Well, actually, since U.S. taxpayers paid for the launch and the recording thereof, it seems to me that the recording is public property, so yes, if the public ask for it I think NASA really *is* obliged to give it.
Thanks. Hmmm, I followed a link and found http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/extensio ns/extensions.html which told me something I needed to know: they're now "optional packages" rather than "Standard Extensions". I didn't think that e.g. the PostgreSQL driver sounded like a Standard Extension. Sun has found a really obscure way of saying "add system libraries here".
I'm still a little uneasy about the security implications of dropping something into jre/lib/ext but I'll study it some more.
Not defining a standard library location into which the sysadmin can place locally-required libraries for his users to share is high on my list of jaw-dropping omissions. Having to maintain a 4KB CLASSPATH string for every application is not my idea of robust design.
They're not necessarily stalling. Sun's a big company. It takes a while to pass The Word to all of the middle managers and beat the lawyers into submission.
I still wonder why "Linux" (whoever that is) *needs* to make a big push for *anything*. What do we get for our effort? "My marketshare is bigger'n your marketshare" doesn't interest me.
If what I bought is just like what I replaced, didn't I just waste my money? Why would I switch if the thing I'm switching to is just like the thing I'm switching from?
And that's why this sort of question doesn't help. What you just described is what I would judge to be the *worst* distro. It has all of the things that drove me away from MS Windows. It's the same reason I avoid Red Hat -- the things they've done to "improve" Linux are almost, but not quite, exactly unlike what I need.
Also Dell have kept prices down by shipping whatever's cheap today, even if it's not what was cheap yesterday. Commitment to FOSS driver availability pins them down to fewer suppliers, so the prices *they* pay may go up.
Yeah, the only personal reason I really have for caring about "Linux on the desktop" is so I can have it on *my* desktop. Well, I've had it on my desktop since 1994. It'll become an issue for me again if someone comes round thinking that enforcing superficial uniformity is more important than getting the work out.
I guess I do have another reason, but it's only that I care about people who have had that happen and don't get a choice.
Well, that's why I build my own instead of buying Dell. I know all the parts that go into a box and I've made sure that they are supported before I bought them. If Dell would do that for me, they can surely beat the price I have to pay for onesy-twosey parts purchases and they might win my business. But then there's no money in onesy-twosey customers, so I guess they'll be satisfied to do without my business.
Nah, if the VP Finance thinks Linux will help him, he'll decree Red Hat for everybody and that's that. Meanwhile the guys who know how to fix stuff are running Gentoo or Debian and didn't bother telling anyone, the datacenter guys are running what the consultant told them to, and the engineers are running whatever the heck works best for each since nobody understands what engineers want anyway.
If anything is hurting Linux uptake in corporate-land, it's this strange notion that everybody has to have the same flavor. What saves money in the front office costs money in the back room, and vice versa, because the work and the necessary tools are very different.
I have to side against Mr. Dell. If Dell would pick one distro, *any* distro, and support it, soon all the distros would work well on Dell -- for free -- and he'd be selling more gear than ever.
It's really sad, too, that those who can fix problems never call in, because they'd be calling in *fixes* not problems. Your knowledge base that supports your service engineers grows and all you had to do was hire call-center people who can get the spelling right.
Vendors used to take those calls and customers would see their fixes taken up, so we took extra care to make good, general fixes that they could use as-is. Nowadays nobody wants to hear about your fix, so surprise! all that free labor dried up.
Dunno, maybe it's the same thing that seemingly makes some people believe there were no extinctions until Man invented the chainsaw. It's hard to believe in something you can't see happening -- you need tools to help your senses. Some folks never pick up those tools.
Still it's good to have actual data to back up the reasonable assumption that evolution hasn't stopped since we see nothing that would have stopped it. (Tools again!) We get a kick out of scientists breathlessly announcing things that "everybody knows", but there's a long and growing list of things "everybody knew" that turned out to be wrong. When studying the obvious, occasionally you find useful things that nobody saw, because the truth was so "obvious".
It's my understanding that in the US, transmission lines tend to operate at some power of ten times 7 Volts. (Or more likely 7.07V (RMS, =10V P-P).) So you get probably 7kV for residential areas, 70kV to the substations, and I've heard of 700kV trunks. I'm trying to recall whether I ever heard of a 7mV line.
Tesla's big idea IIRC was to try to approach 100% "loss" at the power station, eliminate the wires, and tap into the radiated power locally. Hence his interest in high frequencies, I guess. It's rather clever to turn the efficiency of the system on its head like that -- like electric heating making resistance losses the goal rather than the enemy.
Another Popular Science article: a project that involved a 500,000F capacitor. It was slightly smaller than a coffee can. They had a cover picture of one filling someone's hand.
Don't guess. Look in Popular Science about, oh, maybe 30 years ago for lots of articles on how ultra-speed flywheels were going to power the cars of the future. Engineers have already worked out the optimal figure for a 20,000RPM flywheel and studied the materials problem extensively. Worry more about things like the delivery truck being unable to lean over on a sloping road, even slightly, without the load tipping up on one edge. (Of course the flywheels have to have their axes vertical or you can't turn corners with 'em. You also can't go *too* far to deliver them or local vertical will be noticeably different from factory's local vertical.)
BTW that truck delivering the superconductors had better be, not just nonmagnetic, but magnetically *shielded*. Visit a medical NMR facility sometime and see all the warning signs with the funny slashed Ws on them. Big magnetic fields can be *dangerous*.
Because there's oodles of 48VDC power supply gear out there now, since telcos buy it in trainload lots to run their equipment. Battery for telephony has been 48V pretty much forever. Gear that can give you reliable 5V@1000A is probably rather scarce (pronounced "expensive").
It's a good idea but it won't fly until DC becomes common in datacenters. And then it won't fly because the datacenters will have all been rigged for 48V.:-(
Under what theory would the mere user (A) of software procured in good faith from another (B) be liable for B's infringement of C's intellectual property rights, whether the software is OSS or closed-source?
s/Open Source license/license/g and it's all still true. I'd like to see some big organizations do it and find out what they have let themselves in for. Imagine that someone at, say, General Motors sent the license terms for e.g. MS Office and OpenOffice to counsel for review, in the same envelope.
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See one chapter of _Bad Astronomy_ for why the stars don't show, etc.
Well, actually, since U.S. taxpayers paid for the launch and the recording thereof, it seems to me that the recording is public property, so yes, if the public ask for it I think NASA really *is* obliged to give it.
Thanks. Hmmm, I followed a link and found http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/extensio ns/extensions.html which told me something I needed to know: they're now "optional packages" rather than "Standard Extensions". I didn't think that e.g. the PostgreSQL driver sounded like a Standard Extension. Sun has found a really obscure way of saying "add system libraries here".
I'm still a little uneasy about the security implications of dropping something into jre/lib/ext but I'll study it some more.
Thank you. 'twould be nice if this were documented somewhere or, if it is, had I been able to find it.
Not defining a standard library location into which the sysadmin can place locally-required libraries for his users to share is high on my list of jaw-dropping omissions. Having to maintain a 4KB CLASSPATH string for every application is not my idea of robust design.
They're not necessarily stalling. Sun's a big company. It takes a while to pass The Word to all of the middle managers and beat the lawyers into submission.
I still wonder why "Linux" (whoever that is) *needs* to make a big push for *anything*. What do we get for our effort? "My marketshare is bigger'n your marketshare" doesn't interest me.
If what I bought is just like what I replaced, didn't I just waste my money? Why would I switch if the thing I'm switching to is just like the thing I'm switching from?
And that's why this sort of question doesn't help. What you just described is what I would judge to be the *worst* distro. It has all of the things that drove me away from MS Windows. It's the same reason I avoid Red Hat -- the things they've done to "improve" Linux are almost, but not quite, exactly unlike what I need.
Exactly! "Which Linux are you talking about?" The one that comes from kernel.org, of course. Make *certain* of that and the rest is easy.
Yeah, and there's no reason that chocolate ice cream couldn't be made to taste like vanilla. Except that people who prefer chocolate wouldn't buy it.
Also Dell have kept prices down by shipping whatever's cheap today, even if it's not what was cheap yesterday. Commitment to FOSS driver availability pins them down to fewer suppliers, so the prices *they* pay may go up.
Yeah, the only personal reason I really have for caring about "Linux on the desktop" is so I can have it on *my* desktop. Well, I've had it on my desktop since 1994. It'll become an issue for me again if someone comes round thinking that enforcing superficial uniformity is more important than getting the work out.
I guess I do have another reason, but it's only that I care about people who have had that happen and don't get a choice.
Well, that's why I build my own instead of buying Dell. I know all the parts that go into a box and I've made sure that they are supported before I bought them. If Dell would do that for me, they can surely beat the price I have to pay for onesy-twosey parts purchases and they might win my business. But then there's no money in onesy-twosey customers, so I guess they'll be satisfied to do without my business.
Nah, if the VP Finance thinks Linux will help him, he'll decree Red Hat for everybody and that's that. Meanwhile the guys who know how to fix stuff are running Gentoo or Debian and didn't bother telling anyone, the datacenter guys are running what the consultant told them to, and the engineers are running whatever the heck works best for each since nobody understands what engineers want anyway.
If anything is hurting Linux uptake in corporate-land, it's this strange notion that everybody has to have the same flavor. What saves money in the front office costs money in the back room, and vice versa, because the work and the necessary tools are very different.
I have to side against Mr. Dell. If Dell would pick one distro, *any* distro, and support it, soon all the distros would work well on Dell -- for free -- and he'd be selling more gear than ever.
It's really sad, too, that those who can fix problems never call in, because they'd be calling in *fixes* not problems. Your knowledge base that supports your service engineers grows and all you had to do was hire call-center people who can get the spelling right.
Vendors used to take those calls and customers would see their fixes taken up, so we took extra care to make good, general fixes that they could use as-is. Nowadays nobody wants to hear about your fix, so surprise! all that free labor dried up.
Dunno, maybe it's the same thing that seemingly makes some people believe there were no extinctions until Man invented the chainsaw. It's hard to believe in something you can't see happening -- you need tools to help your senses. Some folks never pick up those tools.
Still it's good to have actual data to back up the reasonable assumption that evolution hasn't stopped since we see nothing that would have stopped it. (Tools again!) We get a kick out of scientists breathlessly announcing things that "everybody knows", but there's a long and growing list of things "everybody knew" that turned out to be wrong. When studying the obvious, occasionally you find useful things that nobody saw, because the truth was so "obvious".
It's my understanding that in the US, transmission lines tend to operate at some power of ten times 7 Volts. (Or more likely 7.07V (RMS, =10V P-P).) So you get probably 7kV for residential areas, 70kV to the substations, and I've heard of 700kV trunks. I'm trying to recall whether I ever heard of a 7mV line.
Tesla's big idea IIRC was to try to approach 100% "loss" at the power station, eliminate the wires, and tap into the radiated power locally. Hence his interest in high frequencies, I guess. It's rather clever to turn the efficiency of the system on its head like that -- like electric heating making resistance losses the goal rather than the enemy.
Another Popular Science article: a project that involved a 500,000F capacitor. It was slightly smaller than a coffee can. They had a cover picture of one filling someone's hand.
Don't guess. Look in Popular Science about, oh, maybe 30 years ago for lots of articles on how ultra-speed flywheels were going to power the cars of the future. Engineers have already worked out the optimal figure for a 20,000RPM flywheel and studied the materials problem extensively. Worry more about things like the delivery truck being unable to lean over on a sloping road, even slightly, without the load tipping up on one edge. (Of course the flywheels have to have their axes vertical or you can't turn corners with 'em. You also can't go *too* far to deliver them or local vertical will be noticeably different from factory's local vertical.)
BTW that truck delivering the superconductors had better be, not just nonmagnetic, but magnetically *shielded*. Visit a medical NMR facility sometime and see all the warning signs with the funny slashed Ws on them. Big magnetic fields can be *dangerous*.
What are the radiative losses of 5000 km of distribution grid at 50/60Hz vs. 1kHz vs. 1mHz?
Because there's oodles of 48VDC power supply gear out there now, since telcos buy it in trainload lots to run their equipment. Battery for telephony has been 48V pretty much forever. Gear that can give you reliable 5V@1000A is probably rather scarce (pronounced "expensive").
:-(
It's a good idea but it won't fly until DC becomes common in datacenters. And then it won't fly because the datacenters will have all been rigged for 48V.
Don't hope; visit them and present your evidence. Ask them to do something about it.
Under what theory would the mere user (A) of software procured in good faith from another (B) be liable for B's infringement of C's intellectual property rights, whether the software is OSS or closed-source?
s/Open Source license/license/g and it's all still true. I'd like to see some big organizations do it and find out what they have let themselves in for. Imagine that someone at, say, General Motors sent the license terms for e.g. MS Office and OpenOffice to counsel for review, in the same envelope.