Ok, admittedly I'm shooting for (Score 5, Funny) with this one, but bear in mind that this isn't a joke I made up. This is a solid, technological fact; check out the books Entering Space or Mining The Sky for the best discussions of Helium 3 extraction I've seen. Neither of those authors got the joke, or perhaps they had more taste than I and didn't print it. If you don't find it as amusing as I do, blame the Greeks, the astronomers, and the universe.
Getting Helium 3 from the moon to power fusion reactors is a nice, short term way of providing mankind with a non-polluting energy source. It isn't weak like solar, wind, and geothermal power, it isn't polluting like fossil fuels, it isn't a huge radioactivity source like fission is or a small one like other fusion reactions could be. Its extraction is environmentally friendly, and it comes from places where there is no "environment" to speak of. And at current energy prices, each kilogram of helium 3 would be worth millions of dollars if we master fusion power.
But it's a nonrenewable resource. It comes from the solar wind, it doesn't embed itself very deeply in solid rock, and it "leaks". It might be profitably extracted from the moon, but it won't supply more than a few centuries of the world's energy needs, not once the third world consumption rises to that of fully industrialized countries.
If we want plentiful energy that will last us for thousands or millions of years, we need to look for a Helium 3 trap that has collected far more of the stuff than our moon. The outer planets have done this; straining out even the thin concentrations of He3 in their atmospheres would give us electrical power for a longer time than homo sapiens has existed so far.
Unfortunately, not all the outer planets are easy to pick up He3 from. Sure, you could drop a probe into the atmosphere of Jupiter, but even if it wasn't crushed, we don't have rockets with both the thrust and the specific impulse to get it back again. For this and other reasons, there is one outer planet that stands out from all the rest for He3 mining. And when the fossil fuels start running out, the fissionable uranium starts running out, and the price of energy skyrockets, there will be only one place capable of supplying the demand.
That's right. A thousand years from today, humanity's energy will be supplied by the extraction of millions of kilograms of powerful gasses from Uranus.
One Point Twenty-One Quickiewatts!!!
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I'd like SMP on the consumer end so that starting Netscape doesn't make my MP3 skip.
Unless you have a years-old processor, you shouldn't need a second CPU to keep MP3s from skipping. Your problem is more likely misconfiguration of the system you have.
Are you using DMA (or UDMA if you've got it, but switching from PIO to DMA is the big CPU saver) on your hard disks? If not, then every heavy disk access (like starting up a big program) is begging your CPU to drop whatever else it's doing (like playing MP3s) and handle the flood of interrupts from the drive.
If you're using Linux, try putting "hdparm -d 1/dev/hda" in your rc.local script. (or "man hdparm" to find more tweaks, turning on DMA is just the most important).
If you're using Windows (even Win98), there are lots of motherboards with UDMA drivers that don't get installed by default; check the manufacturer's website. And even if the drivers are installed they may not be turned on; there's a checkbox somewhere in one of those Control Panel doohickies.
If that is insufficient by itself, try making your MP3 player a niced or realtime process. If you make xmms suid root, for example, there's an option to make it a realtime process. (why it doesn't give you a separate option to set a nice level, I have no idea). This can be a stability/security risk, so don't do it on the company web server.
One of the things that I've seen being discussed in the Kernel development threads is adding metadata support to Linux.
The nicest idea I've seen is Application Logical Bundles of Data (ALBODs), which look like a tarball if you open(), stat(), etc. them, and look like a directory if you opendir(), readdir(), etc with them. Check out Treating Multiple Files as One for Kernel Traffic's summary of the linux-kernel discussion last year on this topic.
This would allow applications to do the kind of substorage that they need to efficiently; a word processor document may have jpegs, spreadsheet tables, etc. embedded into it; things that can be more efficiently stored and manipulated as a directory full of files than as a single file. However, people don't want to manage a directory for each document, they want to manage a file. So, only new applications (or wily users; imagine being able to copy the images out of a document with "cp my.doc/*.jpg ~") that know to expect an albod actually try treating it as a directory; old tools that try to treat it as a file just get a file, so "cp my.doc my2.doc" still works without changing cp.
Unfortunately, this wouldn't let you add forks to normal files, and in fact adding forks to normal files seems impossible without breaking POSIX semantics and rewriting a bunch of old programs. You got it exactly right: "cp", "tar", "ftp", "apache", and a billion other programs act on files by simply doing an open() and read or mmap on the file. If we provide metadata at the end of that reading, then it gets copied correctly, but the program actually using the file probably breaks. If we don't provide metadata that way, then applications work unchanged, but we need to change all the applications that copy files around. And either way, what happens when you use FTP, scp, HTTP, etc to transfer your file around? Do you send the other end a tarball and leave it to the resource fork aware receiver to handle it ok? It'd be a mess.
Every time the price of a gallon of gas or a meg of RAM jumps 25 cents, you get the usual conspiracy theorists, claiming, "It's those big evil businesses, conspiring together to start ripping you off." I don't believe it.
Well, to be accurate, I don't believe all of it. I believe that those businesses are evil, of course, and they're obviously big. I just don't believe that having had the chance to rip us off before, they'd have neglected to start until now. I can just picture the unlucky lackey to point that out to his (evil) boss: "What, you mean we could have been selling this stuff for twice as much, and you didn't tell me sooner? Go raise our prices, then clean out your desk!"
If its compatibility we are looking for here, why would expect MS to do it?
Because their customers expect them to make decisions that make their software better for the user, particularly when those decisions would come at little or no (or negative, in the case of maintaining a consistent document format) cost to Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft repeatedly changed the Word format costs themselves and their competitors money for additional programming work on filter and import/export code, and costs their users money for repeated unnecessary upgrades, incompatibility hassles with other programs. Looking at the Microsoft+competitors+users system as a whole, there is no benefit to anyone for Microsoft to use a poorly documented, convoluted format without an accurate public specification.
However, looking at MS, competitors, and users independently, it's obvious that while the value of the system as a whole is reduced by Microsoft's decisions, the handicap that it gives to competitors and the additional revenues it generates from users causes more of that value to end up as cash in Microsoft's hands.
This isn't the way a free market is supposed to work. If someone makes an inferior product, I'm supposed to be able to switch to a different producer and not be adversely impacted by said product. (and as a side effect, my readily available choices encourage all producers not to produce inferior products) Unfortunatly, when you add network effects, i.e. the requirement that my new product be compatible with the old, suddenly Microsoft has the ability to use an existing large marketshare as it's own "benefit", to make it self-sustaining, to reduce or eliminate that choice.
I'm not saying that, after thinking about it, it doesn't make sense for Microsoft to do just that. I'm just saying that, to consumers used to having a wide selection of companies competing solely based on price and quality for their purchasing dollars, it certainly counts as "unexpected".
ok, according to our law, you can't use encryption, your email and stuff is readable by the govt, what you say can be held against you etc. but on the other hand, none of these laws are actually implemented. my former college, which is owned by the navy, teaches RSA, for example. So the deal is that they want to keep the economy open to whatever benefits CS and IT can bring, but they want a saftey net, "just in case".
Yes, but that safety net might not be for what you think. What that "safety net" does is gives them legal justification for prosecuting a select portion of a large number of people, without just cause.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the effect turn out similar to freeways in the United States: the speed limits are low enough that everyone on the road does 5 miles over, which gives the traffic cops justification to pull over anyone who "looks suspicious", who is of a race that the cop is bigoted against, or who has speeding ticket money to pay into the coffers of whatever city they happen to be passing by.
a-ha! So why don't you make QT a part of the OS? QT even meets Debian's free software guidelines, as you stated before.
That would solve the problem for Debian, but it wouldn't stop people from distributing KDE binaries for other distributions/platforms, which would still be technically illegal. So, it wouldn't solve the underlying problems:
Disrespect for the GPL. You soulless pragmatists mouthing off out there, you want to know why everyone who cares about free software is up in arms? Because there is a lot of software out there under the GPL, a license which solidly gives those rights that the developers want to give, but which hasn't been tested in court. And we don't want that first test to be filled with a lot of crap about "look at all these KDE developers, here, letting people trample all over their GPL, so it must be ok". Well, it's not OK. The GPL prohibits linking your code against non-system, non-GPL code. If you want your code to stay free software, but you want it to be linked against code with a sharply different license, you use the LGPL or append a special exception to the GPL, like the KDE developers should have done.
Sure, the KDE developers are just peachy about you linking your code to Qt, but is all the code getting linked from KDE developers? I think kfloppy was a possible example: if you take someone's GPLed code, link it against yours, and link that against Qt, then you are breaking their license, whether you claim your code is GPLed or not. And you know what, it pisses some of us off when the GPL gets broken, whether the people doing the breaking are among the "good guys" or not.
Oh, and BTW, does this mean that ddd (www.gnu.org/software/ddd/) is illegal to run under Linux?
No. For one thing, DDD works fine with lesstif now. But even when it only worked with Motif, it was legal to distribute DDD source code, or DDD binaries dynamically linked against Motif system libraries. But it is illegal to distribute Linux ddd binaries statically linked against Motif, which I think does occur. That should be stopped, too, or the DDD license should include a special exception; it's just not as high profile a case as KDE.
It looks like everyone has already brought up the point that the danger in putting a "self-destruct" mechanism in a nanite. With millions or billions of nanites, even if the odds of one of them surviving that self-destruction are one in a million, those odds are too high. And if that nanite is designed to construct other nanites (or, worst case, copies of itself) then you have a problem on your hands.
If nanotechnology ever reaches the total control of matter, self-replicating machine, Diamond Age "Seed" level (I don't have enough information to argue either way, but it seems to me that it'd be easier to create macroscopic Von Neumann machines than microscopic ones, and we haven't even done that yet) we're going to need more protection than a self destruct mechanism.
What I'd like to see, in a world swarming with potential nanotech viruses, is an analogous nanotech immune system to take care of them, nanites which can be set to recognize and rip apart other nanites which meet certain parameters. Got a rogue oil-spill cleaning nanite ripping up asphalt in San Francisco? Get the standby security nanites in Oakland to kill it.
There was an interview with a somewhat apocalyptic tech giant (a veep at Sun? I forget) who believed that the ever increasing technological power available to humanity (nanotech, biotech, and AI being three examples I remember) would cause the world to be ripped apart by terrorism in the coming century. He likened it to an airplane in which every passenger had a "Crash" button in front of their seat, and only one psycho was necessary to bring everyone down with him.
I don't think it will be that way. With nanotechnology specifically, if our available defenses are kept up to the level that our potential offenses would require, then having a small set of nanites go rogue wouldn't be a concern; they would be overwhelmed by their surroundings. Going back to that analogy, if everybody had a "Crash" button in front of their airplane seat, but the plane was guaranteed to survive unless 50% of the passengers voted to crash, that would be the safest flight in history.
Let corporations have the moon; there isn't a government on Earth that seems to want anything to do with it. You'd think polar ice and martian microbes would be enough to spark a little more public interest, but I suppose everybody's much more worried this year about how to save the Ponzi Security system.
What are you afraid of? Are Radio Shack sponsored rovers going to cause traffic problems between our thriving lunar cities? Are their communications frequencies overlapping important bands that the NASA Lunar Observatory uses? Are their rocket landings going to disturb the aluminum refineries and the ice mining operations?
I know, I know, it's a corporation on the moon, so it must be a horrible thing for humanity. I just happen to think having nobody on the moon, three decades after Apollo, is worse.
So I hope they get all the financing they need, send as many rockets as they want up there, and bring back video from any place they can drive a rover. I particularly hope they drive by all the old Apollo sites; maybe seeing an overturned American flag through the eyes of a Radio Shack toy will wake up a few people.
>I really thought once upon a time Linux advocates >(such as myself) were more into promoting Linux >for it's merits rather than continually seeking >to make it a cheap clone of another OS.
See those broken pencil and eyeglasses modifiers to the file manager icons? Rest assured, those are just bugs in the development release; the final Nautilus will run as root and give everyone insecure access to the entire system, just like Windows. It will refuse to run on remote X servers, limiting you to the local display just like on a Windows desktop. It will delete apache, gcc, and all those "server" programs which just confuse users and which should really only be run on the $500 Linux 2000 Server anyway. It will carefully check your CPU, and refuse to run on non-Intel Linux versions. The source code will be wrapped in a big #ifdef __linux__ to make it non-portable in the short run to all the other operating systems out there, and in the long run they're going to ditch glibc and Posix and reinvent the wheel like Win16 (and Win32, and in another 4 years Win64) did. It will stick itself in one spot on the screen and refuse to be launched in or dragged to any of those weird "virtual desktops". It will cost $100 for the single user upgrade, with license fees for each additional user. It will save all your settings in undocumented binary format in an enormous hierarchical registry file, then it will orphan a random number of registry settings each time you upgrade or uninstall. And, of course, it will uninstall any previous user interfaces that you might be upgrading from, like that threatening KDE or that archaic bash. It will be released under the Grossly Proprietary License, will be sold for whatever the market will bear, and will generate fake error messages and invalidate your OEM's pricing discounts if it detects any competing software installed. Rumor says that the developers originally intended to create an easy to use, familiar GUI for new users moving from other operating systems to Unix, but scrapped that idea when they realized that cloning Windows was much more profitable.
Granted, that was a list of many fine algorithm discoveries, but is it a correct list? The many notable omissions that slashdotters here are bringing up (my personal fave that didn't make the list: Reed Solomon encoding) would indicate not.
Moreover, didn't all the "Top Ten" lists from other fields come and go last December?
So how good can the best computer algorithms be, when it still takes them 6 months to generate a "Top Ten" list, and the list is incorrect?
I just found out (in an unrelated conversation at work) that a friend of mine hacked into my dorm computer three years ago, when I was running Win95 (I forget what release) and it had a remotely exploitable SMB service. Good thing I didn't keep anything sensitive on it at the time, huh?
Wrong. Everybody has root on your system, in fact you have no way to prevent people from having root on your system. If a Linux application gives a local user unrestricted access to the computer, it's a horrible security bug that causes frantic warning emails to fill inboxes and newsgroups worldwide. If a Windows application manages to restrict a local user's access to the computer, it's a technological marvel built on a shaky foundation.
That is because I don't run a time-sharing system,
Unless you're really using DOS, this is untrue. BeOS and Windows9x are both multitasking systems, and Windows at least provides better mechanisms than Linux for allowing malicious processes to *hide* themselves from the user.
where the whole system is structured so that multiple users can wait poised to do things I don't approve of.
What, you've never heard of Back Orifice, NetBus, BO2K, or even the trojan "movie file" that's been bouncing around the net this morning?
My single-user operating system (BeOS, Windows 9x, DOS, whatever OS you choose to hate, Slashdotters) doesn't have a root account.
Yes it does. Root is the *only* account it has.
The only way to get that power on it is to sit down at it.
Or to get you to run a trojan Word document, VBscript, or executable (like millions of people have, for multiple different trojans), or to get you to run a malicious ActiveX applet, or to exploit a buffer overflow in any of a number of old versions of IE, NetMeeting, various FTP daemons...
You're not going to be allowed to do that, by the way.
Oh, you've never let anyone else sit down at your computer? You've never even left your computer alone while you weren't in the room? You're not a common case, you realize that?
Besides, who needs to sit down at your computer? I just need to burn my trojan backdoor to a CD-R and stick it in your drive, if you're one of the 99% of users who hasn't disabled autorun.
Or hell, I just need to sell you some nice closed source software or give you some shareware with a proprietary internet protocol, and upload whatever I want in the data stream. How many different companies wrote software that's installed on your computer? Do you realize that every one of those companies have "root" access? Do you trust all of them?
If there's one thing that xbill should teach us, it's that the more "Baby Bills" you have, the worse life gets, no matter how small and harmless-looking they are.
First off, you can remove the government granted immunity from personal responsibility called incorporation away, most of the problems vanish as the major conglomerate shareholders face almost perpetual lawsuits on the losing side.
Then you can watch new problems crop up tenfold to take their place, as the rate of small business creation goes down the tubes. Running any business involves the risk that someday, your creditors (or your victorious plaintiffs) are going to take away everything you've invested and worked at. If running a business also required risking your home, your retirement savings, and your kids' college money, entrenched large businesses would be a lot more secure from those pesky startups.
Ecologically friendly capitalism doesn't mean developing "biomimicing" technologies or reducing our waste products 100%. If such things are profitable, boring, normal capitalism will do them without caring what the positive environmental repercussions are.
One of the nice things about that boring, normal capitalism is that the non-externalized costs of production get minimized much more effectively by the efforts of competing producers than by the plans of your average "revolutionary" thinker. Water vapor car exhaust sounds nice, until you actually try and design the fuel cells and hydrogen storage systems to make it work.
And I just wanted to slap someone after watching Ralph Nader whine on television this morning about how "the poor American farmer is working from sunup to sundown to survive against the evil agricultural conglomerates who sell food too cheaply." What the hell is he smoking? The green party is supposed to be an advocate of the poor, common man, and their presidential candidate wants to see higher food prices? What next, is housing too cheap also?
What we need for eco-friendly capitalism isn't book authors telling corporations to panic about how much fossil fuel or landfill space they're using. We have enough of each to last us a hundred years, by which time we'll have more exotic options available.
What we need is a way of bringing currently externalized environmental costs back to the corporations and individuals who create them, to give them incentive to reduce those environmental costs where it is practical to do so.
I saw another post entitled "Tragedy of the Commons", so some people here already know what I'm talking about. If an unfiltered factory smokestack dumps crap into the air, it may cause hundreds of dollars of health problems, environmental damage, and quality of life reduction for each of a million people. However, only a hundred of those million people may actually work for the factory. $100 million of total environmental cost, $10 thousand of which is actually felt by the polluters. If a smokestack filter costs $1 million to install, then for society as a whole you certainly want to install filters, but the factory has no financial incentive to.
Currently, our system doesn't give corporations financial incentives to reduce pollution, we give them legal incentives, in the form of "You will install that filter before you start operating this factory" type instructions. That's a fine, workable solution, but it's not a capitalistic solution, it's a command economy solution. We control the exhaust of our vehicles, the effluents of our manufacturing, and the natural resources that we mine and log in the same way: through permits and regulations. The idea, of course, is to put environmentally important decisions in the hands of lawmakers who should be concerned for the environment and economy of society as a whole rather than for the costs and revenues of one particular corporation.
And it works, mostly, as well as you can expect an inexpert government to decide where the country should draw the line between economic prosperity and environmental health. There are excesses here and there on both sides of that line, and there are bitter political arguments between people who disagree on where that line should be placed, but there's not going to be any revolutionary improvement within the governmental decision-making framework.
In a utopian capitalist world, of course, the government wouldn't decide how environmentally friendly a manufacturing process had to be, any more than it decides how much that process should produce or how much the product should sell for. How would the free market economy make decisions about natural resources and environmental harm without falling into the "tragedy of the commons" trap (I prefer the "prisoner's dilemma" analogy myself) that makes life worse for everyone? By applying externalized costs to their producers. Instead of putting a limit on the amount of air pollution a factory can generate, you charge them some fee per unit mass of each pollutant component. If they've got filter after high-tech filter trapping every gram of sulfur dioxide, you still charge them by the kilo for the escaping CO2.
The point is that you then put into managers' hands the decisions about what environmentally unfriendly processes are worthwhile, and what processes aren't valuable enough to be worth the environmental costs inherent in their use. Would mass transit in places like Houston and LA be in it's current lousy state, and would so many overcompensating city dwellers be buying gas-guzzling SUVs to drive to work, if gasoline there was taxed according to how much damage it does?
I'm not really suggesting this as a way for America (or other countries) to go, however. First of all, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and our current mass of environmental regulation is only sprained at worst. Secondly, moving environmental regulation from a command to a capitalist decision-making model wouldn't be as nearly as productive as, say, capitalist price regulation is. You'd still need government to decide what the costs of pollution were, and you'd still need audits to measure the environmental costs generated by a company. Unlike labor, equipment costs, and revenue, it's a little tough for your corporate accountants to put a fair dollar figure to environmental costs without a government inspector standing over their shoulders.
Perhaps most importantly, since there is no perfect way to let the "invisible hand of the market" handle the environment as well, you'd still see the same furious debates between the people who think that the atmosphere is a limitless sinkhole and those who think that CO2 is poisoning Mother Earth, and you'd still see lengthy pointless rants from people like me with a slight vested interest in the outcome.
Take a look at the web site, would you? The "niche controller" is a two dollar plastic kiddie lightsaber toy. The trick is that he's got image analysis software hooked up to a web cam to tell the game exactly where that lightsaber is being held and with what orientation. If you've already got the web cam for other reasons (and they sell pretty well; people like sending their pictures along with personal email, or videoconferencing with good connections) then the "controller" cost in this case is trivial.
Earth escape speed is about 25 mi/sec. This speed, however, will still leave the object in solar orbit at earth's distance. To make the object fall into the sun, you have to accelerate it to the orbital speed of the earth around the sun, about 67 mi/sec. This delta-v requires far more fuel than any spacecraft can possibly carry to low earth orbit.
You got all the facts right; the numbers are off. Earth escape speed is 7 miles per second (perhaps you were thinking Mach 25, orbital speed?), and earth orbital speed is... damn, I used to know this one. BOTE calculations give me 19 mi/sec.
Anyway, a lot of speed. We can't even send probes up to solar escape velocity without gravity assists, and solar escape velocity is actually lower deltaV than an orbit inside the sun.
No, much better to drop used-up LEO satellites into the ocean (since air resistance will bring them down eventually, best to force the matter and keep the reentry risks minimal), and to move used-up HEO satellites into parking orbits where they are less likely to be a debris source.
To answer another poster's question, yes satellites carry rocket fuel on them... although it's almost certainly not going to be the same high-thrust cryogenic fuel that got them up in orbit to begin with. For a satellite, you just need a little thrust for stationkeeping purposes. Since the Earth isn't perfectly round and isn't the only other body in the universe, you can't expect your satellite to follow a nice Kepler orbit exactly without help. And for LEO sats, your orbit will drop over time as air resistance (not much of it, but it's there) takes its toll, unless you have small thrusters to raise the orbit again.
Of course, what I'd like to see done with old satellites is refueling and refurbishing. I'd like to see a tug in orbit with ion drives to reduce its fuel requirements and a metal or water-shielded bay to carry satellites through the Van Allen belt. The primary use of such a beast would be to carry satellites from LEO to GEO (thus putting much heavier sats in geosynchronous orbit than we can with chemical rockets alone, and permitting travel to GEO from reusable launch vehicles), but perhaps even bringing back satellites for on-orbit refueling and replacement of failed parts would be economical.
I am becoming increasingly disconcerted with the amount of applications that are REQUIRING gnome libs to run.
Why? I have apps that require imlib, GL, gtk, ncurses, or many other libraries to run. Those libraries make it possible for the app authors to get more functionality out of less new code by accessing the work of others, and they reduce the amount of RAM in use on my system by allowing the same code pages to be loaded once and used by many different processes. Gnome libraries aren't any different; they have extra widgets, XML support, printing support, and other things that every app writer shouldn't have to reinvent.
And how is this any better than somebody writing an application for Windows only?
Because Windows isn't freely downloadable, won't work alongside my other Linux apps, doesn't use portable APIs, and takes a hundred times the space of the gnome libraries.
On a related note, I have been told by friends on the gnome mailing lists that Helix isn't going to make Debian packages because they feel it is "too hard". What the hell kind of logic is this? As if it is any harder to make a.deb than it is to make a.rpm?
I wouldn't know... but I've made well-written tarballs into RPMs in fifteen minutes, so I doubt making a.deb is any harder; you could do it yourself if it's that important. Otherwise, I wouldn't expect it to take too long for a third party to take care of it.
I've even had apps spawn a GNOME Panel when I run them.
Not apps, but applets. I agree, it'd be nice if they'd run in their own Xwindow. I suppose that will be done eventually, but the regular Gnome developers have enough on their todo lists now, and I don't see anyone else interested in doing the work.
Please don't suggest f*cked hardware, thats what Windows NT users say every day when thier beloved OS BSOD's on them.
Sometimes they're right. It's easy enough to check; simply swap out the hardware. I've had a SCSI card and ethernet card physically fail in the last two years, and I've seen two DIMMs, a video card, and a hard drive fail among my friends. It happens. RAM failures are the worst, as it's basically impossible to distinguish between unstable software and stable software running on unstable RAM. Swapping out the RAM to test or heavily loading it with known stable software (a large compile in Linux, for example) is still possible.
Also, most Linux users are more hardware savvy than the Windows crowd.
That means they know how to avoid low-quality hardware, not how to telepathically detect when their quality hardware goes bad. These things all have their MTBF, you know.
"It must be the hardware." is a last resort Windiot explanation.
True, but that doesn't mean it isn't sometimes a correct one.
Even when it's not the hardware, it can be the drivers. Adaptec drivers in Linux are pretty shaky when the hardware returns unexpected (but correctable) errors, for instance, and I've seen Windows systems go from daily crashes to stability with updated video drivers.
I have. On HP-UX workstations, for about a year and a half at work.
It was much less flexible, more difficult to reconfigure, uglier, and more limited in what functionality it offered the user, compared to current stable versions of either Gnome or KDE. That sounds like a broad, sweeping statement, but it applies to every specific aspect of the system I used often: the window manager, the panel, the configuration system, the help screens, the text editor, and the file manager. Well, to be honest I didn't use the file manager often. You wouldn't either, given either moderate shell proficiency or a choice like gmc or kfm.
It was more stable than KDE Beta 4 or Gnome 1.0, but more recent versions of both have negated that deficiency too, or reversed it if you consider the system as a whole. My officemate last year had more crashes on his $8000 workstation (3, I think) than I did on my $3000 Linux/XFree/Gnome PC; though to be fair it looked like X server or OS crashes, not a CDE problem.
Maybe because of the recent opening of the source on Motif it'll be more likely we'll see these things getting ported over
They have been ported over. Red Hat, for one, sold CDE/Motif for Linux before either Gnome or KDE existed. Didn't catch on, did they?
but so far, the new open-source "modern" desktop environments are only being used as a secondary to CDE on anything but the open-source OSes.
Because CDE is usually preinstalled, because the modern (ooh, look, if you put it in quotes it looks dubious!) desktop environments aren't as simple to install (or even compile, on many, particularly older, systems) as they are on Linux, and because on most networks they can't be installed by the users, only by admins who may be afraid of change or reluctant to put in the work.
I think it'll be a long time before anything "beats the tar out of CDE" as far as sheer number of users.
Actually, it's already happened. It was last year sometime when the rate of new Linux server purchases exceeded that of other Unix servers. And when you consider the relatively greater usage of Linux on cheaper workstations, and the number of non-purchased Linux installs, I think it's a safe bet that there are more Gnome and KDE users total. Whether either desktop individually surpasses CDE yet is questionable, but they both will within the next year, and rightfully so.
The problem is, every version of GNOME was supposed to be the stable one.
Well, all software is supposed to be stable. Whether it turns out that way or not is another story.
GNOME was released early, oh well, it's a 1.0 release, what do you expect.
I expected a stable release, and was sadly disappointed. Releasing too early was a huge PR mistake; as your post points out, people become jaded and treat even good subsequent releases unfairly.
1.01 is stable. Oops, it's not, oh well, 1.02 is stable, oops it's not...
No, but each was more stable than the last. After about 1.07, IIRC, I never had a desktop crash on my system. With October Gnome, I never saw a crash on any of my friends' systems either.
Ooops, October release is still not that stable (crashes on my system).
How often? How does it crash? Have you considered checking your RAM? I'm not saying it's impossible; I've seen one panel crash and I think one GMC crash with October Gnome. But I've been running October Gnome nearly 24/7, with weeks between login and logout, ever since it's release (updating with subsequent releases). If you're seeing a crash every week there may be something else wrong with your system.
Now, if M$ had done the same (and they are), nobody would believe them
And nobody does.. but I'm starting to. A friend of mine, after seeing Windows 2000 crashes daily, managed to find the right combination of drivers to leave it rock solid. It's a rock solid lightly loaded desktop, but compared to every other OS I've seen from Microsoft that's still impressive.
but if GNOME does it, then it is all OK?
That if statement is false; but that's okay, the premise is false too. Gnome isn't perfect, and stuff like abiword, dia, and gnumeric (the pre-1.0 apps) are probably still unstable, but the core apps seem solid now.
I admit that I am guilty of piracy. I know that I am stealing. I have no lame excuse I made up to cover my ass. Now ask if I really care... the answer is no. My reason? I'm cheep.
You just made my day... for some reason the actual act of ripping someone off doesn't bug me nearly as much as the losers who try to rationalize it afterwards to protect their fragile sense of self-worth.
It seems that there are a hundred people out there spouting about how "information wants to be free" or "it's only a small amount of money from such a big corporation", for everybody who admits, "yeah, I'm stealing; I got free stuff and don't expect to get caught".
The matrix is almost an exception, but for people endlessly bitching about keanu (sp?) reeves.
I don't see why more people don't realize that Keanu Reeves was a perfect actor to play Neo. The problem most people have is that Keanu isn't a martial artist badass, and they thought Neo was supposed to be a martial artist badass.
He isn't. Neo is no more a martial artist badass than I am a rocket-launcher-toting Strogg killing machine; both of us are just skinny, pasty white computer geeks who don't sleep regular hours. Neo just got to play with a much better computer.
And c'mon, didn't Keanu do the "pasty white computer geek" thing pretty well? He spent all weekend in his cluttered room developing a healthy monitor tan, he acted appropriately just a little dazed each time he was forced to confront the "real world" (at least I'll give Keanu the benefit of a doubt and assume that dazed look was intentional), and he hammed it up like a goofy kid beating his dad at Soul Calibur when he finally got the chance to kick a little computer-enhanced ass. If you were a wuss who suddenly was taught every form of fighting imaginable and could move with superhuman reflexes, wouldn't your behavior be a little corny and a lot cocky too?
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Ok, admittedly I'm shooting for (Score 5, Funny) with this one, but bear in mind that this isn't a joke I made up. This is a solid, technological fact; check out the books Entering Space or Mining The Sky for the best discussions of Helium 3 extraction I've seen. Neither of those authors got the joke, or perhaps they had more taste than I and didn't print it. If you don't find it as amusing as I do, blame the Greeks, the astronomers, and the universe.
Getting Helium 3 from the moon to power fusion reactors is a nice, short term way of providing mankind with a non-polluting energy source. It isn't weak like solar, wind, and geothermal power, it isn't polluting like fossil fuels, it isn't a huge radioactivity source like fission is or a small one like other fusion reactions could be. Its extraction is environmentally friendly, and it comes from places where there is no "environment" to speak of. And at current energy prices, each kilogram of helium 3 would be worth millions of dollars if we master fusion power.
But it's a nonrenewable resource. It comes from the solar wind, it doesn't embed itself very deeply in solid rock, and it "leaks". It might be profitably extracted from the moon, but it won't supply more than a few centuries of the world's energy needs, not once the third world consumption rises to that of fully industrialized countries.
If we want plentiful energy that will last us for thousands or millions of years, we need to look for a Helium 3 trap that has collected far more of the stuff than our moon. The outer planets have done this; straining out even the thin concentrations of He3 in their atmospheres would give us electrical power for a longer time than homo sapiens has existed so far.
Unfortunately, not all the outer planets are easy to pick up He3 from. Sure, you could drop a probe into the atmosphere of Jupiter, but even if it wasn't crushed, we don't have rockets with both the thrust and the specific impulse to get it back again. For this and other reasons, there is one outer planet that stands out from all the rest for He3 mining. And when the fossil fuels start running out, the fissionable uranium starts running out, and the price of energy skyrockets, there will be only one place capable of supplying the demand.
That's right. A thousand years from today, humanity's energy will be supplied by the extraction of millions of kilograms of powerful gasses from Uranus.
"Great Scott!"
"What... What the hell is a Quickiewatt?"
I'd like SMP on the consumer end so that starting Netscape doesn't make my MP3 skip.
/dev/hda" in your rc.local script. (or "man hdparm" to find more tweaks, turning on DMA is just the most important).
Unless you have a years-old processor, you shouldn't need a second CPU to keep MP3s from skipping. Your problem is more likely misconfiguration of the system you have.
Are you using DMA (or UDMA if you've got it, but switching from PIO to DMA is the big CPU saver) on your hard disks? If not, then every heavy disk access (like starting up a big program) is begging your CPU to drop whatever else it's doing (like playing MP3s) and handle the flood of interrupts from the drive.
If you're using Linux, try putting "hdparm -d 1
If you're using Windows (even Win98), there are lots of motherboards with UDMA drivers that don't get installed by default; check the manufacturer's website. And even if the drivers are installed they may not be turned on; there's a checkbox somewhere in one of those Control Panel doohickies.
If that is insufficient by itself, try making your MP3 player a niced or realtime process. If you make xmms suid root, for example, there's an option to make it a realtime process. (why it doesn't give you a separate option to set a nice level, I have no idea). This can be a stability/security risk, so don't do it on the company web server.
One of the things that I've seen being discussed in the Kernel development threads is adding metadata support to Linux.
The nicest idea I've seen is Application Logical Bundles of Data (ALBODs), which look like a tarball if you open(), stat(), etc. them, and look like a directory if you opendir(), readdir(), etc with them. Check out Treating Multiple Files as One for Kernel Traffic's summary of the linux-kernel discussion last year on this topic.
This would allow applications to do the kind of substorage that they need to efficiently; a word processor document may have jpegs, spreadsheet tables, etc. embedded into it; things that can be more efficiently stored and manipulated as a directory full of files than as a single file. However, people don't want to manage a directory for each document, they want to manage a file. So, only new applications (or wily users; imagine being able to copy the images out of a document with "cp my.doc/*.jpg ~") that know to expect an albod actually try treating it as a directory; old tools that try to treat it as a file just get a file, so "cp my.doc my2.doc" still works without changing cp.
Unfortunately, this wouldn't let you add forks to normal files, and in fact adding forks to normal files seems impossible without breaking POSIX semantics and rewriting a bunch of old programs. You got it exactly right: "cp", "tar", "ftp", "apache", and a billion other programs act on files by simply doing an open() and read or mmap on the file. If we provide metadata at the end of that reading, then it gets copied correctly, but the program actually using the file probably breaks. If we don't provide metadata that way, then applications work unchanged, but we need to change all the applications that copy files around. And either way, what happens when you use FTP, scp, HTTP, etc to transfer your file around? Do you send the other end a tarball and leave it to the resource fork aware receiver to handle it ok? It'd be a mess.
Every time the price of a gallon of gas or a meg of RAM jumps 25 cents, you get the usual conspiracy theorists, claiming, "It's those big evil businesses, conspiring together to start ripping you off." I don't believe it.
Well, to be accurate, I don't believe all of it. I believe that those businesses are evil, of course, and they're obviously big. I just don't believe that having had the chance to rip us off before, they'd have neglected to start until now. I can just picture the unlucky lackey to point that out to his (evil) boss: "What, you mean we could have been selling this stuff for twice as much, and you didn't tell me sooner? Go raise our prices, then clean out your desk!"
If its compatibility we are looking for here, why would expect MS to do it?
Because their customers expect them to make decisions that make their software better for the user, particularly when those decisions would come at little or no (or negative, in the case of maintaining a consistent document format) cost to Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft repeatedly changed the Word format costs themselves and their competitors money for additional programming work on filter and import/export code, and costs their users money for repeated unnecessary upgrades, incompatibility hassles with other programs. Looking at the Microsoft+competitors+users system as a whole, there is no benefit to anyone for Microsoft to use a poorly documented, convoluted format without an accurate public specification.
However, looking at MS, competitors, and users independently, it's obvious that while the value of the system as a whole is reduced by Microsoft's decisions, the handicap that it gives to competitors and the additional revenues it generates from users causes more of that value to end up as cash in Microsoft's hands.
This isn't the way a free market is supposed to work. If someone makes an inferior product, I'm supposed to be able to switch to a different producer and not be adversely impacted by said product. (and as a side effect, my readily available choices encourage all producers not to produce inferior products) Unfortunatly, when you add network effects, i.e. the requirement that my new product be compatible with the old, suddenly Microsoft has the ability to use an existing large marketshare as it's own "benefit", to make it self-sustaining, to reduce or eliminate that choice.
I'm not saying that, after thinking about it, it doesn't make sense for Microsoft to do just that. I'm just saying that, to consumers used to having a wide selection of companies competing solely based on price and quality for their purchasing dollars, it certainly counts as "unexpected".
ok, according to our law, you can't use encryption, your email and stuff is readable by the govt, what you say can be held against you etc. but on the other hand, none of these laws are actually implemented. my former college, which is owned by the navy, teaches RSA, for example. So the deal is that they want to keep the economy open to whatever benefits CS and IT can bring, but they want a saftey net, "just in case".
Yes, but that safety net might not be for what you think. What that "safety net" does is gives them legal justification for prosecuting a select portion of a large number of people, without just cause.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the effect turn out similar to freeways in the United States: the speed limits are low enough that everyone on the road does 5 miles over, which gives the traffic cops justification to pull over anyone who "looks suspicious", who is of a race that the cop is bigoted against, or who has speeding ticket money to pay into the coffers of whatever city they happen to be passing by.
a-ha! So why don't you make QT a part of the OS? QT even meets Debian's free software guidelines, as you stated before.
That would solve the problem for Debian, but it wouldn't stop people from distributing KDE binaries for other distributions/platforms, which would still be technically illegal. So, it wouldn't solve the underlying problems:
Disrespect for the GPL. You soulless pragmatists mouthing off out there, you want to know why everyone who cares about free software is up in arms? Because there is a lot of software out there under the GPL, a license which solidly gives those rights that the developers want to give, but which hasn't been tested in court. And we don't want that first test to be filled with a lot of crap about "look at all these KDE developers, here, letting people trample all over their GPL, so it must be ok". Well, it's not OK. The GPL prohibits linking your code against non-system, non-GPL code. If you want your code to stay free software, but you want it to be linked against code with a sharply different license, you use the LGPL or append a special exception to the GPL, like the KDE developers should have done.
Sure, the KDE developers are just peachy about you linking your code to Qt, but is all the code getting linked from KDE developers? I think kfloppy was a possible example: if you take someone's GPLed code, link it against yours, and link that against Qt, then you are breaking their license, whether you claim your code is GPLed or not. And you know what, it pisses some of us off when the GPL gets broken, whether the people doing the breaking are among the "good guys" or not.
Oh, and BTW, does this mean that ddd (www.gnu.org/software/ddd/) is illegal to run under Linux?
No. For one thing, DDD works fine with lesstif now. But even when it only worked with Motif, it was legal to distribute DDD source code, or DDD binaries dynamically linked against Motif system libraries. But it is illegal to distribute Linux ddd binaries statically linked against Motif, which I think does occur. That should be stopped, too, or the DDD license should include a special exception; it's just not as high profile a case as KDE.
It looks like everyone has already brought up the point that the danger in putting a "self-destruct" mechanism in a nanite. With millions or billions of nanites, even if the odds of one of them surviving that self-destruction are one in a million, those odds are too high. And if that nanite is designed to construct other nanites (or, worst case, copies of itself) then you have a problem on your hands.
If nanotechnology ever reaches the total control of matter, self-replicating machine, Diamond Age "Seed" level (I don't have enough information to argue either way, but it seems to me that it'd be easier to create macroscopic Von Neumann machines than microscopic ones, and we haven't even done that yet) we're going to need more protection than a self destruct mechanism.
What I'd like to see, in a world swarming with potential nanotech viruses, is an analogous nanotech immune system to take care of them, nanites which can be set to recognize and rip apart other nanites which meet certain parameters. Got a rogue oil-spill cleaning nanite ripping up asphalt in San Francisco? Get the standby security nanites in Oakland to kill it.
There was an interview with a somewhat apocalyptic tech giant (a veep at Sun? I forget) who believed that the ever increasing technological power available to humanity (nanotech, biotech, and AI being three examples I remember) would cause the world to be ripped apart by terrorism in the coming century. He likened it to an airplane in which every passenger had a "Crash" button in front of their seat, and only one psycho was necessary to bring everyone down with him.
I don't think it will be that way. With nanotechnology specifically, if our available defenses are kept up to the level that our potential offenses would require, then having a small set of nanites go rogue wouldn't be a concern; they would be overwhelmed by their surroundings. Going back to that analogy, if everybody had a "Crash" button in front of their airplane seat, but the plane was guaranteed to survive unless 50% of the passengers voted to crash, that would be the safest flight in history.
Let corporations have the moon; there isn't a government on Earth that seems to want anything to do with it. You'd think polar ice and martian microbes would be enough to spark a little more public interest, but I suppose everybody's much more worried this year about how to save the Ponzi Security system.
What are you afraid of? Are Radio Shack sponsored rovers going to cause traffic problems between our thriving lunar cities? Are their communications frequencies overlapping important bands that the NASA Lunar Observatory uses? Are their rocket landings going to disturb the aluminum refineries and the ice mining operations?
I know, I know, it's a corporation on the moon, so it must be a horrible thing for humanity. I just happen to think having nobody on the moon, three decades after Apollo, is worse.
So I hope they get all the financing they need, send as many rockets as they want up there, and bring back video from any place they can drive a rover. I particularly hope they drive by all the old Apollo sites; maybe seeing an overturned American flag through the eyes of a Radio Shack toy will wake up a few people.
>I really thought once upon a time Linux advocates >(such as myself) were more into promoting Linux >for it's merits rather than continually seeking >to make it a cheap clone of another OS.
See those broken pencil and eyeglasses modifiers to the file manager icons? Rest assured, those are just bugs in the development release; the final Nautilus will run as root and give everyone insecure access to the entire system, just like Windows. It will refuse to run on remote X servers, limiting you to the local display just like on a Windows desktop. It will delete apache, gcc, and all those "server" programs which just confuse users and which should really only be run on the $500 Linux 2000 Server anyway. It will carefully check your CPU, and refuse to run on non-Intel Linux versions. The source code will be wrapped in a big #ifdef __linux__ to make it non-portable in the short run to all the other operating systems out there, and in the long run they're going to ditch glibc and Posix and reinvent the wheel like Win16 (and Win32, and in another 4 years Win64) did. It will stick itself in one spot on the screen and refuse to be launched in or dragged to any of those weird "virtual desktops". It will cost $100 for the single user upgrade, with license fees for each additional user. It will save all your settings in undocumented binary format in an enormous hierarchical registry file, then it will orphan a random number of registry settings each time you upgrade or uninstall. And, of course, it will uninstall any previous user interfaces that you might be upgrading from, like that threatening KDE or that archaic bash. It will be released under the Grossly Proprietary License, will be sold for whatever the market will bear, and will generate fake error messages and invalidate your OEM's pricing discounts if it detects any competing software installed. Rumor says that the developers originally intended to create an easy to use, familiar GUI for new users moving from other operating systems to Unix, but scrapped that idea when they realized that cloning Windows was much more profitable.
>Sad.
Idiot.
Granted, that was a list of many fine algorithm discoveries, but is it a correct list? The many notable omissions that slashdotters here are bringing up (my personal fave that didn't make the list: Reed Solomon encoding) would indicate not.
Moreover, didn't all the "Top Ten" lists from other fields come and go last December?
So how good can the best computer algorithms be, when it still takes them 6 months to generate a "Top Ten" list, and the list is incorrect?
I just found out (in an unrelated conversation at work) that a friend of mine hacked into my dorm computer three years ago, when I was running Win95 (I forget what release) and it had a remotely exploitable SMB service. Good thing I didn't keep anything sensitive on it at the time, huh?
Nobody has 'root' on my system.
Wrong. Everybody has root on your system, in fact you have no way to prevent people from having root on your system. If a Linux application gives a local user unrestricted access to the computer, it's a horrible security bug that causes frantic warning emails to fill inboxes and newsgroups worldwide. If a Windows application manages to restrict a local user's access to the computer, it's a technological marvel built on a shaky foundation.
That is because I don't run a time-sharing system,
Unless you're really using DOS, this is untrue. BeOS and Windows9x are both multitasking systems, and Windows at least provides better mechanisms than Linux for allowing malicious processes to *hide* themselves from the user.
where the whole system is structured so that multiple users can wait poised to do things I don't approve of.
What, you've never heard of Back Orifice, NetBus, BO2K, or even the trojan "movie file" that's been bouncing around the net this morning?
My single-user operating system (BeOS, Windows 9x, DOS, whatever OS you choose to hate, Slashdotters) doesn't have a root account.
Yes it does. Root is the *only* account it has.
The only way to get that power on it is to sit down at it.
Or to get you to run a trojan Word document, VBscript, or executable (like millions of people have, for multiple different trojans), or to get you to run a malicious ActiveX applet, or to exploit a buffer overflow in any of a number of old versions of IE, NetMeeting, various FTP daemons...
You're not going to be allowed to do that, by the way.
Oh, you've never let anyone else sit down at your computer? You've never even left your computer alone while you weren't in the room? You're not a common case, you realize that?
Besides, who needs to sit down at your computer? I just need to burn my trojan backdoor to a CD-R and stick it in your drive, if you're one of the 99% of users who hasn't disabled autorun.
Or hell, I just need to sell you some nice closed source software or give you some shareware with a proprietary internet protocol, and upload whatever I want in the data stream. How many different companies wrote software that's installed on your computer? Do you realize that every one of those companies have "root" access? Do you trust all of them?
If there's one thing that xbill should teach us, it's that the more "Baby Bills" you have, the worse life gets, no matter how small and harmless-looking they are.
First off, you can remove the government granted immunity from personal responsibility called incorporation away, most of the problems vanish as the major conglomerate shareholders face almost perpetual lawsuits on the losing side.
Then you can watch new problems crop up tenfold to take their place, as the rate of small business creation goes down the tubes. Running any business involves the risk that someday, your creditors (or your victorious plaintiffs) are going to take away everything you've invested and worked at. If running a business also required risking your home, your retirement savings, and your kids' college money, entrenched large businesses would be a lot more secure from those pesky startups.
Ecologically friendly capitalism doesn't mean developing "biomimicing" technologies or reducing our waste products 100%. If such things are profitable, boring, normal capitalism will do them without caring what the positive environmental repercussions are.
One of the nice things about that boring, normal capitalism is that the non-externalized costs of production get minimized much more effectively by the efforts of competing producers than by the plans of your average "revolutionary" thinker. Water vapor car exhaust sounds nice, until you actually try and design the fuel cells and hydrogen storage systems to make it work.
And I just wanted to slap someone after watching Ralph Nader whine on television this morning about how "the poor American farmer is working from sunup to sundown to survive against the evil agricultural conglomerates who sell food too cheaply." What the hell is he smoking? The green party is supposed to be an advocate of the poor, common man, and their presidential candidate wants to see higher food prices? What next, is housing too cheap also?
What we need for eco-friendly capitalism isn't book authors telling corporations to panic about how much fossil fuel or landfill space they're using. We have enough of each to last us a hundred years, by which time we'll have more exotic options available.
What we need is a way of bringing currently externalized environmental costs back to the corporations and individuals who create them, to give them incentive to reduce those environmental costs where it is practical to do so.
I saw another post entitled "Tragedy of the Commons", so some people here already know what I'm talking about. If an unfiltered factory smokestack dumps crap into the air, it may cause hundreds of dollars of health problems, environmental damage, and quality of life reduction for each of a million people. However, only a hundred of those million people may actually work for the factory. $100 million of total environmental cost, $10 thousand of which is actually felt by the polluters. If a smokestack filter costs $1 million to install, then for society as a whole you certainly want to install filters, but the factory has no financial incentive to.
Currently, our system doesn't give corporations financial incentives to reduce pollution, we give them legal incentives, in the form of "You will install that filter before you start operating this factory" type instructions. That's a fine, workable solution, but it's not a capitalistic solution, it's a command economy solution. We control the exhaust of our vehicles, the effluents of our manufacturing, and the natural resources that we mine and log in the same way: through permits and regulations. The idea, of course, is to put environmentally important decisions in the hands of lawmakers who should be concerned for the environment and economy of society as a whole rather than for the costs and revenues of one particular corporation.
And it works, mostly, as well as you can expect an inexpert government to decide where the country should draw the line between economic prosperity and environmental health. There are excesses here and there on both sides of that line, and there are bitter political arguments between people who disagree on where that line should be placed, but there's not going to be any revolutionary improvement within the governmental decision-making framework.
In a utopian capitalist world, of course, the government wouldn't decide how environmentally friendly a manufacturing process had to be, any more than it decides how much that process should produce or how much the product should sell for. How would the free market economy make decisions about natural resources and environmental harm without falling into the "tragedy of the commons" trap (I prefer the "prisoner's dilemma" analogy myself) that makes life worse for everyone? By applying externalized costs to their producers. Instead of putting a limit on the amount of air pollution a factory can generate, you charge them some fee per unit mass of each pollutant component. If they've got filter after high-tech filter trapping every gram of sulfur dioxide, you still charge them by the kilo for the escaping CO2.
The point is that you then put into managers' hands the decisions about what environmentally unfriendly processes are worthwhile, and what processes aren't valuable enough to be worth the environmental costs inherent in their use. Would mass transit in places like Houston and LA be in it's current lousy state, and would so many overcompensating city dwellers be buying gas-guzzling SUVs to drive to work, if gasoline there was taxed according to how much damage it does?
I'm not really suggesting this as a way for America (or other countries) to go, however. First of all, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and our current mass of environmental regulation is only sprained at worst. Secondly, moving environmental regulation from a command to a capitalist decision-making model wouldn't be as nearly as productive as, say, capitalist price regulation is. You'd still need government to decide what the costs of pollution were, and you'd still need audits to measure the environmental costs generated by a company. Unlike labor, equipment costs, and revenue, it's a little tough for your corporate accountants to put a fair dollar figure to environmental costs without a government inspector standing over their shoulders.
Perhaps most importantly, since there is no perfect way to let the "invisible hand of the market" handle the environment as well, you'd still see the same furious debates between the people who think that the atmosphere is a limitless sinkhole and those who think that CO2 is poisoning Mother Earth, and you'd still see lengthy pointless rants from people like me with a slight vested interest in the outcome.
(Score: -1, Longwinded)
Take a look at the web site, would you? The "niche controller" is a two dollar plastic kiddie lightsaber toy. The trick is that he's got image analysis software hooked up to a web cam to tell the game exactly where that lightsaber is being held and with what orientation. If you've already got the web cam for other reasons (and they sell pretty well; people like sending their pictures along with personal email, or videoconferencing with good connections) then the "controller" cost in this case is trivial.
Earth escape speed is about 25 mi/sec. This speed, however, will still leave the object in solar orbit at earth's distance. To make the object fall into the sun, you have to accelerate it to the orbital speed of the earth around the sun, about 67 mi/sec. This delta-v requires far more fuel than any spacecraft can possibly carry to low earth orbit.
You got all the facts right; the numbers are off. Earth escape speed is 7 miles per second (perhaps you were thinking Mach 25, orbital speed?), and earth orbital speed is... damn, I used to know this one. BOTE calculations give me 19 mi/sec.
Anyway, a lot of speed. We can't even send probes up to solar escape velocity without gravity assists, and solar escape velocity is actually lower deltaV than an orbit inside the sun.
No, much better to drop used-up LEO satellites into the ocean (since air resistance will bring them down eventually, best to force the matter and keep the reentry risks minimal), and to move used-up HEO satellites into parking orbits where they are less likely to be a debris source.
To answer another poster's question, yes satellites carry rocket fuel on them... although it's almost certainly not going to be the same high-thrust cryogenic fuel that got them up in orbit to begin with. For a satellite, you just need a little thrust for stationkeeping purposes. Since the Earth isn't perfectly round and isn't the only other body in the universe, you can't expect your satellite to follow a nice Kepler orbit exactly without help. And for LEO sats, your orbit will drop over time as air resistance (not much of it, but it's there) takes its toll, unless you have small thrusters to raise the orbit again.
Of course, what I'd like to see done with old satellites is refueling and refurbishing. I'd like to see a tug in orbit with ion drives to reduce its fuel requirements and a metal or water-shielded bay to carry satellites through the Van Allen belt. The primary use of such a beast would be to carry satellites from LEO to GEO (thus putting much heavier sats in geosynchronous orbit than we can with chemical rockets alone, and permitting travel to GEO from reusable launch vehicles), but perhaps even bringing back satellites for on-orbit refueling and replacement of failed parts would be economical.
I am becoming increasingly disconcerted with the amount of applications that are REQUIRING gnome libs to run.
.deb than it is to make a .rpm?
.deb is any harder; you could do it yourself if it's that important. Otherwise, I wouldn't expect it to take too long for a third party to take care of it.
Why? I have apps that require imlib, GL, gtk, ncurses, or many other libraries to run. Those libraries make it possible for the app authors to get more functionality out of less new code by accessing the work of others, and they reduce the amount of RAM in use on my system by allowing the same code pages to be loaded once and used by many different processes. Gnome libraries aren't any different; they have extra widgets, XML support, printing support, and other things that every app writer shouldn't have to reinvent.
And how is this any better than somebody writing an application for Windows only?
Because Windows isn't freely downloadable, won't work alongside my other Linux apps, doesn't use portable APIs, and takes a hundred times the space of the gnome libraries.
On a related note, I have been told by friends on the gnome mailing lists that Helix isn't going to make Debian packages because they feel it is "too hard". What the hell kind of logic is this? As if it is any harder to make a
I wouldn't know... but I've made well-written tarballs into RPMs in fifteen minutes, so I doubt making a
I've even had apps spawn a GNOME Panel when I run them.
Not apps, but applets. I agree, it'd be nice if they'd run in their own Xwindow. I suppose that will be done eventually, but the regular Gnome developers have enough on their todo lists now, and I don't see anyone else interested in doing the work.
Please don't suggest f*cked hardware, thats what Windows NT users say every day when thier beloved OS BSOD's on them.
Sometimes they're right. It's easy enough to check; simply swap out the hardware. I've had a SCSI card and ethernet card physically fail in the last two years, and I've seen two DIMMs, a video card, and a hard drive fail among my friends. It happens. RAM failures are the worst, as it's basically impossible to distinguish between unstable software and stable software running on unstable RAM. Swapping out the RAM to test or heavily loading it with known stable software (a large compile in Linux, for example) is still possible.
Also, most Linux users are more hardware savvy than the Windows crowd.
That means they know how to avoid low-quality hardware, not how to telepathically detect when their quality hardware goes bad. These things all have their MTBF, you know.
"It must be the hardware." is a last resort Windiot explanation.
True, but that doesn't mean it isn't sometimes a correct one.
Even when it's not the hardware, it can be the drivers. Adaptec drivers in Linux are pretty shaky when the hardware returns unexpected (but correctable) errors, for instance, and I've seen Windows systems go from daily crashes to stability with updated video drivers.
>>that let them beet the tar out of CDE
>I guess you haven't used CDE much then.
I have. On HP-UX workstations, for about a year and a half at work.
It was much less flexible, more difficult to reconfigure, uglier, and more limited in what functionality it offered the user, compared to current stable versions of either Gnome or KDE. That sounds like a broad, sweeping statement, but it applies to every specific aspect of the system I used often: the window manager, the panel, the configuration system, the help screens, the text editor, and the file manager. Well, to be honest I didn't use the file manager often. You wouldn't either, given either moderate shell proficiency or a choice like gmc or kfm.
It was more stable than KDE Beta 4 or Gnome 1.0, but more recent versions of both have negated that deficiency too, or reversed it if you consider the system as a whole. My officemate last year had more crashes on his $8000 workstation (3, I think) than I did on my $3000 Linux/XFree/Gnome PC; though to be fair it looked like X server or OS crashes, not a CDE problem.
Maybe because of the recent opening of the source on Motif it'll be more likely we'll see these things getting ported over
They have been ported over. Red Hat, for one, sold CDE/Motif for Linux before either Gnome or KDE existed. Didn't catch on, did they?
but so far, the new open-source "modern" desktop environments are only being used as a secondary to CDE on anything but the open-source OSes.
Because CDE is usually preinstalled, because the modern (ooh, look, if you put it in quotes it looks dubious!) desktop environments aren't as simple to install (or even compile, on many, particularly older, systems) as they are on Linux, and because on most networks they can't be installed by the users, only by admins who may be afraid of change or reluctant to put in the work.
I think it'll be a long time before anything "beats the tar out of CDE" as far as sheer number of users.
Actually, it's already happened. It was last year sometime when the rate of new Linux server purchases exceeded that of other Unix servers. And when you consider the relatively greater usage of Linux on cheaper workstations, and the number of non-purchased Linux installs, I think it's a safe bet that there are more Gnome and KDE users total. Whether either desktop individually surpasses CDE yet is questionable, but they both will within the next year, and rightfully so.
The problem is, every version of GNOME was supposed to be the stable one.
Well, all software is supposed to be stable. Whether it turns out that way or not is another story.
GNOME was released early, oh well, it's a 1.0 release, what do you expect.
I expected a stable release, and was sadly disappointed. Releasing too early was a huge PR mistake; as your post points out, people become jaded and treat even good subsequent releases unfairly.
1.01 is stable. Oops, it's not, oh well, 1.02 is stable, oops it's not...
No, but each was more stable than the last. After about 1.07, IIRC, I never had a desktop crash on my system. With October Gnome, I never saw a crash on any of my friends' systems either.
Ooops, October release is still not that stable (crashes on my system).
How often? How does it crash? Have you considered checking your RAM? I'm not saying it's impossible; I've seen one panel crash and I think one GMC crash with October Gnome. But I've been running October Gnome nearly 24/7, with weeks between login and logout, ever since it's release (updating with subsequent releases). If you're seeing a crash every week there may be something else wrong with your system.
Now, if M$ had done the same (and they are), nobody would believe them
And nobody does.. but I'm starting to. A friend of mine, after seeing Windows 2000 crashes daily, managed to find the right combination of drivers to leave it rock solid. It's a rock solid lightly loaded desktop, but compared to every other OS I've seen from Microsoft that's still impressive.
but if GNOME does it, then it is all OK?
That if statement is false; but that's okay, the premise is false too. Gnome isn't perfect, and stuff like abiword, dia, and gnumeric (the pre-1.0 apps) are probably still unstable, but the core apps seem solid now.
I admit that I am guilty of piracy. I know that I am stealing. I have no lame excuse I made up to cover my ass. Now ask if I really care... the answer is no. My reason? I'm cheep.
You just made my day... for some reason the actual act of ripping someone off doesn't bug me nearly as much as the losers who try to rationalize it afterwards to protect their fragile sense of self-worth.
It seems that there are a hundred people out there spouting about how "information wants to be free" or "it's only a small amount of money from such a big corporation", for everybody who admits, "yeah, I'm stealing; I got free stuff and don't expect to get caught".
The matrix is almost an exception, but for people endlessly bitching about keanu (sp?) reeves.
I don't see why more people don't realize that Keanu Reeves was a perfect actor to play Neo. The problem most people have is that Keanu isn't a martial artist badass, and they thought Neo was supposed to be a martial artist badass.
He isn't. Neo is no more a martial artist badass than I am a rocket-launcher-toting Strogg killing machine; both of us are just skinny, pasty white computer geeks who don't sleep regular hours. Neo just got to play with a much better computer.
And c'mon, didn't Keanu do the "pasty white computer geek" thing pretty well? He spent all weekend in his cluttered room developing a healthy monitor tan, he acted appropriately just a little dazed each time he was forced to confront the "real world" (at least I'll give Keanu the benefit of a doubt and assume that dazed look was intentional), and he hammed it up like a goofy kid beating his dad at Soul Calibur when he finally got the chance to kick a little computer-enhanced ass. If you were a wuss who suddenly was taught every form of fighting imaginable and could move with superhuman reflexes, wouldn't your behavior be a little corny and a lot cocky too?