What if Kennedy had set a lesser goal, such as orbiting the moon?

There's no tangible goal to take to the people there. What do you say? "Ha! We circled a man around the moon first!"? Doesn't hold much punch.

Do you remember who the first man was to orbit the earth? The vast majority of people wouldn't be able to answer. Some might answer "John Glenn". Only a small fraction of a percent of people would correctly answer Yuri Gagarin.

Do you remember who first set foot on the moon? Do you remember what his first words were? The fact that I don't have to answer either question speaks for itself.

8) SALT II would have long been abandoned and Earth would be surrounded by nuke armed stations.
9) No Cruise missiles. Why build a Mosquito when an Elephant would be cheaper.

Read up on the Revolt of the Admirals sometime. There's a good reason why we have cruise missiles and not nukes. It's not for want of orbital platforms.

4) No Space Shuttle. Rockets all the way. (Why mess with something that works)

We would have a space shuttle. It simply wouldn't be the "jack of all trades, master of none" we got.

The space shuttle was supposed to be a lightweight launch craft for transporting people to/from LEO where they could rendezvous with a space station and take a transport to a location like the moon. Economically, it made a lot of sense. It would have been fairly simple, cheap to operate, and with fewer disposable parts than the Saturn V. (Which basically throws away millions of pounds of hardware to return barely a few tons of mass. Very wasteful.)

So what went wrong?

Obviously, the same politics that killed the moon program. Nixon told NASA that they could have one launch vehicle, and the Saturn V was too expensive to be "it". Oh, and they needed to meet the military's needs for a launch vehicle as well, because the Titan rockets were also too expensive.

NASA got out their abacuses, ran some numbers, decided that the shuttle was key to a future space station, and committed to producing a super-shuttle that could be all things to all people. After all, they had the technology, right? Right?

Well, sort of. The engineers did an amazing job of producing the most sophisticated piece of space equipment ever designed. The power curves were incredible and the engines left the Saturn V in the dust. Only problem: It was a hellva lot of mass to send up and bring back, leaving little room for cargo. Worse yet, it was so complex that maintenance costs were through the roof. In the end, it would have been cheaper to continue operating the Saturn V with the economics of scale resulting in MORE cost reductions than the Shuttle ever realized!

What I'm getting at is that if we're going to play along with this dream-world where politics don't kill off programs, we'd have the Saturn V, the space shuttle, the space station (with artificial gravity!), and transport tugs originally envisioned by NASA. Because all those pieces have to fit together to make this mythical lunar base of 5,000 people possible.

Back here in reality, all those ideas were doomed from the beginning. The politicians only ever supported the space program to combat the USSR. By the 1970's, the Soviet Union had already collapsed. They were just coasting on momentum from there on out. That's why (save for a push by Regan to push the USSR to the brink of bankruptcy) the space program never recovered. There was no political need. And anyone who knows anything about politics knows that there has to be a need commiserate with size of the solution before there will be a large commitment. Hopes, dreams, and peaceful exploration ala Star Trek just don't cut it. :-(

No offense, but that's exactly the type of bullshit Microsoft wants you to believe. They've implemented some of the CSS stuff, but they're a LONG way from meeting a standard even as simple as FF1.5.

Call me when IE's DOM support leaves the DOM1 standard and moves on to the DECADE OLD DOM2 support. Then we'll talk.

Well, that explains the post. However, that's not 1337, that's LOLCAT; a derivative of texting language, itself a derivative of common IRC abbreviations.

1337-5p34| was developed to make the text hard to read/index and was "cool" for the hip 90's h4X0rz generation. i.e. Back when putting Zs on everything was kewl. :-P

I'd insert some completely random references that make fun of the movie Hackers, but that would be admitting far too much about my knowledge of the 90's computer culture. ;-)

My first reaction to the parent post is, "I'll bet he encoded a cool circuit design into the ASCII of his text!!! COOL!"

Then I realized he was posting from a cellphone. Probably the same one he had when he learned HDL "10 YEERS AGO". :-P

Now that Xilinx has released new chips, the old ones are pretty cheap.

The old ones were always cheap. I got my Spartan-3 kit about 5 years ago for $150. That's what the smallest Xilinx kit is selling for now.

As many people have pointed out, FPGAs are so cheap now that there are plenty of other boards for less. My problem with those boards is that you don't often get the comprehensive devkit you get from Xilinx. As a hobbyist getting started with FPGAs, I found the Spartan kit to be incredible at hand-holding you through the basics of getting into hardware design. Diving into logic theory took care of the rest.

The board layouts ended up being far more of a challenge. Without an instructor to guide you, getting the correct solutions for circuit voltages was a bit of a challenge. Not to mention selecting the right parts among the 11 billionty parts available. A little persistence can get you through it, though. I just wish I'd stop forgetting how a transistor works. Drives me nuts having to relearn it every time. (Probably because it still boggles me a bit. It makes perfect sense... and then it doesn't. Grrr.... :-P)

Trying to explain to a potential employer why you know JHDL and not verilog or VHDL is kind of depressing. JHDL's last release was 2 years ago and I'm not sure if it is an active project any more.

I think you miss the point. I'm not saying that he shouldn't learn VHDL and/or Verilog. Just that doing a bit of JHDL can give him some good experience with the way circuits lay out. He can actually see how, say, an adder circuit is constructed. Armed with that knowledge, he can more confidently write VHDL/Verilog code that will translate into the hardware he wants rather than some random circuitry that seems to do the right thing.

The lack of updates is disappointing, but not really a show-stopper. Even if the hardware JHDL supports falls into disuse, the simulation tools will still operate. And that's all one really needs for the learning experience. :-)

Hardware: I highly recommend the Spartan Starter Kits. They're dirt cheap, well supported by the industry, and come with a good toolkit. There's not much more you need to know other than you'll probably want a serial cable in addition to the JTAG cable the kit ships with.

I'll grant you that the fabric isn't very large by today's standards, but it's still enough space to learn about the hardware. By the time you outgrow the fabric, you should have a good idea of what size hardware you want. In fact, your next board may even be a custom design based on a bus like wishbone. ;-)

Software: The Xilinx stuff (pronounced "Zy-Links") comes with a full toolkit for VHDL/Verilog development including an IDE, place and route tools, and software to reconfigure the FPGA. It's all quite slick and easy for a beginner to use.

Language: The most common route taken by new hardware developers is to learn Verilog. They do this because it's similar to C and that makes them comfortable. THIS IS A BAD IDEA. I can't count how many hardware designers swear up a storm when they see a Verilog project with loops and other software constructs stuck into them. See, the comfort and familarity of C makes new hardware developers forget that the hardware is a fixed layout. There is no for loops or control logic as you think of it. It all ends up flattening to hardware. If you write regular software constructs, you'll end up with the least efficient circuit possible.

From this perspective, learning VHDL is better because you won't have that comfort and familiarity that might tempt you into creating poor circuits.

I actually recommend doing some JHDL code for a while. It's lower level than VHDL, but that's a good thing. You have to think about every wire connection and how it all links up. When you're done, you can easily step through your circuit and see how it plays out in hardware. Even better, you learn how to properly use software constructs like loops to create a large number of static hardware objects. This will make your code better without falling in the trap of trying to write software.

That's my 2 cents anyway. Good luck! :-)

You joke, but between the Canvas and Web Socket standards, I don't see any reason why they couldn't.

Granted, WebSockets have yet to be implemented in browsers, but I hear Google owns a fairly popular one...

wasnt that the whole point of XWindows?

Yes. But it failed to account for future advancements in graphics technology. Thus regular desktop usage became too heavyweight for wide deployment. Thin clients splintered in the directions of Citrix, NX, and VNC. Microsoft also screwed over Citrix and developed RDP.

NX basically is the X11 protocol with many of the issues that make it suck removed. This is accomplished through imperceptible delays to bunch up commands, compression of packets, and caching of previously executed series of commands.

XWindows was remote window graphics developed at Stanford and fortified at MIT during the 1980s.

X Windowing System, actually. X11 for short.

Read this:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

Specifically, scroll down to the section "Enter the Web". After reading that, you should understand that it's not about keeping Internet Explorer dominant. It's about holding back the progress of the web.

Another source (in print):

http://www.amazon.com/Barbarians-Bill-Gates-Jennifer-Edstrom/dp/0805057544

I'm sorry, but this is just not true.

^ What is untrue is this statement. You offer it up with no backing as if we're supposed to accept it as reality. Well, it isn't. At least not anymore.

I've been observing non-technical users for a while now, trying to understand what it would take to make them switch. You know what I found? It just took critical mass. That was it. Over the past year, there's been a subtle shift in the way users treat alternative browsers.

Specifically, there's a huge amount of peer pressure *not* to use Internet Explorer! Just pop up in any chat room, forum, or other internet site and mention that you're using Internet Explorer. The responses used to be ambivalent. Now, you'll have just about everyone there descend on you and tell you which browser you should use!

Even in real life, I'm seeing the same trend. The message that "Internet Explorer == Viruses/Bugs/End of the World" seems to be percolating into the zeitgeist. Even the least technical of users tend to be very afraid of using IE and prefer to use FireFox or Safari whenever possible.

See, what you're espousing is the old wisdom. Something that used to be true, but no longer is. The reality of here and now is that the old wisdom is no longer true. For me, it took observing an event of an IE user finding it humorous that an HTML5 game didn't work in IE, and still getting pressed by those around him to explain why he would possibly be using such a POS as IE.

Open your eyes. I think you'll see much the same thing. The only thing propping up IE's market share at the moment is the IE6 "corporate standard" in many companies. Once that falls (and it WILL fall), IE is done for.

Oh, for crying out loud. The parent is NOT, I repeat NOT, flamebait.

Well, ok. Calling Carter a dolt was uncalled for, but so is saying the same of Bush. You see, the government has a bit of an unwritten rule around the pronunciation of "nuclear". It's a rule that was introduced for propaganda purposes, but hasn't always worked like they want it to.

Basically, government officials always pronounce the weapons as "nucular arsenal". This pronounciation is intended to associate the term with "bad", "danger", and "massive destruction". When they're referring to nuclear in the context of power generation or some other "good" aspect, it's supposed to be properly pronounced as "nuclear".

Of course, it didn't exactly work out as planned. The public sees no difference between "nucular" and "nuclear". Worse yet, the politicians often get the two mixed up anyway, thus failing at the message they're supposed to be delivering. But the concept is still out there and the Presidents have tried to somewhat follow it.

If you're interested in the origin of the use of "nucular" in the government, it goes back to Eisenhower. Eisenhower pushed a program known as "Atoms for Peace". Unfortunately, he couldn't pronounce "nuclear" correctly to save his life. As such, the term "nucular" ended up in the government lexicon.

Besides, there's a long tradition of never contradicting the President. Past or present. A tradition abused by the airforce to get the name of the RS-71 changed to SR-71. But that's another story... ;-)

It's not that Google can't or couldn't create a successful operating system... it's that for the vast majority of Windows users, they're not going to switch OS's.

If there's anything I've learned from the current browser war, it's that the best way to take down Microsoft is not another monopoly, but healthy competition.

i.e. FireFox has done a bang-up job in being a strong competitor to Internet Explorer. Yet it remained fairly niche until Safari, Opera, and Chrome all worked there way into people's lives.
They're all still niches in of themselves, but they add up to a whole that presents a serious competition to Microsoft. Worse yet, they've captured enough marketshare to where the idea of IE being the "only option" has mostly gone the way of the dodo.

Competition for Windows will need to be the same. No one Operating System will dethrone it. Not Linux, not OS X, not Google Chrome OS. But together, in competition, they can become more than the sum of their parts.