A generic PEM fuel cell doesn't run backwards. I can't remember the technical reasons why, but I worked in a fuel cell lab, and the stuff we were working on didn't have the potential to run backwards. There are different designs that do have this ability (called "regenerative fuel cells"), but I think the catalyst is different, making it less optimal for the regular forward use. Also, very important issues in fuel cells are the humidification of hydrogen and the flow distribution to the PEM, both of which are optimized for one direction or the other. Most work so far has been on fuel cell power generation, not fuel cell hydrogen generation. All the hydrogen right now comes from electrolysis of water or hydrocarbon sources.
One application where the fuel cell will have to run both ways is the Helios Project, where they want to fly a solar plane for 96 hours at above 50,000 feet.
So a company can make a proprietary product (no source code, not free) based on Mozilla if they just link to the libraries and don't change any of the code?
That is, if they don't get put off by RMS & co. ESR is doing the right thing
with opensource.org (and his involvement with Mozilla) to work together
with companies and solve their problems.
I agree that ESR is doing good things, and there is no doubt that RMS can be a turn-off, especially for business types.
Is Mozilla copyleft or similarly restricted? Can a company take Mozilla parts and make a closed application? I don't know. When people don't use standard licenses, I don't have the time to spend an hour trying to parse the legaleze.
I'm actually working on a compiler, so I'll check out the Jikes parser generator.
I found this in the Jikes parser generator FAQ:
The release of JikesTM Parser Generator does not establish a policy for the rest of IBM
outside of Research, nor does it define a standard Source License for Research. Other
Source agreements from IBM, including IBM Research, if and when they do come, are
likely to be more restrictive with respect to commercial use -- we are allowing almost any
use for Jikes because we believe it benefits the Java community and doesn't give away
any intellectual property.
In other words, if they were afraid of giving away intellectual property, they would be using a more restrictive license such as the Qt license, or not open-sourcing at all.
This scenario, where companies are a big force in open source and many
open source developers will actually get paid, will not happen with GPL. It
(rightfully IMO) scares the shit out of managers. They will just keep their
programmers on closed sourced projects, instead of assigning them to
open source work.
What are some examples of companies investing a significant amount of money in a BSD project? Seems to me like most companies would be more afraid of BSD projects, because if they make project X the bomb, their competitors can swoop in for nothing and make an even better application out of it.
Here is the free software I use daily which was developed in large part by companies:
Xwindows (is this similar to BSD?)
Netscape (definitely not BSD)
StarOffice (definitely not BSD)
SourceForge (no way)
KDE/Qt (nope again)
It looks to me like most companies would prefer to use a more restrictive license such as the GPL to make sure their competitors can't benefit from their code. In other words: companies are more likely to take from BSD, and more likely to give to GPL.
At my office (I'm a graduate student), we were pulling our hair out with the RedHat RPM bug in 6.2, so we tried Debian. Debian has everything you are looking for, and it's free. You can also keep Debian up to date for free:
# apt-get update
# apt-get dist-upgrade
It's really that simple. With Debian, you can also choose where you want to be on the new/stable tradeoff. Debian stable is great for running servers that need uptimes of months or years. Debian testing is what we use, because it has fairly new packages and almost never crashes (uptime > 30 days average for us). Debian unstable has very up-to-date packages.
However, after some 60 years of
steadily increasing government involvement, it seems that the more
government gets involved, the less good it does. Indeed, it seems, at
least to some people, to be doing more harm than good.
There is a reason that George Will, as a conservative, can't get it straight. Conservatives for the most part want government to stay out of the way of business. However, they don't want government out of the way
with whether or not I grow marijuana on my property
with my sexual practices
My point is, the libertarians are the only group who are honest about their dislike of government. The conservatives and the liberals just want to use the power of government in different ways.
The anti-trust laws are so vague that merely breaking the
law is a matter of opinion.
Yeah, but it's the opinion of four pretty important judges that Microsoft did in fact break that law. As the "law and order" types like to say: If you don't like the law, get off your butt and change it.
Personally, I like the anti-trust laws and will fight you if you try.
When I rip CDs myself I use lame at 192 for rock, 256 or higher for classical. I should have said 128 kbps with a decent encoder sounds decent. I agree that it doesn't sound good. It's a shame that emusic uses Xing. I guess only a small percentage of people will even know the difference, but those are also the same small percentage of people they want to sell this service to!
I have been considering signing up with Emusic, but before I hand over my credit card there are a couple of questions I have:
I know all their tracks are 128 kbps. This doesn't tell me a whole lot. A good codec at 128 sounds great, Xing on fast mode at 128 sounds terrible.
I have a T1 connection. How quickly will I be able to grab an album? I'm assuming they have bandwidth throttling, but how slow is it? Do they crank it way down so you can't grab dozens of albums in an hour?
Needless to say, the answers to these questions are not on the emusic.com web site...
I bet more doctoral dissertations are written in Word than anything else.
I don't know if that is true or not. However, I do know people who have lost significant portions of their dissertations thanks to Word. I have never heard of anyone losing parts of a LaTeX document.
I also know that Word slows to a crawl and crashes a lot when working with a dissertation-sized document.
I have used it for about six months now for medium-size (50 pages) technical documents in graduate school. I have had great success with it all except one occasion when it would not load the document without segfaulting. I have dozens of macros in the document, though, and when I moved them around (the.lyx source files are ASCII text) it fixed the problem.
It has all the power of LaTeX, and can be picked up in a couple of days. You can send PDFs to people and generate web pages.
I haven't used it much with CVS, but since the.lyx source files are basically just LaTeX with some additional macro thrown in, I'm guessing it would work well.
If Dmitry didn't commit the crime (and I hate to break it to you, but he did), then Dmitry can sue for libel. Since he did commit the crime, I bet he won't be suing.
If that is the case, why isn't he being prosecuted? Why would the prosecutor drop a winnable case, after going through all this trouble already?
How about putting up some actual numbers on your web site? I don't see the rates or setup fees on anything, so I really don't have any way to compare your service, do I?
I could be wrong, but the last time I researched fuel cells, I got the
impression that a properly designed cell could ingest propane, methane,
etc. directly.
You're probably thinking of the high-temperature ceramic fuel cells. These can basically combine the functions of a "reformer" (which extracts hydrogen from hydrocarbons) with the functions of the fuel cell, because of the high temperature.
I think Ballard makes polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells, which operate at around 80 Celcius (the membrane is basically teflon). These fuel cells can only run on hydrogen, or methanol at greatly reduced power density and greatly increased catalyst loading.
I worked in a fuel cell lab with a similar setup to the one you are describing. However, we once developed a small leak, and over a couple of hours, it raised the hydrogen concentration to 25% of the lower explosive limit (which is around 5%, right?). Certainly gave me an appreciation of the risk. Perhaps you didn't see the response because you were only testing for a few minutes, and the hydrogen was dispersing very quickly.
Natural gas is not as dangerous in a house because the lower explosive limit is higher, plus there is hydrogen sulfide added, which alerts the humans. Hydrogen sulfide kills fuel cell membranes though, so it can't be added to hydrogen for fuel cell use.
Seriously, I'd done some fuel cell research a couple of years
back and one of the biggest problems the people doing it faced was
regulating the flow of hydrogen & oxygen.
I have also worked on fuel cell research, and I agree that this is the biggest problem. The storage tanks for hydrogen are pretty safe at this point, although if they do rupture for some reason, it's bad news. The big problem is that it is hard to keep the oxygen and hydrogen separated with 100% certainty, 100% of the time. Small fires in large fuel cells were common, at least in the research setting. It's not really a problem for research work, and it usually just destroys the cell where it happens without causing a large fire, but you can't have it happening in a plane.
Now, realistically speaking, after a few years only the most rabid control freaks continue to care about how
their old code is used, so it's really all a moot point anyway except in the short term (1-5 years).
Try distributing some commercial Unix code from the 80s and you'll find out who cares how their old code is used. The GNU tools are mostly older than five years, and people still use them. Same with BSD stuff.
I was waiting for a flight at DC National airport watching the planes go in and out from the observation area. A 747 with "UPS" on the side pulled in nearby, and the cargo bay door (which was about 15 feet off the ground) opened. Before long, large boxes came flying out of the cargo bay, falling at least 10-15 feet down to the shuttle. Some of them bounced, some didn't. They unloaded the whole cargo this way as I watched.
All the "power users" who think CLIs are more efficient because it seems like it takes less time would do well to try making some objective speed measurements with a stopwatch.
It depends on what you are doing. For many simple tasks, I agree with you that GUIs are better, and I actually prefer them if it is possible to use one. Here are some tasks that I would challenge you to accomplish using a GUI:
Regular expression search in a document
Repeating an action with slight changes, like what you can do with a bash script
Anything complicated enough to require programming. There are visual programming languages (like LabView). Why aren't they used for more software if it's easier?
There are just a million things that I want to do with a computer that can't be done with a modern GUI. Without a grammar, how can you describe an extremely complex action or condition?
Slashdot Mirror
One application where the fuel cell will have to run both ways is the Helios Project, where they want to fly a solar plane for 96 hours at above 50,000 feet.
So a company can make a proprietary product (no source code, not free) based on Mozilla if they just link to the libraries and don't change any of the code?
That's the hardest I've laughed in a long time. Thanks.
I agree that ESR is doing good things, and there is no doubt that RMS can be a turn-off, especially for business types.
Is Mozilla copyleft or similarly restricted? Can a company take Mozilla parts and make a closed application? I don't know. When people don't use standard licenses, I don't have the time to spend an hour trying to parse the legaleze.
I'm actually working on a compiler, so I'll check out the Jikes parser generator.
I found this in the Jikes parser generator FAQ:
The release of JikesTM Parser Generator does not establish a policy for the rest of IBM outside of Research, nor does it define a standard Source License for Research. Other Source agreements from IBM, including IBM Research, if and when they do come, are likely to be more restrictive with respect to commercial use -- we are allowing almost any use for Jikes because we believe it benefits the Java community and doesn't give away any intellectual property.
In other words, if they were afraid of giving away intellectual property, they would be using a more restrictive license such as the Qt license, or not open-sourcing at all.
What are some examples of companies investing a significant amount of money in a BSD project? Seems to me like most companies would be more afraid of BSD projects, because if they make project X the bomb, their competitors can swoop in for nothing and make an even better application out of it.
Here is the free software I use daily which was developed in large part by companies:
Xwindows (is this similar to BSD?)
Netscape (definitely not BSD)
StarOffice (definitely not BSD)
SourceForge (no way)
KDE/Qt (nope again)
It looks to me like most companies would prefer to use a more restrictive license such as the GPL to make sure their competitors can't benefit from their code. In other words: companies are more likely to take from BSD, and more likely to give to GPL.
At my office (I'm a graduate student), we were pulling our hair out with the RedHat RPM bug in 6.2, so we tried Debian. Debian has everything you are looking for, and it's free. You can also keep Debian up to date for free:
# apt-get update
# apt-get dist-upgrade
It's really that simple. With Debian, you can also choose where you want to be on the new/stable tradeoff. Debian stable is great for running servers that need uptimes of months or years. Debian testing is what we use, because it has fairly new packages and almost never crashes (uptime > 30 days average for us). Debian unstable has very up-to-date packages.
Huh? Maybe you should read up on your political theory a bit. You're making the criticism given to anarchists, not libertarians.
There is a reason that George Will, as a conservative, can't get it straight. Conservatives for the most part want government to stay out of the way of business. However, they don't want government out of the way
My point is, the libertarians are the only group who are honest about their dislike of government. The conservatives and the liberals just want to use the power of government in different ways.
Yeah, but it's the opinion of four pretty important judges that Microsoft did in fact break that law. As the "law and order" types like to say: If you don't like the law, get off your butt and change it.
Personally, I like the anti-trust laws and will fight you if you try.
When I rip CDs myself I use lame at 192 for rock, 256 or higher for classical. I should have said 128 kbps with a decent encoder sounds decent. I agree that it doesn't sound good. It's a shame that emusic uses Xing. I guess only a small percentage of people will even know the difference, but those are also the same small percentage of people they want to sell this service to!
I haven't played with docbook yet, but there's one requirement I have that is a must:
Can docbook generate complex math equations?
I don't know if that is true or not. However, I do know people who have lost significant portions of their dissertations thanks to Word. I have never heard of anyone losing parts of a LaTeX document.
I also know that Word slows to a crawl and crashes a lot when working with a dissertation-sized document.
One more vote for LyX here...
.lyx source files are ASCII text) it fixed the problem.
.lyx source files are basically just LaTeX with some additional macro thrown in, I'm guessing it would work well.
I have used it for about six months now for medium-size (50 pages) technical documents in graduate school. I have had great success with it all except one occasion when it would not load the document without segfaulting. I have dozens of macros in the document, though, and when I moved them around (the
It has all the power of LaTeX, and can be picked up in a couple of days. You can send PDFs to people and generate web pages.
I haven't used it much with CVS, but since the
If that is the case, why isn't he being prosecuted? Why would the prosecutor drop a winnable case, after going through all this trouble already?
How about putting up some actual numbers on your web site? I don't see the rates or setup fees on anything, so I really don't have any way to compare your service, do I?
You're probably thinking of the high-temperature ceramic fuel cells. These can basically combine the functions of a "reformer" (which extracts hydrogen from hydrocarbons) with the functions of the fuel cell, because of the high temperature.
I think Ballard makes polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells, which operate at around 80 Celcius (the membrane is basically teflon). These fuel cells can only run on hydrogen, or methanol at greatly reduced power density and greatly increased catalyst loading.
I worked in a fuel cell lab with a similar setup to the one you are describing. However, we once developed a small leak, and over a couple of hours, it raised the hydrogen concentration to 25% of the lower explosive limit (which is around 5%, right?). Certainly gave me an appreciation of the risk. Perhaps you didn't see the response because you were only testing for a few minutes, and the hydrogen was dispersing very quickly.
Natural gas is not as dangerous in a house because the lower explosive limit is higher, plus there is hydrogen sulfide added, which alerts the humans. Hydrogen sulfide kills fuel cell membranes though, so it can't be added to hydrogen for fuel cell use.
I didn't realize breaking and entering or trespassing were felonies in most states...
So are you saying the record companies are taking a loss on every cassette sold?
I have also worked on fuel cell research, and I agree that this is the biggest problem. The storage tanks for hydrogen are pretty safe at this point, although if they do rupture for some reason, it's bad news. The big problem is that it is hard to keep the oxygen and hydrogen separated with 100% certainty, 100% of the time. Small fires in large fuel cells were common, at least in the research setting. It's not really a problem for research work, and it usually just destroys the cell where it happens without causing a large fire, but you can't have it happening in a plane.
Try distributing some commercial Unix code from the 80s and you'll find out who cares how their old code is used. The GNU tools are mostly older than five years, and people still use them. Same with BSD stuff.
I was waiting for a flight at DC National airport watching the planes go in and out from the observation area. A 747 with "UPS" on the side pulled in nearby, and the cargo bay door (which was about 15 feet off the ground) opened. Before long, large boxes came flying out of the cargo bay, falling at least 10-15 feet down to the shuttle. Some of them bounced, some didn't. They unloaded the whole cargo this way as I watched.
That's their fault for not using Debian.
It depends on what you are doing. For many simple tasks, I agree with you that GUIs are better, and I actually prefer them if it is possible to use one. Here are some tasks that I would challenge you to accomplish using a GUI:
There are just a million things that I want to do with a computer that can't be done with a modern GUI. Without a grammar, how can you describe an extremely complex action or condition?