into an automated operations project on our MVS/XA system and, over the next three years or so, coded thousands of lines of REXX (under NetView) for that project. While none of the individual "scripts" were more than 500 or so lines, some of the more complicated ones (like the system shutdown and startup routines) involved dozens of scripts interacting and being triggered by system messages. After that, I ended up writing still more REXX code for migrating people from VM/CMS (which we were phasing out) to TSO. I followed this with ISPF dialogs and OS/2 routines. Then I left IT to finish my degree and pursue a masters, and still found REXX too useful to abandon. I ran it on Windows until I switched Linux 3 years ago and, after a brief attempt to learn Perl, I downloaded ObjectRexx from IBM and am currently building a REXX-based interface to my PostgreSQL inventory database, or at least I would be if I could get the fscking API to work...
As for your questions:
To be fair, REXX is an excellent scripting language, but it does have some serious limitiations as a pure programming language. The first (and biggest IMHO) is in the math department; if you want to raise a number to an irrational power, you're out of luck, and if you need trig or exponential or log functions, you'll have to write them yourself. Second problem is the "compound variable" mistakenly referred to as an "array" in the article. REXX does not do arrays. The compound variable can be used like an array, but its contents are stored as they are assigned, rather than placed in a contiguous chunk of memory. This is not a big problem, if you are aware of the difference, but can cause confusion and faulty code if not careful.
So, I still use REXX, though not nearly as often as when it was my source of income. I have investigated alternatives, but I'm too weak to learn Perl and too lazy to learn Python...
Actually, the challenge is for 5kg (mass) of O2, but the units just got dumbed down for those who don't to metric. Extracting O2 from soil is done all the time on Earth, we just tend to treat the oxygen as an unnecessary byproduct while we keep the useful things (e.g. most metals); this will probbably not be "the biggest invention in human history"...
Yes.
Okay, that was a bit flippant, but I think I can justify my cynicism. When I was groing up, TV science fiction meant Irwin Allen productions ("Lost in Space", "Land of the Giants", "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea") until "Star Trek" came along (that's right, just "Star Trek" without subheadings). Naturally, NBC did their best to kill it and succeeded in three seasons. The next high point in TV science fiction was over ten years later in Battlestar Galactica. Note that I said high point; BSG was so-so science fiction, more of a brainless action show painted in SF colors. And so it went. Years of dry spells until the Star Trek franchise was resurrected. Too bad that Berman and Braga have no clue as to what made Star Trek "good science fiction". They've been feeding on the franchise's desicated husk for a decade now.
I've been a Star Trek fan for 39 years, but I won't mourn the loss of Enterprise. Watching the series' continuity getted fscked up worse than Star Wars for the sake of mindless action and CGI was too much for me and I stopped watching it after the second season. "Good sci-fi?" I don't think so. "Too much to ask?" Yeah, pretty much.
It's all about capitalizing on nostalgia.
It's also about the dearth of ideas in Hollywood. Last time I went to see a movie, the eight previews were for four sequels, two remakes, one comic adaptation and only one "new" film which sounded more like a pilot for a new Fox network sitcom. Hollywood is running out of 70's shows and old movies to remake, they have (with rare exception) done terrible things to books they've adapted, but comic book fans will pretty much watch anything ("Catwoman" and "Elektra" leap to mind).
This is sort of scam is used on pricing for mainframes all the time. One place where I worked used this as an excuse to (finally!) dump some crappy and archaic Computer Associates products when they started charging us double for a dual processor, even though one processor was partitioned to another OS that didn't run any of their products.
Actually, I think that the Psychopathic CEO's study (and the associated test) might have a further application; politicians. Imagine a world where "subcriminal" nutjobs could be kept out of public office in stead of the reverse that seems to be happening these days...
Maybe, maybe not. Terrestrial microbial life-forms have had millenia of evolution and competition to fill every available niche in their available environment; how will Martian microbes compete, let alone thrive? How many extremophiles have been dredged up from their remote terrestrial locations and then caused terrible plagues?
Caution is appropriate here, but the article seems to be hinting at a "let's just stay home and lock the door and hope no one bothers us" attitude that would have kept mankind safely ensconced in the Olduvai Gorge.
Gartner aside, this has been a slow but steady trend for years now. I was working in a mainframe shop that went from fourteen operators working 24/7 to eight ops working 20/6 due to automation. The nice thing was, since the "conversion" was done over a period of a couple years, no-one was fired; we relied on attrition and promotion to thin the herd. The expectation for operators is that they will be able to handle the mind-numbingly dull routine of running the same batch jobs night after night after night, but, at the same time, they are expected to be able to deal with a variety of problems quickly, efficiently, and (best-case) autonomously. Finding operators that can do both is pretty much impossible. Automation can minimize the tedious aspects of the job; I've been in shops where one person would spend the whole shift doing little more than keying in, "REPLY nn, WAIT" and "REPLY nn,NOHOLD" over and over and over again, when two simple scripts can do that automatically.
Back at the dawn of time, my first exposure to D&D was the original pamphlet-style books, and boy were they sloppy. And the knock-offs were even worse; typos in the D&D books ended up replicated in things like the Arduin Grimoire (sp?) series. There's a Murphy's Rules strip that describes a "% in liar" typo (note spelling) that propogated from the original rules into one of the AG books. So maybe the bad publication values are actually a twisted sort of homage...
I managed to miss this book (series?), but I still have my handbook for my "Computer Merit Badge" kicking around, complete with the then obligatory explanation/illustration of core memory, and the picture of the latest and greatest IBM mainframe (I think it's whatever preceeded the S/360). Now I have two resources to refer to when my nephew askes, "What were computers like when you were my age?"
Actually, this is one of those DOS things that the author may have missed. You can't format c: if you're accessing it at the time. I don't know how XP would handle it, but you can format c: simply by switching to another drive, at least on older versions. All that trouble he had with c: being mounted etc. was because he was "on" the c: drive, not because he'd booted from it. He could have inserted a floppy disk, switched to a:, then formatted c: from there no problem.
OTOH, I haven't run anything more recent that Win98, and I haven't actually tried this stunt since running Win95. Maybe XP has been cleaned up... And maybe when they're done counting and recounting, Badnarick will be president. ;p
I'm sure the site will be up just as soon as they present some actual evidence of how IBM done them wrong...
By "the hard way" I meant going to Mars with existing tech. 15 years is a long time in "computer years", but something like long-term hibernation is going to take at least a decade to to work out the bugs because every test is going to have to run at least a few months in order to have meaning. Even if they were to come up with something that works tomorrow, it would be pushing to make it practical by 2020. Sleeping in shifts might help (a la 2001), but that would further complicate things.
Lots of things need to be done before we go to Mars; we need far more durable, reliable and usable pressure suits, a life-support system that can run for three (minimum) years without spare parts from Earth, some sort of rover that can go more than a couple klicks, actual studies of the effects of long term exposure to low-gravity, etc. etc. Suspended animation will be useful, someday, but...
Yes, computers, robotics, medicine, and other technologies have come a long way in a short time, but there's no gaurantee that the growth will continue; aircraft technology went from none 100 years ago to jets in the 50's, but it took another 50 years (and the X-prize) to kick things up a notch... Progress can be linear, but it doesn't have to be.
A bit cynical, I know, but I've been disappointed by NASA for 30 years now; I watched Armstrong set foot on the moon when I was eight and was told that we'd be on Mars by the mid-80's. By the time I got out of high school, we were trapped in LEO by the shuttle. Things like this worry me because they can keep us waiting for a "perfect" solution for a loooong time...
This strikes me as having two BIG problems right from the start:
This would be great, if it works, but I bet we end up doing it the hard way...
Actually, the advantages are there, but not huge... In order to achieve a typical LEO, you need (ideally) a delta-v of not quite 8000 m/s. Launching from the equator provides ~470 m/s of that delta-v, if you're shooting for an equatorial orbit, rather than pole-to-pole. Launching from Florida means you only get ~400 m/s plus the sinusoidal trajectory relative to the surface (the orbit is circular, but the axis is not the same as the Earth's). The dry-mass (empty) to wet-mass (fully fueled) ratio is a logarithmic function, so that 70 m/s translates to a percent or two of additional payload mass, but that's all.
Caveat: the actual delta-v needed is closer to 10000 m/s because of various factors. Atmospheric drag and other stuff contribute, but mostly launching straight up then kicking over means a highly eccentric orbit and the extra delta-v means not hitting the atmosphere at perigee.
Hey, I finally got some use out of my graduate level orbital mechanics class!
Not true! I use REXX on my home machine to update an inventory DB I've got in MySQL, and I used it extensively on my school machine for my work on my thesis (mostly data extraction 'cause the CFD software I was using, WIND, does damn near nothing in post-processing). I've looked at Perl and Python for scripting since I transitioned to Linux 2 years ago, but I still haven't found anything to rival the REXX "parse" instruction...