It'd be nice if they'd copy MS Office 2004 for OS X
Dear God, NO. Please no. I nearly had an aneurysm trying to click on the tiny little icons in the floaty window that is so difficult to reach and so easy to use to hide important things with. It's like Clippy, but more insidious! You're trying to read or type and THERE IT IS! THE TINY LITTLE USELESS WINDOW! GAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
...
Err... Yeah. Just don't copy the Office 2004 interface. It really is terrible. (Well and truly!)
Any chance to get database support outside of Windows ?
??? It already exists? OpenOffice Base has a dependency on Java, but otherwise it's available for all platforms. (The core database is HSQLDB.) As I recall, you can use either JDBC or ODBC drivers to connect to a remote database.
The data sources configured in OpenOffice Base can then be used in programs like Calc.
FWIW, he does have something of a point. Microsoft cycles its platforms at an incredible rate that just is not natural for the industry. As soon as one gets used to the existing API, Microsoft deprecates it and creates a new one. What's the advantage of the new one over the old one? In many cases, no one knows.
Why did Microsoft rearrange the VBA API from Access 97 to Access 2000? Heck if I know. Why did Microsoft make IIS extensions written in.NET 1.x incompatible with 2.0? No idea. All I know is that Microsoft does these things. Evidence suggests that Microsoft does it intentionally to lock out competitors. (source: Barbarians Led by Bill Gates) If that's true, then it certainly doesn't cast Microsoft in a good light.
That being said, you are also correct in saying that C# is a superior desktop development platform. If you're developing for Windows, I don't see any real reason not to use it. It's a fairly decent platform with tons of modern features. The only time it's really inappropriate is when your program needs to be cross platform. In which case Java might be the best choice despite the inherent difficulty in developing a good GUI in Swing. (Or SWT if you prefer. Don't even think about using Mono. Trust me, it's bad juju. Even the Mono devs will tell you that compatibility with.NET is NOT their primary goal.)
Have a chip on your shoulder much? Most of what you're saying is simply incorrect. e.g. Java does not have half-a-dozen containers. Yes, the switch from the STL-inspired Vector to the more Java-ish ArrayList was annoying. Same with HashTable to HashMap. But beyond that, all those different containers you think you see are actually interfaces for wiring up complex functionality. Either that or completely different data structures with different performance characteristics. (Remember your CompSci courses?) The Java Collections package (which seems to be the only thing in Java you're remotely familiar with) provides enough functionality to write a complete database engine. Which, as a matter of fact, hasbeendonequite a fewtimes. (Sorry, ranout of words to link. Doh!Stillmore. Ah, to hellwithit.)
The rest of the Java API is also not bloat. There are libraries for printing, crytography, sound, graphics, DOM, file I/O, text parsing, text formatting, text display, mathematics, directory interfaces (e.g. LDAP), distributed object systems, reflection, security, SQL database interface, logging, cross-platform preferences, regular expressions, ZIP/GZip support, accessibility, networking, the compiler, scripting engines, etc., etc., etc. Very little of the core API is redundant, with most of the (few!) redundancies being a result of the early days of Java before they moved away from the C++ style objects.
Nearly all of the post-1.0 APIs were done correctly the first time. Which means that the core Java API is actually quite slim for the amount of functionality it provides. And even then, there is a HUGE number of official expansion APIs for mail, multimedia codecs, network request/response handlers (e.g. servlets), 3D graphics, 3D sound, text-to-speech, speech recognition, telephony, SOAP, REST, USB, Bluetooth, scientific units, cross-platform desktop integration, Instant Messaging, P2P, and quite a bit more. And that's just the official JSR-approved expansions! The OSS and (bleh) commercial worlds are full of unofficial libraries to deal with nearly any problem you can come up with.
If you want bloat, stop looking at Java. Try compiling a few Linux apps sometime and tell me how many redundant libraries you come across. If you know what they all do (which is a miracle in of itself), compiling just ONE of those programs is enough to make a person blush with embarrassment. Not to mention that when a platform IS solidified (e.g. GNOME), it suffers from versionitis. (i.e. The constant need to upgrade your version of the libraries because this latest program no longer targets the version you just compiled. Or even worse, it requires a specific minor release, thus requiring you to have multiple minor releases of the library compiled and installed.) I won't even go into Microsoft's practice of inventing a new API for the same technology over, and over, and over again. (ODBC, DAO, ADO, JET, anyone?)
Now I happen to think that a lot of the choice that Linux offers is good. But don't point fingers at other platforms when there are more than enough examples of far worse situations close to home.
And a stripped-down non-existent API is a way to make things simple?
Nope. Einstein said it best, I think:
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
It's a given that new features will increase complexity. (Which, surprisingly, is not always true. But stick with me for a moment.) The key is to increase the complexity only as much as necessary. If you increase the complexity any farther, you have failed.
I can't count how many times I have seen code that is overly complex. e.g. Someone piled up layer upon redundant layer of code, hoping to get simplicity out of each one. Instead, they create more maintenance, more points of failure, and more bugs. Probably one of the most egregious examples was a company that wanted me to use a go-between piece of software on another server to make a real-time request for XML. They had a lot of weak excuses for this decision, not one of which held water. After peeling back the layers of nonsense, I found out that the reason why they wanted it used is because they had already sunk $10,000 into it.
While not all examples I've seen are motivated by money or CYA, I have certainly seen a lot of examples that were motivated by blind adherence to company standards or existing technologies. Never mind that this particular module doesn't need any of the features of Struts, the company policy says use it, so we use it. Never mind that ADO isn't a good API. We have it, so we should wrap it. Never mind that we could just plug in a lib to do the secure transfer directly, we need to Rube Goldberg it through 5 different machines, protocols, and scripts written in 7 different languages!
There's a reason why engineers harp on the KISS principle. KISS is all about engineering a solution that will last for a long time to come. A solution that can be understood by others, maintained, is reliable, and exceeds the specs wherever reasonable. As Einstein said, make it as simple as possible and no simpler.
No worries! FWIW, at least Atlantis doesn't try to pretend that the ZPMs really work on regular Zero Point Energy. Their construction (as described in the series) consists of a suspended microuniverse from which energy is drawn. Later on they attempt to draw energy from a parallel universe, which didn't work out quite like they planned.
Still a bit outlandish, but good enough for suspension of disbelief.:-)
Beyond that, one of the benefits of ornithopters over fixed-wing aircraft is that they have the potential to take off like birds do; i.e., almost vertically.
They can take off almost vertically. They cannot land so easily. Flapping the wings produces forward momentum. Birds are able to slow themselves and make ornithopter landings without a runway for two major reasons:
1. They can warp their wings to change the direction of thrust as well as the amount of thrust applied with a sweep of the wing. This allows them to cancel their forward momentum suddenly, thus making a near-vertical landing. Our mechanical creations have a hard time replicating the flesh and blood aspects of birds. For one thing, warping a wing places stress on the rigid components and thus reduces reliability. Birds (and humans!) have similar issues, but their self-repair systems keep things in tip-top shape.
2. Birds have an advanced landing gear that allows them to grab on to protrusions such as branches, wires, and other types of outcroppings. An ornithopter is likely to have skids, which are nowhere near as well adapted.
Have you ever actually used one of those RC dragonflies?
Sure. I've even used remote controlled helicopters.
I've landed them plenty of times without capsizing
Key word: I've
When you've got a UAV, the software has to do the tricky work. Even with remote control, it's difficult to execute a landing with only a camera view of what's going on. Without that human element, the chances of a failed landing skyrocket.
And I mentioned deserts as well as forests, if you'll notice.
Deserts are actually worse. Putting aside how easy it is for a 6 inch ornithopter to sink into the sand, it will be incredibly easy to spot for anyone on patrol in the area.
all I had to do was flip it over and it was ready to go again.
What do you do when there's no one around? Some of the most advanced drones in existence (e.g. the Mars rovers) become useless if they capsize.
Do you really think that they couldn't manage an autorighting system with $10 million to play with?
No, not really. You're glossing over the difficulty in creating a reliable autorighting system. Not to mention the expense of the many other components.
While yes, 10M isn't that much by the standards of many military devices, for the sorts of prototyping and tech development we're talking, over the next five years, that's not an unreasonable sum
It is indeed an unreasonable sum. They're talking about miniaturizing a 12 foot wide, complex piece of automated technology into a 6 inch ornithopter. Do you have any idea how much fab costs are for advanced microprocessors, battery technology, custom solar panels, lightweight flexible materials, and other technologies required to make this thing a reality?
I can tell you, just one of those technologies would easily sap up that $10 million in development costs.
We have plenty of designs capable of taking off and landing autonomously wherever it's needed
Taking off and landing automatically on runways. Taking off and landing from regular terrain is a lot more difficult. Think about the HUDs we have on modern jet aircraft. They're lining up their approach based on the lighting and radar information the runway and ground control is feeding back to them. Give the ILS an open field and it will choke.
hell, those little WowWee dragonfly RC toys can take off from ground in about five feet.
Taking off is easy. Landing is not. The most common result? Capsizing. And when your $10 million toy capsizes, it's not so easy to get it back off the ground.
On rooftops, in trees, in forested clearings or desert away from people - yes, I think it could find places out of the way to sit and recharge during the day.
Wishful thinking. I'd like to see their toy make regular landings on level ground. Until that's solved, rooftops and trees are out. And forested clearings are exposed areas where the enemy might spot your drone. (Assuming you can even find a forested clearing in our current theaters of operation.;-))
I suspect that's why they're giving the University of Michigan $10 million to try to improve the current technology.
$10 million is pocket change. This type of project could easily result in a craft that would cost $10 million a piece for mass manufacture.
Those system DLLs are shared by multiple programs (at least in theory) and thus have their memory usage accounted for separate from the programs that use them. In fact, the memory counts against the operating system. Microsoft uses this fact to hide much of IE's memory in DLLs that have been installed as part of the OS.
So unless you have tools to pick apart where your OS's memory is going, you're going to get bad results for IE.
Try using something like Process Explorer instead. It will give you a much better view into what memory is being used and where.
Save for the fact that it's an utterly ridiculous goal. We don't even have short range UAVs that meet these specs. Yet the military wants to jump straight to a magical robot that's 6 inches wide and can handle long-range missions? Worse yet, we don't have UAVs that can land and takeoff unattended inside enemy territory. Yet the military thinks that this magical ornithopter is going to manage takeoff and landing unattended? (Which is significantly complicated by its wing design.) On top of that, the military really expects that these things will lay out in the open (where they can get sunlight) and go completely undetected?
There are so many WTFs in their long-range reconnaissance plan, that it sounds like something Dan Brown wrote.
You are assuming the battery would only charge while the bat is flying.
That I am. Because otherwise I don't see the point. Rather than add the weight and complexity of all those charging methods, why not pull the battery pack out and plug it into a charger? If finding a power source is a problem, make the charger plug into the cigarette lighter in the Humvees. (Or whatever other power plug the military might be equipping their vehicles with.) Much simpler, less expensive, and more reliable.
Of course, I've seen enough of these descriptions to know that the military sends out requests for SciFi technology all the time. They don't actually expect anyone to meet these goals. What they expect is for the contractors to push themselves as close as they can possibly get. The contractor that gets the closest gets the contract.
maybe it could be repurposed to scaring the hell out of and possibly murdering people.
The problem with such psychological tricks is that they are very short lived. Once your enemy realizes what you're throwing at them, they'll piece together their opponent and develop countermeasures. And when we're talking about a 12 foot flying machine, it wouldn't take long for fear to be replaced by, "target that craft and shoot it out of the sky". At which point its effectiveness would drop substantially.
Even if we assume that the weapon has a 100% operational effectiveness (yeah, right) and thus leaves no survivors to tell what happened, the enemy is going to start noticing his increased losses. And when he notices those losses, he's going to change his deployments to counter the problem. i.e. It only takes one sortie where the enemy has a second team hidden in the shadows to give away the secret of your weapon.
Stealth. It needs to act (at least somewhat) like a real bat or it will be detected. Real bats are ornithopters. Ergo, the spy craft must be an ornithopter.
The bat is supposed to be powered by a lithium-ion battery, charged by solar and wind energy, as well as simple vibrations.
Why don't they just ask for Zero Point Energy while they're at it? The "bat" is going to be working against the wind, generating vibrations, and (presumably) flying at night. Which makes all those charge methods about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. Why don't they ask for something that follows the KISS principle and just pull the battery pack to charge it?
IE lies. Much of its memory is hidden in system DLLs that don't show up in the Windows Task Manager. To get an accurate read on how much memory IE is using, you need to use special tools that track memory across the system.
If there is a game crash, it my be far worse than what you saw in 82/83, as it is unlikely to just be a platform switch for gaming.
Nonsense. The market forces that existed then don't exist today. The market of 1983 was HUGELY oversaturated with knock-off games from companies attempting to cash in. Frustratingly, some of those companies were the first party game producers. After the whole Pacman and ET fiascos, the market simply didn't trust Atari or anyone else to make a good game. The resulting loss of consumer confidence combined with the oversupply lead to a decline of video game sales. Tramiel's price war then caused retailers to dump* their stock of console systems in favor of cheap Commodore computers.
Because of these issues, modern console makers hold absolute control over their consoles. No one creates a game for their console without express approval from the console manufacturer. In addition, the console makers produce high-quality first-party titles and seek out desirable third-party exclusives in an effort to keep consumer confidence high. This careful control of the market ensures that the market conditions of the 1980's are not repeated.
Maybe people would go back to the PC, but I think that would be recognized as a platform shift this time around.
Unlikely. The PC platform is effectively dead as a gaming platform. There are some holdouts, but there just isn't enough incentive to play games on PCs anymore. Driver issues, constant hardware upgrades, installation problems, DRM, and other headaches just don't make the minor quality difference worth it. Which is a very different situation from the 90's when computers were capable of producing expansive worlds and 3D graphics that consoles were (for the most part) unable to replicate. Now that the difference is just some minor differences in rendering quality, there is no real incentive to use the PC platform for gaming. Better to use it for web surfing and business uses. Especially when most games released today are available on both the PC and console platforms.
* When I say dump, I mean that in a fairly literal sense. $30 game cartridges were being sold for 99 cents. Retailers were willing to take the loss because they felt that there was no hope of selling the stock in time to make a profit off of the holiday season. So they freed up the shelf space for stuff that they felt they *could* sell. Like the $199 Commodore 64 and the $99 VIC-20.
Then there are some significant PS3 exclusives coming out for holiday season. Microsoft has no obvious counter at this point.
I'm not a fan of either the 360 or the PS3, but I feel it's worth noting that the XBox has Gears of War 2 in the pipeline, and has exclusive downloadable episodes announced for GTA4. Those may or may not be enough to counter Sony's push, but they do exist and do provide an answering salvo to some degree.
There's also the E3 to be concerned about. While Nintendo is outright saying that they're holding their cards close, the other competitors haven't said anything either way. I'm fairly certain that Sony has already played their cards and are in it for the long haul, but the possibility exists that Microsoft could produce a big announcement at the show. Again, I'm not sure of the likelihood of Microsoft coming up with something big enough to stop Sony in their tracks, but the possibility definitely exists there.
When polonium is crushed onto beryllium by explosion, reaction occurs between polonium alpha emissions and beryllium leading to Carbon-12 & 1 neutron. This, in practice, would lead to a predictable neutron flux, sufficient to set off device.
Was declassified decades ago. The need for the additional neutron source was questionable in the gun-type nuclear weapons, but the scientists who built the bomb wanted to make sure that it detonated. Especially since they had only tested the implosion device. (The gun-type device was considered so simple that it didn't need testing.)
I'm not really sure how you're disagreeing with me. In fact, it sounds like we're on the exact same page. I won't pay for ZIP libraries anymore because I can get Open Source products that do just as good of a job. But I will pay for GarageBand because it's an excellent product with no commoditized equivalent. Similarly, a lot of people pay for Photoshop because it still has a lot of high-end features that GIMP does not replicate.:-)
But, seriously, all this tells me is that open source geeks use open source. Duh.
That matters not. Just as all those open standards and government-provided data improves the quality of products in traditional industries, Open Source improves the level of quality in technological services. Joe Average doesn't really care how that PDF he's using came to be, but the engineers who created the solution he's using were able to quickly and effectively meet his needs thanks to FOP and PDFBox.
Similarly, Jane Average doesn't care that the news she's getting was parsed from an RSS feed using Rome, she just knows that she gets her news and she's happy.
So yay for Open Source! Providing better solutions in a modern world.:-)
- FireFox - Apache Webserver - Derby Database - Sun Java Server Application Server (aka Glassfish) - PDFBox - TortoiseCVS - OpenPortal - Netbeans - Rhino - GWT - POI - PostgreSQL - MySQL - Solaris - BCEL - ANT - FOP - Rome (RSS) - FFMPEG - VLC - FileZilla - GIMP - DOSBox - QEMU - Cygwin - JHDL - Bouncy Castle - jTDS - PHP - GCC
The list above is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of Open Source projects that I use and rely upon on a regular basis. It has grown significantly over the years, going from a relatively small list of key programs to permeating nearly every aspect of my day-to-day life and work. If you did a similar inventory of the OSS products you use, I wouldn't be surprised if you came up with a similarly growing list.
So while the article may not answer all your questions, some answers can be found by just looking closer to home.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Dear God, NO. Please no. I nearly had an aneurysm trying to click on the tiny little icons in the floaty window that is so difficult to reach and so easy to use to hide important things with. It's like Clippy, but more insidious! You're trying to read or type and THERE IT IS! THE TINY LITTLE USELESS WINDOW! GAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
Err... Yeah. Just don't copy the Office 2004 interface. It really is terrible. (Well and truly!)
??? It already exists? OpenOffice Base has a dependency on Java, but otherwise it's available for all platforms. (The core database is HSQLDB.) As I recall, you can use either JDBC or ODBC drivers to connect to a remote database.
The data sources configured in OpenOffice Base can then be used in programs like Calc.
So... I'm not really sure what the issue is?
FWIW, he does have something of a point. Microsoft cycles its platforms at an incredible rate that just is not natural for the industry. As soon as one gets used to the existing API, Microsoft deprecates it and creates a new one. What's the advantage of the new one over the old one? In many cases, no one knows.
.NET 1.x incompatible with 2.0? No idea. All I know is that Microsoft does these things. Evidence suggests that Microsoft does it intentionally to lock out competitors. (source: Barbarians Led by Bill Gates) If that's true, then it certainly doesn't cast Microsoft in a good light.
.NET is NOT their primary goal.)
Why did Microsoft rearrange the VBA API from Access 97 to Access 2000? Heck if I know. Why did Microsoft make IIS extensions written in
That being said, you are also correct in saying that C# is a superior desktop development platform. If you're developing for Windows, I don't see any real reason not to use it. It's a fairly decent platform with tons of modern features. The only time it's really inappropriate is when your program needs to be cross platform. In which case Java might be the best choice despite the inherent difficulty in developing a good GUI in Swing. (Or SWT if you prefer. Don't even think about using Mono. Trust me, it's bad juju. Even the Mono devs will tell you that compatibility with
Have a chip on your shoulder much? Most of what you're saying is simply incorrect. e.g. Java does not have half-a-dozen containers. Yes, the switch from the STL-inspired Vector to the more Java-ish ArrayList was annoying. Same with HashTable to HashMap. But beyond that, all those different containers you think you see are actually interfaces for wiring up complex functionality. Either that or completely different data structures with different performance characteristics. (Remember your CompSci courses?) The Java Collections package (which seems to be the only thing in Java you're remotely familiar with) provides enough functionality to write a complete database engine. Which, as a matter of fact, has been done quite a few times. (Sorry, ran out of words to link. Doh! Still more. Ah, to hell with it.)
The rest of the Java API is also not bloat. There are libraries for printing, crytography, sound, graphics, DOM, file I/O, text parsing, text formatting, text display, mathematics, directory interfaces (e.g. LDAP), distributed object systems, reflection, security, SQL database interface, logging, cross-platform preferences, regular expressions, ZIP/GZip support, accessibility, networking, the compiler, scripting engines, etc., etc., etc. Very little of the core API is redundant, with most of the (few!) redundancies being a result of the early days of Java before they moved away from the C++ style objects.
Nearly all of the post-1.0 APIs were done correctly the first time. Which means that the core Java API is actually quite slim for the amount of functionality it provides. And even then, there is a HUGE number of official expansion APIs for mail, multimedia codecs, network request/response handlers (e.g. servlets), 3D graphics, 3D sound, text-to-speech, speech recognition, telephony, SOAP, REST, USB, Bluetooth, scientific units, cross-platform desktop integration, Instant Messaging, P2P, and quite a bit more. And that's just the official JSR-approved expansions! The OSS and (bleh) commercial worlds are full of unofficial libraries to deal with nearly any problem you can come up with.
If you want bloat, stop looking at Java. Try compiling a few Linux apps sometime and tell me how many redundant libraries you come across. If you know what they all do (which is a miracle in of itself), compiling just ONE of those programs is enough to make a person blush with embarrassment. Not to mention that when a platform IS solidified (e.g. GNOME), it suffers from versionitis. (i.e. The constant need to upgrade your version of the libraries because this latest program no longer targets the version you just compiled. Or even worse, it requires a specific minor release, thus requiring you to have multiple minor releases of the library compiled and installed.) I won't even go into Microsoft's practice of inventing a new API for the same technology over, and over, and over again. (ODBC, DAO, ADO, JET, anyone?)
Now I happen to think that a lot of the choice that Linux offers is good. But don't point fingers at other platforms when there are more than enough examples of far worse situations close to home.
Nope. Einstein said it best, I think:
It's a given that new features will increase complexity. (Which, surprisingly, is not always true. But stick with me for a moment.) The key is to increase the complexity only as much as necessary. If you increase the complexity any farther, you have failed.
I can't count how many times I have seen code that is overly complex. e.g. Someone piled up layer upon redundant layer of code, hoping to get simplicity out of each one. Instead, they create more maintenance, more points of failure, and more bugs. Probably one of the most egregious examples was a company that wanted me to use a go-between piece of software on another server to make a real-time request for XML. They had a lot of weak excuses for this decision, not one of which held water. After peeling back the layers of nonsense, I found out that the reason why they wanted it used is because they had already sunk $10,000 into it.
While not all examples I've seen are motivated by money or CYA, I have certainly seen a lot of examples that were motivated by blind adherence to company standards or existing technologies. Never mind that this particular module doesn't need any of the features of Struts, the company policy says use it, so we use it. Never mind that ADO isn't a good API. We have it, so we should wrap it. Never mind that we could just plug in a lib to do the secure transfer directly, we need to Rube Goldberg it through 5 different machines, protocols, and scripts written in 7 different languages!
There's a reason why engineers harp on the KISS principle. KISS is all about engineering a solution that will last for a long time to come. A solution that can be understood by others, maintained, is reliable, and exceeds the specs wherever reasonable. As Einstein said, make it as simple as possible and no simpler.
May I just say... AMEN!
No worries! FWIW, at least Atlantis doesn't try to pretend that the ZPMs really work on regular Zero Point Energy. Their construction (as described in the series) consists of a suspended microuniverse from which energy is drawn. Later on they attempt to draw energy from a parallel universe, which didn't work out quite like they planned.
:-)
Still a bit outlandish, but good enough for suspension of disbelief.
They can take off almost vertically. They cannot land so easily. Flapping the wings produces forward momentum. Birds are able to slow themselves and make ornithopter landings without a runway for two major reasons:
1. They can warp their wings to change the direction of thrust as well as the amount of thrust applied with a sweep of the wing. This allows them to cancel their forward momentum suddenly, thus making a near-vertical landing. Our mechanical creations have a hard time replicating the flesh and blood aspects of birds. For one thing, warping a wing places stress on the rigid components and thus reduces reliability. Birds (and humans!) have similar issues, but their self-repair systems keep things in tip-top shape.
2. Birds have an advanced landing gear that allows them to grab on to protrusions such as branches, wires, and other types of outcroppings. An ornithopter is likely to have skids, which are nowhere near as well adapted.
Sure. I've even used remote controlled helicopters.
Key word: I've
When you've got a UAV, the software has to do the tricky work. Even with remote control, it's difficult to execute a landing with only a camera view of what's going on. Without that human element, the chances of a failed landing skyrocket.
Deserts are actually worse. Putting aside how easy it is for a 6 inch ornithopter to sink into the sand, it will be incredibly easy to spot for anyone on patrol in the area.
What do you do when there's no one around? Some of the most advanced drones in existence (e.g. the Mars rovers) become useless if they capsize.No, not really. You're glossing over the difficulty in creating a reliable autorighting system. Not to mention the expense of the many other components.It is indeed an unreasonable sum. They're talking about miniaturizing a 12 foot wide, complex piece of automated technology into a 6 inch ornithopter. Do you have any idea how much fab costs are for advanced microprocessors, battery technology, custom solar panels, lightweight flexible materials, and other technologies required to make this thing a reality?
I can tell you, just one of those technologies would easily sap up that $10 million in development costs.
Congratulations, you've vetted out my point.
Now where's my magic charger? I need it to power my flying car^H^H^H bat!
Taking off and landing automatically on runways. Taking off and landing from regular terrain is a lot more difficult. Think about the HUDs we have on modern jet aircraft. They're lining up their approach based on the lighting and radar information the runway and ground control is feeding back to them. Give the ILS an open field and it will choke.
Taking off is easy. Landing is not. The most common result? Capsizing. And when your $10 million toy capsizes, it's not so easy to get it back off the ground.
Wishful thinking. I'd like to see their toy make regular landings on level ground. Until that's solved, rooftops and trees are out. And forested clearings are exposed areas where the enemy might spot your drone. (Assuming you can even find a forested clearing in our current theaters of operation.
$10 million is pocket change. This type of project could easily result in a craft that would cost $10 million a piece for mass manufacture.
Those system DLLs are shared by multiple programs (at least in theory) and thus have their memory usage accounted for separate from the programs that use them. In fact, the memory counts against the operating system. Microsoft uses this fact to hide much of IE's memory in DLLs that have been installed as part of the OS.
So unless you have tools to pick apart where your OS's memory is going, you're going to get bad results for IE.
Try using something like Process Explorer instead. It will give you a much better view into what memory is being used and where.
Save for the fact that it's an utterly ridiculous goal. We don't even have short range UAVs that meet these specs. Yet the military wants to jump straight to a magical robot that's 6 inches wide and can handle long-range missions? Worse yet, we don't have UAVs that can land and takeoff unattended inside enemy territory. Yet the military thinks that this magical ornithopter is going to manage takeoff and landing unattended? (Which is significantly complicated by its wing design.) On top of that, the military really expects that these things will lay out in the open (where they can get sunlight) and go completely undetected?
There are so many WTFs in their long-range reconnaissance plan, that it sounds like something Dan Brown wrote.
That I am. Because otherwise I don't see the point. Rather than add the weight and complexity of all those charging methods, why not pull the battery pack out and plug it into a charger? If finding a power source is a problem, make the charger plug into the cigarette lighter in the Humvees. (Or whatever other power plug the military might be equipping their vehicles with.) Much simpler, less expensive, and more reliable.
Of course, I've seen enough of these descriptions to know that the military sends out requests for SciFi technology all the time. They don't actually expect anyone to meet these goals. What they expect is for the contractors to push themselves as close as they can possibly get. The contractor that gets the closest gets the contract.
The problem with such psychological tricks is that they are very short lived. Once your enemy realizes what you're throwing at them, they'll piece together their opponent and develop countermeasures. And when we're talking about a 12 foot flying machine, it wouldn't take long for fear to be replaced by, "target that craft and shoot it out of the sky". At which point its effectiveness would drop substantially.
Even if we assume that the weapon has a 100% operational effectiveness (yeah, right) and thus leaves no survivors to tell what happened, the enemy is going to start noticing his increased losses. And when he notices those losses, he's going to change his deployments to counter the problem. i.e. It only takes one sortie where the enemy has a second team hidden in the shadows to give away the secret of your weapon.
Stealth. It needs to act (at least somewhat) like a real bat or it will be detected. Real bats are ornithopters. Ergo, the spy craft must be an ornithopter.
Why don't they just ask for Zero Point Energy while they're at it? The "bat" is going to be working against the wind, generating vibrations, and (presumably) flying at night. Which makes all those charge methods about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. Why don't they ask for something that follows the KISS principle and just pull the battery pack to charge it?
IE lies. Much of its memory is hidden in system DLLs that don't show up in the Windows Task Manager. To get an accurate read on how much memory IE is using, you need to use special tools that track memory across the system.
Move to Java?
I kid, I kid! Ow, ow, ow!
Obviously. The crash was around the holiday season of '83, thus making it the Great Video Game Crash of '83/'84.
The C64, actually. And it was mostly Jack Tramiel's fault for turning a simple recession into a full-out crash: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Game_Crash#Price_war
Nonsense. The market forces that existed then don't exist today. The market of 1983 was HUGELY oversaturated with knock-off games from companies attempting to cash in. Frustratingly, some of those companies were the first party game producers. After the whole Pacman and ET fiascos, the market simply didn't trust Atari or anyone else to make a good game. The resulting loss of consumer confidence combined with the oversupply lead to a decline of video game sales. Tramiel's price war then caused retailers to dump* their stock of console systems in favor of cheap Commodore computers.
Because of these issues, modern console makers hold absolute control over their consoles. No one creates a game for their console without express approval from the console manufacturer. In addition, the console makers produce high-quality first-party titles and seek out desirable third-party exclusives in an effort to keep consumer confidence high. This careful control of the market ensures that the market conditions of the 1980's are not repeated.
Unlikely. The PC platform is effectively dead as a gaming platform. There are some holdouts, but there just isn't enough incentive to play games on PCs anymore. Driver issues, constant hardware upgrades, installation problems, DRM, and other headaches just don't make the minor quality difference worth it. Which is a very different situation from the 90's when computers were capable of producing expansive worlds and 3D graphics that consoles were (for the most part) unable to replicate. Now that the difference is just some minor differences in rendering quality, there is no real incentive to use the PC platform for gaming. Better to use it for web surfing and business uses. Especially when most games released today are available on both the PC and console platforms.
* When I say dump, I mean that in a fairly literal sense. $30 game cartridges were being sold for 99 cents. Retailers were willing to take the loss because they felt that there was no hope of selling the stock in time to make a profit off of the holiday season. So they freed up the shelf space for stuff that they felt they *could* sell. Like the $199 Commodore 64 and the $99 VIC-20.
I'm not a fan of either the 360 or the PS3, but I feel it's worth noting that the XBox has Gears of War 2 in the pipeline, and has exclusive downloadable episodes announced for GTA4. Those may or may not be enough to counter Sony's push, but they do exist and do provide an answering salvo to some degree.
There's also the E3 to be concerned about. While Nintendo is outright saying that they're holding their cards close, the other competitors haven't said anything either way. I'm fairly certain that Sony has already played their cards and are in it for the long haul, but the possibility exists that Microsoft could produce a big announcement at the show. Again, I'm not sure of the likelihood of Microsoft coming up with something big enough to stop Sony in their tracks, but the possibility definitely exists there.
Was declassified decades ago. The need for the additional neutron source was questionable in the gun-type nuclear weapons, but the scientists who built the bomb wanted to make sure that it detonated. Especially since they had only tested the implosion device. (The gun-type device was considered so simple that it didn't need testing.)
I blame the Romans. Romanes Eunt Domus!
(This post copyright MMVIII)
I'm not really sure how you're disagreeing with me. In fact, it sounds like we're on the exact same page. I won't pay for ZIP libraries anymore because I can get Open Source products that do just as good of a job. But I will pay for GarageBand because it's an excellent product with no commoditized equivalent. Similarly, a lot of people pay for Photoshop because it still has a lot of high-end features that GIMP does not replicate. :-)
Bouncy Castle: http://www.bouncycastle.org/
Best crypto lib this side of the solar system.
That matters not. Just as all those open standards and government-provided data improves the quality of products in traditional industries, Open Source improves the level of quality in technological services. Joe Average doesn't really care how that PDF he's using came to be, but the engineers who created the solution he's using were able to quickly and effectively meet his needs thanks to FOP and PDFBox.
Similarly, Jane Average doesn't care that the news she's getting was parsed from an RSS feed using Rome, she just knows that she gets her news and she's happy.
So yay for Open Source! Providing better solutions in a modern world.
- FireFox
:-)
- Apache Webserver
- Derby Database
- Sun Java Server Application Server (aka Glassfish)
- PDFBox
- TortoiseCVS
- OpenPortal
- Netbeans
- Rhino
- GWT
- POI
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- Solaris
- BCEL
- ANT
- FOP
- Rome (RSS)
- FFMPEG
- VLC
- FileZilla
- GIMP
- DOSBox
- QEMU
- Cygwin
- JHDL
- Bouncy Castle
- jTDS
- PHP
- GCC
The list above is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of Open Source projects that I use and rely upon on a regular basis. It has grown significantly over the years, going from a relatively small list of key programs to permeating nearly every aspect of my day-to-day life and work. If you did a similar inventory of the OSS products you use, I wouldn't be surprised if you came up with a similarly growing list.
So while the article may not answer all your questions, some answers can be found by just looking closer to home.