There's only one obvious reason for a spacecraft company to be secretive. They're involved in a top secret military project.
Then again, maybe Blue Origin is trying to be the Apple Inc of the space transport biz. Except that Blue Origin's chief financial backer is a web billionaire named Jeff Bezos. So maybe Blue Origin is trying to be secretive like Amazon?
Maybe BO has figured out a way to bring down space fares to a new low, a Kindle Fire among the iPads of the launch industry? That, or JB is trying to cover up the lack of progress.
Most people won't consider quantum physics magic simply because it involves things that aren't experienced in everyday life. If I see a chair float in the air, I'd say it's magic because a chair suddenly floating up is contrary to my everyday experience of chairs. Familiar things behaving in unfamiliar ways, that's magic. A person being cut up and put back together is a magic trick. A medieval person might consider the Amazon Kindle magic because it resembles a book or at least a biblical tablet and yet contains the contents of thousands of books.
I'd consider quantum states magical only in so far as they produce macroscopic effects, a real-life cat that's both alive and dead. Quantum entanglement would be magical if it would allow us to develop instantaneous communication devices or, even more magical, Star Trek-style teleportation.
"I've been following this project for a while now, and it is going in a direction which I believe in. I am getting tired of proprietary ARM hardware and software."
According to the link, the Allwinner A10 has a MALI GPU, which presently requires a proprietary driver although there's an nVidia Nouveau-like project to produce a reverse-engineered driver, aptly named Lima.
I agree it's an important project, if only because it would allow hardware computer geeks to continue building their own kit after today's tower and mini-tower PCs go extinct. I'm still waiting for the day I can assemble the equivalent of a full-powered desktop PC in a form factor smaller than a consumer router. Which has me wondering while Intel and AMD aren't doing their own Manhattan project to produce their own full-featured SoCs rather than the more powerful but less integrated APUs.
Mars would be the perfect place to test such technologies. My point being that today's driverless cars are dependent on external assistance, whereas the Mars rovers can operate autonomously but at snail's pace. So yes, you can safely let loose a driverless car on the countryside but at a speed that would be impractical for anybody who has to work for a living.
Probably won't work for Nokia unless they can quickly empty their inventory to convince Microsoft that Nokia should retain their favored early adopter status. If Nokia can't sell the WinPhone units quickly, Microsoft would be forced to cut deals with other big manufacturers, Samsung, HTC, maybe even Sony. Microsoft may yet emerge as a winner in the smartphone wars. The future looks bleaker for Nokia. Failure for Microsoft would mean failure for Nokia as well, but success for Microsoft would not necessarily translate into success for Nokia. Microsoft at this point can still afford to fail. For Nokia it's not an option.
If there's any truth to the news, then surely one of those "disgruntled" students could be given an incentive to spill the beans on the specs or the look of the new iPhone? Even an actual photo would be possible. I'm sure there are tech "news" orgs out there willing to shell a few grand for even a low-res photo taken via a spy cam that can easily be tucked into the workers' underwear or body cavity. This can be foiled of course if Foxconn security does a strip/cavity search of each worker entering the factory or use some sort of Orwellian system that monitors suspcious/nervous behavior or even a walk-thru lie-detector test.
"Next you'll be saying that that HTC (?) ad with the fashion photographer jumping out of the plane and doing a photo shoot in free-fall wasn't entirely shot on a smartphone?"
Next you'll tell me Google faked its Google Glass demo:
If you're playing catch-up, you overwhelm the competition not by designing some elusive quality called beauty but by adding more features to your product or selling it for less. Alternatively you can include just one killer feature that nobody else has or is at least vastly superior to everything everybody else has. This is what Apple did with the original iPhone, a touch screen experience that was as good as or just slightly worse than what what you get from using a keypad.
People who want a beautiful phone will already buy an iPhone. Imagine you're a sales clerk trying to sell a non-iPhone because you've been given the "incentive" to do so. What would be easier to "prove" to the customer? That the OtherPhone is more beautiful, or that the OtherPhone is has more features than the iPhone?
Since you're no marketing expert, you can simply dazzle the customer by listing and demo-ing the features, no matter how useless they might appear at first. Sir, this has a 16MB camera, a TV function, a micro SD card, a flashlight, etc. By running through such a point-by-point comparison, you can make the iPhone look bad.
As for beauty, ever wonder why touch screen cellphones look remarkably similar to one another? It's because design-wise the most prominent feature of a touch screen phone is the screen. Everything else is the picture frame. So the perfect touch screen phone would be one that would work well without any buttons or other proturberances.
So, no, Nokia can't succeed against Apple by designing a more beautiful phone. That is already Apple's game.
Driverless cars would only work if all cars within an area are driverless and the road network is isolated from pedestrians of whatever shape and size. Such a setup would effectively turn a car into a track-less personal train system. I think I saw an example of this in Minority Report or some other dark-toned sci-fi movie.
Drivers make sense where the probability of unforseen obstructions are great. You don't want your driverless car crashing into some bumpkin or a cow too stupid to know the difference between the road and the sidewalk.
That's too extreme. Just leave all your microwave-transmitting information devices inside the microwave oven, which wil probably be the "deadest" spot inside your house. If your microwave is safe enough to bake a potato, it won't leak enough microwaves for you or the FBI to use YOUR cellphone.
Incidentally, texting or calling a cellphone placed inside a hopefully inactive microwave oven is a crude way to test for possible leaks in the oven's protective coating.
"With the launch of the Raspberry Pi, computers are becoming affordable again for the younger generations."
"Affordable again" implies there was some golden age when computers were significantly cheaper than today, a premise easily disproven by a simple look at the economics of mass production. More programmable devices are being made today than at any time in the past. Almost every device more complex than a light bulb has some sort of microchip built into it.
Low-end Android phones are now cheaper but still more powerful than any PC or programmable calculator from the 70's and 80's, when the "personal" computer revolution took off and took root. Now, even a locked smart phone can be a programming device for the end user, so long as you can download an app that can provide a virtual machine for a simple scripting language. Just GOTO Google to find some examples of that RETRO interpreter for the smartphone of your choice.
Running a disto's unstable branch is likely the culprit. I remember reading about Vbox being broken by some kernel updates. The distro maintainer's solution was to hold back the kernel update until Vbox was patched to be compatible. This can easily be overlooked in the unstable branch of a rolling release distro.
You can be secure enough if you use a router, an updated operating system and separate profiles or different browsers when browsing all the stuff you shouldn't be browsing. Unless you're a politician, a drug lord, a terrorist cell leader, or somebody else with potentially powerful enemies.
That said, killing Javascript and disabling or better uninstalling all plug-ins for new sites or sites that you rarely visit should fix most Internet security issues.
Too bad it's just a CGI animation. Around the 0:30 mark you see what looks surprisingly like a coconut with two eyes and the beginings of a mouth or nose. More stuff for alien conspiracy theorists to shake their stick at.
This is so we can fight over whether to call some rock a "dwarf" planet or a "giant" asteroid. Or we can start call Vesta a mini dwarf planet and Ceres a super giant asteroid.
There's a car crash. The neighbors scream. By hearing the neighbors scream and listening to their remarks, I conclude that there's been a car crash. This works well so long as the neighbors aren't practically jokers.
Sure Twitter's a much bigger neighborhood and more immune as a whole to pranksters. But what if organized mayhem like Anonymous decide to pull off an out-of-season April Fools Joke and start tweeting #alieninvasion? There goes your Armageddon Detection System.
Vmware is a rare example of software that need to be rebuilt after a kernel upgrade. Neither Gnome nor Mono needs to be rebuilt, unless I'm mistaken or De Icaza is an incompetent software architect. I personally haven't rebuilt anything after a kernel upgrade for several years already. This thanks to Dell's DKMS, which automatically rebuilds out-of-tree modules like the notorious VirtualBox.
Vmware is a special problem because it's a low-level non-opensource program running on a monolithic kernel. Far more problematic for the GNU/Linux userland is a glibc upgrade, which does break a lot of things, especially programs written in C++. However, major architectural changes like the adoption of Kernel Mode Setting have sometimes strange effects on rather desktop programs, including programs as seemingly high-level as Firefox. Something which on closer inspection shouldn't be surprising given the push to turn the browser into the client side of the Cloud OS.
They're the ones making the movie, so I don't really have the right to say it's a waste of time and effort. But the first thought that comes to my mind when I see a competently done, if not altogether well-made, "fan" movie or other fan-made media project is why haven't they expended the same amount of time, effort and yes money on something that might lead to a legal suit or a C&D. Sure anybody can get hit by a copyright troll, but fan media are clearly in the darker side of the fair use grey zone.
How much harder would it be to make Iron Sky when you already have the special effects knowhow to make yet another Star Wars/Star Trek spoof?
Where there are no burning issues at hand, human interest stories are a good tactic to keep a candidate in the news or at least in Twitterverse. Expect to learn more trivial, but harmless stuff like these "brewed" by the campaign strategists who work behind the scenes.
Somehow this only convinces me that come November a new occupant will fill that hopefully not empty Chair at the Oval Office.
This seems to be the better option to keeping the corpse of an abandoned program on life support. The best solution would be to redo the whole site using HTML5 or other open web technologies, but a dedicated app is probably the only solution, besides Flash, where some form of light DRM is needed to "protect" online shows from unauthorized uses.
"The ACTUAL usability problem is installing software - it needs to work universally so people can actually do things and therefore be interested in and dependent on the OS."
Installing software that already has a GNU/Linux version is either just as easy or just a little more difficult than installing software in Mac OSX or Windows. Before the advent of the App Store, it might even be said that installing software in a distro like Ubuntu is actually easier.
The problem I think is the availabity of those special pieces of software that have no or poor equivalents in Linux. If there's one company, aside from the Usual Suspect, that can be blamed for the failure of the Linux desktop, it's probably Adobe.
Sure, there's the chicken-and-egg dilemma of Linux being a market too insiginficant to develop for, but imagine how different things would have been if Adobe peristed in releasing initially unprofitable versions of its popular graphics applications for Linux. Adobe would have had a chance of growing the market, and indirectly they would have become less dependent on the whims of Apple and Microsoft, since they could always roll out their own Linux fork, ala Corel Linux
Purely anecdotal: whenever I volunteer to install Linux for friends and acquaintances, the question I'm most often asked is if there's a Linux version of Photoshop, InDesign or Dreamweaver. MS Office they can live without, since all the fancy formatting tricks that Office can do can be done better or at least fancier in InDesign. Word processors tend to be strictly that, programs for typing and spell checking text.
Next to gamers, graphic designers are the loudest group of computer users in the Internet. A ringing endorsement from them that a given product could run better or just a wee bit worse under Linux would have done wonders for the Linux desktop market share.
Saying you need FAA approval to prototype an airplane is a bit misleading. Do you need FAA approval to fly a model airplane or a drone? Because that is how you prototype an airplane on the presumably open source budget that the project will start with, unless they can get someone like Mark Shuttleworth to sponsor them.
Maybe I'm wrong about the drone part. Still I find it hard to believe that attaching a motor to some flat pieces of wood or fiberglass I'd soon get the Feds knocking on my door and not just the local cops for wrecking the neighbor's lawn.
Start small and scale up. Think first about about how you can send your doll collection up to the clouds before you start worrying about FAA approval to strap your significant other onto the cockpit of your full-size aircraft.
Slashdot Mirror
There's only one obvious reason for a spacecraft company to be secretive. They're involved in a top secret military project.
Then again, maybe Blue Origin is trying to be the Apple Inc of the space transport biz. Except that Blue Origin's chief financial backer is a web billionaire named Jeff Bezos. So maybe Blue Origin is trying to be secretive like Amazon?
Maybe BO has figured out a way to bring down space fares to a new low, a Kindle Fire among the iPads of the launch industry? That, or JB is trying to cover up the lack of progress.
Er, that's a different Lima project. The Lima Mali GPU reverse-engineering project page is at: http://limadriver.org/ The obligatory git code page is at: https://gitorious.org/lima
Most people won't consider quantum physics magic simply because it involves things that aren't experienced in everyday life. If I see a chair float in the air, I'd say it's magic because a chair suddenly floating up is contrary to my everyday experience of chairs. Familiar things behaving in unfamiliar ways, that's magic. A person being cut up and put back together is a magic trick. A medieval person might consider the Amazon Kindle magic because it resembles a book or at least a biblical tablet and yet contains the contents of thousands of books.
I'd consider quantum states magical only in so far as they produce macroscopic effects, a real-life cat that's both alive and dead. Quantum entanglement would be magical if it would allow us to develop instantaneous communication devices or, even more magical, Star Trek-style teleportation.
"I've been following this project for a while now, and it is going in a direction which I believe in. I am getting tired of proprietary ARM hardware and software."
According to the link, the Allwinner A10 has a MALI GPU, which presently requires a proprietary driver although there's an nVidia Nouveau-like project to produce a reverse-engineered driver, aptly named Lima.
http://limadriver.org/
I agree it's an important project, if only because it would allow hardware computer geeks to continue building their own kit after today's tower and mini-tower PCs go extinct. I'm still waiting for the day I can assemble the equivalent of a full-powered desktop PC in a form factor smaller than a consumer router. Which has me wondering while Intel and AMD aren't doing their own Manhattan project to produce their own full-featured SoCs rather than the more powerful but less integrated APUs.
Mars would be the perfect place to test such technologies. My point being that today's driverless cars are dependent on external assistance, whereas the Mars rovers can operate autonomously but at snail's pace. So yes, you can safely let loose a driverless car on the countryside but at a speed that would be impractical for anybody who has to work for a living.
Probably won't work for Nokia unless they can quickly empty their inventory to convince Microsoft that Nokia should retain their favored early adopter status. If Nokia can't sell the WinPhone units quickly, Microsoft would be forced to cut deals with other big manufacturers, Samsung, HTC, maybe even Sony. Microsoft may yet emerge as a winner in the smartphone wars. The future looks bleaker for Nokia. Failure for Microsoft would mean failure for Nokia as well, but success for Microsoft would not necessarily translate into success for Nokia. Microsoft at this point can still afford to fail. For Nokia it's not an option.
If there's any truth to the news, then surely one of those "disgruntled" students could be given an incentive to spill the beans on the specs or the look of the new iPhone? Even an actual photo would be possible. I'm sure there are tech "news" orgs out there willing to shell a few grand for even a low-res photo taken via a spy cam that can easily be tucked into the workers' underwear or body cavity. This can be foiled of course if Foxconn security does a strip/cavity search of each worker entering the factory or use some sort of Orwellian system that monitors suspcious/nervous behavior or even a walk-thru lie-detector test.
"Next you'll be saying that that HTC (?) ad with the fashion photographer jumping out of the plane and doing a photo shoot in free-fall wasn't entirely shot on a smartphone?"
Next you'll tell me Google faked its Google Glass demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh-liQDE3cM
If you're playing catch-up, you overwhelm the competition not by designing some elusive quality called beauty but by adding more features to your product or selling it for less. Alternatively you can include just one killer feature that nobody else has or is at least vastly superior to everything everybody else has. This is what Apple did with the original iPhone, a touch screen experience that was as good as or just slightly worse than what what you get from using a keypad.
People who want a beautiful phone will already buy an iPhone. Imagine you're a sales clerk trying to sell a non-iPhone because you've been given the "incentive" to do so. What would be easier to "prove" to the customer? That the OtherPhone is more beautiful, or that the OtherPhone is has more features than the iPhone?
Since you're no marketing expert, you can simply dazzle the customer by listing and demo-ing the features, no matter how useless they might appear at first. Sir, this has a 16MB camera, a TV function, a micro SD card, a flashlight, etc. By running through such a point-by-point comparison, you can make the iPhone look bad.
As for beauty, ever wonder why touch screen cellphones look remarkably similar to one another? It's because design-wise the most prominent feature of a touch screen phone is the screen. Everything else is the picture frame. So the perfect touch screen phone would be one that would work well without any buttons or other proturberances.
So, no, Nokia can't succeed against Apple by designing a more beautiful phone. That is already Apple's game.
Driverless cars would only work if all cars within an area are driverless and the road network is isolated from pedestrians of whatever shape and size. Such a setup would effectively turn a car into a track-less personal train system. I think I saw an example of this in Minority Report or some other dark-toned sci-fi movie.
Drivers make sense where the probability of unforseen obstructions are great. You don't want your driverless car crashing into some bumpkin or a cow too stupid to know the difference between the road and the sidewalk.
That's too extreme. Just leave all your microwave-transmitting information devices inside the microwave oven, which wil probably be the "deadest" spot inside your house. If your microwave is safe enough to bake a potato, it won't leak enough microwaves for you or the FBI to use YOUR cellphone.
Incidentally, texting or calling a cellphone placed inside a hopefully inactive microwave oven is a crude way to test for possible leaks in the oven's protective coating.
"With the launch of the Raspberry Pi, computers are becoming affordable again for the younger generations."
"Affordable again" implies there was some golden age when computers were significantly cheaper than today, a premise easily disproven by a simple look at the economics of mass production. More programmable devices are being made today than at any time in the past. Almost every device more complex than a light bulb has some sort of microchip built into it.
Low-end Android phones are now cheaper but still more powerful than any PC or programmable calculator from the 70's and 80's, when the "personal" computer revolution took off and took root. Now, even a locked smart phone can be a programming device for the end user, so long as you can download an app that can provide a virtual machine for a simple scripting language. Just GOTO Google to find some examples of that RETRO interpreter for the smartphone of your choice.
Running a disto's unstable branch is likely the culprit. I remember reading about Vbox being broken by some kernel updates. The distro maintainer's solution was to hold back the kernel update until Vbox was patched to be compatible. This can easily be overlooked in the unstable branch of a rolling release distro.
You can be secure enough if you use a router, an updated operating system and separate profiles or different browsers when browsing all the stuff you shouldn't be browsing. Unless you're a politician, a drug lord, a terrorist cell leader, or somebody else with potentially powerful enemies.
That said, killing Javascript and disabling or better uninstalling all plug-ins for new sites or sites that you rarely visit should fix most Internet security issues.
West and East are directions on a map, where the possibility of falling off the edge is very great.
Too bad it's just a CGI animation. Around the 0:30 mark you see what looks surprisingly like a coconut with two eyes and the beginings of a mouth or nose. More stuff for alien conspiracy theorists to shake their stick at.
This is so we can fight over whether to call some rock a "dwarf" planet or a "giant" asteroid. Or we can start call Vesta a mini dwarf planet and Ceres a super giant asteroid.
There's a car crash. The neighbors scream. By hearing the neighbors scream and listening to their remarks, I conclude that there's been a car crash. This works well so long as the neighbors aren't practically jokers.
Sure Twitter's a much bigger neighborhood and more immune as a whole to pranksters. But what if organized mayhem like Anonymous decide to pull off an out-of-season April Fools Joke and start tweeting #alieninvasion? There goes your Armageddon Detection System.
Vmware is a rare example of software that need to be rebuilt after a kernel upgrade. Neither Gnome nor Mono needs to be rebuilt, unless I'm mistaken or De Icaza is an incompetent software architect. I personally haven't rebuilt anything after a kernel upgrade for several years already. This thanks to Dell's DKMS, which automatically rebuilds out-of-tree modules like the notorious VirtualBox.
Vmware is a special problem because it's a low-level non-opensource program running on a monolithic kernel. Far more problematic for the GNU/Linux userland is a glibc upgrade, which does break a lot of things, especially programs written in C++. However, major architectural changes like the adoption of Kernel Mode Setting have sometimes strange effects on rather desktop programs, including programs as seemingly high-level as Firefox. Something which on closer inspection shouldn't be surprising given the push to turn the browser into the client side of the Cloud OS.
Change that "on something that might lead to a legal suit or a C&D" to "on something that wouldn't lead to a legal suit or a C&D"
They're the ones making the movie, so I don't really have the right to say it's a waste of time and effort. But the first thought that comes to my mind when I see a competently done, if not altogether well-made, "fan" movie or other fan-made media project is why haven't they expended the same amount of time, effort and yes money on something that might lead to a legal suit or a C&D. Sure anybody can get hit by a copyright troll, but fan media are clearly in the darker side of the fair use grey zone.
How much harder would it be to make Iron Sky when you already have the special effects knowhow to make yet another Star Wars/Star Trek spoof?
Where there are no burning issues at hand, human interest stories are a good tactic to keep a candidate in the news or at least in Twitterverse. Expect to learn more trivial, but harmless stuff like these "brewed" by the campaign strategists who work behind the scenes.
Somehow this only convinces me that come November a new occupant will fill that hopefully not empty Chair at the Oval Office.
This seems to be the better option to keeping the corpse of an abandoned program on life support. The best solution would be to redo the whole site using HTML5 or other open web technologies, but a dedicated app is probably the only solution, besides Flash, where some form of light DRM is needed to "protect" online shows from unauthorized uses.
"The ACTUAL usability problem is installing software - it needs to work universally so people can actually do things and therefore be interested in and dependent on the OS."
Installing software that already has a GNU/Linux version is either just as easy or just a little more difficult than installing software in Mac OSX or Windows. Before the advent of the App Store, it might even be said that installing software in a distro like Ubuntu is actually easier.
The problem I think is the availabity of those special pieces of software that have no or poor equivalents in Linux. If there's one company, aside from the Usual Suspect, that can be blamed for the failure of the Linux desktop, it's probably Adobe.
Sure, there's the chicken-and-egg dilemma of Linux being a market too insiginficant to develop for, but imagine how different things would have been if Adobe peristed in releasing initially unprofitable versions of its popular graphics applications for Linux. Adobe would have had a chance of growing the market, and indirectly they would have become less dependent on the whims of Apple and Microsoft, since they could always roll out their own Linux fork, ala Corel Linux
Purely anecdotal: whenever I volunteer to install Linux for friends and acquaintances, the question I'm most often asked is if there's a Linux version of Photoshop, InDesign or Dreamweaver. MS Office they can live without, since all the fancy formatting tricks that Office can do can be done better or at least fancier in InDesign. Word processors tend to be strictly that, programs for typing and spell checking text.
Next to gamers, graphic designers are the loudest group of computer users in the Internet. A ringing endorsement from them that a given product could run better or just a wee bit worse under Linux would have done wonders for the Linux desktop market share.
Saying you need FAA approval to prototype an airplane is a bit misleading. Do you need FAA approval to fly a model airplane or a drone? Because that is how you prototype an airplane on the presumably open source budget that the project will start with, unless they can get someone like Mark Shuttleworth to sponsor them.
Maybe I'm wrong about the drone part. Still I find it hard to believe that attaching a motor to some flat pieces of wood or fiberglass I'd soon get the Feds knocking on my door and not just the local cops for wrecking the neighbor's lawn.
Start small and scale up. Think first about about how you can send your doll collection up to the clouds before you start worrying about FAA approval to strap your significant other onto the cockpit of your full-size aircraft.