Man, I thought I read this article on a Slashdot link a few weeks ago, but I guess I read it somewhere else.
No, it's not just semantics. There's actually a huge difference between gravastars and black holes. The key difference is that a black hole contains a singularity. A point at which our physics break down. This is commonly described as the point where the physics are "undefined". A gravastar doesn't have this. Physics contiue to make sense within a gravastar. I haven't studied it in detail, but that's the claim.
No alternate universes, no place to go, except a big fat heap of particle soup to go crashing into. Okay, more like a big particle rock, than a soup.
Of course, the biggest difference is that gravastar is just a much cooler name.
If I've used it for 15 years without it every being compromised, why is it that nobody has ever hacked it, despite the fact that I use it in a number of places?
Like I said, for important things, I use a variation that's more difficult. As for shoulder surfing, again, 15 years (including 2 years using it daily in a wide-open internet cafe where anybody could have seen it), and nobody has ever hacked it.
And no, I didn't pick a mental pattern on the keyboard. I was assigned a random password by CompuServe 15 years ago and I've used it ever since.
You said, and I quote: "There's a damn good reasons why you're told not to reuse passwords." Show me why? 15 years and it's never been hacked. I'd say that's a damn good track record for a single password. I don't see a damn good reason to change it. Until it gets hacked, I probably won't.
So now you have to remember the order in which you click on an image? Maybe that's easier for some people, but certainly not for me. I have one password that I've used for the past 15 years or so. It's 8 characters (9 if I need to mix numbers with it), and it appears completely random.
I've been using it for 15 years an nobody has ever hacked it. All you have to do is have one of these and remember it. Almost anyone can remember a single 8-10 digit password, if that's all they use. Just make one and stick with it. Maybe you'll need to change it every couple of years, but even so, once you have it down, it's pretty easy to remember.
Is it hack-proof? Of course not. Not even close, but for most applications where a password is needed, it's more than sufficient. I doubt anyone will take the time to try to hack my hotmail account when there are so many that can easily be dictionary attacked. I'll always be the last one someone tries to hack because it will take too long to hack mine, compared to most.
Just my personal opinion. Obviously for some things, you simply need real encryption, but for most online stuff, a single 8 character/digit password is fine.
We're using WTS, and for what we do, it works great, but we're not supporting nearly as many clients as you are. WTS is essentially Citrix, lacking some features Citrix has.
If you're going to go that direction, you're going to need a number of servers with LOTS of memory. As someone else mentioned, it can be dead-slow. You really need powerful servers. I would imagine a P3-1GHZ with 1-2GB RAM, for every 15-20 concurrent users, minimum. Even then, you're going to see fairly mediocre performance.
As for administration, frankly, you'd probably be as well off with thick clients. The administration of WTS or Citrix can be about as difficult per client.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I e-mailed the RIAA and most of the major labels saying that if they continued their course with Napster, that I'd stop buying CDs. Haven't bought a single one since. I used to download songs off Napster and if I liked the song, I'd buy the CD for my car. Now I just download the songs I like and cut my own CDs. The RIAA shot themselves in the foot as far as I'm concerned.
I'm more than happy to buy from indie labels, but I won't buy a CD from a major label anytime in the forseeable future.
It's only 8:37 and Rambus stock is already down 6%. I imagine it will drop some more. They made an announcement yesterday that they're going to start making cheaper memory, and it boosted their stock a lot. I think they'll completely lose that gain. Personally, I'd like to see them go out of business just because of their crappy attitude in the industry towards consumers and competitors.
'Computer and video-device companies need to sit at the table with the movie industry. Together, in good-faith talks...'
Cough. Cough. Excuse me? Good faith? You have the cajones to use that phrase?
There's nothing "good faith" about the MPAA or RIAA. I won't speak for movie stars (just yet), but ask a recording artist what they get from the label. IF their album goes platinum, they MIGHT make money off their next album, if they tour a lot.
Let's face it, though: They spend too much on the stars, get too much for themselves, and then sit around and bitch and moan about how they're not making enough.
If you reduced the pay for "stars" to a reasonable amount, you could cut the budget of the average major production, significantly, you could then afford to have the movies play in the theatre for less, you could charge less for DVDs and rentals, more people would buy these products because they'd be priced reasonably, AND YOU'D STILL MAKE AS MUCH MONEY OR MORE.
Sorry, but I think it's wrong that Tom Cruise makes God knows how many $$$ per movie, while school teachers, cops, firemen, people who do something really important for society get paid crap.
Sorry, had to rant a bit. I think they're all a bunch of blood sucking vampires myself.
Y'all are all paranoid. Geez, I think ComCast is giving an absolutely legitimate reason for their efforts. First of all, why trace it back to the source? Because you want to know what to cache in what areas. Personally, if that's what they're really doing it for, then good for them. I respect the idea that my ISP is trying to provide the best possible service by reducing bandwidth.
Personally, I think everyone is way too paranoid about this invasion of privacy stuff. I could care less if they know I'm going to whatever sites I go to. If it's going to get them to me faster, cool!
Hell, that's part of the reason I run Squid on my Linux router at home anyway.
I have 3 computers that are on 24 hours a day. I haven't noticed any real difference between the 1 and 3 computers as far as my electric bill goes. I turn my monitor off when I'm not around, but the rest keeps running.
I also leave my work computer on overnight (again, the two monitor are turned off). One of the reasons I leave my computers on is that losing a hard drive is the worst thing I could have happen. The hardest thing on a hard drive is start-up time. Thanks, but I'll keep mine running.
Sorry, but the/. community is so f@$%ng paranoid about people reading their packets. I have ComCast. Who cares? Oh wow, they're reading my e-mail. I hope they enjoy it. What a waste of time. If this is how big brother operates, then big brother is an idiot. Okay, so I tag my.sig with things like bombs, nitrogrlycerin, TNT, pipes, Amonia, Nitrate, etc..... Yeah, whatever.'
What makes a powerful programming language? Programmers do! The author of Turbo Pascal and later C#, wrote Turbo Pascal in assembly language. Crazy, but he made it a powerful programming language.
Our company uses Visual Basic and Visual C++. Both powerful languages, in the right hands. Define your requirements, and then find a language that suits that. Don't define the language before the requirements. That's ridiculous. If a language meets your needs, and the ramp-up time for learning it is low, then it's a good language for the purpose.
As for cross-platform, there are a number of languages that are cross-platform. Python appears to meet your needs, but I haven't used it so I can't say. Personally, I don't care for it, but if that were a requirement, I might go that way.
C++ is pretty good if you don't target it for a single environment. There are multi-platform frameworks, if you want to go that way. If you're going with command-line related stuff, then C++ is pretty platform independent, if you write it properly.
Overpopulation is a problem. It produces groups, even individuals, who can't feed their own offspring.
No, there's no "class of people" who shouldn't be allowed to produce. As far as I'm concerned, the Chinese have it right (about this one thing only). One child per couple. No more.
What do we do over the next 10-20 years as lifespans begin to move on average to 100 years or longer. It's going to happen. What if people are living longer? What do we do then?
Familiar with natural selection? Natural selection works like this: You evolve to a point where you can survive long enough to reproduce. Once you reach that stage, natural selection stops working. We've now moved way beyond the lifespan that natural selection requires. Natural selection requires about a 30-40 year lifespan (and that happens to be roughly what the average lifespan was before vaccines, antibiotics, and other medications that prolong life began).
Deer are a good example of what happens when you overpopulate. Deer have a tendency to overpopulate because we've killed off most of their natural predators, either intentionally or unintentionally. Now they overpopulate and then starve en-masse. And then the cycle begins again.
Same thing will happen to us if we don't put some sort of controls in place, soon.
I've done my share of assembly language, from 8-bit Ataris to 32-bit Intels, to IBM/390 mainframes.
I can't even conceive of having to write assembly code for these monsters. Anyone happen to browse through the instruction set reference? All 900+ pages of it? It's all cryptic as hell. I could sooner build a rocket bound for Pluto than write a simple recursive factorial program in IA-64 assembly.
I sure hope someone can figure it out. I doubt I'll be doing any assembly optimizations in the future.
I and 4 of my family members are all members of Netflix. We all live on the East coast. I was the last to join of my family.
Now, I can't say much about the Anime fan who didn't like the service, but I rent mainly mainstream movies and have enjoyed the service immensly. My biggest problem was that I was always returning movies late. I also watch a lot of movies.
I've always gotten the 3 movies at the top of my list, so far. It's only been two months, but it's definitely saved me money. It only takes 2-3 days for my movies to get returned and another 2-3 days for the new ones to arrive.
I'm even thinking about upgrading my account to one that allows me to have even more out at a time.
The self-addressed, no stamp required, return envelopes are ingenius. It just can't be any easier.
Man, some of you guys get way too paranoid. These things have a range of a few feet at best. They're "passive", meaning that the electricity they have is generated from the signal sent to them. That's not a whole lot of energy, so the range is very limited. It would be like walking through those things they have at stores to detect shoplifters.
It would be just as obvious, so you'd be able to choose whether or not you wanted to be scanned.
First their was Back Orifice. It got a lot of press, so a lot people downloaded it to see what it was all about. Stupidly, a lot of them ran the self-installing server, which made no mention of the fact that it was installing itself to run at bootup. So, thousands (if not more) people ended up exposing their machines without even knowing it.
Then there's Windows. People sharing their drives (God knows why you'd share a drive unless you have more than one computer in your house, but who knows), and those people were exposed by Sharesniffer (which seems to have disappeared, otherwise I'd provide a link. It's IP address now resolves to 10.10.10.10).
Okay, so now there's a flaw in Morpheus that isn't published, and you'd probably have to be a programmer to expose it anyway. Big deal.
Just my personal opinion, but this isn't too newsworthy.
I don't just mean e-mail them a complaint. I mean, set up your spam filter to forward all of your spam to all of your elected representatives. Maybe THEN they'll get the message that SPAM can be a problem and that we consumers are $@*#ing sick of it.
Actually, the pressure differential is correct in your explanation. The capsule doors were built to open in space, where the outside pressure would be close to 0 and the inside pressure would be close to 1ATM, however, that same fact is used to actually keep airplane doors from opening at high-altitude. The fact is that they are built in such a way that a higher pressure inside than outside makes it harder to open the doors. A lab door is not really as relevant in this arguement.
Actually, you're wrong. The consensus view is that they died of suffocation, not bruning to death. Yes, they were in a fire, but they were also in space suits designed to protect them from the extreme heat of the sun in space (it gets a hell of a lot hotter out there than it does here, thanks to our atmosphere.
It wasn't just a design fault. It WAS, as you mention, a ridiculous test to put such a high concentration of O2 in the capsule. Much higher than it would ever receive in-flight.
Still it was part of the price paid to advance the space program. As the saying goes, and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, but to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs. Going into space is/was, and probably always will be, to some degree, a dangerous endeavor. Just as going into submarine is inherently dangerous.
In the case of a submarine the danger is always implosion. In the case of space, it's explosion. Space is also inherently more dangerous because of the types of fuels involved and the lower degree for margin of error.
Anyway, the only design flaw, in regards to your post, was an overuse of velcro, which happens to be quite flammable, especially in a high oxygen atmostphere. The other flaw (the O2) level, wasn't a design flaw, it was a "execution" (for lack of having the proper vocabulary on hand) flaw.
School gives you a piece of paper, and maybe some education, but it doesn't determine who you will be or what you'll do.
I started off majoring in chemistry back in '87. I started programming in about '79. I was a really good programmer. Chemistry was something I got interested in after a poor year of chemistry in high school and studying organic chemistry during my summer break and really loving it.
What I learned is that what interests me is not necessarily what I should study. I dropped out for a year, then went back as a computer science major and eventually dropped out and got a job as a programmer.
The classes I look back on as providing me with the best education, were my chemistry and English classes. I was way ahead of my Comp. Sci. program. I wrote a Pascal compiler just so that I could pass out of the compiler class. I showed up to my assembly language class twice. The first day and the final exam. I got an A+.
I'm not bragging, I'm just saying, school is one thing, education is another, and your choice of profession yet another.
I'm lucky, I can make a good living in my chosen profession. It's something I love to do and I'm good at it.
I'm 33 and my education is far from done. I learned a long time ago that I learn better on my own. Since then, I've studied physics, languages, chemistry, medicine, law, you name it, I've stuck my nose into most of it. I'm not a genius, and I'm not as good at any of these as I am at programming, but this is my education. School didn't educate me, except to let me know that I learn better without it (save the English and Chem classes).
Study what makes you happy. Then get a job that makes you happy, in whatever field. Take it from me: Making good money at a shitty job sucks, and making mediocre money at something you love is awesome. That's the only thing you should consider. Consider school 4 years of a chance to learn things you don't know anything about and to learn more about the things you want to know. When it comes to getting a job, go after what you want to do. Forget about which profession will make you the most money (unless that's what makes you happy).
Do what you want, not what others would suggest you do.
IDE Let me ephasize "Integrated." Put it all in one place, and that works for me. Thats's what works for a number of other developers. I'm not against Linux. I want to see it grow and proliferatate. This is what I need to make it happen for me as a developer.
I know there are good tools out their for Liinux. What I want to see is MSDEV with MFC on top of it, and then you'll have me as a developer. Point me to the SINGLE download for this, and you have another Linux developer.
Personally, I could care less about what the actual compiler is. For our product, we use MS VC++ for development and the Intel compiler for release builds (it's a better compiler).
All I ask from Linux is a similar or better IDE. I want to be able to write code, edit resources (dialogs), and do it all from one environment. I want a class wizard (again, I'm a VC++ user). Give me that, and I'll develop software for Linux in all my spare time.
Everyone talks about the advantages of Open Source. Give me this one simple thing, and I as user, will become an open source developer.
Don't make me deal with configure and manual makefiles and all that garbage. Forget it, I'm spoiled. I won't go back to that. It's like going back to the old DOS days. Give me a true IDE environment for development, and you've got me hooked. Throw on top of that a really good C++ class library for dealing with X, and you're done. So, who's doing this?
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I thought I read this article on a Slashdot link a few weeks ago, but I guess I read it somewhere else.
No, it's not just semantics. There's actually a huge difference between gravastars and black holes. The key difference is that a black hole contains a singularity. A point at which our physics break down. This is commonly described as the point where the physics are "undefined". A gravastar doesn't have this. Physics contiue to make sense within a gravastar. I haven't studied it in detail, but that's the claim.
No alternate universes, no place to go, except a big fat heap of particle soup to go crashing into. Okay, more like a big particle rock, than a soup.
Of course, the biggest difference is that gravastar is just a much cooler name.
If I've used it for 15 years without it every being compromised, why is it that nobody has ever hacked it, despite the fact that I use it in a number of places?
Like I said, for important things, I use a variation that's more difficult. As for shoulder surfing, again, 15 years (including 2 years using it daily in a wide-open internet cafe where anybody could have seen it), and nobody has ever hacked it.
And no, I didn't pick a mental pattern on the keyboard. I was assigned a random password by CompuServe 15 years ago and I've used it ever since.
You said, and I quote: "There's a damn good reasons why you're told not to reuse passwords." Show me why? 15 years and it's never been hacked. I'd say that's a damn good track record for a single password. I don't see a damn good reason to change it. Until it gets hacked, I probably won't.
So now you have to remember the order in which you click on an image? Maybe that's easier for some people, but certainly not for me. I have one password that I've used for the past 15 years or so. It's 8 characters (9 if I need to mix numbers with it), and it appears completely random.
I've been using it for 15 years an nobody has ever hacked it. All you have to do is have one of these and remember it. Almost anyone can remember a single 8-10 digit password, if that's all they use. Just make one and stick with it. Maybe you'll need to change it every couple of years, but even so, once you have it down, it's pretty easy to remember.
Is it hack-proof? Of course not. Not even close, but for most applications where a password is needed, it's more than sufficient. I doubt anyone will take the time to try to hack my hotmail account when there are so many that can easily be dictionary attacked. I'll always be the last one someone tries to hack because it will take too long to hack mine, compared to most.
Just my personal opinion. Obviously for some things, you simply need real encryption, but for most online stuff, a single 8 character/digit password is fine.
We're using WTS, and for what we do, it works great, but we're not supporting nearly as many clients as you are. WTS is essentially Citrix, lacking some features Citrix has.
If you're going to go that direction, you're going to need a number of servers with LOTS of memory. As someone else mentioned, it can be dead-slow. You really need powerful servers. I would imagine a P3-1GHZ with 1-2GB RAM, for every 15-20 concurrent users, minimum. Even then, you're going to see fairly mediocre performance.
As for administration, frankly, you'd probably be as well off with thick clients. The administration of WTS or Citrix can be about as difficult per client.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I e-mailed the RIAA and most of the major labels saying that if they continued their course with Napster, that I'd stop buying CDs. Haven't bought a single one since. I used to download songs off Napster and if I liked the song, I'd buy the CD for my car. Now I just download the songs I like and cut my own CDs. The RIAA shot themselves in the foot as far as I'm concerned.
I'm more than happy to buy from indie labels, but I won't buy a CD from a major label anytime in the forseeable future.
It's only 8:37 and Rambus stock is already down 6%. I imagine it will drop some more. They made an announcement yesterday that they're going to start making cheaper memory, and it boosted their stock a lot. I think they'll completely lose that gain. Personally, I'd like to see them go out of business just because of their crappy attitude in the industry towards consumers and competitors.
'Computer and video-device companies need to sit at the table with the movie industry. Together, in good-faith talks...'
Cough. Cough. Excuse me? Good faith? You have the cajones to use that phrase?
There's nothing "good faith" about the MPAA or RIAA. I won't speak for movie stars (just yet), but ask a recording artist what they get from the label. IF their album goes platinum, they MIGHT make money off their next album, if they tour a lot.
Let's face it, though: They spend too much on the stars, get too much for themselves, and then sit around and bitch and moan about how they're not making enough.
If you reduced the pay for "stars" to a reasonable amount, you could cut the budget of the average major production, significantly, you could then afford to have the movies play in the theatre for less, you could charge less for DVDs and rentals, more people would buy these products because they'd be priced reasonably, AND YOU'D STILL MAKE AS MUCH MONEY OR MORE.
Sorry, but I think it's wrong that Tom Cruise makes God knows how many $$$ per movie, while school teachers, cops, firemen, people who do something really important for society get paid crap.
Sorry, had to rant a bit. I think they're all a bunch of blood sucking vampires myself.
Y'all are all paranoid. Geez, I think ComCast is giving an absolutely legitimate reason for their efforts. First of all, why trace it back to the source? Because you want to know what to cache in what areas. Personally, if that's what they're really doing it for, then good for them. I respect the idea that my ISP is trying to provide the best possible service by reducing bandwidth.
Personally, I think everyone is way too paranoid about this invasion of privacy stuff. I could care less if they know I'm going to whatever sites I go to. If it's going to get them to me faster, cool!
Hell, that's part of the reason I run Squid on my Linux router at home anyway.
I have 3 computers that are on 24 hours a day. I haven't noticed any real difference between the 1 and 3 computers as far as my electric bill goes. I turn my monitor off when I'm not around, but the rest keeps running.
I also leave my work computer on overnight (again, the two monitor are turned off). One of the reasons I leave my computers on is that losing a hard drive is the worst thing I could have happen. The hardest thing on a hard drive is start-up time. Thanks, but I'll keep mine running.
Well, I wanted to read the FAQ to find out what Mosix was, exactly, but apparently you have to be an admin to get to the FAQ. That sucks.
Sorry, but the /. community is so f@$%ng paranoid about people reading their packets. I have ComCast. Who cares? Oh wow, they're reading my e-mail. I hope they enjoy it. What a waste of time. If this is how big brother operates, then big brother is an idiot. Okay, so I tag my .sig with things like bombs, nitrogrlycerin, TNT, pipes, Amonia, Nitrate, etc..... Yeah, whatever.'
Like I care.
What makes a powerful programming language? Programmers do! The author of Turbo Pascal and later C#, wrote Turbo Pascal in assembly language. Crazy, but he made it a powerful programming language.
Our company uses Visual Basic and Visual C++. Both powerful languages, in the right hands. Define your requirements, and then find a language that suits that. Don't define the language before the requirements. That's ridiculous. If a language meets your needs, and the ramp-up time for learning it is low, then it's a good language for the purpose.
As for cross-platform, there are a number of languages that are cross-platform. Python appears to meet your needs, but I haven't used it so I can't say. Personally, I don't care for it, but if that were a requirement, I might go that way.
C++ is pretty good if you don't target it for a single environment. There are multi-platform frameworks, if you want to go that way. If you're going with command-line related stuff, then C++ is pretty platform independent, if you write it properly.
Overpopulation is a problem. It produces groups, even individuals, who can't feed their own offspring.
No, there's no "class of people" who shouldn't be allowed to produce. As far as I'm concerned, the Chinese have it right (about this one thing only). One child per couple. No more.
What do we do over the next 10-20 years as lifespans begin to move on average to 100 years or longer. It's going to happen. What if people are living longer? What do we do then?
Familiar with natural selection? Natural selection works like this: You evolve to a point where you can survive long enough to reproduce. Once you reach that stage, natural selection stops working. We've now moved way beyond the lifespan that natural selection requires. Natural selection requires about a 30-40 year lifespan (and that happens to be roughly what the average lifespan was before vaccines, antibiotics, and other medications that prolong life began).
Deer are a good example of what happens when you overpopulate. Deer have a tendency to overpopulate because we've killed off most of their natural predators, either intentionally or unintentionally. Now they overpopulate and then starve en-masse. And then the cycle begins again.
Same thing will happen to us if we don't put some sort of controls in place, soon.
I've done my share of assembly language, from 8-bit Ataris to 32-bit Intels, to IBM/390 mainframes.
I can't even conceive of having to write assembly code for these monsters. Anyone happen to browse through the instruction set reference? All 900+ pages of it? It's all cryptic as hell. I could sooner build a rocket bound for Pluto than write a simple recursive factorial program in IA-64 assembly.
I sure hope someone can figure it out. I doubt I'll be doing any assembly optimizations in the future.
I and 4 of my family members are all members of Netflix. We all live on the East coast. I was the last to join of my family.
Now, I can't say much about the Anime fan who didn't like the service, but I rent mainly mainstream movies and have enjoyed the service immensly. My biggest problem was that I was always returning movies late. I also watch a lot of movies.
I've always gotten the 3 movies at the top of my list, so far. It's only been two months, but it's definitely saved me money. It only takes 2-3 days for my movies to get returned and another 2-3 days for the new ones to arrive.
I'm even thinking about upgrading my account to one that allows me to have even more out at a time.
The self-addressed, no stamp required, return envelopes are ingenius. It just can't be any easier.
Man, some of you guys get way too paranoid. These things have a range of a few feet at best. They're "passive", meaning that the electricity they have is generated from the signal sent to them. That's not a whole lot of energy, so the range is very limited. It would be like walking through those things they have at stores to detect shoplifters.
It would be just as obvious, so you'd be able to choose whether or not you wanted to be scanned.
Oh blow me. A small spelling error.
First their was Back Orifice. It got a lot of press, so a lot people downloaded it to see what it was all about. Stupidly, a lot of them ran the self-installing server, which made no mention of the fact that it was installing itself to run at bootup. So, thousands (if not more) people ended up exposing their machines without even knowing it.
Then there's Windows. People sharing their drives (God knows why you'd share a drive unless you have more than one computer in your house, but who knows), and those people were exposed by Sharesniffer (which seems to have disappeared, otherwise I'd provide a link. It's IP address now resolves to 10.10.10.10).
Okay, so now there's a flaw in Morpheus that isn't published, and you'd probably have to be a programmer to expose it anyway. Big deal.
Just my personal opinion, but this isn't too newsworthy.
I don't just mean e-mail them a complaint. I mean, set up your spam filter to forward all of your spam to all of your elected representatives. Maybe THEN they'll get the message that SPAM can be a problem and that we consumers are $@*#ing sick of it.
Earth First! We'll strip mine the other planets later.
Actually, the pressure differential is correct in your explanation. The capsule doors were built to open in space, where the outside pressure would be close to 0 and the inside pressure would be close to 1ATM, however, that same fact is used to actually keep airplane doors from opening at high-altitude. The fact is that they are built in such a way that a higher pressure inside than outside makes it harder to open the doors. A lab door is not really as relevant in this arguement.
Actually, you're wrong. The consensus view is that they died of suffocation, not bruning to death. Yes, they were in a fire, but they were also in space suits designed to protect them from the extreme heat of the sun in space (it gets a hell of a lot hotter out there than it does here, thanks to our atmosphere.
It wasn't just a design fault. It WAS, as you mention, a ridiculous test to put such a high concentration of O2 in the capsule. Much higher than it would ever receive in-flight.
Still it was part of the price paid to advance the space program. As the saying goes, and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, but to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs. Going into space is/was, and probably always will be, to some degree, a dangerous endeavor. Just as going into submarine is inherently dangerous.
In the case of a submarine the danger is always implosion. In the case of space, it's explosion. Space is also inherently more dangerous because of the types of fuels involved and the lower degree for margin of error.
Anyway, the only design flaw, in regards to your post, was an overuse of velcro, which happens to be quite flammable, especially in a high oxygen atmostphere. The other flaw (the O2) level, wasn't a design flaw, it was a "execution" (for lack of having the proper vocabulary on hand) flaw.
That's a quote from Mark Twain, a smart man.
School gives you a piece of paper, and maybe some education, but it doesn't determine who you will be or what you'll do.
I started off majoring in chemistry back in '87. I started programming in about '79. I was a really good programmer. Chemistry was something I got interested in after a poor year of chemistry in high school and studying organic chemistry during my summer break and really loving it.
What I learned is that what interests me is not necessarily what I should study. I dropped out for a year, then went back as a computer science major and eventually dropped out and got a job as a programmer.
The classes I look back on as providing me with the best education, were my chemistry and English classes. I was way ahead of my Comp. Sci. program. I wrote a Pascal compiler just so that I could pass out of the compiler class. I showed up to my assembly language class twice. The first day and the final exam. I got an A+.
I'm not bragging, I'm just saying, school is one thing, education is another, and your choice of profession yet another.
I'm lucky, I can make a good living in my chosen profession. It's something I love to do and I'm good at it.
I'm 33 and my education is far from done. I learned a long time ago that I learn better on my own. Since then, I've studied physics, languages, chemistry, medicine, law, you name it, I've stuck my nose into most of it. I'm not a genius, and I'm not as good at any of these as I am at programming, but this is my education. School didn't educate me, except to let me know that I learn better without it (save the English and Chem classes).
Study what makes you happy. Then get a job that makes you happy, in whatever field. Take it from me: Making good money at a shitty job sucks, and making mediocre money at something you love is awesome. That's the only thing you should consider. Consider school 4 years of a chance to learn things you don't know anything about and to learn more about the things you want to know. When it comes to getting a job, go after what you want to do. Forget about which profession will make you the most money (unless that's what makes you happy).
Do what you want, not what others would suggest you do.
IDE Let me ephasize "Integrated." Put it all in one place, and that works for me. Thats's what works for a number of other developers. I'm not against Linux. I want to see it grow and proliferatate. This is what I need to make it happen for me as a developer.
I know there are good tools out their for Liinux. What I want to see is MSDEV with MFC on top of it, and then you'll have me as a developer. Point me to the SINGLE download for this, and you have another Linux developer.
Personally, I could care less about what the actual compiler is. For our product, we use MS VC++ for development and the Intel compiler for release builds (it's a better compiler).
All I ask from Linux is a similar or better IDE. I want to be able to write code, edit resources (dialogs), and do it all from one environment. I want a class wizard (again, I'm a VC++ user). Give me that, and I'll develop software for Linux in all my spare time.
Everyone talks about the advantages of Open Source. Give me this one simple thing, and I as user, will become an open source developer.
Don't make me deal with configure and manual makefiles and all that garbage. Forget it, I'm spoiled. I won't go back to that. It's like going back to the old DOS days. Give me a true IDE environment for development, and you've got me hooked. Throw on top of that a really good C++ class library for dealing with X, and you're done. So, who's doing this?