"Creationism is the polar opposite of science. You start with a conclusion (God made the Earth and the Bible shows how he did it) and then proceed to find evidence that supports that, as opposed to finding evidence and then making a conclusion based on the evidence."
I agree with your premise but your explanation is wrong. Both types will go look for facts to support their ideas. The basic difference is that the scientist makes a statement crafted in such a way that it COULD be dis-proved and accepts the fact that nothing CAN be proven to be true because there is always the possibility of one more observation at a future date. Creationism takes the logically impossible possition that a stament can be proven correct by empirical evidence.
Creationism is something that can never be disproved nor verified by any amount of evidence. I respect creationists who know this. It think most do. In fact mainstream Christan churches teach it that way. The Idiots are the ones who look for natural evidence to support the supper natural. These people don't understand what science is, not do they really even know what religion is.
As an example here is a statement: "I (yes me, ChrisA90278) created the universe 30 seconds ago." I'll give a beer to anyone who can dis-prove it.
"Nobody has ever presented a valid argument for intelligent design"
By definition there can be no logical argument based on evidence for a supernatural event. "supernatural" means outside of the realm of observation. There can not be evidence for or against.
For example let me make a claim: "I created the universe five minutes ago." I doubt many people believe me but I'll give you a beer if you can prove me wrong. (hint: Your memory or yesterday and your collection of 78RPM records is part of the universe that I created so don't use those as proof.)
It would be very easy to measure the current in a wire. I could build a cheap device that could be built into an AC power cord. Almost any engineer could. To that you add a small 8-bit micro controller to send the measurement via Ethernet. You don't need 100% stable accuracy like you do with a meter that is read once per month. This little instrument would be read out once a minute or every five minutes. This is NOT a KWH meter you are simply sampling the instantaneous current in the AC line and logging to a DBMS.
The other method would be for the data center to keep a list of how much power each kind of equipment draws and use that to estimate the power and then the bill.
Several things could happen... First off none of this will happen for this century or next
1) People wil be a LOT richer. 100 years ago the average american workers could not own more than a few shirts now because to automation he can have a closet full. This is simply the result of worker productivity divided by the population. We are seeing trends already in some selected types of good like computers where costs are going down. Clothing prices took the nose dive last century. Eventually all manufactures goods will be built in "lights out" robot factories and will cost only the raw materials and energy costs. It may take 250 years but eventually it "stuff" will be cheap and we will be able to afford whatever we want. This has been the general trend for over 2,000 years. It's likly to continue
"Why is the interesting question. Why send stuff off when the results will not come back in your lifetime. only two reasons I think: (1) "lifetime" may be radically re-defined in the future. We would not even think about sending machine out to explore the galaxy before we can build very intelligent machines. Once we have such machines perhaps it is them not us that wants to go on the long trip. (2) if you can build a robot that can build a robot then building 100 robots is not such a massive undertaking, very few labor hours would be needed. (3) if it were cheap enough SOMEONE would do it just because he can. Maybe an artist thinks of it as a kind of "Performance art." and many of us like to build things that will out live us. Rich people have been building things that wil "last forever" for a long time. First the pirymens in egept and latter tings like the Getty Trust or the Carnegie Endowment.
Generation ships? The way these will happen is some day people will live in space in some kind of large self sustaining kind of structure. There could be hundreds of these structures. One day one of them will decide to hurle itself outside of the solar system. They may not even miss the Sun and the others may not even care that they leave. People on Earth will not build and launch these. They will be launched by the people who have already lived in them for generations.
Have you ever owned a sailboat? A sailboat is not "transportation" because "you are already there". You live on the boat so the fact that it is going some place out on the ocean is secondary. It's not like you've left you house to spent time in an airplane to get some place. No, sailing is where to slowly move your house at about the speed of a slow jog (3 to 6 knots is typical)
Back to Fermi. Even if a few cicilizations send just a few of these the entire galaxy would soon be full. It would not take billions of years.
About the "where to go" problem: Today you've have a problem. We have no idea where to go but that is changing quickly. Just as soon as we can get some better instruments up in space that problem will be solved. It's a problem we can solve with time and money, no breakthroughs in physics or science required.
"So be patient, my fellow humans, it may take a few million (or even billion) more years."
You missed Fermi's point. They should be here NOW. In fact by conservative estimates it should be hard NOT to find them as they should be everywhere. The paradox is that if they exist at all they should be here in numbers to large to miss.
It's the same way you can prove that time travel can't work. If it did we'd see time travellers from the future. We don't see them.
How long will it take us humans to explore the entire galaxy? Really not as long as you think. What you do is build a self-replicating robot. Send only 100 of these to 100 nearby stars. Each of these robots sets up a robot factory and sends hundreds of copies out. These do the same. In less then million years every star will have an army of robots. You don't need ultra-fast space travel either 1/10th of the speed of light is enough that by now the galaxy should be full.
Many people think that these robots are the dominate form of life in the universe. We have been walking upright on Earth for maybe a million years but in less time those robots could far outnumber us.
If robots (Either with good AI or maybe with biological minds downloaded into them) are common they don't need to live on a planet. They could be happy any place there is enough energy and raw material.
Yes they WOULD notice a downstreem speed boost. Lets say my mom could get 1 gigabit fiber into her house. What would she do with it? Wel, she's cancel here cable TV subscription and her telephone subscription. She would no longer look at the TV Guide to "see what was on" She would browse a library catalog of 100,000 films and just pick one.
What would I do with 1Gb fiber. I'd not have to go to work haldf the time. I could call up a video "chat" with coworkers and export the screen from the compters in the lab to my house with almost zero lag. I'd pay for the 1Gb service with not having to drive my car.
To say "my current 1Mbps gets the job done" is backwards. No, you created to "job" to fit the connection speed. If the connection where 1000 faster you would create a different, bigger job.
Actually my old 300 baud dial up modem "got the job" done too back in the 1980's but back then the "job" was USNET access, email and maybe a telnet seesion and and their was no "web" as "Mosaic" was yet to be written. But I was very happy to have Internet access 25 years ago because most people didn't have it at all.
Here in the US working PCs are free. Or even less than free. A while back a loaded a pickup truck with old computers, CRTs and some printers and scanners and took them to a recycle facility. I effect I paid someone to take them off my hands. Today I still have a couple working computers that are powered down and in storage. I tried giving this stuff to a school (my daughter is in 3rd grade) but the school has a "minimum standard" that they will accept. Basically if it's not a 2Ghz Pentium with a good sized hard drive and monitor and CD/DVD they don't want it. The school has to haul of their old stuff to be recycled too.
So anyone who wants a three or four year old PC can have on for the asking. and if they work it right can have hundreds of them. All of these are usable and better then the using a TV set for a monitor.
There is a difference if the sale is an auction. eBay sells out the rules and each party agrees to them. Many people would call this a contract. If I make my own web site and offer items for sale can make my own rules and you can agree to them or not. There is no contract untill both parties agree. The details of how contracts work and what is a contract depends on where in the world you are so we can't argu fine point here. I'm in California and I'm sure the law is differnt in mexico or even Nevada.
But I'm sure everywhere an auction is differnt then puttin up a web site where you just have some items and prices listed
Believe me. Even if the oceans heated and all life in them died and the atmosphere became unbreathable and vast areas of land ere radioactive due to nuclear war the Earth would STILL be a far better place to live then Mars. No don't talk about "terraformming". A badly screwed up earth would be easier to terraform than Mars.
Still I suspect that one day people will live on Mars. Some may prefer the lighter gravity. But they will live underground in pressurized tunnels and almost never go out side. Humans can not handle the radiation so their time outdoors would have to be rationed over their lifetime. Same with living on the moon. You would want many feet of rock and soil between you and the Sun. But then if they find a 100% cure for cancer people may stop caring so much about radiation. Hard to predict the future
I have both ubuntu and a Mac on my desk at home. I use just one monitor. The are very much alike except for one big thing and that one big thing is huge. I can't run Photoshop or Apple's Final Cut, Aperture or even iTunes on my Linux system. The other thing is that Mac OS X will not run on my non-Apple hardware. So I use both.
At work I'm on Linux almost exclusivly with some things running on Solaris.
The trouble is the capital cost. Who would put in a $10,000 solar eletric system when their electric bill is only $80 per month? They will never entirely bring the bill to zero. the ther is a not so small cost to run a solar power system - batteries have only a 5 year life and they are not cheap to replace. I'd be better off investing the $10K in the stock market and using the proceeds to pay the $80 per month bill.
The cost is still 10X to high. They have a long way to go. But the panels are only half of the system. Batteries are the other half and I don't see the cost of batteries coming down
"one LPAR can run up to several hundred x86 VMs concurrently)."
When I started out the "hot" PC, the best you could get, was a 4Mhz Z80 running CP/M. I had one of those at home and at work, I worked the operating system of a very old (even then) CDC mainframe. It was a CDC6600. We had a Z80 emulator that ran on the 6600 and we could emulate a Z80 at about 20 times real time. Not bad, a virtual PC running on a mainframe in the late 1970's
Us software people really need to get off the ball and think of something new rather then just re-implementing 40 year old ideas on ever cheaper and faster hardware.
Have you ever watch a wild mouse in the field? Not an easy life. Almost all of them die young. If you watch, they live a life trying to balance fear and starvation. They will go out and forage but they are always looking all around and up. they know instinctivley that they are prey for cats, hawks, foxes and whatever. They have to come out if hiding to eat but if they do the chances are nearly 100% that one day they will be killed and eaten. Mice may actually like cages -- an enclosed space where food magically appears -- heaven _before_ you de, what a deal. Mice are fearful of open spaces and open sky overhead. they prefer to be inside a small enclosed space near a supply of food.
Humans are built to cover much ground while using little energy. Bipedal locomotion (walking upright on two feet) means you can search a lot of area and don't use up much food/energy in the process. For a million yars our ancestors were hunters and gatherers that search large areas for food. Humans tend to have an instinctive need to move around and don't like confinement.
We make the mistake of thinking all animals are like humans. Animals that are on the bottom of the food chain are not like us at all.
Because Solaris can do things Linux can't. First off Solaris scales better.
To make an analogy, You might argue that Toyota makes nice pickup trucks and "Who needs Caterpillar?". Well those 20 foot tall earth moving machines do a different job and are very usfull to some people. But yes Toyota sell __way__ more trucks than Cat. Those 20 foot tall machine are real "clunkers" f you try to use then for every day tasks like driving to work or the store.
If you really need a machine with four dozen CPUs then Solaris is the way to go. It Also wins in terms of reliability. Linux is good but Solaris is about 10X better. (Yes really, one more "9" to the right of the decimal point) Solaris has better fault tolerance. For example Solaris can "boot around" failed CPU cores and bad memory. And then there is D-trace and ZFS. These two alone will make some people go for Solaris. Solaris also has the same advantage as Apple's Mac OS X in that Sun builds the hardware and the OS so you can be pretty sure the two work together. And what about storage and I/O bandwidth? Again Solaris scales better.
Operating costs. Sun's new T1 really does offer the best compute power per watt of any server class machine. At $0.14 per KWH power adds up fast. In fact power and cooling costs more than some machines do over a several year lifetime. So Solaris might save you big $$ per month on power bill if you have a large data center running many light weight processes.
Now, if you have a PC, even a "high end" quad core Xeon based PC and you need to select an OS then Linux may work well but Sun calls a machine like this "entry level"
Many end users could not tell a Solaris system from a Linux system. Both can run the Gnome desktop and both run the same csh and bash shells and so on. The differience is the Kernels
I use Solaris, Linux and Mac OS X. Mission critical stuff goes on Solaris. I develop on a Linux system and use GNU Autotools to make it portable to Solaris. Use the Mac at home for photo/video and so on. One OS is not "better" but each has strengths.
About the obnly thing I can think of is with Linux you can run all of the free open source software that is written for Linux but doesn't all most all of this run under Mac OS X? What can Linux do that Mac OS X can't?
The claim that emulation is not efficient may be true but VMware is not emulation. The code runs mostly native under VMware. The problem is that to run two OSes at once you need a lot of memory.
I've got a couple Linux systems and two Macs I use them both at work and at home and for the most part they are interchangeable. The Mac can run most anything the Linux systems can but iLife, Photoshop, Final Cut and iTunes don't run under Linux.
I'd go with Macs all round except that Apple's hardware offerings are quite limited.
We spend a LOT more on applied research. NASA is the only one with a rover on Mars but there are many, many people at government labs, universitoies and corporations doing helthcare related work.
One interesting study would be to compare NASA's budget to the amount of money we spend in the US in movie tickets, TV reality shows or on new ring tones for cell phones. Actually we as a nation spent more on the ring tones then on mars. Think of all the poor starving kids in Africa that could have been fed if not for the money wasted on ring tones.
Actually none of the money NASA spent goes to Mars. All of it goes to pay people who live here on Earth a salary. The money is not "gone", just redistributed.
Moore stated the the number of transitors per unit area will double every 18 months. This is in effect the ratio of cost to performance.
There are two ways to look at this (1) For fixed cost performance will double every 18 months or (2) For a given performance the cost will be reduced by 1/2 every 18 months.
So, if people decide they don't need fast computers Moore's law will continue to apply. and the machines will just get cheaper.
In the real world we are seeing both sides of Moore's law. The cost is falling and performance is improving but neither at the double per 18 month rate. Again Moore talked about a ratio transistors per unit area. Later in an interview he said his "law" was simply the result of how much Intel spends on R&D and new facilities and that the "law" is driven by economics rather then technology.
Ok so you brush off some dust. Then what? The dust in the air is so thick it obscures sunlight. Cleaning the panel will do not good.
A more robust system would use a radio isotope heater and not depend on battery power to run heaters. But these were designed to be within a set budget and had a short design lifespan.
I am sure that when humans go to mars a nuclear power plant will go with them to the surface.
"...Today I own 4 laptops and 3 desktops. They're all heavily used,..."
How can one person own 4 laptops and claim they are "all heavily used"? at most each only sees 25% of what I'd call "heavily used". That is unless you own the machine and have given it out to someone else but then you only "own" it technically
Still, I agree. The notebook wil eventualy replace most all desktops because one day they will be les expensive. They are smaler, take less material to build and as robots get better neither will take many labor hours to assemble so small and easy to ship and stock will win.
(1) They are MUCH cheaper then space telescopes. Maybe 20X cheaper. There ground based scopes only cost as much as a few Hollywood blockbuster movies. We can't afford more then about one space telescope per decade so this means there is more demand for time then a space telescope can supply
(2) ground based scopes can be very much larger and collect more light
(3) Adaptive optics combined with the large size means the images are about as sharp from the ground as from space. So we get same result but as 1/20th the cost
(4) the air is non transparent as some wave lengths and you simply can't see through it from the ground. At these wave lenths a space telesciope is the best or only option.
The bottom line is that you want both ground and space based telescopes because they are complementary.
the question of where a person's personality 'is' between death and later revival,
The brain is to personality and conciseness what legs are to "walking". One needs legs to walk and one needs a brain to think
There are people who have no use of their legs. They can't walk. But on the other hand just because you have legs you are not walking. Walking is a process of balance and motion performed by legs
personality and conciseness is a process that a brain can do.
So where does personality go when the brain stops working? The same place "walking" goes when you sit down.
The problem here is that the question is leading. You can never answer a leading question. So when did you stop beating you wife? Why did you take the money?... Where does personality go? All these question assume something that is not true
I'm not impressed either. I came to them with cash in hand and a simple pre-sales question. If a salesman had called back he could have made a sale. But as a result of such very poor service before the sale I figured after sale service would be even worse and decided not to invest in anything but their free products and even then to continue tracking other alternatives.
Their main products simply don't work on modern versions of Linux. One has to either modify their product with a 3rd party patch or down grade the OS to run VMware.
But you can get it to work so I figure the free (beer) product worth what I paid for it.
Postscript is not "owned" by Adobe. The Postscript spec is public. I have a copy of the "red book" right here near my desk. What Adobe does sell is their Postscript interpretor. But there are other Postscript interpetors. One of them is "Ghostscript" and this is the one CUPS and Apple use. Ghostscript is inside some printers but most printers us an Adobe engine internally. Gostscript is open source and not part of CUPS, only used by CUPS
In the Red Book is an intro written by John Warnock (Warnock is the founder of Adobe) where he says that Postscript the language was originated by Evens and Sutherland in 1976. This statement has been in every edition of the language standard. Adobe makes the best interpretor for the language but they don't own the language
I hope they do make a phone smaller than the iPod Shuffle. In fact they could build the entire device into the erabud headphones and do away with the wires. You don't need a scree or keyboard to control a phone. Not if voice control is perfected. Some day the phone could disappear.
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"Creationism is the polar opposite of science. You start with a conclusion (God made the Earth and the Bible shows how he did it) and then proceed to find evidence that supports that, as opposed to finding evidence and then making a conclusion based on the evidence."
I agree with your premise but your explanation is wrong. Both types will go look for facts to support their ideas. The basic difference is that the scientist makes a statement crafted in such a way that it COULD be dis-proved and accepts the fact that nothing CAN be proven to be true because there is always the possibility of one more observation at a future date. Creationism takes the logically impossible possition that a stament can be proven correct by empirical evidence.
Creationism is something that can never be disproved nor verified by any amount of evidence. I respect creationists who know this. It think most do. In fact mainstream Christan churches teach it that way. The Idiots are the ones who look for natural evidence to support the supper natural. These people don't understand what science is, not do they really even know what religion is.
As an example here is a statement: "I (yes me, ChrisA90278) created the universe 30 seconds ago." I'll give a beer to anyone who can dis-prove it.
"Nobody has ever presented a valid argument for intelligent design"
By definition there can be no logical argument based on evidence for a supernatural event. "supernatural" means outside of the realm of observation. There can not be evidence for or against.
For example let me make a claim: "I created the universe five minutes ago." I doubt many people believe me but I'll give you a beer if you can prove me wrong. (hint: Your memory or yesterday and your collection of 78RPM records is part of the universe that I created so don't use those as proof.)
It would be very easy to measure the current in a wire. I could build a cheap device that could be built into an AC power cord. Almost any engineer could. To that you add a small 8-bit micro controller to send the measurement via Ethernet. You don't need 100% stable accuracy like you do with a meter that is read once per month. This little instrument would be read out once a minute or every five minutes.
This is NOT a KWH meter you are simply sampling the instantaneous current in the AC line and logging to a DBMS.
The other method would be for the data center to keep a list of how much power each kind of equipment draws and use that to estimate the power and then the bill.
Several things could happen... First off none of this will happen for this century or next
1) People wil be a LOT richer. 100 years ago the average american workers could not own more than a few shirts now because to automation he can have a closet full. This is simply the result of worker productivity divided by the population. We are seeing trends already in some selected types of good like computers where costs are going down. Clothing prices took the nose dive last century. Eventually all manufactures goods will be built in "lights out" robot factories and will cost only the raw materials and energy costs. It may take 250 years but eventually it "stuff" will be cheap and we will be able to afford whatever we want. This has been the general trend for over 2,000 years. It's likly to continue
"Why is the interesting question. Why send stuff off when the results will not come back in your lifetime. only two reasons I think: (1) "lifetime" may be radically re-defined in the future. We would not even think about sending machine out to explore the galaxy before we can build very intelligent machines. Once we have such machines perhaps it is them not us that wants to go on the long trip. (2) if you can build a robot that can build a robot then building 100 robots is not such a massive undertaking, very few labor hours would be needed. (3) if it were cheap enough SOMEONE would do it just because he can. Maybe an artist thinks of it as a kind of "Performance art." and many of us like to build things that will out live us. Rich people have been building things that wil "last forever" for a long time. First the pirymens in egept and latter tings like the Getty Trust or the Carnegie Endowment.
Generation ships? The way these will happen is some day people will live in space in some kind of large self sustaining kind of structure. There could be hundreds of these structures. One day one of them will decide to hurle itself outside of the solar system. They may not even miss the Sun and the others may not even care that they leave. People on Earth will not build and launch these. They will be launched by the people who have already lived in them for generations.
Have you ever owned a sailboat? A sailboat is not "transportation" because "you are already there". You live on the boat so the fact that it is going some place out on the ocean is secondary. It's not like you've left you house to spent time in an airplane to get some place. No, sailing is where to slowly move your house at about the speed of a slow jog (3 to 6 knots is typical)
Back to Fermi. Even if a few cicilizations send just a few of these the entire galaxy would soon be full. It would not take billions of years.
About the "where to go" problem: Today you've have a problem. We have no idea where to go but that is changing quickly. Just as soon as we can get some better instruments up in space that problem will be solved. It's a problem we can solve with time and money, no breakthroughs in physics or science required.
"So be patient, my fellow humans, it may take a few million (or even billion) more years."
You missed Fermi's point. They should be here NOW. In fact by conservative estimates it should be hard NOT to find them as they should be everywhere. The paradox is that if they exist at all they should be here in numbers to large to miss.
It's the same way you can prove that time travel can't work. If it did we'd see time travellers from the future. We don't see them.
How long will it take us humans to explore the entire galaxy? Really not as long as you think. What you do is build a self-replicating robot. Send only 100 of these to 100 nearby stars. Each of these robots sets up a robot factory and sends hundreds of copies out. These do the same. In less then million years every star will have an army of robots. You don't need ultra-fast space travel either 1/10th of the speed of light is enough that by now the galaxy should be full.
Many people think that these robots are the dominate form of life in the universe. We have been walking upright on Earth for maybe a million years but in less time those robots could far outnumber us.
If robots (Either with good AI or maybe with biological minds downloaded into them) are common they don't need to live on a planet. They could be happy any place there is enough energy and raw material.
Yes they WOULD notice a downstreem speed boost. Lets say my mom could get 1 gigabit fiber into her house. What would she do with it? Wel, she's cancel here cable TV subscription and her telephone subscription. She would no longer look at the TV Guide to "see what was on" She would browse a library catalog of 100,000 films and just pick one.
What would I do with 1Gb fiber. I'd not have to go to work haldf the time. I could call up a video "chat" with coworkers and export the screen from the compters in the lab to my house with almost zero lag. I'd pay for the 1Gb service with not having to drive my car.
To say "my current 1Mbps gets the job done" is backwards. No, you created to "job" to fit the connection speed. If the connection where 1000 faster you would create a different, bigger job.
Actually my old 300 baud dial up modem "got the job" done too back in the 1980's but back then the "job" was USNET access, email and maybe a telnet seesion and and their was no "web" as "Mosaic" was yet to be written. But I was very happy to have Internet access 25 years ago because most people didn't have it at all.
Here in the US working PCs are free. Or even less than free. A while back a loaded a pickup truck with old computers, CRTs and some printers and scanners and took them to a recycle facility. I effect I paid someone to take them off my hands. Today I still have a couple working computers that are powered down and in storage. I tried giving this stuff to a school (my daughter is in 3rd grade) but the school has a "minimum standard" that they will accept. Basically if it's not a 2Ghz Pentium with a good sized hard drive and monitor and CD/DVD they don't want it. The school has to haul of their old stuff to be recycled too.
So anyone who wants a three or four year old PC can have on for the asking. and if they work it right can have hundreds of them. All of these are usable and better then the using a TV set for a monitor.
There is a difference if the sale is an auction. eBay sells out the rules and each party agrees to them. Many people would call this a contract. If I make my own web site and offer items for sale can make my own rules and you can agree to them or not. There is no contract untill both parties agree. The details of how contracts work and what is a contract depends on where in the world you are so we can't argu fine point here. I'm in California and I'm sure the law is differnt in mexico or even Nevada. But I'm sure everywhere an auction is differnt then puttin up a web site where you just have some items and prices listed
Believe me. Even if the oceans heated and all life in them died and the atmosphere became unbreathable and vast areas of land ere radioactive due to nuclear war the Earth would STILL be a far better place to live then Mars. No don't talk about "terraformming". A badly screwed up earth would be easier to terraform than Mars.
Still I suspect that one day people will live on Mars. Some may prefer the lighter gravity. But they will live underground in pressurized tunnels and almost never go out side. Humans can not handle the radiation so their time outdoors would have to be rationed over their lifetime. Same with living on the moon. You would want many feet of rock and soil between you and the Sun. But then if they find a 100% cure for cancer people may stop caring so much about radiation. Hard to predict the future
I have both ubuntu and a Mac on my desk at home. I use just one monitor. The are very much alike except for one big thing and that one big thing is huge. I can't run Photoshop or Apple's Final Cut, Aperture or even iTunes on my Linux system. The other thing is that Mac OS X will not run on my non-Apple hardware. So I use both.
At work I'm on Linux almost exclusivly with some things running on Solaris.
The trouble is the capital cost. Who would put in a $10,000 solar eletric system when their electric bill is only $80 per month? They will never entirely bring the bill to zero. the ther is a not so small cost to run a solar power system - batteries have only a 5 year life and they are not cheap to replace. I'd be better off investing the $10K in the stock market and using the proceeds to pay the $80 per month bill.
The cost is still 10X to high. They have a long way to go. But the panels are only half of the system. Batteries are the other half and I don't see the cost of batteries coming down
"one LPAR can run up to several hundred x86 VMs concurrently)."
When I started out the "hot" PC, the best you could get, was a 4Mhz Z80 running CP/M. I had one of those at home and at work, I worked the operating system of a very old (even then) CDC mainframe. It was a CDC6600. We had a Z80 emulator that ran on the 6600 and we could emulate a Z80 at about 20 times real time. Not bad, a virtual PC running on a mainframe in the late 1970's
Us software people really need to get off the ball and think of something new rather then just re-implementing 40 year old ideas on ever cheaper and faster hardware.
Have you ever watch a wild mouse in the field? Not an easy life. Almost all of them die young. If you watch, they live a life trying to balance fear and starvation. They will go out and forage but they are always looking all around and up. they know instinctivley that they are prey for cats, hawks, foxes and whatever. They have to come out if hiding to eat but if they do the chances are nearly 100% that one day they will be killed and eaten. Mice may actually like cages -- an enclosed space where food magically appears -- heaven _before_ you de, what a deal. Mice are fearful of open spaces and open sky overhead. they prefer to be inside a small enclosed space near a supply of food.
Humans are built to cover much ground while using little energy. Bipedal locomotion (walking upright on two feet) means you can search a lot of area and don't use up much food/energy in the process. For a million yars our ancestors were hunters and gatherers that search large areas for food. Humans tend to have an instinctive need to move around and don't like confinement.
We make the mistake of thinking all animals are like humans. Animals that are on the bottom of the food chain are not like us at all.
Because Solaris can do things Linux can't. First off Solaris scales better.
To make an analogy, You might argue that Toyota makes nice pickup trucks and "Who needs Caterpillar?". Well those 20 foot tall earth moving machines do a different job and are very usfull to some people. But yes Toyota sell __way__ more trucks than Cat. Those 20 foot tall machine are real "clunkers" f you try to use then for every day tasks like driving to work or the store.
If you really need a machine with four dozen CPUs then Solaris is the way to go. It Also wins in terms of reliability. Linux is good but Solaris is about 10X better. (Yes really, one more "9" to the right of the decimal point) Solaris has better fault tolerance. For example Solaris can "boot around" failed CPU cores and bad memory. And then there is D-trace and ZFS. These two alone will make some people go for Solaris. Solaris also has the same advantage as Apple's Mac OS X in that Sun builds the hardware and the OS so you can be pretty sure the two work together. And what about storage and I/O bandwidth? Again Solaris scales better.
Operating costs. Sun's new T1 really does offer the best compute power per watt of any server class machine. At $0.14 per KWH power adds up fast. In fact power and cooling costs more than some machines do over a several year lifetime. So Solaris might save you big $$ per month on power bill if you have a large data center running many light weight processes.
Now, if you have a PC, even a "high end" quad core Xeon based PC and you need to select an OS then Linux may work well but Sun calls a machine like this "entry level"
Many end users could not tell a Solaris system from a Linux system. Both can run the Gnome desktop and both run the same csh and bash shells and so on. The differience is the Kernels
I use Solaris, Linux and Mac OS X. Mission critical stuff goes on Solaris. I develop on a Linux system and use GNU Autotools to make it portable to Solaris. Use the Mac at home for photo/video and so on. One OS is not "better" but each has strengths.
What do you gain by running Mac Apps on Linux?
About the obnly thing I can think of is with Linux you can run all of the free open source software that is written for Linux but doesn't all most all of this run under Mac OS X? What can Linux do that Mac OS X can't?
The claim that emulation is not efficient may be true but VMware is not emulation. The code runs mostly native under VMware. The problem is that to run two OSes at once you need a lot of memory.
I've got a couple Linux systems and two Macs I use them both at work and at home and for the most part they are interchangeable. The Mac can run most anything the Linux systems can but iLife, Photoshop, Final Cut and iTunes don't run under Linux.
I'd go with Macs all round except that Apple's hardware
offerings are quite limited.
We spend a LOT more on applied research. NASA is the only one with a rover on Mars but there are many, many people at government labs, universitoies and corporations doing helthcare related work. One interesting study would be to compare NASA's budget to the amount of money we spend in the US in movie tickets, TV reality shows or on new ring tones for cell phones. Actually we as a nation spent more on the ring tones then on mars. Think of all the poor starving kids in Africa that could have been fed if not for the money wasted on ring tones. Actually none of the money NASA spent goes to Mars. All of it goes to pay people who live here on Earth a salary. The money is not "gone", just redistributed.
Moore stated the the number of transitors per unit area will double every 18 months. This is in effect the ratio of cost to performance.
There are two ways to look at this (1) For fixed cost performance will double every 18 months or (2) For a given performance the cost will be reduced by 1/2 every 18 months.
So, if people decide they don't need fast computers Moore's law will continue to apply. and the machines will just get cheaper.
In the real world we are seeing both sides of Moore's law. The cost is falling and performance is improving but neither at the double per 18 month rate. Again Moore talked about a ratio transistors per unit area. Later in an interview he said his "law" was simply the result of how much Intel spends on R&D and new facilities and that the "law" is driven by economics rather then technology.
Ok so you brush off some dust. Then what? The dust in the air is so thick it obscures sunlight. Cleaning the panel will do not good.
A more robust system would use a radio isotope heater and not depend on battery power to run heaters. But these were designed to be within a set budget and had a short design lifespan.
I am sure that when humans go to mars a nuclear power plant will go with them to the surface.
"...Today I own 4 laptops and 3 desktops. They're all heavily used,..."
How can one person own 4 laptops and claim they are "all heavily used"? at most each only sees 25% of what I'd call "heavily used". That is unless you own the machine and have given it out to someone else but then you only "own" it technically
Still, I agree. The notebook wil eventualy replace most all desktops because one day they will be les expensive. They are smaler, take less material to build and as robots get better neither will take many labor hours to assemble so small and easy to ship and stock will win.
"and then a big load with the unmanned portion of the mission"
The problem with your idea is the above. How to do that. If you can do "big loads" the whole problem goes away.
Why build ground based telescopes?
(1) They are MUCH cheaper then space telescopes. Maybe 20X cheaper. There ground based scopes only cost as much as a few Hollywood blockbuster movies. We can't afford more then about one space telescope per decade so this means there is more demand for time then a space telescope can supply
(2) ground based scopes can be very much larger and collect more light
(3) Adaptive optics combined with the large size means the images are about as sharp from the ground as from space. So we get same result but as 1/20th the cost
(4) the air is non transparent as some wave lengths and you simply can't see through it from the ground. At these wave lenths a space telesciope is the best or only option.
The bottom line is that you want both ground and space based telescopes because they are complementary.
The brain is to personality and conciseness what legs are to "walking".
One needs legs to walk and one needs a brain to think
There are people who have no use of their legs. They can't walk.
But on the other hand just because you have legs you are not walking.
Walking is a process of balance and motion performed by legs
personality and conciseness is a process that a brain can do.
So where does personality go when the brain stops working? The same
place "walking" goes when you sit down.
The problem here is that the question is leading. You can never
answer a leading question. So when did you stop beating you wife?
Why did you take the money?... Where does personality go? All these
question assume something that is not true
I'm not impressed either. I came to them with cash in hand and a simple pre-sales question. If a salesman had called back he could have made a sale. But as a result of such very poor service before the sale I figured after sale service would be even worse and decided not to invest in anything but their free products and even then to continue tracking other alternatives.
Their main products simply don't work on modern versions of Linux. One has to either modify their product with a 3rd party patch or down grade the OS to run VMware.
But you can get it to work so I figure the free (beer) product worth what I paid for it.
Postscript is not "owned" by Adobe. The Postscript spec is public. I have a copy of the "red book" right here near my desk. What Adobe does sell is their Postscript interpretor. But there are other Postscript interpetors. One of them is "Ghostscript" and this is the one CUPS and Apple use. Ghostscript is inside some printers but most printers us an Adobe engine internally. Gostscript is open source and not part of CUPS, only used by CUPS
In the Red Book is an intro written by John Warnock (Warnock is the founder of Adobe) where he says that Postscript the language was originated by Evens and Sutherland in 1976. This statement has been in every edition of the language standard. Adobe makes the best interpretor for the language but they don't own the language
I hope they do make a phone smaller than the iPod Shuffle. In fact they could build the entire device into the erabud headphones and do away with the wires. You don't need a scree or keyboard to control a phone. Not if voice control is perfected. Some day the phone could disappear.