I think it turned out that the gameplay for a FP hand-to-hand combat system was just too bad. The field of view that your brain can process with a perspective projection with the viewing angle of your monitor doesn't give you enough information about something close up, and you don't get enough information about the position of your body from the game to tell what you're doing.
Now, it is possible to do well (see Thief), but it's too much of a pain to make it the majority of the game.
Actually, their goal is just to have all of the servers in the country running Linux. If there were few servers running in the country, it would be that much easier.
As far as the politics are concerned, I suspect that many Iraqis would be quite pleased to get rid of the products of some big American company in favor of stuff controlled locally and supported by Iraqis, whether because of opposing the American occupation or simply out of pride in Iraqi work.
They'd be selected against, assuming evolution stays Darwinian. But gene therapy already works for giving people genetic material neither of their parents had. Given how much body modification there is in American society (pierced ears or circumcision, just to mention two which are more common than not), there is a substantial amount of phenotype which is obviously not genetic, and is therefore passed on by conscious decisions, not natural selection.
Once there's a substantial portion of behavior that is based on information passed between memebers of the species during their lifetime, things get much more complicated. Things that limit the advantage of various features may be corrected for afterwards. Chances are that this kid will get myostatin somehow before the lack of it kills him, and will grow up to need occasional unusual medical attention, but not be reproductively impaired.
I'm nostalgic for the old days, when nobody believed that iD would actually release the game they'd been talking about, and that they couldn't possibly actually implement the stuff they were saying they had planned. Then they released it, and it had sloped floors, water, and walls with triangular holes, in addition to most of the claimed features. Although they never did do melee combat like they had originally claimed. A bit later, they released the official version, which wasn't nearly as cool. Ah, how I miss chasing people around with a plain brown stick, blowing myself up.
The real problem with "free software" is that "free software" isn't free. It's the users of "free software" that are free, not the software, which is constrained to do what it's told. To people for whom "Free Software" isn't an idiom like "Free Speech", it could only mean either no-cost software or viruses. "Open Source" has the advantage in learnability that the source is, in fact, in the relevant sense, open.
The nicest office chair I've used is this one. Bought two of them when the company I was at went under, and I'm sitting in mine now. It was partially responsible for me working late on numerous occasions ("hey, it's 7, I should go home... but it's so comfy here"). Lots of adjustable things, sufficiently good construction that they don't end up falling out of alignment or getting stuck.
Are the projects he supports genuinely useful to society? A lot of the purpose of the government is to get funding to projects which are beneficial to the community as a whole rather than to paying individuals. Pork barrel funding is only bad when the projects are only a way to funnel money to influential groups without particular merit.
The community they're giving back to is not the people who search the web, but the people who develop software they use. Of course, practically anyone who develops software searches the web, but the service isn't really a repayment in kind.
In addition to their web searching engine, they have a whole lot of interesting software. Their PDF to HTML converter, for example, is nicer in some ways than any PDF viewer I've seen for Linux. They clearly have some useful tools for transforming HTML, as well (highlighting words, e.g.). That's the sort of thing that's nice to release to the community, both because people will like it, and because people will improve and maintain it.
Actually, the best benefit could be the simple fact of the code and therefore capabilities being the same: consider the effect it would have on web publishing if Google searches would only find a Word document if Open Office could read it, and FireFox would render DOC the way Google sees it. IE has a large market share, but Google's is possibly even more strategic. There are lots of good possibilities here: if FireFox can't skip your flash intro, Google won't either, and you won't get any hits. If Open Office mangles your document, Google will also mangle it while highlighting the search terms.
Yes. In fact, without attitude controls, he would have cancelled the flight when the ship flipped halfway over just after firing the engine. As it was, he had attitude control until he left the atmosphere, at which point he was happy, so it wasn't necessary any more, and he could just watch candy float around the cockpit.
In fact, pilots have control over everyone's attitudes, which is why we would be sad if he'd lost it sooner.
PE is only mgh on small scales, where 'g' is approximately constant. KE and PE for orbits are the same, but only if you measure the PE based on falling all the way to the center of the earth; the delta PE from the surface of the earth is an order of magnitude less.
There are plenty of way to change your direction while maintaining (some of) your speed without using your own power, from curved tracks to wings. Unfortunately, they all depend on having something in the way of going straight, which is what makes a big swoop in space impossible.
I thought you were suggesting that, at some altitude the velocity necessary to get into orbit becomes trivial; I assume the original poster suggested "falling into orbit" because SpaceShipOne was doing so well at getting altitude that it seemed like it should be possible to translate some of the gravitational potential into enough kinetic energy to be in orbit. Unfortunately for that idea, the kinetic energy is a whole lot, and that translates to a whole lot more energy.
What I meant was, in terms of energy, the potential energy due to altitude of a craft in orbit and the kinetic energy are equal, but a craft on the ground has 98% of the distance from the center of the earth of one at 100km, so you have to go the last 2% up, but the whole 100% forward.
If I'm doing my math right, in order to have sufficient energy from gravitational potential to be able to fall into orbit, you need to get twice the 'r' that you will have in orbit. That means that, in order to get in orbit at the edge of space, you'd have to fly straight up to 6478km above sea level and then do a perfect swoop without an atmosphere.
Getting to the right altitude is only half of the trip to orbit, and you start at 98% of the right altitude, due to taking off from the surface, rather than the center, of the the earth.
Now that would be embarassing... "June 21: Went up to 100km. Saw black sky during day. First civilian to pilot in space. Would have gone higher, but accidentally turned off engine (nobody looking, still high enough). Heard loud noise on way back. Forgot to put down landing gear (11,000 people watching).
"June 22: Biked into tree (nobody looking). Space is easier; nothing to run into."
I think that images and such are important parts of the content of a document these days. Journalists and academics, for example, need to be able to put figures in their articles. At this point they don't care about getting the layout right, but they need to refer to figure 2 and actually have a figure 2 in the document.
Of course, the page layout program may add more images for decoration, and will also handle placing the images in the desired places. But the simple association of images with documents should be a word processor function.
One thing we've learned since then is that you can build one of each piece of the program to throw away, and never throw the whole thing away. Provided you're written reuseable code, you can even throw away the whole architecture without losing most of the code at once.
Also, it's easier to convince people of if you call the first one a stub, a demo, or a mock-up. You build a first one so that the rest of the teams can use it while you do the real one. You build a first one so that you can give marketing an idea of what to sell. You build a first one so that people can evaluate something with actual behavior, rather than a specification which might not be well-defined. It's also more convincing if you can either do the first one really quickly or salvage a lot of the code from it when you throw it away.
I like the surgical team idea, but I think that a lot of the members can be shared with other teams. The administrator is probably more effective when performing this role for most of the teams. The product of the editors for the organization as a whole will be better if they are all the same person (and therefore have consistant style and such). The program clerk job is probably largely handled by revision control these days. Tools should probably be a team by itself, since it's a development task which is often as large in total as the official product. Testing needs to have a cross-team role, to the extent that it isn't satisfied by automated processes. This reduces the team membership to the surgeon and copilot (plus shared people on call), which is the XP pair programming idea.
Actually, the thing I find very striking is how far CLIs have come. Sure, you can still type commands character for character. But there are a ton of useful special keys and control characters. I think my most command interaction with a CLI is up-arrow return. I also use "cd wo{tab}j{tab}o{tab}i{tab}{return}" and "up-arrow ctrl-a ctrl-d right-arrow ctrl-d ctrl-d". Then there's "ctrl-r m return". It's almost painful to watch someone actually try to type a complete command line correctly.
Over the years, CLIs have changed such that you don't actually type whole commands any more. The core point of a CLI is just that the actions are specified as text in a simple and compact format; you can see what is going to happen when you hit return. I think it would be interesting to write a command line GUI; you click on things with the mouse in order to form your command, but the command is shown at the bottom of the window, and nothing happens until you hit return or click go.
Functional languages, once created, don't change except by replacing the implementation with an equivalent one, obviously.
The thing about functional languages is that they frequently don't act like programming languages are expected to. A Turing machine is a poor description of a functional programming environment, for example. This means that most of the influence that functional languages have is on things that aren't generally considered programming languages. They're great for the formal specification of things that process information, while allowing you to completely ignore the question of how they could possibly be implemented.
Interestingly, as computer-generated code improves, it becomes increasingly possible to just let the compiler figure out how to write the (imperative) program, while just writing a functional specification for it. How does it work? Who cares, so long as it does what it's supposed to?
Well, he does say that Mozilla development took too long to produce a good result. Going to the new codebase when they did was wrong; doing XUL first was wrong; making a monolithic browser was wrong.
Mozilla was, in that period, a failure as an OSS project. They got where they are today based on being funded by AOL through the period where the project's output was not sufficiently interesting to attract development on its merits. We should be thankful for the flexibility of the Mozilla team and the investment AOL put in to overcome their discouragement.
(As for Microsoft always being one step ahead, as he said, Microsoft can only be stopped by its own weight; if Microsoft had actually continued to take steps, it would probably be one step ahead now, but it hasn't actually managed to do anything since it declared victory)
They go through the small numbers quickly for a number of reasons and then slow down. Essentially, there are a lot of small changes that they wanted to make from 2.6.0, and they want to get all of the small changes in before they start on big disruptive stuff (which will start 2.7); once localized changes are less important than rearranging awkward interfaces, 2.7 will start, 2.6 will be turned over to Andrew Morton, and 2.6 will change more slowly, since people will tend to work with the nice new interfaces and have to backport to get changes into 2.6
Actually, the standard for web browsers, mail reader, etc., is to use content types rather than file extensions, and programs tend to use magic numbers to be sure they know what they're doing. (For example, konqueror will happily display a PNG file called "foo.gif"). Older versions of Mac OS used stored content types, which really only caused problems with getting files from other places, because then the content type could be wrong. I'm not sure what OS X does.
All modern file formats have distinctive structures which let programs tell from the first few bytes exactly what's in them. External information, whether in the file name or sent with the file only serves to cause problems. Users benefit from having the filenames mean something to them, and extensions could actually help with this.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it turned out that the gameplay for a FP hand-to-hand combat system was just too bad. The field of view that your brain can process with a perspective projection with the viewing angle of your monitor doesn't give you enough information about something close up, and you don't get enough information about the position of your body from the game to tell what you're doing.
Now, it is possible to do well (see Thief), but it's too much of a pain to make it the majority of the game.
Actually, their goal is just to have all of the servers in the country running Linux. If there were few servers running in the country, it would be that much easier.
As far as the politics are concerned, I suspect that many Iraqis would be quite pleased to get rid of the products of some big American company in favor of stuff controlled locally and supported by Iraqis, whether because of opposing the American occupation or simply out of pride in Iraqi work.
They'd be selected against, assuming evolution stays Darwinian. But gene therapy already works for giving people genetic material neither of their parents had. Given how much body modification there is in American society (pierced ears or circumcision, just to mention two which are more common than not), there is a substantial amount of phenotype which is obviously not genetic, and is therefore passed on by conscious decisions, not natural selection.
Once there's a substantial portion of behavior that is based on information passed between memebers of the species during their lifetime, things get much more complicated. Things that limit the advantage of various features may be corrected for afterwards. Chances are that this kid will get myostatin somehow before the lack of it kills him, and will grow up to need occasional unusual medical attention, but not be reproductively impaired.
I'm nostalgic for the old days, when nobody believed that iD would actually release the game they'd been talking about, and that they couldn't possibly actually implement the stuff they were saying they had planned. Then they released it, and it had sloped floors, water, and walls with triangular holes, in addition to most of the claimed features. Although they never did do melee combat like they had originally claimed. A bit later, they released the official version, which wasn't nearly as cool. Ah, how I miss chasing people around with a plain brown stick, blowing myself up.
The real problem with "free software" is that "free software" isn't free. It's the users of "free software" that are free, not the software, which is constrained to do what it's told. To people for whom "Free Software" isn't an idiom like "Free Speech", it could only mean either no-cost software or viruses. "Open Source" has the advantage in learnability that the source is, in fact, in the relevant sense, open.
The nicest office chair I've used is this one. Bought two of them when the company I was at went under, and I'm sitting in mine now. It was partially responsible for me working late on numerous occasions ("hey, it's 7, I should go home... but it's so comfy here"). Lots of adjustable things, sufficiently good construction that they don't end up falling out of alignment or getting stuck.
Are the projects he supports genuinely useful to society? A lot of the purpose of the government is to get funding to projects which are beneficial to the community as a whole rather than to paying individuals. Pork barrel funding is only bad when the projects are only a way to funnel money to influential groups without particular merit.
The community they're giving back to is not the people who search the web, but the people who develop software they use. Of course, practically anyone who develops software searches the web, but the service isn't really a repayment in kind.
In addition to their web searching engine, they have a whole lot of interesting software. Their PDF to HTML converter, for example, is nicer in some ways than any PDF viewer I've seen for Linux. They clearly have some useful tools for transforming HTML, as well (highlighting words, e.g.). That's the sort of thing that's nice to release to the community, both because people will like it, and because people will improve and maintain it.
Actually, the best benefit could be the simple fact of the code and therefore capabilities being the same: consider the effect it would have on web publishing if Google searches would only find a Word document if Open Office could read it, and FireFox would render DOC the way Google sees it. IE has a large market share, but Google's is possibly even more strategic. There are lots of good possibilities here: if FireFox can't skip your flash intro, Google won't either, and you won't get any hits. If Open Office mangles your document, Google will also mangle it while highlighting the search terms.
According to the article, the ship was doing some alarming things right after he turned on the engine. So the hard part was mostly before the view.
Yes. In fact, without attitude controls, he would have cancelled the flight when the ship flipped halfway over just after firing the engine. As it was, he had attitude control until he left the atmosphere, at which point he was happy, so it wasn't necessary any more, and he could just watch candy float around the cockpit.
In fact, pilots have control over everyone's attitudes, which is why we would be sad if he'd lost it sooner.
PE is only mgh on small scales, where 'g' is approximately constant. KE and PE for orbits are the same, but only if you measure the PE based on falling all the way to the center of the earth; the delta PE from the surface of the earth is an order of magnitude less.
There are plenty of way to change your direction while maintaining (some of) your speed without using your own power, from curved tracks to wings. Unfortunately, they all depend on having something in the way of going straight, which is what makes a big swoop in space impossible.
I thought you were suggesting that, at some altitude the velocity necessary to get into orbit becomes trivial; I assume the original poster suggested "falling into orbit" because SpaceShipOne was doing so well at getting altitude that it seemed like it should be possible to translate some of the gravitational potential into enough kinetic energy to be in orbit. Unfortunately for that idea, the kinetic energy is a whole lot, and that translates to a whole lot more energy.
What I meant was, in terms of energy, the potential energy due to altitude of a craft in orbit and the kinetic energy are equal, but a craft on the ground has 98% of the distance from the center of the earth of one at 100km, so you have to go the last 2% up, but the whole 100% forward.
If I'm doing my math right, in order to have sufficient energy from gravitational potential to be able to fall into orbit, you need to get twice the 'r' that you will have in orbit. That means that, in order to get in orbit at the edge of space, you'd have to fly straight up to 6478km above sea level and then do a perfect swoop without an atmosphere.
Getting to the right altitude is only half of the trip to orbit, and you start at 98% of the right altitude, due to taking off from the surface, rather than the center, of the the earth.
Now that would be embarassing... "June 21: Went up to 100km. Saw black sky during day. First civilian to pilot in space. Would have gone higher, but accidentally turned off engine (nobody looking, still high enough). Heard loud noise on way back. Forgot to put down landing gear (11,000 people watching).
"June 22: Biked into tree (nobody looking). Space is easier; nothing to run into."
Car & Driver would be quite different if they reviewed unique cars or prototypes.
"Dang, supercomputers are still backordered at the Apple Store."
For that matter, just using /bin/sh on Solaris will drive you nuts.
I think that images and such are important parts of the content of a document these days. Journalists and academics, for example, need to be able to put figures in their articles. At this point they don't care about getting the layout right, but they need to refer to figure 2 and actually have a figure 2 in the document.
Of course, the page layout program may add more images for decoration, and will also handle placing the images in the desired places. But the simple association of images with documents should be a word processor function.
One thing we've learned since then is that you can build one of each piece of the program to throw away, and never throw the whole thing away. Provided you're written reuseable code, you can even throw away the whole architecture without losing most of the code at once.
Also, it's easier to convince people of if you call the first one a stub, a demo, or a mock-up. You build a first one so that the rest of the teams can use it while you do the real one. You build a first one so that you can give marketing an idea of what to sell. You build a first one so that people can evaluate something with actual behavior, rather than a specification which might not be well-defined. It's also more convincing if you can either do the first one really quickly or salvage a lot of the code from it when you throw it away.
I like the surgical team idea, but I think that a lot of the members can be shared with other teams. The administrator is probably more effective when performing this role for most of the teams. The product of the editors for the organization as a whole will be better if they are all the same person (and therefore have consistant style and such). The program clerk job is probably largely handled by revision control these days. Tools should probably be a team by itself, since it's a development task which is often as large in total as the official product. Testing needs to have a cross-team role, to the extent that it isn't satisfied by automated processes. This reduces the team membership to the surgeon and copilot (plus shared people on call), which is the XP pair programming idea.
That's why you need to set your blue color to something that's not all that blue. I like: XTerm*color4: DodgerBlue
There's nothing wrong with things being blue-tinted, even if you can't focus on the blue itself.
Actually, the thing I find very striking is how far CLIs have come. Sure, you can still type commands character for character. But there are a ton of useful special keys and control characters. I think my most command interaction with a CLI is up-arrow return. I also use "cd wo{tab}j{tab}o{tab}i{tab}{return}" and "up-arrow ctrl-a ctrl-d right-arrow ctrl-d ctrl-d". Then there's "ctrl-r m return". It's almost painful to watch someone actually try to type a complete command line correctly.
Over the years, CLIs have changed such that you don't actually type whole commands any more. The core point of a CLI is just that the actions are specified as text in a simple and compact format; you can see what is going to happen when you hit return. I think it would be interesting to write a command line GUI; you click on things with the mouse in order to form your command, but the command is shown at the bottom of the window, and nothing happens until you hit return or click go.
Functional languages, once created, don't change except by replacing the implementation with an equivalent one, obviously.
The thing about functional languages is that they frequently don't act like programming languages are expected to. A Turing machine is a poor description of a functional programming environment, for example. This means that most of the influence that functional languages have is on things that aren't generally considered programming languages. They're great for the formal specification of things that process information, while allowing you to completely ignore the question of how they could possibly be implemented.
Interestingly, as computer-generated code improves, it becomes increasingly possible to just let the compiler figure out how to write the (imperative) program, while just writing a functional specification for it. How does it work? Who cares, so long as it does what it's supposed to?
No, SCO produces road maps and marketing plans, and well as other sorts of press releases.
Well, he does say that Mozilla development took too long to produce a good result. Going to the new codebase when they did was wrong; doing XUL first was wrong; making a monolithic browser was wrong.
Mozilla was, in that period, a failure as an OSS project. They got where they are today based on being funded by AOL through the period where the project's output was not sufficiently interesting to attract development on its merits. We should be thankful for the flexibility of the Mozilla team and the investment AOL put in to overcome their discouragement.
(As for Microsoft always being one step ahead, as he said, Microsoft can only be stopped by its own weight; if Microsoft had actually continued to take steps, it would probably be one step ahead now, but it hasn't actually managed to do anything since it declared victory)
They go through the small numbers quickly for a number of reasons and then slow down. Essentially, there are a lot of small changes that they wanted to make from 2.6.0, and they want to get all of the small changes in before they start on big disruptive stuff (which will start 2.7); once localized changes are less important than rearranging awkward interfaces, 2.7 will start, 2.6 will be turned over to Andrew Morton, and 2.6 will change more slowly, since people will tend to work with the nice new interfaces and have to backport to get changes into 2.6
Actually, the standard for web browsers, mail reader, etc., is to use content types rather than file extensions, and programs tend to use magic numbers to be sure they know what they're doing. (For example, konqueror will happily display a PNG file called "foo.gif"). Older versions of Mac OS used stored content types, which really only caused problems with getting files from other places, because then the content type could be wrong. I'm not sure what OS X does.
All modern file formats have distinctive structures which let programs tell from the first few bytes exactly what's in them. External information, whether in the file name or sent with the file only serves to cause problems. Users benefit from having the filenames mean something to them, and extensions could actually help with this.