[...]this article has no mention of Poincare space
Uhm, it's mentioned 20 times, including a mention right in the abstract. Download the TeX source and look at lines 76, 144, 147, 158, 164, 175, 176, 180, 197, 215, 223, 226, 340, 342, 345, 386, 390, 399, 400, and 405.
Second i guess people are looking at the overal consumer experience. The others just can't match the ease of use and the itunes music store
I'm pretty sure the 20 GB and 40 GB iPod match the 10 GB iPod for ease of use and having the iTunes music store.:-)
The 10 GB iPod is a horrible deal among the iPods. That's why I was surprised to see it on top. I would have expected the 20 GB to be on top...it is still not as good a deal as the 40 GB, but that is where I would have expected the balance between absolute cost and cost effectiveness to end up for most people.
Interesting that the 10 GB iPod is number 1, since that is the worst deal of any of the iPods, if you measure by price/GB. I'm looking for a new player, and here are the price/GB for the ones I've looked at, and where I saw it:
Also, Columbia wasn't carring the MMU, so how are they getting over there in the first place?
It didn't have an MMU, but it had suits for two crew to do tethered EVA, and they were trained in using them (one of the emergencies every flight is prepared for is a problem closing the bay doors requiring an EVA to get them closed).
The resupply scenario would be to put the supply package in a nearby orbit, then move the shuttle there, and go out tethered and get it. This kind of thing HAS been done--there was a satellite once they were supposed to get with the arm, but it was spinning too fast, so they went out and grabbed it by hand.
The main problem with resupply is that there isn't any existing NASA cargo canister made for Atlas or Delta rockets, so the big uncertainty would be how fast something could be made.
If they had known there was a problem, they probably could have held out for Atlantis, if it could have been determined that Atlantis was safe. NASA says Atlantis could have been launched in two weeks in an emergency.
What you are overlooking is that if they knew how bad the damage was, even the riskiest resupply scenario is safer than reentry.
Most of the possible failures you list are rather unlikely.
Blows up on launch. The rockets used for unmanned payloads are much more reliable then shuttles.
Fails to make matching orbit due to errors in hastily written flight control software. This would be no different than any routine military satellite launch. How often do they fail to make the desired orbit?
Collides with shuttle do to human error or bad software. Possible. Unless it is one hell of an error, though, it would be a collision of two things in very similar orbits.
Hasty packing leads to the omission of critical consumable. So you send another.
As far as having an unmanned vehicle mate with the shuttle, you wouldn't do that. You'd put the supply package in a nearby orbit, and then go get it. You don't dock it with the shuttle.
Most open source contributors are programmers (obviously). Some are students, and some are hobbiest programmers who earn their living some way other than programming, but a lot are programmers earning their living at companies that don't contribute to open source.
At least some fraction of the pay these programmers earn at those companies should be counted when figuring the corporate effect on open source.
Open source feeds the non-contributing companies, but those non-contributing companies enable more people to work as programmers, increasing the pool of people who are able to work on open source as individuals.
Plenty of vehicles? As in the kind that can re-enter and protect passengers?
Who said anything about re-entering and protecting passengers? I said plenty of vehicles that could have been adapted to resupply Columbia to keep it up. The military has plenty of rockets that can reach that orbit, for example, as does the non-military side of the US government, plus several other countries.
The goal wouldn't be to use one of those to bring the crew back, but rather to supply them to keep them up long enough to figure out what caused the problem, fix it on the other shuttles, and send another shuttle, either to bring them back, or to make repairs.
Since they had no way of repairing anyway, not enough reserves to get to ISS and no "life boat," what difference does it make?
There are plenty of vehicles besides shuttles that could reach the orbit Columbia was in. If they had known there was a problem, they could probably have used those to supply Columbia to allow it to stay up until some way for repair or rescue could be devised.
I wonder if heating up a tank with liquid oxygen is a bright idea
If keeping it from going below a certain temperature by insultating it is OK, then heating it to that temperature would be OK. Why would you think otherwise?
However, that fact alone does not make it a good bet, because the variance overwhelms the positive expectation
That reminds me of a question. Might make an interesting Slashdot poll. Suppose you've won a free drawing. You have your choice of the following prizes, each of which has an expected value of $1. Which do you take?
$1
A random chance at $2, with a probability of 1/2 of winning
A random chance at $4, with a probabilty of 1/4 of winning
A random chance of $8, with a probability of 1/8 of winning
...
A random chance of $4294967296, with a probabilty of 1/4294967296 of winning.
Hmm, must some new law of statistics I'm not familiar with
Uhm...you aren't familiar with the formula
Expected payoff = probability of winning * prize if you win
?
You should have got this in the first week of your first statistics course.:-)
Or maybe you aren't familiar with how lottery prizes work? If no one wins, the prize gets added to the next lottery.
The probability of a given ticket winning is the same each week, but the prize goes up. However, more people tend to play as the prize goes up, so the chances of sharing the prize go up, but the net effect is the "prize if you win" term goes up each week.
If a lottery goes a few weeks without a winner, this can push the expected payoff higher than the price of a ticket.
The lottery is occasionally in your favor, when it has gone several weeks without a winner, so the prize is very large. (Yes, that does attract more players, but not enough more to compensate for the larger prize).
The Nigerian scam is never in your favor.:-)
There is an interesting case included in income tax caselaw books, where a consortium of Australian investors tried to buy one of each possible combination for such a lottery. Buying tickets turned out to take longer than they thought, so they only got about half what they wanted, but still won most of the prizes, including all the big ones, and so made a nice profit. The case is in the books because there was some question over how to tax this.
Tax law cases are often a lot more interesting than other cases, because people put a lot more thought into avoiding taxes than they do to most other things. People who would only devote a few minutes to planning a murder will spend weeks trying to figure out how to deduct the cost of the bullets.:-) (This also makes it hard. I've got a B.S. degree in math from Caltech, and never in my life have numbers so confused as they did when we studied partnership taxation in law school)
Modern science has not found the upper limit that the eye can distinguish
And you are just talking about the human eye. What about animal eyes? No, I'm not some PETA nut...it just occurs to me that many people have pets that they are quite fond of and would not want to do things to cause discomfort for those pets.
So, I wonder what pets think of our modern video and audio systems? Are those DVDs that to us have spectacular pictures and CD-quality surround sound appear to dogs as horrible flickering lightshows accompanied by intolerably distorted sound full of digital artifacts?
In the same section about choices where he lists GNOME as the choice over KDE, he also lists Python over Perl.
If this means that all UserLinux-specific scripts ini the distribution will be written in Python, that's fine. If it means that Perl won't even be in the distribution, he's nuts.
There are certain things that pretty much everyone assumes are available on Linux systems, and Perl is one of them.
The business world already was offered Unix systems with one choice for everything (that's how most commercial Unix systems worked), and Linux is kicking their asses, and one of the reasons is that Linux includes all these alternatives.
Picking one GUI for users is one thing, but for things that are used by programs rather than directly by users, a good Linux-for-business distribution should have them all.
Time to change the name to IrrelevantLinux. BlueCurve indeed makes KDE and GNOME look a lot like, but good user interface is about a lot more than just looking pretty. More people find KDE to be better.
A distro without KDE is not going to get very far.
It will be pretty simple to outlaw this kind of thing. They'll just change the law so that if you knowingly participate in something like this, and your system delivers illegal material, then you are liable for that, unless you've got logs that show where your system got the material.
It doesn't matter how much you encrypt, there is always a final link where someone gets the illegal material from someone in the system whose IP address they have. Make that person liable, and the system will fall apart.
Microsoft could actually clone the Linux development model, if they wished.
They've got enough programmers that they could simple go "open source" within the company, and that would be a big enough community to get all the benefits cited by ESR in his Cathedral paper.
A few other big companies could also do this if they wished.
Long term, I think, what Linus himself will be remembered for won't be the Linux kernel itself, but for how he managed the project. Hell, I personally know half a dozen people that could have done everything Linus did on the technical side of things, but I doubt any of them would have been the project manager he turned out to be.
And a person's "fair share" is defined by speed of the connection they have
No it isn't. It's defined by the amount of data. Let's try an analogy. Suppose you have a hookup to a shared water tower. Your fair share of the water is a certain number of liters. If you have a bigger pipe connected to the water system, you can go through your share faster.
Home broadband is like having a big water pipe. It doesn't mean it is connected to a bigger water tower.
They wouldn't have to use the fine print if they didn't mislead consumers into purchasing the service in the first place
Consumers aren't mislead, since consumers know that when you are buying "unlimited" access to a shared resource, it means you get your fair share, not that the amount of the resource is large enough that everyone can have as much as they want, all the time.
This is no different than the myriad other "unlimited" access things consumers are familiar with.
According to this NZ news article it appears local music is being boosted by piracy
That's one of the most idiotic things ever said on Slashdot. Nowhere in the article does it say that, or even say anything that could remotely be interepreted as implying that.
The article does say that broadcast and performance are up, which would naturally lead to a boost in both sales and piracy, so the conclusion non-idiots would come to is that piracy is up because popularity is up, which is the same reason sales are up, rather than simply concluding that because piracy is mentioned in the same article as sales being up that piracy must somehow be causing the sales increase.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, it's mentioned 20 times, including a mention right in the abstract. Download the TeX source and look at lines 76, 144, 147, 158, 164, 175, 176, 180, 197, 215, 223, 226, 340, 342, 345, 386, 390, 399, 400, and 405.
I'm pretty sure the 20 GB and 40 GB iPod match the 10 GB iPod for ease of use and having the iTunes music store. :-)
The 10 GB iPod is a horrible deal among the iPods. That's why I was surprised to see it on top. I would have expected the 20 GB to be on top...it is still not as good a deal as the 40 GB, but that is where I would have expected the balance between absolute cost and cost effectiveness to end up for most people.
It didn't have an MMU, but it had suits for two crew to do tethered EVA, and they were trained in using them (one of the emergencies every flight is prepared for is a problem closing the bay doors requiring an EVA to get them closed).
The resupply scenario would be to put the supply package in a nearby orbit, then move the shuttle there, and go out tethered and get it. This kind of thing HAS been done--there was a satellite once they were supposed to get with the arm, but it was spinning too fast, so they went out and grabbed it by hand.
The main problem with resupply is that there isn't any existing NASA cargo canister made for Atlas or Delta rockets, so the big uncertainty would be how fast something could be made.
If they had known there was a problem, they probably could have held out for Atlantis, if it could have been determined that Atlantis was safe. NASA says Atlantis could have been launched in two weeks in an emergency.
What you are overlooking is that if they knew how bad the damage was, even the riskiest resupply scenario is safer than reentry.
Blows up on launch. The rockets used for unmanned payloads are much more reliable then shuttles.
Fails to make matching orbit due to errors in hastily written flight control software. This would be no different than any routine military satellite launch. How often do they fail to make the desired orbit?
Collides with shuttle do to human error or bad software. Possible. Unless it is one hell of an error, though, it would be a collision of two things in very similar orbits.
Hasty packing leads to the omission of critical consumable. So you send another.
As far as having an unmanned vehicle mate with the shuttle, you wouldn't do that. You'd put the supply package in a nearby orbit, and then go get it. You don't dock it with the shuttle.
At least some fraction of the pay these programmers earn at those companies should be counted when figuring the corporate effect on open source.
Open source feeds the non-contributing companies, but those non-contributing companies enable more people to work as programmers, increasing the pool of people who are able to work on open source as individuals.
That's a phrase someone named "karnal" should never use.
Who said anything about re-entering and protecting passengers? I said plenty of vehicles that could have been adapted to resupply Columbia to keep it up. The military has plenty of rockets that can reach that orbit, for example, as does the non-military side of the US government, plus several other countries.
The goal wouldn't be to use one of those to bring the crew back, but rather to supply them to keep them up long enough to figure out what caused the problem, fix it on the other shuttles, and send another shuttle, either to bring them back, or to make repairs.
There are plenty of vehicles besides shuttles that could reach the orbit Columbia was in. If they had known there was a problem, they could probably have used those to supply Columbia to allow it to stay up until some way for repair or rescue could be devised.
If keeping it from going below a certain temperature by insultating it is OK, then heating it to that temperature would be OK. Why would you think otherwise?
That reminds me of a question. Might make an interesting Slashdot poll. Suppose you've won a free drawing. You have your choice of the following prizes, each of which has an expected value of $1. Which do you take?
Uhm...you aren't familiar with the formula
?You should have got this in the first week of your first statistics course. :-)
Or maybe you aren't familiar with how lottery prizes work? If no one wins, the prize gets added to the next lottery.
The probability of a given ticket winning is the same each week, but the prize goes up. However, more people tend to play as the prize goes up, so the chances of sharing the prize go up, but the net effect is the "prize if you win" term goes up each week.
If a lottery goes a few weeks without a winner, this can push the expected payoff higher than the price of a ticket.
The lottery is occasionally in your favor, when it has gone several weeks without a winner, so the prize is very large. (Yes, that does attract more players, but not enough more to compensate for the larger prize).
The Nigerian scam is never in your favor. :-)
There is an interesting case included in income tax caselaw books, where a consortium of Australian investors tried to buy one of each possible combination for such a lottery. Buying tickets turned out to take longer than they thought, so they only got about half what they wanted, but still won most of the prizes, including all the big ones, and so made a nice profit. The case is in the books because there was some question over how to tax this.
Tax law cases are often a lot more interesting than other cases, because people put a lot more thought into avoiding taxes than they do to most other things. People who would only devote a few minutes to planning a murder will spend weeks trying to figure out how to deduct the cost of the bullets. :-) (This also makes it hard. I've got a B.S. degree in math from Caltech, and never in my life have numbers so confused as they did when we studied partnership taxation in law school)
And you are just talking about the human eye. What about animal eyes? No, I'm not some PETA nut...it just occurs to me that many people have pets that they are quite fond of and would not want to do things to cause discomfort for those pets.
So, I wonder what pets think of our modern video and audio systems? Are those DVDs that to us have spectacular pictures and CD-quality surround sound appear to dogs as horrible flickering lightshows accompanied by intolerably distorted sound full of digital artifacts?
Yes, your comment was stupid. If you would like to avoid that in the future, try actually reading the story before commenting.
If this means that all UserLinux-specific scripts ini the distribution will be written in Python, that's fine. If it means that Perl won't even be in the distribution, he's nuts.
There are certain things that pretty much everyone assumes are available on Linux systems, and Perl is one of them.
The business world already was offered Unix systems with one choice for everything (that's how most commercial Unix systems worked), and Linux is kicking their asses, and one of the reasons is that Linux includes all these alternatives.
Picking one GUI for users is one thing, but for things that are used by programs rather than directly by users, a good Linux-for-business distribution should have them all.
A distro without KDE is not going to get very far.
It doesn't matter how much you encrypt, there is always a final link where someone gets the illegal material from someone in the system whose IP address they have. Make that person liable, and the system will fall apart.
They've got enough programmers that they could simple go "open source" within the company, and that would be a big enough community to get all the benefits cited by ESR in his Cathedral paper.
A few other big companies could also do this if they wished.
Long term, I think, what Linus himself will be remembered for won't be the Linux kernel itself, but for how he managed the project. Hell, I personally know half a dozen people that could have done everything Linus did on the technical side of things, but I doubt any of them would have been the project manager he turned out to be.
No it isn't. It's defined by the amount of data. Let's try an analogy. Suppose you have a hookup to a shared water tower. Your fair share of the water is a certain number of liters. If you have a bigger pipe connected to the water system, you can go through your share faster.
Home broadband is like having a big water pipe. It doesn't mean it is connected to a bigger water tower.
Consumers aren't mislead, since consumers know that when you are buying "unlimited" access to a shared resource, it means you get your fair share, not that the amount of the resource is large enough that everyone can have as much as they want, all the time.
This is no different than the myriad other "unlimited" access things consumers are familiar with.
OK, so where can I get a warp drive, transporter, replicator, and holodeck?
EQ and DAoC use about 7 megs an hour.
You have unlimited access at most ISPs. What you don't have is unlimited bandwidth.
That's one of the most idiotic things ever said on Slashdot. Nowhere in the article does it say that, or even say anything that could remotely be interepreted as implying that.
The article does say that broadcast and performance are up, which would naturally lead to a boost in both sales and piracy, so the conclusion non-idiots would come to is that piracy is up because popularity is up, which is the same reason sales are up, rather than simply concluding that because piracy is mentioned in the same article as sales being up that piracy must somehow be causing the sales increase.