What you were expecting to see was a balistic missile. A "rocket" is mererly the motor.
Well, if you want to get picky, the dictionary defines "rocket" as a "rocket engine" or "anything propelled by a rocket engine". So the rocket isn't necessarily merely the motor. In fairness, I suppose that in this case "rocket" could refer to the chair that's being propelled by the rocket motor. Admittedly, I would have preferred to see an aerodynamic shell around the seat, and I would have preferred it to go several orders of magnitude higher than 6 feet.
Now I've earned a picky credit, so I'll use it. Ballistic has two l's.
I was expecting to see a rocket, but it's just a flying seat with a dude and some fuel strapped onto it. Okay, okay, it's still quite an achievement. I was just hoping these guys were further along, ready to kick some major butt on the competition for private manned rocket flight. Oh well, there's still time I guess.:)
Indeed. A friend has VAG COM installed on his laptop and he plugged it into the computer port under the steering wheel on my A4. You can monitor just about anything on the car in real time. You can also put the car through diagnostics, make the dials do weird things, etc. And, as you mentioned, you can turn on and off all sorts of features. He turned on a feature that makes the doors automatically lock when you go over 10 MPH, a feature which is normally only enabled on the higher end models. Really cool.
There are lots of cars with "easter eggs". I can describe at least half a dozen with Audis that have been around for years. For example, holding down the "5" button on the stereo while turning it on reveals a hidden graphic equalizer (actually two - one for the front and one for the back).
And so on. I'm sure easter eggs aren't limited only to Audis either.
Okay, that makes sense. They don't want particles in the compressed air to sandblast the engine. But then, why not filter the air on the way IN, when you're compressing the air, rather than on the way OUT when you want utmost efficiency?
How much energy does it take to charge up? This car will only be worthwhile if it takes less energy to charge it than would be consumed by a conventional auto in the form of gasoline over the same distance and hauling the same load.
I'm also a bit perplexed by the air exhaust filter. Why filter the outgoing air at all? If it's just expelling air that was pumped into it from the atmosphere, why would there be any reason to filter it? Surely the filtration decreases the efficiency of the car, since it would take energy to force the expelled air through the filter.
The ship in Quark was a garbage scow. They went around picking up trash shipments. I loved it when I was a kid, but I recently saw some of it and it was utterly horrendous. Goodbye Richard Benjamin...
I've been to the last four Battlebots season events, and they were a lot of fun. It definitely ruins the TV show for you, because TV cannot come close to the live event. It's truly sad that they're having problems. I will miss it incredibly if they can't defibrillate it somehow.
That said, it was clear from the last event that Battle Bots is on its way out. The robots are getting stale, and the rules surrounding robot design and weaponry are too restrictive. There were few, if any, innovative robot designs this last time. Mostly the same old robots you see each season, or knockoffs of existing robots. They even had to cancel the customary rumbles which take place after the finals (and even had to cancel the last half of the last final), because they were shut down by the San Francisco FD after one of the robots started ripping holes in the battlebox and spewing metal projectiles into the audience.
We were rather disappointed at the whole thing, and decided to only see the last day of competition next time (it takes a weekend for them to do all of the filming). Looks like there may not be a next time.
Seems like it will take a bit of work to resurrect the show. Not only will they need to get a new sponsor, but they'll have to spice it up somehow to get better robots. They will also need a better battlebox...
He states in the article that he's not running an open relay, but got blacklisted anyway by an open relay detector robot. To quote:
How had it gained access to my mail server? Simple. It had forged the headers on its email to convince my mail server that the email it sent was from a permitted user. You see, my mail servers were set up to pass mail only from a domain name of which I am the only user. It blocks everything else. That's not an open relay. Unless you're a user in my domain, you can't use it.
By definition, he's running an open relay. Someone was able to connect to his mail server, forge the headers (a spammer would *never* forge a header, would they?:), and cause mail to be sent to an arbitrary destination on the Internet. I.e., an open relay. Mail originating from an outside connection should never be sendable to a domain outside the one the mail server serves, unless some sort of secure authentication method is used to validate the identity of the sender. Period.
This guy needs to get a clue. He's got some very valid points in his article, but his ignorance really gets in the way of his message. He also talks of fighting the blackhole listers through legal means, because they "trespassed" on his computer by falsifying email headers. Technically he may be correct, but how else are blackholers supposed to determine if spammers can get mail through his server? Spammers fake the headers as a matter of common practice, but is this guy talking of suing the spammers who have sent him junk mail with faked headers? No.
If this guy would do the simple thing and secure his server, his problems would go away. Instead, he decides to take a sledgehammer to those who are trying to stamp out ignorance about open relays, because he's ignorant and doesn't want to face it.
Here's a message for you, buddy. This is old ground. Much less clueless people than you, such as John Gilmore, have learned the hard way that there is NO EXCUSE for open relays, and that legal action probably won't help you. All reasons for having open relays have been obviated by secure relay mechanisms that are readily available. Most likely, if you're not sending mail through your mail server from the outside world (i.e., when you're on the road or something), you don't even need a secure relay because you don't need a relay at all. Get with the program and STOP WHINING. And geez, at least try to become fully educated on a topic before writing a freaking article about it.
The battle won't be over until the RIAA is disbanded. Legal setbacks are meaningless other than as delays in pursuit of their goals. They have as much money and time as they need to chip away at consumer rights. Failure in any attempt they make simply means they'll come back again using different tactics.
I don't see the RIAA going away any time soon, so neither will the battle.
This patent is clearly baseless, there were other online auctioning systems in place before this patent was made.
Never make this claim unless you truly believe you understand the patent. Have you read the patent text? Obviously not, else you would see the difference between simply selling stuff online and what they claim to have invented.
Mind you, I'm not defending their patent, but what they're claiming they invented is much more than just the concept of selling crap over a computer network. Their idea involves the concept of electronic verification, etc., in addition.
Furthermore, eBay
had no way of knowing this patent was being processed when they first went into business.
Nobody ever knows. This case is no different. It takes years to get a patent, and traditionally there has been no way of knowing what's pending. The USPTO has finally started making information available on pending patents, but that's a very, very recent practice.
I'm not saying it's right, but Ebay is in no worse of a position than anyone else facing patent infringement. It's a fucked up system, but everyone has to deal with the same issues.
BTW, Ebay has been one of the worst offenders when it comes to intellectual property, going so far as to sue people if they even have "bay" in their company or product name. How many patents do you think they have that are just as bad as this one? How many do you think they've got secretly in the pipeline in the USPTO machine? Ebay is just another one of the many companies that use and abuse the patent system, and he who lives by the sword dies by it. I feel no sorrow for them here. They're employing strongarm tactics against the company that is suing them (a very small company, BTW, from what I understand) in the hopes of stalling them into bankruptcy or oblivion; they use those same tactics against companies they accuse of infringing Ebay IP. Do you still feel any sympathy for Ebay?
Same people, new story. They hadn't shown yet that van der Waals forces were the reason for Geckos' stickiness. That's essentially what they're asserting in this paper. They firmly believed it before, but hadn't finished the research yet. It's important, because it proves that there is no adhesive other than simple solid keratin, like hair or fingernails. It's the size that matters more than anything else.
I do not disagree with you. This is the evil of western government. This is why the US is hated by so many countries. It's also how the US wins wars against other countries without firing a shot. Domination through western capitalism.
A friend of mine spent months doing biological research in the Gobi desert in China. They visited small villages and towns in the middle of absolute nowhere; places where they had never even seen a caucasian; through big cities and small. He drove thousands of miles, through just about every type of terrain imaginable.
One of the things that struck him was the incredible amount of pollution taking place, and the complete lack of consciousness of the problem. Chemicals being dumped straight out of factories into rivers, etc. That sort of thing.
They spent some time in a windy little desert village where the dust swirled thickly. You couldn't see too far when the wind blew, and people sometimes wore those disposable white breathing masks when going out. It was a mining town, but when my friend finally realized just what they mined in that town, they got the hell out. It wasn't desert dust enveloping the town, but asbestos dust from the mine and surrounding landscape. The inhabitants either didn't know or didn't care about the implications of breathing high volumes of asbestos dust on a constant basis. Certainly the government didn't care. But so it goes for China, the most polluted country on the planet.
So when I hear that discarded stuff from the US makes its way to China to add to the pollution there, I'm not surprised at all. The utter lack of controls on pollution by the government does indeed take a toll on the population. This is just another of thousands of instances of large scale pollution taking place in China. While I do not condone US corporations paying the Chinese to take our poisonous junk, the blame lies largely on the government of China for allowing this to happen. They do it to their own people with their own spew, and it's sad that they're willing to add our spew to the mix. It's unfortunate that life is apparently so cheap in China. Until they take a more protective stance on their own people and environment, I'm afraid there will always be countries eager to send them their refuse.
before people come up with ways to make digital
copies of SACDs. When that happens, I'll buy them. Until then, they can suck dust. I do not play music from physical media any more. When I buy a disc, I copy it to my file server and store it away in the basement in a crate full of all my other previously-ripped CDs.
This robot didn't "evolve" as researchers (or the article) claim. The robot "learned", which is entirely different. Claiming it evolved at lightning speed, somehow implying that its computerized "evolution" is superior to that of living animals, is scientific masturbation.
Evolution is when you only have arms or legs, then over time (millions of years in terms of animal species) your appendages become wings that are capable of flight. An animal merely having legs or some form of primordial wings cannot learn to fly in three hours time, because it is not physically capable. And it cannot change its appendage into a wing no matter how hard it tries.
Learning is when you have a working wing, and through trial and error, or some instinctive a priori knowledge, figure out how to use your fully functioning wings to fly. Some birds do learn to fly quite quickly, once their wings have matured to the point of usefulness when they're young. That's what this robot did, to some extent.
While it does appear to be a very interesting experiment, in no sense did the robot evolve. It merely learned how to use what it was already given. Should it have been created with no wing, and subsequently created self-replicating robots that eventually did have usable wings, then perhaps one might say it evolved.
True enough, you can get 64 bit types simply by using a "long long" type on modern C compilers, but nobody seems interested in implementing 64 bit OSes (including the Unix clock) until 64 bit processors come into being. Maybe it has something to do with having to implement the types in software until then, rather than having an actual register to do the math.
UNIX currently faces a Y2038 problem with 32 bit signed seconds since the epoch, yet I don't anyone paying people proactively deal with that
problem; do you?
The solution is called time64_t. Perhaps
we'll be seeing it in Intel processors soon, or whenever they get off their sorry wannabe 64-bit ass.
These guys obviously had a grasp of the problem and understood how to avoid date problems in the future. They also understood the devastation that could ensue if dates were to go awry in software. But, as is human nature, did any of them do anything about the problems? I guess not, since 15 years later everyone was in a panic about Y2k. One guy even quit his job rather than fix a serious pending date problem in his system.
Human nature: ignore problems until you can't. My nature: fix problems now, you'll be happier in the long run. My fate: get treated as a doomsayer/whiner.
I've always wondered what sort of philanthropic sorts of things I would put my money into if I had an excess of wealth. Just one of those recurring daydreams we all have when sitting at our desks wishing it were lunchtime. So far, I've been unable to put my finger on one thing that just grabs me and shouts, "You must do this!" Helping stop rainforest depletion, buying up unbuilt land around my house and donating it to the regional parks, etc., all seem like obvious good causes, but somehow they just don't touch my soul.
I have now found the calling for my money. The half mil it will take to manage this unparalleled science fiction literature collection is a drop in the bucket to preserve something so important. There are lots of people helping save the rainforests, but until now, who has looked after preserving these words that cannot be replaced? Should they be lost, they will only live in the fading memories of the people who have read them, a la Fahrenheit 451.
As soon as I win the lottery, I'll be writing them a check. I'll probably send them money anyway, but it would be most excellent to fund it all in one fell swoop.
I hate floppies, but until vendors stop shipping software on floppies, I'll always have one. I just bought a brand-new Netgear ethernet card, and lo and behold, the driver came on a floppy. No CD. I would have returned it and bought another card, but (besides being a hassle) there was no guarantee that the next card I bought would have the driver on a CD. Vendors need to stop being idiots and shipping product on floppies, but for now the floppy drive is idiot vendor insurance.
Also, there is no ubiquitous sneakernet media yet other than floppies. CD-RW does not cut it. Too slow and klunky, and the drives are far bigger than floppies. You shouldn't have to have a CD burner in your system just so you can copy files between home and work. Zip drives are almost as lame as floppies, and are not very common. So they're out. There just ain't no substitute, and there probably won't be until some committee comes up with an open standard that is free of lameness and cost.
You don't need a floppy drive on every machine, though. I have only one between three machines, and that's fine. It's only an issue if I have to boot off floppy for that very, very rare circumstance where I have an OS install CD that's not bootable for some reason. In that case, I might have to temporarily relocate my floppy to the target machine. Otherwise, I just copy the files from the machine with the drive to the final destination.
Over the years I've asked Rational salespeople if they plan on porting some of their more popular debugging tools to Linux, such as Purify, Pure Coverage, Quantify, etc. The earliest responses to the question were, "What's Linux?" In later years, the response has simply been "No". I do not understand why, but it has been a major sticking point for me. More and more, people are developing software for Linux, and it's hard to understand why companies like Rational won't embrace it.
I'll tell you, it's a major hassle to develop a product for Linux while being forced to debug it on Solaris because that's the only place our debug tools will run. The first company to make decent Linux tools that are similar to Rational's will have my business. And Rational won't.
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What you were expecting to see was a balistic missile. A "rocket" is mererly the motor.
Well, if you want to get picky, the dictionary defines "rocket" as a "rocket engine" or "anything propelled by a rocket engine". So the rocket isn't necessarily merely the motor. In fairness, I suppose that in this case "rocket" could refer to the chair that's being propelled by the rocket motor. Admittedly, I would have preferred to see an aerodynamic shell around the seat, and I would have preferred it to go several orders of magnitude higher than 6 feet.
Now I've earned a picky credit, so I'll use it. Ballistic has two l's.
I was expecting to see a rocket, but it's just a flying seat with a dude and some fuel strapped onto it. Okay, okay, it's still quite an achievement. I was just hoping these guys were further along, ready to kick some major butt on the competition for private manned rocket flight. Oh well, there's still time I guess. :)
... I'm not sure if it will even make a dent in my daily dose of > 150 spams.
Indeed. A friend has VAG COM installed on his laptop and he plugged it into the computer port under the steering wheel on my A4. You can monitor just about anything on the car in real time. You can also put the car through diagnostics, make the dials do weird things, etc. And, as you mentioned, you can turn on and off all sorts of features. He turned on a feature that makes the doors automatically lock when you go over 10 MPH, a feature which is normally only enabled on the higher end models. Really cool.
There are lots of cars with "easter eggs". I can describe at least half a dozen with Audis that have been around for years. For example, holding down the "5" button on the stereo while turning it on reveals a hidden graphic equalizer (actually two - one for the front and one for the back).
And so on. I'm sure easter eggs aren't limited only to Audis either.
Okay, that makes sense. They don't want particles in the compressed air to sandblast the engine. But then, why not filter the air on the way IN, when you're compressing the air, rather than on the way OUT when you want utmost efficiency?
Sorry, should have been more clear. I was referring to the air powered car.
How much energy does it take to charge up? This car will only be worthwhile if it takes less energy to charge it than would be consumed by a conventional auto in the form of gasoline over the same distance and hauling the same load.
I'm also a bit perplexed by the air exhaust filter. Why filter the outgoing air at all? If it's just expelling air that was pumped into it from the atmosphere, why would there be any reason to filter it? Surely the filtration decreases the efficiency of the car, since it would take energy to force the expelled air through the filter.
The ship in Quark was a garbage scow. They went around picking up trash shipments. I loved it when I was a kid, but I recently saw some of it and it was utterly horrendous. Goodbye Richard Benjamin...
I've been to the last four Battlebots season events, and they were a lot of fun. It definitely ruins the TV show for you, because TV cannot come close to the live event. It's truly sad that they're having problems. I will miss it incredibly if they can't defibrillate it somehow.
That said, it was clear from the last event that Battle Bots is on its way out. The robots are getting stale, and the rules surrounding robot design and weaponry are too restrictive. There were few, if any, innovative robot designs this last time. Mostly the same old robots you see each season, or knockoffs of existing robots. They even had to cancel the customary rumbles which take place after the finals (and even had to cancel the last half of the last final), because they were shut down by the San Francisco FD after one of the robots started ripping holes in the battlebox and spewing metal projectiles into the audience. We were rather disappointed at the whole thing, and decided to only see the last day of competition next time (it takes a weekend for them to do all of the filming). Looks like there may not be a next time.
Seems like it will take a bit of work to resurrect the show. Not only will they need to get a new sponsor, but they'll have to spice it up somehow to get better robots. They will also need a better battlebox...
He states in the article that he's not running an open relay, but got blacklisted anyway by an open relay detector robot. To quote:
:), and cause mail to be sent to an arbitrary destination on the Internet. I.e., an open relay. Mail originating from an outside connection should never be sendable to a domain outside the one the mail server serves, unless some sort of secure authentication method is used to validate the identity of the sender. Period.
How had it gained access to my mail server? Simple. It had forged the headers on its email to convince my mail server that the email it sent was from a permitted user. You see, my mail servers were set up to pass mail only from a domain name of which I am the only user. It blocks everything else. That's not an open relay. Unless you're a user in my domain, you can't use it.
By definition, he's running an open relay. Someone was able to connect to his mail server, forge the headers (a spammer would *never* forge a header, would they?
This guy needs to get a clue. He's got some very valid points in his article, but his ignorance really gets in the way of his message. He also talks of fighting the blackhole listers through legal means, because they "trespassed" on his computer by falsifying email headers. Technically he may be correct, but how else are blackholers supposed to determine if spammers can get mail through his server? Spammers fake the headers as a matter of common practice, but is this guy talking of suing the spammers who have sent him junk mail with faked headers? No.
If this guy would do the simple thing and secure his server, his problems would go away. Instead, he decides to take a sledgehammer to those who are trying to stamp out ignorance about open relays, because he's ignorant and doesn't want to face it.
Here's a message for you, buddy. This is old ground. Much less clueless people than you, such as John Gilmore, have learned the hard way that there is NO EXCUSE for open relays, and that legal action probably won't help you. All reasons for having open relays have been obviated by secure relay mechanisms that are readily available. Most likely, if you're not sending mail through your mail server from the outside world (i.e., when you're on the road or something), you don't even need a secure relay because you don't need a relay at all. Get with the program and STOP WHINING. And geez, at least try to become fully educated on a topic before writing a freaking article about it.
The battle won't be over until the RIAA is disbanded. Legal setbacks are meaningless other than as delays in pursuit of their goals. They have as much money and time as they need to chip away at consumer rights. Failure in any attempt they make simply means they'll come back again using different tactics.
I don't see the RIAA going away any time soon, so neither will the battle.
This patent is clearly baseless, there were other online auctioning systems in place before this patent was made.
Never make this claim unless you truly believe you understand the patent. Have you read the patent text? Obviously not, else you would see the difference between simply selling stuff online and what they claim to have invented.
Mind you, I'm not defending their patent, but what they're claiming they invented is much more than just the concept of selling crap over a computer network. Their idea involves the concept of electronic verification, etc., in addition.
Furthermore, eBay had no way of knowing this patent was being processed when they first went into business.
Nobody ever knows. This case is no different. It takes years to get a patent, and traditionally there has been no way of knowing what's pending. The USPTO has finally started making information available on pending patents, but that's a very, very recent practice.
I'm not saying it's right, but Ebay is in no worse of a position than anyone else facing patent infringement. It's a fucked up system, but everyone has to deal with the same issues.
BTW, Ebay has been one of the worst offenders when it comes to intellectual property, going so far as to sue people if they even have "bay" in their company or product name. How many patents do you think they have that are just as bad as this one? How many do you think they've got secretly in the pipeline in the USPTO machine? Ebay is just another one of the many companies that use and abuse the patent system, and he who lives by the sword dies by it. I feel no sorrow for them here. They're employing strongarm tactics against the company that is suing them (a very small company, BTW, from what I understand) in the hopes of stalling them into bankruptcy or oblivion; they use those same tactics against companies they accuse of infringing Ebay IP. Do you still feel any sympathy for Ebay?
Not exactly news...
Same people, new story. They hadn't shown yet that van der Waals forces were the reason for Geckos' stickiness. That's essentially what they're asserting in this paper. They firmly believed it before, but hadn't finished the research yet. It's important, because it proves that there is no adhesive other than simple solid keratin, like hair or fingernails. It's the size that matters more than anything else.
I do not disagree with you. This is the evil of western government. This is why the US is hated by so many countries. It's also how the US wins wars against other countries without firing a shot. Domination through western capitalism.
A friend of mine spent months doing biological research in the Gobi desert in China. They visited small villages and towns in the middle of absolute nowhere; places where they had never even seen a caucasian; through big cities and small. He drove thousands of miles, through just about every type of terrain imaginable.
One of the things that struck him was the incredible amount of pollution taking place, and the complete lack of consciousness of the problem. Chemicals being dumped straight out of factories into rivers, etc. That sort of thing.
They spent some time in a windy little desert village where the dust swirled thickly. You couldn't see too far when the wind blew, and people sometimes wore those disposable white breathing masks when going out. It was a mining town, but when my friend finally realized just what they mined in that town, they got the hell out. It wasn't desert dust enveloping the town, but asbestos dust from the mine and surrounding landscape. The inhabitants either didn't know or didn't care about the implications of breathing high volumes of asbestos dust on a constant basis. Certainly the government didn't care. But so it goes for China, the most polluted country on the planet.
So when I hear that discarded stuff from the US makes its way to China to add to the pollution there, I'm not surprised at all. The utter lack of controls on pollution by the government does indeed take a toll on the population. This is just another of thousands of instances of large scale pollution taking place in China. While I do not condone US corporations paying the Chinese to take our poisonous junk, the blame lies largely on the government of China for allowing this to happen. They do it to their own people with their own spew, and it's sad that they're willing to add our spew to the mix. It's unfortunate that life is apparently so cheap in China. Until they take a more protective stance on their own people and environment, I'm afraid there will always be countries eager to send them their refuse.
before people come up with ways to make digital copies of SACDs. When that happens, I'll buy them. Until then, they can suck dust. I do not play music from physical media any more. When I buy a disc, I copy it to my file server and store it away in the basement in a crate full of all my other previously-ripped CDs.
This robot didn't "evolve" as researchers (or the article) claim. The robot "learned", which is entirely different. Claiming it evolved at lightning speed, somehow implying that its computerized "evolution" is superior to that of living animals, is scientific masturbation.
Evolution is when you only have arms or legs, then over time (millions of years in terms of animal species) your appendages become wings that are capable of flight. An animal merely having legs or some form of primordial wings cannot learn to fly in three hours time, because it is not physically capable. And it cannot change its appendage into a wing no matter how hard it tries.
Learning is when you have a working wing, and through trial and error, or some instinctive a priori knowledge, figure out how to use your fully functioning wings to fly. Some birds do learn to fly quite quickly, once their wings have matured to the point of usefulness when they're young. That's what this robot did, to some extent.
While it does appear to be a very interesting experiment, in no sense did the robot evolve. It merely learned how to use what it was already given. Should it have been created with no wing, and subsequently created self-replicating robots that eventually did have usable wings, then perhaps one might say it evolved.
Gems are a complete scam. Just say yes to cubic zirconiums! Or no gems at all.
If she needs a ring to feel secure in the marriage, maybe your relationship isn't secure in the first place.
True enough, you can get 64 bit types simply by using a "long long" type on modern C compilers, but nobody seems interested in implementing 64 bit OSes (including the Unix clock) until 64 bit processors come into being. Maybe it has something to do with having to implement the types in software until then, rather than having an actual register to do the math.
UNIX currently faces a Y2038 problem with 32 bit signed seconds since the epoch, yet I don't anyone paying people proactively deal with that problem; do you?
The solution is called time64_t. Perhaps we'll be seeing it in Intel processors soon, or whenever they get off their sorry wannabe 64-bit ass.
These guys obviously had a grasp of the problem and understood how to avoid date problems in the future. They also understood the devastation that could ensue if dates were to go awry in software. But, as is human nature, did any of them do anything about the problems? I guess not, since 15 years later everyone was in a panic about Y2k. One guy even quit his job rather than fix a serious pending date problem in his system.
Human nature: ignore problems until you can't.
My nature: fix problems now, you'll be happier in the long run.
My fate: get treated as a doomsayer/whiner.
There is a cost to being proactive...
I've always wondered what sort of philanthropic sorts of things I would put my money into if I had an excess of wealth. Just one of those recurring daydreams we all have when sitting at our desks wishing it were lunchtime. So far, I've been unable to put my finger on one thing that just grabs me and shouts, "You must do this!" Helping stop rainforest depletion, buying up unbuilt land around my house and donating it to the regional parks, etc., all seem like obvious good causes, but somehow they just don't touch my soul.
I have now found the calling for my money. The half mil it will take to manage this unparalleled science fiction literature collection is a drop in the bucket to preserve something so important. There are lots of people helping save the rainforests, but until now, who has looked after preserving these words that cannot be replaced? Should they be lost, they will only live in the fading memories of the people who have read them, a la Fahrenheit 451.
As soon as I win the lottery, I'll be writing them a check. I'll probably send them money anyway, but it would be most excellent to fund it all in one fell swoop.
I hate floppies, but until vendors stop shipping software on floppies, I'll always have one. I just bought a brand-new Netgear ethernet card, and lo and behold, the driver came on a floppy. No CD. I would have returned it and bought another card, but (besides being a hassle) there was no guarantee that the next card I bought would have the driver on a CD. Vendors need to stop being idiots and shipping product on floppies, but for now the floppy drive is idiot vendor insurance.
Also, there is no ubiquitous sneakernet media yet other than floppies. CD-RW does not cut it. Too slow and klunky, and the drives are far bigger than floppies. You shouldn't have to have a CD burner in your system just so you can copy files between home and work. Zip drives are almost as lame as floppies, and are not very common. So they're out. There just ain't no substitute, and there probably won't be until some committee comes up with an open standard that is free of lameness and cost.
You don't need a floppy drive on every machine, though. I have only one between three machines, and that's fine. It's only an issue if I have to boot off floppy for that very, very rare circumstance where I have an OS install CD that's not bootable for some reason. In that case, I might have to temporarily relocate my floppy to the target machine. Otherwise, I just copy the files from the machine with the drive to the final destination.
Over the years I've asked Rational salespeople if they plan on porting some of their more popular debugging tools to Linux, such as Purify, Pure Coverage, Quantify, etc. The earliest responses to the question were, "What's Linux?" In later years, the response has simply been "No". I do not understand why, but it has been a major sticking point for me. More and more, people are developing software for Linux, and it's hard to understand why companies like Rational won't embrace it.
I'll tell you, it's a major hassle to develop a product for Linux while being forced to debug it on Solaris because that's the only place our debug tools will run. The first company to make decent Linux tools that are similar to Rational's will have my business. And Rational won't.