Check out the blimp-to-orbit project here.
Not to say that I wouldn't rather see $400M of funding put into that project, but we're at the point now where it makes sense to try multiple ways to get into space to find out what's most cost-effective, and JP Aerospace has a $70M USAF contract to build ultra-high altitude blimps at this point.
the tech has improved so much in the 30 years since the Shuttle was designed that almost anything Bert Rutan is likely to come up with will be a hell of a lot safer.
Reentry from orbit is the most stressful thing anyone does with anything that flies, and any current construction isn't going to have 30 years of accumulated material fatigue in it.
The other point was that the design of the Shuttle was dictated largely by political considerations which partitioned the design components to put as many military contracts in the districts of politically powerful Congressmen as possible.
While the same may not be true of the regular aerospace contractor building the other part of the system, AFAIK, the only priority Rutan's got is safe, profitable flight, and things that fall out of the sky will put him out of business. He hasn't been around enough to have the kind of political connections the big aerospace companies do, he isn't going to get financially rewarded for failure.
It's about time the remaining Shuttles go where they belong, into museums. It's time people who go into space go with the benefit of ships built with modern technology, not 30 year old designs implemented in aging airframes running decades after any sane person would have put them out to pasture.
I want to see NASA successfully put people into space and not have them return as barbecued chunks.
I also like the idea of manned space missions at a fraction of the current costs.
If your intent is to compare to Fedora, try yum or better yet, apt-get/synaptic.
Manual fetch (unless you count urpmi and stuff) - automatic fetch auto-felch? check.
Binary based - source based (with an option for binary)
the automated downloaders for Fedora are binary-based.
No dependency handling - automatic dep handling
Centralized list of available packages (with urpmi and stuff) - Centralized list of available packages that is copied to clients
different versions of packages - USE flags
Check, sort of (Fedora Core yum and apt-get require heavy customization of repositories.conf files to make them usable), sort of.
told him that I prefer vi. They all looked at me like I was nuts.
You prefer nano to vi? Have you considered getting help from a mental health professional?
Seriously, there's no upside to vi unless you're doing one hell of a lot of text editing, and if you're doing that much, you're probably better off going with a full GUI text editor like kwrite.
I abandoned vi at the first possible opportunity.
introduce at 1TB... they may be worrying too much about saturating consumer markets. At this point, I think that they could max out whatever they're planning to use for assembly lines for a 1TB writable drive almost regardless of production capacity.
Imagine. . . no more tape backups. Video archiving. Low-hassle data warehouses.
Or the ability to put 200 TB into a desktop jukebox.
I worked at several startups in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, finally winding up at Waveform in Marin (we later wound up in Berkeley)... we were doing music software for the Commodore 64 and Apple II.
It was still like that even in the 1980s. Fun, really... even including the occasional 18 hour days.
If you believe what you say, I'm sure you'll have no problem putting your personal life savings into SCO.
After all, if what you say is true, you'll be right at a time when the market and the consensus among the informed is wrong... and your savings will suddenly multiply in value as IBM and the other companies SCO has taken legal action against start paying the license fees they owe plus punitive damages as per the forthcoming court order. I mean, look what happened to AutoZone!
So when are you going to find yourself a chunk of SCOX for yourself? Your fortune's a waitin'! Don't you believe what you're telling the public?
DISCLAIMER: I am not a registered financial adviser and this is not investment advice.
VCs tanking companies through greedy stupidity was happening before the dot.com boom or even a publically available Internet.
Saw this happen at a VC-funded company I worked at back in the 1980s when they put in their own CEO who dictated a $70 price point for a C-64 music software package.
Why does a programmer, tester, system analyst, or program manager need to know anything about the customer's culture? Why not just have a few marketing/sales guys deal w/ that.
This has been tried and it doesn't work.
It turns out that if the people designing a product don't understand where it is going and how it's really going to be used, your product is likely to suck.
if you want to make djvu formats with a windows box free as in beer, check my original post, it's got links that'll get you to file conversion sites that you can upload files to and get djvus back from.
It is true that if you've got real big files and no broadband, you'll have a problem using them, but most people who don't have broadband know people who do.
The majority of spams are sent out by spambot networks composed of 0wn3D PCs running Windows.
There are 274 spams in my spam folder, I was too busy to clean it out yesterday.
I don't care so much about getting people on to Open Source as I care about getting the people the fuck off Microsoft Windows and onto applications software that's interoperable with the Linux apps I'm using.
I get tired of doing informal tech support for friends because Microsoft thinks it can substitute spin control for competent security practices and hype for good coding.
It's a hassle to have problems with perfectly workable office productivity software that has compatibility problems with MS Office because Microsoft refuses to provide full document format specifications to anybody else to force vendor lockin on users.
I want to see people and businesses using any solution that works for them, Linux, Apple, BSD, Solaris... as long as it is not one of those spambot and malware magnet hunks of shit we call the Windows operating system.
Hmmm... guess I've got more than 274 reasons to care whether people use Windows or not.
Or perhaps only one... Microsoft is the source of most of what's wrong with using a personal computer today.
LizardTech (ABSOLUTELY NO RELATION)
Heh. We believe you:P
Actually, I was mildly pissed when I found out about the name... I was looking for a business name at the time and... well, that became not a choice.
But you've just compared a complete storage system encompassing fonts, vector graphics, images, form fields and the whole kitchensink - with an image compression app.
This appears to describe more than that, and describes metadata capability that sounds like it could handle the functionaliy you describe if anyone wanted to standardize a format that would fit within the DJVU container.
Depends on what you need a document format for. If I want to put complete job information for a print run into a document and e-mail it to a printer, of course a PDF is the format of choice. That's what printers are set up for, and that's certainly reason enough.
If I want to display via browser plugin or download a big document, whether formatted print or image or the combination of the two, djvu is the format of choice, if enough people can be persuaded to use it.
In short, DjVu is a multipage document format that can use a number of different coder/decoders (codecs) to compress the individual chunks that compose an images or a page. In fact, DjVu is really four compression techniques wrapped into one format:
BZZ: A general-purpose data compression technique similar to bzip2. Bzz is used to compress searchable text layers and other metadata in DjVu documents.
and that's what makes it more than just another compressed bitmap format like.JPG)
DjVuPhoto (aka IW44): A progressive, wavelet-based lossy compression format for continuous-tone images (i.e. photos and pictures).
DjVuBitonal (aka JB2): A lossless or lossy compression technique for bitonal (black & white) or palettized images that is particularly effective on images with repeated shapes (such as documents images where the same character appears many times in the document).
DjVuDocument: A technique for scanned color document that separates images into a foreground layer that contains the text and line drawings, and a background layer that contains the pictures and background textures. The foreground is encoded with DjVuBitonal and the Background with DjVuPhoto.
and that can really make for small files with big impact. I once downloaded a map document that was a meg or two with DJVU, that decompressed to 100+ megs when I decompressed it into a bitmap. (I think it was the early 1900s map of Yellowstone on the djvuzone site somewhere) The text was sharp and clear in either document... as you know, legible text does not survive high image compression levels well in ordinary bit maps.
If you want a REALLY superior document format that makes PDF look like something out of the Old Stone Age, check out DJVU. It's a seriously cool format that practically nobody knows about.
DjVu (pronounced "déjà vu") is a new image compression technology developed since 1996 at AT&T Labs to solve precisely that problem. DjVu allows the distribution on the Internet of very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs. DjVu allows content developers to scan high-resolution color pages of books, magazines, catalogs, manuals, newspapers, historical or ancient documents, and make them available on the Web.
. . .
and white documents. Scanned pages at 300 DPI in full color can be compressed down to 30 to 100KB files from 25MB.. Black-and-white pages at 300 DPI typically occupy 5 to 30KB when compressed. This puts the size of high-quality scanned pages within the realm of an average HTML page (which is typically around 50KB).
How to get it
Viewers are available for Win/Mac/Linux.
The Linux package DJVUlibre allows both viewing and DJVU document creation and is Open Source. It is available for most major Linux distros, source, Solaris, cygwin and may be available for automated installation by whatever method your distro uses.
LizardTech (ABSOLUTELY NO RELATION) provides the free downloadable Mac/Win viewers, and sells Win/Mac DJVU creation tools. (either above URL)
However, there are also free document conversionsites, upload various file formats (e.g. PDF, images) and get back.DJVUs.
"Political consultant" = "place to buy political influence"
The only question Ralph Reed can answer for MS are:
"how do we stop Religious Right crazies from changing platforms over to Apple or Linux?"
"how can we trade our regular gay/lesbian/nonredneck customers for Terri Schiavo right-to-non-life crazies?"
Would anybody in his right mind pay $240,000 for the answers to those questions? Even if Reed threw in the answer to "How can I spread bubonic plague at 1 Microsoft Way?" in for free, it's still a bad deal.
Consider it a delayed payoff for DOJ transforming it's victory in DOJ v MS into a loss. Reed delivered, now it's MS's turn.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the blimp-to-orbit project here. Not to say that I wouldn't rather see $400M of funding put into that project, but we're at the point now where it makes sense to try multiple ways to get into space to find out what's most cost-effective, and JP Aerospace has a $70M USAF contract to build ultra-high altitude blimps at this point.
Unless you know of an environmentally cleaner way to get enough power to put "clean coal" out of business than a solar power satellite network.
the tech has improved so much in the 30 years since the Shuttle was designed that almost anything Bert Rutan is likely to come up with will be a hell of a lot safer. Reentry from orbit is the most stressful thing anyone does with anything that flies, and any current construction isn't going to have 30 years of accumulated material fatigue in it. The other point was that the design of the Shuttle was dictated largely by political considerations which partitioned the design components to put as many military contracts in the districts of politically powerful Congressmen as possible. While the same may not be true of the regular aerospace contractor building the other part of the system, AFAIK, the only priority Rutan's got is safe, profitable flight, and things that fall out of the sky will put him out of business. He hasn't been around enough to have the kind of political connections the big aerospace companies do, he isn't going to get financially rewarded for failure.
I want to see NASA successfully put people into space and not have them return as barbecued chunks.
I also like the idea of manned space missions at a fraction of the current costs.
Assuming you have one, and if you're a PETArd, you're incapable of making one that any reasonable person should spend time on.
If your intent is to compare to Fedora, try yum or better yet, apt-get/synaptic. Manual fetch (unless you count urpmi and stuff) - automatic fetch .conf files to make them usable), sort of.
auto-felch? check. Binary based - source based (with an option for binary) the automated downloaders for Fedora are binary-based. No dependency handling - automatic dep handling Centralized list of available packages (with urpmi and stuff) - Centralized list of available packages that is copied to clients different versions of packages - USE flags Check, sort of (Fedora Core yum and apt-get require heavy customization of repositories
sorry, that was vi to nano. Never drink a pint of Jack Daniels before posting to slashdot.
told him that I prefer vi. They all looked at me like I was nuts. You prefer nano to vi? Have you considered getting help from a mental health professional? Seriously, there's no upside to vi unless you're doing one hell of a lot of text editing, and if you're doing that much, you're probably better off going with a full GUI text editor like kwrite. I abandoned vi at the first possible opportunity.
Buy MS software ... it sucks and you can contribute to theocracy in America with every license fee.
Of course, these are good things to some of the people around here.
the guy's intent is obviously humor...
introduce at 1TB... they may be worrying too much about saturating consumer markets. At this point, I think that they could max out whatever they're planning to use for assembly lines for a 1TB writable drive almost regardless of production capacity. Imagine. . . no more tape backups. Video archiving. Low-hassle data warehouses. Or the ability to put 200 TB into a desktop jukebox.
Surely the author meant "cracked team".
It was still like that even in the 1980s. Fun, really... even including the occasional 18 hour days.
After all, if what you say is true, you'll be right at a time when the market and the consensus among the informed is wrong... and your savings will suddenly multiply in value as IBM and the other companies SCO has taken legal action against start paying the license fees they owe plus punitive damages as per the forthcoming court order. I mean, look what happened to AutoZone!
So when are you going to find yourself a chunk of SCOX for yourself? Your fortune's a waitin'! Don't you believe what you're telling the public?
DISCLAIMER: I am not a registered financial adviser and this is not investment advice.
Saw this happen at a VC-funded company I worked at back in the 1980s when they put in their own CEO who dictated a $70 price point for a C-64 music software package.
This has been tried and it doesn't work.
It turns out that if the people designing a product don't understand where it is going and how it's really going to be used, your product is likely to suck.
Honda's had R&D operations in the USA for years.
It is true that if you've got real big files and no broadband, you'll have a problem using them, but most people who don't have broadband know people who do.
There are 274 spams in my spam folder, I was too busy to clean it out yesterday.
I don't care so much about getting people on to Open Source as I care about getting the people the fuck off Microsoft Windows and onto applications software that's interoperable with the Linux apps I'm using.
I get tired of doing informal tech support for friends because Microsoft thinks it can substitute spin control for competent security practices and hype for good coding.
It's a hassle to have problems with perfectly workable office productivity software that has compatibility problems with MS Office because Microsoft refuses to provide full document format specifications to anybody else to force vendor lockin on users.
I want to see people and businesses using any solution that works for them, Linux, Apple, BSD, Solaris... as long as it is not one of those spambot and malware magnet hunks of shit we call the Windows operating system.
Hmmm... guess I've got more than 274 reasons to care whether people use Windows or not.
Or perhaps only one... Microsoft is the source of most of what's wrong with using a personal computer today.
Actually, I was mildly pissed when I found out about the name... I was looking for a business name at the time and... well, that became not a choice.
But you've just compared a complete storage system encompassing fonts, vector graphics, images, form fields and the whole kitchensink - with an image compression app.
This appears to describe more than that, and describes metadata capability that sounds like it could handle the functionaliy you describe if anyone wanted to standardize a format that would fit within the DJVU container.
Depends on what you need a document format for. If I want to put complete job information for a print run into a document and e-mail it to a printer, of course a PDF is the format of choice. That's what printers are set up for, and that's certainly reason enough.
If I want to display via browser plugin or download a big document, whether formatted print or image or the combination of the two, djvu is the format of choice, if enough people can be persuaded to use it.
easiest to quote, I rearranged the text order a bit to highlight the most obvious and important difference.
From What's Inside DJVU
In short, DjVu is a multipage document format that can use a number of different coder/decoders (codecs) to compress the individual chunks that compose an images or a page. In fact, DjVu is really four compression techniques wrapped into one format:
BZZ: A general-purpose data compression technique similar to bzip2. Bzz is used to compress searchable text layers and other metadata in DjVu documents.
and that's what makes it more than just another compressed bitmap format like .JPG)
DjVuPhoto (aka IW44): A progressive, wavelet-based lossy compression format for continuous-tone images (i.e. photos and pictures).
DjVuBitonal (aka JB2): A lossless or lossy compression technique for bitonal (black & white) or palettized images that is particularly effective on images with repeated shapes (such as documents images where the same character appears many times in the document).
DjVuDocument: A technique for scanned color document that separates images into a foreground layer that contains the text and line drawings, and a background layer that contains the pictures and background textures. The foreground is encoded with DjVuBitonal and the Background with DjVuPhoto.
and that can really make for small files with big impact. I once downloaded a map document that was a meg or two with DJVU, that decompressed to 100+ megs when I decompressed it into a bitmap. (I think it was the early 1900s map of Yellowstone on the djvuzone site somewhere) The text was sharp and clear in either document... as you know, legible text does not survive high image compression levels well in ordinary bit maps.
What it is/does
Info from DJVUZONE:
DjVu (pronounced "déjà vu") is a new image compression technology developed since 1996 at AT&T Labs to solve precisely that problem. DjVu allows the distribution on the Internet of very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs. DjVu allows content developers to scan high-resolution color pages of books, magazines, catalogs, manuals, newspapers, historical or ancient documents, and make them available on the Web. . . . and white documents. Scanned pages at 300 DPI in full color can be compressed down to 30 to 100KB files from 25MB.. Black-and-white pages at 300 DPI typically occupy 5 to 30KB when compressed. This puts the size of high-quality scanned pages within the realm of an average HTML page (which is typically around 50KB).
How to get it
Viewers are available for Win/Mac/Linux.
The Linux package DJVUlibre allows both viewing and DJVU document creation and is Open Source. It is available for most major Linux distros, source, Solaris, cygwin and may be available for automated installation by whatever method your distro uses.
LizardTech (ABSOLUTELY NO RELATION) provides the free downloadable Mac/Win viewers, and sells Win/Mac DJVU creation tools. (either above URL)
However, there are also free document conversion sites, upload various file formats (e.g. PDF, images) and get back .DJVUs.
Check it out.
The only question Ralph Reed can answer for MS are:
Would anybody in his right mind pay $240,000 for the answers to those questions? Even if Reed threw in the answer to "How can I spread bubonic plague at 1 Microsoft Way?" in for free, it's still a bad deal.
Consider it a delayed payoff for DOJ transforming it's victory in DOJ v MS into a loss. Reed delivered, now it's MS's turn.
None, of course, they blue-screen themselves.
Go home to FreeRepublic.
No, I don't know which one... I'll google it myself if I wind up needing it.