I tend to agree. The point of an Ornithopter would be to provide both lift and thrust with one element: the flapping wing. But this contraption uses a mini turbine to provide thrust, and it flaps the wing only for... no purpose at all? Or rather it flaps the wing for being classified as a flapping wing contraption.
Even for real a Ornithopter I remain skeptical. Using wings for lift and turbines for thrust is a very solid principle with a minimum of moving parts. To be precise, there is one (!) moving part: the turbine shaft with fan and turbo blades. Compare that to maybe 100 moving parts in a car engine, or even a flapping wing mechanic, you can easily spot the advantage of the classical yet powered aircraft.
I think you are right. There is also no mention if the HDTV can do HD-full (1080i or 1080p). In all honesty, an HDTV without 1080p does *not* qualify as a dream setup.
> Second, let's say that the chief virtue of good writing is clarity.
And clarity comes with structure, usually. Teach to think and organize before writing something down, and it will improve the resulting text by a huge margin in my experience.
Structure (or the lack thereof) is something you can recognize by just scanning the TOC and the minor headings. It is a bit more difficult with shorter texts, but even there you can distinguish one that presents the information in a reasonable order and one that interleaves sentences in complex ways.
> Problem is, you can't just ghost Windows XP onto different hardware
In my view there is no way to effeciently manage Windows on widely varying hardware. The installation is the smallest problem, but then certain applications are incompatible with certain drivers etc.
So you should just sell your existing hardware and replace it with a defined hardware platform. Both Intel and AMD have programs for exactly that. Intel calls it the "stable image program", and the goal is that you can buy the same hardware platform for several years, and still use all the same drivers.
In my experience, this is the only way to deploy Windows on a wider scale.
Now if only a virtualisation engine would support the stable image (such as VMware), you could run the same image on legacy machines in the virtual machine... But I am not sure that would be a good solution for the average user.
> Where are these people when we (in the business community) put up ads for employment?
Obviously, they are trying to apply, but the web application crashes on the second page...
Seriously, have you recently read job ads? You may complain about the quality of applicants, but most ads actually fail to state in clear english what the job is about. Instead they are full of impossible requirements, such as 5 years experience in Web 2.0 design.
As long as you write reasonable ads, and you realise that people usually have both strengths an weaknesses, than you should be able to find someone suitable for the job.
Yes, I know, Lotus Notes can do nearly everything, but can it also do it right? I have tried the Lotus Notes client several times, and it has always been the most horrible piece of software on my machine. Big, slow, ugly, unintuitive and often disfunctional, too.
And I refuse to take them serious unless they are not only "fully behind Linux", but also deliver a client for it.
> I may be able to help you here! According to Gogle:
> Gmail Integration > Gmail now recognizes when messages mention events, and you can add those events to your calendar with just a couple of clicks
Well, I can read, but I can also try it. And it most certainly does not work, or not in the cases that I have tried. Since they look like standard invitations from Outlook and evolution, this is rather surprising. It would have been the first thing I would test with the calender (hey, it was the first thing I did test!).
So I can only conlude that Google Calender has not seen any serious testing. Welcome to the wonderful new world of Beta software that does not work[TM].
I would prefer any calender that integrates properly with my email client. Why is that so difficult? If I receive an invitation (from Outlook Express or Evolution or what not), I want to be able to accept it right there, without saving it first and then importing it into the calender.
Mozilla Calendar cannot do it, Yahoo Mail fails the test, even Gmail does not integration (or I haven't figure out how to switch it on). The only program that really does this is evolution (and of course Outlook). For all the other, it should be back to the drawing board.
> The outstanding key issue is resolution dependence - with Vista, a 12pt font should finally be a 12pt font, not "whatever 12pt is at 72dpi, in pixels, no matter what your real display res is".
You don't need Vista for that. I think Windows had the option to specify fonts in pt (and not pixels) since 95. The applications are the problem: most programmers are not worth their money, and don't know or care about resolution independence.
If course Microsoft has contributed to the problem by making it hard to design resolution independent GUIs in Visual Studio, and by leading with bad examples. Now the million dollar question is why that should change with Vista.
> That said, Microsoft can coast along reaping huge profits on XP for a long, long time.
Actually, I would trust XP SP2 more than I would trust the first release of Vista. It seems like every system comes out rather unstable, and it takes at least one SP to make it really worthwhile.
Having said that, there are still a huge number of inconsistencies in XP. Most of them date back to the NT4 days, but they have worsened over time. So I wonder whether they will be fixed in Vista.
too late. I mean really, the calender in Mozilla sucked since it came out with Netscape Communicator 3.0 or so. There are other programs that fill the niche (Kalendar, evolution), but they are not perfect.
Having a good calendar application in Mozilla would certainly be nice. But at this glacial speed of development, I don't see it going mainstream any time soon.
> What I want to know is why Sun doesn't get together with the Ubuntu team to create a package for the new JDK 1.5.
Because Sun never gets anything together concerning JDK on Linux. Honestly, as nice as the language is, the packaging is just plain horrible. For example, have you noticed how much slower 1.5 is than 1.4, despite Sun's claims to the opposite effect?
My situation is even worse than yours: I have a pure64 system with a 64bit mozilla. Sun does provide a 64bit Java package, but without the browser plugin! So I had to install the ancient 1.4 packages from blackdown.org to get Java applets working.
My advice to Sun: get 1.5 working before working on 1.6.
> How did you handle software licensing, especially for high-priced apps? How do you do software installs/upgrades? What do you do for resource-hungry apps (e.g. CAD, 3D rendering)? What about traditional lab configuration issues like anti-malware software, classroom restrictions on IM/P2P/network gaming, standard configuration options, etc. that would seem impossible to do with computers you don't own?
You are right: the main problem is to sort out the ownership of the laptops. How is responsible for it? If you expect 3000 students to be their own administrators, I can't imagine anything but chaos resulting from this (I guess even 3000 professional administrators would cause that:-)).
So either you break them down in groups and teach them how to administrate the laptop.
Or you take ownership of the laptop and have that done by professionals. This will only work if you also give the students some freedom, e.g. install new software. A dual boot setup (one official partition, and one private partition) might be helpful if you go down this road.
As for licensing, I think you have to buy either campus licenses or network licenses. Individual licenses are probably way to costly.
The simple fact that you post three exclamation marks on slashdot tells me that you can't get into the geek mindset. So how can you judge whether someone is able to do the job?
> Look up a good firm that is local to you.
That is all nice and find, but most good geeks tend to move around quite a bit. So having a local recruiter *and* building a long time relationship is just not feasible.
Although, if I found a good recruiter, I would stay with him or her even if I moved or changed my job or whatever. They *are* rare.
> Even if it didn't fit past articles, this one alone should be grounds for an indefinite suspension of story submission rights (for both submitter and editor).
Absolutely. The idea alone that you could beat the second law of thermodynamics with stronger magnets seems pretty "interesting". But the mentioning of the "over-unity machine" in the first paragraph should have proven bejond doubt that this is not a reliable article.
Well, whatever. In the end you have to do the filtering yourself. I just wander what kind of science article are declared "uninteresting" by the editor. I guess there must be a lot of good reads in that category:-)
Ok, so I do Alt-F2 http://www.msnsearchandwin.com/ [ENTER], and konqueror shows me a blank page. OMG, they put so many meta tags into the source of the page, that they ran out of space for a non-javascript version. I mean, this was considered a pretty blunt mistake around 1998.
But I get the feeling that they don't want any Linux user to use it. It doesn't work with javascript enabled, either, not even in mozilla. Which begs the question why they promote it, if it doesn't work?
> Actually, have you tried installing the latest "light" versions of boh Oracle and DB2? They're dead simple to install and administer.
I have tried Oracle, and I was not happy with the installation. Debian is not supported, so you have to fool the install script to go ahead anyway. I needed a hard disk update because I was running out of disk space (several GB necessary). The installation went fine, but it doesn't tell you what its doing.
So now I have several java application web servers, some of which seem to be essential for "user friendly" maintenance. I have a listener, and a database. And guess what? None of these parts start up automatically after a reboot. Figuring out how to restart it took ages. And I am still having problems with my connection definitions.
MySQL on the other hand couldn't be simpler. mysqld and libmysql.so, that's it. Hostname:port, user+password specifies your database connection. Lots of nifty tools around, in just about any language.
If you believe in KISS, MySQL beats Oracle any day.
> I need to create an ultra-stable, crash-free application in C++.
First order of the day: think about what this means. You want an ultra-stable application, so you conclude it shouldn't crash. Right. But it also shouldn't get stuck. Or return the wrong data. Or screw up something.
Once you have a good idea of what you want to avoid, just limit your use of the language features. Afraid of NULL pointers/dangling pointers? Ok, use smart pointers. But check that your smart pointer library is rock solid.
Afraid of deadlock? No more while loops, for loops only with a maximum loop counter, no more recursion etc. See, it is getting rather tricky.
In the end, C++ can probably do this if you use the necessary restrictions, but it is not going to be efficient. Using an interpreted language might be the easier option.
Too slow? Fast, safe and useful, pick two out of three.
> For example, the Sun GNOME engineers have often complained about how hard it was to get many of their usability improvements into the main trunk.
While I agree with the general problem of getting an improvement included if it doesn't have the right taste for the community, this problem could have easily been avoided (or rather forseen). Firstly, GNOME people not known for being very open to suggestions. I think writing in C takes some kind of a calling, and that determines the people that you get.
Secondly, Sun are not especially experts on usability, either. OpenView was impressive, but how long ago was that? Ever since we have seen clunky graphics and poor performing apps coming of out Sun, so why should anybody listen to them? The technology might be great, but the usability just suffered over the years.
> What they want you to know now is that Itanium is not, repeat not a competitor for Xeon, Opteron, or the x86 architecture. Itanium's market is in high-end "mission critical computing" and as a replacement for RISC chips (meaning Power and Sparc).
I don't know. The Itanium might not want to compete with the Opteron, but the Opteron is certainly competing with the Sparc architecture, and that might mean there is less of a reason to go down the increasingly uncertain Itanium path.
As for PowerPC, I think IBM is happy with niche applications for embedded systems and scientific computing. Itanium might be a contender for the scientific computing, but even there the Opteron is scoring with its low price tag.
> I work a lot of overtime in a high-stress, tight deadline job. Once you get into that kind of downward spiral, how do you find another job?
That's an obvious one: you quit this job before looking for a new one.
> I'd quit if I had a choice, but I really need the money
I wonder what you do with all the overtime pay? Sometimes a good career has to be organised, and this starts with having some money in the bank for situations like this. Proper planing can also reduce the level of stress you are experiencing...
> The loss of the modem isn't such a big deal. I've only ever used mine once (when I was moving) and it wasn't a pleasant experience. If I'd had a Wifi card, I probably would have gone to a local hotspot instead of bothering with the modem.
But still, the modem can be the only way to go online in some places. So the 10% or so users are going to have to buy one. Which wouldn't be so bad in itself, but Apple charges 49 bucks (!) for a simple 56k modem. This is the classical Apple way to hitting a price point: take things out of the package, and sell it separately for a lot of money.
I always wondered whether that works. How may people are going to shell out 49 bucks for the modem? Yes, you can probably get a cheaper one somewhere else, but will it work with your Mac?
> if you own slashdot@gmail.com you can also use slashdot+anything@gmail.com
Sure, sendmail style subaddressing. This can be convenient for mailing lists, but you have to watch the discrepancy between your Sender address and the subscribed address.
On the plus side (however you see it), most Microsoft products seem to be unable to handle the + in email addresses. So you wont get many emails from Microsoft systems. (I wonder whether that also goes for SPAM?)
> Linux may have earned a reputation for being awkward to use on a desktop. I evaluate it at the moment, and at the moment it's still a set of apps with no common standards held together by sticky tape and pipes.
I don't want to reiterate that Linux is not a set of apps, but I would like to point out that my KDE desktop looks like a very sensible set of programs. In fact, it is very well intergrated (exactly how Windows should be, sometimes fails to be).
Now if only there was a KDE version of Emacs...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
> Calling [...] BULLSHIT
... no purpose at all? Or rather it flaps the wing for being classified as a flapping wing contraption.
I tend to agree. The point of an Ornithopter would be to provide both lift and thrust with one element: the flapping wing. But this contraption uses a mini turbine to provide thrust, and it flaps the wing only for
Even for real a Ornithopter I remain skeptical. Using wings for lift and turbines for thrust is a very solid principle with a minimum of moving parts. To be precise, there is one (!) moving part: the turbine shaft with fan and turbo blades. Compare that to maybe 100 moving parts in a car engine, or even a flapping wing mechanic, you can easily spot the advantage of the classical yet powered aircraft.
> -People drool over my red blackberry
> -I'm a free thinker and everyone else is an idiot
> -I got a car paintjob on a blackberry case
You forgot: "I have a midlife crises, and I want to make this perfectly clear."
I think you are right. There is also no mention if the HDTV can do HD-full (1080i or 1080p). In all honesty, an HDTV without 1080p does *not* qualify as a dream setup.
> Second, let's say that the chief virtue of good writing is clarity.
And clarity comes with structure, usually. Teach to think and organize before writing something down, and it will improve the resulting text by a huge margin in my experience.
Structure (or the lack thereof) is something you can recognize by just scanning the TOC and the minor headings. It is a bit more difficult with shorter texts, but even there you can distinguish one that presents the information in a reasonable order and one that interleaves sentences in complex ways.
> Problem is, you can't just ghost Windows XP onto different hardware
In my view there is no way to effeciently manage Windows on widely varying hardware. The installation is the smallest problem, but then certain applications are incompatible with certain drivers etc.
So you should just sell your existing hardware and replace it with a defined hardware platform. Both Intel and AMD have programs for exactly that. Intel calls it the "stable image program", and the goal is that you can buy the same hardware platform for several years, and still use all the same drivers.
In my experience, this is the only way to deploy Windows on a wider scale.
Now if only a virtualisation engine would support the stable image (such as VMware), you could run the same image on legacy machines in the virtual machine... But I am not sure that would be a good solution for the average user.
> Where are these people when we (in the business community) put up ads for employment?
Obviously, they are trying to apply, but the web application crashes on the second page...
Seriously, have you recently read job ads? You may complain about the quality of applicants, but most ads actually fail to state in clear english what the job is about. Instead they are full of impossible requirements, such as 5 years experience in Web 2.0 design.
As long as you write reasonable ads, and you realise that people usually have both strengths an weaknesses, than you should be able to find someone suitable for the job.
> Lotus Notes does it
Yes, I know, Lotus Notes can do nearly everything, but can it also do it right? I have tried the Lotus Notes client several times, and it has always been the most horrible piece of software on my machine. Big, slow, ugly, unintuitive and often disfunctional, too.
And I refuse to take them serious unless they are not only "fully behind Linux", but also deliver a client for it.
> I may be able to help you here! According to Gogle:
> Gmail Integration
> Gmail now recognizes when messages mention events, and you can add those events to your calendar with just a couple of clicks
Well, I can read, but I can also try it. And it most certainly does not work, or not in the cases that I have tried. Since they look like standard invitations from Outlook and evolution, this is rather surprising. It would have been the first thing I would test with the calender (hey, it was the first thing I did test!).
So I can only conlude that Google Calender has not seen any serious testing. Welcome to the wonderful new world of Beta software that does not work[TM].
I would prefer any calender that integrates properly with my email client. Why is that so difficult? If I receive an invitation (from Outlook Express or Evolution or what not), I want to be able to accept it right there, without saving it first and then importing it into the calender.
Mozilla Calendar cannot do it, Yahoo Mail fails the test, even Gmail does not integration (or I haven't figure out how to switch it on). The only program that really does this is evolution (and of course Outlook). For all the other, it should be back to the drawing board.
> The outstanding key issue is resolution dependence - with Vista, a 12pt font should finally be a 12pt font, not "whatever 12pt is at 72dpi, in pixels, no matter what your real display res is".
You don't need Vista for that. I think Windows had the option to specify fonts in pt (and not pixels) since 95. The applications are the problem: most programmers are not worth their money, and don't know or care about resolution independence.
If course Microsoft has contributed to the problem by making it hard to design resolution independent GUIs in Visual Studio, and by leading with bad examples. Now the million dollar question is why that should change with Vista.
> That said, Microsoft can coast along reaping huge profits on XP for a long, long time.
Actually, I would trust XP SP2 more than I would trust the first release of Vista. It seems like every system comes out rather unstable, and it takes at least one SP to make it really worthwhile.
Having said that, there are still a huge number of inconsistencies in XP. Most of them date back to the NT4 days, but they have worsened over time. So I wonder whether they will be fixed in Vista.
too late. I mean really, the calender in Mozilla sucked since it came out with Netscape Communicator 3.0 or so. There are other programs that fill the niche (Kalendar, evolution), but they are not perfect.
Having a good calendar application in Mozilla would certainly be nice. But at this glacial speed of development, I don't see it going mainstream any time soon.
> What I want to know is why Sun doesn't get together with the Ubuntu team to create a package for the new JDK 1.5.
Because Sun never gets anything together concerning JDK on Linux. Honestly, as nice as the language is, the packaging is just plain horrible. For example, have you noticed how much slower 1.5 is than 1.4, despite Sun's claims to the opposite effect?
My situation is even worse than yours: I have a pure64 system with a 64bit mozilla. Sun does provide a 64bit Java package, but without the browser plugin! So I had to install the ancient 1.4 packages from blackdown.org to get Java applets working.
My advice to Sun: get 1.5 working before working on 1.6.
> How did you handle software licensing, especially for high-priced apps? How do you do software installs/upgrades? What do you do for resource-hungry apps (e.g. CAD, 3D rendering)? What about traditional lab configuration issues like anti-malware software, classroom restrictions on IM/P2P/network gaming, standard configuration options, etc. that would seem impossible to do with computers you don't own?
:-)).
You are right: the main problem is to sort out the ownership of the laptops. How is responsible for it? If you expect 3000 students to be their own administrators, I can't imagine anything but chaos resulting from this (I guess even 3000 professional administrators would cause that
So either you break them down in groups and teach them how to administrate the laptop.
Or you take ownership of the laptop and have that done by professionals. This will only work if you also give the students some freedom, e.g. install new software. A dual boot setup (one official partition, and one private partition) might be helpful if you go down this road.
As for licensing, I think you have to buy either campus licenses or network licenses. Individual licenses are probably way to costly.
The simple fact that you post three exclamation marks on slashdot tells me that you can't get into the geek mindset. So how can you judge whether someone is able to do the job?
> Look up a good firm that is local to you.
That is all nice and find, but most good geeks tend to move around quite a bit. So having a local recruiter *and* building a long time relationship is just not feasible.
Although, if I found a good recruiter, I would stay with him or her even if I moved or changed my job or whatever. They *are* rare.
> Even if it didn't fit past articles, this one alone should be grounds for an indefinite suspension of story submission rights (for both submitter and editor).
:-)
Absolutely. The idea alone that you could beat the second law of thermodynamics with stronger magnets seems pretty "interesting". But the mentioning of the "over-unity machine" in the first paragraph should have proven bejond doubt that this is not a reliable article.
Well, whatever. In the end you have to do the filtering yourself. I just wander what kind of science article are declared "uninteresting" by the editor. I guess there must be a lot of good reads in that category
Ok, so I do Alt-F2 http://www.msnsearchandwin.com/ [ENTER], and konqueror shows me a blank page. OMG, they put so many meta tags into the source of the page, that they ran out of space for a non-javascript version. I mean, this was considered a pretty blunt mistake around 1998.
But I get the feeling that they don't want any Linux user to use it. It doesn't work with javascript enabled, either, not even in mozilla. Which begs the question why they promote it, if it doesn't work?
> Actually, have you tried installing the latest "light" versions of boh Oracle and DB2? They're dead simple to install and administer.
I have tried Oracle, and I was not happy with the installation. Debian is not supported, so you have to fool the install script to go ahead anyway. I needed a hard disk update because I was running out of disk space (several GB necessary). The installation went fine, but it doesn't tell you what its doing.
So now I have several java application web servers, some of which seem to be essential for "user friendly" maintenance. I have a listener, and a database. And guess what? None of these parts start up automatically after a reboot. Figuring out how to restart it took ages. And I am still having problems with my connection definitions.
MySQL on the other hand couldn't be simpler. mysqld and libmysql.so, that's it. Hostname:port, user+password specifies your database connection. Lots of nifty tools around, in just about any language.
If you believe in KISS, MySQL beats Oracle any day.
> I need to create an ultra-stable, crash-free application in C++.
First order of the day: think about what this means. You want an ultra-stable application, so you conclude it shouldn't crash. Right. But it also shouldn't get stuck. Or return the wrong data. Or screw up something.
Once you have a good idea of what you want to avoid, just limit your use of the language features. Afraid of NULL pointers/dangling pointers? Ok, use smart pointers. But check that your smart pointer library is rock solid.
Afraid of deadlock? No more while loops, for loops only with a maximum loop counter, no more recursion etc. See, it is getting rather tricky.
In the end, C++ can probably do this if you use the necessary restrictions, but it is not going to be efficient. Using an interpreted language might be the easier option.
Too slow? Fast, safe and useful, pick two out of three.
> For example, the Sun GNOME engineers have often complained about how hard it was to get many of their usability improvements into the main trunk.
While I agree with the general problem of getting an improvement included if it doesn't have the right taste for the community, this problem could have easily been avoided (or rather forseen). Firstly, GNOME people not known for being very open to suggestions. I think writing in C takes some kind of a calling, and that determines the people that you get.
Secondly, Sun are not especially experts on usability, either. OpenView was impressive, but how long ago was that? Ever since we have seen clunky graphics and poor performing apps coming of out Sun, so why should anybody listen to them? The technology might be great, but the usability just suffered over the years.
So: no surprise here.
> What they want you to know now is that Itanium is not, repeat not a competitor for Xeon, Opteron, or the x86 architecture. Itanium's market is in high-end "mission critical computing" and as a replacement for RISC chips (meaning Power and Sparc).
I don't know. The Itanium might not want to compete with the Opteron, but the Opteron is certainly competing with the Sparc architecture, and that might mean there is less of a reason to go down the increasingly uncertain Itanium path.
As for PowerPC, I think IBM is happy with niche applications for embedded systems and scientific computing. Itanium might be a contender for the scientific computing, but even there the Opteron is scoring with its low price tag.
> I work a lot of overtime in a high-stress, tight deadline job. Once you get into that kind of downward spiral, how do you find another job?
That's an obvious one: you quit this job before looking for a new one.
> I'd quit if I had a choice, but I really need the money
I wonder what you do with all the overtime pay? Sometimes a good career has to be organised, and this starts with having some money in the bank for situations like this.
Proper planing can also reduce the level of stress you are experiencing...
> The loss of the modem isn't such a big deal. I've only ever used mine once (when I was moving) and it wasn't a pleasant experience. If I'd had a Wifi card, I probably would have gone to a local hotspot instead of bothering with the modem.
But still, the modem can be the only way to go online in some places. So the 10% or so users are going to have to buy one. Which wouldn't be so bad in itself, but Apple charges 49 bucks (!) for a simple 56k modem. This is the classical Apple way to hitting a price point: take things out of the package, and sell it separately for a lot of money.
I always wondered whether that works. How may people are going to shell out 49 bucks for the modem? Yes, you can probably get a cheaper one somewhere else, but will it work with your Mac?
> if you own slashdot@gmail.com you can also use slashdot+anything@gmail.com
Sure, sendmail style subaddressing. This can be convenient for mailing lists, but you have to watch the discrepancy between your Sender address and the subscribed address.
On the plus side (however you see it), most Microsoft products seem to be unable to handle the + in email addresses. So you wont get many emails from Microsoft systems. (I wonder whether that also goes for SPAM?)
> Linux may have earned a reputation for being awkward to use on a desktop. I evaluate it at the moment, and at the moment it's still a set of apps with no common standards held together by sticky tape and pipes.
:-)
I don't want to reiterate that Linux is not a set of apps, but I would like to point out that my KDE desktop looks like a very sensible set of programs. In fact, it is very well intergrated (exactly how Windows should be, sometimes fails to be).
Now if only there was a KDE version of Emacs...