I had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with Dr. Brin earlier this year. A wonderful thing about him is his ability to go off on a discourse such as the one above off the top of head, in real time. In person he has a great enthusiasm and clarity that few people have.
Whats more he's right (IMO of course)
IF they could really build a 50KM high tower, you could put a mag lev launching rail up the side, and use that toaccelerate spacecraft. Forget about the space elevator.
At 50Km you are basicaly free of the atmosphere and the enrgy need to rasie the spacecraft out of the atmposphere and accelerate it to whatever speed it gets too after 50km comes from the ground, drasticaly reducing the weight of the ship. (The Shuttle weighs less than 1/2 what it did at launch a mere 2min after lift off and is no where close to 50km up)
Such as system would drasticaly reduce the cost per pound to orbit.
I never heard about it either & I work in OP near the Sprint campus too. In my case I couldn't have gone anyway because i WAS in Vegas at the SAP TechEd2000, which was a lot of fun....er... and oh yeah, intformative and educational.
On the topic of SAP I was surprised at how much they were pushing linux. Had their chief linux zealot speak at the keynote session. They have contributed to the latest version of linux (so that SAP could run on it) and now use it as their defualt unix development platform.
KC is a god place for tech stuff BTW, there is more going on here than just mainframe shops & sprint. (We, for instance, write stuff for mobile devices as well as servers)
Same here. I turned down a job when they told me I'd have to take a drug test. I'd worked for this company for 6 months on a contract-for-hire basis at the end of which they offered me a big raise & a permenant position, but I had to take a drug test. I repsonded with a big 'You gotta be kidding!'
Did they think I'd turn into crack fiend the minute I was a full time employee? And even if was a secret heoin junkie the code I was turning out was good enough...
My manager couldn't come up with an acceptable reason for this outrageous invasion of my privacy, so I refused the job. (In the end things turned out for the best: I have a position with a better company, working on a much more interesting project, and have better future growth opportunities.)
I just don't understand why these companies think they have the right to test my urine, and why they would want to hire people who are so desperate for a job that they would forgo any shred of dignity and piss into the little cup on demand.
I would guess that up to a third of DVDs that the movie in widescreen also have it in pan & scan. Some are 2-sided, some are not. Early on DVDs were single layer. Now the manufacturing process for dual layer DVDs is commonplace many newer DVD use this format.
P & S on the fly is not vapor, I know of at least one title that uses this, Last Temptation of Christ, the problem is with the players not showing a smooth images when the co-ordinates of the P& S images moves across the image. If/when this is rectified (bigger image buffers maybe) P& S on the fly will probably become more widespread.
Criterion's Last Temptation of Christ does Pan and Scan on the fly, but I beleive that the portion of the film you see is a fixed subset of the image, i.e. it doesn't change co-ordinates at all during the film. This feature is not widely implemented because in P & S the portion of the image that is shown changes during the movie (its not always cntered on the same point) many DVD players do not handle the changes well, the image is jerky when during the change from one position to another. If this can be fixed the P & S on the fly would be a perfect solution. Widescreen HDTVs can be had for under $2500. I have the Toshiba TW40X81 which retails for $2200-$2500 coupled with a porgressive output DVD player, the image on anamorphic DVD is nothing short of stunning. Plus digital cable is coming in my area which will include some limited HDTV prgramming. I hear Braveheart is amazing in HDTV, can't wait to see it!
Janes is a very well respected publisher, and their decision to use Slashdot as an "open source" on this topic is a great endorsement of the benefits of the Slashdot model. I think a little self back slapping on the/. community is in order here, there have been many examples of the negative side of/. (mass flaming to authors who were less than complementary to linux)
Anyone who reads/. on a regular basis is well aware of the bias here toward linux and OSS. However in the spirit of self congratulation and ego-boosting that this news brings [disclaimer: I did not contribute to the thread in question] I will point out there are quite a few intelligent and often well informed posters here. The bias on the part of moderators does not completely drown out the non-Slashdot-centric views.
I my self have been often moderated up and Im no OSS-zealot by any means! Im certainly not against it but I use a proprietary OS as my main OS (BeOS) and I don't beleive that OSS, despite its important contributions, will take over the world and have said so more than once in this forum. Ive even got a permanent score 2 rating, which I suppose is in part due to realtively frequent +ve moderation.
The fact that the bias here is an open one, and that it does not completely drown out dissenting opinion (at least in many topics) shows that Janes was right in very carefully using this forum as a source for a topic that maybe/. is in fact uniquely qualified to have opinions on.
What got canceled was a ceremony which was to have been performed bby Prince Charles during a visit to Sri Lanka where Aurthur Clarke lives. Clarke is somewhat infirm and doesn't travel so could not go to London to recieve the award from the Queen as such things are normaly done. He is officialy Sir Aurthur however.
Before the visit happened some rumor about Clarke being a pedophile appeared in a UK newspaper. I don't know if the rumors were around before then or not. Im a big Clarke fan and had never heard anysuch thing before, but then Im not one to be at all interested in rumors about famous people.
The Sri Lanken police investigated the claims and found nothing to substantiate them.
IIRC Clarke had lived for a long time with a Sri Lanken family of a Sri Lanken befriended by Clarke when he first moved there. IF he was a child molestor it would seem to me that they would not let him to continue to live with them.
1) By the end of the 21st century the Nation State will be of diminshed importance and will be on the way out. The globalization of trade, the globalization of culture and the globalization of communication of ideas brought about by the internet will make national boundaries increasingly less important. Computing and communication devices will become continue to get cheaper and will beome increasingly available in poorer parts of the world.
2) Cheap access to space will (finaly) come about
3) The resources of the Solar System especialy Near Earth Orbit asteroids will begin, and indeed must if the consumer orientated consumer society we live in is to continue past the next century.
What about overpopulation in North America and Europe?
Right now there is a food surplus, famines happen because, for various reasons, food is not distributed to where it is needed. A drought in a poor African country will cause a famine becuase that country cannot afford to import food. Its seems that for maybe the next 100 years the world may be able to increase food production to keep pace with the population. The problem is in the mechanisms of distribution.
The "developed" countries use up many more resources per capita than non-developed countries. In fact the very defeintion of a developed country is one that uses more resources per person. North America and Western Europe comprise maybe 10% of the World's resources but consume probably 80-90% of the resources. So population in these countries is just as harmful as over population in Asia, India & Africa. Wars will start over control over the dwindling resourses these industrial nations need, indeed they allready have started (The Gulf War in 1990)
Why split consumer apps apart from commercial/enterprise apps?
To stop them comming up with, say, an enterprise e-commerce server with ActiveDooDads(TM) and then having ActiveDooDads(TM) only work properly with their own client software.
Some time ago I saw a link to MICROS~1's "freedom to innovate" page I of couse took advantage of the offer to not only remind MICROS~1 that they have never innovated anything, not once, ever and to also e-mail to all my congress critters that, in my opinion, MICROS~1 should be broken up into seperate companies 1 to do OSes, 1 to do consumer apps, 1 to do commercial/enterprise apps, and one to do software develpoment apps.
I got a nice letter back from my ChristianConservativeRepublican Senator saying he didn't beleive in gov't interference in the marketplace. Oh well, it was fun though.
Clearly MICROS~1 is abusing their dominant position in the marketplace, and breaking them up would allow for competition based on the quality of the competing products, not based on whether MICROS~1 alows the competition entry to the marketplace.
I thought I told you to stop this thread! It started off allright as a parody of a Monty Python skit, buts gotten too Silly. That last post was obviousl fave. And that vicar's hair was too long.
Stop it! All right this thread has gone on long enough. It started out ok but now its just too silly.
No-one enjoys a good laugh more than i do, well except for my wife, and oh yes Captain Johnson. Well come to think of it mos people enjoy a good laugh more than I do!
Python is just downright funny and clever too, so im not surprised its popular in the US, although looking at most US-produced TV you would have thought that clever was the kiss of death.
Some of the python humor is very much british and Im surprised that americans get it. For instance the Romans Go Home bit in Life of Brian... when i was about 10 I had latin at school, the teaching method was pretty much the same as in that skit except that the latin master wasn't allowed a sword. I kinda doubt that latin was taught that way in US schools (could be wrong of course) Even though the skit is funny at face value its even funnier to me as a parody of teaching methods.
Whats really amusing about this is that the Chairman of Sprint dedicated Sprint's $800 million "World Headquaters Campus" in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, KS last Friday
This is the largest office construction project in the USA (maybe the world) and has been underway for the past couple of years and is (was?) scheduled to be completed in 2001 (IIRC). It was designed to house all of Sprints 14,000+ employees in the KC area. Now of course we don't know if "Worldcom" as the new company is known as will keep any employees in KC!
Whats the point of asking an Open Source advocate their opinion of a closed source porject? They can't say that it has a future without contradicting their pro-open source position.
BeOS is one reason I am no longer an open source advocate. Don't get me wrong Im certainly not against it, but the fact that BeOS is as good as it is, and is as innovative as it is proves that closed source development can come up with great products.
I spend my spare coding time writing for BeOS, Ive participated in linux/GPL'd peojects in the past but no longer do so. It seems that ESR thinks BeOS will fail because the linux zealots will bully developers into going to linux. I think hes wrrong.
this reminds me of the the scene in The Life of Brian members of the People's Front of Judea and the Campaign for a Free Galilee are fighting each other in the sewers beneath Pilate's palace
Brian:we should be united against our common enemy !
Everyone else:the Judean People's Front!
Needless to say in our case the Romans = MICROS~1 and the various little factions squabbling in the sewer are the various alternate OSes who are too often fighting each other.
The problem as i see it with linux advocacy is that too often there is religious or poilitical baggage. The religous types are those who say "if its not OSS its crap" and when asked why they reply "because if its not OSS it must be crap". As with all religous zealots there is no arguing with such people.
The political types (such as ESR) beleive that OSS is an inherently better model for software development and also that the existence of OSS alternatives is a matter of personal freedom (speech and freedom from corporate dominance)Personaly I don't agree with that position but at least its a rational argument (and at least in theory leaves room for the idea that some non-open source software doesn't suck)and its an idea that i can respect.
In ESR's case the gun-thing is not helping. I understand its part of his personaly politics and his advocacy of OSS and guns come from the same core ideas. But he must realize that alot of people even inside the US do not share those ideas, so emphasising the linkage between the guns and OSS is going to hurt more than it helps.
For me, and i think for alot of other people in the anti-MICROS~1 camp, it simply a question of wanting software that doesn't suck. Software is a tool, and in MICROS~1's case its a tool they use to make you buy more of their product. Their domination of much of the software market is so complete that they have no incentive to make even half-way decent products.
The problem with especialy the religous linux zealots but also the political ones is that this additional baggage tends to fragment people. We get the fights over the GPL vs BSD licenses, GNOME vs KDE linux vs *BSD etc etc.
A lot of people use linux because it works not becuase of politics. If people were simply interested in making good software that just gets the job done, and is not either a marketing tool or a political statement, we would make alot more progress to a better software world!
About BeOS I use it because its really good, and is actually innovative and technicaly advanced and is fun to use. Be is not in a position to abuse its users even if it wanted to. BeOS does owe quite alot to OSS though, the bash shell is very nice to have (i'd have never used it if it weren't for that) the x86 version uses gcc, and alot of GNU tools are available on BEOS.
Like I said I was just repeating what my friend said. My only point was YMMV.
Personaly I take the digital out form my DVD player and pipe it through my Theta Colbalt D/A box and from there to my Linn amp. I don't even have a "receiver". It sounds pretty good to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with Dr. Brin earlier this year. A wonderful thing about him is his ability to go off on a discourse such as the one above off the top of head, in real time. In person he has a great enthusiasm and clarity that few people have. Whats more he's right (IMO of course)
IF they could really build a 50KM high tower, you could put a mag lev launching rail up the side, and use that toaccelerate spacecraft. Forget about the space elevator.
At 50Km you are basicaly free of the atmosphere and the enrgy need to rasie the spacecraft out of the atmposphere and accelerate it to whatever speed it gets too after 50km comes from the ground, drasticaly reducing the weight of the ship. (The Shuttle weighs less than 1/2 what it did at launch a mere 2min after lift off and is no where close to 50km up)
Such as system would drasticaly reduce the cost per pound to orbit.
I never heard about it either & I work in OP near the Sprint campus too. In my case I couldn't have gone anyway because i WAS in Vegas at the SAP TechEd2000, which was a lot of fun ....er... and oh yeah, intformative and educational.
On the topic of SAP I was surprised at how much they were pushing linux. Had their chief linux zealot speak at the keynote session. They have contributed to the latest version of linux (so that SAP could run on it) and now use it as their defualt unix development platform.
KC is a god place for tech stuff BTW, there is more going on here than just mainframe shops & sprint. (We, for instance, write stuff for mobile devices as well as servers)
Same here. I turned down a job when they told me I'd have to take a drug test. I'd worked for this company for 6 months on a contract-for-hire basis at the end of which they offered me a big raise & a permenant position, but I had to take a drug test. I repsonded with a big 'You gotta be kidding!'
Did they think I'd turn into crack fiend the minute I was a full time employee? And even if was a secret heoin junkie the code I was turning out was good enough...
My manager couldn't come up with an acceptable reason for this outrageous invasion of my privacy, so I refused the job. (In the end things turned out for the best: I have a position with a better company, working on a much more interesting project, and have better future growth opportunities.)
I just don't understand why these companies think they have the right to test my urine, and why they would want to hire people who are so desperate for a job that they would forgo any shred of dignity and piss into the little cup on demand.
I would guess that up to a third of DVDs that the movie in widescreen also have it in pan & scan. Some are 2-sided, some are not. Early on DVDs were single layer. Now the manufacturing process for dual layer DVDs is commonplace many newer DVD use this format.
P & S on the fly is not vapor, I know of at least one title that uses this, Last Temptation of Christ, the problem is with the players not showing a smooth images when the co-ordinates of the P& S images moves across the image. If/when this is rectified (bigger image buffers maybe) P& S on the fly will probably become more widespread.
Criterion's Last Temptation of Christ does Pan and Scan on the fly, but I beleive that the portion of the film you see is a fixed subset of the image, i.e. it doesn't change co-ordinates at all during the film. This feature is not widely implemented because in P & S the portion of the image that is shown changes during the movie (its not always cntered on the same point) many DVD players do not handle the changes well, the image is jerky when during the change from one position to another. If this can be fixed the P & S on the fly would be a perfect solution. Widescreen HDTVs can be had for under $2500. I have the Toshiba TW40X81 which retails for $2200-$2500 coupled with a porgressive output DVD player, the image on anamorphic DVD is nothing short of stunning. Plus digital cable is coming in my area which will include some limited HDTV prgramming. I hear Braveheart is amazing in HDTV, can't wait to see it!
Janes is a very well respected publisher, and their decision to use Slashdot as an "open source" on this topic is a great endorsement of the benefits of the Slashdot model. I think a little self back slapping on the
Anyone who reads
I my self have been often moderated up and Im no OSS-zealot by any means! Im certainly not against it but I use a proprietary OS as my main OS (BeOS) and I don't beleive that OSS, despite its important contributions, will take over the world and have said so more than once in this forum. Ive even got a permanent score 2 rating, which I suppose is in part due to realtively frequent
+ve moderation.
The fact that the bias here is an open one, and that it does not completely drown out dissenting opinion (at least in many topics) shows that Janes was right in very carefully using this forum as a source for a topic that maybe
What got canceled was a ceremony which was to have been performed bby Prince Charles during a visit to Sri Lanka where Aurthur Clarke lives. Clarke is somewhat infirm and doesn't travel so could not go to London to recieve the award from the Queen as such things are normaly done. He is officialy Sir Aurthur however.
Before the visit happened some rumor about Clarke being a pedophile appeared in a UK newspaper. I don't know if the rumors were around before then or not. Im a big Clarke fan and had never heard anysuch thing before, but then Im not one to be at all interested in rumors about famous people.
The Sri Lanken police investigated the claims and found nothing to substantiate them.
IIRC Clarke had lived for a long time with a Sri Lanken family of a Sri Lanken befriended by Clarke when he first moved there. IF he was a child molestor it would seem to me that they would not let him to continue to live with them.
1) By the end of the 21st century the Nation State will be of diminshed importance and will be on the way out. The globalization of trade, the globalization of culture and the globalization of communication of ideas brought about by the internet will make national boundaries increasingly less important. Computing and communication devices will become continue to get cheaper and will beome increasingly available in poorer parts of the world.
2) Cheap access to space will (finaly) come about
3) The resources of the Solar System especialy Near Earth Orbit asteroids will begin, and indeed must if the consumer orientated consumer society we live in is to continue past the next century.
What about overpopulation in North America and Europe?
Right now there is a food surplus, famines happen because, for various reasons, food is not distributed to where it is needed. A drought in a poor African country will cause a famine becuase that country cannot afford to import food. Its seems that for maybe the next 100 years the world may be able to increase food production to keep pace with the population. The problem is in the mechanisms of distribution.
The "developed" countries use up many more resources per capita than non-developed countries. In fact the very defeintion of a developed country is one that uses more resources per person. North America and Western Europe comprise maybe 10% of the World's resources but consume probably 80-90% of the resources. So population in these countries is just as harmful as over population in Asia, India & Africa. Wars will start over control over the dwindling resourses these industrial nations need, indeed they allready have started (The Gulf War in 1990)
Why split consumer apps apart from commercial/enterprise apps?
To stop them comming up with, say, an enterprise e-commerce server with ActiveDooDads(TM) and then having ActiveDooDads(TM) only work properly with their own client software.
Its not down.. its resting!
I run BeOS as my primary desktop OS and unfortunately it does not support playback of encoded DVD movies. This support may appear in R5
Details may be found here.
Some time ago I saw a link to MICROS~1's "freedom to innovate" page I of couse took advantage of the offer to not only remind MICROS~1 that they have never innovated anything, not once, ever and to also e-mail to all my congress critters that, in my opinion, MICROS~1 should be broken up into seperate companies 1 to do OSes, 1 to do consumer apps, 1 to do commercial/enterprise apps, and one to do software develpoment apps.
I got a nice letter back from my ChristianConservativeRepublican Senator saying he didn't beleive in gov't interference in the marketplace. Oh well, it was fun though.
Clearly MICROS~1 is abusing their dominant position in the marketplace, and breaking them up would allow for competition based on the quality of the competing products, not based on whether MICROS~1 alows the competition entry to the marketplace.
I thought I told you to stop this thread! It started off allright as a parody of a Monty Python skit, buts gotten too Silly. That last post was obviousl fave. And that vicar's hair was too long.
Now Stop It!
It's a dog's life in the Modern Army!
Stop it! All right this thread has gone on long enough. It started out ok but now its just too silly.
No-one enjoys a good laugh more than i do, well except for my wife, and oh yes Captain Johnson. Well come to think of it mos people enjoy a good laugh more than I do!
Python is just downright funny and clever too, so im not surprised its popular in the US, although looking at most US-produced TV you would have thought that clever was the kiss of death.
Some of the python humor is very much british and Im surprised that americans get it. For instance the Romans Go Home bit in Life of Brian... when i was about 10 I had latin at school, the teaching method was pretty much the same as in that skit except that the latin master wasn't allowed a sword. I kinda doubt that latin was taught that way in US schools (could be wrong of course) Even though the skit is funny at face value its even funnier to me as a parody of teaching methods.
Whats really amusing about this is that the Chairman of Sprint dedicated Sprint's $800 million "World Headquaters Campus" in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, KS last Friday
This is the largest office construction project in the USA (maybe the world) and has been underway for the past couple of years and is (was?) scheduled to be completed in 2001 (IIRC).
It was designed to house all of Sprints 14,000+ employees in the KC area. Now of course we don't know if "Worldcom" as the new company is known as will keep any employees in KC!
Whats the point of asking an Open Source advocate their opinion of a closed source porject? They can't say that it has a future without contradicting their pro-open source position.
BeOS is one reason I am no longer an open source advocate. Don't get me wrong Im certainly not against it, but the fact that BeOS is as good as it is, and is as innovative as it is proves that closed source development can come up with great products.
I spend my spare coding time writing for BeOS, Ive participated in linux/GPL'd peojects in the past but no longer do so. It seems that ESR thinks BeOS will fail because the linux zealots will bully developers into going to linux. I think hes wrrong.
none of the geeks i kinow (coders and network admins) own guns
82.5% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
this reminds me of the the scene in The Life of Brian members of the People's Front of Judea and the Campaign for a Free Galilee are fighting each other in the sewers beneath Pilate's palace
Brian:we should be united against our common enemy !
Everyone else:the Judean People's Front!
Needless to say in our case the Romans = MICROS~1
and the various little factions squabbling in the sewer are the various alternate OSes who are too often fighting each other.
The problem as i see it with linux advocacy is that too often there is religious or poilitical baggage. The religous types are those who say "if its not OSS its crap" and when asked why they reply "because if its not OSS it must be crap". As with all religous zealots there is no arguing with such people.
The political types (such as ESR) beleive that OSS is an inherently better model for software development and also that the existence of OSS alternatives is a matter of personal freedom (speech and freedom from corporate dominance)Personaly I don't agree with that position but at least its a rational argument (and at least in theory leaves room for the idea that some non-open source software doesn't suck)and its an idea that i can respect.
In ESR's case the gun-thing is not helping. I understand its part of his personaly politics and his advocacy of OSS and guns come from the same core ideas. But he must realize that alot of people even inside the US do not share those ideas, so emphasising the linkage between the guns and OSS is going to hurt more than it helps.
For me, and i think for alot of other people in the anti-MICROS~1 camp, it simply a question of wanting software that doesn't suck. Software is a tool, and in MICROS~1's case its a tool they use to make you buy more of their product. Their domination of much of the software market is so complete that they have no incentive to make even half-way decent products.
The problem with especialy the religous linux zealots but also the political ones is that this additional baggage tends to fragment people. We get the fights over the GPL vs BSD licenses, GNOME vs KDE linux vs *BSD etc etc.
A lot of people use linux because it works not becuase of politics. If people were simply interested in making good software that just gets the job done, and is not either a marketing tool or a political statement, we would make alot more progress to a better software world!
About BeOS I use it because its really good, and is actually innovative and technicaly advanced and is fun to use. Be is not in a position to abuse its users even if it wanted to. BeOS does owe quite alot to OSS though, the bash shell is very nice to have (i'd have never used it if it weren't for that) the x86 version uses gcc, and alot of GNU tools are available on BEOS.
Like I said I was just repeating what my friend said. My only point was YMMV.
Personaly I take the digital out form my DVD player and pipe it through my Theta Colbalt D/A box and from there to my Linn amp. I don't even have a "receiver". It sounds pretty good to me.
Some Blockbusters already rent DVDs and will have DVDs available in most/all of its US stores by the end of this year. Click here for more info.
Do you have a link for the tea specs? I couldn't find it on the ig-noble page and a search on the british standards web site didn't come up with it.