they were so strong up to the early 1990's. then...argggh.
company i was working for replaced a couple compaq/sco boxes with a bunch of nt machines (ten or so). performance was degraded for quite awhile.
last i heard (i no longer work there) things are much better. but the owner was miffed that although he eliminated the $40K/yr sco licensing, he ended up paying something a little over $100k to mshaft when the conversion was over (ten fully loaded, legal nt boxes ain't cheap).
i saw something about benchmarks in another post, i wonder how well oracle is doing with improving linux?
without improved db support/performance under linux, mshaft is going to bulldoze sco. of course, even coming close makes linux/sco/oracle a good option, if they can keep the price reasonable.
uh, can anyone name a commercial software product that is certified for such use?
not apple, not mshaft, not qnx, not linux, not sun, not irix, not...any of them. all of their products have this disclaimer.
one particularly famous one was shipped with IE 4.01 (i think) the disclaimer read similarly, but was about "Sun Microsystems Java". okay, let me make this clear: no company has a commercial software product certified for use in the above scenarios.
typically, such software is part of an "integrated whole" and certified at the systemic level.
i used to write s/w for a medical device that could possibly kill, if something went wrong. it ran dos 5.0, so there you go. microsoft never certified it for that use. it cleared the FDA at the system level by showing the variety of ways it detected errors and notified the operator of same.
seriously, i remember NASA saying they knew there were a dozen or so serious flaws with MPL that were discovered "during the flight".
okay, it's too late to fix it, so we're covered, right?
that's some serious arrogance, folks. if the tests were falsified, as the report states, that should be "prison time" for someone. maybe some inmate will send a nice big probe to uranus.
NASA, you might want to start reviewing designs *before* the construction and launch of your probes. just an idea.
on the other hand, the MPL was supposed to be some kind of "industry validation" using low bidders and COTS technology. you sure saved the tax payers a lot of money! just think, we could have payed three times as much for a probe that worked! you still have two freebies to go using this logic!
the job shortage is a myth created so the larger companies can bring in pros from overseas and have them work here.
some of the russian, german, indian h1b's i've worked with are *extremely* skilled, and work tirelessly.
others are...ahem, as bad as the worst american programmer, actually worse because of poor language skills. their so-called degrees are worthless.
by creating the myth of a shortage, it makes it easier for companies to pressure congress into letting in overseas talent.
additionally, it keeps the pump primed -- "wow, keannu reaves(sp) was cool in the matrix, i wanna be a programmer, no problem getting a job! the paper says so!"
the last company i worked for got (literally) 200-300 resumes submitted for each opening. they whittled those down to the top ten or so, then interviewed those final candidates.
so, nearly everyone in the industry does the old "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" at the so-called "IT Shortage". It's a joke to pressure congress and keep people exciting about being a programmer.
the reality is, programmers are odd, uncomfortable people that most normals don't want to be around. yeech. i guess it's the same for lawyers, or whatever.
a lot of people tell me about these doom 'n' gloom articles, and i have to admit that (historically) the stronger segments of society have benefitted greatly by raping/plundering the weaker. The evidence is simply overwhelming, and it continues to this day.
therefore, as information becomes a commodity, instead of creating manufactured goods, it may be that humans are simply an obsolete, surplus herd-of-animal on the planet -- except for the powerful -- they will continue in splendor, as they always have.
the kinks in all this are: the current economy is built on oil; expensive oil. nearly every procedure or process must take into consideration the expense of energy that will be required for the endeavour; that is, "will the energy costs render this project unprofitable? if so, shelf it."
when the earth runs out of oil in thirty or so years, many beleive two revolutions will occur: fusion and high density electron storage ("ultracapacitor"). It may be that we will have energy "too cheap to meter".
if this is the case, why not build a obscenely energy inneficient factory that makes complete houses? and have a cyclotron making gold for the toilet seats...and machines that use inordinate amounts of energy to create the best permanent magnets ever...that power aircraft?
farmers, truckers, trains, planes, cars, a/c, lights -- all for a fraction of the cost today. massive automated factories could grow food automagically and be built/taken care of by robots. similarly, the moon could be terrformed, with the question of "energy" being placed behind the question of technology.
food replicators? ibm already has machines that move individual atoms around. with nearly infinite energy available, perhaps it will be possible to create tacos out of dog turds (you try it first, though). or perhaps a bucket of steaming hot grits, and mae lin mak or a natalie portman to go (petrified, for your increased pleasure).
so, the opposite may be true. we may be on the brink of nearly infinite leasure, homes for everyone, food for the asking, permananet vactions.
'spose you write closed source...for whatever reason.
TrollTech: A set of libraries; $1550 per developer.
Microsoft: Visual C++ Pro AND W2K. About $500 per developer, for both.
My sources: The trolltech webpage and pricewatch.com
I think the price for Qt is ridiculous. Borland sold their stuff to anyone, for $49.99, at a time when the cheapest alternatives were over a thousand. Phillipe Kahn is still a very rich man. The way they (Troll and KDE) keep yapping about the "QPL" is sickening. The Qt libs do not even have a value of a Borland product, let alone MSHAFT.
Really, I know a lot of people don't like to hear it, but far too many Linux OS and add-on companies are guaging their price structures off of Microsoft, Borland and Apple.
Here's some news for you: your product only runs on a few percent of the world's machines, if that. Stop staring at your P&L and get the products out for low cost so developers can use them.
You are killing Linux, which wouldn't exist without people like RMS and Linus, who were selfless and knew they would have to give for a long time before the rewards came back.
i am suprised at how mny people think motorola can just walk away from it and leave them for some type of free use.
this system requires a lot of maintenance both on the ground and in the sky. very expensive. not to mention replacements.
and $5B "wasted"? i dunno. MOT does/has done some very cool things. not everything turns out as planned! i tend to agree with other posters that this one got too far along before they pulled the plug. so goes it.
voice over 2400 baud does sound rather impressive...anyone heard the quality? how does it sound? maybe MOT will open source the algorithm?
...would be to fire the people who wrote that lame ass encryption routine, and hire these two guys as consultants to come in and upgrade the software every time it gets hacked.
because it will get hacked eventually.
and it would be cheaper than attorneys.
and their crappy software should be as easy to upgrade as norton antivirus or whatever.
heheh...that's a funny cartoon. appropriate for the topic, too.
but i must say, my first project was writing a serial port driver for a cp/m machine. back then, we used to laugh about how crappy dos was, and how the junky pc's would take 20 years to be as powerful and flexible as a s-100 and cp/m.
well, that was 1982 -- 18 years ago. about a year ago, a working cp/m machine was found in a secretary's office. it finally refused to boot, and someone from the help desk came and took a look at it. she had a notebook of sorts going back through several secretaries and about 15 years. the notes explained how to use the software and the machine. the help desk people were stunned. of course, cpm died many years earlier than anyone thought.
we used to also say unix was a dinosaur and would die within years. we thought unix would never outlast that modern digital research operating system. who needed multiuser/tasking when you had cheap $10K machines to throw at anything that needed one? one s-100 per hundred employees was approaching overkill. anything more was a useless waste of technology.
unix is pretty entrenched. the steep learning curve (like mshaft doesn't have one) leaves the phb's in terror. they want mshaft to sooth them with "look at all the mcse's, look at them, easy replacements for your overpaid employees". some employers believe the rhetoric, some still think it's the people that make a company work -- and a good, loyal employee is worth a lot.
times change. i've been seeing more and more of the "microsoft strut" going on lately. it's the kind of thing people do when they read something like "internet week", and see all those microsoft ads and glowing reviews of W2K, and all the testosterone-laced comments from stevie ballmer about freedom, innovation and vigor, and the various nimrod bylines. they kind of "get high" on it, and walk around repeating the things they read like some kind of holy mantra.
of course, i have a dark side of my personality, so as i listen to the speech, i can almost see the shirt turning brown, and see the swastika, and i think of that "bill gates as hitler" jpeg that everyone loves -- if i really relax, i can almost hear a german accent describing how much money microsoft will save us. it's kinda fun.
of course, the last company i worked for went microsoft. they had the pleasure of transitioning from a system with a bunch of cheap pcs and two unix servers, to a bunch of NT servers and a slew of high end pcs. their "microsoft bill" (software licensing) was $150,000.00 -- $100,000 more that for the proprietary unix machines.
overall, i wish i had done something other than be a programmer. i was pretty good at biology; i think i would be happier there at this point. i really dislike seeing my industry on the front page of all the magazines, and having my profession described by the various microsoft pundits as being overpaid, protecting my job by utilizing a mystic/cryptic technology, etc.
who knows what the future will hold. when i first started programming, they used to say any idiot could do it, and programmers would never be paid more than $10 USD an hour. they also said women were far better at it, and that nearly all future programmers would be women. women worked harder, were more stable, and easier to get a along with than men.
yes, i was thinking i might be able to pursuade them to open the source and obviate the need for the license, but it (honestly) would have to be reviewed by our parent company and our lawyers...and that's expensive, too -- maybe more expensive than the trolltech qt libraries in the first place.
plus, the code is literally useless for anyone without our hardware or the proprietary code from the third parties (which we could never release).
with the w2k/vc++ option, we don't have to release the useless (to anyone else) code, it's almost 1/4th the price, the phb's are happy cuz they chose MS, no legal review, arrrrghhh.
i can tell i'm screwed. by this time next year, i bet we'll be switching to mshaft, and there won't be a thing i can do about it.
kde/qt just won't acknowedge how much they are hurting small tech companies. we don't want to go mshaft, but we just don't have any choice. we have masses of c++ code that would be kind of a bear to move to gtk. it's easier to sell phb's on kde than gnome. the programmers want gui builders and c++, and they're (increasingly) tired of linux's promises.
of course, i'll never stop fighting...but if they throw a fat dual pIII compaq on my desk with 1/2 gb. of ram, w2k, and vc++, i won't really have much choice but to just get on with it.
hi, from the troll page the qt lib license is $1550.00 for one developer.
from pricewatch.com, W2K pro is $138.00 and Visual C++ pro is $250.00
so, unfortunately, i was way off. the situation is worse than i said! I can set up a developer with a legal copy of W2K and VC++ Pro for $388 or pay trolltech $1550 for a set of libraries.
yeah, i hear you. but the powers-that-be already want cheap pc's. so cross platform fades away.
as far as getting what we pay for, there is just no way for me to write "$1200 per developer" on a p.o. and get way with it. it won't happen.
why? cuz we have several win2k/vc++ enthusiasts here, who want us to skip even trying linux. they would just laugh at the cross platform/eye candy argument. it would get torn to nothing in our meetings.
seriously, the OOD state of linux is not holding up very well. and it's the direct fault of trolltech, qt, and even kde for failing to acknowledge how many opportunities are lost to linux because of their licensing issues.
i can hardly beleive the situation is as bad as it is. an os, developed and given away for free, but the (arguably) best tools and desktop for it are held hostage by a small company that charges more than twice that of Microsoft for a lesser product.
with Microsoft, you get a complete OS, popular leading compilation/debugging that many developers already know, a plethora of VC++ books, etc. your end result runs on 90% of the desktops, and PHB's like it.
with qt, i'm eventually lost. there's nothing i can do for linux except cross my fingers and hope something develops (sorry) before MS takes everything. we lost a couple more open servers here to MS with the W2K rollout in the last week.
it's like ballmer says: they are just taking their time and picking away at unix. if it keeps happening, linux will fall too, once MS controls the big servers.
without an MFC-like OOD environment to develop in, that is a higher value than MSHAFT, we're screwed. trolltech is really hurting linux. i write this msg. everytime i see a qt or kde post, but no one listens.
look, i'll apologize up front for the people who get angry, but i have to ask:
has there been any movement, any at all, toward a free "qt" replacement? something like "gt" or whatever?
C++ needs to be available for Linux. I like Gtk and gnome, and Vdk/VdkBuilder, but I think KDE is better.
my employer writes proprietary s/w for our custom/low volume hardware sales. we only have a few installations, and the code doesn't run anywhere else. Some of our linked code is completely proprietary anyway. We can't release the source.
it literally costs 2X the Microsoft solution if we want to use KDE (the licensing of the Qt libs is more than twice the cost of W2K + Visual C++ pro).
If something has changed at TrollTech, I apologize for posting this. But it used to be something like $1200 per developer.
Please post some news on this if you know of any progress in this area. From my perspective, every day qt remains non-free is another day forward for Microsoft.
unfortunately, humanity does tend to focus on the accumulation of power/control by any means necessary.
nanotechnology and ai will open a lot of doors to the saddam husseins, hitlers, stalins of the future.
it's a catch 22 though. if we (ie the free world) aren't the leader, then you can be sure some country like red china or iraq will jump in and try to go for the power grab.
so there is no way to "just quit". the fact is, if you quit someone will fill the void. hopefully not someone who thinks a lot *more* like ted krackzinski!
actually, depending on the controller used, they are more enjoyable to drive. reduced vibration, and no more likely to "light up" the tires than if you floor it in a gas junker.
like any chemical vehicle, tire issues are a function of design, there is no inherent cause for the problems of tire wear, etc. The torque is from the applied current, which must be controlled properly.
as far as energy density, there are many threads spun off the article that mention this as being the primary issue holding back evs.
i completely disagree with your assertions for any chem burner being better than an electric motor for ev's.
electricity is clean, efficient and safe to transport. your hydrogen is not. it may be that chemical combustion will be used at the remote plant, where it can be carefully monitored, tuned and upgraded, but i honestly hope you are wrong.
it makes no sense to have a chem burner under the hood of millions upon millions of vehicles, when a single electric motor will, with some advances in energy density, do everything you need.
the point you are missing is that by using a remote powerplant to do the heat exchange/burn, you lose all constraints on size, rpm and cosmetic issues that vehicles have.
for example, the design team working on the engine can make it run ultra efficient at a single rpm, wrap all the tubing in heat shields, use a flywheel the size of a house, etc. -- none of which can be done on a little car.
Additionally, if someone comes out with a new way to burn coal, that is far cleaner and more efficient, you can replace the powerplant *now*, and (in effect) instantly upgrade the power source of millions of vehicles.
technology shifts, and it remains to be seen if some kind of "ultra capacitor" will come down the pike and make evs surpass the gas junk in every way. afaik, the best ultracapitors are at about 1/3 the density of lead acid batteries, which have about 1/10th the energy density of gasoline (this is from memory so cut me some slack here).
i think they need to get about a 30x increase in ultra capacitor density before all the issues fade and we get some real cars on the road.
energy density has always been the issue holding back evs. the poster said pulling the heat exchanger away from the vehicle has the benefit of allowing multiple "plug and play" fuel options. my point was that you also lose the size, weight, rpm and cosmetic restrictions placed on vehicles; thus you can make ultra efficient heat exchangers and emission controls that do not have to be hampered by real world vehicle designs. thus coal (or any other fuel) can be much more efficiently and cleanly burned in a large power plant. as far as flywheels, electric vehicles have no need for them. a flywheel stores energy on a combustion engine, which is used for several purposes, but the primary use is smoothing the pulses from the fuel explosions. electric vehicles have no such issue.
when you "abstract the fuel burn" away from the vehicle, you do more than allow choice of primary fuel. you also lose weight and size restrictions. thus, your hypothetical power plant can have state of the art stacks and scrubbers that (done right) have a very low impact on the environment.
gasoline's energy density is far greater than any battery. thus, a drag racer can go through a quarter mile with a half gallon or less of fuel.
the batteries in this vehicle weigh many times the weight of that fuel.
in actuality, a electric motor has power characteristics far superior than any heat echanger/gas engine. the only reason they are not is wide use for moving people is the energy density problem.
...you'll love seeing $1.80 a gallon for the stinky toxic gasoline that you fill your car with every time you go to the pump.
electric motors are in every way superior to gasoline engines. as few as a single moving part, lifetimes in the range of 250K miles, and the torque curve of an electric motor is better than any gas engine ever built. when you kink in an electric motor, it's solid torque from 0 rpm to [in some cases] over 15k rpm -- no gas engine can do that. transmissions are not even used on many electrics -- except for reverse. no need to constantly adjust the drive ratio to match the pathetic powerband of the gas junker.
it the energy density/storage that's killing evs. just no way to store all those electrons in anything close to an efficient way. the energy density of chemical fuel is many times that of even the best theoretical batteries.
it's a shame, cuz gas engines are a horrid relic of the past. having a heat pump under the hood is a big waste. better to do the conversion at the remote power station, where you can make the engines ultra efficient at one rpm and let 'em spin. you can also put good stacks/scrubbers on a power station that limit emissions, no room on gas junk.
hopefully, someone will have a storage solution ready before too much longer. maybe right about the time fusion goes online! that would so rock.
gasoline==fur==meat==(death&&poison) although i still eat meat. too tasty. sorry.
can't borland hire someone who can write an article that stays on topic? it was pretty good, then all the sudden he starts yapping about "the window manager being closer to windows than unix" and "linux being a clone of something old from a long time ago" and "people involved in linux who don't know the technological history of it" and on and on -- nothing to do with delphi at all. if that isn't bad enough, some of it is just wrong. everything in any gui system can trace it's roots to xerox parc or mit, not apple or mshaft. it's doesn't matter what they look like now. I only use xfce, and that looks like CDE, not an apple or a microsoft. none of my friend's desktops look like apple or mshaft. it was a dumb thing to write. why should anyone need to know the technological history of mshaft, apple or linux to comment on it? this is america, after all. from what i've heard, linux has a lot of features that are fairly unlike any unix system. i can run way more desktops, desktops far more capable than an mshaft or apple system. yet he says nothing abou that. he's whining about whiners. well, at least he's honest. but he oughta focus more on his job rather than whine about the customer base. that's pathetic and unprofessional. so what's professional? ibm and jikes, plus remember how they wrote that paper on improving the threading scheduler under linux? that's about people doing good work and giving back. that was a professional, on-topic paper. this guy was just venting at the user base because of his personal issues or something.
if i worked for riaa/mpaa/whatever. their palace is crumbling around them.
they might be kicking ass this year, and for a few more, but unless something drastic happens sales will start to drop radically as average bandwidth-to-consumer increases.
when it gets as easy (and fast) to send entire songs or videos as it does to attach a jpeg, they're completely screwed.
i maintained a small sheet music archive for a choir for a short time, and one of my responsibilities was maintaining 75 legal copies of sheet music for the chorale.
It was just a little paperwork -- find the publisher, call them, get the cost, get the check cut/signed and send it in.
While waiting for the order to come in, we did rehearsals with photocopies. Of course, this was a legit org that did things the "right way". I bet a lot of sheet music gets copied all over the place, with no fees paid whatsoever.
Realistally, in the future, i don't see a lot of people paying $1.25 or whatever per song, regardless of format or distribution vehicle. There's a fat ghost in the machine that's getting ready to drop on the music industry.
maybe artists will make their money off touring, or merchandise? dunno. but i think mutimedia (audio/video/whatever) will eventually be free. i don't see a way to stop it.
Maybe they can sell the things through industry websites. $1.00 a song or whatever, and be harsh with unauthorized servers. That seems realistic. They can use the same search tools, and nab the piraters/illegal napsters. Friends sharing mp3's quietly will be something they have to live with.
after all, when the last time you saw a site allowing public downloads of win95, that is easily found by the average surfer?
Slashdot Mirror
they were so strong up to the early 1990's. then...argggh.
company i was working for replaced a couple compaq/sco boxes with a bunch of nt machines (ten or so). performance was degraded for quite awhile.
last i heard (i no longer work there) things are much better. but the owner was miffed that although he eliminated the $40K/yr sco licensing, he ended up paying something a little over $100k to mshaft when the conversion was over (ten fully loaded, legal nt boxes ain't cheap).
i saw something about benchmarks in another post, i wonder how well oracle is doing with improving linux?
without improved db support/performance under linux, mshaft is going to bulldoze sco. of course, even coming close makes linux/sco/oracle a good option, if they can keep the price reasonable.
uh, can anyone name a commercial software product that is certified for such use?
not apple, not mshaft, not qnx, not linux, not sun, not irix, not...any of them. all of their products have this disclaimer.
one particularly famous one was shipped with IE 4.01 (i think) the disclaimer read similarly, but was about "Sun Microsystems Java". okay, let me make this clear: no company has a commercial software product certified for use in the above scenarios.
typically, such software is part of an "integrated whole" and certified at the systemic level.
i used to write s/w for a medical device that could possibly kill, if something went wrong. it ran dos 5.0, so there you go. microsoft never certified it for that use. it cleared the FDA at the system level by showing the variety of ways it detected errors and notified the operator of same.
seriously, i remember NASA saying they knew there were a dozen or so serious flaws with MPL that were discovered "during the flight".
okay, it's too late to fix it, so we're covered, right?
that's some serious arrogance, folks. if the tests were falsified, as the report states, that should be "prison time" for someone. maybe some inmate will send a nice big probe to uranus.
NASA, you might want to start reviewing designs *before* the construction and launch of your probes. just an idea.
on the other hand, the MPL was supposed to be some kind of "industry validation" using low bidders and COTS technology. you sure saved the tax payers a lot of money! just think, we could have payed three times as much for a probe that worked! you still have two freebies to go using this logic!
the job shortage is a myth created so the larger companies can bring in pros from overseas and have them work here.
some of the russian, german, indian h1b's i've worked with are *extremely* skilled, and work tirelessly.
others are...ahem, as bad as the worst american programmer, actually worse because of poor language skills. their so-called degrees are worthless.
by creating the myth of a shortage, it makes it easier for companies to pressure congress into letting in overseas talent.
additionally, it keeps the pump primed -- "wow, keannu reaves(sp) was cool in the matrix, i wanna be a programmer, no problem getting a job! the paper says so!"
the last company i worked for got (literally) 200-300 resumes submitted for each opening. they whittled those down to the top ten or so, then interviewed those final candidates.
so, nearly everyone in the industry does the old "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" at the so-called "IT Shortage". It's a joke to pressure congress and keep people exciting about being a programmer.
the reality is, programmers are odd, uncomfortable people that most normals don't want to be around. yeech. i guess it's the same for lawyers, or whatever.
a lot of people tell me about these doom 'n' gloom articles, and i have to admit that (historically) the stronger segments of society have benefitted greatly by raping/plundering the weaker. The evidence is simply overwhelming, and it continues to this day.
therefore, as information becomes a commodity, instead of creating manufactured goods, it may be that humans are simply an obsolete, surplus herd-of-animal on the planet -- except for the powerful -- they will continue in splendor, as they always have.
the kinks in all this are: the current economy is built on oil; expensive oil. nearly every procedure or process must take into consideration the expense of energy that will be required for the endeavour; that is, "will the energy costs render this project unprofitable? if so, shelf it."
when the earth runs out of oil in thirty or so years, many beleive two revolutions will occur: fusion and high density electron storage ("ultracapacitor"). It may be that we will have energy "too cheap to meter".
if this is the case, why not build a obscenely energy inneficient factory that makes complete houses? and have a cyclotron making gold for the toilet seats...and machines that use inordinate amounts of energy to create the best permanent magnets ever...that power aircraft?
farmers, truckers, trains, planes, cars, a/c, lights -- all for a fraction of the cost today. massive automated factories could grow food automagically and be built/taken care of by robots. similarly, the moon could be terrformed, with the question of "energy" being placed behind the question of technology.
food replicators? ibm already has machines that move individual atoms around. with nearly infinite energy available, perhaps it will be possible to create tacos out of dog turds (you try it first, though). or perhaps a bucket of steaming hot grits, and mae lin mak or a natalie portman to go (petrified, for your increased pleasure).
so, the opposite may be true. we may be on the brink of nearly infinite leasure, homes for everyone, food for the asking, permananet vactions.
who knows?
'spose you write closed source...for whatever reason.
TrollTech: A set of libraries; $1550 per developer.
Microsoft: Visual C++ Pro AND W2K. About $500 per developer, for both.
My sources: The trolltech webpage and pricewatch.com
I think the price for Qt is ridiculous. Borland sold their stuff to anyone, for $49.99, at a time when the cheapest alternatives were over a thousand. Phillipe Kahn is still a very rich man. The way they (Troll and KDE) keep yapping about the "QPL" is sickening. The Qt libs do not even have a value of a Borland product, let alone MSHAFT.
Really, I know a lot of people don't like to hear it, but far too many Linux OS and add-on companies are guaging their price structures off of Microsoft, Borland and Apple.
Here's some news for you: your product only runs on a few percent of the world's machines, if that. Stop staring at your P&L and get the products out for low cost so developers can use them.
You are killing Linux, which wouldn't exist without people like RMS and Linus, who were selfless and knew they would have to give for a long time before the rewards came back.
Wake up, Trolls.
make it into a beowolf cluster running seti@home.
(sorry)
i am suprised at how mny people think motorola can just walk away from it and leave them for some type of free use.
this system requires a lot of maintenance both on the ground and in the sky. very expensive. not to mention replacements.
and $5B "wasted"? i dunno. MOT does/has done some very cool things. not everything turns out as planned! i tend to agree with other posters that this one got too far along before they pulled the plug. so goes it.
voice over 2400 baud does sound rather impressive...anyone heard the quality? how does it sound? maybe MOT will open source the algorithm?
...would be to fire the people who wrote that lame ass encryption routine, and hire these two guys as consultants to come in and upgrade the software every time it gets hacked.
because it will get hacked eventually.
and it would be cheaper than attorneys.
and their crappy software should be as easy to upgrade as norton antivirus or whatever.
these two folks did mattel a favor!
heheh...that's a funny cartoon. appropriate for the topic, too.
but i must say, my first project was writing a serial port driver for a cp/m machine. back then, we used to laugh about how crappy dos was, and how the junky pc's would take 20 years to be as powerful and flexible as a s-100 and cp/m.
well, that was 1982 -- 18 years ago. about a year ago, a working cp/m machine was found in a secretary's office. it finally refused to boot, and someone from the help desk came and took a look at it. she had a notebook of sorts going back through several secretaries and about 15 years. the notes explained how to use the software and the machine. the help desk people were stunned. of course, cpm died many years earlier than anyone thought.
we used to also say unix was a dinosaur and would die within years. we thought unix would never outlast that modern digital research operating system. who needed multiuser/tasking when you had cheap $10K machines to throw at anything that needed one? one s-100 per hundred employees was approaching overkill. anything more was a useless waste of technology.
unix is pretty entrenched. the steep learning curve (like mshaft doesn't have one) leaves the phb's in terror. they want mshaft to sooth them with "look at all the mcse's, look at them, easy replacements for your overpaid employees". some employers believe the rhetoric, some still think it's the people that make a company work -- and a good, loyal employee is worth a lot.
times change. i've been seeing more and more of the "microsoft strut" going on lately. it's the kind of thing people do when they read something like "internet week", and see all those microsoft ads and glowing reviews of W2K, and all the testosterone-laced comments from stevie ballmer about freedom, innovation and vigor, and the various nimrod bylines. they kind of "get high" on it, and walk around repeating the things they read like some kind of holy mantra.
of course, i have a dark side of my personality, so as i listen to the speech, i can almost see the shirt turning brown, and see the swastika, and i think of that "bill gates as hitler" jpeg that everyone loves -- if i really relax, i can almost hear a german accent describing how much money microsoft will save us. it's kinda fun.
of course, the last company i worked for went microsoft. they had the pleasure of transitioning from a system with a bunch of cheap pcs and two unix servers, to a bunch of NT servers and a slew of high end pcs. their "microsoft bill" (software licensing) was $150,000.00 -- $100,000 more that for the proprietary unix machines.
overall, i wish i had done something other than be a programmer. i was pretty good at biology; i think i would be happier there at this point. i really dislike seeing my industry on the front page of all the magazines, and having my profession described by the various microsoft pundits as being overpaid, protecting my job by utilizing a mystic/cryptic technology, etc.
who knows what the future will hold. when i first started programming, they used to say any idiot could do it, and programmers would never be paid more than $10 USD an hour. they also said women were far better at it, and that nearly all future programmers would be women. women worked harder, were more stable, and easier to get a along with than men.
it can be rather difficult to predict the future.
yes, i was thinking i might be able to pursuade them to open the source and obviate the need for the license, but it (honestly) would have to be reviewed by our parent company and our lawyers...and that's expensive, too -- maybe more expensive than the trolltech qt libraries in the first place.
plus, the code is literally useless for anyone without our hardware or the proprietary code from the third parties (which we could never release).
with the w2k/vc++ option, we don't have to release the useless (to anyone else) code, it's almost 1/4th the price, the phb's are happy cuz they chose MS, no legal review, arrrrghhh.
i can tell i'm screwed. by this time next year, i bet we'll be switching to mshaft, and there won't be a thing i can do about it.
kde/qt just won't acknowedge how much they are hurting small tech companies. we don't want to go mshaft, but we just don't have any choice. we have masses of c++ code that would be kind of a bear to move to gtk. it's easier to sell phb's on kde than gnome. the programmers want gui builders and c++, and they're (increasingly) tired of linux's promises.
of course, i'll never stop fighting...but if they throw a fat dual pIII compaq on my desk with 1/2 gb. of ram, w2k, and vc++, i won't really have much choice but to just get on with it.
hi, from the troll page the qt lib license is $1550.00 for one developer.
from pricewatch.com, W2K pro is $138.00 and Visual C++ pro is $250.00
so, unfortunately, i was way off. the situation is worse than i said! I can set up a developer with a legal copy of W2K and VC++ Pro for $388 or pay trolltech $1550 for a set of libraries.
bummer. it got worse.
dunno what it has to do with certification, but it can be illegal to be a monopoly.
for example, some years ago a radio/tv conglomerate owned too many radio and tv stations. there is a law that establishes a limit on this.
the doj forced them to sell several stations. i don't think it even went to court, the law is very clear.
thus, some monopolies are illegal.
yeah, i hear you. but the powers-that-be already want cheap pc's. so cross platform fades away.
:-(
as far as getting what we pay for, there is just no way for me to write "$1200 per developer" on a p.o. and get way with it. it won't happen.
why? cuz we have several win2k/vc++ enthusiasts here, who want us to skip even trying linux. they would just laugh at the cross platform/eye candy argument. it would get torn to nothing in our meetings.
seriously, the OOD state of linux is not holding up very well. and it's the direct fault of trolltech, qt, and even kde for failing to acknowledge how many opportunities are lost to linux because of their licensing issues.
i can hardly beleive the situation is as bad as it is. an os, developed and given away for free, but the (arguably) best tools and desktop for it are held hostage by a small company that charges more than twice that of Microsoft for a lesser product.
with Microsoft, you get a complete OS, popular leading compilation/debugging that many developers already know, a plethora of VC++ books, etc. your end result runs on 90% of the desktops, and PHB's like it.
with qt, i'm eventually lost. there's nothing i can do for linux except cross my fingers and hope something develops (sorry) before MS takes everything. we lost a couple more open servers here to MS with the W2K rollout in the last week.
it's like ballmer says: they are just taking their time and picking away at unix. if it keeps happening, linux will fall too, once MS controls the big servers.
without an MFC-like OOD environment to develop in, that is a higher value than MSHAFT, we're screwed. trolltech is really hurting linux. i write this msg. everytime i see a qt or kde post, but no one listens.
it's just like mshaft, no one listens.
look, i'll apologize up front for the people who get angry, but i have to ask:
has there been any movement, any at all, toward a free "qt" replacement? something like "gt" or whatever?
C++ needs to be available for Linux. I like Gtk and gnome, and Vdk/VdkBuilder, but I think KDE is better.
my employer writes proprietary s/w for our custom/low volume hardware sales. we only have a few installations, and the code doesn't run anywhere else. Some of our linked code is completely proprietary anyway. We can't release the source.
it literally costs 2X the Microsoft solution if we want to use KDE (the licensing of the Qt libs is more than twice the cost of W2K + Visual C++ pro).
If something has changed at TrollTech, I apologize for posting this. But it used to be something like $1200 per developer.
Please post some news on this if you know of any progress in this area. From my perspective, every day qt remains non-free is another day forward for Microsoft.
Thx,
S.D.
The Professional Linux OpenCertification Project.
(PLOP).
just take the overall structure of the existing certifications and have the kommunity come up with realistic Q&A.
host it on valinux; it's free to study all questions and answers.
when you want to take the test, log in through a secure browser, pay valinux, and if you pass they send you a cert.
What so "wrong" with this picture?
unfortunately, humanity does tend to focus on the accumulation of power/control by any means necessary.
nanotechnology and ai will open a lot of doors to the saddam husseins, hitlers, stalins of the future.
it's a catch 22 though. if we (ie the free world) aren't the leader, then you can be sure some country like red china or iraq will jump in and try to go for the power grab.
so there is no way to "just quit". the fact is, if you quit someone will fill the void. hopefully not someone who thinks a lot *more* like ted krackzinski!
actually, depending on the controller used, they are more enjoyable to drive. reduced vibration, and no more likely to "light up" the tires than if you floor it in a gas junker.
like any chemical vehicle, tire issues are a function of design, there is no inherent cause for the problems of tire wear, etc. The torque is from the applied current, which must be controlled properly.
as far as energy density, there are many threads spun off the article that mention this as being the primary issue holding back evs.
i completely disagree with your assertions for any chem burner being better than an electric motor for ev's.
electricity is clean, efficient and safe to transport. your hydrogen is not. it may be that chemical combustion will be used at the remote plant, where it can be carefully monitored, tuned and upgraded, but i honestly hope you are wrong.
it makes no sense to have a chem burner under the hood of millions upon millions of vehicles, when a single electric motor will, with some advances in energy density, do everything you need.
the point you are missing is that by using a remote powerplant to do the heat exchange/burn, you lose all constraints on size, rpm and cosmetic issues that vehicles have.
for example, the design team working on the engine can make it run ultra efficient at a single rpm, wrap all the tubing in heat shields, use a flywheel the size of a house, etc. -- none of which can be done on a little car.
Additionally, if someone comes out with a new way to burn coal, that is far cleaner and more efficient, you can replace the powerplant *now*, and (in effect) instantly upgrade the power source of millions of vehicles.
technology shifts, and it remains to be seen if some kind of "ultra capacitor" will come down the pike and make evs surpass the gas junk in every way. afaik, the best ultracapitors are at about 1/3 the density of lead acid batteries, which have about 1/10th the energy density of gasoline (this is from memory so cut me some slack here).
i think they need to get about a 30x increase in ultra capacitor density before all the issues fade and we get some real cars on the road.
energy density has always been the issue holding back evs. the poster said pulling the heat exchanger away from the vehicle has the benefit of allowing multiple "plug and play" fuel options. my point was that you also lose the size, weight, rpm and cosmetic restrictions placed on vehicles; thus you can make ultra efficient heat exchangers and emission controls that do not have to be hampered by real world vehicle designs. thus coal (or any other fuel) can be much more efficiently and cleanly burned in a large power plant. as far as flywheels, electric vehicles have no need for them. a flywheel stores energy on a combustion engine, which is used for several purposes, but the primary use is smoothing the pulses from the fuel explosions. electric vehicles have no such issue.
when you "abstract the fuel burn" away from the vehicle, you do more than allow choice of primary fuel. you also lose weight and size restrictions. thus, your hypothetical power plant can have state of the art stacks and scrubbers that (done right) have a very low impact on the environment.
it's not the motor, it's the batteries.
gasoline's energy density is far greater than any battery. thus, a drag racer can go through a quarter mile with a half gallon or less of fuel.
the batteries in this vehicle weigh many times the weight of that fuel.
in actuality, a electric motor has power characteristics far superior than any heat echanger/gas engine. the only reason they are not is wide use for moving people is the energy density problem.
...you'll love seeing $1.80 a gallon for the stinky toxic gasoline that you fill your car with every time you go to the pump.
electric motors are in every way superior to gasoline engines. as few as a single moving part, lifetimes in the range of 250K miles, and the torque curve of an electric motor is better than any gas engine ever built. when you kink in an electric motor, it's solid torque from 0 rpm to [in some cases] over 15k rpm -- no gas engine can do that. transmissions are not even used on many electrics -- except for reverse. no need to constantly adjust the drive ratio to match the pathetic powerband of the gas junker.
it the energy density/storage that's killing evs. just no way to store all those electrons in anything close to an efficient way. the energy density of chemical fuel is many times that of even the best theoretical batteries.
it's a shame, cuz gas engines are a horrid relic of the past. having a heat pump under the hood is a big waste. better to do the conversion at the remote power station, where you can make the engines ultra efficient at one rpm and let 'em spin. you can also put good stacks/scrubbers on a power station that limit emissions, no room on gas junk.
hopefully, someone will have a storage solution ready before too much longer. maybe right about the time fusion goes online! that would so rock.
gasoline==fur==meat==(death&&poison) although i still eat meat. too tasty. sorry.
can't borland hire someone who can write an article that stays on topic? it was pretty good, then all the sudden he starts yapping about "the window manager being closer to windows than unix" and "linux being a clone of something old from a long time ago" and "people involved in linux who don't know the technological history of it" and on and on -- nothing to do with delphi at all. if that isn't bad enough, some of it is just wrong. everything in any gui system can trace it's roots to xerox parc or mit, not apple or mshaft. it's doesn't matter what they look like now. I only use xfce, and that looks like CDE, not an apple or a microsoft. none of my friend's desktops look like apple or mshaft. it was a dumb thing to write. why should anyone need to know the technological history of mshaft, apple or linux to comment on it? this is america, after all. from what i've heard, linux has a lot of features that are fairly unlike any unix system. i can run way more desktops, desktops far more capable than an mshaft or apple system. yet he says nothing abou that. he's whining about whiners. well, at least he's honest. but he oughta focus more on his job rather than whine about the customer base. that's pathetic and unprofessional. so what's professional? ibm and jikes, plus remember how they wrote that paper on improving the threading scheduler under linux? that's about people doing good work and giving back. that was a professional, on-topic paper. this guy was just venting at the user base because of his personal issues or something.
the web page says it's coed -- i'm thinking of going to beaver college so i can study abroad.
if i worked for riaa/mpaa/whatever. their palace is crumbling around them.
they might be kicking ass this year, and for a few more, but unless something drastic happens sales will start to drop radically as average bandwidth-to-consumer increases.
when it gets as easy (and fast) to send entire songs or videos as it does to attach a jpeg, they're completely screwed.
i maintained a small sheet music archive for a choir for a short time, and one of my responsibilities was maintaining 75 legal copies of sheet music for the chorale.
It was just a little paperwork -- find the publisher, call them, get the cost, get the check cut/signed and send it in.
While waiting for the order to come in, we did rehearsals with photocopies. Of course, this was a legit org that did things the "right way". I bet a lot of sheet music gets copied all over the place, with no fees paid whatsoever.
Realistally, in the future, i don't see a lot of people paying $1.25 or whatever per song, regardless of format or distribution vehicle. There's a fat ghost in the machine that's getting ready to drop on the music industry.
maybe artists will make their money off touring, or merchandise? dunno. but i think mutimedia (audio/video/whatever) will eventually be free. i don't see a way to stop it.
Maybe they can sell the things through industry websites. $1.00 a song or whatever, and be harsh with unauthorized servers. That seems realistic. They can use the same search tools, and nab the piraters/illegal napsters. Friends sharing mp3's quietly will be something they have to live with.
after all, when the last time you saw a site allowing public downloads of win95, that is easily found by the average surfer?