Well said. I didn't mean to infer that Workbench 3.1's "Installer" had a standard way of adding itself to the listings in the Tool menu. You're correct--it didn't.:)
True, Workbench had a CLI. But almost no one used it. Sure, it was useful, but the bulk of activity could be done via menus, and avoiding the notion of a shell entirely. If it were up to me, my dream OS would have a shell, but it wouldnt be forced upon the user.
ToolsDaemon, MUI, MFR and ReqTools.. Ahh, those were the days, eh?;)
"They make their work GPL for other reasons, and the fact that some people are making money of their work is a side-effect of GPL which is not a big deal so far."
See, I would argue that.. I think its had a tremendous chilling effect on the OSS movement thats only bound to get worse. Just look at Gnome.:) Popularity is almost a self-defeating attribute in most OSS projects. The more popular your project becomes, the more likely you are to get co-opted, forked or otherwise screwed.
Theres nothing wrong with doing both. I code some things for the movement, and I code other things professionally. I don't mix the two.
1) There isnt a single windowmanager for Linux that makes anyone's life simpler.
2) Half of the problem is, most of the people coding windowmanagers grew up suckling the teats of Windows 95. Thats their baseline to which they will compare everything they create against, and its the ideal they will try to emulate until they're exposed to something genuinely different. None of them have stopped and looked at articles that were written at the time, or posts on Usenet about how absolutely terrible Windows 95's UI was compared to common UIs of the day. It didn't win by popular vote--It won because Microsoft had nothing else to push.
I'm suggesting the GPL only works in environments where there is no parasitism.
The GPL works when no one is trying to capitalize and exploit it. In instances like those, the GPL is pointless, and GPL'ing your code is akin to hanging a sign on your ass saying "screw me over". The GPL is basically unprepared to remain sturdy and secure in environments like these. It was written under the assumption that we all give and take equally. Thats not the case anymore, because there is no way to ensure your work won't be co-opted by an individual or organization with less than purely altruistic intent.
A browser is a poor tool to use to launch/run/encompass programs. Any chimpanzee can drive nails with a socket wrench. It takes a human to use the right tool for the right task.
I tried. Twice. Both efforts failed, largely because people can't seem to look past Windows as the one and only example of how a UI should be done.
For the record, the last "real" desktop I ever used was AmigaDOS 3.1. Fast, elegant, simple, all-encompassing, good design, clearly understandable, flexible, extensible and neat. The closest thing i've been able to look like it is WindowMaker, and even WindowMaker doesn't quite have it right.
A windowmanager need not occupy anything more than a single slat at the top of every screen. Why the top? Simple. The human eye, in Western cultures, tracks diagonally from northwest to southeast whenever it encounters an image. The flow of information should conform to that--Its absolutely opposite in Windows, where the origin of an action begins in the southwest corner (the Start button) and traverses awkwardly northeast. By the way, dont whine about "Well, what about non-Western cultures??? Are we just going to leave them out???" because the answer is YES. Let them come up with their own design. We do it our way, they do it their way.
A book is a perfect example of a proper user interface that has undergone hundreds of years of refinement. The title is at the top, relevant information is in the corners, and the page (or screen, if you will) is dominated by the body of the data. UIs should follow this convention.
Suppose you want to do a simple action. Start a program. In Windows, there are no less than 7 or so ways to start a program. Sometimes its an icon. Sometimes in an icon in the Tray. Sometimes its an icon in the Quick Launch bar. Sometimes its in the task bar. Sometimes its in Explorer. Sometimes its in the Start Menu. Sometimes its in DOS. On, and on, and on, ad infinitum, ad stupiditum.
A computer's UI should look and react like a television set, where all the channels are nothing but top-down views of books. Each channel has a single line across the top. It shows memory usage on the left, a date-clock on the right, and a single [x] button to kill the whole fucking thing and drop down to console. The remaining 99% of the screen can be occupied with any number of windows. No Docks. No taskbars. no trays. No icons.
All programs that exist on the system can be listed in a single pull-down menu. Right-clicking anywhere on the backdrop of that "channel" (or workspace) will give you the option of selecting a program to launch from a menu. A single, authoritative way of launching a program, not 7 of them.
Suppose you want to delete some junk--Fine. You need a filemanager. Not a filemanager, a browser, a text editor, a Trashcan, and a "delete" command. The filemanager is listed no differently than any other program in the menu listed above. One way for all. If you dont like it, use another OS.
Those are just two simple little improvements that would simplify the task of using Linux with a GUI a hundredfold. More options don't always means more flexibility. More options ALWAYS mean more complexity, and more intimidation for first-time users.
What I basically described to you is AmigaDOS 3.1's appearance in a nutshell. Installation of new apps was a snap, and it all worked out of the box. Instead, Linux has two maddenly different standards that fight for the same square foot of turf and both look retarded in the process. Until that gets resolved, you and I are stuck.
If a developer of a GPL project stops working on it, because a co-developer is in the lucky position of being paid to work on it, or because a company takes their great code and incorporates it into the product they need to sell to stay in business, then why did they start working in Open Source to begin with?
I'm not being stroppy, I just don't understand the psychology.
Enlightenment, Windowmaker, Blackbox, every single windowmanager in common usage today found its genesis in the days before the rampant carpetbagging that began in late '99 and early '00. Before then, we were all in it for the sheet fun of it, and money didn't matter. The instant the first GPL-involved programmer went to work for these companies, they began making money off of someone else's freely given work. The incentive for these guys to continue working for free vanished around the same time. Would you continue to code for free if you knew a group of half a dozen guys were fiddling with your code for $50K a year?
Hell no.
Thats why companies that try to make money off of selling GPL'ed software are an inherently Bad Thing (tm) for the Linux community. It destroys the very incentive that caused us all to start coding in the first place.
Here's why the mainstays for Linux development have ground to a halt:
1) Nobody is willing to work on something, pouring hours upon hours of work into it, only to have someone working in Company X take their code, and make a living off of tweaking it. Suppose you're writing a windowmanager for Linux. In order for your windowmanager to succeed, it probably has to be GPL in order for it to really catch on. And if its GPL, surprise-surprise, there are employees of parasitic companies like VA Linux Systems who make a nice living playing with your code. No one in their right mind is going to do something for free, working side by side next to someone who is getting paid to do the same. By simple virtue of the fact that parasitic GPL companies exist, you're effectively letting someone else make the money off your work by making it GPL. This is why companies who capitalize on Linux software development are a (tm) Bad Thing, because they assert a choking influence over the entire community. It stops becoming an exercise in fun, and rapidly becomes an exercise in profiteering.
2) Nobody is willing to think about doing anything different, more useful, or more ergonomic right now. The main driving force driving Linux UI development is "lets make it look like Windows!" which is a horrendously bad move. Instead of giving Linux its own face, its own appeal, and its own distinct look, we're playing Poor-Man's Explorer with X11. Instead of putting our own talents to work, making something useful for us, we're playing second fiddle to a third rate design by copying it.
Now, rather than purely bitching, here's what you can do about it:
Start at the ground up. Get ahold of the source of a weak windowmanager like fvwm, that has all the basic guts you need to work from. Ask yourself what makes sense to you as a user, NOT what makes sense because you've seen the same thing in Windows. Give Linux its own look. Try to avoid imitating other platforms. Build it because it makes sense to build, not because "Windows has it". The sheer number of things that Windows has wrong with its UI would require a completely separate article to discuss them in detail. Think about how to represent things differently. Is there a better way to represent the same information? Do you really want an OS that resembles a browser? Think, ask, and move. Learn, modify, and repeat.
Cheers, (and yes, Propaganda is still running..)
A follow-up to a follow-up. Niiice.
on
IgNobel Awards
·
· Score: 2
Enough with the "shower curtain" stories, Michael. You yourself originally posted the same story back in July. Out of the hundreds of submissions for stories given to Slashdot, you picked this one? Come on..
Rather than seeing gigantic LCD panels with gigantic pricetags, how about gfx card manufacturers start playing with the idea of "virtual resolutions" ?... No, no, no, not the old boring "If I move my mouse off screen, the whole view follows me!"...Thats called a virtual desktop...What i'm talking about falls more along the lines of...... You have a virtual display of 3200x3200, anti-aliased and scaled down on the fly to fit within 1600x1600 at 60-90 FPS..You accomplish the same effect in a smaller piece of real-estate. Seems like it would be easy to pull off, actually. Does such a thing already exist?
Linux/UNIX and Windows come from radically different parentage. Linux/UNIX was built from the ground up over the past 30 some-odd years to be a system of fast, modular components. That philosophy of design (thankfully) has changed relatively little during that timeframe.
Conversely, Windows was built from the ground up to be more monolithic in design, with little attention payed to streamlining and modularity. This results in less than elegant implementations of features easilly expressed in other OS'es. Unix, by design, allows for such things to be accomplished with relative ease. Windows can, but not with the same degree of ease.
Heaven forbid anyone modifies the internal design of my television! You YRO hippies make it sound like I wont be able to watch "all my favorite shows on the WB" without a masters degree in industrial-strength crypto. Give it a rest, and come back to the real world where no ones out to get you.
Look.. I'm not exactly a big supporter of Microsoft, but this brand a blatantly inflammatory rhetoric is just childish.
USAToday discovers the new upgrade scheme, designed to milk every last cent out of those who've locked themselves into Windows.
Translation: Microsoft will be charging for significant upgrades.
And why shouldn't they? They spend time and money creating the upgrades...aren't they justified in trying to recoup some or all of that cost, so they can continue to offer product upgrades in the future? Micosoft is a business, same as any other. They stay in business by making money. That doesn't make them evil. If you happen not to like how they go about doing things, then you use Linux, which many of us do..myself included. Its as simple as that. Theres no point in demonizing a company for doing the exact same thing YOU would be doing in their shoes.
MS discusses its plans to control how you compute (by the way, the license agreement for Windows Media Player now allows Microsoft to disable any software on your computer - you do read those license agreements, don't you?)
Translation: Microsoft wants users to have a solid, consistant computing platform, rather than a disorganized assembly of argumentative standards that disrupt, aggrevate and annoy most users.
Ugh..More fear-mongering. You'll notice it says "disable" and not "uninstall", by the way. Disabling other products is a common practice. RealPlayer, Netscape, IE, all engadge in this. So, of course they're trying to "control how you compute".. So are we. Thats the whole purpose of an operating system. Again, don't demonize another party for something you engadge in as well. Now, the next topic -- Windows Media Player. Windows Media Player is a Microsoft product, designed to work with other Microsoft products. That includes the underlying OS. If something gets in the way of its task, it has a right to remove that "thing" so it can perform correctly. After all, by choosing installing WMP, you're basically inferring that you want to use it, are you not? Why else would you want to install it, unless you wanted it to run? This is the whole point of an 'upgrade' in the first place. You are replacing something that either does not work (or doesnt work well enough) with something that does work. So what are you really complaining about here? Sensical, consistant design? Admittedly, its a heavy handed approach, but XP is an OS for beginners that dont want to worry about how things are internally. They just want them to work. Period. And is that so wrong? Isn't that what we all want for Linux, ultimately, as well?
Like I said.. I dont like Microsoft all that much either. But I know an unfair criticism when I see it. Laying that sort of fearmongering onto a captive audience several hundred thousand wide is not only childish but terribly irresponsible, IMHO.
While it seems like a "cool" idea on the outside, it probably isn't. There are at least two problems I can think of, off the top of my head, as to why microsatellites would be a Bad Idea (tm)...
First and foremost, tracking. Suppose your microsatellite fulfills its useful lifespan, and dies, like so many other satellites....Without any means to communicate, the object is too small (and its irregular orbit too unpredictable) to be reliably tracked from the ground. Your microsatellite now becomes a big danger to other spacecraft, and other satellites, as it joins the ranks of tens of thousands of other pieces of other untrackable space junk.
Secondly, suppose you to manage to get a microsatellite up into orbit. You're an amateur, of course, which means you arent really aware of the orbital paths of other satellites. It might just be a matter of time before your little science fair project interrupts communication to half a continent due to the radio noise it gives off from a poor design meant to maximize for space, and not function.
I think we'd be wise to leave space for the professionals and be content with ground-based communications like shortwave packet and slow-scan TV.
We already HAVE a nationwide ID card. Its called your Social Security Number.Infact, we have several. Your credit card #, your Tax ID Number, your address, your birth certificate ID, among others.
The degree of civil-liberties whining on Slashdot has gotten out of control. Instead of sound, logical arguments, we get frothing at the mouth from unbathed hippies who think the government is out to tag 'n bag all of us. Jeezus.
Maybe the comet is giving off truckloads of Xenon gas..the ion engine aboard this spacecraft (or any spacecraft with a similar ion engine) could "draft" the comet, conserve its own fuel, and ride along with the comet to a particular destination before pulling off and resuming its travel... Sorta like gravitational assist without the gravity part.:)
..So, Slashdot wants you to think the SSSCA would make "any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies" illegal in the U.S.
Looks like i'm going to have to buy a new alarm clock.
It's this sort of flame that causes 500-response posts.
Odd that Slashdot, a VA-owned website, will report on Red Hat's losses, but somehow neglect to inform their readers that VA Linux Systems stock has finally slipped into penny-stock territory as of yesterday, closing at a whopping $0.95/shr.
But wait..that would mean that VA is fair and impartial when it comes to informing the Linux community..hmm.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. I'm just better looking than you.
I love you.
Well said. I didn't mean to infer that Workbench 3.1's "Installer" had a standard way of adding itself to the listings in the Tool menu. You're correct--it didn't.
True, Workbench had a CLI. But almost no one used it. Sure, it was useful, but the bulk of activity could be done via menus, and avoiding the notion of a shell entirely. If it were up to me, my dream OS would have a shell, but it wouldnt be forced upon the user.
ToolsDaemon, MUI, MFR and ReqTools.. Ahh, those were the days, eh?
Elegance.
Cheers,
"They make their work GPL for other reasons, and the fact that some people are making money of their work is a side-effect of GPL which is not a big deal so far."
See, I would argue that.. I think its had a tremendous chilling effect on the OSS movement thats only bound to get worse. Just look at Gnome.
Theres nothing wrong with doing both. I code some things for the movement, and I code other things professionally. I don't mix the two.
1) There isnt a single windowmanager for Linux that makes anyone's life simpler.
2) Half of the problem is, most of the people coding windowmanagers grew up suckling the teats of Windows 95. Thats their baseline to which they will compare everything they create against, and its the ideal they will try to emulate until they're exposed to something genuinely different. None of them have stopped and looked at articles that were written at the time, or posts on Usenet about how absolutely terrible Windows 95's UI was compared to common UIs of the day. It didn't win by popular vote--It won because Microsoft had nothing else to push.
I'm suggesting the GPL only works in environments where there is no parasitism.
The GPL works when no one is trying to capitalize and exploit it. In instances like those, the GPL is pointless, and GPL'ing your code is akin to hanging a sign on your ass saying "screw me over". The GPL is basically unprepared to remain sturdy and secure in environments like these. It was written under the assumption that we all give and take equally. Thats not the case anymore, because there is no way to ensure your work won't be co-opted by an individual or organization with less than purely altruistic intent.
A browser is good for viewing documents.
It is a tool designed for a specific purpose.
A browser is a poor tool to use to launch/run/encompass programs. Any chimpanzee can drive nails with a socket wrench. It takes a human to use the right tool for the right task.
I tried. Twice. Both efforts failed, largely because people can't seem to look past Windows as the one and only example of how a UI should be done.
For the record, the last "real" desktop I ever used was AmigaDOS 3.1. Fast, elegant, simple, all-encompassing, good design, clearly understandable, flexible, extensible and neat. The closest thing i've been able to look like it is WindowMaker, and even WindowMaker doesn't quite have it right.
A windowmanager need not occupy anything more than a single slat at the top of every screen. Why the top? Simple. The human eye, in Western cultures, tracks diagonally from northwest to southeast whenever it encounters an image. The flow of information should conform to that--Its absolutely opposite in Windows, where the origin of an action begins in the southwest corner (the Start button) and traverses awkwardly northeast. By the way, dont whine about "Well, what about non-Western cultures??? Are we just going to leave them out???" because the answer is YES. Let them come up with their own design. We do it our way, they do it their way.
A book is a perfect example of a proper user interface that has undergone hundreds of years of refinement. The title is at the top, relevant information is in the corners, and the page (or screen, if you will) is dominated by the body of the data. UIs should follow this convention.
Suppose you want to do a simple action. Start a program. In Windows, there are no less than 7 or so ways to start a program. Sometimes its an icon. Sometimes in an icon in the Tray. Sometimes its an icon in the Quick Launch bar. Sometimes its in the task bar. Sometimes its in Explorer. Sometimes its in the Start Menu. Sometimes its in DOS. On, and on, and on, ad infinitum, ad stupiditum.
A computer's UI should look and react like a television set, where all the channels are nothing but top-down views of books. Each channel has a single line across the top. It shows memory usage on the left, a date-clock on the right, and a single [x] button to kill the whole fucking thing and drop down to console. The remaining 99% of the screen can be occupied with any number of windows. No Docks. No taskbars. no trays. No icons.
All programs that exist on the system can be listed in a single pull-down menu. Right-clicking anywhere on the backdrop of that "channel" (or workspace) will give you the option of selecting a program to launch from a menu. A single, authoritative way of launching a program, not 7 of them.
Suppose you want to delete some junk--Fine. You need a filemanager. Not a filemanager, a browser, a text editor, a Trashcan, and a "delete" command. The filemanager is listed no differently than any other program in the menu listed above. One way for all. If you dont like it, use another OS.
Those are just two simple little improvements that would simplify the task of using Linux with a GUI a hundredfold. More options don't always means more flexibility. More options ALWAYS mean more complexity, and more intimidation for first-time users.
What I basically described to you is AmigaDOS 3.1's appearance in a nutshell. Installation of new apps was a snap, and it all worked out of the box. Instead, Linux has two maddenly different standards that fight for the same square foot of turf and both look retarded in the process. Until that gets resolved, you and I are stuck.
You got it -- Its weak, generic, and untainted by modern ideas. Thats why it makes an excellent code base to start from.
Read what I wrote before you start pissing and moaning.
Cheers,
Why do they start in the first place, then?
If a developer of a GPL project stops working on it, because a co-developer is in the lucky position of being paid to work on it, or because a company takes their great code and incorporates it into the product they need to sell to stay in business, then why did they start working in Open Source to begin with?
I'm not being stroppy, I just don't understand the psychology.
Enlightenment, Windowmaker, Blackbox, every single windowmanager in common usage today found its genesis in the days before the rampant carpetbagging that began in late '99 and early '00. Before then, we were all in it for the sheet fun of it, and money didn't matter. The instant the first GPL-involved programmer went to work for these companies, they began making money off of someone else's freely given work. The incentive for these guys to continue working for free vanished around the same time. Would you continue to code for free if you knew a group of half a dozen guys were fiddling with your code for $50K a year?
Hell no.
Thats why companies that try to make money off of selling GPL'ed software are an inherently Bad Thing (tm) for the Linux community. It destroys the very incentive that caused us all to start coding in the first place.
Cheers,
Here's why the mainstays for Linux development have ground to a halt:
1) Nobody is willing to work on something, pouring hours upon hours of work into it, only to have someone working in Company X take their code, and make a living off of tweaking it. Suppose you're writing a windowmanager for Linux. In order for your windowmanager to succeed, it probably has to be GPL in order for it to really catch on. And if its GPL, surprise-surprise, there are employees of parasitic companies like VA Linux Systems who make a nice living playing with your code. No one in their right mind is going to do something for free, working side by side next to someone who is getting paid to do the same. By simple virtue of the fact that parasitic GPL companies exist, you're effectively letting someone else make the money off your work by making it GPL. This is why companies who capitalize on Linux software development are a (tm) Bad Thing, because they assert a choking influence over the entire community. It stops becoming an exercise in fun, and rapidly becomes an exercise in profiteering.
2) Nobody is willing to think about doing anything different, more useful, or more ergonomic right now. The main driving force driving Linux UI development is "lets make it look like Windows!" which is a horrendously bad move. Instead of giving Linux its own face, its own appeal, and its own distinct look, we're playing Poor-Man's Explorer with X11. Instead of putting our own talents to work, making something useful for us, we're playing second fiddle to a third rate design by copying it.
Now, rather than purely bitching, here's what you can do about it:
Start at the ground up. Get ahold of the source of a weak windowmanager like fvwm, that has all the basic guts you need to work from. Ask yourself what makes sense to you as a user, NOT what makes sense because you've seen the same thing in Windows. Give Linux its own look. Try to avoid imitating other platforms. Build it because it makes sense to build, not because "Windows has it". The sheer number of things that Windows has wrong with its UI would require a completely separate article to discuss them in detail. Think about how to represent things differently. Is there a better way to represent the same information? Do you really want an OS that resembles a browser? Think, ask, and move. Learn, modify, and repeat.
Cheers, (and yes, Propaganda is still running..)
Enough with the "shower curtain" stories, Michael. You yourself originally posted the same story back in July. Out of the hundreds of submissions for stories given to Slashdot, you picked this one? Come on..
Cheers,
Rather than seeing gigantic LCD panels with gigantic pricetags, how about gfx card manufacturers start playing with the idea of "virtual resolutions" ?
Cheers,
"AquaPad? Quick!! Sue them over the use of the word "Aqua" before we go bankrupt!!"
-- Everyone employed at Apple, Inc.
Is it really that surprising?
Linux/UNIX and Windows come from radically different parentage. Linux/UNIX was built from the ground up over the past 30 some-odd years to be a system of fast, modular components. That philosophy of design (thankfully) has changed relatively little during that timeframe.
Conversely, Windows was built from the ground up to be more monolithic in design, with little attention payed to streamlining and modularity. This results in less than elegant implementations of features easilly expressed in other OS'es. Unix, by design, allows for such things to be accomplished with relative ease. Windows can, but not with the same degree of ease.
E-Mail is more than 30 years old. Doug Englebart's NLS system was doing email for years prior to '71, and infact, demonstrated it publically in '68.
Get your facts straight, gang.
Cheers,
Heaven forbid anyone modifies the internal design of my television! You YRO hippies make it sound like I wont be able to watch "all my favorite shows on the WB" without a masters degree in industrial-strength crypto. Give it a rest, and come back to the real world where no ones out to get you.
Look.. I'm not exactly a big supporter of Microsoft, but this brand a blatantly inflammatory rhetoric is just childish.
USAToday discovers the new upgrade scheme, designed to milk every last cent out of those who've locked themselves into Windows.
Translation: Microsoft will be charging for significant upgrades.
And why shouldn't they? They spend time and money creating the upgrades...aren't they justified in trying to recoup some or all of that cost, so they can continue to offer product upgrades in the future? Micosoft is a business, same as any other. They stay in business by making money. That doesn't make them evil. If you happen not to like how they go about doing things, then you use Linux, which many of us do..myself included. Its as simple as that. Theres no point in demonizing a company for doing the exact same thing YOU would be doing in their shoes.
MS discusses its plans to control how you compute (by the way, the license agreement for Windows Media Player now allows Microsoft to disable any software on your computer - you do read those license agreements, don't you?)
Translation: Microsoft wants users to have a solid, consistant computing platform, rather than a disorganized assembly of argumentative standards that disrupt, aggrevate and annoy most users.
Ugh..More fear-mongering. You'll notice it says "disable" and not "uninstall", by the way. Disabling other products is a common practice. RealPlayer, Netscape, IE, all engadge in this. So, of course they're trying to "control how you compute".. So are we. Thats the whole purpose of an operating system. Again, don't demonize another party for something you engadge in as well. Now, the next topic -- Windows Media Player. Windows Media Player is a Microsoft product, designed to work with other Microsoft products. That includes the underlying OS. If something gets in the way of its task, it has a right to remove that "thing" so it can perform correctly. After all, by choosing installing WMP, you're basically inferring that you want to use it, are you not? Why else would you want to install it, unless you wanted it to run? This is the whole point of an 'upgrade' in the first place. You are replacing something that either does not work (or doesnt work well enough) with something that does work. So what are you really complaining about here? Sensical, consistant design? Admittedly, its a heavy handed approach, but XP is an OS for beginners that dont want to worry about how things are internally. They just want them to work. Period. And is that so wrong? Isn't that what we all want for Linux, ultimately, as well?
Like I said.. I dont like Microsoft all that much either. But I know an unfair criticism when I see it. Laying that sort of fearmongering onto a captive audience several hundred thousand wide is not only childish but terribly irresponsible, IMHO.
Cheers,
While it seems like a "cool" idea on the outside, it probably isn't. There are at least two problems I can think of, off the top of my head, as to why microsatellites would be a Bad Idea (tm)
First and foremost, tracking. Suppose your microsatellite fulfills its useful lifespan, and dies, like so many other satellites....Without any means to communicate, the object is too small (and its irregular orbit too unpredictable) to be reliably tracked from the ground. Your microsatellite now becomes a big danger to other spacecraft, and other satellites, as it joins the ranks of tens of thousands of other pieces of other untrackable space junk.
Secondly, suppose you to manage to get a microsatellite up into orbit. You're an amateur, of course, which means you arent really aware of the orbital paths of other satellites. It might just be a matter of time before your little science fair project interrupts communication to half a continent due to the radio noise it gives off from a poor design meant to maximize for space, and not function.
I think we'd be wise to leave space for the professionals and be content with ground-based communications like shortwave packet and slow-scan TV.
Cheers,
We already HAVE a nationwide ID card. Its called your Social Security Number.Infact, we have several. Your credit card #, your Tax ID Number, your address, your birth certificate ID, among others.
The degree of civil-liberties whining on Slashdot has gotten out of control. Instead of sound, logical arguments, we get frothing at the mouth from unbathed hippies who think the government is out to tag 'n bag all of us. Jeezus.
Cheers,
Here's an interesting thought..
Maybe the comet is giving off truckloads of Xenon gas..the ion engine aboard this spacecraft (or any spacecraft with a similar ion engine) could "draft" the comet, conserve its own fuel, and ride along with the comet to a particular destination before pulling off and resuming its travel... Sorta like gravitational assist without the gravity part.
Cheers, and yes, we're open for business,
You know, PROPAGANDA has a nice photo of Michael Jackson's plastic surgery disaster. Its no wonder he wears a mask wherever he goes.. his fucking nose is falling off.
Cheers,
..So, Slashdot wants you to think the SSSCA would make "any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies" illegal in the U.S.
Looks like i'm going to have to buy a new alarm clock.
It's this sort of flame that causes 500-response posts.
Cheers,
Odd that Slashdot, a VA-owned website, will report on Red Hat's losses, but somehow neglect to inform their readers that VA Linux Systems stock has finally slipped into penny-stock territory as of yesterday, closing at a whopping $0.95/shr.
But wait..that would mean that VA is fair and impartial when it comes to informing the Linux community..hmm.