Yes, that is the essential problem... if the engine in your Volvo stalls, you don't fall to your very messy death (unless you drive off a cliff or something). Aircraft in regular use are in constant maintenance, and the cost of owning, operating, and maintaining such a 'personal helpcopter' would be prohibitive to all but the very wealthy... most of which already own Learjets, which are faster, and better known to aero-mechanics.;-)
The only upside is that, as I mentioned in another post, I doubt that thing can get more than five feet off the ground. That's an upside because you have a chance of surviving a fall.:-D
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You know, it's funny -- I thought the same thing. I checked out the pictures, and said, "finally, some proof of scientific advancement in the last fifty years. George Jetson would be proud." Sort of a bummer that it hasn't actually flown yet, though; for now it's just a big (but very cool looking) chair. It's the year 2000, and we may not have flying cars or moon colonies, but I'm willing to settle for a personal heli'.
However, from the looks of that contraption, you probably can't get more than five feet off the ground, and once you're up, I imagine you can't go much faster than a good sprinter. I didn't check out the rest of the site, so I'm not sure how fast/high they claim it can fly, but since it hasn't been used yet, my guess is as good as theirs.;-)
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I will testify against the entire Open Source community in exchange for a VAIO PCG-F590
. Are you listening, Sony?
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Re:UNIX as a programming environment
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
If it's the use of computers in businesses... go ask your friendly neighbourhood administrative assistant whether the graphical interface is irrelevant to his/her work - because that's where the business gets done, after all.
The UNIX admins at my office do everything from the console or telnet. A couple use the popular Win32 X client "Exceed", but only for the xterms.:) The NT admins use a GUI, but they don't have a choice in the matter. A GUI has never been necessary to properly admin a UNIX box, and that is a "plus". An NT server wastes countless megs on GUI crap which increases the hardware requirements and I've been told by NT admins that the integration of display code into the kernel in NT4 has reduced stability.
Check your facts. Notepad / Wordpad come free with Windows and are a long sight more powerful than vi if not due to features then due to their sheer usability.
*Ahem*... IMHO usability does not define power; would you argue that MacOS is the most powerful OS in the world because it's supposedly so easy to use? Notepad does not even come close to the power of vi... it doesn't even have regexp search and replace. I'll stop there because we're venturing dangerously close to provoking an editor flamewar.:)
As for "checking my facts", that shouldn't be too difficult, seeing as how I'm posting this from NT5. (I may be a UNIX goon, but I proudly dual-boot. GNU/Linux is great for development, but not for games.:) Yep, Notepad is here. Yep, it still sucks. Anything you'd like verified? Such as the "My Computer" icon or color of the taskbar?:-)
I mean, no offense, but have you ever really used vi? I've never met anyone who knows how to use it that would ever even dare to compare it to frikkin' Notepad. I even have vi installed in NT, on the off-chance that I have to edit anything.
Actually, UNIX has not even ventured where the money really is. As far as I know, Microsoft made its money by OEM'ing Windows into the great majority of all PC desktops out there, and they're not exactly poor.
UNIX runs some of the most powerful computers in the world. The market for mainframes and supercomputers predates the PC market, and will still exist even if McNeally's wet dream comes true and we're all using JavaStation NCs in ten years. I feel that the high-end will gradually regain its position of "where the money really is". And no one who has ever priced a fully loaded E10k or RS/6000 machine will tell you that there's no money in that market.:-)
Regardless, I can't think of when UNIX has ever even been strongly marketed as a PC desktop OS before the current GNU/Linux buzz. And there's the upcoming MacOS X. Unix (after a fashion) is slowly becoming a viable desktop OS for "average" users.
So yes, it's great for programming, but that doesn't make UNIX the Godly Kewl System of Everything That Gets The Chicks And The Money.
It doesn't always get the money, and almost never the chicks;), but UNIX as a whole (meaning the system design itself, and not individual vendors' specific implementations) has no competitors. What other OS can do as many things as well on as many platforms as UNIX?
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UNIX as a programming environment
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
It's actually a pretty good discussion of what components a modern OS needs beyond a kernel and a shell.
Anyone who sees UNIX as just a kernel and shell probably hasn't used it. Even without a windowing system (GUIs are irrelevant to majority of business computing tasks), UNIX is the most full-featured, flexible, and powerful OS available today.
Yes, UNIX is an operating system.
It's also been marketed as a "programming environment", which I think is another accurate way of looking at it. People often shoot me strange looks when I scream "IDE? UNIX is my IDE!" with glee (possibly because I was in a bus station), but it is. UNIX and Unix-workalikes are the only operating systems today that where you don't have to pay extra for powerful text editors (a la vi), powerful search-and-replace tools (a la grep, awk, and sed), and a suite of compilers. (Okay, to be fair, you usually will pay extra for a C compiler on a commercial UNIX system, but it's assumed to be a standard tool. If you don't want to pay, get EGCS.) These are all traditional programmer's tools. Add to this a reference manual of system calls, and the fact that the interface in itself is a programming language (sh/ksh), and it's no doubt that UNIX and Unix-workalikes are favored by hackers everywhere.
As a WWW applications developer, being a UNIX goon has an added benefit: 90% of what I develop is deployed in UNIX environments. Design and implementation are both accelerated by the fact that I'm developing on a machine practically identical to the RS/6000 (AIX 4.3) production boxen. What other OS is possibly suitable as both a programmer's toolkit and Enterprise deployment platform?
I may come off as a zealot, but no other OS has succeeded so totally in almost every market it has ventured into: file server, web server, mail server, timesharing system, router/firewall, database server, high-end graphics, systems and application development - the list goes on and on. The high-end of almost every existing computing market is dominated by UNIX in different flavors. In recent years Microsoft and Apple have taken a chunk of the UNIX workstation market, but UNIX is still relatively unchallenged where the money really is.
UNIX will not outperform operating systems designed for very specific tasks or around specific hardware systems, but this shortcoming is more than made up for in versatility and (with the advent of POSIX) portability.
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What happened to those 80's game designers, anyway?
Well, the half that isn't employed by McDonald's Coporation (or a subsidiary) is reportedly working on a TI-83 port of "Drug Wars 2: Extreme Doobiesmack".
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So I assume Slashdot has officially embraced this as the "hot" topic of the fall? How many mentions of this in the past two days? Three? Four? Are you sure that posting a new story everytime some Geocities page adds someone's Microsoft/Linux insider info isn't just manufacturing news? You know, like you did with the MS/DoJ trial a few months back? Explain to me again how you can laugh at those Mac rumour sites? Hey, Hemos, here's a rumour for you: I hear Bill Gates killed Steve Jobs fifteen years ago and has been living two lives ever since. I expect you to make this a front-page news item within the next hour. Or maybe something like...
Microsoft/Mainsoft Porting to Linux - Follow-up, Part 2 Posted by Hemos on Saturday August 19, @01:15AM
from the its-true-because-i-say-so dept. Reportedly Bill Gates observed two Emperor penguins while visting a zoo with his child today. Several respected minds in the GNU/Linux community (most notably, CmdrTaco from Slashdot and **5kull-R4p3R** from #l337erthanthou) have interpreted this as a sign that Microsoft is indeed dumping the NT platform and migrating to Linux. Oh, shit, I'm getting verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: the woman I married is very familiar with both woe and men. Discuss.
I'll have to add this to my "News from the Linux frontlines" serial post.
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***********************************************
Help The_Messenger make Slashdot better!
Looking to help clueless newbies.
Current need: keep your sig to four lines or less, asshole. Ever heard of "netiquette?"
I'd ask you to e-mail me, but I get enough spam.
***********************************************
I'm rather tired at the moment, and I won't remember this tomorrow, so feel free to make your first impression again then.:) Welcome to/.
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PHBs are too busy making retarded PowerPoint presentations (which I think is some kind of PHB national pasttime) to realize that we installed Slackware on the new Dell boxen.
during these PowerPoint presentations, developers are able to reclaim lost sleep during the pointless transition animations.
it provides an upgrade path for HyperCard shops.
Visual Basic is a good product because
it allows the mentally handicapped to obtain high-paying jobs as "para-programmers".
it provides employment for male quadriplegics whose only marketable skill is the ability to click a mouse (with their penises).
it is the language of choice for demonstrating the poor security of Microsoft software, thereby convincing IT managers to dump Windows.
I didn't click the link, but I'll assume that Linus gave similar reasons. Any questions?
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Real end users do not have a strong opinion on the GPL or QPL.
Hear, hear! I love debating licensing issues, and they are very important to me as a developer, but as an end-user, I couldn't care less! I'm currently posting from an NT5 box which I just upgraded to MSIE 5.5 via the "Windows Update" feature. When that "PLEASE CAREFULLY READ THIS LICENSE INFORMATION BLAH BLAH BLAH" box popped up, I clicked "I Agree" without even a second's thought. Hell, I may have just clicked a legally binding contract allowing Microsoft to scan my disks and giving Bill Gates the right to eat my first-born child, but I have no idea. I may seem to be awfully trusting, especially considering this is Microsoft (who most people on this site consider more evil than Satan, and almost as evil as Kathy Lee), but the sad truth is that I am a lazy bastard whose most energetic response to those license click-to-agree dialogue boxes is a vaguely Python-esque "Get on with it!"
PS - I think this not uncommon. Perhaps even RMS himself hastily clicks away those license-boxes too, when he sits home using his blueberry iMac (naked, of course. how's that for imagery?).
PPS - What? You think RMS uses GNU/Linux as a desktop OS? Of course not... only morons like ESR do that, right? RMS is too busy thinking of more ways to convince universities and major corporations that because he wrote Emacs and GCC, they should pay for him to live like a twenty-year college student. Ah, the life-long academic, how quaint... btw, all of you "RMS is a commie" trolls should know that RMS recently took a trip to the PRC. Links to photos are on his website.
PPPS - I have nothing against RMS. He's a sexy, sexy man, and I use Emacs almost everyday. It's quite a fine OS, although Unix has a better text-editor.
PPPPS - It's been a long week. Perhaps I should stop posting inane comments on Slashdot and go to bed.
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I installed Mandrake+KDE on my home desktop machine because I promised my wife that Linux would look almost exactly like windows.
Wow, she's got you pussy-whipped good... so your wife tells you what window manager to use? That's harsh. You ought to be glad I'm not Cartman, who would say, "You'll use the command-line and like it, bitch! Now get your ass in the kitchen and make me some pie!" Thankfully, I'm not Cartman, so our female readers (both of them) won't have to read that and start PMSing at me.
(I'm pressing my luck today. But I'm not going to worry about it.)
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Very insightful comments (hint hint moderators)... but I'd like to comment on your last point:
GNOME feels to unix-ey, and not very Mac-ey or Window-ey. Part of this is in the design purposely, most of the GNOME creators are UNIX people, who are used to writing UNIX software in motif.
I think the difference is that the KDE team is willing to admit they're ripping off Apple, Microsoft, and the Open Group. GNOME stills believes they're fresh and original. To me, GNOME feels like an attempt at a compromise beween the Windows 95 GUI and a window manager like AfterStep (speaking as an AfterStep fan)... and an unprofessional attempt at that... all due respect to Miguel "Yo Quiero Childsex" de Icazza and crew, but GNOME still feels like an unfinished hack. (Yes! Blatant flamebait! Bite me, fanboys!) KDE, whatever gripes I have with it, just "feels" complete. No, the GNOME creators aren't UNIX people, they're Linux people, which is an important distinction... the distinction is implied professionalism. (Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but "UNIX" stills means something to me.) I see this professionalism in KDE. I hope that Sun and HP reconsider this decision. To be honest, I don't see how a group of corporate computer professionals could use both and pick GNOME. I'd love to hear their reasoning, although I fear it would turn out to be something like "Well, Red Hat uses GNOME, and Red Hat is Linux, right? So GNOME is good. KDE is bad because 'KDE' is similar to 'CDE', which we'd like to forget."
(Btw, I've heard a lot of negative things about CDE in this discussion, but frankly it rocks both KDE and GNOME in terms of stablity, consistency, and OS integration. As I've ranted about before, Solaris 8 with CDE is a living, working example of user-friedly UNIX; an aquaintence who used to do Sun marketing used it as his desktop OS while employed there with no trouble (and I'll emphasize he is not a hacker).)
This post has surely come off as flamebait, and I'll live with that. I like what I see so far in GNOME, but it's not quite polished... give it another six months and I may change my mind.
It's funny... I'm an AfterStep man at heart, but I use KDE for my day-to-day work in GNU/Linux. I'm not completely happy, but I get more work done. Which is the same reason I do Java development in NT. Why is this relevant? Because Sun and HP's software is meant for just that: getting work done. That's why I question their judgement.
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Try setting up a regular POP account and using the Exchange server's name as the incoming and outgoing (SMTP) server. I've been able to access my Exchange mail this way from Netscape's client as well as Outlook Express (seems to work much better with the latter; imagine that!). You can't use the special calendar or scheduling functions, and possibly the company-wide address book, but you may be able to read and send mail. If it doesn't like your username/password, try checking/unchecking the "secure/automatic password authenication" (sorry, forget exactly what it says) box. I think when that is enabled the client tries to authenticate using your NT login, and some Exchange installations will only accept this type of authentication... sorry, I'm not a big Windows guy. Maybe someone more knowledgable can confirm/deny?
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And that damn new "Geek Groupie" (i.e., want to appear smart but nothing intelligent to say) messageboard just pisses me off. I stopped reading a week after they started that crap. I quickly got annoyed with scrolling down and seeing insightful comments such as "Wow, geeks are so cool! Lnuix (whatever) rools! =) P.S. - Pitr is awesome!" and then about a thousand "I agree!!!!" replies. Sure, I didn't have to scroll down... but it's like a car crash. A '79 Chevy Stupidity colliding with a '92 Mitsubishi Poseur.
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Slashdot Mirror
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All generalizations are false.
The only upside is that, as I mentioned in another post, I doubt that thing can get more than five feet off the ground. That's an upside because you have a chance of surviving a fall. :-D
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Portman, grits, and ass pictures
Having no life sucks
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The tragedy, of course, is that posts 2-5 and 5-10 will likely be killed in the inevitable nuclear conflict. War is hell.
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However, from the looks of that contraption, you probably can't get more than five feet off the ground, and once you're up, I imagine you can't go much faster than a good sprinter. I didn't check out the rest of the site, so I'm not sure how fast/high they claim it can fly, but since it hasn't been used yet, my guess is as good as theirs. ;-)
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(I believe the punchline is, "Neither will a VAIO." Bada bing.)
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The UNIX admins at my office do everything from the console or telnet. A couple use the popular Win32 X client "Exceed", but only for the xterms. :) The NT admins use a GUI, but they don't have a choice in the matter. A GUI has never been necessary to properly admin a UNIX box, and that is a "plus". An NT server wastes countless megs on GUI crap which increases the hardware requirements and I've been told by NT admins that the integration of display code into the kernel in NT4 has reduced stability.
*Ahem*... IMHO usability does not define power; would you argue that MacOS is the most powerful OS in the world because it's supposedly so easy to use? Notepad does not even come close to the power of vi... it doesn't even have regexp search and replace. I'll stop there because we're venturing dangerously close to provoking an editor flamewar. :)
As for "checking my facts", that shouldn't be too difficult, seeing as how I'm posting this from NT5. (I may be a UNIX goon, but I proudly dual-boot. GNU/Linux is great for development, but not for games. :) Yep, Notepad is here. Yep, it still sucks. Anything you'd like verified? Such as the "My Computer" icon or color of the taskbar? :-)
I mean, no offense, but have you ever really used vi? I've never met anyone who knows how to use it that would ever even dare to compare it to frikkin' Notepad. I even have vi installed in NT, on the off-chance that I have to edit anything.
UNIX runs some of the most powerful computers in the world. The market for mainframes and supercomputers predates the PC market, and will still exist even if McNeally's wet dream comes true and we're all using JavaStation NCs in ten years. I feel that the high-end will gradually regain its position of "where the money really is". And no one who has ever priced a fully loaded E10k or RS/6000 machine will tell you that there's no money in that market.Regardless, I can't think of when UNIX has ever even been strongly marketed as a PC desktop OS before the current GNU/Linux buzz. And there's the upcoming MacOS X. Unix (after a fashion) is slowly becoming a viable desktop OS for "average" users.
It doesn't always get the money, and almost never the chicks---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
Anyone who sees UNIX as just a kernel and shell probably hasn't used it. Even without a windowing system (GUIs are irrelevant to majority of business computing tasks), UNIX is the most full-featured, flexible, and powerful OS available today.
Yes, UNIX is an operating system.
It's also been marketed as a "programming environment", which I think is another accurate way of looking at it. People often shoot me strange looks when I scream "IDE? UNIX is my IDE!" with glee (possibly because I was in a bus station), but it is. UNIX and Unix-workalikes are the only operating systems today that where you don't have to pay extra for powerful text editors (a la vi), powerful search-and-replace tools (a la grep, awk, and sed), and a suite of compilers. (Okay, to be fair, you usually will pay extra for a C compiler on a commercial UNIX system, but it's assumed to be a standard tool. If you don't want to pay, get EGCS.) These are all traditional programmer's tools. Add to this a reference manual of system calls, and the fact that the interface in itself is a programming language (sh/ksh), and it's no doubt that UNIX and Unix-workalikes are favored by hackers everywhere.
As a WWW applications developer, being a UNIX goon has an added benefit: 90% of what I develop is deployed in UNIX environments. Design and implementation are both accelerated by the fact that I'm developing on a machine practically identical to the RS/6000 (AIX 4.3) production boxen. What other OS is possibly suitable as both a programmer's toolkit and Enterprise deployment platform?
I may come off as a zealot, but no other OS has succeeded so totally in almost every market it has ventured into: file server, web server, mail server, timesharing system, router/firewall, database server, high-end graphics, systems and application development - the list goes on and on. The high-end of almost every existing computing market is dominated by UNIX in different flavors. In recent years Microsoft and Apple have taken a chunk of the UNIX workstation market, but UNIX is still relatively unchallenged where the money really is.
UNIX will not outperform operating systems designed for very specific tasks or around specific hardware systems, but this shortcoming is more than made up for in versatility and (with the advent of POSIX) portability.
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Damn. You have a pretty fucking big desk.
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All generalizations are false.
I'll have to add this to my "News from the Linux frontlines" serial post.
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All generalizations are false.
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All generalizations are false.
***********************************************
Help The_Messenger make Slashdot better!
Looking to help clueless newbies.
Current need: keep your sig to four lines or less, asshole. Ever heard of "netiquette?"
I'd ask you to e-mail me, but I get enough spam.
***********************************************
I'm rather tired at the moment, and I won't remember this tomorrow, so feel free to make your first impression again then. :) Welcome to /.
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All generalizations are false.
Visual Basic is a good product because
I didn't click the link, but I'll assume that Linus gave similar reasons. Any questions?
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
PS - I think this not uncommon. Perhaps even RMS himself hastily clicks away those license-boxes too, when he sits home using his blueberry iMac (naked, of course. how's that for imagery?).
PPS - What? You think RMS uses GNU/Linux as a desktop OS? Of course not... only morons like ESR do that, right? RMS is too busy thinking of more ways to convince universities and major corporations that because he wrote Emacs and GCC, they should pay for him to live like a twenty-year college student. Ah, the life-long academic, how quaint... btw, all of you "RMS is a commie" trolls should know that RMS recently took a trip to the PRC. Links to photos are on his website.
PPPS - I have nothing against RMS. He's a sexy, sexy man, and I use Emacs almost everyday. It's quite a fine OS, although Unix has a better text-editor.
PPPPS - It's been a long week. Perhaps I should stop posting inane comments on Slashdot and go to bed.
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All generalizations are false.
(I'm pressing my luck today. But I'm not going to worry about it.)
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All generalizations are false.
(Btw, I've heard a lot of negative things about CDE in this discussion, but frankly it rocks both KDE and GNOME in terms of stablity, consistency, and OS integration. As I've ranted about before, Solaris 8 with CDE is a living, working example of user-friedly UNIX; an aquaintence who used to do Sun marketing used it as his desktop OS while employed there with no trouble (and I'll emphasize he is not a hacker).)
This post has surely come off as flamebait, and I'll live with that. I like what I see so far in GNOME, but it's not quite polished... give it another six months and I may change my mind.
It's funny... I'm an AfterStep man at heart, but I use KDE for my day-to-day work in GNU/Linux. I'm not completely happy, but I get more work done. Which is the same reason I do Java development in NT. Why is this relevant? Because Sun and HP's software is meant for just that: getting work done. That's why I question their judgement.
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Sheeze... AC-hating morons...
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And that damn new "Geek Groupie" (i.e., want to appear smart but nothing intelligent to say) messageboard just pisses me off. I stopped reading a week after they started that crap. I quickly got annoyed with scrolling down and seeing insightful comments such as "Wow, geeks are so cool! Lnuix (whatever) rools! =) P.S. - Pitr is awesome!" and then about a thousand "I agree!!!!" replies. Sure, I didn't have to scroll down... but it's like a car crash. A '79 Chevy Stupidity colliding with a '92 Mitsubishi Poseur.
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All generalizations are false.
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All generalizations are false.