...just switch to Linux or MacOS. For non-technical users especially, the answer is MacOS. My neighbors call me often, asking for help to eliminate malware from their Windows-based PCs. I'm constantly amazed at how increasingly time-consuming this is to do, even for a tech-geek like me. On the other hand, I spend no time needing to deal with this on my Mac. Those folks who use only Windows-based PCs probably take it for granted that malware will always be part of their computing life, but once you get off Windows you realize that the Linux and MacOS alternatives are a real pleasure to live with.
Yah, I've never liked that Tiger vs. Longhorn comparison either. It seems to me that some of the major "from the ground-up" re-writes in the Mac & PC world have been:
OS/2 [December 1987] -- Of course, this is way back when IBM and Microsoft were collaborating on OS/2, as a successor to DOS.
Windows NT [May 1990] -- Somewhat like MacOS X using BSD/NeXT as its underpinnings, I'm told a lot of this from-the-ground-up development team came from DEC's VMS group, so maybe MacOS X is to Unix as Windows NT is to VMS.:-)
NeXTSTEP OS [1990] -- was this a from-the-ground-up development? I don't recall ever reading about where the original NeXT OS came from.
MacOS 7 (aka System 7) [May 1991] -- previous MacOS's were written in assembler I believe, so OS 7 pretty-much required from-the-ground-up new development, in Pascal, as I recall.
Linux [September 1991] -- Of course, this is a from-the-ground-up development only if you don't consider Linux to be derived from SCO's Unix. (Joke!)
Windows 95 [August 1995] -- I'd call this a from-the-ground up development despite its DOS underpinnings.
MacOS X [March 2001] -- I think it's fair to call this a from-the-ground-up development, despite the BSD and NeXT underpinnings.
So basically, both the Microsoft and Apple world occasionally need to do from-the-ground-up new development, but they're doing it on completely different cycles. That's why Steve's "Tiger vs. Longhorn" comparison is pretty silly; how can you call it a concurrent race when the runners are starting the race at different times? Where I would give Apple some credit is in having made the from-the-ground-up transition at a time and in a way that positions them well for ongoing, modern OS enhancements. The Windows NT architecture dates back to 1990 originally? It's way overdue for an overhaul.
As I recall having read previously, to migrate users from an old OS X Mac to a G5 OS X Mac, basically all I need to do is hook a firewire cable between the old Mac and the new Mac, boot, specify the user accounts that I want to migrate, and then sit back and relax. This Register article claims Windows XP also makes it easy to migrate users from an old PC to a new PC, but I've never read anything on that topic. How does that migration work on a PC?
"Talking Panda iLingo sets a new standard for language translation software. Designed for the iPod, it's stocked with over four hundred essential words and phrases of the language you want to speak, organized for instant access. Download and install the program right now and begin your adventure abroad. Virtual fluency available in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Japanese."
Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876-October 5, 1960) was one of the most influential figures in American anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century.
Kroeber was born in Hoboken, New Jersey. He received his doctorate under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, basing his dissertation on his field work among the Arapaho. He spent most of his career in California, primarily at the University of California, Berkeley. The anthropology department's headquarters building at the University of California is known as Kroeber Hall.
Although he is known primarily as a cultural anthropologist, he did significant work in archaeology, and he contributed to anthropology by making connections between archaeology and culture. He conducted excavations in New Mexico, Mexico, and Peru.
Kroeber and his students did important work collecting cultural data on western tribes of Native Americans. The work done in preserving California tribes appeared in Handbook of Indians of California (1925). These efforts to preserve remaining data on these tribes has been termed "Salvage Ethnography." He is credited with developing the concepts of Culture Area and Cultural Configuration (Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, 1939).
His influence was so strong that many contemporaries adopted his style of beard and mustache as well as his views as a social scientist.
He is noted for working with Ishi, who was claimed (though not uncontroversially) to be the last California Yahi Indian. His second wife, Theodora Kroeber, wrote a well-known biography of Ishi, Ishi in Two Worlds.
His textbook, Anthropology (1923, 1948), was widely used for years.
Kroeber was the father of the academic Clifton Kroeber by his first wife and the fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin and academic Karl Kroeber by his second. He also adopted the two children of his second wife's first marriage. Clifton and Karl recently (2003) edited a book together on the Ishi case, Ishi in Three Centuries.
One topic not mentioned in this article -- and very rarely sited in camera performance specs anywhere -- is the delay between user-click of the button and the actual snapping of the photograph. If you've used a digital camera, you know what I mean. If what you're looking for is a good vacation & party camera, that spec is more important (I think) than either megapixels OR depth-of-field.
As a former hiring manager of software developers, I can say that I never gave a lot of thought to which school the candidate came from. It was important to me that the GPA be good, but anything 3.0 or better was okay by me. I did look for a well-written resume, because half of a developer's job is documentation, and if they can't write a good resume then there's a better chance they won't be a good writer in general. I also looked for good social skills in the job interview, because my developers all worked in teams.
I didn't care much about what programming languages the candidate knew, so impressing me with the quantity of languages and operating systems was moot -- as a former software developer myself, I know it doesn't take as long to learn a new language as it does to learn a new development environment, and odds are you've not used my development environment anyway.
I did look for participation in co-op programs and summer internships, because real-world experience is important. Why? Because it is so-o-o-o difficult to convince new developers that I care less about the quantity of code being generated and more about the quality of the documentation that accompanies it. Former co-ops and interns seem to understand that better, sooner (but never well enough or soon enough to really make me happy!).
During the interview I tend to ask a lot of questions about non-CS courses. Did you like history or literature better? Which non-CS course surprised you most in terms of enjoyment of the material? Here I'm looking to see if the person likes learning things in general, rather than just writing code, because during the first year on the job especially the person is going to have to love to learn in order to succeed.
Bottom line: I don't believe the choice of school matters much for your first job, and it matters not at all for all your jobs thereafter (experience counts more, as indicated by numerous prior posts), so if you're happy where you are, then you might as well stay.
"To reduce the nation's vulnerability, the Rumsfeld commission urges leaders to develop 'superior space capabilities,' including the ability to 'negate the hostile use of space against U.S. interests' by using 'power projection in, from and through space.' Translated into lay terms, that means the development and deployment of anti-satellite weapons."
A quick Google search shows numerous "space superiority" references dating back to the start of the Bush administration.
Wouldn't -any- form of downloadable software be vulnerable to this? It seems to me the issue here isn't that the software is open source so much as that the software is downloadable. Proprietary versions of a product can also be hacked. It's just that distributing the software via shinkwrap (mostly) prevents hackers from inserting a hack into the product, not the fact that the software is proprietary. It's true that open source products tend to be downloadable more often than proprietary products, but it's not their "open sourciness" that makes them vulnerable to this particular problem, just their downloadableness.
Smart Cars More Quickly Declared "Totaled"
on
Vehicles of Tomorrow?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's probably worth mentioning again, as we discuss smarter cars, that insurance companies are declaring a car "totaled" more quickly these days, even with relatively minor structural damage, because the cost of replacing all of these electronic gizmos after an accident is adding signficantly to the typical repair cost. Reference, for example: http://csmonitor.com/2004/0419/p13s02-wmgn.html
So as we contemplate even smarter cars with even more electronics installed, even relatively minor accidents might result in a car being declared "totaled" and thereby increase insurance costs overall. Ironically, it may not be the purchase cost of the electronics that eventually constrains the smart-car market (particularly since smart electronics seem to get cheaper all the time), but rather the insurance considerations instead!
Changing the story to "reinterpret" it makes sense, particularly when you're working with a classic story. "The Mists of Avalon" is the tread-worn King Arthur tale made fresh by telling from a different viewpoint (in this case, the viewpoint of the women in the story). "Rozencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" is a terrific retelling of Hamlet, again told from an alternative viewpoint. Showtime's old "Robin Hood" series turned a story about rich vs. poor into a story about Saxons vs. Normans (and, like Mists of Avalon, threw in a good bit of pagonism vs. Christianity to boot). Classic stories are refreshed through reinterpretation. That's why we make movies from books but change the stories.
I have a theory that there are enough dog-loving hackers out there that if I started a small business and housed it in an old run-down building with a really big fenced-in yard, and allowed my employees to bring their dogs to work with them, that I'd get top-notch coders at below-market prices, just because they'd be able to bring their dogs to work with them. Back when I was a coder, I would have bitten on that offer!
...or just making copies of the burned audio CD using your favorite app, such as Toast. That's faster than re-burning from a playlist anyway, so if I want a copy for (say) my home, office, and car, that's how I'd do it.
Or looked at another way, proof that any "manifestation" of a supreme being in this universe must have finite wisdom, even if somehow (however nonsensical) a supreme being "outside" this universe might still have infinite wisdom. So in order to be known to mankind, you'd need to transmit a "finite" approximation of yourself -- hmmm...
One would expect the sciences to continue to advance quickly. After all, science progresses via an open source model.
Proprietary development of new physics doesn't advance very rapidly.:-) Neither does proprietary development of software, for the same reasons!
If Microsoft "owned" 95% of physics, we'd still be stuck on Newtonian mechanics, because only a small handful of physicists would be allowed to read physics books...and they wouldn't be the really smart physicists either.
Why would one want a tax writeoff at the -beginning- of the year? The -end- of the year makes more sense. We pay taxes now on -last- year's activities, not this year's.
One good ancillary point made by this article is that writing software is inexpensive...it's the -design- of software that costs so much.
We all generally take it as a given that software is expensive to develop, but that's really not true. Only the design/requirements phase is expensive. If you know exactly what it is that you need to write, in great detail, then the actual generation of documented, working code isn't that time consuming.
This is why open source software has been successful in recent years. The feature sets of operating systems, office suites, web servers, and database management systems have all stabilized to the point where we all now know exactly what each of these applications ought to look like. As a result, teams of enthusiasts and hobbyists can write credible, enterprise-applications at negligible expense. Open Source works well in precisely the same situations that offshoring works well. That's not to say that Open Source developers can't also be innovative, but I do claim that anything you can offshore successfully you'll probably be able to Open Source successfully as well, for exactly the same reason -- the expensive up-front design work has already been done.
Add to that the fact that the cost of reproducing software is nearly zero, then Open Source becomes an economic inevitability. Kudos to Stallman for starting the movement, but it would have happened eventually anyway I think, because eventually society gets wise to the fact that corporations are re-selling the same zero-cost product over and over again, and somebody somewhere will get the idea into their head that there is an obviously better way: write it once and for all and then just give it away.
I really enjoyed it. Parts I particularly liked were:
Mary McDonnel choosing to leave a third of the convoy behind when jumping. The writers had almost set her up at a touchy-feely wimpy female leader, but then surprise us by showing her making a hard command decision. Very nice touch. Note like the old Battlestar where the politicos were always portrayed as wrong-headed.
Edward James Olmos insisting that the war wasn't over, but then realizing that Mary McDonnel was right (again, with her seemingly touchy-feely "making babies" point). It's so rare that you see a "good guy" character change his mind because somebody else makes a convincing argument; that's much more interesting than the usual cliche that the good guy is always right about every topic the first time, every time.
The excuse to show Battlestar technology that looks a lot LESS advanced than our own current technology (i.e., so that it's immune from Cylon problems). Clever trick to give the show a retro-look in a believable way.
The weird camera angles on the space shot. I've read here that most people didn't like 'em. I liked them, for reasons others have cited.
The US military is working on VTOL UAVs such as Northrop
Grumman'sFire Scout
(e.g., for use by the Coast
Guard) and Raytheon is building a Tactical
Control System that allows one human operator to control multiple
UAVs. Manyotherpeople
also make VTOL UAVs,
increasingly focusing on autonomous
operations. (Nowadays it takes more than one operator to control a
single UAV -- it would be nice to reverse that ratio in the
future.) So I wonder what makes this Israeli drone so unique?
"The Fire Scout system, a vertical takeoff and landing tactical UAV, is
in low-rate
initial production for the U.S. Navy by [Northrop Grumman's] Integrated
Systems sector. Fire Scout will fly at
an altitude of up to 20,000 feet, and use an advanced payload with an
electro-optical/
infrared sensor and a laser designator to survey littoral regions with
pinpoint
accuracy, giving military decision-makers the most current information
about enemy
resources and personnel on the ground. Fire Scout is a fully autonomous
targeting and surveillance system that can fly
almost silently above deployed Marines to watch for hidden enemies
within 100 nautical
miles."
"[Raytheon's] TCS, which allows the simultaneous control of multiple
UAVs and
their payloads from the same control station, was conceived as a
joint-service program but never was adopted by the Air Force or the
Army. The program is likely to survive, however, as a Navy-only system
that eventually could be modified to accommodate UAVs from additional
services, experts said."
One reason to create Open Source in this field is that it would help small businesses become bigger businesses. We slashdotters advocate competition and choice in software, but a good ERP and CRM package would help promote better competition in a field outside our normal domain. A big obstacle to growing any business is managing the increasingly complexity of enterprise resources; if we could help businesses solve that problem, we would help small businesses grow.
Large companies would benefit as well, since an Open Source ERP system could help eliminate a lot of the inefficiencies that arise from incompatible enterprise information systems. This is particularly true for companies that have grown through acquisition and have therefore inherited a lot of different EIS. In turn, increased efficiencies in large companies are good for the economy, and hence good for us in the long run. (In the long run, efficiency improvements create more jobs; in the short run, however, a lot of jobs are lost, as many types of jobs depend on inefficiencies as part of their charter.)
An Open Source ERP and CRM system would also contribute to globalization, which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on which part of the globe you call home.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), I don't think the cultures of ERP and CRM systems are sufficiently mature yet for the Open Source model to create best-of-breed offerings. The Open Source model works best when the requirements and design of the applications being developed are very well understood by lots of people; i.e., when all the commercial offerings have evolved to the point that they all more-or-less look alike. ERP and CRM aren't to that point yet.
I wonder
how many tons
of stars
it takes to make prehistoric vegetation? If
we could figure out how many stars need to nova to make a ton of raw
materials for plants (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.) then we could
show how inefficient cars REALLY are. Wow!
Slashdot Mirror
...just switch to Linux or MacOS. For non-technical users especially, the answer is MacOS. My neighbors call me often, asking for help to eliminate malware from their Windows-based PCs. I'm constantly amazed at how increasingly time-consuming this is to do, even for a tech-geek like me. On the other hand, I spend no time needing to deal with this on my Mac. Those folks who use only Windows-based PCs probably take it for granted that malware will always be part of their computing life, but once you get off Windows you realize that the Linux and MacOS alternatives are a real pleasure to live with.
Yah, I've never liked that Tiger vs. Longhorn comparison either. It seems to me that some of the major "from the ground-up" re-writes in the Mac & PC world have been:
:-)
OS/2 [December 1987] -- Of course, this is way back when IBM and Microsoft were collaborating on OS/2, as a successor to DOS.
Windows NT [May 1990] -- Somewhat like MacOS X using BSD/NeXT as its underpinnings, I'm told a lot of this from-the-ground-up development team came from DEC's VMS group, so maybe MacOS X is to Unix as Windows NT is to VMS.
NeXTSTEP OS [1990] -- was this a from-the-ground-up development? I don't recall ever reading about where the original NeXT OS came from.
MacOS 7 (aka System 7) [May 1991] -- previous MacOS's were written in assembler I believe, so OS 7 pretty-much required from-the-ground-up new development, in Pascal, as I recall.
Linux [September 1991] -- Of course, this is a from-the-ground-up development only if you don't consider Linux to be derived from SCO's Unix. (Joke!)
Windows 95 [August 1995] -- I'd call this a from-the-ground up development despite its DOS underpinnings.
MacOS X [March 2001] -- I think it's fair to call this a from-the-ground-up development, despite the BSD and NeXT underpinnings.
So basically, both the Microsoft and Apple world occasionally need to do from-the-ground-up new development, but they're doing it on completely different cycles. That's why Steve's "Tiger vs. Longhorn" comparison is pretty silly; how can you call it a concurrent race when the runners are starting the race at different times? Where I would give Apple some credit is in having made the from-the-ground-up transition at a time and in a way that positions them well for ongoing, modern OS enhancements. The Windows NT architecture dates back to 1990 originally? It's way overdue for an overhaul.
As I recall having read previously, to migrate users from an old OS X Mac to a G5 OS X Mac, basically all I need to do is hook a firewire cable between the old Mac and the new Mac, boot, specify the user accounts that I want to migrate, and then sit back and relax. This Register article claims Windows XP also makes it easy to migrate users from an old PC to a new PC, but I've never read anything on that topic. How does that migration work on a PC?
Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's FATHER???
(D'oh! Shoulda posted a spoiler warning. Sorry.)
"Talking Panda iLingo sets a new standard for language translation software. Designed for the iPod, it's stocked with over four hundred essential words and phrases of the language you want to speak, organized for instant access. Download and install the program right now and begin your adventure abroad. Virtual fluency available in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Japanese."
Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876-October 5, 1960) was one of the most influential figures in American anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century.
Kroeber was born in Hoboken, New Jersey. He received his doctorate under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, basing his dissertation on his field work among the Arapaho. He spent most of his career in California, primarily at the University of California, Berkeley. The anthropology department's headquarters building at the University of California is known as Kroeber Hall.
Although he is known primarily as a cultural anthropologist, he did significant work in archaeology, and he contributed to anthropology by making connections between archaeology and culture. He conducted excavations in New Mexico, Mexico, and Peru.
Kroeber and his students did important work collecting cultural data on western tribes of Native Americans. The work done in preserving California tribes appeared in Handbook of Indians of California (1925). These efforts to preserve remaining data on these tribes has been termed "Salvage Ethnography." He is credited with developing the concepts of Culture Area and Cultural Configuration (Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, 1939).
His influence was so strong that many contemporaries adopted his style of beard and mustache as well as his views as a social scientist.
He is noted for working with Ishi, who was claimed (though not uncontroversially) to be the last California Yahi Indian. His second wife, Theodora Kroeber, wrote a well-known biography of Ishi, Ishi in Two Worlds.
His textbook, Anthropology (1923, 1948), was widely used for years.
Kroeber was the father of the academic Clifton Kroeber by his first wife and the fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin and academic Karl Kroeber by his second. He also adopted the two children of his second wife's first marriage. Clifton and Karl recently (2003) edited a book together on the Ishi case, Ishi in Three Centuries.
One topic not mentioned in this article -- and very rarely sited in camera performance specs anywhere -- is the delay between user-click of the button and the actual snapping of the photograph. If you've used a digital camera, you know what I mean. If what you're looking for is a good vacation & party camera, that spec is more important (I think) than either megapixels OR depth-of-field.
As a former hiring manager of software developers, I can say that I never gave a lot of thought to which school the candidate came from. It was important to me that the GPA be good, but anything 3.0 or better was okay by me. I did look for a well-written resume, because half of a developer's job is documentation, and if they can't write a good resume then there's a better chance they won't be a good writer in general. I also looked for good social skills in the job interview, because my developers all worked in teams.
I didn't care much about what programming languages the candidate knew, so impressing me with the quantity of languages and operating systems was moot -- as a former software developer myself, I know it doesn't take as long to learn a new language as it does to learn a new development environment, and odds are you've not used my development environment anyway.
I did look for participation in co-op programs and summer internships, because real-world experience is important. Why? Because it is so-o-o-o difficult to convince new developers that I care less about the quantity of code being generated and more about the quality of the documentation that accompanies it. Former co-ops and interns seem to understand that better, sooner (but never well enough or soon enough to really make me happy!).
During the interview I tend to ask a lot of questions about non-CS courses. Did you like history or literature better? Which non-CS course surprised you most in terms of enjoyment of the material? Here I'm looking to see if the person likes learning things in general, rather than just writing code, because during the first year on the job especially the person is going to have to love to learn in order to succeed.
Bottom line: I don't believe the choice of school matters much for your first job, and it matters not at all for all your jobs thereafter (experience counts more, as indicated by numerous prior posts), so if you're happy where you are, then you might as well stay.
Since GNU's Not Unix, clearly this sets the stage for an assault on GNU.
Isn't this old news anyway? The Rumsfeld Doctrine has always included superiority in space. For example, reference from April 2001, http://www.msnbc.com/news/546843.asp?0sp=n5b6&cp1= 1:
"To reduce the nation's vulnerability, the Rumsfeld commission urges leaders to develop 'superior space capabilities,' including the ability to 'negate the hostile use of space against U.S. interests' by using 'power projection in, from and through space.' Translated into lay terms, that means the development and deployment of anti-satellite weapons."
A quick Google search shows numerous "space superiority" references dating back to the start of the Bush administration.
Wouldn't -any- form of downloadable software be vulnerable to this? It seems to me the issue here isn't that the software is open source so much as that the software is downloadable. Proprietary versions of a product can also be hacked. It's just that distributing the software via shinkwrap (mostly) prevents hackers from inserting a hack into the product, not the fact that the software is proprietary. It's true that open source products tend to be downloadable more often than proprietary products, but it's not their "open sourciness" that makes them vulnerable to this particular problem, just their downloadableness.
It's probably worth mentioning again, as we discuss smarter cars, that insurance companies are declaring a car "totaled" more quickly these days, even with relatively minor structural damage, because the cost of replacing all of these electronic gizmos after an accident is adding signficantly to the typical repair cost. Reference, for example: http://csmonitor.com/2004/0419/p13s02-wmgn.html
So as we contemplate even smarter cars with even more electronics installed, even relatively minor accidents might result in a car being declared "totaled" and thereby increase insurance costs overall. Ironically, it may not be the purchase cost of the electronics that eventually constrains the smart-car market (particularly since smart electronics seem to get cheaper all the time), but rather the insurance considerations instead!
Changing the story to "reinterpret" it makes sense, particularly when you're working with a classic story. "The Mists of Avalon" is the tread-worn King Arthur tale made fresh by telling from a different viewpoint (in this case, the viewpoint of the women in the story). "Rozencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" is a terrific retelling of Hamlet, again told from an alternative viewpoint. Showtime's old "Robin Hood" series turned a story about rich vs. poor into a story about Saxons vs. Normans (and, like Mists of Avalon, threw in a good bit of pagonism vs. Christianity to boot). Classic stories are refreshed through reinterpretation. That's why we make movies from books but change the stories.
I have a theory that there are enough dog-loving hackers out there that if I started a small business and housed it in an old run-down building with a really big fenced-in yard, and allowed my employees to bring their dogs to work with them, that I'd get top-notch coders at below-market prices, just because they'd be able to bring their dogs to work with them. Back when I was a coder, I would have bitten on that offer!
...or just making copies of the burned audio CD using your favorite app, such as Toast. That's faster than re-burning from a playlist anyway, so if I want a copy for (say) my home, office, and car, that's how I'd do it.
Or looked at another way, proof that any "manifestation" of a supreme being in this universe must have finite wisdom, even if somehow (however nonsensical) a supreme being "outside" this universe might still have infinite wisdom. So in order to be known to mankind, you'd need to transmit a "finite" approximation of yourself -- hmmm...
Sure, they can try to crack down on sites relating to sadism, necrophilia, or bestiality...but wouldn't that be beating a dead horse?
One would expect the sciences to continue to advance quickly. After all, science progresses via an open source model.
:-) Neither does proprietary development of software, for the same reasons!
Proprietary development of new physics doesn't advance very rapidly.
If Microsoft "owned" 95% of physics, we'd still be stuck on Newtonian mechanics, because only a small handful of physicists would be allowed to read physics books...and they wouldn't be the really smart physicists either.
Why would one want a tax writeoff at the -beginning- of the year? The -end- of the year makes more sense. We pay taxes now on -last- year's activities, not this year's.
There are two ways to say it.
1. Implement the high-risk features first. (spiral development)
2. Implement the high-payoff features first. (evolutionary development)
One good ancillary point made by this article is that writing software is inexpensive ...it's the -design- of software that costs so much.
We all generally take it as a given that software is expensive to develop, but that's really not true. Only the design/requirements phase is expensive. If you know exactly what it is that you need to write, in great detail, then the actual generation of documented, working code isn't that time consuming.
This is why open source software has been successful in recent years. The feature sets of operating systems, office suites, web servers, and database management systems have all stabilized to the point where we all now know exactly what each of these applications ought to look like. As a result, teams of enthusiasts and hobbyists can write credible, enterprise-applications at negligible expense. Open Source works well in precisely the same situations that offshoring works well. That's not to say that Open Source developers can't also be innovative, but I do claim that anything you can offshore successfully you'll probably be able to Open Source successfully as well, for exactly the same reason -- the expensive up-front design work has already been done.
Add to that the fact that the cost of reproducing software is nearly zero, then Open Source becomes an economic inevitability. Kudos to Stallman for starting the movement, but it would have happened eventually anyway I think, because eventually society gets wise to the fact that corporations are re-selling the same zero-cost product over and over again, and somebody somewhere will get the idea into their head that there is an obviously better way: write it once and for all and then just give it away.
I really enjoyed it. Parts I particularly liked were:
Mary McDonnel choosing to leave a third of the convoy behind when jumping. The writers had almost set her up at a touchy-feely wimpy female leader, but then surprise us by showing her making a hard command decision. Very nice touch. Note like the old Battlestar where the politicos were always portrayed as wrong-headed.
Edward James Olmos insisting that the war wasn't over, but then realizing that Mary McDonnel was right (again, with her seemingly touchy-feely "making babies" point). It's so rare that you see a "good guy" character change his mind because somebody else makes a convincing argument; that's much more interesting than the usual cliche that the good guy is always right about every topic the first time, every time.
The excuse to show Battlestar technology that looks a lot LESS advanced than our own current technology (i.e., so that it's immune from Cylon problems). Clever trick to give the show a retro-look in a believable way.
The weird camera angles on the space shot. I've read here that most people didn't like 'em. I liked them, for reasons others have cited.
The US military is working on VTOL UAVs such as Northrop Grumman's Fire Scout (e.g., for use by the Coast Guard) and Raytheon is building a Tactical Control System that allows one human operator to control multiple UAVs. Many other people also make VTOL UAVs, increasingly focusing on autonomous operations. (Nowadays it takes more than one operator to control a single UAV -- it would be nice to reverse that ratio in the future.) So I wonder what makes this Israeli drone so unique?
"The Fire Scout system, a vertical takeoff and landing tactical UAV, is in low-rate initial production for the U.S. Navy by [Northrop Grumman's] Integrated Systems sector. Fire Scout will fly at an altitude of up to 20,000 feet, and use an advanced payload with an electro-optical/ infrared sensor and a laser designator to survey littoral regions with pinpoint accuracy, giving military decision-makers the most current information about enemy resources and personnel on the ground. Fire Scout is a fully autonomous targeting and surveillance system that can fly almost silently above deployed Marines to watch for hidden enemies within 100 nautical miles."
"[Raytheon's] TCS, which allows the simultaneous control of multiple UAVs and their payloads from the same control station, was conceived as a joint-service program but never was adopted by the Air Force or the Army. The program is likely to survive, however, as a Navy-only system that eventually could be modified to accommodate UAVs from additional services, experts said."
One reason to create Open Source in this field is that it would help small businesses become bigger businesses. We slashdotters advocate competition and choice in software, but a good ERP and CRM package would help promote better competition in a field outside our normal domain. A big obstacle to growing any business is managing the increasingly complexity of enterprise resources; if we could help businesses solve that problem, we would help small businesses grow.
Large companies would benefit as well, since an Open Source ERP system could help eliminate a lot of the inefficiencies that arise from incompatible enterprise information systems. This is particularly true for companies that have grown through acquisition and have therefore inherited a lot of different EIS. In turn, increased efficiencies in large companies are good for the economy, and hence good for us in the long run. (In the long run, efficiency improvements create more jobs; in the short run, however, a lot of jobs are lost, as many types of jobs depend on inefficiencies as part of their charter.)
An Open Source ERP and CRM system would also contribute to globalization, which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on which part of the globe you call home.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), I don't think the cultures of ERP and CRM systems are sufficiently mature yet for the Open Source model to create best-of-breed offerings. The Open Source model works best when the requirements and design of the applications being developed are very well understood by lots of people; i.e., when all the commercial offerings have evolved to the point that they all more-or-less look alike. ERP and CRM aren't to that point yet.
I wonder how many tons of stars it takes to make prehistoric vegetation? If we could figure out how many stars need to nova to make a ton of raw materials for plants (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.) then we could show how inefficient cars REALLY are. Wow!