"They also fail to recognize that technology may radically change humans in the next century or so.'"

What does humanity changing have to do with robotic exploration or not? Why are you insisting everyone acknowledge this point? What is it being made for? Why do we have to recognize this possibility? What possibilities for radical human change are interesting in the framework of the space-development debate?

Stop trying so hard to insist on being right and spend more effort helping people discover what is in their own imagination.

It's possible to use a hottened egrep by booting up one egrep, checkpointing it, then restoring that checkpoint again and again whenever you need an instance.
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4150171&cid=44759217

The problem is not using egrep, the problem is not using an existing already launched copy of egrep. Which, you CAN do. And I'd even recommend doing so, because it's manageable and uses sane well known and unfancy tools that are decoupled from each other.

Thanks for writing GIT. So many in this thread immediately jump into alternative options without discussing what's really at the heart of this problem. Grep is fine software and is known to do it's job well. As you say, the problem is simply that grep has startup costs, but those can be near totally ameliorated out.

Use CRIU (Checkpoint Restore in Userspace) to checkpoint a hot version of grep that has been started and given a couple seconds to load in the dictionary and build it's pattern matcher and is thus just awaiting stdin (which you haven't given it). Restore a fresh instance for every new email, and pass the new email into the just-opened stdin for that restored, hot, waiting to go instance.

Instead of launching a fresh grep and initializing it with your corpus, this will create a grep that you can online which will be ready to go, awaiting input.

Ma-fucking-gic.

Traditionally one could achieve this effect by forking child workers, but that's a fucking huge pain in the ass as far as program design goes, making things really complicated- instead of a single program doing a single thing, it couples many uses of a program into a single programs lifestyle. Daemonized apps require system level management and have to be running. Service apps require complex interfaces to handle the different servicings they are performing. Decouple concerns (stay unix'y: stdin->program->stdout), and CRIU the bitch. Just use a hot program, rather than a cold one.

If the problem persists: fuck grep, it's pattern matching is rubbish and it's worthless. Please let us know. You might also consider 'head' 'ing the first 64k or some such of your email to avoid pattern matching the entire doc.

I'd love to be helping to polish and work on Pandora, AnonymousCoward, but after placing an order two months in, early December 08, I have no hardware and little hope.

OpenPandora has not disclosed how many units have made it out into the field.
OpenPandora has not told us anything about the current rate of fulfillment for backlogged units.
OpenPandora claims to be out of funds.
OpenPandora claim to be using new sales to fund the backlog.

But we've been strung along for four years already, and I'd be shocked if I ever saw a thing from the $330 I mail ordered to them.

Get classic OpenPandora preorders fulfilled? Um, no, not at all. My guess is they've fulfilled considerably less than 1/2.

The devs state they don't have funds to fulfill orders, and that they're using new revenue to help fulfill the massive backlog they presently cannot afford.

I was in fairly early in the queue, early December `08. I've listened to hopeful progress report after hopeful progress report, but I'm skeptical I'll ever see a thing from the $330 I mail ordered them. If OpenPandora disclosed any information about the backlog fulfillment rate, I might have a hope, but they've left pre-orders hanging indefinitely and provided no solid information to build expectations or hopes against.

I'm not upset at what seems like my loss of $330: it was a good notion, I'm sure it's been a wild adventure, and I doubt anyone's going to bed on large piles of money, but getting strung along for four years, being told they've run out of money, and are trying to use sales to earn themselves back into the black... after four years of being strung along, I don't believe I'll ever see a thing.

CALEA's "Second Report & Order" states it's providers that must foot the bill. If our government paid for MS to acquire Skype perhaps there are shady deals afoot, but the US law states providers must pay the costs of snooping: the aforementioned shady deals would be very bad behavior from the US of A government, paying to acquire CALEA compliance.

The costs of running a couple thousand Linux nodes & paying bandwidth can not be that bad. MS certainly knew they'd have to remake Skype when they bought them, that the old P2P structure would have to go. I would want to think no grand conspiracy was involved, that what happened, the remodeling to a snoop-friendly infrastructure was simply due. It will be interesting to see going forwards, with the tentative thumbs up given to Skype plus the upcoming WebRTC technologies, how CALEA enforcement can be maintained: WebRTC certainly suggests decentralized models, although of course STUN & the various tunneling protocols are ripe for deliberately avoiding the easiest P2P routes & tunneling through glassboxes.

This premise, a managed AST you can manipulate programmatically (a SOM, Source Object Model), plus a managed compiler pipeline to compile, is nothing new. Boo language was doing this on .NET , and I'm sure there are many examples before it: Boo was started in 2003.

Re: dark matter, apparently not. http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2332984&cid=36800042

Yet another place the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) would be fantastically useful!

Also, how seriously would the presence of previously undetectable ultra-cool stars affect the search for dark matter? Aren't we looking for energy/matter based off some energy level, and might that mass be tucked away in the form of ultra-cool stars, just to cool to detect?

i wasnt aware the addon had a toolbar. what i was aware of, is that it attempts to detect phone numbers on the page, and replaces those numbers with a graphical link that launches a skype call to that number.

http://www.redhat.com/virtualization/rhev/desktop/spice/
http://www.spicespace.org/

it's pretty aggressive. just found out about it a couple months ago. QEMU based. they're doing some cool stuff with virtual devices; qxl is their accelerated graphics driver for Linux & Windows, and is probably gonna end up taking over for NX client now that they're closed source. and yes, i am aware there is a difference between a remote desktop and vm.

interested to see how RHEL manufacture disk images for the individual clients; needing a dedicated disk image for each OS is pretty bogus, but fairly common practice.

ecomotors sells diesel variants already. EM100, EM30, &c. they're ungodly expensive, but basically unparalleled if you need a high power high efficiency engine for a smallish drone aircraft.

a normal two stroke has recirculating air in the combustion chamber. when you exhaust you dump some fuel. when you intake you mix with existing fuel/air. air is coming and going from the same general area.

axial flow is the key to opposing piston. the chamber is shuffling a little forwards and backwards in opposed piston design, exposing intake and exhaust ports at opposite ends of the chamber. since air is moving in a net direction, circulation can be much more tightly controlled. there's huge potential to get air behaving according to design and engineering wishes-- the trick, the reason these guys are spending money and this hasnt taken over already, is that this timing is incredibly difficult and exacting. if done right, you get a two stroke that breathes as well as a four stroke. it's just not easy.

opposed piston's been championed for high efficiency and high power density since the 1950's. this is why. given the tooling we now have at our disposal to understand complex factors like airflow and thermal dynamics, it should be no surprise these things are gonna see a huge resurgence.

i agree on everything except your conclusion. yes this is old tech. wikipedia lists examples as far back as 1907: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposed-piston_engine .

however it's old tech that was the leader in power density and efficiency, right up until they got upstaged by gas turbine. axial flow keeps air moving in one direction and not recirculating, which can go a huge way to mitigate the down sides of the two stroke design, while playing to two strokes natural power density advantage. coupled with increased kinetic capture (% of combustion surface which is piston v. chamber), opposed piston makes a lot of sense.

as far as replacements go, the only viable example i can think of is Fuel Cell, and frankly we arent energy rich enough to throw power away compressing and processing inputs to supply ourselves with a fuel replacement. fuel cell will make more economic sense in fifty years when petrofuels are expensive and grid power is cheap. for now, we have nearly a billion vehicles on the road and doubling the power/weight and fuel efficiency of the next ones we build makes a lot of sense.

also, power density has it's own merits at times, and these are unparalleled, being extremely efficient two strokes.

the fact is ICE has a lot of life left, and a lot of strengths. given that absolute 100% fact, this tech is sensible and ought be pursued.

Yes opposed piston is an old idea. For a time they were popular for high power density applications, and high efficiency applications (awesome axial flow properties). The reason this old creation fell out of favor is that, for the high-density extreme-efficiency uses fulfilled, there was an all around better replacement: gas turbines.

Gas turbines, however, have their own host of issues which make them unsuitable for all applications. Captone's 30kW microturbine, for example, is itself small, but has a sizable host of systems to support it and deal with the high temperatures, and costs a decent fraction of a million dollars last I checked. It and it's upsized bretheren are found in buses, and the occasional exotic-- see the CMT-380: a car custom built around the sizable & demanding microturbine power plant.

Given the challenges of using gas turbines, EcoMotors opting to dust off and enhance the next best thing makes some sense. There's big opportunity to evolve this already uber efficient two stroke's airflow with modern techniques and tooling. You've pointed out a number of mechanical challenges, but these seem to me considerably more mundane than the challenges of adapting a gas turbine to an every day machine. It may be old tech, but it's considerably better than what powers nearly a billion motorized vehicles on the roads and in the fields today.

I'd say the revival is both well timed and worth pausing to examine. Please feel free to contribute alternative reasons for their having fallen out of favor; would be most interesting to collect more facts or anecdotes.