If there is a patent trap in Mono (which exists regardless of its license), then that means that MS can then sue all those businesses and governments for patent infringement.
I'm getting sick of this meme.
Tell me, are you a patent attorney? What is your expertise for making claims like this one?
Now I'm not a patent attorney either, but here is my understanding: If Microsoft does assert some kind of submarine patent, the main effect will be to cause GNOME and everybody else to yank out Mono. At that point, we will just have to port the Mono apps to Java or something. That is the absolute worst case. Can you give me an example of any time where some company had a submarine patent, then suddenly asserted it, and successfully extracted a bunch of penalties from businesses and governments?
Furthermore, while I'm still not a patent attorney, I have read Groklaw for a while, and I read some essays there about the "unclean hands" doctrine. If a company has patent rights, and discovers that someone is infringing, that company has a duty to inform the infringers as soon as possible; it is not allowed to just let the patent sit there ticking like a bomb, and then demand extra damages because the infringer was infringing for so long.
So, let's review: Mono is a technology that is very similar to the JVM, which in turn is similar to other virtual systems, going all the way back to the UCSD P-system. The amount of prior art is staggering. Besides that, the only danger is a submarine patent, not a new patent: the.NET stuff has been around for years and years, and you have to file for a patent before you publicly disclose a technology, or you lose your chance.
So, the alleged threat is that there is a patent already granted, that nobody has noticed, on technology that has a ton of prior art; and Microsoft is deviously not asserting the patent, but is going to later. Microsoft won't care about the negative publicity for itself and for.NET, because it stands to gain so much and is certain its patent will survive all challenges. And anyone infringing will somehow be on the hook for penalties.
I for one don't believe any of it. C# is as safe as Java and Mono is as safe as the JVM.
Or, they could be honest and raise the money though an old-fashioned income tax, or sales tax.
Washington state doesn't have a state income tax. As a side-effect of this, every other thing you can imagine is taxed as highly as the state government thinks they can manage. (Except car licensing... that used to be hundreds of dollars per year, but an initiative slashed that to a flat $30 per year. But that was years ago... I just re-licensed a car and paid about $120 so I guess it is ratcheting back up to where it was.)
In Washington, a state income tax is very nearly a "political third rail" issue. You can't get elected governor here without piously promising that an income tax would be your absolute last emergency resort. Our current governor and the one before here both started talking about a state income tax shortly after being elected, though.
This month, our state legislature seriously debated a proposal to enact a state income tax, only on "the rich", and with a sales-tax reduction as a bribe to make the rest of the voters happy. This was not a popular idea; I think most people view this as the camel's nose entering the tent. (Certainly that's how I view it... once we have the income tax, every year the definition of who is "rich" will be revised downward.) That idea is dead for now.
As for sales tax:
The sales tax is already 9.5% in the Seattle area; of that, 6.5% goes to the state. (Numbers from here.) I suspect that nobody quite dares yet to hit the threshold of 10% sales tax or higher. Double digits? That might get some headlines.
But surprise surprise, the state legislature is seriously debating a proposal to add 0.2% to the state sales tax rate, at least temporarily. This would bring sales tax new me to 9.7%.
But I'm sure they'd rather hide the tax burden from the people who are ultimately paying it. Gotta love the government.
They'd certainly rather find creative ways to hike taxes than ever to cut spending. It's a down economy, everyone is hurting, tax revenues have fallen, but they can't possibly cut spending. I wonder how long this can last.
As I have already commented, I think this is a horrible idea. Windows is not going to change its window buttons, I have to use Windows, and I dread this change. And, if you have to put the buttons on the left, the most-commonly-used button (the Close button) should be in the left corner, so that in the common case where I have a maximized window, it's easier to hit.
I went ahead and read through Mark Shuttleworth's comments about the bug. In summary: they want to try some new cool stuff, they want to shake things up and not be bound by the past, they have some ideas (not described) for ways to use the right-hand side of the menu bar. (He was even talking about moving the scroll bar away from the right side of the window, on the grounds that few people use it, and scroll wheels/touchscreen interfaces are becoming the big new thing. This doesn't give me the warm fuzzies either.) They are shipping the beta like this to see what actual reactions are to this idea.
I went ahead and listened to the podcast also (the relevant bit starts around 0:39 into the podcast). Ivanka Majic said many things, but IMHO did not adequately explain why they think this is a good idea. Some vague comments about how they are actually testing things. She said many commendable things, such as talking about how new users can find it really hard to even understand just what Ubuntu is. And she said something that sounded like her department was behind the "papercuts" project, of which I firmly approve. But if you are trying to understand what the heck is going on with those crazy buttons, you can skip the podcast.
So, if (like me) you dread these new buttons, the best thing you could possibly do is to actually get a copy of the Ubuntu beta and try it out; then post, not just opinions, but informed opinions supported by personal experience. "I tried to click on the Edit menu and closed my window" (if that actually happens to you) should be much more persuasive than "I looked at your screen shot and I can already tell I hate it".
So, I'm planning to download the Ubuntu Beta ISO image, and install it (possibly in VirtualBox), and try the thing out. Then I will add my voice to those commenting on the new buttons.
There are lots of USB devices out there with a line-in jack.
Here's one I like a lot. Unfortunately, Turtle Beach has discontinued this product; fortunately, there are some still out there, so buy one now before it's too late.
Even if we trust those numbers, even if those numbers are perfectly accurate, they don't tell the whole story.
How many doctors have simply stopped providing care because they couldn't afford (or couldn't get) the insurance anymore? How much more competition would we see if the malpractice situation wasn't so screwed up?
I remember reading an essay by a doctor who said he had had to stop delivering babies. He liked delivering babies, he viewed it as one of the better parts of his job, but he just couldn't afford the malpractice insurance anymore.
I personally hope that smart people will want to become doctors. The way things are going, the smartest people are going to avoid becoming doctors, and become lawyers or investment bankers or something.
What is in it to stop the premiums going up as the money from subsidies comes in? In other words, will the basic laws of supply and demand in a free market not still apply? This bill does not seem to limit the dynamics of the free market.
To understand the answers, you need to understand the true purpose of the bill.
The Democrats want to completely socialize health care: they call it "single payer", i.e. the US Government is the only entity to pay for health care. The Democrats knew they couldn't get there immediately, but rather needed to pretend to do something else.
This bill is over 2700 pages long, and I haven't read it. So, I'm relying on various news sources for this analysis. But as I understand it, here is how the bill works:
Each American is required to buy health insurance. Anyone who cannot afford it can apply to the government for help. But those who don't buy insurance, can simply pay a "fine" to the government. This fine will cost less than the insurance would have cost.
This bill also requires insurance companies to accept anyone, and pay for their care, regardless of pre-existing conditions.
So, in short: I could cancel all my insurance, and pay a fine to the government, and no insurance company gets any of that money. Then one day I could discover that I had cancer, buy insurance, and that insurance company would be compelled to accept me as a patient and pay for my cancer treatment. Or, one day I could get in a car crash, then buy the insurance and get treated.
Because the above would completely destroy the actuarial basis of insurance, all the companies currently providing health insurance would be forced by cold hard economic reality to stop selling insurance. If they didn't stop on their own, they would go out of business, and close down.
The end game is that the US government would announce that due to the entirely unexpected and unforeseeable wave of insurance companies closing down, the US government would start offering insurance. That, or else it would buy the remaining insurance companies the way the government bought failing car manufacturers.
And there you go: single-payer. The US government would provide all "insurance" (really, it wouldn't look anything like insurance at that point, but the name would be kept for sentimental reasons).
Also, the bill as written saves a tiny bit of money: over ten years, it saves (IIRC) about 160 billion dollars. However, the bill as written includes drastic cuts to Medicare to help pay for it; and the bill does not include the "Doc Fix", so it assumes that bad cuts to doctor pay will be allowed to stand. Also, this bill includes the provision that the broad increases in taxes go into effect immediately, but the benefits don't start to get paid out for four years. I do not expect the cuts to Medicare to be allowed to stand; I expect to see another bill to increase taxes in order to put back everything that was cut. In short, I am expecting the actual costs of this bill to be far in excess of what was promised.
I view this bill as a complete disaster. Either everything I have read about it is wrong, or else all the cheerful and happy postings I have read here on Slashdot are uninformed.
I'm interested in learning the essentials of statistics. What would be a good book to start me out?
I got The Manga Guide to Statistics and it did introduce me to the very basics. However, there are many places where it just gives you an equation, without deriving it or even explaining it. After reading this book, I now know how to calculate standard deviation, but I'm still a bit vague on how people actually use it. I would like to see some examples of how people use statistics in (for example) science experiments.
My ideal book would explain the basics, with examples, and show how the math works. Ideally it wouldn't be a thousand pages long, either, but that's a secondary consideration.
Recommendations, please?
P.S. Those of you who know about statistics: how good are the Wikipedia pages on statistics?
I understand that may you think things have changed at Apple, but your previous post used older examples as supporting evidence, which I posited were unrelated or irrelevant.
The major change, I submit, is that now Steve Jobs gets his way more often. My "older" examples were intended to demonstrate that Steve Jobs was never a fan of openness, even back in the old old days.
[Steve Jobs] is doing everything in his power to avoid or prevent the same issues he encountered during his first tenure at Apple
Perhaps this is true, but this is not by itself adequate explanation of why Apple rules the iPhone and the iPad with an iron fist.
There are other smart phones out there, and they let you install whatever software you want. I've heard various wild claims that Apple needs to approve each and every app because they want to make sure the FCC doesn't get annoyed, but no other smart phone seems to have a problem with being open.
I don't see any anti-competitive behaviour:
Irrelevant.
The market is full of portable music players and smart-phones, and many online stores and attractions have come and gone in the past. Even Google has their own phone and store now; I don't see Apple trying to close those down.
Irrelevant.
Do you forget that mere two years ago, when dinosaurs walked the Earth, Apple was laughed at by the rest of the industry because they were going to attempt to enter the smart-phone market, which was wholly owned by the Big Players? And now these same critics claim Apple is a bully attempting to squash everybody else... interesting.
Irrelevant.
My thesis has been that Steve Jobs likes to lock down the products produced under his watch. Now the iPhone and iPad are so locked down that one cannot even install software on them without permission from Apple. You can bring up other issues all you may like, but I'm not really interested in a long discussion about them.
You and I won't solve anything by debating here anyway. You seem to be an Apple fan; okay, then, I hope you enjoy your Apple products. I will never spend my own money on an iPhone or iPad, but you may buy whatever you choose, and it's not my business to try to tell you otherwise.
I don't think we disagree. The original poster commented that Apple is schizophrenic, with the Apple II series coming with schematics and program listings and such, but other Apple products locked down hard. My thesis was simply that Steve Jobs likes to lock things down hard, and the more he is in control, the more Apple does this (and thus the less schizophrenic Apple gets).
For the Lisa and the Mac I think one can make the case that Steve Jobs was simply trying to make the "best" possible product, with his own vision of what "best" means.
For the iPhone and iPad I am no longer willing to cut him that slack; Apple is ruling those platforms with an iron fist. Giving users the best possible experience might be one reason why they are doing this, but stifling competition Apple does not want cannot be a coincidence.
To the extent that Steve Jobs can get his way, Apple will sell locked-down products that they can control. Steve Wozniak was in favor of openness, Steve Jobs not so much.
The Apple II series was open, with card slots, and anyone could make cards for it. Steve Jobs was in charge of first the Lisa and then the Mac; these were released with no card slots at all. I don't have a citation, but I have heard that Steve Jobs fiercely resisted putting a hard disk into the Mac initially, because they were able to sell the Mac initially without a cooling fan, but adding a hard disk would require also adding a fan, and fan noise offended his sense of aesthetics.
When Apple killed off the Newton, some Newton fans got together and made a serious bid to buy out the Newton technology so they could keep the platform going. Steve Jobs preferred to kill Newton rather than let someone else have control of it.
There are other examples, but enough. Basically, Steve Jobs wants to control your whole experience. Because Steve Jobs has, overall, very good taste in user experience issues, this does have its good points. Man, the iPhone is really slick!
But I won't buy in to the Apple "walled gardens" of the iPod and the iPad. If I spend my own money on a smart phone, I will get an Android phone; and I'm eagerly waiting for the $300 Taiwanese tablet computers that will actually let me install Ubuntu, plug in USB devices, and slot in memory cards.
Which sort of proves that most of the assumptions by those in love with Capitalism are at best incredibly dishonest. If people were guaranteed a relative level of stability (guaranteed housing, health care, food, and education) while being allowed to concentrate on what they love, you'd see humanity advancing by leaps and bounds.
I find your enthusiasm charming, but I consider it rather naive.
Who will provide the housing? If I don't like the housing, do I have the "right" to turn my nose up at it and demand better? Who will decide whether I deserve better housing?
Who will provide the health care? Everyone wants an infinite amount of health care; how do you ration it? If you pay the doctors well, where will you get the money for it? If you don't pay the doctors well, how do you get good ones?
Who will provide the food? Sometimes I like a fancy steak dinner; how often will I get one, and who decides?
But never mind these questions; let's get down to the important ones. Where on Earth, and when, has this been tried and shown to work?
The USSR was structured something like what you are describing. In theory, Communism gave to each as they needed. In reality, the economy was so bad that the USSR had a negative GDP: they were subtracting value. They took valuable iron ore and turned it into lousy Soviet steel. Then they took the lousy Soviet steel and turned it into lousy Soviet automobiles. The people were hungry, the health care was abysmal, and pollution was horrible.
The Pligrims tried something like what you described when they first arrived in America. It didn't work out.
In this country, in Chicago, there were massive "projects" built to provide housing for the poor. It didn't work out.
It turns out that people work both harder and smarter when they benefit from their work. And top-down-planning economies cannot possibly keep up with a a chaotic free market (and the creative destruction associated with it).
It is often argued that pure capitalism is heartless and cruel. But pure communism and socialism have even worse horrible disadvantages. If I'm going to live under pure anything, I'm going to choose the capitalism.
So, I'm happy that you have this faith in the innate goodness of humankind. But sorry dude, I don't think it's going to work.
As a result, the plant produces one kilowatt-hour -- or 1,000 watt-hours -- of electricity for each 870 watts consumed the previous night. In contrast, the most common mode of energy storage is pumped hydro, in which water is pumped uphill at night, and during the day a valve is turned and the water runs back down, with the pumps recapturing the mechanical energy and turning it into electricity. But in that system, each kilowatt-hour put in delivers no more than 700 or 750 watts back out again. Batteries have about the same ratio.
I assume we should reverse those first numbers: we spend 1,000 watt-hours to gain 870 watt-hours later. Cool to see that it beats pumped hydro.
Hydroelectric plants often cost $1,000 per kilowatt of capacity, and batteries cost far more. The cost of building the Alabama plant was about $550 per kilowatt of capacity.
And it's cheaper than pumped hydro!
The American plant has one new twist, however: the exhaust gases from the turbine are used to preheat the compressed air after it is brought up from the cavern. That makes it 25 percent more efficient than its German predecessor, the institute says.
Interesting. Of course, if you use this with a wind farm, you don't get this benefit; the plant discussed here is a coal plant, with plenty of waste heat.
The above article is from 1991. Despite all these advantages, the idea never took off before now. It saved money, but not a huge amount. But since the wind blows when it blows, not when you want it to blow, I can see this being a useful thing for a wind farm.
The first question I thought of was, "Why not just use pumped hydro power?" Then, oddly enough, I read TFA and found the answer in it:
The nation's largest energy storage option right now is pumped hydroelectricity. When excess electricity is present in a system, it can be used to pump water up to a reservoir. Then, when that power is needed, the water is sent through a turbine to generate electricity. The U.S. electric system has 2.5 gigawatts of pumped hydro storage capacity, but most of the good, cheap sites are already occupied, and creating new reservoirs is not environmentally benign.
And, as noted in the summary, compressed air energy storage (CAES) been tried and it works:
'We expect the CAES plant technology pioneered in Alabama to lead to widespread application in this country," said Robert Schainker, the manager of the Electric Power Research Institute's Energy Storage Program in a press release announcing the plant's completion. 'Three fourths of the United States has geology suitable for underground air storage. At present, more than a dozen utilities are evaluating sites for CAES application."
Ubuntu has been available for half a dozen years. In all that time, the window buttons have not moved. That is good.
Moving the buttons should only be done if there is a really huge benefit that can only be derived from the change. In this case there is no benefit. It's not easier for Mac users; the buttons are in the wrong order. It's not easier for Windows users; the current button order and placement is exactly the same as Windows. It"s not more like the button order from nature, because there is no such thing. It's not a winner in usability tests; there have been none.
I use Ubuntu by choice and Windows often by necessity. Please, Ubuntu, don't make it harder to switch between the two.
But the problem isn't in HTML. The problem is this: a web site can pass a WinHelp (.HLP) file to Internet Explorer, and Internet Explorer will trust it. WinHelp is a binary format, and somebody found a buffer overrun attack or something similar that allows for arbitrary code execution.
WinHelp was state-of-the-art in Windows 3.0, but its day is long past. It's a legacy format. The reason this attack doesn't work in Windows Vista or Windows 7 is that Microsoft had finally stopped supporting it.
This issue is roughly similar to having a JPEG decoder that is vulnerable to badly-formed JPEG images that contain exploit code. However, image formats do kind of need to be binary; given that we have both HTML and XML, there is really no need for a binary help file format anymore.
The summary is unbelievably slanted; whoever tagged this story "troll" was correct. Here is the complete situation; judge for yourself.
Lake Washington is a tall, skinny lake that's rather deep in the middle. It takes a while to drive around it; if you bicycle around the circumference of the lake, it's about 50 miles total.
On the west side of the lake, you have a tall, skinny city: Seattle. The biggest city in the state, lots of people live there.
On the east side of the lake, you have a tall, skinny populated area. But it isn't just one city; it's Bothell, Woodinville, Kirkland, Bellevue, Redmond, Renton, and a few small ones. Collectively these are known as "the Eastside".
Because Lake Washington is so deep, an ordinary bridge is impractical. That is why the three longest floating bridges in the world are on Lake Washington: the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge (I tend to slip and call it the "floating point bridge") is the one with highway 520, and it is the longest single floating bridge in the world. (The other two are used for I-90 a couple of miles to the south of 520.) By the way, I suspect that one of the reasons we have the longest floating bridges is the fact that the Chittenden Locks in Seattle allow for some control over the water level of Lake Washington; if we have torrential rain, engineers can just open the locks and let the waters drain out of the lake system and lower the water level again to the safe zone for the floating bridges.
When the 520 bridge was first built, all the action was in Seattle. Not that many people lived on the Eastside, and not that many Seattle people needed to go to the Eastside. But Microsoft and a bunch of other technical companies are on the Eastside, so now many people actually commute from Seattle to the Eastside over the 520 bridge.
There are rich neighborhoods right on the water, on both sides of the lake. The fabled small city of Medina, where Bill Gates has his famous house, is right by the 520 bridge. The rich folks have been successfully blocking all attempts to upgrade the 520 bridge; as I understand it, their attitude is that they already don't like the car noise, so why would they want more traffic to be able to flow over the bridge? The area has been talking about replacing the 520 bridge for something like 14 years now, and for most of that time the project has been blocked.
But the 520 bridge really needs to be replaced. If you measure the life of the bridge in terms of how many cars have driven over it, the bridge is way, way past its planned lifetime already. A serious wind storm could sink it. A serious earthquake could sink it. And the consequences for traffic would be epic (not in a good way).
Right now, all it takes is a Husky football game at the University of Washington, putting extra traffic on the already overloaded bridge, and the whole area is just about paralyzed. Normally the I-90 bridge is fine, but when the 520 gets bad enough and traffic diverts to the other bridge, both bridges can be parking lots. It will already be bad when the 520 bridge is closed for construction of the new bridge; I seriously hope that they can mostly build the new bridge somewhere and float it into place with minimal down time. If the bridge fails in a wind storm, we will be many months, possibly years without any bridge and the traffic will be dire. In short, any further delay in building the bridge is Not A Good Idea.
Now, the existing bridge is two traffic lanes each way. There is no carpool lane. There is no shoulder. Any time a vehicle stalls, a tow truck gets over there ASAP and pulls it off the bridge, but it still does horrible things to the already horrible traffic. As other posters have noted, the 520 carpool lane disappears right before the bridge, and the westbound neck-down where three lanes go to two lanes is the single most congested piece of road in the whole state.
So, we have a bridge plan finally that is ready to move ahead. It ha
As much as HDMI is great it simply is not as good as component for running an HD signal over a long distance.
HDMI is terrible for running over a long distance. HDMI should have been a serial protocol, with a really high speed bitstream that you could put over a single shielded copper cable (or a single optical fiber). Just as SATA replaced parallel ATA, some sort of serial video standard will someday replace HDMI.
if they have access to facebook why not just call the police?
It's perfectly understandable that you would ask such a question. To find the answer you would have to do something incredibly difficult and unusual, such as RTFA.
But I'll help you out. Here's the relevant part of TFA:
In the first few hours that followed the earthquake, mobile service was completely disrupted. It was almost impossible to place a call, due to the combination of the damages on the cellular networks and the spike in phone calls. However, on some networks, SMS service was still available. People stuck under rubbles started texting to their friends and family (in Haiti and abroad) to tell them they were still alive and needed help. In Haiti, on a population of 8 million, there were about 4 million mobile phone subscribers. Those friends and family, not knowing what to do, started posting these SOS messages on their social networks, mainly on Facebook.
In a disaster, the phone system can be overwhelmed. The bandwidth and resources the phone system needs to make a voice call are huge compared with the bandwidth and resources needed for a simple SMS text message. A 160-character text message, plus its envelope, should be under 2 kilobits for the whole message. A GSM voice connection uses at least 6.5 kilobits per second, every second.
Also, there are a limited number of conversations possible at one time for each cell tower. In terms of how many people can use a tower at a time, SMS messages are a huge win: an SMS message doesn't tie up a chunk of the tower for seconds.
At my job, we had a Red Cross disaster training session, and the person from the Red Cross told us to expect that cell phone voice service is very likely to not be available in a disaster, but text messages are likely to still work. That was the first time I actually got interested in text messages.
I think, very seriously, that emergency services (police, fire department, etc.) should be set up to receive text messages, precisely to handle the mass-disaster scenario.
Also, in the USA, mobile phones are now required to send GPS location data when the user calls an emergency number (911). I'd like to see a similar feature for texts: when you text to 911, the phone attaches GPS location data to the text message.
The first thing you do is get everything under source code control. If it already is, good. You should have a clearly-marked branch that shows where you started hacking on it, so you can easily tell what pre-dates you.
And by the way, I highly recommend the Git version control system. Among its many great features, it lets you use a version control system that is only on one computer, and get things right before you "push" your changes up to the group server. Thus you have the full power of a version control system, and the freedom to use it, without worrying about breaking things for anyone else. Best practice use of Git: on your local machine, make a new "branch", check out the branch, and do your experimenting in that. If you suddenly, urgently need to fix a bug in the main code, you switch away from your branch to the main branch, do what you must, then switch back to your new branch when convenient. If the branch doesn't work out, you can just delete it. If it works out, you can merge it. (By the way, the above is true of any "distributed" version control system, not just Git.)
Several others have told you to start with unit tests. If the code base already has a set, start by studying them. If the code base does not have unit tests, write some.
Presumably you inherited a working system. The unit tests will put a definition on what "working" currently means. When you change the code, if you introduce a bug, you want one or more of your unit tests to detect the bug and let you know, before you share your updated code with anyone else. Unit tests are some work to set up, but they provide huge peace of mind for you once you have a good set.
And, whenever you are asked to fix a bug (whether you caused it or not), you add a unit test that tests for that bug. Over time the unit tests will become more and more valuable.
I also second this advice by npsimons. Try various automated tools that check for memory leaks and such. If they find bugs, fix the bugs (in your private branch) and then make sure that the fixed version passes the unit tests. You will learn the code base as you find and fix the bugs, and you will improve the stability of the code.
If you find any particularly important variables or data structures, you might want to add some assert statements that check those values in the Debug build. In the Release build, the asserts don't even get compiled in, so they are "free", but if you run the debug build, the asserts can find bugs for you. For example, if you have a crucial handle to some resource, and the handle is getting clobbered, put asserts all through the code that assert that the handle hasn't been clobbered yet, then run the debug build and see where the assert fires. This may not save you time if the clobbering bug only happens once, but you never take the asserts out, so the asserts can find a bug for you if you accidentally re-introduce the bug. (Note that this implies you will want to run your Debug build under the unit tests, in addition to your Release build. The asserts can fire and show you where a bug is, but you need the code to run, and if you have good code coverage from your unit tests, that will happen.)
Credit where it's due. MS did not write the original MS Office ODF support. Sun did.
I remember a Microsoft spokesman, in his official capacity, saying that it would be "impossible" to support ODF in Office. Then Sun went and did it. Oh yeah, I'll give Sun the credit for doing it first. (And if anyone can give me a URL to one of the news stories quoting that Microsoft spokesman, please do. I've been trying to find evidence to support my memory...)
What I'm curious about now, is: was microsoft dumb enough to re-write the ODF support when they did cave, or did that at least run with what they had? Re-writing would be my guess, just so they could claim ownership and also introduce bugs..
Look, I'm ready to shoot arrows at Microsoft over the whole OOXML fiasco, but you are being really unreasonable here.
First, Microsoft needs to have clear ownership over their converter, so they can ship it legally with Office. Unless the original plugin was released under a BSD-ish license, Microsoft could not possibly use it at all. And the Sun converter is not under a BSD-ish license. (I don't even think Sun is releasing the source code; it seems to be free-as-in-beer.)
Second, Microsoft Office applications already have a whole framework for import/export converters, and Microsoft would want to use that. I don't believe Microsoft ever published open specs so that people could write free software converters, so I don't think Sun used the Office converter framework.
Finally, I am not quite paranoid enough to think that Microsoft would deliberately introduce errors with their ODF converters. It's not like Norway is going to just take Office, never test it, buy ten million copies, and then say "uh oh, ODF doesn't work". Norway would test Microsoft Office, find that it does not handle ODF well, and say "this software is not qualified for our use. We will just have to adopt OpenOffice.org and not pay anything, instead of buying Microsoft Office." Thus, any attempt by Microsoft to screw up the ODF converters would only keep Microsoft from ever selling Office to ODF users. And Microsoft isn't stupid enough to think this would work.
What I could easily believe is that Microsoft might put only one or two developers on the task, then internal Microsoft politics could lead to the developers being yanked away when the converter was only half-baked. That's stupid, but stupid is more plausible than the deliberate errors scenario.
MS is just as free to implement the OpenDocument format as anyone else; and they have in fact implemented ODF support.[1] So, if ODF is chosen as the standard in Norway, the Norwegian government is still free to buy copies of Microsoft Office, as long as it can do a good job of reading and writing ODF files.
Of course, Microsoft will still view this as some kind of defeat, because they would prefer their own standard be adopted; OOXML will be just as much of a lockin trap as the older binary Microsoft formats. If OOXML is adopted, everyone has to buy Microsoft Office; if ODF is adopted, everyone can choose from among many alternatives, several of which are completely free.
It is obvious why Microsoft would prefer OOXML adoption for government (and everywhere else). It is less obvious why government should adopt OOXML instead of ODF.
0) I hope it was clear that the "space pickup truck" is not a disposable rocket, but some sort of reusable spacecraft. Either a single-stage-to-orbit or perhaps a two-stage-to-orbit (where the first stage is either recoverable or very very cheap). The important thing is to drive down operational costs; with an airplane such as a 747, fuel costs dominate, but with the space shuttle, operational costs completely overshadowed everything else. You want something that can fly to orbit, land, and fly to orbit again with a minimal turnaround time. Anything that needs man-centuries of labor to overhaul it between flights is right out.
1) "Third, you build a "moon shuttle" in orbit, a vehicle that will never land on Earth and never land on the moon, but will safely travel between the fuel." Erm, I meant to say "between the two." Sorry.
Here is my advice: plan a slow-and-steady strategy, rather than a "space race" strategy. Plan for effectiveness over the long haul, rather than short-term results.
That means you will be doing things rather differently than Apollo.
For software, as far as I can tell, nothing exists that will meet your needs. Thus your first step is to figure out what free software has a hope of someday meeting your needs, then figure out how to get developers to work on it until it does meet your needs. So, actually, your very first step is to find an expert in rocket design who can tell you what features you need, what software exists that can do what you need (even if you don't want to use it because it is proprietary). If you are very very lucky, you might find a retired aerospace project manager who will give you advice for free. (I don't think this is far-fetched. Anyone who worked on rockets in the glory days will be old enough to be retired now, and you might find someone who shares your dream and will give advice for free.)
For simulations and engineering computations, you should look at SciPy. As I said above, it probably doesn't meet your needs now, but it has a solid foundation and lots of people working on it.
As far as a strategy for going to the moon, I don't claim to be an expert, but here is my advice.
You really, really do not want to try to re-create the Saturn V rocket. In fact, you don't want any design where you use up one rocket per moon trip. The slow-and-steady plan goes like this: First you get a "space pickup truck", some sort of launch vehicle that can reliably go to Earth orbit with a small payload (say, 1000 KG or so). Second, using many "space pickup" flights, you build a space station, and stock it with lots of oxygen, food, fuel, etc. Third, you build a "moon shuttle" in orbit, a vehicle that will never land on Earth and never land on the moon, but will safely travel between the fuel. Fourth, you build your "moon lander", which will be carried by the moon shuttle. Finally, you fuel up the moon shuttle and lander, and send a mission to the moon.
At that point, you have the infrastructure to visit the moon as often as you find convenient. You ferry up some more fuel, oxygen, and supplies, refuel the moon shuttle and lander, and off you go.
I'll point out that there are plenty of small companies trying to build a "space pickup truck" right now. You could sensibly just plan on hiring one of those, rather than trying to build your own launch vehicle. You won't get this project done tomorrow anyway, so you might as well start designing your space station and moon-specific hardware now, and just assume you can hire the orbital transport by the time you need it.
If someone gets a "space cannon" operational in time for you, so much the better. Use the cannon to send up lots of fuel and oxygen and such as cheaply as possible. In this case, you will want to build a "space tug" vehicle that can scoot around and collect the canisters shot up by the cannon.
The USA sent men to the moon using a cost-is-no-object, win-the-race strategy. You will do much better to incrementally build the infrastructure to go to the moon conveniently.
Slashdot Mirror
If there is a patent trap in Mono (which exists regardless of its license), then that means that MS can then sue all those businesses and governments for patent infringement.
I'm getting sick of this meme.
Tell me, are you a patent attorney? What is your expertise for making claims like this one?
Now I'm not a patent attorney either, but here is my understanding: If Microsoft does assert some kind of submarine patent, the main effect will be to cause GNOME and everybody else to yank out Mono. At that point, we will just have to port the Mono apps to Java or something. That is the absolute worst case. Can you give me an example of any time where some company had a submarine patent, then suddenly asserted it, and successfully extracted a bunch of penalties from businesses and governments?
Furthermore, while I'm still not a patent attorney, I have read Groklaw for a while, and I read some essays there about the "unclean hands" doctrine. If a company has patent rights, and discovers that someone is infringing, that company has a duty to inform the infringers as soon as possible; it is not allowed to just let the patent sit there ticking like a bomb, and then demand extra damages because the infringer was infringing for so long.
So, let's review: Mono is a technology that is very similar to the JVM, which in turn is similar to other virtual systems, going all the way back to the UCSD P-system. The amount of prior art is staggering. Besides that, the only danger is a submarine patent, not a new patent: the .NET stuff has been around for years and years, and you have to file for a patent before you publicly disclose a technology, or you lose your chance.
So, the alleged threat is that there is a patent already granted, that nobody has noticed, on technology that has a ton of prior art; and Microsoft is deviously not asserting the patent, but is going to later. Microsoft won't care about the negative publicity for itself and for .NET, because it stands to gain so much and is certain its patent will survive all challenges. And anyone infringing will somehow be on the hook for penalties.
I for one don't believe any of it. C# is as safe as Java and Mono is as safe as the JVM.
steveha
I'm almost certain that it defaults to "no", you have to click the "yes" button to participate.
That is correct, for both Ubuntu and for Debian (upon which Ubuntu is based).
In fact, in Ubuntu, the checkbox for this is only available if you click on a button that says "Advanced".
steveha
Or, they could be honest and raise the money though an old-fashioned income tax, or sales tax.
Washington state doesn't have a state income tax. As a side-effect of this, every other thing you can imagine is taxed as highly as the state government thinks they can manage. (Except car licensing... that used to be hundreds of dollars per year, but an initiative slashed that to a flat $30 per year. But that was years ago... I just re-licensed a car and paid about $120 so I guess it is ratcheting back up to where it was.)
In Washington, a state income tax is very nearly a "political third rail" issue. You can't get elected governor here without piously promising that an income tax would be your absolute last emergency resort. Our current governor and the one before here both started talking about a state income tax shortly after being elected, though.
This month, our state legislature seriously debated a proposal to enact a state income tax, only on "the rich", and with a sales-tax reduction as a bribe to make the rest of the voters happy. This was not a popular idea; I think most people view this as the camel's nose entering the tent. (Certainly that's how I view it... once we have the income tax, every year the definition of who is "rich" will be revised downward.) That idea is dead for now.
As for sales tax:
The sales tax is already 9.5% in the Seattle area; of that, 6.5% goes to the state. (Numbers from here.) I suspect that nobody quite dares yet to hit the threshold of 10% sales tax or higher. Double digits? That might get some headlines.
But surprise surprise, the state legislature is seriously debating a proposal to add 0.2% to the state sales tax rate, at least temporarily. This would bring sales tax new me to 9.7%.
But I'm sure they'd rather hide the tax burden from the people who are ultimately paying it. Gotta love the government.
They'd certainly rather find creative ways to hike taxes than ever to cut spending. It's a down economy, everyone is hurting, tax revenues have fallen, but they can't possibly cut spending. I wonder how long this can last.
steveha
As I have already commented, I think this is a horrible idea. Windows is not going to change its window buttons, I have to use Windows, and I dread this change. And, if you have to put the buttons on the left, the most-commonly-used button (the Close button) should be in the left corner, so that in the common case where I have a maximized window, it's easier to hit.
I went ahead and read through Mark Shuttleworth's comments about the bug. In summary: they want to try some new cool stuff, they want to shake things up and not be bound by the past, they have some ideas (not described) for ways to use the right-hand side of the menu bar. (He was even talking about moving the scroll bar away from the right side of the window, on the grounds that few people use it, and scroll wheels/touchscreen interfaces are becoming the big new thing. This doesn't give me the warm fuzzies either.) They are shipping the beta like this to see what actual reactions are to this idea.
I went ahead and listened to the podcast also (the relevant bit starts around 0:39 into the podcast). Ivanka Majic said many things, but IMHO did not adequately explain why they think this is a good idea. Some vague comments about how they are actually testing things. She said many commendable things, such as talking about how new users can find it really hard to even understand just what Ubuntu is. And she said something that sounded like her department was behind the "papercuts" project, of which I firmly approve. But if you are trying to understand what the heck is going on with those crazy buttons, you can skip the podcast.
So, if (like me) you dread these new buttons, the best thing you could possibly do is to actually get a copy of the Ubuntu beta and try it out; then post, not just opinions, but informed opinions supported by personal experience. "I tried to click on the Edit menu and closed my window" (if that actually happens to you) should be much more persuasive than "I looked at your screen shot and I can already tell I hate it".
By the way, check this out: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1430585
So, I'm planning to download the Ubuntu Beta ISO image, and install it (possibly in VirtualBox), and try the thing out. Then I will add my voice to those commenting on the new buttons.
steveha
There are lots of USB devices out there with a line-in jack.
Here's one I like a lot. Unfortunately, Turtle Beach has discontinued this product; fortunately, there are some still out there, so buy one now before it's too late.
http://www.turtlebeach.com/products/audio-advantage-srm/home.aspx
P.S. This is discontinued... does anyone know where I can find anything remotely similar that is not discontinued?
steveha
Even if we trust those numbers, even if those numbers are perfectly accurate, they don't tell the whole story.
How many doctors have simply stopped providing care because they couldn't afford (or couldn't get) the insurance anymore? How much more competition would we see if the malpractice situation wasn't so screwed up?
I remember reading an essay by a doctor who said he had had to stop delivering babies. He liked delivering babies, he viewed it as one of the better parts of his job, but he just couldn't afford the malpractice insurance anymore.
I personally hope that smart people will want to become doctors. The way things are going, the smartest people are going to avoid becoming doctors, and become lawyers or investment bankers or something.
steveha
What is in it to stop the premiums going up as the money from subsidies comes in? In other words, will the basic laws of supply and demand in a free market not still apply? This bill does not seem to limit the dynamics of the free market.
To understand the answers, you need to understand the true purpose of the bill.
The Democrats want to completely socialize health care: they call it "single payer", i.e. the US Government is the only entity to pay for health care. The Democrats knew they couldn't get there immediately, but rather needed to pretend to do something else.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/print/49788
This bill is over 2700 pages long, and I haven't read it. So, I'm relying on various news sources for this analysis. But as I understand it, here is how the bill works:
Each American is required to buy health insurance. Anyone who cannot afford it can apply to the government for help. But those who don't buy insurance, can simply pay a "fine" to the government. This fine will cost less than the insurance would have cost.
This bill also requires insurance companies to accept anyone, and pay for their care, regardless of pre-existing conditions.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/21/health.care.faqs/index.html
So, in short: I could cancel all my insurance, and pay a fine to the government, and no insurance company gets any of that money. Then one day I could discover that I had cancer, buy insurance, and that insurance company would be compelled to accept me as a patient and pay for my cancer treatment. Or, one day I could get in a car crash, then buy the insurance and get treated.
Because the above would completely destroy the actuarial basis of insurance, all the companies currently providing health insurance would be forced by cold hard economic reality to stop selling insurance. If they didn't stop on their own, they would go out of business, and close down.
The end game is that the US government would announce that due to the entirely unexpected and unforeseeable wave of insurance companies closing down, the US government would start offering insurance. That, or else it would buy the remaining insurance companies the way the government bought failing car manufacturers.
And there you go: single-payer. The US government would provide all "insurance" (really, it wouldn't look anything like insurance at that point, but the name would be kept for sentimental reasons).
Also, the bill as written saves a tiny bit of money: over ten years, it saves (IIRC) about 160 billion dollars. However, the bill as written includes drastic cuts to Medicare to help pay for it; and the bill does not include the "Doc Fix", so it assumes that bad cuts to doctor pay will be allowed to stand. Also, this bill includes the provision that the broad increases in taxes go into effect immediately, but the benefits don't start to get paid out for four years. I do not expect the cuts to Medicare to be allowed to stand; I expect to see another bill to increase taxes in order to put back everything that was cut. In short, I am expecting the actual costs of this bill to be far in excess of what was promised.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/03/04/health-cost-projections-to-2019-the-doc-fix-trick-again/
I view this bill as a complete disaster. Either everything I have read about it is wrong, or else all the cheerful and happy postings I have read here on Slashdot are uninformed.
steveha
I'm interested in learning the essentials of statistics. What would be a good book to start me out?
I got The Manga Guide to Statistics and it did introduce me to the very basics. However, there are many places where it just gives you an equation, without deriving it or even explaining it. After reading this book, I now know how to calculate standard deviation, but I'm still a bit vague on how people actually use it. I would like to see some examples of how people use statistics in (for example) science experiments.
My ideal book would explain the basics, with examples, and show how the math works. Ideally it wouldn't be a thousand pages long, either, but that's a secondary consideration.
Recommendations, please?
P.S. Those of you who know about statistics: how good are the Wikipedia pages on statistics?
steveha
I do think we disagree.
So be it.
I understand that may you think things have changed at Apple, but your previous post used older examples as supporting evidence, which I posited were unrelated or irrelevant.
The major change, I submit, is that now Steve Jobs gets his way more often. My "older" examples were intended to demonstrate that Steve Jobs was never a fan of openness, even back in the old old days.
[Steve Jobs] is doing everything in his power to avoid or prevent the same issues he encountered during his first tenure at Apple
Perhaps this is true, but this is not by itself adequate explanation of why Apple rules the iPhone and the iPad with an iron fist.
There are other smart phones out there, and they let you install whatever software you want. I've heard various wild claims that Apple needs to approve each and every app because they want to make sure the FCC doesn't get annoyed, but no other smart phone seems to have a problem with being open.
I don't see any anti-competitive behaviour:
Irrelevant.
The market is full of portable music players and smart-phones, and many online stores and attractions have come and gone in the past.
Even Google has their own phone and store now; I don't see Apple trying to close those down.
Irrelevant.
Do you forget that mere two years ago, when dinosaurs walked the Earth, Apple was laughed at by the rest of the industry because they were going to attempt to enter the smart-phone market, which was wholly owned by the Big Players? And now these same critics claim Apple is a bully attempting to squash everybody else... interesting.
Irrelevant.
My thesis has been that Steve Jobs likes to lock down the products produced under his watch. Now the iPhone and iPad are so locked down that one cannot even install software on them without permission from Apple. You can bring up other issues all you may like, but I'm not really interested in a long discussion about them.
You and I won't solve anything by debating here anyway. You seem to be an Apple fan; okay, then, I hope you enjoy your Apple products. I will never spend my own money on an iPhone or iPad, but you may buy whatever you choose, and it's not my business to try to tell you otherwise.
steveha
I don't think we disagree. The original poster commented that Apple is schizophrenic, with the Apple II series coming with schematics and program listings and such, but other Apple products locked down hard. My thesis was simply that Steve Jobs likes to lock things down hard, and the more he is in control, the more Apple does this (and thus the less schizophrenic Apple gets).
For the Lisa and the Mac I think one can make the case that Steve Jobs was simply trying to make the "best" possible product, with his own vision of what "best" means.
For the iPhone and iPad I am no longer willing to cut him that slack; Apple is ruling those platforms with an iron fist. Giving users the best possible experience might be one reason why they are doing this, but stifling competition Apple does not want cannot be a coincidence.
steveha
To the extent that Steve Jobs can get his way, Apple will sell locked-down products that they can control. Steve Wozniak was in favor of openness, Steve Jobs not so much.
The Apple II series was open, with card slots, and anyone could make cards for it. Steve Jobs was in charge of first the Lisa and then the Mac; these were released with no card slots at all. I don't have a citation, but I have heard that Steve Jobs fiercely resisted putting a hard disk into the Mac initially, because they were able to sell the Mac initially without a cooling fan, but adding a hard disk would require also adding a fan, and fan noise offended his sense of aesthetics.
When Apple killed off the Newton, some Newton fans got together and made a serious bid to buy out the Newton technology so they could keep the platform going. Steve Jobs preferred to kill Newton rather than let someone else have control of it.
There are other examples, but enough. Basically, Steve Jobs wants to control your whole experience. Because Steve Jobs has, overall, very good taste in user experience issues, this does have its good points. Man, the iPhone is really slick!
But I won't buy in to the Apple "walled gardens" of the iPod and the iPad. If I spend my own money on a smart phone, I will get an Android phone; and I'm eagerly waiting for the $300 Taiwanese tablet computers that will actually let me install Ubuntu, plug in USB devices, and slot in memory cards.
steveha
Which sort of proves that most of the assumptions by those in love with Capitalism are at best incredibly dishonest. If people were guaranteed a relative level of stability (guaranteed housing, health care, food, and education) while being allowed to concentrate on what they love, you'd see humanity advancing by leaps and bounds.
I find your enthusiasm charming, but I consider it rather naive.
Who will provide the housing? If I don't like the housing, do I have the "right" to turn my nose up at it and demand better? Who will decide whether I deserve better housing?
Who will provide the health care? Everyone wants an infinite amount of health care; how do you ration it? If you pay the doctors well, where will you get the money for it? If you don't pay the doctors well, how do you get good ones?
Who will provide the food? Sometimes I like a fancy steak dinner; how often will I get one, and who decides?
But never mind these questions; let's get down to the important ones. Where on Earth, and when, has this been tried and shown to work?
The USSR was structured something like what you are describing. In theory, Communism gave to each as they needed. In reality, the economy was so bad that the USSR had a negative GDP: they were subtracting value. They took valuable iron ore and turned it into lousy Soviet steel. Then they took the lousy Soviet steel and turned it into lousy Soviet automobiles. The people were hungry, the health care was abysmal, and pollution was horrible.
The Pligrims tried something like what you described when they first arrived in America. It didn't work out.
In this country, in Chicago, there were massive "projects" built to provide housing for the poor. It didn't work out.
It turns out that people work both harder and smarter when they benefit from their work. And top-down-planning economies cannot possibly keep up with a a chaotic free market (and the creative destruction associated with it).
It is often argued that pure capitalism is heartless and cruel. But pure communism and socialism have even worse horrible disadvantages. If I'm going to live under pure anything, I'm going to choose the capitalism.
So, I'm happy that you have this faith in the innate goodness of humankind. But sorry dude, I don't think it's going to work.
steveha
I assume we should reverse those first numbers: we spend 1,000 watt-hours to gain 870 watt-hours later. Cool to see that it beats pumped hydro.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/29/business/technology-using-compressed-air-to-store-up-electricity.html
And it's cheaper than pumped hydro!
Interesting. Of course, if you use this with a wind farm, you don't get this benefit; the plant discussed here is a coal plant, with plenty of waste heat.
The above article is from 1991. Despite all these advantages, the idea never took off before now. It saved money, but not a huge amount. But since the wind blows when it blows, not when you want it to blow, I can see this being a useful thing for a wind farm.
steveha
The first question I thought of was, "Why not just use pumped hydro power?" Then, oddly enough, I read TFA and found the answer in it:
And, as noted in the summary, compressed air energy storage (CAES) been tried and it works:
steveha
Hot is also a bad word for picante since it can also refer to temperature, and when talking about food, we need to differentiate somehow.
According to the Jargon File, the hacker slang has a term that means the same thing you called picante. The term is: zapped
I don't know how common it is, but I have used it for years. It's a useful distinction to make and deserves a word.
steveha
Ubuntu has been available for half a dozen years. In all that time, the window buttons have not moved. That is good.
Moving the buttons should only be done if there is a really huge benefit that can only be derived from the change. In this case there is no benefit. It's not easier for Mac users; the buttons are in the wrong order. It's not easier for Windows users; the current button order and placement is exactly the same as Windows. It"s not more like the button order from nature, because there is no such thing. It's not a winner in usability tests; there have been none.
I use Ubuntu by choice and Windows often by necessity. Please, Ubuntu, don't make it harder to switch between the two.
steveha
why would you have two distinct HTML renderers?
But the problem isn't in HTML. The problem is this: a web site can pass a WinHelp (.HLP) file to Internet Explorer, and Internet Explorer will trust it. WinHelp is a binary format, and somebody found a buffer overrun attack or something similar that allows for arbitrary code execution.
WinHelp was state-of-the-art in Windows 3.0, but its day is long past. It's a legacy format. The reason this attack doesn't work in Windows Vista or Windows 7 is that Microsoft had finally stopped supporting it.
This issue is roughly similar to having a JPEG decoder that is vulnerable to badly-formed JPEG images that contain exploit code. However, image formats do kind of need to be binary; given that we have both HTML and XML, there is really no need for a binary help file format anymore.
steveha
The summary is unbelievably slanted; whoever tagged this story "troll" was correct. Here is the complete situation; judge for yourself.
Lake Washington is a tall, skinny lake that's rather deep in the middle. It takes a while to drive around it; if you bicycle around the circumference of the lake, it's about 50 miles total.
On the west side of the lake, you have a tall, skinny city: Seattle. The biggest city in the state, lots of people live there.
On the east side of the lake, you have a tall, skinny populated area. But it isn't just one city; it's Bothell, Woodinville, Kirkland, Bellevue, Redmond, Renton, and a few small ones. Collectively these are known as "the Eastside".
Because Lake Washington is so deep, an ordinary bridge is impractical. That is why the three longest floating bridges in the world are on Lake Washington: the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge (I tend to slip and call it the "floating point bridge") is the one with highway 520, and it is the longest single floating bridge in the world. (The other two are used for I-90 a couple of miles to the south of 520.) By the way, I suspect that one of the reasons we have the longest floating bridges is the fact that the Chittenden Locks in Seattle allow for some control over the water level of Lake Washington; if we have torrential rain, engineers can just open the locks and let the waters drain out of the lake system and lower the water level again to the safe zone for the floating bridges.
When the 520 bridge was first built, all the action was in Seattle. Not that many people lived on the Eastside, and not that many Seattle people needed to go to the Eastside. But Microsoft and a bunch of other technical companies are on the Eastside, so now many people actually commute from Seattle to the Eastside over the 520 bridge.
There are rich neighborhoods right on the water, on both sides of the lake. The fabled small city of Medina, where Bill Gates has his famous house, is right by the 520 bridge. The rich folks have been successfully blocking all attempts to upgrade the 520 bridge; as I understand it, their attitude is that they already don't like the car noise, so why would they want more traffic to be able to flow over the bridge? The area has been talking about replacing the 520 bridge for something like 14 years now, and for most of that time the project has been blocked.
But the 520 bridge really needs to be replaced. If you measure the life of the bridge in terms of how many cars have driven over it, the bridge is way, way past its planned lifetime already. A serious wind storm could sink it. A serious earthquake could sink it. And the consequences for traffic would be epic (not in a good way).
Right now, all it takes is a Husky football game at the University of Washington, putting extra traffic on the already overloaded bridge, and the whole area is just about paralyzed. Normally the I-90 bridge is fine, but when the 520 gets bad enough and traffic diverts to the other bridge, both bridges can be parking lots. It will already be bad when the 520 bridge is closed for construction of the new bridge; I seriously hope that they can mostly build the new bridge somewhere and float it into place with minimal down time. If the bridge fails in a wind storm, we will be many months, possibly years without any bridge and the traffic will be dire. In short, any further delay in building the bridge is Not A Good Idea.
Now, the existing bridge is two traffic lanes each way. There is no carpool lane. There is no shoulder. Any time a vehicle stalls, a tow truck gets over there ASAP and pulls it off the bridge, but it still does horrible things to the already horrible traffic. As other posters have noted, the 520 carpool lane disappears right before the bridge, and the westbound neck-down where three lanes go to two lanes is the single most congested piece of road in the whole state.
So, we have a bridge plan finally that is ready to move ahead. It ha
As much as HDMI is great it simply is not as good as component for running an HD signal over a long distance.
HDMI is terrible for running over a long distance. HDMI should have been a serial protocol, with a really high speed bitstream that you could put over a single shielded copper cable (or a single optical fiber). Just as SATA replaced parallel ATA, some sort of serial video standard will someday replace HDMI.
steveha
if they have access to facebook why not just call the police?
It's perfectly understandable that you would ask such a question. To find the answer you would have to do something incredibly difficult and unusual, such as RTFA.
But I'll help you out. Here's the relevant part of TFA:
In a disaster, the phone system can be overwhelmed. The bandwidth and resources the phone system needs to make a voice call are huge compared with the bandwidth and resources needed for a simple SMS text message. A 160-character text message, plus its envelope, should be under 2 kilobits for the whole message. A GSM voice connection uses at least 6.5 kilobits per second, every second.
Also, there are a limited number of conversations possible at one time for each cell tower. In terms of how many people can use a tower at a time, SMS messages are a huge win: an SMS message doesn't tie up a chunk of the tower for seconds.
At my job, we had a Red Cross disaster training session, and the person from the Red Cross told us to expect that cell phone voice service is very likely to not be available in a disaster, but text messages are likely to still work. That was the first time I actually got interested in text messages.
I think, very seriously, that emergency services (police, fire department, etc.) should be set up to receive text messages, precisely to handle the mass-disaster scenario.
Also, in the USA, mobile phones are now required to send GPS location data when the user calls an emergency number (911). I'd like to see a similar feature for texts: when you text to 911, the phone attaches GPS location data to the text message.
steveha
The first thing you do is get everything under source code control. If it already is, good. You should have a clearly-marked branch that shows where you started hacking on it, so you can easily tell what pre-dates you.
And by the way, I highly recommend the Git version control system. Among its many great features, it lets you use a version control system that is only on one computer, and get things right before you "push" your changes up to the group server. Thus you have the full power of a version control system, and the freedom to use it, without worrying about breaking things for anyone else. Best practice use of Git: on your local machine, make a new "branch", check out the branch, and do your experimenting in that. If you suddenly, urgently need to fix a bug in the main code, you switch away from your branch to the main branch, do what you must, then switch back to your new branch when convenient. If the branch doesn't work out, you can just delete it. If it works out, you can merge it. (By the way, the above is true of any "distributed" version control system, not just Git.)
Several others have told you to start with unit tests. If the code base already has a set, start by studying them. If the code base does not have unit tests, write some.
Presumably you inherited a working system. The unit tests will put a definition on what "working" currently means. When you change the code, if you introduce a bug, you want one or more of your unit tests to detect the bug and let you know, before you share your updated code with anyone else. Unit tests are some work to set up, but they provide huge peace of mind for you once you have a good set.
And, whenever you are asked to fix a bug (whether you caused it or not), you add a unit test that tests for that bug. Over time the unit tests will become more and more valuable.
I also second this advice by npsimons. Try various automated tools that check for memory leaks and such. If they find bugs, fix the bugs (in your private branch) and then make sure that the fixed version passes the unit tests. You will learn the code base as you find and fix the bugs, and you will improve the stability of the code.
If you find any particularly important variables or data structures, you might want to add some assert statements that check those values in the Debug build. In the Release build, the asserts don't even get compiled in, so they are "free", but if you run the debug build, the asserts can find bugs for you. For example, if you have a crucial handle to some resource, and the handle is getting clobbered, put asserts all through the code that assert that the handle hasn't been clobbered yet, then run the debug build and see where the assert fires. This may not save you time if the clobbering bug only happens once, but you never take the asserts out, so the asserts can find a bug for you if you accidentally re-introduce the bug. (Note that this implies you will want to run your Debug build under the unit tests, in addition to your Release build. The asserts can fire and show you where a bug is, but you need the code to run, and if you have good code coverage from your unit tests, that will happen.)
Good luck.
steveha
Credit where it's due. MS did not write the original MS Office ODF support. Sun did.
I remember a Microsoft spokesman, in his official capacity, saying that it would be "impossible" to support ODF in Office. Then Sun went and did it. Oh yeah, I'll give Sun the credit for doing it first. (And if anyone can give me a URL to one of the news stories quoting that Microsoft spokesman, please do. I've been trying to find evidence to support my memory...)
What I'm curious about now, is: was microsoft dumb enough to re-write the ODF support when they did cave, or did that at least run with what they had? Re-writing would be my guess, just so they could claim ownership and also introduce bugs..
Look, I'm ready to shoot arrows at Microsoft over the whole OOXML fiasco, but you are being really unreasonable here.
First, Microsoft needs to have clear ownership over their converter, so they can ship it legally with Office. Unless the original plugin was released under a BSD-ish license, Microsoft could not possibly use it at all. And the Sun converter is not under a BSD-ish license. (I don't even think Sun is releasing the source code; it seems to be free-as-in-beer.)
Second, Microsoft Office applications already have a whole framework for import/export converters, and Microsoft would want to use that. I don't believe Microsoft ever published open specs so that people could write free software converters, so I don't think Sun used the Office converter framework.
Finally, I am not quite paranoid enough to think that Microsoft would deliberately introduce errors with their ODF converters. It's not like Norway is going to just take Office, never test it, buy ten million copies, and then say "uh oh, ODF doesn't work". Norway would test Microsoft Office, find that it does not handle ODF well, and say "this software is not qualified for our use. We will just have to adopt OpenOffice.org and not pay anything, instead of buying Microsoft Office." Thus, any attempt by Microsoft to screw up the ODF converters would only keep Microsoft from ever selling Office to ODF users. And Microsoft isn't stupid enough to think this would work.
What I could easily believe is that Microsoft might put only one or two developers on the task, then internal Microsoft politics could lead to the developers being yanked away when the converter was only half-baked. That's stupid, but stupid is more plausible than the deliberate errors scenario.
steveha
MS is just as free to implement the OpenDocument format as anyone else; and they have in fact implemented ODF support.[1] So, if ODF is chosen as the standard in Norway, the Norwegian government is still free to buy copies of Microsoft Office, as long as it can do a good job of reading and writing ODF files.
Of course, Microsoft will still view this as some kind of defeat, because they would prefer their own standard be adopted; OOXML will be just as much of a lockin trap as the older binary Microsoft formats. If OOXML is adopted, everyone has to buy Microsoft Office; if ODF is adopted, everyone can choose from among many alternatives, several of which are completely free.
It is obvious why Microsoft would prefer OOXML adoption for government (and everywhere else). It is less obvious why government should adopt OOXML instead of ODF.
[1] Microsoft resisted the inclusion of ODF import/export filters for some time, but finally decided to include them:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050930181153972
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_software
steveha
Two minor points:
0) I hope it was clear that the "space pickup truck" is not a disposable rocket, but some sort of reusable spacecraft. Either a single-stage-to-orbit or perhaps a two-stage-to-orbit (where the first stage is either recoverable or very very cheap). The important thing is to drive down operational costs; with an airplane such as a 747, fuel costs dominate, but with the space shuttle, operational costs completely overshadowed everything else. You want something that can fly to orbit, land, and fly to orbit again with a minimal turnaround time. Anything that needs man-centuries of labor to overhaul it between flights is right out.
1) "Third, you build a "moon shuttle" in orbit, a vehicle that will never land on Earth and never land on the moon, but will safely travel between the fuel." Erm, I meant to say "between the two." Sorry.
steveha
Here is my advice: plan a slow-and-steady strategy, rather than a "space race" strategy. Plan for effectiveness over the long haul, rather than short-term results.
That means you will be doing things rather differently than Apollo.
For software, as far as I can tell, nothing exists that will meet your needs. Thus your first step is to figure out what free software has a hope of someday meeting your needs, then figure out how to get developers to work on it until it does meet your needs. So, actually, your very first step is to find an expert in rocket design who can tell you what features you need, what software exists that can do what you need (even if you don't want to use it because it is proprietary). If you are very very lucky, you might find a retired aerospace project manager who will give you advice for free. (I don't think this is far-fetched. Anyone who worked on rockets in the glory days will be old enough to be retired now, and you might find someone who shares your dream and will give advice for free.)
For simulations and engineering computations, you should look at SciPy. As I said above, it probably doesn't meet your needs now, but it has a solid foundation and lots of people working on it.
As far as a strategy for going to the moon, I don't claim to be an expert, but here is my advice.
You really, really do not want to try to re-create the Saturn V rocket. In fact, you don't want any design where you use up one rocket per moon trip. The slow-and-steady plan goes like this: First you get a "space pickup truck", some sort of launch vehicle that can reliably go to Earth orbit with a small payload (say, 1000 KG or so). Second, using many "space pickup" flights, you build a space station, and stock it with lots of oxygen, food, fuel, etc. Third, you build a "moon shuttle" in orbit, a vehicle that will never land on Earth and never land on the moon, but will safely travel between the fuel. Fourth, you build your "moon lander", which will be carried by the moon shuttle. Finally, you fuel up the moon shuttle and lander, and send a mission to the moon.
At that point, you have the infrastructure to visit the moon as often as you find convenient. You ferry up some more fuel, oxygen, and supplies, refuel the moon shuttle and lander, and off you go.
I'll point out that there are plenty of small companies trying to build a "space pickup truck" right now. You could sensibly just plan on hiring one of those, rather than trying to build your own launch vehicle. You won't get this project done tomorrow anyway, so you might as well start designing your space station and moon-specific hardware now, and just assume you can hire the orbital transport by the time you need it.
If someone gets a "space cannon" operational in time for you, so much the better. Use the cannon to send up lots of fuel and oxygen and such as cheaply as possible. In this case, you will want to build a "space tug" vehicle that can scoot around and collect the canisters shot up by the cannon.
The USA sent men to the moon using a cost-is-no-object, win-the-race strategy. You will do much better to incrementally build the infrastructure to go to the moon conveniently.
Good luck with your grand dream.
steveha