All the great FOSS projects so far have come from someone "scratching an itch"; Linux was made because Linus didn't like the networking and terminal emulation on MINIX, gcc was created because Richard Stallman needed a Free compiler. Take that thing that always bothered you, but that you never got around to solving, and solve it. With a database.
A few examples might be: -a database management system that actually works (for your own definition of "works") -an interpreter for the programming language you always wanted to build but never got around to (the standard library for this language comes with a database API) -port the concept of a database to a platform which has never seen one, eg.: write one in PDP-1 asm, or build a database program for the ENIAC (extra credit if you build your own ENIAC emulator)
For the non-Dutch: the 50plus party defends the interests of people above 50 years of age. I was quite surprised when I saw him on the Dutch news last year, showing off his "1337 h4x0r sk1llz".
If you're saying it shouldn't illegal for me to break into a school's wiring cabinet and hook up my laptop to get access to things, you're a moron.
There are perfectly valid laws against burglary and breaking and entering. If Aaron Swartz were persecuted for that, no one would complain. The problem is that he was not; he was being persecuted for computer fraud and he was facing a longer prison sentence than someone who assists a terrorist group in building a nuke (20 years max), while his "computer crime" was totally victimless. Bradley Manning did commit a nonvictimless crime. He stole secret documents, but in doing this he uncovered some far more horrible crimes of the American army. He might be a criminal, but he does not deserve a 10-year prison sentence.
A man who fought for my freedom has died. The Three Bills which he defied, COICA, SOPA, PIPA could, Not stop the power of the world, Led by this great modern sage, Who died at a far too young age, We fought, we struggled and we won, Aaron Schwartz was the internet's son.
Oh, Creator of Reddit and RSS, Was it fear of the feds? We shall never know. We can hypothesize though, We can talk, comment forlorn, But Aaron Schwartz is forever gone.
Slashdot, BoingBoing, Reddit, and 4chan, BBC and Reuters all mourn this man.
Thank you Aaron Schwartz, I wish you would have stayed a bit longer.
A physicist's "trivial" means something more like "it won't take me more than a year to work out the general theory, and then I might be able to provide a full description somewhere in the next two years, but it isn't TOO hard.". In other words, he groks networking technology.
Actually, the local chief of police said they wouldn't (on a show on national television). The chance of one of your relatives submitting DNA is so large that they'll be able to arrest you if you are guilty, even if you didn't give them anything.
The editor wars came to a standstill in the 90's! Why did you have to break the ceasefire? But if we're flaming anyway, I would like to remind you that Emacs Makes Any Computer Slow and that it is a very nice operating system; it just lacks a text editor (but it's still infinitely better than nano or pico or notepad).
To this day I still want a space cadet keyboard.. so hard to find, and so many meta keys.
A real nerd hacks his own. This one is very mac-oriented, but it shouldn't be too hard to build a new keymap for your Linux box. Windows might be a bit harder.
Yes, curiosity was cool, but it wasn't new. It wasn't groundbreaking research and technology.
Unlike Beagle 2? (I'm British so maybe I'm allowed to joke about this!)
If you are not inspired by spacecraft currently exploring Mercury, Mars, and Saturn, and spacecraft on the way to Pluto, Ceres and Jupiter, then you may be an expensive person to please.
I agree that NASA has some cool stuff going, but I'm talking about sending people up there. If we don't do any of that very soon, NASA will stop sending anyone past LEO.
If NASA would propose a plan to send humans to Mars, think it out really well, sell it to the people via press conferences and YouTube videos and _then_ propose it to congress and ask for a 'small sum' of money, the overwhelming public opinion would force any reasonable politician who wants to be reelected to vote in favor. If NASA adds some stuff about 'cracking down on the Chinese' who are already planning trips to the Moon and 'glory to America' the nationalists and some of the neocons would also be convinced. There would be some small opposition for Akin-esque and Broun-like politicians, but not too much. (Assuming the average American thinks spaceflight is cool.)
At this point, it would be completely irresponsible to put fertile men and women on a long-term trip. Chances are the woman and her baby would die.
If we don't have gravity (or centrifugal imitations of gravity) other bad things could happen. Even if the baby survives, imagine the shock of encountering gravity after more than a year in space. It will not be familiar with gravity, which might lead to it jumping of an object, expecting to fly, but falling instead. The child's muscles might also be very underdeveloped and it's bones would be way too high on collagen and not strong enough for a gravitational environment.
No, the value of the ISS is much, much more mundane. How to keep a gigantic pile of junk working in space. Short term flips around the moon or earth orbit are one thing, but you really have to be able to do stuff like fix something when it breaks.
ISS has been up there for 14 years now. The trip to Mars only takes a few years. I think we've had enough time to collect data by now. It's time NASA does something, or it will be superseded and made obsolete by commercial spaceflight companies. These companies will probably only be interested in profit, not in pure science, and might not even publish the results of their extraterrestrial surveys. This would lead to a horrible fragmentation of human knowledge of space, where the employees of companies will know about what's out there, NDAs will prevent them from spreading that knowledge. (What if the competitors find out that certain asteroids are full of palladium?)
Of course I like the fact that space travel is becoming a commercial matter, with more opportunities for us civvies, but here we also see the decline of NASA. They used to build one cool thing after another and launch greater and greater mission (Gemini, Apollo, Pioneer, Mariner, etc), but now the NASA is losing it's momentum and budget. One cause of this is because it doesn't set any real goals any more. In the good ol' days NASA had goals; put a man on the moon, put a robot on Mars, send a satellite to the edge of the solar system, etc, but now it's primary occupation is the ISS, where they do research which might one day be useful. (in the far future) Yes, curiosity was cool, but it wasn't new. It wasn't groundbreaking research and technology. According to Robert Zubrin who explains this far better than I can, we could have people on Mars by now. The reason we don't is because the NASA has become unfocused. Dragon, to me, symbolizes this.
Build a mineral oil-cooled PC, put it in a transparent container, embed it in the wall and put an aquarium in front of it. It'll look as if the fish are swimming in the same liquid as the computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the last option isn't too useful, but I for one would love an ENIAC emulator.
All the great FOSS projects so far have come from someone "scratching an itch"; Linux was made because Linus didn't like the networking and terminal emulation on MINIX, gcc was created because Richard Stallman needed a Free compiler. Take that thing that always bothered you, but that you never got around to solving, and solve it.
With a database.
A few examples might be:
-a database management system that actually works (for your own definition of "works")
-an interpreter for the programming language you always wanted to build but never got around to (the standard library for this language comes with a database API)
-port the concept of a database to a platform which has never seen one, eg.: write one in PDP-1 asm, or build a database program for the ENIAC (extra credit if you build your own ENIAC emulator)
For the non-Dutch: the 50plus party defends the interests of people above 50 years of age. I was quite surprised when I saw him on the Dutch news last year, showing off his "1337 h4x0r sk1llz".
If you're saying it shouldn't illegal for me to break into a school's wiring cabinet and hook up my laptop to get access to things, you're a moron.
There are perfectly valid laws against burglary and breaking and entering. If Aaron Swartz were persecuted for that, no one would complain. The problem is that he was not; he was being persecuted for computer fraud and he was facing a longer prison sentence than someone who assists a terrorist group in building a nuke (20 years max), while his "computer crime" was totally victimless.
Bradley Manning did commit a nonvictimless crime. He stole secret documents, but in doing this he uncovered some far more horrible crimes of the American army. He might be a criminal, but he does not deserve a 10-year prison sentence.
I don't use any antivirus software.
Yes, I know, I misspelled his name!
A man who fought for my freedom has died.
The Three Bills which he defied,
COICA, SOPA, PIPA could,
Not stop the power of the world,
Led by this great modern sage,
Who died at a far too young age,
We fought, we struggled and we won,
Aaron Schwartz was the internet's son.
Oh, Creator of Reddit and RSS,
Was it fear of the feds?
We shall never know.
We can hypothesize though,
We can talk, comment forlorn,
But Aaron Schwartz is forever gone.
Slashdot, BoingBoing, Reddit, and 4chan,
BBC and Reuters all mourn this man.
Thank you Aaron Schwartz,
I wish you would have stayed a bit longer.
"I find networking technology absolutely trivial"
A physicist's "trivial" means something more like "it won't take me more than a year to work out the general theory, and then I might be able to provide a full description somewhere in the next two years, but it isn't TOO hard.".
In other words, he groks networking technology.
Definitely XKCD!
+1 agree
Being born in 1996, I missed out on most of computer history. Thank you, Casio and TI for allowing me to experience the growth of the computer -again.
It's like re-living history.
Someone please mod this up.
People were concerned about this, but the desire to get this case solved was stronger than any worry about the DNA.
Actually, the local chief of police said they wouldn't (on a show on national television). The chance of one of your relatives submitting DNA is so large that they'll be able to arrest you if you are guilty, even if you didn't give them anything.
The editor wars came to a standstill in the 90's! Why did you have to break the ceasefire?
But if we're flaming anyway, I would like to remind you that Emacs Makes Any Computer Slow and that it is a very nice operating system; it just lacks a text editor (but it's still infinitely better than nano or pico or notepad).
And real men use ed!
It's still a little bloaty, but what isn't, honestly.
Plain X or Xmonad.
I believe warrantless wire taping started under Bush....*eye roll*
What about Hoover? (The FBI guy, not the engineer.) He _started_ the whole surveillance of government subjects thing.
Sure, but where are you going to find beige and blue keycaps?
You'll probably have to relabel your keys anyway; might as well paint them.
To this day I still want a space cadet keyboard.. so hard to find, and so many meta keys.
A real nerd hacks his own. This one is very mac-oriented, but it shouldn't be too hard to build a new keymap for your Linux box. Windows might be a bit harder.
Yes, curiosity was cool, but it wasn't new. It wasn't groundbreaking research and technology.
Unlike Beagle 2? (I'm British so maybe I'm allowed to joke about this!)
If you are not inspired by spacecraft currently exploring Mercury, Mars, and Saturn, and spacecraft on the way to Pluto, Ceres and Jupiter, then you may be an expensive person to please.
I agree that NASA has some cool stuff going, but I'm talking about sending people up there. If we don't do any of that very soon, NASA will stop sending anyone past LEO.
If NASA would propose a plan to send humans to Mars, think it out really well, sell it to the people via press conferences and YouTube videos and _then_ propose it to congress and ask for a 'small sum' of money, the overwhelming public opinion would force any reasonable politician who wants to be reelected to vote in favor. If NASA adds some stuff about 'cracking down on the Chinese' who are already planning trips to the Moon and 'glory to America' the nationalists and some of the neocons would also be convinced.
There would be some small opposition for Akin-esque and Broun-like politicians, but not too much.
(Assuming the average American thinks spaceflight is cool.)
At this point, it would be completely irresponsible to put fertile men and women on a long-term trip. Chances are the woman and her baby would die.
If we don't have gravity (or centrifugal imitations of gravity) other bad things could happen.
Even if the baby survives, imagine the shock of encountering gravity after more than a year in space. It will not be familiar with gravity, which might lead to it jumping of an object, expecting to fly, but falling instead.
The child's muscles might also be very underdeveloped and it's bones would be way too high on collagen and not strong enough for a gravitational environment.
No, the value of the ISS is much, much more mundane. How to keep a gigantic pile of junk working in space. Short term flips around the moon or earth orbit are one thing, but you really have to be able to do stuff like fix something when it breaks.
ISS has been up there for 14 years now. The trip to Mars only takes a few years.
I think we've had enough time to collect data by now. It's time NASA does something, or it will be superseded and made obsolete by commercial spaceflight companies.
These companies will probably only be interested in profit, not in pure science, and might not even publish the results of their extraterrestrial surveys. This would lead to a horrible fragmentation of human knowledge of space, where the employees of companies will know about what's out there, NDAs will prevent them from spreading that knowledge. (What if the competitors find out that certain asteroids are full of palladium?)
Of course I like the fact that space travel is becoming a commercial matter, with more opportunities for us civvies, but here we also see the decline of NASA. They used to build one cool thing after another and launch greater and greater mission (Gemini, Apollo, Pioneer, Mariner, etc), but now the NASA is losing it's momentum and budget.
One cause of this is because it doesn't set any real goals any more. In the good ol' days NASA had goals; put a man on the moon, put a robot on Mars, send a satellite to the edge of the solar system, etc, but now it's primary occupation is the ISS, where they do research which might one day be useful. (in the far future)
Yes, curiosity was cool, but it wasn't new. It wasn't groundbreaking research and technology. According to Robert Zubrin who explains this far better than I can, we could have people on Mars by now.
The reason we don't is because the NASA has become unfocused.
Dragon, to me, symbolizes this.
Build a mineral oil-cooled PC, put it in a transparent container, embed it in the wall and put an aquarium in front of it. It'll look as if the fish are swimming in the same liquid as the computer.
Sorry for the double post.