Just because I suggested that the prior poster to read licences and use what fits and not to expect to be able to produce commercial software without obligation?
I'll bite: I've spent most of my working life in heavy engineering or peering through microscopes, usually only working with software that applies only to those things. What use would I be to troll? I'm a hobbist with my degree and work experience in a totally different area to software and I've never produced a piece of commercial software in my life. I use linux because I'm used to unix and it was better than xenix (and open source) at the time when I started to use it.
It confused the guy I gave it to - he thought it was just a bit of paper attached to a pile of CD's with a rubber band, and he looked at the CD's a few times before he worked it out.
They're normally more expensive, but that one was a giveaway. Also I wanted to see if it worked and only had to shift 7MB of data.
If I had something that I needed to take to work daily and couldn't have two copies of it I'd probably use them for that.
A sign of true geekness would be a linux distro on a credit card sized CD permanently stored in the wallet. Perhaps Slackzip would fit? You could whip it out at LAN parties to get a game of Freeciv going (be sure to wear sandals with socks for extra effect). Another alternative is XFree86 for win* on a credit card sized CD.
I believe that's because it wasn't developed in the open. Even now there's no public mailing list on which the developers discuss its development.
I remember a friend working for a local University contributing a patch to qt in 1996 - development seemed to be pretty open back then, and I suspect it's a lot more so now.
I was labeled a troll for making this post earlier.
I read your post as saying that you wanted to be able to make money from a "killer app" and use other people's work without releasing the source code or paying any money for the privelage of not releasing the source code - that it was OK for you to make money but not anyone else. It appears that you were just complaining about the price, but as I said before, if you can't afford it you can't buy it - use something else.
Do you think some small commercial software company will want to purchase a $2000 Trolltech license
If they don't want to the don't have to, they could always use Xt, Motif, the free Motif clone, gtk, or something in-house. If troll's target market was shareware on *nix people would still complain about $10 and refuse to pay. I'd be surprised if anyone that reads this has paid anything for *nix shareware.
why should Trolltech get compensated
I'm sure a lot of work and expense has gone into making qt what it is today on all platforms, and if they stop getting compensated all of that stops immediately. Linux, gcc and others all started in a different way.
I still don't understand why you want to be paid, and want to use qt, but don't want the Trolltech people to be paid?
Gnome has grown up from the KDE replacement idea (to a MS windows replacement - no it's a lot more than that), and at least one window manager supports both systems. The CDE didn't take off, no-one wanted to standardise. Why do we need only the one desktop shell? There's more than one shell and more than one window manager on most *nix boxes, people can always drop back to twm if they prefer - or one user may prefer fvwm and have E with a win* style theme for their significant one. As for dependancies etc in commercial products I have two words for you. Static binaries. I think with the rapid pace of change in gtk that is probably essential anyway.
It's stupid of TrollTech to require people to pay money up front to develop a commercial application with Qt. All it does is push the smaller developers (mostly individuals) to another environment
So they lose the business of the people that won't pay them anyway?
Also, if they don't get the money up front how are they going to collect it? How may readers here who use *nix systems have ever paid a cent for the almost ubiquitous shareware image viewing program "XV". Shareware on *nix hasn't worked (and I suspect it only worked on M$ systems because it provided missing major functionality, like a TCP/IP stack - the only non-game shareware I've found useful enough to pay for)
It's simple; if you want to write open software you have a variety of choices. Once you want to make money from the efforts of others you are expected to respect their conditions - otherwise you are not being a good citizen. Say if I took the published results of a university research project on streaming video, added an ecryption key to the file format, gave it a crappy GUI knocked up over a weekend and used that to get rich (without acknowledging the authors) then I would not be a good citizen.
An attitude seems to be emerging that you can use everyone elses work for nothing with full access to the source, but you can sell your own fully derivative work without source in violation of the licence. That is what I meant by "other buggers efforts."
open source != warez
It is a completly different idea where it is expected that something will be given back, even if it just helping newbies with problems on a linux newsgroup.
OK - say troll let you have the full version for evalution (as if the free version is not enough for evalution), when do you buy the licence?
Do you buy it at the start of development of your commercial app? Obviously not from the above comments.
Do you buy it on release? Obviously not because that will stop shareware writers, since they can't afford it at that point.
Do you buy it after you've sold 1000 copies? Two dollars a unit for a development library is a bit steep people will say.
Do you buy it after 1,000,000 copies are sold? Obviouly not, since you can afford a good lawyer, and after all no-one will ever know that you didn't buy a licence - how are trolltech going to find out that you stole their evaluation version?
After all, the above wants a FULL version for evaluation, and any time limit locks would be trivial to get around on a *nix system ("You idiot!" screams the IT manager, "you fixed the date on the qt dev machine, now we have to explain why we've sold these packages for three years without buying a licence!").
What you would get is a Qt library that is free as in beer and dead as in dodo - it would be a good library, but the pace of furthur development would slow to a stop or crawl.
Consider two types of software - OPEN, where you can use it for nothing as long as you keep to the licence, and COMMERCIAL, where if you want it you have to pay cash for it. To stay alive troll embrace both systems (by selling the commercial version), while RedHat et al stay alive by selling convenience and documentation.
Commercial software companies work on the assumption that they are going to get an income from somewhere to pay all of the developers. They also work on the assumption that all of that hardware costs money, and that software that saves time (and wages) is worth money. If you can't justify the cost then you use something else.
Most people live with the assumption that if they can't afford something that is no-essential then they can't have it. It would be nice to have the hope diamond, but I don't expect that anyone will ever let me have it. Shareware writers don't need qt, they can do things in other ways. I've always thought the qt licences were very simple - if you want to make money give troll some, if you don't here's all the source to the free version.
XEmacs supported things like multiple windows on X , hence the name XEmacs (previouly Lucid Emacs). Gnu Emacs can do that now as well. Here's a great little quote from RMS in 1993:
Lucid Emacs is set up to use and require an X toolkit; our version does not use one. I think it is too expensive to require a toolkit. Especially since we have already got most of the features we want, without a toolkit.
To sum up, Lucid wanted to use gnu emacs in their product suite, so they gave the emacs developer some hardware and paid him to update emacs. The pace of development sped up enormously, and RMS didn't have the time to check all of the code line by line, and appointed a new developer to keep control, and to not implement features that were not supported by the gnu tools and hurd.
So why is this relevant? RMS did asked Lucid to do a rewrite of the same features for him, but under his complete micromanaged control - his emails at the time (link above) tell the story. The question remains as to whether his attitude has matured and whether he will treat the gnome project as its own entity and not just as a tool for his other projects. His recent words about gcc, about everthing else taking second place to hurd support is probably more relevant.
This is all just the opinion of an outsider that has been flamed a few too many times for not putting gnu in front of linux - gnome confuses me when things break and it shows up weird dependancies (if thai language support is broken in pango you can forget about compiling the gimp) so it's up to the real gnome people to do what they do and increase the functionality of the Gimp Tool Kit and port it to more platforms.
I can't create a KDE application and sell it without buying a QT license for over $2000
So you can't get rich on the efforts of others without giving them something back? Tough.
Your killer app is just going to have to be open source isn't it?
Somehow I think all of the people that want to get rich on open source software without giving anything back (Trolltech has given a lot back) are missing the point entirely.
a new naming scheme...GNU/Gnome [running on GNU/Linux]
Shouldn't that be on LiGNux? After all, we should respect RMS's first choice.
Why is there a board anyway? Isn't the whole point to have an open system with a developer in charge, and not a part-timer (or commitee) who occasionally chirps in with orders for the developer. Think back to the darkest days of Emacs development, when RMS replaced the Emacs developer with someone that took many months before any development happened.
RMS has plenty to do without sitting on a gnome board. He may actually be good, as long as he doesn't reject features purely on the basis of their lack of relevance to hurd (eg. his rejection of X windows support in Emacs due to the fact hurd would not be capable of using X for some time).
Now that gnome has some real goals and has long discarded the "replacement of the evil KDE desktop" goal, it is probably a good time to let the developers continue with developement and not have things imposed on them by a bunch of uninvolved people that consider the project for a few hours each year.
The Russian engineers in charge of Chernobyl essentially shut down all of the safeguards...in order to test the plant's backup generators
Things that interfere with test get shut down during testing. The thing they were testing was effectively part of the safety system. They were testing the equipment that would get them out of a nasty situation and ended up with a far worse sitution. They obviously did not do it very well.
You also fail to mention that Chernobyl will not happen unless incredible stupidity is present.
History is full of situations of incredible stupidity - which is often just called expediency until someone gets hurt. What is there in place to stop someone that is more clueless than Dan Quale but with the same sort of connections ending up in charge of a US nuclear project? All of the expert advice in the world is no challange to expediency and arrogance. The challenger explosion showed that the US is not immune to such Chenobyl scale stupidity (as in technical studipity, not the cost in lives), and it took a dying Nobel Laureate to tell the truth, because all of the others that new would have lost their jobs and had their arguments ignored.
If there is no arrogance in the Atomic Energy Commision and a free exchange of information internally then you have nothing to worry about.
People are people - the people of one nation are not intrinsicly less stupid than anywhere else, the "master race" idea went out with the Nazis and Victorian gentlemen that measured skulls as a hobby. A steam explosion like the one at Chenobyl can happen in any large reactor from a wide variety of causes. The leak at Three Mile Island happened due to criminal negligence that was made possible by mismanagement, and that should have been even less likely than stupidity.
I hate to be the voice of reason, but regular water, regardless of how many neutrons it is exposed to cannot in turn irradiate other materials with neutrons.
Good point - it's not the water, I didn't think about that before I posted. My point (which I didn't argue very clearly) is that the equipment that is exposed to the radioactive material (in some cases the entire cycle that is heated by the fuel) becomes radioactive enough to become a waste problem when the plant is decommisioned. This had added a few hundred tonnes of steel per reactor to the waste when it comes time for decommisioning.
Neutron sources are involved, but I can't remember what. Time for more reading.
While its true that the 1.4 MeV betas emitted from the (negligibly small) amount of tritiated primary cooling water could damage the pipes
True, there's a lot of good information about how radiation damages steel - ultimately you're left with a lot of very small holes in the material that can join up and become cracks (a lot like just having the steel very hot all of the time really - like in any kind of boiler).
First, engineers do not regard nuclear power as a dirty source of energy that must be contained, lest it kill everyone.
Perhaps I should remove the word "dirty" from that line to make it more accurate. Containment is, of course, vital in the context of nuclear fuel.
Those engineers regard nuclear power as an extremely safe, potentially cheap form of power
The ex-patriate Russian turbine engineer I've talked to a couple of times had very different views on the subject. In the ex-USSR there was occasionally dodgy state-run engineering, in the US you sometimes have an unsupervised lowest bidder during a recession - either way the lowest common denominator is not good in a very dangerous system. The Indonesian nuclear power station engineer that I talked to had some stories about some odd attitudes to radiation safety (doing a lot of radiography with neutron sources and things like that).
The total number of American deaths from nuclear power is incredibly small
Interesting that you qualified that statement by nationality, but yes, the total number of deaths is lower than that in the very large coal, oil and natural gas industries. Chenobyl, however, did affect a large number of people.
Second, nuclear power plants can be built very cheaply.
In comparison to what other forms of power? The exotic materials required push up the constuction cost, which is offset by the lower fuel costs, but the extremely high cost of decommissioning a plant adds in a major cost as well to produce something that is not very cost effective in terms of producing power. The decommisioning cost will most likely go down and perhaps someone will be funded again to solve the waste storage problem, but currently those problems push nuclear power generation into the catagory of a good idea that doesn't quite work. Nuclear power stations are only built by nations that want to be self-sufficent and don't have other resources, or nations that want to build atomic weapons. Britain cancelled the construction of a nuclear power plant a few years ago on economic grounds, you'll find something article about it in a 1996 "New Scientist" magazine (I wish they had put stuff on the web back then).
Nuclear power plants can be cheap
Example please. The only cost breakdown I've seen was for the unbuilt British plant listed in a "New Scientist" article - and that one was very expensive in comparison to a coal fired plant. They didn't really need it since they left the cold war early.
Third, the water used in the steam cycle is extremely clean.
True, it has to be or it destroys your pipework. I'm talking about the pipework that is exposed to the water that is heated by the rods (the radioactive steam cycle, for plants that are built that way) - eventually neutron sources (like that water that is converted to heavy water by radiation) irradiate the pipework, making it radioactive and a furthur waste problem. Similar things happen in plants with other liquids in the loop that is exposed to the fuel. Obviously the steam that goes through the turbines has never touched the fuel, and the cooling water that runs through the cooling towers doesn't touch the turbine.
After testing the water, the chemists would often wet their whistles with the excess
Probably safe, but very bad practice. In a lot of cases it is a good idea to add some things (hydrazine? can't remember) to reduce the corrosion rate of the pipework, and that may make the water toxic. The water may be "distilled" by definition (since it has condensed out of steam, but it is rarely pure, and you don't really want it to be.
The steam (water vapor, technically) put off by cooling towers is likewise incredibly pure
Yes, it's far removed from radioactive material, except for incidents like Sellafield where an accident happened.
Perhaps you meant the coolant itself?
Yes - that's the material that has become highly radioactive in the past (also creating other radioactive materials) and created problems with decommisioning. From what you said it looks like some advances have been made in that area.
The majority of your fears (and the public's fears) about nuclear power are unfounded.
There's a lot of hysteria, but I strongly dispute the discription of nuclear power as "clean".
An accident in a coal fired power station or oil refinery can kill a few people, but an accident in a nuclear power plant makes the entire continent worry - just ask a few europeans how "clean" they think nuclear power is.
Why do I feel justified in my opinion? I've read about the subject (a long time ago now) and talked to a couple of engineers from nuclear power stations - one that I was working with and another that I was teaching (about ceramics - so not much to with the subject). I'm not in opposition to nuclear reactors, since we need a source of radioactive materials for a variety of reasons (medical etc), and I've used an Iridium isotope to examine weld joints at an oil refinery, and thick welded test plates. I've talked to one of the people that worked on the "synrock" project for containing nuclear waste (it probably works, but we'll never know). I've also worked in coal fired power stations, alongside people that work in the research facility attached to my nations small reactor. What I do think is that using very large quantities of radioactive material is a dangerous and expensive exercise. Ask the Swedes and Fins how much they are spending to prop up the reactors in the old USSR - it's bound to be on public record somewhere. I've got no idea how much in US Federal government funds goes into propping up the US nuclear power industry - have you ever wondered why they pay so much for weapons grade materials if nothing else? It looks like a subsity to me to keep a weapons production system and some jobs.
He's 'fission' and you bit, but then I bit off of your line
Yes, it is a bad pun, but I don't consider any of this thread to be a troll - just offtopic.
Fission is not an alternative energy, and I am not convinced that a lump of plutonium is any more "clean" than coal or oil or the HF acid used in oil refining. If the HF gets loose people die. If the plutonium gets loose a lot of poeple die, and keep dying unless they stay away or until it's cleaned up. There's more to environmental issues in power generation than carbon dioxide, NOx and SOx.
I just don't see much of a situation where using hydrogen as a quasi-battery is better than just using a battery
A battery is not particularly efficent. Getting 20% of the power that you put in back out of a battery to drive a wheel is a major acheivement. With combustion or a fuel cell you get greater efficency. Storing the hydrogen is still a bit of a problem.
I personally like the idea of a big solar powered ammonia plant for peak loads. You break the ammonia up during the heat of the day (and use spare solar heat to generate power) and recombine the hydrogen and nitrogen during the night (and peak demand) to produce more heat to generate power. The recombining step could be skipped if you have a lot of ammonia and want to produce hydrogen for fuel cells, but I suspect that the energy cost to produce the ammonia in the first place would be higher than by getting hydrogen from another source.
I don't know why people are so afraid of good clean nuclear power.
Chenobyl, Three Mile Island, Sellafield and that power station in France where all of those people died (from liquid sodium) during the decommisioning.
Three Mile Island particularly showed that the people who were in charge of the plant should probably not be trusted with anything as dangerous as a motor vehicle - the contractors x-rayed the same weld joint dozens of times (and changed the id numbers) instead of inspecting the whole plant because they knew that no-one would check up on them.
Fission is clean power to public relations people and a government that wants a good source of radioactive material for weapons, but to engineers it is very dirty power that needs to be very carefully contained in case it gets out and kills everything near the powerplant.
The financial cost of construction and decomissioning nuclear power plants is enormous - that price may come down after a few more have been decommisioned, but for now it is an expensive form of power over the life cycle of the plant. All of those rare earths and hi-tech materials are not cheap - and everything used in the steam cycle is going to be radioactive enough to cause storage problems for more than a lifetime. The environmental costs have been enormous in the Ukrane, and may be high in other places in the future.
In Australia we were going to have something like this at the olympics with an extra little twist. It was going to be illegal to bring in drinking water, but perfectly legal to line up for three hours (which happened) for bottled water at 300% mark up in 35 celcius heat. The reason given was for security reasons - but it was overthrown because it was just someone using security as an excuse to make a buck.
If someone wants to bring anthrax to comdex, why will they need to bring it in a bag? If someone wants to bring in an automatic weapon it should be pretty easy to pick up in a bag search. Explosives don't need a lot of space.
Whatever you do, don't be Irish.. (no wait that should read from anywhere from Morroco to the Phillipines, or even be Greek) and be in the wrong place at the wrong time until sanity prevails.
When I read that the Linux version needed tons of memory
It runs acceptably on 192MB (dual celeron 300, 16MB Vanta card), and not badly enough for me to want to go to the effort of getting memory out of the other machine.
Scenes are slow to load, but the gameplay is fine.
I've had it for months, and it wasn't new then either. I don't think it was a simultaneous release with the Win* version, but it was released not long after.
It's good to see a business administration view of this, but a little odd. All of the substance is in large numbers of pretty pictures (targeting the market I suppose). This is a new way of doing things to the writer's audience, but to a large chunk of the world it is nothing new.
Q: What does an unemployed person with a degree in business say?
A:Hey buddy, can you paradigm?
I'd say Jules Verne and Rodger Zelazny for the 20th century and Greg Egan for the 21st.
Asimov's novels went downhill after "Third Stone From The Sun", but a lot of his short stories were good. A great deal of his later stuff appeared to suffer from the "you can't edit this, he's a genius!" attitude while his earlier stuff seemed to suffer from the "we can't edit this, we have a dealine" attitude. He was very good at describing two cultures; inner city new york and a little russian village. Extrapolating those cultures out to a galactic empire didn't really do much for me, even at age 15. He may be remembered the same way Thackeray is remembered today, an incredibly prolific writer that isn't read much anymore.
The late George Turner made a point some years ago, that there was no SF in his home country that could be considered literature by the standard of it lasting the test of time. I think the majority of current SF will be read by fans of the obscure as light entertainment in fifty years time, like reading the Leslie Charteris "Saint" short stories now - or they will change medium and distort wildly, like the "Saint" TV program (resembles the stories) and movie (sort of resembles the TV series slightly).
The US military funds lots of projects here in Australian academia
Please give me the benefit of the doubt and at least read my post above before replying to it. If this was some kind of missile project it would have received better funding and be done in a less open way. The many people who have worked on this project over the last decade and more would be very upset if the only purpose of their research was to kill people. Most of the ones I met would not be able to get a US security clearance of any kind, being fourth year engineering students (or postgraduates from many countries), and a vast number of papers have been published by the many people who have worked on the project. For years anyone could wander in off the street and look at the T-2 shock tunnel and the scramjet model (if it was in place at the time). The new tunnel is in the basement of a different building and doesn't pass over a public walkway like the T-2 does. The T-2 shock tunnel, however, does have some similarities to a design for a multi-stage gas gun that Iraq was going to build as artillery piece, but that is a different story.
Trust me the booster rocket they're using on this thing is far, far, beyond any local capacity.
Therefore it's some kind of conspiracy? Perhaps some of the project funding was used to buy a rocket.
After reading a bit more about the reasons for sending the rocket to a high altitude, it appears that the engine as it is wouldn't work in some kind of low altitude vehicle, but would need to go ballistic - which leads me back to my original assertion; this is useful where you want to save fuel and increase the amount of payload that gets into orbit then this is the thing to do it, but if you want to drop bombs on people sub-orbital rockets will do the job very quickly.
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Just because I suggested that the prior poster to read licences and use what fits and not to expect to be able to produce commercial software without obligation?
I'll bite: I've spent most of my working life in heavy engineering or peering through microscopes, usually only working with software that applies only to those things. What use would I be to troll? I'm a hobbist with my degree and work experience in a totally different area to software and I've never produced a piece of commercial software in my life. I use linux because I'm used to unix and it was better than xenix (and open source) at the time when I started to use it.
It confused the guy I gave it to - he thought it was just a bit of paper attached to a pile of CD's with a rubber band, and he looked at the CD's a few times before he worked it out.
They're normally more expensive, but that one was a giveaway. Also I wanted to see if it worked and only had to shift 7MB of data.
If I had something that I needed to take to work daily and couldn't have two copies of it I'd probably use them for that.
A sign of true geekness would be a linux distro on a credit card sized CD permanently stored in the wallet. Perhaps Slackzip would fit? You could whip it out at LAN parties to get a game of Freeciv going (be sure to wear sandals with socks for extra effect). Another alternative is XFree86 for win* on a credit card sized CD.
I still don't understand why you want to be paid, and want to use qt, but don't want the Trolltech people to be paid?
Gnome has grown up from the KDE replacement idea (to a MS windows replacement - no it's a lot more than that), and at least one window manager supports both systems. The CDE didn't take off, no-one wanted to standardise. Why do we need only the one desktop shell? There's more than one shell and more than one window manager on most *nix boxes, people can always drop back to twm if they prefer - or one user may prefer fvwm and have E with a win* style theme for their significant one. As for dependancies etc in commercial products I have two words for you. Static binaries. I think with the rapid pace of change in gtk that is probably essential anyway.
Yes.
I don't have any links to RTFM (perhaps try the KDE home page), but the enlightenment window manager source should give you some ideas.
Also, if they don't get the money up front how are they going to collect it? How may readers here who use *nix systems have ever paid a cent for the almost ubiquitous shareware image viewing program "XV". Shareware on *nix hasn't worked (and I suspect it only worked on M$ systems because it provided missing major functionality, like a TCP/IP stack - the only non-game shareware I've found useful enough to pay for) It's simple; if you want to write open software you have a variety of choices. Once you want to make money from the efforts of others you are expected to respect their conditions - otherwise you are not being a good citizen. Say if I took the published results of a university research project on streaming video, added an ecryption key to the file format, gave it a crappy GUI knocked up over a weekend and used that to get rich (without acknowledging the authors) then I would not be a good citizen.
An attitude seems to be emerging that you can use everyone elses work for nothing with full access to the source, but you can sell your own fully derivative work without source in violation of the licence. That is what I meant by "other buggers efforts."
open source != warez
It is a completly different idea where it is expected that something will be given back, even if it just helping newbies with problems on a linux newsgroup.
Do you buy it on release? Obviously not because that will stop shareware writers, since they can't afford it at that point.
Do you buy it after you've sold 1000 copies? Two dollars a unit for a development library is a bit steep people will say.
Do you buy it after 1,000,000 copies are sold? Obviouly not, since you can afford a good lawyer, and after all no-one will ever know that you didn't buy a licence - how are trolltech going to find out that you stole their evaluation version?
After all, the above wants a FULL version for evaluation, and any time limit locks would be trivial to get around on a *nix system ("You idiot!" screams the IT manager, "you fixed the date on the qt dev machine, now we have to explain why we've sold these packages for three years without buying a licence!").
What you would get is a Qt library that is free as in beer and dead as in dodo - it would be a good library, but the pace of furthur development would slow to a stop or crawl.
Consider two types of software - OPEN, where you can use it for nothing as long as you keep to the licence, and COMMERCIAL, where if you want it you have to pay cash for it. To stay alive troll embrace both systems (by selling the commercial version), while RedHat et al stay alive by selling convenience and documentation.
Commercial software companies work on the assumption that they are going to get an income from somewhere to pay all of the developers. They also work on the assumption that all of that hardware costs money, and that software that saves time (and wages) is worth money. If you can't justify the cost then you use something else.
Most people live with the assumption that if they can't afford something that is no-essential then they can't have it. It would be nice to have the hope diamond, but I don't expect that anyone will ever let me have it. Shareware writers don't need qt, they can do things in other ways. I've always thought the qt licences were very simple - if you want to make money give troll some, if you don't here's all the source to the free version.
XEmacs supported things like multiple windows on X , hence the name XEmacs (previouly Lucid Emacs). Gnu Emacs can do that now as well. Here's a great little quote from RMS in 1993:
To sum up, Lucid wanted to use gnu emacs in their product suite, so they gave the emacs developer some hardware and paid him to update emacs. The pace of development sped up enormously, and RMS didn't have the time to check all of the code line by line, and appointed a new developer to keep control, and to not implement features that were not supported by the gnu tools and hurd.So why is this relevant? RMS did asked Lucid to do a rewrite of the same features for him, but under his complete micromanaged control - his emails at the time (link above) tell the story. The question remains as to whether his attitude has matured and whether he will treat the gnome project as its own entity and not just as a tool for his other projects. His recent words about gcc, about everthing else taking second place to hurd support is probably more relevant.
This is all just the opinion of an outsider that has been flamed a few too many times for not putting gnu in front of linux - gnome confuses me when things break and it shows up weird dependancies (if thai language support is broken in pango you can forget about compiling the gimp) so it's up to the real gnome people to do what they do and increase the functionality of the Gimp Tool Kit and port it to more platforms.
Your killer app is just going to have to be open source isn't it?
Somehow I think all of the people that want to get rich on open source software without giving anything back (Trolltech has given a lot back) are missing the point entirely.
Why is there a board anyway? Isn't the whole point to have an open system with a developer in charge, and not a part-timer (or commitee) who occasionally chirps in with orders for the developer. Think back to the darkest days of Emacs development, when RMS replaced the Emacs developer with someone that took many months before any development happened.
RMS has plenty to do without sitting on a gnome board. He may actually be good, as long as he doesn't reject features purely on the basis of their lack of relevance to hurd (eg. his rejection of X windows support in Emacs due to the fact hurd would not be capable of using X for some time).
Now that gnome has some real goals and has long discarded the "replacement of the evil KDE desktop" goal, it is probably a good time to let the developers continue with developement and not have things imposed on them by a bunch of uninvolved people that consider the project for a few hours each year.
If there is no arrogance in the Atomic Energy Commision and a free exchange of information internally then you have nothing to worry about.
People are people - the people of one nation are not intrinsicly less stupid than anywhere else, the "master race" idea went out with the Nazis and Victorian gentlemen that measured skulls as a hobby. A steam explosion like the one at Chenobyl can happen in any large reactor from a wide variety of causes. The leak at Three Mile Island happened due to criminal negligence that was made possible by mismanagement, and that should have been even less likely than stupidity.
Neutron sources are involved, but I can't remember what. Time for more reading.
True, there's a lot of good information about how radiation damages steel - ultimately you're left with a lot of very small holes in the material that can join up and become cracks (a lot like just having the steel very hot all of the time really - like in any kind of boiler).An accident in a coal fired power station or oil refinery can kill a few people, but an accident in a nuclear power plant makes the entire continent worry - just ask a few europeans how "clean" they think nuclear power is.
Why do I feel justified in my opinion? I've read about the subject (a long time ago now) and talked to a couple of engineers from nuclear power stations - one that I was working with and another that I was teaching (about ceramics - so not much to with the subject). I'm not in opposition to nuclear reactors, since we need a source of radioactive materials for a variety of reasons (medical etc), and I've used an Iridium isotope to examine weld joints at an oil refinery, and thick welded test plates. I've talked to one of the people that worked on the "synrock" project for containing nuclear waste (it probably works, but we'll never know). I've also worked in coal fired power stations, alongside people that work in the research facility attached to my nations small reactor. What I do think is that using very large quantities of radioactive material is a dangerous and expensive exercise. Ask the Swedes and Fins how much they are spending to prop up the reactors in the old USSR - it's bound to be on public record somewhere. I've got no idea how much in US Federal government funds goes into propping up the US nuclear power industry - have you ever wondered why they pay so much for weapons grade materials if nothing else? It looks like a subsity to me to keep a weapons production system and some jobs.
Yes, it is a bad pun, but I don't consider any of this thread to be a troll - just offtopic.Fission is not an alternative energy, and I am not convinced that a lump of plutonium is any more "clean" than coal or oil or the HF acid used in oil refining. If the HF gets loose people die. If the plutonium gets loose a lot of poeple die, and keep dying unless they stay away or until it's cleaned up. There's more to environmental issues in power generation than carbon dioxide, NOx and SOx.
A battery is not particularly efficent. Getting 20% of the power that you put in back out of a battery to drive a wheel is a major acheivement. With combustion or a fuel cell you get greater efficency. Storing the hydrogen is still a bit of a problem.
I personally like the idea of a big solar powered ammonia plant for peak loads. You break the ammonia up during the heat of the day (and use spare solar heat to generate power) and recombine the hydrogen and nitrogen during the night (and peak demand) to produce more heat to generate power. The recombining step could be skipped if you have a lot of ammonia and want to produce hydrogen for fuel cells, but I suspect that the energy cost to produce the ammonia in the first place would be higher than by getting hydrogen from another source.
Yes, you can have a hydrogen/oxygen fuel cell and use it to generate electricity.
Three Mile Island particularly showed that the people who were in charge of the plant should probably not be trusted with anything as dangerous as a motor vehicle - the contractors x-rayed the same weld joint dozens of times (and changed the id numbers) instead of inspecting the whole plant because they knew that no-one would check up on them.
Fission is clean power to public relations people and a government that wants a good source of radioactive material for weapons, but to engineers it is very dirty power that needs to be very carefully contained in case it gets out and kills everything near the powerplant.
The financial cost of construction and decomissioning nuclear power plants is enormous - that price may come down after a few more have been decommisioned, but for now it is an expensive form of power over the life cycle of the plant. All of those rare earths and hi-tech materials are not cheap - and everything used in the steam cycle is going to be radioactive enough to cause storage problems for more than a lifetime. The environmental costs have been enormous in the Ukrane, and may be high in other places in the future.
Ripping apart an old keyboard should do the job.
If someone wants to bring anthrax to comdex, why will they need to bring it in a bag? If someone wants to bring in an automatic weapon it should be pretty easy to pick up in a bag search. Explosives don't need a lot of space.
Whatever you do, don't be Irish .. (no wait that should read from anywhere from Morroco to the Phillipines, or even be Greek) and be in the wrong place at the wrong time until sanity prevails.
Scenes are slow to load, but the gameplay is fine.
I've had it for months, and it wasn't new then either. I don't think it was a simultaneous release with the Win* version, but it was released not long after.
It's good to see a business administration view of this, but a little odd. All of the substance is in large numbers of pretty pictures (targeting the market I suppose). This is a new way of doing things to the writer's audience, but to a large chunk of the world it is nothing new.
Q: What does an unemployed person with a degree in business say?
A:Hey buddy, can you paradigm?
Asimov's novels went downhill after "Third Stone From The Sun", but a lot of his short stories were good. A great deal of his later stuff appeared to suffer from the "you can't edit this, he's a genius!" attitude while his earlier stuff seemed to suffer from the "we can't edit this, we have a dealine" attitude. He was very good at describing two cultures; inner city new york and a little russian village. Extrapolating those cultures out to a galactic empire didn't really do much for me, even at age 15. He may be remembered the same way Thackeray is remembered today, an incredibly prolific writer that isn't read much anymore.
The late George Turner made a point some years ago, that there was no SF in his home country that could be considered literature by the standard of it lasting the test of time. I think the majority of current SF will be read by fans of the obscure as light entertainment in fifty years time, like reading the Leslie Charteris "Saint" short stories now - or they will change medium and distort wildly, like the "Saint" TV program (resembles the stories) and movie (sort of resembles the TV series slightly).
After reading a bit more about the reasons for sending the rocket to a high altitude, it appears that the engine as it is wouldn't work in some kind of low altitude vehicle, but would need to go ballistic - which leads me back to my original assertion; this is useful where you want to save fuel and increase the amount of payload that gets into orbit then this is the thing to do it, but if you want to drop bombs on people sub-orbital rockets will do the job very quickly.