While much of the satellite coverage is from geostationary satellites which have drifted out of their normal orbit and thus give partial coverage for a small window each day, the Iridium satellites provide 24 hour coverage. The Iridium links are pretty low-bandwidth, so they're not useful for shipping large amounts of data, but they're useable for phone calls.
I write software for a physics experiment based at the South Pole, and I got a call from there to my home phone just a few days ago, regarding some problems the winter-overs were having. I was a bit confused when I picked up, because the call showed up on caller ID as something like "U.S. Government (Hawaii)".
The Wii is a copy of everything before it in the same way as the iPod is just another MP3 player.
Both have a revolutionary new user interface which redefines the landscape.
So we can write an x86 program which does raw computation. Now how does it display the result of that computation or save it to disk? If it needs to read a file or prompt the user for input, how does that happen?
I'd love to use FreeBSD, but then there's that whole messy Java issue. In other words that it's not supported for, nor does it run well on FreeBSD last time I checked.
The fact that the developers haven't been able to get Sun to certify them for binary distribution is regrettable, but it certainly doesn't mean that it's not supported.
I've been developing Java-based web and command-line applications on FreeBSD for at least 6 years and have never had any problems.
Karl Sims did some fantastic work on evolving movement a decade ago. Creatures were randomly assembled using blocks and a few standard connectors, and eventually evolved a wide variety of strategies for motion. My favorties were the 3-block creature which moved like an ape and the 2-block creature which moved in the same way a washing machine walks.
Yep. Because I have so many windows for the same app, it'd be really clumsy to use cmd-` to find the right one.
My work environment has been X-based since '89, and I've used virtual desktops since vtwm came out in around '90.
I'm using CodeTek's VirtualDesktop rather than DesktopManager, because VirtualDesktop supports 'focus follows mouse'. After switching to OS X, I had a couple of months of misery before CodeTek brought out the beta which supported 'focus follows mouse'.
I typically work on one or two major projects in parallel, along with bug fixes for previous projects and the occasional non-work hack. For each of these I have 1-3 terminal windows and one or more emacs windows.
I also have my RSS reader and assorted web pages open at the same time.
Keeping these different tasks in separate desktops allows me to have 20-30 windows open without getting lost.
Disagreeing with Reaganomics doesn't make one a leftist; there are conservatives who disagree with the whole "starve the beast" philosophy.
Asserting that it's leftist *is* a troll, especially in the current climate of ultraconservatives using the word "liberal" as a synonym for "EEVVVIILLL"
You KNOW there is some movie exec out there thinking... "What if Sauramon wasn't Really dead. We could make a sequel!"
Or
"What if the Ring wasn't Really destroyed. We could make a sequel! Yeah, gollum got the ring yeah! yeah... ad nausem"
Nah, it won't be a sequel. I'm betting that, just like Lucas, they'll make a prequel. Maybe they'll elaborate on the story of how Bilbo found the ring. Except it'll be pitched at the kiddies in order to increase market share, so they'll focus on the more comical dwarves rather than the boring elves. And they'll probably throw in something lame like a CGI dragon who sleeps on mounds of treasure. Battle scenes are good, too, so they'll probably end it with a big battle between five armies or something...
So is this version going to include the feature of it not being *fricking painful* to compile nearly anything not specifically targetted at Solaris?
I'm old enough to remember back when Sun was the top dog and all non-SunOS users complained about Unix software being written specifically for Suns.
And before that, the problem was people writing Unix software specifically for the VAX.
This says more about the quality of the people writing OSS than it does about the quality of Solaris. Actually quality is the wrong word, because it's likely that many of these programmers only know or have access to Linux.
Making an effort to port your software to non-Linux dialects of Unix is a really good thing, because other OSes will expose bugs in your software which would not otherwise turn up until, for example, a bug in the current glibc is fixed.
I'm finding it hard to think of examples, but I guess GNU grep's an OK example of something that's just about right. ...
Likewise, it's not sed, awk or perl
You do realize that grep was originally a fork of sed? Hint: Google for sed g/re/p.
The underlying problem is overpopulation. If there were only 1 person in this world, he could not damage the earth regardless of how stupid his decisions might be. However, when there are 6 billion people, the cumulative effect of the 6 billion stupid decisions would destroy the earth.
there was a paper published in the early nineties which tested various standard unix command-line tools from a variety of vendors. They subjected the tools to horrendous stress and abuse, and found (to their suprise) that the GNU tools were the most reliable, with approximately a 1% failure rate in their bank of tests. The second best was HP, with about 8% failure rate, and everyone else was between 12-20%.
I'm guessing you're probably referring to Bart Miller's Fuzz Testing software. They did a survey in 1990 and a followup in 1995. They've even got the software available if you want to do the 2003 version!
Sun does not have the same room for manoeuvre as MS since the JCP has other powerful participants. In practice, there have been few ownership/legal issues in developing Open Source versions of the JVM - see the Kawa web site for a list of these. Their complaints revolve around issues such as access to the test suites - ultimately Sun just owns the Java name, not all the implementations.
The Apache Foundation is working on freeing up access to the test suites, according to
this press release
Subversion isn't the only open-source revision control system out there. Check out these projects as well: OpenCM arch Stellation PRCS
Re:What Difference Does It Make In The Long Run?
on
Palm OS 5.0 Preview
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I mean, think about what people carry around on them today. A pager, a cellphone, a PDA.
Nope, I only carry a Palm III, and I'd be
unlikely to carry around a larger organizer
that with a bunch of other stuff I don't need
(which is why I don't have one of those
PocketPC monstrosities.)
Nothing really stops Palm from designing and delivering a device that does all three of these things in one package.
The phone<->pager convergence makes sense.
I can't think of any time I'd need to use
a phone while looking at a pager, and I doubt
the additional hardware would increase the
phone's size much, if at all.
The pager<->PDA convergence, I can also see. Again, not much size increase, and little need to use both a pager and a PDA simultaneously. In fact, I thought there were already add-ons which would add pager capabilities to a Palm.
The phone<->PDA convergence, on the other hand, just doesn't make sense. First, cellphones seem to be shrinking while PDAs seem to be growing. Second, I frequently need to use my PDA while on the phone, so I can't imagine how merging the two could possibly be a good thing.
Palm's big problem is that they were too good and got most everything right almost immediately, so people have little need to upgrade. Turning their PDA into a PDA+pager+phone seems like the wrong way to go.
Ahh... then, since MS Windows has "more applications", Gnome and KDE have no hope, right?
No... see my "better analogy" in my previous message. There aren't just two levels of popularity, there is a continuum. Just because one user interface is extremely popular doesn't mean that the others have no hope.
KDE and Gnome have obviously reached some critical mass of acceptance, since there are an increasing number of applications written to work under them. They were, however, written in parallel and with virtually no competition. If one had already existed, the other would be an unlikely candidate to succeed. (Yeah, I know Gnome came after KDE, but had the Qt-vs.-GNU license controversy to build its marketshare.)
A new, untested user interface is unlikely to succeed in the current environment unless it is radically better than the tried and true desktop metaphor. That sort of thing takes research and experimentation, things that aren't easily done using a few people's evenings and weekends.
Once upon a time, universities were the centers of new and indepdendent thinking; with corporate sponsorships, such academic freedom is quickly going the way of the dodo. Consider the chances of revolutionary UI being developed by a for-profit enterprise or corporate-sponsored research center...
If there is any hope that software will become "better", it is in the free world of free/open development.
If a radical new user interface were to emerge, a university would be exactly the place I'd expect it to emerge. If it didn't come from an official research project, it could easily come from a group of graduate students, who typically have a bit more free time to mess around with experimental stuff and the intelligence to come up with something new.
...is to be popular? Hmmm... I thought the goal was to produce the best, most powerful tool.
In the open-source world, popularity==survival.
KDE and Gnome are going to out-compete any up-and-coming user interfaces simply because they have more applications written to work with that user-interface.
An analogy: Britney Spears may be popular, but I'd rather have my daughters grow up to be scientists, thinkers, and engineers... do we really want Linux to grow up and be just like Windows? I hope not!
A better analogy: Any independent artist who puts out an innovative form of music which,
while wildly popular among a small group of people, never quite catches on and eventually that artist's debts force them to give up music in favor of eating.
To bring things back to the original post:
Isn't creativity and exploration a goal of "free" software?
Yes, but they aren't the only goals. My guess is that most open-source software is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Creativity happens within the established framework of an application and any exploration is mainly in improvements to that application's framework.
Slashdot Mirror
While much of the satellite coverage is from geostationary satellites which have drifted out of their normal orbit and thus give partial coverage for a small window each day, the Iridium satellites provide 24 hour coverage. The Iridium links are pretty low-bandwidth, so they're not useful for shipping large amounts of data, but they're useable for phone calls.
I write software for a physics experiment based at the South Pole, and I got a call from there to my home phone just a few days ago, regarding some problems the winter-overs were having. I was a bit confused when I picked up, because the call showed up on caller ID as something like "U.S. Government (Hawaii)".
The Wii is a copy of everything before it in the same way as the iPod is just another MP3 player. Both have a revolutionary new user interface which redefines the landscape.
It's actually worse than that, because one of the satellites is currently unusable. Here's the daily connectivity schedule.
So we can write an x86 program which does raw computation. Now how does it display the result of that computation or save it to disk? If it needs to read a file or prompt the user for input, how does that happen?
An OS is more than just an instruction set.
I'd love to use FreeBSD, but then there's that whole messy Java issue. In other words that it's not supported for, nor does it run well on FreeBSD last time I checked.
The fact that the developers haven't been able to get Sun to certify them for binary distribution is regrettable, but it certainly doesn't mean that it's not supported.
I've been developing Java-based web and command-line applications on FreeBSD for at least 6 years and have never had any problems.
I like how the make file are XML based. With other makefiles, you get stuck if your tab has a space in it
<sarcasm>
Cuz Ant is so forgiving if you leave out a '<' or '>' character...
</sarcasm>
Karl Sims did some fantastic work on evolving movement a decade ago. Creatures were randomly assembled using blocks and a few standard connectors, and eventually evolved a wide variety of strategies for motion. My favorties were the 3-block creature which moved like an ape and the 2-block creature which moved in the same way a washing machine walks.
For instance, a player can get a cape at level 20.
Somebody hasn't seen "The Incredibles"...
Out of curiosity, are you on OS X?
Yep. Because I have so many windows for the same app, it'd be really clumsy to use cmd-` to find the right one.
My work environment has been X-based since '89, and I've used virtual desktops since vtwm came out in around '90.
I'm using CodeTek's VirtualDesktop rather than DesktopManager, because VirtualDesktop supports 'focus follows mouse'. After switching to OS X, I had a couple of months of misery before CodeTek brought out the beta which supported 'focus follows mouse'.
I typically work on one or two major projects in parallel, along with bug fixes for previous projects and the occasional non-work hack. For each of these I have 1-3 terminal windows and one or more emacs windows.
I also have my RSS reader and assorted web pages open at the same time.
Keeping these different tasks in separate desktops allows me to have 20-30 windows open without getting lost.
Disagreeing with Reaganomics doesn't make one a leftist; there are conservatives who disagree with the whole "starve the beast" philosophy.
Asserting that it's leftist *is* a troll, especially in the current climate of ultraconservatives using the word "liberal" as a synonym for "EEVVVIILLL"
Maybe because the D programming language is set to replace it.
C is the successor of B, which was a rewrite of BCPL. Therefore, the only true successor to C would be P (the next letter after B and C)
You KNOW there is some movie exec out there thinking ... "What if Sauramon wasn't Really dead. We could make a sequel!"
Or
"What if the Ring wasn't Really destroyed. We could make a sequel! Yeah, gollum got the ring yeah! yeah... ad nausem"
Nah, it won't be a sequel. I'm betting that, just like Lucas, they'll make a prequel. Maybe they'll elaborate on the story of how Bilbo found the ring. Except it'll be pitched at the kiddies in order to increase market share, so they'll focus on the more comical dwarves rather than the boring elves. And they'll probably throw in something lame like a CGI dragon who sleeps on mounds of treasure. Battle scenes are good, too, so they'll probably end it with a big battle between five armies or something...
Appendix A of this document has some Usenet postings from over a decade ago discussing who came up with the concept of Virtual Desktops.
It looks like the first virtual window manager for X was developed sometime between 1988 and 1990
So is this version going to include the feature of it not being *fricking painful* to compile nearly anything not specifically targetted at Solaris?
I'm old enough to remember back when Sun was the top dog and all non-SunOS users complained about Unix software being written specifically for Suns.
And before that, the problem was people writing Unix software specifically for the VAX.
This says more about the quality of the people writing OSS than it does about the quality of Solaris. Actually quality is the wrong word, because it's likely that many of these programmers only know or have access to Linux.
Making an effort to port your software to non-Linux dialects of Unix is a really good thing, because other OSes will expose bugs in your software which would not otherwise turn up until, for example, a bug in the current glibc is fixed.
Bush clearly did something fantastic for the Iraqi, there's no denying it, and for this they should reelect him as President next November 2004.
... Bush did something fantastic for the Iraqi people, so they should elect him President of Iraq.
<joke>
I totally agree
Meanwhile, back in the States...
</joke>
There's a perfectly good precedent for settling this sort of dispute.
Remember when Carl Sagan complained about the Apple project codenamed "Sagan"?
Why not change the codename to Butthead DB?
I'm finding it hard to think of examples, but I guess GNU grep's an OK example of something that's just about right.
...
Likewise, it's not sed, awk or perl
You do realize that grep was originally a fork of sed? Hint: Google for sed g/re/p.
The underlying problem is overpopulation. If there were only 1 person in this world, he could not damage the earth regardless of how stupid his decisions might be. However, when there are 6 billion people, the cumulative effect of the 6 billion stupid decisions would destroy the earth.
Easy solution: kill yourself!
there was a paper published in the early nineties which tested various standard unix command-line tools from a variety of vendors. They subjected the tools to horrendous stress and abuse, and found (to their suprise) that the GNU tools were the most reliable, with approximately a 1% failure rate in their bank of tests. The second best was HP, with about 8% failure rate, and everyone else was between 12-20%.
I'm guessing you're probably referring to Bart Miller's Fuzz Testing software. They did a survey in 1990 and a followup in 1995. They've even got the software available if you want to do the 2003 version!
Sun does not have the same room for manoeuvre as MS since the JCP has other powerful participants. In practice, there have been few ownership/legal issues in developing Open Source versions of the JVM - see the Kawa web site for a list of these. Their complaints revolve around issues such as access to the test suites - ultimately Sun just owns the Java name, not all the implementations.
The Apache Foundation is working on freeing up access to the test suites, according to this press release
Subversion isn't the only open-source revision control system out there. Check out these projects as well:
OpenCM
arch
Stellation
PRCS
I mean, think about what people carry around on them today. A pager, a cellphone, a PDA.
Nope, I only carry a Palm III, and I'd be unlikely to carry around a larger organizer that with a bunch of other stuff I don't need (which is why I don't have one of those PocketPC monstrosities.)
Nothing really stops Palm from designing and delivering a device that does all three of these things in one package.
The phone<->pager convergence makes sense. I can't think of any time I'd need to use a phone while looking at a pager, and I doubt the additional hardware would increase the phone's size much, if at all.
The pager<->PDA convergence, I can also see. Again, not much size increase, and little need to use both a pager and a PDA simultaneously. In fact, I thought there were already add-ons which would add pager capabilities to a Palm.
The phone<->PDA convergence, on the other hand, just doesn't make sense. First, cellphones seem to be shrinking while PDAs seem to be growing. Second, I frequently need to use my PDA while on the phone, so I can't imagine how merging the two could possibly be a good thing.
Palm's big problem is that they were too good and got most everything right almost immediately, so people have little need to upgrade. Turning their PDA into a PDA+pager+phone seems like the wrong way to go.
Ahh... then, since MS Windows has "more applications", Gnome and KDE have no hope, right?
... see my "better analogy" in my previous message. There aren't just two levels of popularity, there is a continuum. Just because one user interface is extremely popular doesn't mean that the others have no hope.
No
KDE and Gnome have obviously reached some critical mass of acceptance, since there are an increasing number of applications written to work under them. They were, however, written in parallel and with virtually no competition. If one had already existed, the other would be an unlikely candidate to succeed. (Yeah, I know Gnome came after KDE, but had the Qt-vs.-GNU license controversy to build its marketshare.)
A new, untested user interface is unlikely to succeed in the current environment unless it is radically better than the tried and true desktop metaphor. That sort of thing takes research and experimentation, things that aren't easily done using a few people's evenings and weekends.
Once upon a time, universities were the centers of new and indepdendent thinking; with corporate sponsorships, such academic freedom is quickly going the way of the dodo. Consider the chances of revolutionary UI being developed by a for-profit enterprise or corporate-sponsored research center...
If there is any hope that software will become "better", it is in the free world of free/open development.
If a radical new user interface were to emerge, a university would be exactly the place I'd expect it to emerge. If it didn't come from an official research project, it could easily come from a group of graduate students, who typically have a bit more free time to mess around with experimental stuff and the intelligence to come up with something new.
...is to be popular? Hmmm... I thought the goal was to produce the best, most powerful tool.
In the open-source world, popularity==survival.
KDE and Gnome are going to out-compete any up-and-coming user interfaces simply because they have more applications written to work with that user-interface.
An analogy: Britney Spears may be popular, but I'd rather have my daughters grow up to be scientists, thinkers, and engineers... do we really want Linux to grow up and be just like Windows? I hope not!
A better analogy: Any independent artist who puts out an innovative form of music which,
while wildly popular among a small group of people, never quite catches on and eventually that artist's debts force them to give up music in favor of eating.
To bring things back to the original post:
Isn't creativity and exploration a goal of "free" software?
Yes, but they aren't the only goals. My guess is that most open-source software is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Creativity happens within the established framework of an application and any exploration is mainly in improvements to that application's framework.