I find it rather funny that a lot of "Open Source" proponents, who obviously aren't really programmers,
Well, this particular Open Source proponent has been earning a good living as a professional programmer (software engineer, programmmer analyst, whatever the current job title fashion is) for over twenty years.
A lot of that has been in-house development, not software-for-sale, and indeed that's where most of the market for programmers is. I've also developed software for sale -- one program went for something like $10,000 a copy (mainframe software), and included source (thus fitting Peru's requirement). I've also worked for a company that wouldn't even talk to a customer unless it looked like they had at least a quarter million dollars to spend. The core of that was closed, the customization scripts were open -- and the contracts typically included source to the binaries in escrow.
But much of the programming I've done is for in-house software that there'd be no other market for even if free, the stuff is either highly tailored to the specific practices of that company, or was one-off type stuff to, for example, fix data errors in a database, or generate specific statistical reports, etc. Then there's the stuff that isn't actually programming that is still part of the job: analysis, design, spec writing, training, tech support, evaluation of third-party software, etc, etc, all of which was worth money to somebody.
If you don't understand that, then you're clearly very naive about what the real job of most programmers really is, and can only conclude you haven't been out in the real world for more than few months.
Then they go and do this, it's Sure! to lay people off.
Mergers pretty much always result in layoffs, since you end up with a lot of duplicate departments (HR, marketing, sales, some of the technical groups, etc.). Sure, the resulting company is bigger so you (maybe) need more people in each of those departments, but not as many as the sum of the two pre-merger companies.
Compaq went for the deal because it was effectively a bailout for their stockholders. H-P went for the deal because...hmm, that one's tougher, which is why the vote was so close.
Nominally it was to gain Compaq's foothold in the PC market, where H-P has been losing share. Why anyone would want to pay good money for such a position in a market that is slowing and rapidly commoditizing itself is another question.
Heck, with a couple of rare exceptions -- and most of them PBS -- I haven't watched live TV in years. Even before PVRs, recording on a good old analog VHS VCR still let you fast-forward over the commercials, pause to go to the bathroom or get a snack, etc. Sure, the image quality wasn't quite up to what a digital recorder with a digital feed will give you, but it's Good Enough.
And time shifting (which is what the above is) was ruled legal in the courts, as I recall.
This gets interesting. Quoting from the Cable TV Privacy act:
h) Disclosure of information to governmental entity pursuant to court order
A governmental entity may obtain personally identifiable information concerning a cable subscriber pursuant to a court order only if, in the court proceeding relevant to such court order -
(1) such entity offers clear and convincing evidence that the subject of the information is reasonably suspected of engaging in criminal activity and that the information sought would be material evidence in the case; and
(2) the subject of the information is afforded the opportunity to appear and contest such entity's claim.
Two key questions: does the unique identifier make it "personally identifiable" information? (I'd say yes -- a Social Security Number is a unique (well, almost) identifier, for example.) and even though the plaintiff isn't a governmental entity (unless I missed something), the court surely is.
So, has the court offered clear and convincing evidence, etc? If not -- and seeing how this is information that is not being gathered at the moment, then the court seems to be exceeding its authority here, and should issue wiretap or search warrants for each subscriber it wants SonicBlue to monitor.
Venturestar was Lockheed's vehicle that the X-33 project was supposed to be a prototype for.
When X-33 went a billion or so dollars over budget (really stupid design to start with) and was cancelled, Lockheed didn't have the guts to put its own money where its mouth was.
If you really are a rocket scientist, as your sig states, then you should know that "efficiency of the engines" (I assume you mean Isp) has damn near bugger all to do with it.
Ion engines are wonderfully efficient in converting mass to thrust, but they won't get you off the ground. The key issue for launch vehicles is the ratio of total impulse (ie, thrust x time) to system weight, where the system weight is not just the propellant mass but also that of the tanks to hold the propellant (this is where LH2 loses out, too bulky), the engines, thermal shielding, etc.
At least you qualified with reusable single-stage launchers. Several simple thought experiments using existing technology provide examples of workable (but not necessarily reusable) SSTO vehicles. E.g. a Shuttle External Tank with six SSMEs. Or a Saturn-II stage (with the bulkhead moved for the different mix ratio) with the 5 J2's replaced with an SSME.
Of course those are both LH2/LOX examples -- high Isp on the engine but crappy structural weights because of the size of the hydrogen tanks. Convert the engines to something like a LCH4/LOX (liquid methane/lox) cycle (easily do-able with RL-10s, probably require a massive redesign of something like SSME) and you lose some seconds of Isp but gain back because the CH4 is so much denser than LH2 that the tankage is much smaller.
Cheap, one-shot boosters, designed for low cost rather than reusability
This sounds good, but the problem is that, unless they are way overengineered (ie heavy) or you're willing to accept a few blow-ups, "cheap" and "one-shot" are mutually contradictory since a one-shot is inherently untestable, therefore you have to inspect quality in.
Max Hunter (rocket scientist, designer of the Delta's daddy, Thor) beat all this to death years ago, didn't anybody listen to him?
If you didn't have to practically rebuild the whole fucking Shuttle after every flight, you could get reliability the same way you do with aeroplanes. I.e., if it worked on the last flight, it'll probably work on the next (otherwise known as "if it ain't broke, don't fix it").
Problem is that Shuttle is practically designed to break on every flight. (SRBs, ET, etc). Then the whole thing is decertified for flight as soon as it lands.
Air travel would be expensive too if the plane had to be reinspected for a new Certificate of Airworthiness between every flight, let a lone doing a full overhaul on the engines.
They've had their fucking chance. More than once. Space launch costs more now than it did in the sixties -- completely counter to all other technology trends.
You should do your homework before calling others ill-informed.
The Russians built several Buran-class shuttles (another one was named something like Ptichka, "bird"). There was a structural model, that's the one sitting in the park, equivalent to the Pathfinder now sitting in Alabama. There was a manned flight test vehicle that flew numerous approach and landings (like the Enterprise) but unlike the US Shuttles, it had jet engine pods so it could take off on its own and do self-ferrying. And of course the Buran itself which flew in space and did a hands-off fully automated landing (something the US Shuttle has never done).
So please tell me why the shuttles are an embarassment. As far as I can see they're _still_ the only space craft that lands on wheels.
Well, that's one reason right there. What the heck is the point of wheels on a spaceship? It doesn't take off using those wheels, or the wings either for that matter. Total dead weight, useful only for landing -- and then only after you've got high enough and light enough that the wings will lift and the gear won't collapse.
Fscking stupid way to design a vehicle. Hell, how many helicopters have wheels? (not counting the tiny ones to make it easy to drag the thing around on the tarmac).
technologies that come out of these "technology development programs" push the cutting edge of modern tech.
That may have been true in the Apollo era, and even for a little while after, but it hasn't been the case for years -- at least, not in the launch vehicle category. (I agree that some of the Centers do useful research, but that's a small fraction NASA's budget compared to what gets eaten by Houston, the Cape, etc.)
If you want "spin off technologies", you get a much better pay off by focusing on those, not on wasting the money pretending you're spending it on innovative launch vehicle design. (The X-33 project is a classic example, with that thoroughly stupid oddly shaped composite propellant tank that couldn't stand up to internal pressures (because of the odd shape) without reinforcing it so much that it was heavier than a metal tank would have been. Among other design stupidities, like VTOHL, which means you have to design for perpendicular load paths, and have no safe abort mode immediately after launch.)
As for "not some sort of conspiracy to keep regular people out of space" -- they tried pretty damn hard to keep Tito out of the International Space Station when he bought a ride on a Russian vehicle.
This is just another money-grubbing scheme, same as the X-33, same as countless others before it. The last thing they want is to really lower the cost of space launch and let the riff-raff in.
They just want gobs of money to spend on technology development programs (read "new toys"). The ultimate goal of upper NASA management these days is to reach retirement without having any disasters (like Apollo 1 or Challenger) on their watch -- the easiest way to avoid that is to launch things as infrequently as possible.
(Note, there are probably a few naive engineers and rocket scientists still at NASA who believe the PR and have honorable intentions. But they're not the decision makers.)
By taking "copyrighted truetype 'programs' as input" you would clearly be creating a derivative work (eg, a translation) of the copyrighted program.
On the other hand, if you generated a bitmapped image of the typeface produced by such a program, then fed that into another program which did edge detection and such to generate the output font, you'd likely be in the clear since the typeface is an uncopyrightable intermediate product.
Revisionism. A minority faction wanted to, but the militarists in control would have none of it, and were willing to -- as Churchill put it in a different context -- "fight them (the US) on the beaches,...in the streets," et bloody cetera.
It has maybe deterred one or two, but not all as you claim.
Did you flunk reading comprehension in school? How many world wars have there been since 1945?
The Manhattan Project sites are great things to have in your state.
Well perhaps, but that would be New Mexico (Los Alamos, and the Trinity site at White Sands), not Nevada. The original bomb test site (Trinity) is open to tourists one day a year, and is now negligably above background radiation. Somewhere in my collection of stuff I have some of the green, fused sand (melted by the explosion) called trinitite.
"+1, interesting" -- as in: now there's an interesting example of historical revisionism.
So Japan was "on the edge of a surrender"? Hardly. And while there may have been a faction that wanted an end to the war, the militarists in control were in no way going to allow a surrender, at least not without a bloody, massive invasion of the home islands that would make Normandy look like a seaside picnic. The nukes brought something enough radically different to the equation that a surrender could be negotiated with less loss of face.
And in a technology-driven World War, there may be civilians, but there are no non-combatants. The "civilian" industrial complex was a key part of the war machine on all sides. As it was, fewer people died in Hiroshima or Nagasaki than in the "conventional" firebombings of various cities earlier in the war.
Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear explosion, it was primarily a fire fueled by the graphite moderator of the reactor. Quite nasty enough, but after they got the fire out and thousands of cubic yards of concrete dumped on the debris, Chernobyl's remaining reactor (there were two) continued to produce power for many years. But yes, it did litter the countryside with radioactive material.
(Power reactors elsewhere in the world use completely different designs, (non-positive void coefficients, or additional safety mechanisms) and can't catch fire.)
Actually the horrendous creature movies of the 50s and early 60s are probably what embedded some of the ridiculous notions about atomic energy in the public's mind.
As for weapons that cause "LONG-TERM, horrific damage" -- one, weapons are supposed to cause damage, and two, dead is about as long term as you can get. If you look at the objective facts, nukes actually have a pretty good record for keeping the peace: they ended one world war, and have deterred any others in the nearly sixty years since -- precisely because they are so horrific.
(It was Alfred Nobel's hope that his invention, dynamite, would make war so horrific that it would never be fought again. Didn't quite work out that way.)
Very appropriate, actually. It was Einstein's 1939 letter to President Roosevelt (albiet at the request of Leo Szilard) that helped kick off fission research and later the Manhattan project.
(Mind, this was in a political climate where it looked like nuclear research in Nazi Germany might get them there first.)
That's a very significant point. (Mod him up!;-) And the floating-point reference version would be an acceptable start because Media Player isn't likely to be running on any integer-only embedded processors.
Which, of course, leaves us with the obvious question: how available are the specs for writing WMP plug-ins?
Heck, I was programming X back when it was X10. (X version 10, that is.) I suppose one of these days I should learn how to do without X10's XAssocTable stuff so that I can stop linking with -loldX.
You must be running some pretty arcane or crappy or ancient hardware, then. Or going the DIY route on software installation.
Every commercial distro I've installed in the past several years (including Caldera, SuSE and Mandrake) has autodetected the hardware and configured X automatically at install time. On everything from cheap old whitebox Pentiums to Compaq Proliants and even an old Sun Sparc IPC.
That was considered a Good Thing back in the dark ages of computing when GUIs were new and the typical user was terrified of doing the slightest thing wrong lest they "break the [expensive] computer".
These days, any user who has spent more than a few minutes surfing the web has seen so many variations on the user interface that a minor difference in widget styles or even behaviour is no big thing.
Hell, at least under Gnome and KDE the buttons are more-or-less rectangular. That's more than I can say for a lot of web sites (and, for that matter, game software) I've seen.
(Heck, even Apple discarded the uniform style of their famed Human Interface Guidelines with their movie player panel a few years back, since cloned by countless variations of media player software since.)
Well, no, you don't send "several kilobytes of pixel information" (at least, not unless you're running some really elaborate graphics-intensive theme), you send a "draw a big rectangle here, draw little rectangles here, here, and here (the button edge shadows) and the text 'OK' here".
The advantage of this (or even sending the pixmap) over the "draw button here" approach is that the X machine can be much stupider in terms of processing power.
Back when X was designed, networks were much faster relative to CPU and memory than they typically are today. (A comparison would be if everyone was running at least gigabit ethernet these days.)
Slashdot Mirror
I find it rather funny that a lot of "Open Source" proponents, who obviously aren't really programmers,
Well, this particular Open Source proponent has been earning a good living as a professional programmer (software engineer, programmmer analyst, whatever the current job title fashion is) for over twenty years.
A lot of that has been in-house development, not software-for-sale, and indeed that's where most of the market for programmers is. I've also developed software for sale -- one program went for something like $10,000 a copy (mainframe software), and included source (thus fitting Peru's requirement). I've also worked for a company that wouldn't even talk to a customer unless it looked like they had at least a quarter million dollars to spend. The core of that was closed, the customization scripts were open -- and the contracts typically included source to the binaries in escrow.
But much of the programming I've done is for in-house software that there'd be no other market for even if free, the stuff is either highly tailored to the specific practices of that company, or was one-off type stuff to, for example, fix data errors in a database, or generate specific statistical reports, etc. Then there's the stuff that isn't actually programming that is still part of the job: analysis, design, spec writing, training, tech support, evaluation of third-party software, etc, etc, all of which was worth money to somebody.
If you don't understand that, then you're clearly very naive about what the real job of most programmers really is, and can only conclude you haven't been out in the real world for more than few months.
Then they go and do this, it's Sure! to lay people off.
Mergers pretty much always result in layoffs, since you end up with a lot of duplicate departments (HR, marketing, sales, some of the technical groups, etc.). Sure, the resulting company is bigger so you (maybe) need more people in each of those departments, but not as many as the sum of the two pre-merger companies.
Compaq went for the deal because it was effectively a bailout for their stockholders. H-P went for the deal because...hmm, that one's tougher, which is why the vote was so close.
Nominally it was to gain Compaq's foothold in the PC market, where H-P has been losing share. Why anyone would want to pay good money for such a position in a market that is slowing and rapidly commoditizing itself is another question.
Heck, with a couple of rare exceptions -- and most of them PBS -- I haven't watched live TV in years. Even before PVRs, recording on a good old analog VHS VCR still let you fast-forward over the commercials, pause to go to the bathroom or get a snack, etc. Sure, the image quality wasn't quite up to what a digital recorder with a digital feed will give you, but it's Good Enough.
And time shifting (which is what the above is) was ruled legal in the courts, as I recall.
So, has the court offered clear and convincing evidence, etc? If not -- and seeing how this is information that is not being gathered at the moment, then the court seems to be exceeding its authority here, and should issue wiretap or search warrants for each subscriber it wants SonicBlue to monitor.
I hope SonicBlue is appealing this.
Venturestar was Lockheed's vehicle that the X-33 project was supposed to be a prototype for.
When X-33 went a billion or so dollars over budget (really stupid design to start with) and was cancelled, Lockheed didn't have the guts to put its own money where its mouth was.
If you really are a rocket scientist, as your sig states, then you should know that "efficiency of the engines" (I assume you mean Isp) has damn near bugger all to do with it.
Ion engines are wonderfully efficient in converting mass to thrust, but they won't get you off the ground. The key issue for launch vehicles is the ratio of total impulse (ie, thrust x time) to system weight, where the system weight is not just the propellant mass but also that of the tanks to hold the propellant (this is where LH2 loses out, too bulky), the engines, thermal shielding, etc.
At least you qualified with reusable single-stage launchers. Several simple thought experiments using existing technology provide examples of workable (but not necessarily reusable) SSTO vehicles. E.g. a Shuttle External Tank with six SSMEs. Or a Saturn-II stage (with the bulkhead moved for the different mix ratio) with the 5 J2's replaced with an SSME.
Of course those are both LH2/LOX examples -- high Isp on the engine but crappy structural weights because of the size of the hydrogen tanks. Convert the engines to something like a LCH4/LOX (liquid methane/lox) cycle (easily do-able with RL-10s, probably require a massive redesign of something like SSME) and you lose some seconds of Isp but gain back because the CH4 is so much denser than LH2 that the tankage is much smaller.
Cheap, one-shot boosters, designed for low cost rather than reusability
This sounds good, but the problem is that, unless they are way overengineered (ie heavy) or you're willing to accept a few blow-ups, "cheap" and "one-shot" are mutually contradictory since a one-shot is inherently untestable, therefore you have to inspect quality in.
Max Hunter (rocket scientist, designer of the Delta's daddy, Thor) beat all this to death years ago, didn't anybody listen to him?
If you didn't have to practically rebuild the whole fucking Shuttle after every flight, you could get reliability the same way you do with aeroplanes. I.e., if it worked on the last flight, it'll probably work on the next (otherwise known as "if it ain't broke, don't fix it").
Problem is that Shuttle is practically designed to break on every flight. (SRBs, ET, etc). Then the whole thing is decertified for flight as soon as it lands.
Air travel would be expensive too if the plane had to be reinspected for a new Certificate of Airworthiness between every flight, let a lone doing a full overhaul on the engines.
Give NASA a chance!
They've had their fucking chance. More than once. Space launch costs more now than it did in the sixties -- completely counter to all other technology trends.
Give somebody else a chance.
You should do your homework before calling others ill-informed.
The Russians built several Buran-class shuttles (another one was named something like Ptichka, "bird"). There was a structural model, that's the one sitting in the park, equivalent to the Pathfinder now sitting in Alabama. There was a manned flight test vehicle that flew numerous approach and landings (like the Enterprise) but unlike the US Shuttles, it had jet engine pods so it could take off on its own and do self-ferrying. And of course the Buran itself which flew in space and did a hands-off fully automated landing (something the US Shuttle has never done).
So please tell me why the shuttles are an embarassment. As far as I can see they're _still_ the only space craft that lands on wheels.
Well, that's one reason right there. What the heck is the point of wheels on a spaceship? It doesn't take off using those wheels, or the wings either for that matter. Total dead weight, useful only for landing -- and then only after you've got high enough and light enough that the wings will lift and the gear won't collapse.
Fscking stupid way to design a vehicle. Hell, how many helicopters have wheels? (not counting the tiny ones to make it easy to drag the thing around on the tarmac).
technologies that come out of these "technology development programs" push the cutting edge of modern tech.
That may have been true in the Apollo era, and even for a little while after, but it hasn't been the case for years -- at least, not in the launch vehicle category. (I agree that some of the Centers do useful research, but that's a small fraction NASA's budget compared to what gets eaten by Houston, the Cape, etc.)
If you want "spin off technologies", you get a much better pay off by focusing on those, not on wasting the money pretending you're spending it on innovative launch vehicle design. (The X-33 project is a classic example, with that thoroughly stupid oddly shaped composite propellant tank that couldn't stand up to internal pressures (because of the odd shape) without reinforcing it so much that it was heavier than a metal tank would have been. Among other design stupidities, like VTOHL, which means you have to design for perpendicular load paths, and have no safe abort mode immediately after launch.)
As for "not some sort of conspiracy to keep regular people out of space" -- they tried pretty damn hard to keep Tito out of the International Space Station when he bought a ride on a Russian vehicle.
This is just another money-grubbing scheme, same as the X-33, same as countless others before it. The last thing they want is to really lower the cost of space launch and let the riff-raff in.
They just want gobs of money to spend on technology development programs (read "new toys"). The ultimate goal of upper NASA management these days is to reach retirement without having any disasters (like Apollo 1 or Challenger) on their watch -- the easiest way to avoid that is to launch things as infrequently as possible.
(Note, there are probably a few naive engineers and rocket scientists still at NASA who believe the PR and have honorable intentions. But they're not the decision makers.)
#include "IANAL_disclaimer"
No.
By taking "copyrighted truetype 'programs' as input" you would clearly be creating a derivative work (eg, a translation) of the copyrighted program.
On the other hand, if you generated a bitmapped image of the typeface produced by such a program, then fed that into another program which did edge detection and such to generate the output font, you'd likely be in the clear since the typeface is an uncopyrightable intermediate product.
Nah, just set up all your Windows clients with PC-NFS.
Japanese government was willing to surrender
Revisionism. A minority faction wanted to, but the militarists in control would have none of it, and were willing to -- as Churchill put it in a different context -- "fight them (the US) on the beaches,...in the streets," et bloody cetera.
It has maybe deterred one or two, but not all as you claim.
Did you flunk reading comprehension in school? How many world wars have there been since 1945?
The Manhattan Project sites are great things to have in your state.
Well perhaps, but that would be New Mexico (Los Alamos, and the Trinity site at White Sands), not Nevada. The original bomb test site (Trinity) is open to tourists one day a year, and is now negligably above background radiation. Somewhere in my collection of stuff I have some of the green, fused sand (melted by the explosion) called trinitite.
"+1, interesting" -- as in: now there's an interesting example of historical revisionism.
So Japan was "on the edge of a surrender"? Hardly. And while there may have been a faction that wanted an end to the war, the militarists in control were in no way going to allow a surrender, at least not without a bloody, massive invasion of the home islands that would make Normandy look like a seaside picnic. The nukes brought something enough radically different to the equation that a surrender could be negotiated with less loss of face.
And in a technology-driven World War, there may be civilians, but there are no non-combatants. The "civilian" industrial complex was a key part of the war machine on all sides. As it was, fewer people died in Hiroshima or Nagasaki than in the "conventional" firebombings of various cities earlier in the war.
Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear explosion, it was primarily a fire fueled by the graphite moderator of the reactor. Quite nasty enough, but after they got the fire out and thousands of cubic yards of concrete dumped on the debris, Chernobyl's remaining reactor (there were two) continued to produce power for many years. But yes, it did litter the countryside with radioactive material.
(Power reactors elsewhere in the world use completely different designs, (non-positive void coefficients, or additional safety mechanisms) and can't catch fire.)
Actually the horrendous creature movies of the 50s and early 60s are probably what embedded some of the ridiculous notions about atomic energy in the public's mind.
As for weapons that cause "LONG-TERM, horrific damage" -- one, weapons are supposed to cause damage, and two, dead is about as long term as you can get. If you look at the objective facts, nukes actually have a pretty good record for keeping the peace: they ended one world war, and have deterred any others in the nearly sixty years since -- precisely because they are so horrific.
(It was Alfred Nobel's hope that his invention, dynamite, would make war so horrific that it would never be fought again. Didn't quite work out that way.)
Very appropriate, actually. It was Einstein's 1939 letter to President Roosevelt (albiet at the request of Leo Szilard) that helped kick off fission research and later the Manhattan project.
(Mind, this was in a political climate where it looked like nuclear research in Nazi Germany might get them there first.)
That's a very significant point. (Mod him up! ;-) And the floating-point reference version would be an acceptable start because Media Player isn't likely to be running on any integer-only embedded processors.
Which, of course, leaves us with the obvious question: how available are the specs for writing WMP plug-ins?
Heck, I was programming X back when it was X10. (X version 10, that is.) I suppose one of these days I should learn how to do without X10's XAssocTable stuff so that I can stop linking with -loldX.
You must be running some pretty arcane or crappy or ancient hardware, then. Or going the DIY route on software installation.
Every commercial distro I've installed in the past several years (including Caldera, SuSE and Mandrake) has autodetected the hardware and configured X automatically at install time. On everything from cheap old whitebox Pentiums to Compaq Proliants and even an old Sun Sparc IPC.
a consistent user experience can't be bad
That was considered a Good Thing back in the dark ages of computing when GUIs were new and the typical user was terrified of doing the slightest thing wrong lest they "break the [expensive] computer".
These days, any user who has spent more than a few minutes surfing the web has seen so many variations on the user interface that a minor difference in widget styles or even behaviour is no big thing.
Hell, at least under Gnome and KDE the buttons are more-or-less rectangular. That's more than I can say for a lot of web sites (and, for that matter, game software) I've seen.
(Heck, even Apple discarded the uniform style of their famed Human Interface Guidelines with their movie player panel a few years back, since cloned by countless variations of media player software since.)
Well, no, you don't send "several kilobytes of pixel information" (at least, not unless you're running some really elaborate graphics-intensive theme), you send a "draw a big rectangle here, draw little rectangles here, here, and here (the button edge shadows) and the text 'OK' here".
The advantage of this (or even sending the pixmap) over the "draw button here" approach is that the X machine can be much stupider in terms of processing power.
Back when X was designed, networks were much faster relative to CPU and memory than they typically are today. (A comparison would be if everyone was running at least gigabit ethernet these days.)