> I for one would love to peek around in this, more out of curiosity
Morbid curiosity perhaps. Considering the amount of backward compatibility in there, and the generations of tools and code frameworks used over the past decade and longer, I would expect the Windows code to be a BLOODY MESS. In fact it would probably be amusing to just grep for comments--"what does the next line do?!" or "what the h3ll were we thinking?!"
> So? If they don't get publicity, they're not worth fixing?
This attitude is EXACTLY what is making OS so popular and attractive. Even a small bug can drive someone out there eventually crazy enough to pick up the code and fix it. There's a famous feature in Word that pushes footnotes to subsequent pages if line spacing is anything other than single spacing. Only the footnote, mind you, not the anchor and the surrounding text. As it so happens, double-spaced text with footnotes is extremely prevalent in academia and other formal environments, making this feature very well known amongst grad students and such. But again, since this feature hasn't brought down entire computer networks and hasn't been mentioned by Tom Brokaw on the six-o-clock news, it's not worth Microsoft's time to fix. Even though it significantly impedes Word's primary purpose, that of creating documents.
Yeah, but being aware of that would require a knowledge and understanding on his part that he's simply not willing to acquire. Too many vendor luncheons and tee-a-thons to attend to spend time on "research".
> Uhhuh? So? They'll be fixed in the next release?
At the whip of the vendor. Which, in Microsoft's case can be never, unless the "hole" gets publicity on the evening news. There are serious--and well-documented and submitted--bugs in Word that have been there since the early '90s, with no obvious intention from MS to ever fix them.
> For individuals, there simply is no need for a different office suite.
And that is MAINLY because it's so EASY to get hold of a FREE copy of MS Office. Ironically the best thing that could happen to Linux and OOo would be for MS to start implementing some SERIOUS copy protection. Once all these legions of MS-enamoured Office fans can't get their fix for free anymore, they WILL start switching. After all, we're talking about people that scour pricegrabber.com for days on end to save $50 on that new notebook. Are these the kinds of people that you see plonking down $130 for an MS Office upgrade? As has been said again and again, MS is closing more than one eye to piracy for the sake of mindshare. Once MS software isn't "free" anymore, suddenly the lack of those other five border styles on a chart object doesn't seem all that important anymore. Plus, in academics, you might actually start to appreciate the free bibliography support in OOs--Endnote it may not be, but it's free and good enough for many users.
> Disney will continue to be the pre-eminate supplier of Children's content
Well, my 5 year old twins (and even more so my wife and I) enjoy SpongeBob more than anything else at the moment. Before that it was VeggieTales and Scooby-Doo. Now, in today's incestuous business world I don't actually know if any of these monies eventually do flow back to Disney anyway, but I'd like to at least think that that's not the case.
I meant his use of "big" words such as the fancy (and wrong) plural and "postulates". IOW he tries to sound educated yet stumbles on the basics of spelling and grammar.
> I really don't care as long as my points are understandable and valid
But that's exactly the point--you are undermining your real points and arguments with poor spelling and grammar. An educated person such as you are addressing with your original letter to the BBC is going to be seriously distracted by the presentation. It's like having a discussion with a person that has a goiter the size of a pumpkin hanging off their forehead. Ideally it should have no bearing on what the person has to say, but you just KNOW that you'd be staring at that goiter and miss half of what the person is saying. Well, your poor spelling and grammar are YOUR goiter.
Incidentally, an acquaintance of mine just recently was hired for a new job, despite submitting a resume and cover letter littered with spelling mistakes. He later learned that he was on a lower pay scale than the original job posting because of the poor spelling. He missed out on around $15K a year. You might think it unfair, but that is the world we're living in, and we adjust ourselves to the world, not the world to us.
And I find it pathetic that someone using words like "virii" and "postulates" insists on alternative spellings such as "apparantly" or "proproted" or "demonstratable". Your points are all very good, yet you're severely blunting them with your ignorant spelling. Remember, you're addressing the BBC, to whom BOTH content AND presentation matter equally, not some two-bit internet forum where members try to one-up each other in reforming English spelling. In fact, one could argue that to a stiff-upper-lip British institution like the BBC presentation matters almost more than content. You're merely confirming their stereotypes of and contempt for the geek community.
They implement the DCC system, which was first developed by Lenz in Germany and then made an official standard by the NMRA. They do make very high quality and expensive equipment. But my opinion of Marklin is marred by my memory of my childhood Marklin AC train set with the center pickup. I just never really cared for either the unrealistic center pickup, or the equally unrealistic jerk when reversing direction. I know their DCC systems won't have either issues, but old prejudices die hard.
> I believe that you can even control the switches with this system.
Most DCC systems also provide accessory decoders, which can be used to switch incandescent lights, LEDs, motors, relays, etc. You can automate just about anything on a layout with accessory decoders.
> the point is that linux didnt work out of the box, but the windows stuff did
Uh, not really. Windows itself maybe did, but his first attempt at a Windows PVR didn't. Besides, only once have I failed to boot Linux successfully on the first try, and that was this week with a MandrakeMove CD on a Dell Latitude. Knoppix worked fine on that same machine.
> having said all that, i think im just gonna buy a pvr
I've had TiVo for several years myself, despite being quite comfortable with Linux and Windows. For one, back then MythTV wasn't even a glimmer in its creator's eye, and furthermore I made the discovery long ago that wives aren't particularly tolerant of slipping IS schedules. Fiddling with a mosaic of software to do what TiVo does might eventually work, but by that time she will have long lost interest in the whole PVR thing. My office is full of half-started projects that eventually got preempted by others, and those by others...
> Nobody said this article was about using Linux to build a Tivo.
To quote the original article:
> Makes you wonder if current Linux PVR apps are just too much of a pain to get working well?
He never even got around to TRYING a Linux PVR, he gave up at not being able to INSTALL Linux properly. Now, Linux can be a bitch to get working for some things--including, ironically, actually successfully resolving all MythTV dependencies--but just getting a vanilla install running on current hardware? No offense, but come on! I'd have given him tons more credit if he had failed at successfully getting MythTV working.
for probably the largest digital layout in the world, check out this in Hamburg. Unfortunately it's only in German, but the pictures speak for themselves (click the logo to enter, then "Fotos" in the top menu, then any of the secondary menu items). The layout was designed fully digital from the beginning, with all accessories (cars, boars, cable cars etc.) also fully digitally controlled. These guys are true nerds that built a lot of the electronics themselves. The layout has cost over EUR4M so far.
His web site screams "tech moron". The bit killed me about never going to use the modem, and then proceeding to bend the case to make it fit anyway! He spends the first two thirds of the page meticulously documenting his incompetence in putting together hardware for all the world to see, then one paragraph on rebooting Linux and not everything working right away, and then off he goes into Windows bliss. And then the moral of the story is that Linux PVRs are not ready for prime time?! To quote Basil Fawlty, his wife clearly made a mistake.
> Devices like this, known generally as "reformers", have beeen in use for a decade at least.
My thoughts exactly. What's news about this, other than that the military are all of a sudden interested in fuel economy? A clean and compact/cheap reformer has been the holy grail of fuel cells for quite a while, I don't see anything Auburn has done to change that. Perhaps they just had the brilliant insight that there's hydrogen in them thar fossil fuels?
> In practice it will be heavier-than-air UAVs that will be used, > they are a more established technology than autonomous blimps
In military use perhaps, but not in reliable commercial use. Once you start charging people for this service that thing better be up there 24/7. I don't think there's any commercial precedent for this combination of technology, UAV/blimp/any-old-flying-platform and high speed bidirectional data communications. It's one thing for NASA or the military to brute-force a solution, it's quite another to advance it to off-the-shelf status for companies that have to actually make it pay for itself.
Keep in mind I'm not saying it's not possible. In fact, I'm pretty sure this will be very common technology in the future. I'm just saying that right now, today, I'd first concentrate on making wireless broadband work without the added complexity of a flying platform. So far I'm not aware of any large-scale wireless broadband installations that would prove a company's ability to operate and make such technology profitable. Where are all these providers? We keep reading articles about its imminence, but it's a little like nanotech--always another few years in the future.
The unproven technology is not the blimp itself but its autonomous control and endurance, a blimp that will reliably hover above the same spot on earth without a tether for weeks on end, possibly much longer. All while up- and downlinking high speed data streams. That combination is unproven so far on any sort of larger scale. I do appreciate your attempt at humour though.
This is just great. Now we have to wait for two emerging technologies to mature: wireless broadband AND autonomous blimps. Not to mention the integration and ground control thereof. It's not like they're not having a hard enough time deploying wireless broadband from the top of a steel pole on a hill--pretty reliable and established mounting technology in most parts of the world--now they have to do it from a floating platform that has been pie-in-the-sky (pardon the pun) for decades. Yeah, it will happen Really Soon Now!
More like "Ahhh, free energy!" At my previous job there was this guy with a BS in physics who was the most technically gullible person I ever met. He firmly believed that perpetuum mobili don't exist only because of government conspiracies. When reminded of the concept of preservation of energy, he scoffed at it as just the opinion of "one guy" or "the establishment".
Anyway, he found some plans on the internet for some pure magnetism motor that employed just the right complexity of gear arrangements and planetary motion to trick a set of rotating magnets into providing perpetual motion. He even brought the contraption to work one day--it consistend of some weird circular plywood sandwich with rotating metal bits inside, held together by some rusty bolts. His only concern was that the plywood wouldn't be strong enough to contain the vibrations and sheer energy released by the device, so he only considered it a "prototype". I agreed with his assessment and left the room fighting hysterical laughter.
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> I for one would love to peek around in this, more out of curiosity
Morbid curiosity perhaps. Considering the amount of backward compatibility in there, and the generations of tools and code frameworks used over the past decade and longer, I would expect the Windows code to be a BLOODY MESS. In fact it would probably be amusing to just grep for comments--"what does the next line do?!" or "what the h3ll were we thinking?!"
> So? If they don't get publicity, they're not worth fixing?
This attitude is EXACTLY what is making OS so popular and attractive. Even a small bug can drive someone out there eventually crazy enough to pick up the code and fix it. There's a famous feature in Word that pushes footnotes to subsequent pages if line spacing is anything other than single spacing. Only the footnote, mind you, not the anchor and the surrounding text. As it so happens, double-spaced text with footnotes is extremely prevalent in academia and other formal environments, making this feature very well known amongst grad students and such. But again, since this feature hasn't brought down entire computer networks and hasn't been mentioned by Tom Brokaw on the six-o-clock news, it's not worth Microsoft's time to fix. Even though it significantly impedes Word's primary purpose, that of creating documents.
Yeah, but being aware of that would require a knowledge and understanding on his part that he's simply not willing to acquire. Too many vendor luncheons and tee-a-thons to attend to spend time on "research".
> Uhhuh? So? They'll be fixed in the next release?
At the whip of the vendor. Which, in Microsoft's case can be never, unless the "hole" gets publicity on the evening news. There are serious--and well-documented and submitted--bugs in Word that have been there since the early '90s, with no obvious intention from MS to ever fix them.
> there is no fucking way I can live with a woman running infront of me.
And I thought that was the ONLY way to run...
> For individuals, there simply is no need for a different office suite.
And that is MAINLY because it's so EASY to get hold of a FREE copy of MS Office. Ironically the best thing that could happen to Linux and OOo would be for MS to start implementing some SERIOUS copy protection. Once all these legions of MS-enamoured Office fans can't get their fix for free anymore, they WILL start switching. After all, we're talking about people that scour pricegrabber.com for days on end to save $50 on that new notebook. Are these the kinds of people that you see plonking down $130 for an MS Office upgrade? As has been said again and again, MS is closing more than one eye to piracy for the sake of mindshare. Once MS software isn't "free" anymore, suddenly the lack of those other five border styles on a chart object doesn't seem all that important anymore. Plus, in academics, you might actually start to appreciate the free bibliography support in OOs--Endnote it may not be, but it's free and good enough for many users.
> Disney will continue to be the pre-eminate supplier of Children's content
Well, my 5 year old twins (and even more so my wife and I) enjoy SpongeBob more than anything else at the moment. Before that it was VeggieTales and Scooby-Doo. Now, in today's incestuous business world I don't actually know if any of these monies eventually do flow back to Disney anyway, but I'd like to at least think that that's not the case.
I meant his use of "big" words such as the fancy (and wrong) plural and "postulates". IOW he tries to sound educated yet stumbles on the basics of spelling and grammar.
> I really don't care as long as my points are understandable and valid
But that's exactly the point--you are undermining your real points and arguments with poor spelling and grammar. An educated person such as you are addressing with your original letter to the BBC is going to be seriously distracted by the presentation. It's like having a discussion with a person that has a goiter the size of a pumpkin hanging off their forehead. Ideally it should have no bearing on what the person has to say, but you just KNOW that you'd be staring at that goiter and miss half of what the person is saying. Well, your poor spelling and grammar are YOUR goiter.
Incidentally, an acquaintance of mine just recently was hired for a new job, despite submitting a resume and cover letter littered with spelling mistakes. He later learned that he was on a lower pay scale than the original job posting because of the poor spelling. He missed out on around $15K a year. You might think it unfair, but that is the world we're living in, and we adjust ourselves to the world, not the world to us.
And I find it pathetic that someone using words like "virii" and "postulates" insists on alternative spellings such as "apparantly" or "proproted" or "demonstratable". Your points are all very good, yet you're severely blunting them with your ignorant spelling. Remember, you're addressing the BBC, to whom BOTH content AND presentation matter equally, not some two-bit internet forum where members try to one-up each other in reforming English spelling. In fact, one could argue that to a stiff-upper-lip British institution like the BBC presentation matters almost more than content. You're merely confirming their stereotypes of and contempt for the geek community.
> Very cool, and, i suspect, much larger than the one in Hamburg
It does seem very large, though not necessarily the model train part.
> Though I've also been to Hamburg I don't remember this.
The Hamburg layout was only opened to the public in 2001.
> I like the attention given to detail.
Hey, what would Hamburg be without the red light district?
> Maerklin is the way to go!
They implement the DCC system, which was first developed by Lenz in Germany and then made an official standard by the NMRA. They do make very high quality and expensive equipment. But my opinion of Marklin is marred by my memory of my childhood Marklin AC train set with the center pickup. I just never really cared for either the unrealistic center pickup, or the equally unrealistic jerk when reversing direction. I know their DCC systems won't have either issues, but old prejudices die hard.
> I believe that you can even control the switches with this system.
Most DCC systems also provide accessory decoders, which can be used to switch incandescent lights, LEDs, motors, relays, etc. You can automate just about anything on a layout with accessory decoders.
> the point is that linux didnt work out of the box, but the windows stuff did
Uh, not really. Windows itself maybe did, but his first attempt at a Windows PVR didn't. Besides, only once have I failed to boot Linux successfully on the first try, and that was this week with a MandrakeMove CD on a Dell Latitude. Knoppix worked fine on that same machine.
> having said all that, i think im just gonna buy a pvr
I've had TiVo for several years myself, despite being quite comfortable with Linux and Windows. For one, back then MythTV wasn't even a glimmer in its creator's eye, and furthermore I made the discovery long ago that wives aren't particularly tolerant of slipping IS schedules. Fiddling with a mosaic of software to do what TiVo does might eventually work, but by that time she will have long lost interest in the whole PVR thing. My office is full of half-started projects that eventually got preempted by others, and those by others...
> Nobody said this article was about using Linux to build a Tivo.
To quote the original article:
> Makes you wonder if current Linux PVR apps are just too much of a pain to get working well?
He never even got around to TRYING a Linux PVR, he gave up at not being able to INSTALL Linux properly. Now, Linux can be a bitch to get working for some things--including, ironically, actually successfully resolving all MythTV dependencies--but just getting a vanilla install running on current hardware? No offense, but come on! I'd have given him tons more credit if he had failed at successfully getting MythTV working.
This picture is precious: Klitschko and a biker-looking dude demonstrating fine motor skills.
for probably the largest digital layout in the world, check out this in Hamburg. Unfortunately it's only in German, but the pictures speak for themselves (click the logo to enter, then "Fotos" in the top menu, then any of the secondary menu items). The layout was designed fully digital from the beginning, with all accessories (cars, boars, cable cars etc.) also fully digitally controlled. These guys are true nerds that built a lot of the electronics themselves. The layout has cost over EUR4M so far.
His web site screams "tech moron". The bit killed me about never going to use the modem, and then proceeding to bend the case to make it fit anyway! He spends the first two thirds of the page meticulously documenting his incompetence in putting together hardware for all the world to see, then one paragraph on rebooting Linux and not everything working right away, and then off he goes into Windows bliss. And then the moral of the story is that Linux PVRs are not ready for prime time?! To quote Basil Fawlty, his wife clearly made a mistake.
> Devices like this, known generally as "reformers", have beeen in use for a decade at least.
My thoughts exactly. What's news about this, other than that the military are all of a sudden interested in fuel economy? A clean and compact/cheap reformer has been the holy grail of fuel cells for quite a while, I don't see anything Auburn has done to change that. Perhaps they just had the brilliant insight that there's hydrogen in them thar fossil fuels?
> modern tanks run on Turbo-shaft engines
ONE major modern tank does so, the Abrams. Most others are diesel.
> In practice it will be heavier-than-air UAVs that will be used,
> they are a more established technology than autonomous blimps
In military use perhaps, but not in reliable commercial use. Once you start charging people for this service that thing better be up there 24/7. I don't think there's any commercial precedent for this combination of technology, UAV/blimp/any-old-flying-platform and high speed bidirectional data communications. It's one thing for NASA or the military to brute-force a solution, it's quite another to advance it to off-the-shelf status for companies that have to actually make it pay for itself.
Keep in mind I'm not saying it's not possible. In fact, I'm pretty sure this will be very common technology in the future. I'm just saying that right now, today, I'd first concentrate on making wireless broadband work without the added complexity of a flying platform. So far I'm not aware of any large-scale wireless broadband installations that would prove a company's ability to operate and make such technology profitable. Where are all these providers? We keep reading articles about its imminence, but it's a little like nanotech--always another few years in the future.
The unproven technology is not the blimp itself but its autonomous control and endurance, a blimp that will reliably hover above the same spot on earth without a tether for weeks on end, possibly much longer. All while up- and downlinking high speed data streams. That combination is unproven so far on any sort of larger scale. I do appreciate your attempt at humour though.
This is just great. Now we have to wait for two emerging technologies to mature: wireless broadband AND autonomous blimps. Not to mention the integration and ground control thereof. It's not like they're not having a hard enough time deploying wireless broadband from the top of a steel pole on a hill--pretty reliable and established mounting technology in most parts of the world--now they have to do it from a floating platform that has been pie-in-the-sky (pardon the pun) for decades. Yeah, it will happen Really Soon Now!
> Will they sell advertising painted on the sides of the airships?
No, because they're too high up to be legible. But they'll insert random redirects to their marketing sites into your HTML pages.
> "Ahhhhhhhhh, deep Juju!"
More like "Ahhh, free energy!" At my previous job there was this guy with a BS in physics who was the most technically gullible person I ever met. He firmly believed that perpetuum mobili don't exist only because of government conspiracies. When reminded of the concept of preservation of energy, he scoffed at it as just the opinion of "one guy" or "the establishment".
Anyway, he found some plans on the internet for some pure magnetism motor that employed just the right complexity of gear arrangements and planetary motion to trick a set of rotating magnets into providing perpetual motion. He even brought the contraption to work one day--it consistend of some weird circular plywood sandwich with rotating metal bits inside, held together by some rusty bolts. His only concern was that the plywood wouldn't be strong enough to contain the vibrations and sheer energy released by the device, so he only considered it a "prototype". I agreed with his assessment and left the room fighting hysterical laughter.