Here is the website for the airframe on display in Speyer. The vehicle was discovered in Bahrain by the director of the museum and transported to Germany a couple of years ago. The (german-language) audio comment of the embedded video mentions that it is the only remaining Buran that actually was flying, if only for tests of the automated landing system.
...to have a thousand chinese goldfarmers following my tweets?
I can see someone paying money to have followers in a certain target demographics, but only buying followers from the internet at large does not seem to make sense...
The N800 (and presumably the N810) also makes for a nice personalized in-flight entertainment device on long flights. Going from Frankfurt to San Francisco, I could watch a feature movie and half a season of Babylon 5 easily. I've got a USB power adapter, so when the N800 runs out of power, I can leech off my laptop's battery.
> Dude, unless some meteor comes along and kills us all, we still have *millions* of years to perfect space travel.
Actually we don't. We have a limited window defined by the expendable resources (fossil and nuclear fuel, ores, etc.) on this planet. We can invest these resources to try to establish new sources off-world. Once the resources are used up, we're stuck on this planet for good.
Might be that we already crossed that point. Might be that it is not really feasible at all. But I believe we're approaching a point where this discussion becomes moot pretty soon.
If you spend a couple of seconds to check the wikipedia entry, you'll find that the Triest was not tethered unlike earlier vessels. The principle used was the same that makes a balloon fly - fill a container with something that is lighter than the surrounding medium to produce lift. The balloon uses hot air or helium, the Trieste used gasoline.
While I find the idea of exploring the abyssal regions of the oceans intriguing, I tend to agree with the GP poster in his opinion that the vessel pictured in TFA would not be capable of going there. The Trieste used a sphere with walls made of 5 inches of steel - somehow the bubble cockpit in the picture in the article does not seem like it has an equivalent structural strength.
Oh, btw - did anyone notice that Trieste's inventor was name Piccard? And that his grandson was part of the team that traveled around the world non-stop in a balloon? To boldly go where no man has gone before, indeed:-)
I'm german, and I agree with the statement that Germany was lucky to lose the war, but not with the reasoning you provide.
Germany losing the war allowed me to grow up and live in a free and democratic country that is worth living in. For that I am most grateful, and my thanks go to the people who made this possible.
In my opinion, it is not the number of choices that matters, but how they are presented to the user. Look at the example in TFA. There are different goals that I can have when I leave a computer. Don't tell me that suspend, hibernate and power off are basically the same. They differ in how much power the computer still consumes and how fast it will be available again if I want to work with it again. You don't pay my electricity bills, and the time wasted for a boot is still mine.
The problem is how the choices are presented. Joel already pointed out one case in which the same functionality could be achieved by a more intelligent analysis of the use case and a refactoring of how the choices are presented, and there I agree with him. But I notice that he does not mention which of the other options should be done away with. I guess he does not want to make that choice. Neither should the software manufacturer. Give me the choices, but present them in a more manageable way. There are several methods that I can think of right now, and I'm certainly no UI expert:
Firefox presents an - admittedly large - selection of choices right in the menu, but make all options available via about:config
You can always hide part of the options behind an "Advanced options" button
You can make configurable which options are part of the standard display and which are hidden/advanced
XP has this thing with the little-used programs disappearing from the menu. I always have a bad feeling when the computer "tries to think for me" and I think it can confuse people. But it's also a way to handle choice.
I'm sure someone with a better background in UI design can come up with lots of other ways to address the problem. But please, pretty please don't remove the choices. I'd bet even money that the choices that would be removed would be the ones I'd like to use.
> spend an unexpected 2 hours out of your 8 hour workday
If you'd actually read the FA (too much to ask, I know), you'd have realized that the 2 hours are the amount of time the manager requesting the emergency work estimated. You really believe that this is correct after everything is factored in?
Also: your developers are working only 8 hours a day? Could you please give me the coordinates to your parallel universe?
Sorry, but to me that suggestion seems to be pretty dangerous. If the company does not take the offer and the vulnerability is exploited at any time later on, the OP might be in hot water. They always could claim that there was no other way of this being exploited than him releasing or using the information. Of course in an ideal world they also would have to prove this. In the real world, I'm afraid, the ensuing hilarity will serve to make a couple of lawyers richer and him much poorer.
... is the ad-free children's channel that is financed by the TV fees here in Germany. I'll grant you that not everyone will benefit from this, but it is a definite plus to be able to let my daughter (she's 5) watch some cartoons or stuff once in a while without her being brainwashed to be a good consumer right away. Although I'm sure that will come later anyhow.
There are certainly drawbacks to the public funding of radio and TV programs, but the ad-supported commercial one are free only if you don't count the higher prices that you have to pay when you buy advertised products. There's no such thing as a free lunch. And the commercial stations are talking about encrypting their signal at least for the sattelite users. Once that's done, you have to pay through the nose. A new receiver for each TV set, a new decryption card for each receiver (for a low monthly fee of only 3,50 IIRC).
> Why is this necessarily bad? Sometimes it's "just a job", but sometimes they "just need an app", one that > just does XYZ with a minimum of necessary polish.
Certainly no software is perfect, and you have to decide where to put your effort and when good enough is good enough. There are minimal requirements, though, that I would not leave unfulfilled if I had the choice. In my book, a terse user interface is certainly ok (especially if I'm likely to remain the only user), an occasional stacktrace in place of a real error message might be ok depending on the intended user, data corruption or program crashes are not.
But I think that was not the original point. The grandparent poster said
> The code I write at home for my own enjoyment is far higher quality than what I write to satisfy > the terms of my employment
I'd like to understand if that sentiment is common. I know for a fact that that's not true for me or my colleagues, but things might be different elsewhere. I'd also like to know if paying for OSS development really would reduce commitment and quality. If I look at some code from Apache or Eclipse that was written by paid employees, this seems not necessarily the case.
In my opinion, the nature of OSS projects gives a motivation to deliver decent work: your code is there for all to see, and your putting your name to it. Having some paid contributors does not change this.
> The code I write at home for my own enjoyment is far higher quality than what I write to satisfy the terms of my employment > contract. End of anecdote.
So why is this? Do you write shoddy code at work because you're put under time pressure and other work conditions that simply don't make it possible to do otherwise? Or is it because your work is "just a job(tm)" for you and you are only putting in the minimal amount of effort needed to cash in your salary?
I think since in an open source project, the quality of the code comitted is visible to the whole world, things would be different. Bad code would lead to questions. If the reason of the bad code is bad management, I'd guess donations would dry up. If the reason is bad attitude, another developer could be found.
> If a content provider (e.g. Sony) implements onerous DRM then don't buy the content or complain to Sony.
That only works if I'm aware that the DRM is present in the product. IIRC Sony was not exactly forthcoming with this information at first. What makes you think that the information policy by companies that want to push DRM will be different in the future?
Yeah, but how many/.ers - or open source / free software developers, for that matter - can read and understand patent applications? I know that I'm not fluent in Legalese, and I don't think that is because English is not my native language.
SJ GAmes say something about this topic here. I have not done any massive conversions from 3e to 4e yet, but converting characters should be pretty straigthforward. The only drawback is that the point costs for 4e are normally significantly higher than for 3e (IQ and DX are now 20 pts/lvl). It would be harder with supers and psionics than with SF or Fantasy characters, I'd guess.
For some areas there are no 4e rules available yet (vehicles and martial arts come to mind), but I heard they are being worked on.
For Transhuman Space they also have an online product in the pipe that should provide more conversion rules.
That said, the core contents of the excellent sourcebooks still will be useful without any changes. I think many people buy those to use them with different systems anyhow.
Except that we're talking Windows Vista here and the site that you linked to states:
> It provides Windows NT4.0/2000/XP with full access to Linux Ext2 volumes
I think I remember reading somewhere that Vista will only load signed drivers. What are the chances that Microsoft will sign an Ext2-driver written by a free project?
> I tend to agree that a really functional computer needs a hard disk.
I would say a really functional computer need non-volatile storage. How much storage is available matters, how it is implemented does not.
My first harddisk had 20 megabytes, this thing beats this hands down with its flash storage. Plus the flash storage is much more robust. And on the computer that my first harddisk was hooked up to I learned to program C and write texts in latex, among other things. I learned Pascal and 6502 and 6800x assembler on other, much less powerfull machines, so I would say there are definitly some usefull things you can do on one of those cheap laptops.
I don't know. Initially only Vista was supposed to have a chance to boot on an iMac due to lack of EFI support in XP. This would have been an incentive for iMac-Owners to get Vista. Now that XP runs on an iMac, those people can use an XP they might already have. And I think it will be a long time before Vista-only software becomes an issue. So this might cost M$ some Vista sales.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is the website for the airframe on display in Speyer. The vehicle was discovered in Bahrain by the director of the museum and transported to Germany a couple of years ago. The (german-language) audio comment of the embedded video mentions that it is the only remaining Buran that actually was flying, if only for tests of the automated landing system.
... a Volvo representing Germany ...
Nitpick:
Volvo is swedish as well. German makers are Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Opel, Porsche, Volkswagen.
...to have a thousand chinese goldfarmers following my tweets?
I can see someone paying money to have followers in a certain target demographics, but only buying followers from the internet at large does not seem to make sense...
The N800 (and presumably the N810) also makes for a nice personalized in-flight entertainment device on long flights. Going from Frankfurt to San Francisco, I could watch a feature movie and half a season of Babylon 5 easily. I've got a USB power adapter, so when the N800 runs out of power, I can leech off my laptop's battery.
> Dude, unless some meteor comes along and kills us all, we still have *millions* of years to perfect space travel.
Actually we don't. We have a limited window defined by the expendable resources (fossil and nuclear fuel, ores, etc.) on this planet. We can invest these resources to try to establish new sources off-world. Once the resources are used up, we're stuck on this planet for good.
Might be that we already crossed that point. Might be that it is not really feasible at all. But I believe we're approaching a point where this discussion becomes moot pretty soon.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/11/plastic-logics-e-reader-vs-amazon-kindle-fight/
I have to say, they have a nice demo :-)
If you spend a couple of seconds to check the wikipedia entry, you'll find that the Triest was not tethered unlike earlier vessels. The principle used was the same that makes a balloon fly - fill a container with something that is lighter than the surrounding medium to produce lift. The balloon uses hot air or helium, the Trieste used gasoline.
While I find the idea of exploring the abyssal regions of the oceans intriguing, I tend to agree with the GP poster in his opinion that the vessel pictured in TFA would not be capable of going there. The Trieste used a sphere with walls made of 5 inches of steel - somehow the bubble cockpit in the picture in the article does not seem like it has an equivalent structural strength.
Oh, btw - did anyone notice that Trieste's inventor was name Piccard? And that his grandson was part of the team that traveled around the world non-stop in a balloon? To boldly go where no man has gone before, indeed :-)
> Unfortunately he was no gangster rapper, only a simple average white billionaire..
/average/.
The impression I got was that Mr. Fosset was anything but
>> Reproduction should not be a universal right.
and governments should be allowed to regulate it because they are so successful in regulating everything else...
Irony tags available on request.
I'm german, and I agree with the statement that Germany was lucky to lose the war, but not with the reasoning you provide.
Germany losing the war allowed me to grow up and live in a free and democratic country that is worth living in. For that I am most grateful, and my thanks go to the people who made this possible.
In my opinion, it is not the number of choices that matters, but how they are presented to the user. Look at the example in TFA. There are different goals that I can have when I leave a computer. Don't tell me that suspend, hibernate and power off are basically the same. They differ in how much power the computer still consumes and how fast it will be available again if I want to work with it again. You don't pay my electricity bills, and the time wasted for a boot is still mine.
The problem is how the choices are presented. Joel already pointed out one case in which the same functionality could be achieved by a more intelligent analysis of the use case and a refactoring of how the choices are presented, and there I agree with him. But I notice that he does not mention which of the other options should be done away with. I guess he does not want to make that choice. Neither should the software manufacturer. Give me the choices, but present them in a more manageable way. There are several methods that I can think of right now, and I'm certainly no UI expert:
I'm sure someone with a better background in UI design can come up with lots of other ways to address the problem. But please, pretty please don't remove the choices. I'd bet even money that the choices that would be removed would be the ones I'd like to use.
> spend an unexpected 2 hours out of your 8 hour workday
If you'd actually read the FA (too much to ask, I know), you'd have realized that the 2 hours are the amount of time the manager requesting the emergency work estimated. You really believe that this is correct after everything is factored in?
Also: your developers are working only 8 hours a day? Could you please give me the coordinates to your parallel universe?
Sorry, but to me that suggestion seems to be pretty dangerous. If the company does not take the offer and the vulnerability is exploited at any time later on, the OP might be in hot water. They always could claim that there was no other way of this being exploited than him releasing or using the information. Of course in an ideal world they also would have to prove this. In the real world, I'm afraid, the ensuing hilarity will serve to make a couple of lawyers richer and him much poorer.
Your approach should be mandatory for any corporate or government laptop containing customer related data.
... is the ad-free children's channel that is financed by the TV fees here in Germany. I'll grant you that not everyone will benefit from this, but it is a definite plus to be able to let my daughter (she's 5) watch some cartoons or stuff once in a while without her being brainwashed to be a good consumer right away. Although I'm sure that will come later anyhow.
There are certainly drawbacks to the public funding of radio and TV programs, but the ad-supported commercial one are free only if you don't count the higher prices that you have to pay when you buy advertised products. There's no such thing as a free lunch. And the commercial stations are talking about encrypting their signal at least for the sattelite users. Once that's done, you have to pay through the nose. A new receiver for each TV set, a new decryption card for each receiver (for a low monthly fee of only 3,50 IIRC).
by not buying the book at all, thank you very much :-)
> Why is this necessarily bad? Sometimes it's "just a job", but sometimes they "just need an app", one that
> just does XYZ with a minimum of necessary polish.
Certainly no software is perfect, and you have to decide where to put your effort and when good enough is good enough. There are minimal requirements, though, that I would not leave unfulfilled if I had the choice. In my book, a terse user interface is certainly ok (especially if I'm likely to remain the only user), an occasional stacktrace in place of a real error message might be ok depending on the intended user, data corruption or program crashes are not.
But I think that was not the original point. The grandparent poster said
> The code I write at home for my own enjoyment is far higher quality than what I write to satisfy
> the terms of my employment
I'd like to understand if that sentiment is common. I know for a fact that that's not true for me or my colleagues, but things might be different elsewhere. I'd also like to know if paying for OSS development really would reduce commitment and quality. If I look at some code from Apache or Eclipse that was written by paid employees, this seems not necessarily the case.
In my opinion, the nature of OSS projects gives a motivation to deliver decent work: your code is there for all to see, and your putting your name to it. Having some paid contributors does not change this.
> The code I write at home for my own enjoyment is far higher quality than what I write to satisfy the terms of my employment
> contract. End of anecdote.
So why is this? Do you write shoddy code at work because you're put under time pressure and other work conditions that simply don't make it possible to do otherwise? Or is it because your work is "just a job(tm)" for you and you are only putting in the minimal amount of effort needed to cash in your salary?
I think since in an open source project, the quality of the code comitted is visible to the whole world, things would be different. Bad code would lead to questions. If the reason of the bad code is bad management, I'd guess donations would dry up. If the reason is bad attitude, another developer could be found.
Defenestration? Is that the process where you replace a Windows installation with Linux?
> If a content provider (e.g. Sony) implements onerous DRM then don't buy the content or complain to Sony.
That only works if I'm aware that the DRM is present in the product. IIRC Sony was not exactly forthcoming with this information at first. What makes you think that the information policy by companies that want to push DRM will be different in the future?
Yeah, but how many /.ers - or open source / free software developers, for that matter - can read and understand patent applications? I know that I'm not fluent in Legalese, and I don't think that is because English is not my native language.
SJ GAmes say something about this topic here. I have not done any massive conversions from 3e to 4e yet, but converting characters should be pretty straigthforward. The only drawback is that the point costs for 4e are normally significantly higher than for 3e (IQ and DX are now 20 pts/lvl). It would be harder with supers and psionics than with SF or Fantasy characters, I'd guess.
For some areas there are no 4e rules available yet (vehicles and martial arts come to mind), but I heard they are being worked on.
For Transhuman Space they also have an online product in the pipe that should provide more conversion rules.
That said, the core contents of the excellent sourcebooks still will be useful without any changes. I think many people buy those to use them with different systems anyhow.
Except that we're talking Windows Vista here and the site that you linked to states:
> It provides Windows NT4.0/2000/XP with full access to Linux Ext2 volumes
I think I remember reading somewhere that Vista will only load signed drivers. What are the chances that Microsoft will sign an Ext2-driver written by a free project?
> I tend to agree that a really functional computer needs a hard disk.
I would say a really functional computer need non-volatile storage. How much storage is available matters, how it is implemented does not.
My first harddisk had 20 megabytes, this thing beats this hands down with its flash storage. Plus the flash storage is much more robust. And on the computer that my first harddisk was hooked up to I learned to program C and write texts in latex, among other things. I learned Pascal and 6502 and 6800x assembler on other, much less powerfull machines, so I would say there are definitly some usefull things you can do on one of those cheap laptops.
I don't know. Initially only Vista was supposed to have a chance to boot on an iMac due to lack of EFI support in XP. This would have been an incentive for iMac-Owners to get Vista. Now that XP runs on an iMac, those people can use an XP they might already have. And I think it will be a long time before Vista-only software becomes an issue. So this might cost M$ some Vista sales.