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Domain: pdx.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to pdx.edu.
Comments · 164
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More InfoRFN had this last night. But here is a page with some other photos.
RFN had links to other research sites, some of which have pics every week or two for the past two months.
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More InfoRFN had this last night. But here is a page with some other photos.
RFN had links to other research sites, some of which have pics every week or two for the past two months.
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Re:Moving away from X
Should the Unix/Linux world move away from X? Redesign a graphical layer from the ground up, supporting antialiasing, transparency, enhanced programming environment, and a new, well defined and examined user interface?
No. Antialiasing and transparency are most of the way into the X server already. Any enhanced programming environment or better user interface is unlikely to be more difficult to implement on top of the X server than atop some from-scratch thing.
Basically, the X protocol does all the hard parts of a window system fairly nicely. Its rendering functionality was until recently unfortunate, but Packard's client-side rendering via the Render extension appears to be adequate for anything anyone wants to do with GUIs these days.
The current client-side libraries are not so good, but this can be fixed without changing the X server or protocol. See XCB for one proposed step in that direction.
IMHO, if one-tenth the energy that was put into whining about X and flailing at never-quite-ready replacement rendering systems went into these sorts of things instead, we'd have a nicer-than-Mac/Windows desktop GUI for free by now.
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Re:One thing I'd like to see
HAHAHAHA trust me inertial guidence / positioning can be made VERY accurate with nearly NO drift.
Clearly you don't have a clue and you're just trolling, but it's worth clarifying the drift problem:
What good is "nearly" no drift? If there's any drift at all, then it means you *have* to have an occasion external reference. If you're talking about a 20 minute missile flight then you're okay, but it doesn't work if you want to track your position for the course of a longer trip.
There is always some noise in your samples, and there's always data lost between sampling intervals. You're integrating twice and then adding up a whole bunch of deltas, each with some error. Over time, your calculated position WILL ALWAYS drift further and further from your actual position. That's why inertial navigation is seldom preferred when GPS or Loran is available.
lets just say it is more accurate than military grade GPS.
Bullsh*t - under what circumstances? Where do you think you're going to get the initial position to program the inertial guidance system?
Here's a good intro to inertial navigation if you're interested. -
1984 Interview with Bill JoyThis page has an interesting interview with Bill Joy, the original author of VI
Interesting tidbits- Originally written in 1976, "...right after Carter got elected"
- Joy had, by 1984, dumped 'vi' for Interleaf for WYSIWYG
- Many interesting predictions about 'the future'
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Low budgets, volunteer participants
Low budgets, encouraging volunteer participants -- now that's the way to run a space program!
An extreme version of this philosophy is central to the Portland State Aerospace Society, Portland State University's group operating under the auspices of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS). Check out in particular our ongoing work on our Inertial Navigation System, which currently costs out at around $500. All of our work is open source, and is specifically targeted at usability by other amateur rocketry groups.
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Low budgets, volunteer participants
Low budgets, encouraging volunteer participants -- now that's the way to run a space program!
An extreme version of this philosophy is central to the Portland State Aerospace Society, Portland State University's group operating under the auspices of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS). Check out in particular our ongoing work on our Inertial Navigation System, which currently costs out at around $500. All of our work is open source, and is specifically targeted at usability by other amateur rocketry groups.
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There *are* amateur rocketeers launching from Bend
While this story may be fictional, there is a group from Portland, OR that are working on rockets to be fired from Bend, OR. Their website is at www.psas.pdx.edu. They're working on inertial navigation, and recently put out a call for volunteers to work on a port of [uC]Linux to the mpc555 chip, which is a PPC variant.
They are launching from Bend because they can get clearance there for the altitudes they expect to hit. When they want to go higher (say, the 100km mark), they'll have to go to Alaska, from what I hear. Alaska's got the only true spaceport that's not NASA controlled, and with (easier) FAA approval you can actually launch from there. Or try for a sea-launch and hope you don't flub the schedule <g>
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... but wrong
Ah come on, there's no compression in XYZmodem - X is just a checksum or crc check, Y the same with 1K blocks and batch transfers, Z opens up a window (can send blocks w/o having to wait for each one to be ack'd ala tcp) and can resume interrupted transfers (something I *wish* ftp could do!).
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Computer Action Team
There's a fantastic example of a successful program at Portland State University. The CAT team runs the computers for the engineering department. Once or twice a year, they train a dozen or so students as admins in unix and win2k, and they eventually end up running the systems. The training is rigorous and hands on experience is given. You can check out their site at www.cat.pdx.edu
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Re:Tcl/TkRMS's complaints about TCL weren't about licenses. (Surprise! he does occationally have opinions on on something other than software licenses.) He had fundamental problems with the way the language was designed.
In 1994, he made his opinions public on the gnu-announce mailing list (gatewayed to Usenet in gnu.announce) in an article titled Why You should not use Tcl. This of course started a huge flame ware in gnu.misc.dicsuss and comp.lang.tcl. He followed it up with another article (which I can't find right now) which detailed his objections further. (I remember distinctly his stating that Tcl's arrays aren't true vectors since they don't have O(1) access)
It was RMS's complaints about Tcl which caused the creation of Guile project. The reason that Guile multiple translator front ends was so that it could replace Tcl as an extention language with no user visible changes.
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A Weather Station for your roof!
You could get a wireless, solar-powered weather station for your roof. Then you could get some UNIX-based software and MRTG and put some graphs of your station online. -
Re:Woz: a hacker's hackerWell, I don't know what you're trying to say. He might have written BASIC for the Apple. I am saying that he did not invent BASIC, which is what I thought you were trying to say. If that is not what you were trying to say, I apologize. If you ARE trying to say that he invented BASIC, you're wrong.
Here is one source. Search for basic.
http://www.irn.pdx.edu/~ke rlinb/myresearch/timeline.html
Like I said before, if I am misunderstanding you, I apologize.
-----BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH-----
Blah. -
Filtering et. al. not censorshipCensorship is the action of not allowing others to be heard or to express themselves. Which is why you call this self-censorship, I'm sure, but we need a different prefix here... self-censorship is the act of blocking one's own expression, not blocking others expression from one's self (and only one's self).
As Webster's puts it, censoring is the act of "supervis[ing] conduct and morals."
My drawn out point being, while I am strong against the notion of any person supervising the conduct and morals of others, I also believe that individuals have an inherent right to impose morals and codes of conduct over themselves. While everyone has a right to speak, and not to be outright censored, I also believe that individuals have the right to choose not to listen to what you say. We're not living in anyone's personal reeducation camp. This is parallel to my support of freedom of press - but not only to people have a right not to listen to what the press reports, they also have a right to privacy (which often suffers via the media machine).
I don't use ShutUp Software personally, but I certainly defend it as a choice that should be there for those who wish to.
