So Alan Kay used to work in a segment of our offices devoted to Squeak development before he officially joined up with HP. I've met him a few times and I've worked very closely with one of his collegues who is actually leaving my company to join Alan again at HP. He is an amazing guy and Squeak is a pretty cool language/environment to program in. Its nice to see his work with Squeak finally being recognized. Word has it that he and some other people (including the guy who is leaving our company) are going to be working on some educational software in Squeak that will come with HP PCs.
You would have thought by now that people would have told Diebold to take their voting machines and shove it. You would also think that another company would have tried to make it into this market, which it seems like would be fairly easy since exhibiting a failure rate lower than Diebold seems achiveable.
Unfortunately for us, the shortcomings of one company are probably going to ruin the chance of e-voting becoming commonplace in our society anytime soon. The fact is, in most other industries, if a vendor makes such a crappy product, and it has been proven multiple times to make a crappy product, that vendor is usually dropped and another one is found. Are there other vendors of e-voting machines that Diebold? I hope there are, and I hope governments wise up and realize that Diebold should be boycotted when it comes to anything to do with counting ballots.
I've always held the belief that the ISS shouldn't have been created, and instead a Lunar base of some sort should have been constructed. The ISS has become a huge money sink. The Russians really need to get their act together money-wise (though in the delivery department they are currently better than us considering the shuttle fleet is grounded).
More money up to this point should have been put into low gravity (and zero-gravity) manufacturing. In order to even conceive of building a lunar base at this point, a lot of money is going to have to be sunk into researching this. Manufacturing at low-G in hostile environments is not the same as manufacturing here on earth.
For any of these plans to succeed, NASA needs to get it through their heads that wings are a bad idea for orbital/lunar space flight. Why? The benefits are more negative than positive. They are only used on landing - therefore on takeoff (where weight is a very important factor) they are the most inefficient waste of mass because they aren't used at all! I also believe that a reusuable, technologically sophisticated, recoverable capsule (similar to Apollo) will be cheaper to build, cheaper to launch, and cheaper to recover than any winged craft will be.
There needs to be a another X-prize, but this time its for building the cheapest, most efficient and economical manned reusable space (not near-space) vehicle. I think that if NASA licenses a technology developed in the private sector we actually have a chance of making some of these timetables that have been put forth, instead of new technology being bogged down by bureaucracy and stubbornness.
In this day and age, the part of NASA that manages manned space exploration is all about not taking risks but ducking their heads and making sure nothing disastrous goes wrong. The Apollo missions were a HUGE RISK undertaken by NASA. But since the last Apollo mission hardly any risks are taken any more because of fears of spending being cut, etc... NASA needs to return to being able to take calculated risks for the good of exploration. I think this lack of any risk-taking has also stifled any new technology from going into current spacecraft.
Where I work, a NDA is pretty much req.
on
The Cult of the NDA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I work for a small research and development company, and yes, we have very strict NDAs. You need one just to get into the building.
But in our case, we need them because we actually do develop new ideas. And I don't think that saying that all these tech companies aren't developing new ideas is giving them a fair shake.
We are much more of a tech company though. We develop new technology, but we also do a lot of design projects, for instance the SmarTruck 2
SCO would make a bad move to release the code before the trial under something less than a NDA. Linux kernel developers would probably have the offending pieces rewritten in a week and back-ported to all 2.4/2.5 kernels within another week.
But honestly, I really don't think IBM cares what SCO does at this point. They know their argument is probably not going to hold water in court.
Unfortuately, with the way our justice system works, it will not be heard in court until probably late 2004/2005.
0.5) Make sure I'm running ext3 or reiserfs 6. Send an email to linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org describing the problem - so maybe it can get fixed.
Developers don't have time to test every piece of hardware.
If you do send an email I recommend listing exactly what airo card you have, including your.config, and any messages that you can maybe extract from dmesg (if it left any there). If you want to try it again, I assume you get a big OOPS screen with a bunch of stuff like Stack Trace on it.
Copying this down and sending it is very valuable information to debugging.
From reports I heard on the news, which, I admit, may not contain all information, it sounded like that after the piece of foam insulation hit the left wing of the orbiter, engineers decided, from looking at imagery taken from the ground of the orbiter, that it "posed no threat."
My question is, why not schedule a spacewalk to actually have astronauts go outside and look at the wing? I realize that scheduling a spacewalk is not a trivial matter, but when its the safety of the crew at stake, I think some allowances can be made.
IMHO had they done this, they would have discovered that some tiles were damaged, and then perhaps a fix could have been made and 7 lives saved.
For all of you who have issues compiling 2.5.x let me remind you that 2.5.x are development kernels. They aren't perfect. They may have issues building in certain configurations, because they are development kernels.
You only really fall into problems if you link with other code that is GPL (but yes, you can compile commerical programs with gcc, no problem). Therefore, you can't actually put your driver into the kernel, but only as a loadable module. (There have been many debates about whether loading a module is "linking", but the consensus seems to be that commerical drivers are OK in this form).
And your management has to be totally blind to think that NVIDIA doesn't distribute a binary driver. What NVIDIA does is have all of their source code in a binary EXCEPT for the hooks into the kernel (aka init_module, etc...) so that you can compile this against your specific kernel headers (so it will work against a wide variety of kernels, and not just say, 2.4.18 or something).
This is probably the same approach your company should use, but in the embedded world you can probably get away with requiring a specific kernel version, since those things are very specialized.
And writing a user space driver is hard on Linux, because userland doesn't let you get at the hardware very well. You might also want to try looking at UML (User-mode Linux) for this approach, though I am not sure if it works on embedded systems.
So, its really hard to compare Linux to Windows in a case like this, because Windows consists of an OS AND a desktop environment (well you could say the desktop environment is part of the OS, but you know what I mean...)
Linux is not that. Linux is only a kernel. So, Linux probably would not gain this certification because that is a lot of security stuff to add into the mainline kernel (though they did just add crypto routines and are almost done with ACLs). Most of the security holes in Linux are a result of other programs and not a fault of the kernel. (Hence RMS' contention it should be called GNU/Linux -- because there is the Linux kernel and a bunch of GNU and other 3rd party programs that actually make it useful). As an example, the desktop environment in Linux is X, which is not considered part of Linux.
As has been pointed out by many people, this whole issue is stilly since 1.1 actually follows the Unicode spec more closely... (so who's code is broken now? huh?)
Personally I don't see the big deal over XML itself. Its just a way of organizing data hierarchially and expressing it in a nice format (aka a TREE)
I still don't know how people manage to write 500+ page books on it. Maybe I"m just completely stupid -- please, someone enlighten me to the great wonder that is XML.
Many comments are about the "expense" of these M$ products. However, "expense" doesn't refer to just the cost of buying the software. It also has to factor in maintenance, compatibility with existing systems, and worker usability.
I bet one of the main problems for the DOI going to *nix is that no one wanted to spend the time and money teaching these govt. employees a *nix, since most likely 95% of them use some form of Windows at home.
I dunno about you, but would you like to have the job of teaching a disgruntled govt. employee *nix?
No OS is 100% bug free and has no security vulnerabilites, but I think the main issue is response time and admission. Most *nix vendors get patches out to any security holes pretty damn fast (usually within 72 hours) even when its not something huge. I think most people are frustrated that Microsoft cannot work in this timeframe and/or tries to downplay the seriousness of their holes. If they had the same paranoia (for lack of a better word) that *nix vendors have about their holes, then the results would be more favorable.
Windows keeps selling because yes, there is a lack of an alternative in most people's minds. Linux is approaching this status, but at the current time it can't support everything that Windows does (mainly because lack of market share does not entice companies to develop for *nix). MacOS is starting to gain a foothold also, but again, it is something NEW. You would be surprised how many people are resistent to change.
And flipping to a new OS for a large company is a monumental undertaking, so it doesn't happen often.
Here's a snippet from the Microsoft Windows Media Player EULA (added in June with the "Security" update):
"Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ('Secure Content), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer . If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update."
So, in pretty plain English, MS is basically saying we can control what applications you can run on your computer. Oh, and we'll post it in some obscure place on the web for ya. Fun.
The fact that Verizon and the EFF are on the same side in this case means that both are looking out for the interests of its consumers instead of trying to wage some politicized battle. If these issues were purely political, you would see them on opposite sides just because of the fact that Verizon didn't agree with the EFF on one thing, therefore they can't agree on anything.
It is refreshing to see big businesses looking out for their customers by fighting against some of this crap going through Congress which is being pushed by Senators who really don't understand the issues and consequences of the bills and take their stance having been lobbied by the RIAAs of the world.
There are a lot of laws governing what Private Corporations can do with this also. You can't just go tap a company's internet pipe w/o permission...its essentially a high-end wiretap (for wiretaps you usually need court-orders).
The FBI could totally circumvent the courts if it really wanted to and everyone would look the other way.
Slashdot Mirror
So Alan Kay used to work in a segment of our offices devoted to Squeak development before he officially joined up with HP. I've met him a few times and I've worked very closely with one of his collegues who is actually leaving my company to join Alan again at HP.
He is an amazing guy and Squeak is a pretty cool language/environment to program in.
Its nice to see his work with Squeak finally being recognized. Word has it that he and some other people (including the guy who is leaving our company) are going to be working on some educational software in Squeak that will come with HP PCs.
You would have thought by now that people would have told Diebold to take their voting machines and shove it.
You would also think that another company would have tried to make it into this market, which it seems like would be fairly easy since exhibiting a failure rate lower than Diebold seems achiveable.
Unfortunately for us, the shortcomings of one company are probably going to ruin the chance of e-voting becoming commonplace in our society anytime soon.
The fact is, in most other industries, if a vendor makes such a crappy product, and it has been proven multiple times to make a crappy product, that vendor is usually dropped and another one is found.
Are there other vendors of e-voting machines that Diebold? I hope there are, and I hope governments wise up and realize that Diebold should be boycotted when it comes to anything to do with counting ballots.
And remember, this company also makes ATMs...
People are talking about high-level Languages to interface to MySQL and other DBs yet no one has mentioned Python.
:\)
It has connectors to MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, DB2, MSSQL (only if its hosted through IE I think
I've always held the belief that the ISS shouldn't have been created, and instead a Lunar base of some sort should have been constructed.
The ISS has become a huge money sink. The Russians really need to get their act together money-wise (though in the delivery department they are currently better than us considering the shuttle fleet is grounded).
More money up to this point should have been put into low gravity (and zero-gravity) manufacturing.
In order to even conceive of building a lunar base at this point, a lot of money is going to have to be sunk into researching this. Manufacturing at low-G in hostile environments is not the same as manufacturing here on earth.
For any of these plans to succeed, NASA needs to get it through their heads that wings are a bad idea for orbital/lunar space flight. Why? The benefits are more negative than positive.
They are only used on landing - therefore on takeoff (where weight is a very important factor) they are the most inefficient waste of mass because they aren't used at all! I also believe that a reusuable, technologically sophisticated, recoverable capsule (similar to Apollo) will be cheaper to build, cheaper to launch, and cheaper to recover than any winged craft will be.
There needs to be a another X-prize, but this time its for building the cheapest, most efficient and economical manned reusable space (not near-space) vehicle. I think that if NASA licenses a technology developed in the private sector we actually have a chance of making some of these timetables that have been put forth, instead of new technology being bogged down by bureaucracy and stubbornness.
In this day and age, the part of NASA that manages manned space exploration is all about not taking risks but ducking their heads and making sure nothing disastrous goes wrong. The Apollo missions were a HUGE RISK undertaken by NASA. But since the last Apollo mission hardly any risks are taken any more because of fears of spending being cut, etc...
NASA needs to return to being able to take calculated risks for the good of exploration. I think this lack of any risk-taking has also stifled any new technology from going into current spacecraft.
I work for a small research and development company, and yes, we have very strict NDAs. You need one just to get into the building. But in our case, we need them because we actually do develop new ideas. And I don't think that saying that all these tech companies aren't developing new ideas is giving them a fair shake.
We are much more of a tech company though. We develop new technology, but we also do a lot of design projects, for instance the SmarTruck 2
SCO would make a bad move to release the code before the trial under something less than a NDA.
Linux kernel developers would probably have the offending pieces rewritten in a week and back-ported to all 2.4/2.5 kernels within another week.
But honestly, I really don't think IBM cares what SCO does at this point. They know their argument is probably not going to hold water in court.
Unfortuately, with the way our justice system works, it will not be heard in court until probably late 2004/2005.
0.5) Make sure I'm running ext3 or reiserfs
.config, and any messages that you can maybe extract from dmesg (if it left any there).
6. Send an email to linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
describing the problem - so maybe it can get fixed.
Developers don't have time to test every piece of hardware.
If you do send an email I recommend listing exactly what airo card you have, including your
If you want to try it again, I assume you get a big OOPS screen with a bunch of stuff like Stack Trace on it.
Copying this down and sending it is very valuable information to debugging.
From reports I heard on the news, which, I admit, may not contain all information, it sounded like that after the piece of foam insulation hit the left wing of the orbiter, engineers decided, from looking at imagery taken from the ground of the orbiter, that it "posed no threat."
My question is, why not schedule a spacewalk to actually have astronauts go outside and look at the wing? I realize that scheduling a spacewalk is not a trivial matter, but when its the safety of the crew at stake, I think some allowances can be made.
IMHO had they done this, they would have discovered that some tiles were damaged, and then perhaps a fix could have been made and 7 lives saved.
My company is the one that the govt. contracted to build this vehicle.
Yes, I did work on it.
Yes it is very impressive.
If you have any questions, reply to this.
For all of you who have issues compiling 2.5.x let me remind you that 2.5.x are development kernels.
They aren't perfect.
They may have issues building in certain configurations, because they are development kernels.
Argh.
I'm pissed I actually missed the conference, cause I used to work for one of the speakers and I think his talk would have been interesting.
I'll have to watch the videos later...its cool they got all of them.
You only really fall into problems if you link with other code that is GPL (but yes, you can compile commerical programs with gcc, no problem).
Therefore, you can't actually put your driver into the kernel, but only as a loadable module.
(There have been many debates about whether loading a module is "linking", but the consensus seems to be that commerical drivers are OK in this form).
And your management has to be totally blind to think that NVIDIA doesn't distribute a binary driver.
What NVIDIA does is have all of their source code in a binary EXCEPT for the hooks into the kernel (aka init_module, etc...) so that you can compile this against your specific kernel headers (so it will work against a wide variety of kernels, and not just say, 2.4.18 or something).
This is probably the same approach your company should use, but in the embedded world you can probably get away with requiring a specific kernel version, since those things are very specialized.
And writing a user space driver is hard on Linux, because userland doesn't let you get at the hardware very well. You might also want to try looking at UML (User-mode Linux) for this approach, though I am not sure if it works on embedded systems.
So, its really hard to compare Linux to Windows in a case like this, because Windows consists of an OS AND a desktop environment (well you could say the desktop environment is part of the OS, but you know what I mean...)
Linux is not that. Linux is only a kernel.
So, Linux probably would not gain this certification because that is a lot of security stuff to add into the mainline kernel (though they did just add crypto routines and are almost done with ACLs). Most of the security holes in Linux are a result of other programs and not a fault of the kernel. (Hence RMS' contention it should be called GNU/Linux -- because there is the Linux kernel and a bunch of GNU and other 3rd party programs that actually make it useful).
As an example, the desktop environment in Linux is X, which is not considered part of Linux.
There is a company called Fulcrum Microsystems which grew out of Caltech's VLSI program and does primarily ASYNC stuff.
As has been pointed out by many people, this whole issue is stilly since 1.1 actually follows the Unicode spec more closely...
(so who's code is broken now? huh?)
Personally I don't see the big deal over XML itself. Its just a way of organizing data hierarchially and expressing it in a nice format (aka a TREE)
I still don't know how people manage to write 500+ page books on it.
Maybe I"m just completely stupid -- please, someone enlighten me to the great wonder that is XML.
Many comments are about the "expense" of these M$ products. However, "expense" doesn't refer to just the cost of buying the software.
It also has to factor in maintenance, compatibility with existing systems, and worker usability.
I bet one of the main problems for the DOI going to *nix is that no one wanted to spend the time and money teaching these govt. employees a *nix, since most likely 95% of them use some form of Windows at home.
I dunno about you, but would you like to have the job of teaching a disgruntled govt. employee *nix?
What I can say is that drive-by-wire and this stuff is currently being worked on.
Unfortunately, that is all I can say.
A very good (tho dense) intro text on E&M
is "Electricity and Magnetism" by Purcell.
I recommend it if you really want to learn the basics of E&M.
What about a big-honking server running NFS...
I mean it is a software solution, but it does work.
Well, we saw this story yesterday,
here
Thank god, /. removed the plagarized comment.
Thanks guys.
No OS is 100% bug free and has no security vulnerabilites, but I think the main issue is response time and admission.
Most *nix vendors get patches out to any security holes pretty damn fast (usually within 72 hours) even when its not something huge. I think most people are frustrated that Microsoft cannot work in this timeframe and/or tries to downplay the seriousness of their holes. If they had the same paranoia (for lack of a better word) that *nix vendors have about their holes, then the results would be more favorable.
Windows keeps selling because yes, there is a lack of an alternative in most people's minds. Linux is approaching this status, but at the current time it can't support everything that Windows does (mainly because lack of market share does not entice companies to develop for *nix). MacOS is starting to gain a foothold also, but again, it is something NEW. You would be surprised how many people are resistent to change.
And flipping to a new OS for a large company is a monumental undertaking, so it doesn't happen often.
Here's a snippet from the Microsoft Windows Media Player EULA (added in June with the "Security" update):
"Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ('Secure Content), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer . If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update."
So, in pretty plain English, MS is basically saying we can control what applications you can run on your computer. Oh, and we'll post it in some obscure place on the web for ya. Fun.
The article that I got this from is here.
The fact that Verizon and the EFF are on the same side in this case means that both are looking out for the interests of its consumers instead of trying to wage some politicized battle.
If these issues were purely political, you would see them on opposite sides just because of the fact that Verizon didn't agree with the EFF on one thing, therefore they can't agree on anything.
It is refreshing to see big businesses looking out for their customers by fighting against some of this crap going through Congress which is being pushed by Senators who really don't understand the issues and consequences of the bills and take their stance having been lobbied by the RIAAs of the world.
There are a lot of laws governing what Private Corporations can do with this also.
You can't just go tap a company's internet pipe w/o permission...its essentially a high-end wiretap (for wiretaps you usually need court-orders).
The FBI could totally circumvent the courts if it really wanted to and everyone would look the other way.