Of course, would we even have a space station if it were not for the international cooperation?
Regardless of it's usefulness (which is, I admit, hard to disregard) it is a large accomplishment that it is even up there.
I wonder, is the space station the largest (read: most expensive) international scientific project? I think it's costs have quite dwarfed even the Large Hadron Collider.
Perhaps the ISS is a good example of how much can be accomplished through international cooperation - but the LHC will hopefully be an example of how well that cooperation can actually work.
If it's feasable that the US alone could go to mars, and that Russia and China together can go to mars - then could not all three work together to achieve this goal better?
Or is it neccessary to have the "us" and "them" philosophy when it comes to these kinds of projects?
Fry: What if the secret ingredient is... people!? Leela: Oh, there's already a soda like that. Soylent Cola. Fry: Oh, how is it? Leela: It varies from person to person.;]
I was just talking about this the other day as I was enjoying a burrito. I love this idea so much, and yet there are those who find it somehow repulsive.
How can growing meat be seen as more repulsive than the murder assembly lines at slaughterhouses?
My more stable-minded vegetarian friends gladly welcome this - as their food choices are equally health and ethics based.
Don't go thinking that all vegitarians hate the taste of beef. That red meat has got some major building blocks in it - and meat is a very good source of the basic building blocks your body needs.
You can think of meat as "pre-fabricated" building materials for your body - since the animal who owned it before you has already done much of the work needed to convert the raw materials into useful proteins.
I love this idea, I would much rather make my own meat than take it from a nice, innocent bovine who happens to be using it at the moment.
And this actually brings up a somewhat...uh, weird question.
If meat is a great building-block food - and certain meats are better for certain things...then might we design the "perfect" meat for human consumption?...if so, and this is the disturbing part, might we actually splice our own DNA into the transgenic mix?
Could this be considered a form of cannibalism?
Ah the future, so fun to turn everything on it's head.
Of course we need these sorts of comments in the summaries! You vacuous, ill-educated buffoon!...and when you say "flamebait", are you reffering to the comment or the laptop battery?
The concept of security is as much about perception as effectiveness.
This article's enlightening example just drives deeper a little concept I recently heard called security theater,
Human psychology is certainly interesting - because on one hand we have people scared of box cutters, but on the other hand we drive 70mph mere feet away from each other every day.
Maybe it could be argued that security is primarily about perception.
In our server room we have recently begun virtualizing servers and as a result have begun to think not in terms of physical servers and hard disks anymore, but in terms of resource pools of storage and processing.
It's like we have been able to smelt our physical machines and from the molten resources forge anew.
The recoverability and fault-tolerance is amazing as well - if a physical box dies there is basically no interruption in service. If something goes awry with an image we can just pull it and restore from yesterday.
Seeing Amazon offering what seems to be more of an ocean of resource than a pool is very tantilizing.
I'm certainly not the first, but I wonder if indeed local operating systems and cpus will become something of an anacronism, and that most processing will someday occur via the internet: that it will become the world-wide-mainframe.
I honestly have not heard anything that makes Vista seem appealing, at least from a feature standpoint.
The only motivators for 'upgrading' to Vista seem to be the lock-ins. Take for example directX 10 being only for Vista. This means that I will have to buy Vista to play newer video games. And of course this is not because there is something inherently better about Vista - it is simply an artificial constraint.
The one technology that had me interested was the databasing file system, but it was announced that this was pulled from Vista long ago.
It's as if Microsoft is an automobile manufacturer from whom you must by the newer model car to be able to use the newly built highway. Not because the new car is better, any safer, or indeed really any different from your current car. But simply because it is a Microsoft brand.
I wish I could believe that the consumer will not stand for such blatant charades - but technology is merely magic to the lay, so they have no choice but to accept what they are told, and they will buy Vista because they 'need' it to watch new movies, and I will buy it because I 'need' it to play new games.
Who's forcing? I am just stating my opinion. And to clairify, that opinion is not that artists should not make money - quite the opposite.
My friends are a signed band, but they did go through many years of very crappy financial means before the big break. These friends of mine have earned every dime their contracts got them.
There are, however, bands and individual artists that magically appear and seem to be entirely concocted from spreadsheets and focus groups: this I do not like.
Nevertheless, some of the manufactured do seem to sound rather nice actually. And after all, home cooking is a great thing - but sometimes taco bell is just what you need when you've been drinking on a Saturday night:)
I simply have hopes that the distribution power of the internet will allow those talented unknowns to finally bubble-up to the surface of the new mainstream without the need of self-serving, manipulative benefactors.
p.s. I can tell that you do not post in opposition to me, and that we indeed seem largely in agreement - I did mention that I'm waxing idealistic? Because that means that I throw-off my usual attempts at even-handedness;)
hmm. this is the problem with posting quickly while trying to leave work.
I do not mean to imply that artist should not make money - far from that in fact. Of course artists should recieve compensation for thier works. But the leechery of hangers-on that has evolved around the artists of decades past has, I think, created a culture where the motivation to create art for money is out of ratio to what I (in opinion) feel is the proper scope.
Yes, I am an artist - not the best of course - but I make music and such because I enjoy it. I feel that if I were to write better music (and hopefully it is improving) that more people would listen to, and download, my music.
Perhaps even one day I may recieve some compensation to create music (for a film or game). This would be a wonderful confirmation for me, but to make money is not my primary reason for making music.
I do not like the idea that there are famous artists who are in the field purely for the lust of - and most importantly - as the direct result of the money that be.
Money-made artists are what I am speaking of, not artists who make money.
Enjoy one of the last artists that is still concerned about his fans and music
Of course you mean that Al is one of the last of the "old-world artists" - our new breed of upcoming new-school artists are born into a world where fame comes before (not neccesarily with) fortune. And this fame spreads as packets riding on word of mouth.
I don't have any right to dictate what is proper motivation or not for a creator, but I think an artist who's primary purpose is to make money has his or her head in the wrong place.
I understand that everyone needs to eat, but I don't see why any artist, no matter how great, thinks he or she needs to drink Cristal.
Make art because you love it, not because you love money. If you love something, set it free!
Oh my, I'm quite the idealist when it comes to art.
It's Bill Gates is gaurded by more than just Orcs. There is evil there that does not sleep, and the Great WGA is ever watchful. It is a barren wasteland riddled with fire, ash, and Starbucks coffee, the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume. Not with ten thousand could you do this. It is folley.
Because it crashes like nobody's business (at least on os x - never used os 9).
If you use any kind of significantly complex spreadsheet excel will crash and burn. Additionally, if you work with designers, like I do, and have more than several hundred fonts you will quickly find that office apps (minus entourage) will fail to launch, do to "corrupted" fonts.
If you clean the font cache with font finagler or with my personal favorite, applejack, you can get things back up and running - but it will only take a day or two for office to once again corrupt it's own font cache - it's quite a headache.
Also, powerpoint has some very annoying quirks in the mac world as well. My most recent had to do with our visual communications director working for 3 hours on a presentation only to have powerpoint suddenly tell him he didn't have permission to save the file. Additionally he couldn't create a new presentation and save the contents he had worked on for so long.
We tried everything but eventually had to close and reopen powerpoint - losing all his work in the process.
Is it any suprise that office just works better on windows?
This is why you NEED to run windows in a corporate environment - you have no idea how addicted the higer-ups are (at least at my corporation) to their ms office.
Lowest number of hops + high latency = cold potato. From wikipedia:Some content networks favor the use of cold-potato routing (MED exchange/honoring) in order to deliver content from replicated server farms closer to the end-user.
You are right, that would be the model I would choose if I owned a cable tv company and was delivering on demand movies over my network.
So it seems that comcast doesn't play well with the other networks and prefers to keep it's packets to itself.
Sounds like they are indeed first on the tiered internet boat.
Doesn't it seem that comcast as an ISP should peer in california for requests originating in california with all the major networks - but hey, that's the first and only comcast connection I've attempted to troubleshoot, so maybe indeed all comcast packets from Sacramento to google and local california game server's ISPs route through new york.
and yes, I understand that in times of bandwidth saturation that dynamic routing alogritms may indeed decide to take your packets half way around the world (and that othewise you would get nice low-latency communication). But this was 4am on a saturday, and his connection had historically been awful.
Maybe his neighbors watch a lot of on demand movies.
How can normal, non-technical people hope to have a chance of understanding our new world of today and the laws being applied to it?
I have spent the last few months speaking (sometimes drunkenly) at great lengths about the net neutrality concept - a concept, which quite frankly, I had taken for granted (I didn't really realize the net was neutral, it's just how it has to work). Many of my friends had fallen for the idea that a tiered internet would simply mean better and faster access to video and music. After all, didn't they pay more for "premium" channels on TV?
My one friend, so adamant - largly because he is naturally agumentative - finally began to realize how easily those in power (and today information is power - has it even not been?) can manipulate the ignorant. He realized this only after he asked me to look at his computer to see why his comcast was so slow (and why his vonage was cutting-out).
I ran a simple trace route and noticed that it appeared requests to local IPs were being routed through dallas and new york from his home in Sacramento. I told him I didn't think this was the best way to reduce the latency he was getting from his long distance calls and online gaming. I hypothesize that by comcast routing some clients through these innefecient routes they were somehow load-balancing the demand on their network (of course, new york, dallas, and chicago could just be fancy names for comcast's local california routers - but it seems a dubious naming scheme for local devices).
Without me, his technical friend, he would simply continue to accept his connection as is - and in fact may begin to attribute his degraded service to the FUD of the internet "falling apart".
There are so few of us who can fully (or at least somewhat) grasp what the debate really means - how can the vast majority of non-technical, voting citizens possibly make informed decisions about this?
I'm going off topic, bit it's funny you say this, because just today I was talking with my coworkers about the Intel iMacs and, says I, "Macintosh would be very smart to ship a bare-bones intel system without OS X installed, or with XP installed, because I think I would like to upgrade some of the executives with Macintosh's hardware."
You see, since I work for a greeting card company we have a lot of the Mac vs. PC compatability issues. Thus, now and then we get a request for IT to install a Macintosh for someone so they can view some Quark documents natively. The user winds up with two computers and a lot less desk real-estate.
Since the intel macs are just good machines I would like to head-off the entire issue by giving everyone in my corp an intel mac with XP installed - then, in the future, if they decide they need to view something natively mac I can just install OS X and parallels instead of a whole new, second, system.
Why do you care what OS is underneath? Your nice $2K machine came with Windows, right? And it plays all your games out of the box, right? So what's the problem? Or is this some sort of irrational religious thing?
hehe, irrational religious thing. I custom built my machine so no xp came with it - but your point about being irrational isn't entirely off-base. I know that a licensed copy of xp pro is just another +/-$125 on top of an already significant pile of cash, so at that point it is just the principle...well, the principle and a $100 bill - that's two games, you know.
It really peeves me that the linux gaming scene is so underdeveloped.
However, on the one hand I can understand. Games are arguably the most sophisticated and difficult computer programs to create.
But on the other hand I just can't stomach the fact that I pay $2k for a nice system, but I must have windows to play my games. It's like all those FLOPS from my CPU and video card are useless unless I am beholden to the software trickery of direct-x.
Now I hear rumors that future games will require vista for play and that newer direct-x releases will only install on vista.
It's so artificial to me. I mean, I know that direct-x's APIs allow for ease of development and speedier time to market, as well as giving a simpler interface to modern video card's best features.
But the hardware is there!
why does the underlying OS matter so much when the raw hardware processing power is right there!?
You sound like you have a fine family, it makes me happy to know there are people like you and your daughter out there.
When Columbia first launched I was 3 years old. My mother tells me that I watched hours and hours of the launch - not just the actual liftoff, but the boring interviews with the astronauts and their breakfast press meeting and such.
I don't know how much I comprehended at that age - but I apparently knew something amazing when I saw it.
I hope I too will have the opportunity to see the shuttle launch, even if from miles away;)
Slashdot Mirror
hehe, good point though.
Of course, would we even have a space station if it were not for the international cooperation?
Regardless of it's usefulness (which is, I admit, hard to disregard) it is a large accomplishment that it is even up there.
I wonder, is the space station the largest (read: most expensive) international scientific project? I think it's costs have quite dwarfed even the Large Hadron Collider.
Perhaps the ISS is a good example of how much can be accomplished through international cooperation - but the LHC will hopefully be an example of how well that cooperation can actually work.
What's keeping the US from joining with them?
If it's feasable that the US alone could go to mars, and that Russia and China together can go to mars - then could not all three work together to achieve this goal better?
Or is it neccessary to have the "us" and "them" philosophy when it comes to these kinds of projects?
Must there always be an adversary?
haha!
;]
Fry: What if the secret ingredient is... people!?
Leela: Oh, there's already a soda like that. Soylent Cola.
Fry: Oh, how is it?
Leela: It varies from person to person.
I was just talking about this the other day as I was enjoying a burrito. I love this idea so much, and yet there are those who find it somehow repulsive.
How can growing meat be seen as more repulsive than the murder assembly lines at slaughterhouses?
My more stable-minded vegetarian friends gladly welcome this - as their food choices are equally health and ethics based.
Don't go thinking that all vegitarians hate the taste of beef. That red meat has got some major building blocks in it - and meat is a very good source of the basic building blocks your body needs.
You can think of meat as "pre-fabricated" building materials for your body - since the animal who owned it before you has already done much of the work needed to convert the raw materials into useful proteins.
I love this idea, I would much rather make my own meat than take it from a nice, innocent bovine who happens to be using it at the moment.
And this actually brings up a somewhat...uh, weird question.
If meat is a great building-block food - and certain meats are better for certain things...then might we design the "perfect" meat for human consumption?...if so, and this is the disturbing part, might we actually splice our own DNA into the transgenic mix?
Could this be considered a form of cannibalism?
Ah the future, so fun to turn everything on it's head.
Of course we need these sorts of comments in the summaries! You vacuous, ill-educated buffoon! ...and when you say "flamebait", are you reffering to the comment or the laptop battery?
to kill people in fiery MP3-player-related explosions.
The concept of security is as much about perception as effectiveness.
This article's enlightening example just drives deeper a little concept I recently heard called security theater,
Human psychology is certainly interesting - because on one hand we have people scared of box cutters, but on the other hand we drive 70mph mere feet away from each other every day.
Maybe it could be argued that security is primarily about perception.
Wow, thanks! :)
Sounds like something from the 5th element? That's one of the best compliments I've ever gotten! ¦D
The concept of virtualization is so seductive.
In our server room we have recently begun virtualizing servers and as a result have begun to think not in terms of physical servers and hard disks anymore, but in terms of resource pools of storage and processing.
It's like we have been able to smelt our physical machines and from the molten resources forge anew.
The recoverability and fault-tolerance is amazing as well - if a physical box dies there is basically no interruption in service. If something goes awry with an image we can just pull it and restore from yesterday.
Seeing Amazon offering what seems to be more of an ocean of resource than a pool is very tantilizing.
I'm certainly not the first, but I wonder if indeed local operating systems and cpus will become something of an anacronism, and that most processing will someday occur via the internet: that it will become the world-wide-mainframe.
I'm right there with you.
I honestly have not heard anything that makes Vista seem appealing, at least from a feature standpoint.
The only motivators for 'upgrading' to Vista seem to be the lock-ins. Take for example directX 10 being only for Vista. This means that I will have to buy Vista to play newer video games. And of course this is not because there is something inherently better about Vista - it is simply an artificial constraint.
The one technology that had me interested was the databasing file system, but it was announced that this was pulled from Vista long ago.
It's as if Microsoft is an automobile manufacturer from whom you must by the newer model car to be able to use the newly built highway. Not because the new car is better, any safer, or indeed really any different from your current car. But simply because it is a Microsoft brand.
I wish I could believe that the consumer will not stand for such blatant charades - but technology is merely magic to the lay, so they have no choice but to accept what they are told, and they will buy Vista because they 'need' it to watch new movies, and I will buy it because I 'need' it to play new games.
hehe, nice :)
Perhaps more artists should be "self-employed" then ;)
Who's forcing? I am just stating my opinion. And to clairify, that opinion is not that artists should not make money - quite the opposite.
:)
;)
My friends are a signed band, but they did go through many years of very crappy financial means before the big break. These friends of mine have earned every dime their contracts got them.
There are, however, bands and individual artists that magically appear and seem to be entirely concocted from spreadsheets and focus groups: this I do not like.
Nevertheless, some of the manufactured do seem to sound rather nice actually. And after all, home cooking is a great thing - but sometimes taco bell is just what you need when you've been drinking on a Saturday night
I simply have hopes that the distribution power of the internet will allow those talented unknowns to finally bubble-up to the surface of the new mainstream without the need of self-serving, manipulative benefactors.
p.s. I can tell that you do not post in opposition to me, and that we indeed seem largely in agreement - I did mention that I'm waxing idealistic? Because that means that I throw-off my usual attempts at even-handedness
hmm. this is the problem with posting quickly while trying to leave work.
I do not mean to imply that artist should not make money - far from that in fact. Of course artists should recieve compensation for thier works. But the leechery of hangers-on that has evolved around the artists of decades past has, I think, created a culture where the motivation to create art for money is out of ratio to what I (in opinion) feel is the proper scope.
Yes, I am an artist - not the best of course - but I make music and such because I enjoy it. I feel that if I were to write better music (and hopefully it is improving) that more people would listen to, and download, my music.
Perhaps even one day I may recieve some compensation to create music (for a film or game). This would be a wonderful confirmation for me, but to make money is not my primary reason for making music.
I do not like the idea that there are famous artists who are in the field purely for the lust of - and most importantly - as the direct result of the money that be.
Money-made artists are what I am speaking of, not artists who make money.
Of course you mean that Al is one of the last of the "old-world artists" - our new breed of upcoming new-school artists are born into a world where fame comes before (not neccesarily with) fortune. And this fame spreads as packets riding on word of mouth.
I don't have any right to dictate what is proper motivation or not for a creator, but I think an artist who's primary purpose is to make money has his or her head in the wrong place.
I understand that everyone needs to eat, but I don't see why any artist, no matter how great, thinks he or she needs to drink Cristal.
Make art because you love it, not because you love money. If you love something, set it free!
Oh my, I'm quite the idealist when it comes to art.
It's Bill Gates is gaurded by more than just Orcs. There is evil there that does not sleep, and the Great WGA is ever watchful. It is a barren wasteland riddled with fire, ash, and Starbucks coffee, the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume. Not with ten thousand could you do this. It is folley.
Because it crashes like nobody's business (at least on os x - never used os 9).
If you use any kind of significantly complex spreadsheet excel will crash and burn. Additionally, if you work with designers, like I do, and have more than several hundred fonts you will quickly find that office apps (minus entourage) will fail to launch, do to "corrupted" fonts.
If you clean the font cache with font finagler or with my personal favorite, applejack, you can get things back up and running - but it will only take a day or two for office to once again corrupt it's own font cache - it's quite a headache.
Also, powerpoint has some very annoying quirks in the mac world as well. My most recent had to do with our visual communications director working for 3 hours on a presentation only to have powerpoint suddenly tell him he didn't have permission to save the file. Additionally he couldn't create a new presentation and save the contents he had worked on for so long.
We tried everything but eventually had to close and reopen powerpoint - losing all his work in the process.
Is it any suprise that office just works better on windows?
This is why you NEED to run windows in a corporate environment - you have no idea how addicted the higer-ups are (at least at my corporation) to their ms office.
Lowest number of hops + high latency = cold potato. From wikipedia:Some content networks favor the use of cold-potato routing (MED exchange/honoring) in order to deliver content from replicated server farms closer to the end-user.
You are right, that would be the model I would choose if I owned a cable tv company and was delivering on demand movies over my network.
So it seems that comcast doesn't play well with the other networks and prefers to keep it's packets to itself.
Sounds like they are indeed first on the tiered internet boat.
Doesn't it seem that comcast as an ISP should peer in california for requests originating in california with all the major networks - but hey, that's the first and only comcast connection I've attempted to troubleshoot, so maybe indeed all comcast packets from Sacramento to google and local california game server's ISPs route through new york.
and yes, I understand that in times of bandwidth saturation that dynamic routing alogritms may indeed decide to take your packets half way around the world (and that othewise you would get nice low-latency communication). But this was 4am on a saturday, and his connection had historically been awful.
Maybe his neighbors watch a lot of on demand movies.
hehe, you've never used excel on mac, have you? ;)
I can see Doctors of the future using the magenetic-lasso to extract tumors more easily.
We can only imagine, however, what the clone tool will be used for.
How can normal, non-technical people hope to have a chance of understanding our new world of today and the laws being applied to it?
I have spent the last few months speaking (sometimes drunkenly) at great lengths about the net neutrality concept - a concept, which quite frankly, I had taken for granted (I didn't really realize the net was neutral, it's just how it has to work). Many of my friends had fallen for the idea that a tiered internet would simply mean better and faster access to video and music. After all, didn't they pay more for "premium" channels on TV?
My one friend, so adamant - largly because he is naturally agumentative - finally began to realize how easily those in power (and today information is power - has it even not been?) can manipulate the ignorant. He realized this only after he asked me to look at his computer to see why his comcast was so slow (and why his vonage was cutting-out).
I ran a simple trace route and noticed that it appeared requests to local IPs were being routed through dallas and new york from his home in Sacramento. I told him I didn't think this was the best way to reduce the latency he was getting from his long distance calls and online gaming. I hypothesize that by comcast routing some clients through these innefecient routes they were somehow load-balancing the demand on their network (of course, new york, dallas, and chicago could just be fancy names for comcast's local california routers - but it seems a dubious naming scheme for local devices).
Without me, his technical friend, he would simply continue to accept his connection as is - and in fact may begin to attribute his degraded service to the FUD of the internet "falling apart".
There are so few of us who can fully (or at least somewhat) grasp what the debate really means - how can the vast majority of non-technical, voting citizens possibly make informed decisions about this?
I'm going off topic, bit it's funny you say this, because just today I was talking with my coworkers about the Intel iMacs and, says I, "Macintosh would be very smart to ship a bare-bones intel system without OS X installed, or with XP installed, because I think I would like to upgrade some of the executives with Macintosh's hardware."
You see, since I work for a greeting card company we have a lot of the Mac vs. PC compatability issues. Thus, now and then we get a request for IT to install a Macintosh for someone so they can view some Quark documents natively. The user winds up with two computers and a lot less desk real-estate.
Since the intel macs are just good machines I would like to head-off the entire issue by giving everyone in my corp an intel mac with XP installed - then, in the future, if they decide they need to view something natively mac I can just install OS X and parallels instead of a whole new, second, system.
Why do you care what OS is underneath? Your nice $2K machine came with Windows, right? And it plays all your games out of the box, right? So what's the problem? Or is this some sort of irrational religious thing?
hehe, irrational religious thing. I custom built my machine so no xp came with it - but your point about being irrational isn't entirely off-base. I know that a licensed copy of xp pro is just another +/-$125 on top of an already significant pile of cash, so at that point it is just the principle...well, the principle and a $100 bill - that's two games, you know.
It really peeves me that the linux gaming scene is so underdeveloped.
However, on the one hand I can understand. Games are arguably the most sophisticated and difficult computer programs to create.
But on the other hand I just can't stomach the fact that I pay $2k for a nice system, but I must have windows to play my games. It's like all those FLOPS from my CPU and video card are useless unless I am beholden to the software trickery of direct-x.
Now I hear rumors that future games will require vista for play and that newer direct-x releases will only install on vista.
It's so artificial to me. I mean, I know that direct-x's APIs allow for ease of development and speedier time to market, as well as giving a simpler interface to modern video card's best features.
But the hardware is there!
why does the underlying OS matter so much when the raw hardware processing power is right there!?
That's simply an awesome and beautiful story :)
;)
You sound like you have a fine family, it makes me happy to know there are people like you and your daughter out there.
When Columbia first launched I was 3 years old. My mother tells me that I watched hours and hours of the launch - not just the actual liftoff, but the boring interviews with the astronauts and their breakfast press meeting and such.
I don't know how much I comprehended at that age - but I apparently knew something amazing when I saw it.
I hope I too will have the opportunity to see the shuttle launch, even if from miles away