If you want good science, a robot can do almost anything on Mars better than a human.
While your point about cost (both in dollars and human life) is poignant, the above statement is just false.
Spirit and Opportunity, which until now have been the pinnacle of robotic rovers, have traveled less than 10 miles and have not gone below an inch of the surface. A human on Mars - specifically, a geologist - could do everything (scientifically) that Spirit and Opportunity have done in the span of a day or two.
We will NEVER colonize the planets. As soon as the technology starts to get close, the scientists and environmentalists will stop it, so as to not contaminate a virgin environment.
The scientists will not stop it. They are the ones that understand that the only way we're going to survive long-term as a species is if we manage to colonize several other planets and other star systems. In 5 billion years, assuming humans make it that far, our Sun will die. Earth will die.
Two billion years after that, the Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way galaxy will collide, which could result in Earth 2.0 being yanked from its orbit by a passing star.
Your point about Mars is taken - it's an inhospitable place - but really, if there was a colony there, I can think of many, many scientists who would love to go - namely, anyone on the Spirit and Opportunity teams.
Environmentalists don't get anything passed in Congress now, so why would you think it'd be any different in the future? If we were staring at technology that would let us colonize Mars, it would get done.
A colony on Mars could find out if it ever supported life a lot better than leaving the planet alone would ever do. How do you think we figured out how life began on Earth? You can look at history in the ice and rock to see what happened long ago.
Yes, there was a flaw in the mirror. I remember the size of the flaw being described at a space museum tour as:
"Take one strand of your hair. Cut it lengthwise 36 times; take one of those strands and cut it another 36 times lengthwise."
To me, that just underscores the difficulty in putting a telescope in space. True, the flaw was considered a debacle, but NASA fixed it by correcting the instruments on the telescope by an equally offsetting amount. This has led to amazing discoveries and the Hubble can largely be viewed as a success.
In my mind, it's a shame that we won't be keeping it running past 2013.
The Mars rover Spirit had a glitch. JPL very nearly lost Spirit because they filled up all of the space on the flash memory. This was recovered because a software engineer thought ahead of time to include a backdoor to boot it into a recovery mode with no file system. There are countless examples on this project where good design ahead of time made for a very successful project.
Spirit and Opportunity are great examples of robots doing wonderful things in space. Landing on Mars and driving around is a very complex task. And it goes to show that NASA and JPL employ some really smart people and these people can make stuff that does great things.
With robots, you only risk the money and time you've invested. With human spaceflight, you end up with a much greater problem - a Columbia or a Challenger type disaster where you not only lose the money invested but also the priceless value of human life.
Count me as one. It'd be more of an issue to me if we were developing on Java 6 yet, but our apps have primarily been written in Java 5, so my Mac has worked great. Apple needs to keep up to date on Java so the newest Java software (a large portion of which is written in Java so that it's cross platform) will run on Macs.
Actually... the reason Apple early adopters are cool are twofold:
The products themselves actually are cool, in the truest sense of the word. What's cooler than an iPhone? (And if you say Neo1973, I will laugh.) Do you think the Zune 1.0 early adopters were ever seen as having something cool?
The products generally have far fewer issues than competing products. Leopard early adopters generally are not suffering at all - the OS works great. Personally, I've early adopted many of Apple's products and I have yet to run into any real issues.
Microsoft (Xbox 360 overheating, Vista compatibility), Ford (flaming tailpipes on the F350), Sony (PS3... but with no games) and many other early adopters have a much different story to tell. They got their item early but it is fraught with core problems and... it doesn't even look good.
You guys deserve it. If any more get togethers are planned that are 1/2 as fun as that party, I'd do my damndest to make it, even if it's a "Slashdot turns 10.1" party!
Totally awesome evening. I'm really glad Vibrant won. It was one of the best parties I've ever been to, so it's GOT to be one of the best Slashdot parties out there, right?:)
I'm in the same boat. I've checked every single day for the past week and still nothing (and I'm set to US English, too.)
Now it's time to warn people about this interface change. My girlfriend's parents barely understand how to log in to the existing interface... if anything changes, they will probably assume it's a virus and we'll get a panicked phone call.
Yep, it's been happening to me in Minneapolis since Sunday. Gmail, Google, and other sites just stop working.
How the hell can they get away with this crap?!
Some might argue that Slashdot is just as guilty as Greenpeace of using Apple's success to grab headlines / make money.
Personally, I don't really care, because we're all in it to make or raise money. PETA says and does offensive things to grab headlines, the WWE does, and 90% of the articles on CNN and even Digg are sensationalist headlines designed to get you to "click through".
That's what Apple said, but people who were on the beta were saying that Leopard wasn't likely to be ready on time already, that it was way less stable and mature than Tiger and Panther had been at a similar point.
Good point. Although, one other point is that the iPhone was already in development for a long time before Apple made that announcement. They very well could already have taken many developers and testers from 10.5 and moved them to iPhone long before. My guess is that Apple, at all costs, wanted to avoid doing what Microsoft did and completely disenchanting their user base by releasing a half-finished OS.
I'd say there were two factors at play - first, Apple took staff from 10.5 and moved them to iPhone in mid-to-late 2006. Apple figures it will impact Leopard but they weren't sure how much. Second, Vista was released in November 2006 and flops. Apple then learns from this and realizes they need to improve Leopard dramatically before release.
It takes Apple until January, and Apple announces the iPhone release date and the Leopard release date as everything solidifies.
Apple was doing something completely new for them - a touch screen and a phone - and they didn't plan for enough resources, so they re-appropriated resources from a project that could afford a delay.
If I play my PS3 for any length of time, the entertainment center becomes an oven hot enough to broil a steak. I'm having trouble comprehending what eight of them would do running intensive math calculations. *shudder*
In a data center, the PS3 would be acceptable. I just can't imagine anyone making a rack mount enclosure for the PS3.:)
I saw some of the same things you outlined while I worked at CompUSA. I used to work behind the upgrade counter where memory and hard disk drives were sold. CompUSA sold extended warranties and they ranked employees each week based on how many you sold.
I was instructed to ask every customer whether they would like to purchase an extended warranty. No matter if they were buying a product that already had a lifetime warranty (e.g. RAM).
I fought back and never once tried to push those ripoff extended warranties on customers. I think I sold on average one per week to people who asked about them (but I was honest about the manufacturer warranties). Every week my name was at the bottom of the ranking list. Every week my manager would talk to me about getting more people to buy the warranties. And every week I would explain that it usually doesn't make sense to buy an extended warranty on RAM/HDD/video cards, because by the time the manufacturer's warranty is out, one that is twice as fast/twice the size/etc will cost the same.
Faking a/. party for free swag has got to be one of the lamest things I've ever heard. It reminds me of Cartman pretending to be mentally handicapped so that he would win the Special Olympics.
What's next? Photoshopping (or, excuse me, GIMPing) some fake party pictures from a Mardi Gras website to try and win $1000 to ThinkGeek? Sheesh.
Sheesh. It's no wonder they have the right to stop you without you actually doing anything wrong - at.02%, you've had what, 1/4 of a beer? There's no way your driving would be affected enough to notice.
Note to self: when traveling to Sweden, leave the mouthwash at home.
Apple has said that they only take $0.25 from each $0.99 song for distribution costs and that the music store is pretty much a break-even venture for them.
This makes me wonder if Amazon is actually making any money here. I'm sure they're paying a premium to the record labels because of the DRM-free solution.
All the same, the more competition out there, the better... and this is coming from an Apple diehard. The online stores charge $8-$9 per album because that's what people are used to paying for a CD.
The album has a perceived value regardless of distribution method, so the labels have to keep prices high for their online sales to resist cannibalizing their brick-and-mortar sales.
With that said, the real reason is probably based around a focus group statistic, such as "X% of people online share their downloaded music illegally, so we need to protect ourselves from that loss." The label is inflating the price to accommodate this feared situation.
All of this would be moot if the labels employed forward-thinking executives who could find creative solutions for a moving marketplace rather than executives who fight their consumer base's desires!
First- no presenter in their right mind wants to rely on the internet to deliver a presentation.
Did you RTFA? They allow you to save the presentation so that it will work offline. You can then burn it to as many DVDs/CDs/USB Sticks/NAS boxes/SATA Hard Drives/MiniDiscs as you like.
In fact, I'd argue that it was more reliable than using PowerPoint, if only because you are only relying on a web browser being installed on a computer for it to work. That means that ANY laptop made in the last seven years will be able to view your presentation out of the box (except a Mac, which will need Firefox) and so you won't have to worry about finding a laptop with PowerPoint installed in order to get it to work.
Thank you for pointing out the obvious. Their iPhone was never off - it was in Standby mode. I'm sure Blackberry and Windows Mobile phones do the same thing.
What good is a phone that doesn't regularly check your email?
90% of responses above recommend PuTTY, which is a great program. However, if you're looking for the ultimate in bloat-free software that hasn't been mentioned:
Microsoft Word 5.1a for Mac. Some say it is the greatest word processor ever made. I say it's close.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want good science, a robot can do almost anything on Mars better than a human.
While your point about cost (both in dollars and human life) is poignant, the above statement is just false.
Spirit and Opportunity, which until now have been the pinnacle of robotic rovers, have traveled less than 10 miles and have not gone below an inch of the surface. A human on Mars - specifically, a geologist - could do everything (scientifically) that Spirit and Opportunity have done in the span of a day or two.
We will NEVER colonize the planets. As soon as the technology starts to get close, the scientists and environmentalists will stop it, so as to not contaminate a virgin environment.
The scientists will not stop it. They are the ones that understand that the only way we're going to survive long-term as a species is if we manage to colonize several other planets and other star systems. In 5 billion years, assuming humans make it that far, our Sun will die. Earth will die.
Two billion years after that, the Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way galaxy will collide, which could result in Earth 2.0 being yanked from its orbit by a passing star.
Your point about Mars is taken - it's an inhospitable place - but really, if there was a colony there, I can think of many, many scientists who would love to go - namely, anyone on the Spirit and Opportunity teams.
Environmentalists don't get anything passed in Congress now, so why would you think it'd be any different in the future? If we were staring at technology that would let us colonize Mars, it would get done.
A colony on Mars could find out if it ever supported life a lot better than leaving the planet alone would ever do. How do you think we figured out how life began on Earth? You can look at history in the ice and rock to see what happened long ago.
Yes, there was a flaw in the mirror. I remember the size of the flaw being described at a space museum tour as:
"Take one strand of your hair. Cut it lengthwise 36 times; take one of those strands and cut it another 36 times lengthwise."
To me, that just underscores the difficulty in putting a telescope in space. True, the flaw was considered a debacle, but NASA fixed it by correcting the instruments on the telescope by an equally offsetting amount. This has led to amazing discoveries and the Hubble can largely be viewed as a success.
In my mind, it's a shame that we won't be keeping it running past 2013.
Think it could be done for $473 billion? I do.
I'm continually depressed by the sheer number of great things we could have accomplished with even 1/10 of the money we've wasted in Iraq.
The Mars rover Spirit had a glitch. JPL very nearly lost Spirit because they filled up all of the space on the flash memory. This was recovered because a software engineer thought ahead of time to include a backdoor to boot it into a recovery mode with no file system. There are countless examples on this project where good design ahead of time made for a very successful project.
Spirit and Opportunity are great examples of robots doing wonderful things in space. Landing on Mars and driving around is a very complex task. And it goes to show that NASA and JPL employ some really smart people and these people can make stuff that does great things.
With robots, you only risk the money and time you've invested. With human spaceflight, you end up with a much greater problem - a Columbia or a Challenger type disaster where you not only lose the money invested but also the priceless value of human life.
- The products themselves actually are cool, in the truest sense of the word. What's cooler than an iPhone? (And if you say Neo1973, I will laugh.) Do you think the Zune 1.0 early adopters were ever seen as having something cool?
- The products generally have far fewer issues than competing products. Leopard early adopters generally are not suffering at all - the OS works great. Personally, I've early adopted many of Apple's products and I have yet to run into any real issues.
Microsoft (Xbox 360 overheating, Vista compatibility), Ford (flaming tailpipes on the F350), Sony (PS3... but with no games) and many other early adopters have a much different story to tell. They got their item early but it is fraught with core problems andYou guys deserve it. If any more get togethers are planned that are 1/2 as fun as that party, I'd do my damndest to make it, even if it's a "Slashdot turns 10.1" party!
Totally awesome evening. I'm really glad Vibrant won. It was one of the best parties I've ever been to, so it's GOT to be one of the best Slashdot parties out there, right? :)
LOLCATS FTW!
I'm in the same boat. I've checked every single day for the past week and still nothing (and I'm set to US English, too.)
Now it's time to warn people about this interface change. My girlfriend's parents barely understand how to log in to the existing interface... if anything changes, they will probably assume it's a virus and we'll get a panicked phone call.
Yep, it's been happening to me in Minneapolis since Sunday. Gmail, Google, and other sites just stop working. How the hell can they get away with this crap?!
Some might argue that Slashdot is just as guilty as Greenpeace of using Apple's success to grab headlines / make money.
Personally, I don't really care, because we're all in it to make or raise money. PETA says and does offensive things to grab headlines, the WWE does, and 90% of the articles on CNN and even Digg are sensationalist headlines designed to get you to "click through".
Who cares?
That's what Apple said, but people who were on the beta were saying that Leopard wasn't likely to be ready on time already, that it was way less stable and mature than Tiger and Panther had been at a similar point.
Good point. Although, one other point is that the iPhone was already in development for a long time before Apple made that announcement. They very well could already have taken many developers and testers from 10.5 and moved them to iPhone long before. My guess is that Apple, at all costs, wanted to avoid doing what Microsoft did and completely disenchanting their user base by releasing a half-finished OS.
I'd say there were two factors at play - first, Apple took staff from 10.5 and moved them to iPhone in mid-to-late 2006. Apple figures it will impact Leopard but they weren't sure how much. Second, Vista was released in November 2006 and flops. Apple then learns from this and realizes they need to improve Leopard dramatically before release.
It takes Apple until January, and Apple announces the iPhone release date and the Leopard release date as everything solidifies.
Apple was doing something completely new for them - a touch screen and a phone - and they didn't plan for enough resources, so they re-appropriated resources from a project that could afford a delay.
In a data center, the PS3 would be acceptable. I just can't imagine anyone making a rack mount enclosure for the PS3. :)
I was instructed to ask every customer whether they would like to purchase an extended warranty. No matter if they were buying a product that already had a lifetime warranty (e.g. RAM).
I fought back and never once tried to push those ripoff extended warranties on customers. I think I sold on average one per week to people who asked about them (but I was honest about the manufacturer warranties). Every week my name was at the bottom of the ranking list. Every week my manager would talk to me about getting more people to buy the warranties. And every week I would explain that it usually doesn't make sense to buy an extended warranty on RAM/HDD/video cards, because by the time the manufacturer's warranty is out, one that is twice as fast/twice the size/etc will cost the same.
What's next? Photoshopping (or, excuse me, GIMPing) some fake party pictures from a Mardi Gras website to try and win $1000 to ThinkGeek? Sheesh.
It doesn't necessarily mean multiple trips. It would be pretty easy to carry five or six laptops at once.
%.02?!
.02%, you've had what, 1/4 of a beer? There's no way your driving would be affected enough to notice.
Sheesh. It's no wonder they have the right to stop you without you actually doing anything wrong - at
Note to self: when traveling to Sweden, leave the mouthwash at home.
I mean this in a very serious way:
Run for office. Please.
Bring a video camera to this event and you'll have the entirety of the next season of Beauty and the Geek .
Who will be eliminated first? Oh, the suspense.
Apple has said that they only take $0.25 from each $0.99 song for distribution costs and that the music store is pretty much a break-even venture for them.
This makes me wonder if Amazon is actually making any money here. I'm sure they're paying a premium to the record labels because of the DRM-free solution.
All the same, the more competition out there, the better... and this is coming from an Apple diehard. The online stores charge $8-$9 per album because that's what people are used to paying for a CD.
The album has a perceived value regardless of distribution method, so the labels have to keep prices high for their online sales to resist cannibalizing their brick-and-mortar sales.
With that said, the real reason is probably based around a focus group statistic, such as "X% of people online share their downloaded music illegally, so we need to protect ourselves from that loss." The label is inflating the price to accommodate this feared situation.
All of this would be moot if the labels employed forward-thinking executives who could find creative solutions for a moving marketplace rather than executives who fight their consumer base's desires!
Well, he ended up donating all of the money to the ACLU of Ohio.
I applaud this man, and the newspaper article certainly backs him up (although it paints him in a poor light).
First- no presenter in their right mind wants to rely on the internet to deliver a presentation.
Did you RTFA? They allow you to save the presentation so that it will work offline. You can then burn it to as many DVDs/CDs/USB Sticks/NAS boxes/SATA Hard Drives/MiniDiscs as you like.
In fact, I'd argue that it was more reliable than using PowerPoint, if only because you are only relying on a web browser being installed on a computer for it to work. That means that ANY laptop made in the last seven years will be able to view your presentation out of the box (except a Mac, which will need Firefox) and so you won't have to worry about finding a laptop with PowerPoint installed in order to get it to work.
Thank you for pointing out the obvious. Their iPhone was never off - it was in Standby mode. I'm sure Blackberry and Windows Mobile phones do the same thing.
What good is a phone that doesn't regularly check your email?
90% of responses above recommend PuTTY, which is a great program. However, if you're looking for the ultimate in bloat-free software that hasn't been mentioned:
Microsoft Word 5.1a for Mac. Some say it is the greatest word processor ever made. I say it's close.
vim. Easily one of the best editors for any platform. And sure, it's more bloated than vi, but it's so much more powerful and usable.