I am old enough to remember that during the viking mission, the very first pictures that were aired showed a blue sky. But when they looked at a red electrical cable visible within the cameras field of view, they decided that the colour balance was off, and made adjustments so that the cables looked right. the sky turned from blue to pink. Thus came the first pictures of the pink martian sky.
Of course, I would be distrustful of the any colour chip reference anyway. Two years in the temperature and radiation extremes of space will likely wreak havoc with paint chips, unless they had gone for a ride in the LDEF (Long Duration Exposure Facility) and were re-checked on the ground for accuracy. Even then, the LDEF never made it out of earth's protective magnetic field.
Actually, the idea of building "integrated vaccum tubes" isn't as silly as it sounds. Transistors don't function above 200C, and microscopic tubes would allow us to build sensors and other circuits where transistors cannot go, at least without elaborate cooling. There has already been talk of using silicon vaccum tubes to power remote sensors in jet and aircraft engines, which must operate at extremely high temperatures.
And I always thought they would find an idea home in robot spacecraft, where there is already a vaccum. They would also offer extreme resistance to the effects of hard radiation such as the Io belt around Jupiter, which tends to fry semiconductor electonics.
You could have made a mint on it if you bought in at the right time. The stock went into the $200 plus range, then became worthless over a period of a week.
I believe this may constitute tortuitous interference - they are imposing retroactive licencing terms on their customers that were not in place when they signed the original SW purchase or lease agreement, and are likely to cause harm to the customer's business, if they are forced to suddenly replace their SCO or Linux SW on short notice because SCO is imposing new conditions that were not in the original contract.
The potential damages are likely to be much worse if and when SCO's claims are trounced out of court.
To protect her against the fanatical army of pro-SCO terrorists.
(And every time groklaw gets/.ed, she can claim it was an attack from SCO zealouts)
The only problem with this is that everybody knows what few techies they have left are probably too stupid to even know how to carry out such an attack.
Actually, I would rather see one universal distro that could become whatever you want it to be - anything from a single floppy firewall that runs on a 386, to an everything but the kitchen sink super desktop system, or perhaps one element of a beowulf cluster.
That is the way the kernel itself is designed - it can be cut down slim and trim or loaded up with all the fixin's. But it is all built off the same code base.
1000 specialized distros will lead to confusion in the marketplace, and would be a nightmare to keep up to date. Imagine if you have even 10 of them to take care of, and had to remember a few months later how to reinstall or patch if the tools and package management are different for each!
Interesting idea, but the real test will be with long term cost of operation. The cost of diesel fuel may be insignificant if this thing spends significantly more time in the garage, or costs more to build.
Not that I want to be a naysayer. I hope it pans out, but don't be too surprised if it quietly goes away never to be heard from again lot a lot of other great ideas. (I remember a british high speed train that leaned into curves, that was quietly taken out of service after much initial fanfare)
Let's suppose a friendly alien landed his intact FTL craft at a military airport and hands the "keys" to the officer in charge. He then says "It's all yours bud - you just need to fill her up with 20 kilos of anti-hydrogen to reach the next star." What do you mean you can only refine a few atoms of it at astronomical cost? I thought you were a technologically advanced, well equipped society?
Consider even a small difference in timeframe. Some of Intel's top engineers in 1970 are handed a modern laptop PC to analyze. They would of course be familiar with integrated circuit technology and have relatively advanced scientific equipment such as electron microscopes to do the analysis. They would certainly be awed by its complexity and would likely glean more than a few patentable ideas from it. But they would not be cranking out 2 GHz Pentium 4's the following year, or likely even by the 1980s. The fabs of the day would be utterly incapable of producing them for many years, even when the CPU was fully analyzed and understood.
I believe it was Asimov who once said that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. We like to think of ourselves as advanced, but I think that this view is pretentious. There is still much to learn about the universe.
I have been thinking about those rumors of a crashed UFO being studied at the Groom Lake facility, and it got me thinking about the possibilities. If the stories were true, I doubt they would gain much useful knowledge from it. Technology far in advance of your own, (or even moderately in advance of your own) would be unfathomable. Consider the following:
A modern F-16 enters a temporal vortex, and crashes on the White House lawn, back in 1862 or so. The pilot is dead, and the plane will never fly again, but President Lincoln realizes the by studying the wreakage of this futuristic machine, they might be able to develop a flying war machine that would bring a speedy victory against the south. He summons the top scientists and engineers of the day to study the wreak and learn what they may.
They would discover that the machine is made of wonderous materials - Aluminum was newly discovered and more expensive than Silver in that day. Titanium was unknown, as would be carbon fibre and other composites. They could discover some of its physical properties, but would have no idea how to manufacture it.
The principle of the turbine was known, but they would likely assume the aircraft was steam driven. The electronic fly by wire controls and on board computer systems would of course be completely unfathomable. It would be doubtful they could even determine the function of the countless electronic black boxes on board, let alone try and reproduce them. Even if the plane and landed intact, and the pilot was co-operative, he could not help them design and build another F16 with the technology of the day. It is doubtful they could even refine the fuel that would enable the one aircraft they had to fly a single mission!
An examination of the overall aircraft would not give them any advantage in learning how to build a flying machine either - aircraft of the early 20th century bear no respemblence to a modern jet fighter. If the Wright brothers were given the opportunity to carefully examine one before they started building their flyer, it would have set them back many years. They might have been wasting time trying to build gas turbines, instead of using internal combustion engines with propellors. Also, modern fighters are not aerodynamically stable, a sacrifice made to improve maneuverability. They require active computer control systems - if the onboard computer goes down, so does the plane. And 1900's era flying machine design attempting to emulate the construction of a modern fighter would be doomed to failure.
I remember seeing an interview with one of the engineers who worked on it. The videos of the AVRO flying saucer only showed it scooting about less than a metre above the ground. As cool as it was, the AVRO flying car had a fatal flaw - as soon as it rose more than a metre or so above the ground, it would "hubcap" - yawing about in an unstable circular motion, that got worse the higher the vehicle rose. They needed a fast response active stability control system, but were never able to design it in before the contract was cancelled.
(They sort of allude to this on page 3 of the aforementioned web site)
Did anybody else find that? (Was Ok with IE, but rather ironic finding a site on open source tools displays correctly only for a closed source browser.
1. Bible. The scene of a final battle between the forces of good and evil, prophesied to occur at the end of the world.
2. A decisive or catastrophic conflic
Before you mod this "off topic" or rant about another SCO article, think about what the this really means for IT in general, and open source in particular. This is THE final, decisive battle between the forces of good and evil.
MS may have a hundred billion dollars in the bank, but they have passed their zenith, and are now slowly, but surely sliding backwards. Country by country, city by city, company by company they are finally starting to lose. Like a fist full of sand, the harder they sqeeze, the more it slips through their fingers.
I don't think the problem is guys like Darl doesn't get it. He does get it, and it probably keeps him awake at night.
Re:Linux written to compete with SCO?
on
SCO News Roundup
·
· Score: 1
"When (The Santa Cruz Operation) sold us the property, included in the property was a non-compete," McBride told IDG News Service. "Last time I checked, Linux was intended to compete with our core products."
Driven through a continuously variable transmission, like those used in many motorcycles. They are more reliable, less prone to breakage than a chain.
I remember seeing bikes with elliptical gears in an old popular mechanics they claimed match the power transfer curve of the human body, that would lower the gear ratio at the point you have less energy to push. They said it was about 20% more efficient or something like that, but I never saw it catch on much. Maybe the patent fees were too high.
We have plenty of more probable ways to destroy civilization. Assuming we do absolutely nothing about the problem for another 1000 years, the change of getting clobbered by "the big one" is still miniscule, and the odds are still much less that we won't detect it in enough time to do something. There have been a few near misses that were not detected until the last moment, but many others were found with decades of warning - enough time to devise a mission from scratch to push the sucker into a slightly different trajectory.
And by that time I predict we will either be i) extinct, ii) living in a second stone age, or iii) have unimaginable technology such as planet wide deflector shields or some super weapon that could take care of the problem in the blink of an eye.
There have been a number of recent articles about solar flare activity, which is more than capable of knocking out satellite electronics. Last time that happened, two of Canada's Anik satellites where affected. as well as a satellite providing pager messaging across the US. So what happens if a gyroscope fails and this the beam drifts over a populated area? If the control circuitry is fried, it might not be able to accept an emergency shutoff command.
Sounds more like a james bond type WMD than a practical power source to me.
'While you are installing your free open source software you may want to write Mrs. Ahmed a check. Her $8.5 million will help pay for the real cost of that free software.'
Should read:
While you are installing your free open source software, you may want to write SCO a cheque, to help pay for the real cost of defending their "stolen" intellectual property which they cannot disclose and will not show to you without an NDA giving SCO exclusive rights to your first born offspring.
No, not a class action suit. Instead, every major kernel contributor (both corporate and individual) should seek a separate injuction in his or her juristdiction barring SCO from distributing whatever potions of the kernel they hold copyright over. Their lawyer will have to fight 1000+ simultaneous cases in jusrisdictions all over the world, or at least all over the USA. If even one of these injuctions are upheld and SCO continues to distribute, they are automatically in contempt.
Slashdot Mirror
No, really!
Actually, flying straight the sun is very difficult.
If you are pushed a hair off course, your remains will go into orbit around the sun, or be blown outward by the solar winds.
Even if you aim precisely at the sun, the ever increasing pressure of the solar discharge will tend to push you off course and away.
Minors cannot legally contract, which presumably (IANAL) includes click through licences. Hmmm, maybe I should get him to install my software?
All they have to do is copyright the capta image, and sue the pants off anybody who uses it without permission.
Any lawyers want to comment on this?
for Borg assimilation.
I am old enough to remember that during the viking mission, the very first pictures that were aired showed a blue sky. But when they looked at a red electrical cable visible within the cameras field of view, they decided that the colour balance was off, and made adjustments so that the cables looked right. the sky turned from blue to pink. Thus came the first pictures of the pink martian sky.
Of course, I would be distrustful of the any colour chip reference anyway. Two years in the temperature and radiation extremes of space will likely wreak havoc with paint chips, unless they had gone for a ride in the LDEF (Long Duration Exposure Facility) and were re-checked on the ground for accuracy. Even then, the LDEF never made it out of earth's protective magnetic field.
Actually, the idea of building "integrated vaccum tubes" isn't as silly as it sounds. Transistors don't function above 200C, and microscopic tubes would allow us to build sensors and other circuits where transistors cannot go, at least without elaborate cooling. There has already been talk of using silicon vaccum tubes to power remote sensors in jet and aircraft engines, which must operate at extremely high temperatures.
And I always thought they would find an idea home in robot spacecraft, where there is already a vaccum. They would also offer extreme resistance to the effects of hard radiation such as the Io belt around Jupiter, which tends to fry semiconductor electonics.
Remember BRE-X?
9 7. htm
http://geology.about.com/cs/mineralogy/a/aa0420
You could have made a mint on it if you bought in at the right time. The stock went into the $200 plus range, then became worthless over a period of a week.
History repeats itself.
I believe this may constitute tortuitous interference - they are imposing retroactive licencing terms on their customers that were not in place when they signed the original SW purchase or lease agreement, and are likely to cause harm to the customer's business, if they are forced to suddenly replace their SCO or Linux SW on short notice because SCO is imposing new conditions that were not in the original contract.
The potential damages are likely to be much worse if and when SCO's claims are trounced out of court.
To protect her against the fanatical army of pro-SCO terrorists.
(And every time groklaw gets
The only problem with this is that everybody knows what few techies they have left are probably too stupid to even know how to carry out such an attack.
Actually, I would rather see one universal distro that could become whatever you want it to be - anything from a single floppy firewall that runs on a 386, to an everything but the kitchen sink super desktop system, or perhaps one element of a beowulf cluster.
That is the way the kernel itself is designed - it can be cut down slim and trim or loaded up with all the fixin's. But it is all built off the same code base.
1000 specialized distros will lead to confusion in the marketplace, and would be a nightmare to keep up to date. Imagine if you have even 10 of them to take care of, and had to remember a few months later how to reinstall or patch if the tools and package management are different for each!
Interesting idea, but the real test will be with long term cost of operation. The cost of diesel fuel may be insignificant if this thing spends significantly more time in the garage, or costs more to build.
Not that I want to be a naysayer. I hope it pans out, but don't be too surprised if it quietly goes away never to be heard from again lot a lot of other great ideas. (I remember a british high speed train that leaned into curves, that was quietly taken out of service after much initial fanfare)
Just tell your PHB to delete all of the afforementioned files from
Would we indeed?
Let's suppose a friendly alien landed his intact FTL craft at a military airport and hands the "keys" to the officer in charge. He then says "It's all yours bud - you just need to fill her up with 20 kilos of anti-hydrogen to reach the next star." What do you mean you can only refine a few atoms of it at astronomical cost? I thought you were a technologically advanced, well equipped society?
Consider even a small difference in timeframe. Some of Intel's top engineers in 1970 are handed a modern laptop PC to analyze. They would of course be familiar with integrated circuit technology and have relatively advanced scientific equipment such as electron microscopes to do the analysis. They would certainly be awed by its complexity and would likely glean more than a few patentable ideas from it. But they would not be cranking out 2 GHz Pentium 4's the following year, or likely even by the 1980s. The fabs of the day would be utterly incapable of producing them for many years, even when the CPU was fully analyzed and understood.
I believe it was Asimov who once said that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. We like to think of ourselves as advanced, but I think that this view is pretentious. There is still much to learn about the universe.
I have been thinking about those rumors of a crashed UFO being studied at the Groom Lake facility, and it got me thinking about the possibilities. If the stories were true, I doubt they would gain much useful knowledge from it. Technology far in advance of your own, (or even moderately in advance of your own) would be unfathomable. Consider the following:
A modern F-16 enters a temporal vortex, and crashes on the White House lawn, back in 1862 or so. The pilot is dead, and the plane will never fly again, but President Lincoln realizes the by studying the wreakage of this futuristic machine, they might be able to develop a flying war machine that would bring a speedy victory against the south. He summons the top scientists and engineers of the day to study the wreak and learn what they may.
They would discover that the machine is made of wonderous materials - Aluminum was newly discovered and more expensive than Silver in that day. Titanium was unknown, as would be carbon fibre and other composites. They could discover some of its physical properties, but would have no idea how to manufacture it.
The principle of the turbine was known, but they would likely assume the aircraft was steam driven. The electronic fly by wire controls and on board computer systems would of course be completely unfathomable. It would be doubtful they could even determine the function of the countless electronic black boxes on board, let alone try and reproduce them. Even if the plane and landed intact, and the pilot was co-operative, he could not help them design and build another F16 with the technology of the day. It is doubtful they could even refine the fuel that would enable the one aircraft they had to fly a single mission!
An examination of the overall aircraft would not give them any advantage in learning how to build a flying machine either - aircraft of the early 20th century bear no respemblence to a modern jet fighter. If the Wright brothers were given the opportunity to carefully examine one before they started building their flyer, it would have set them back many years. They might have been wasting time trying to build gas turbines, instead of using internal combustion engines with propellors. Also, modern fighters are not aerodynamically stable, a sacrifice made to improve maneuverability. They require active computer control systems - if the onboard computer goes down, so does the plane. And 1900's era flying machine design attempting to emulate the construction of a modern fighter would be doomed to failure.
I remember seeing an interview with one of the engineers who worked on it. The videos of the AVRO flying saucer only showed it scooting about less than a metre above the ground. As cool as it was, the AVRO flying car had a fatal flaw - as soon as it rose more than a metre or so above the ground, it would "hubcap" - yawing about in an unstable circular motion, that got worse the higher the vehicle rose. They needed a fast response active stability control system, but were never able to design it in before the contract was cancelled.
(They sort of allude to this on page 3 of the aforementioned web site)
a genetically engineered fish swims into California waters? Will it be promptly arrested and deported?
Did anybody else find that?
(Was Ok with IE, but rather ironic finding a site on open source tools displays correctly only for a closed source browser.
From dictionary.com:
Armageddon ( P ) Pronunciation Key (arm-gdn)
n.
1. Bible. The scene of a final battle between the forces of good and evil, prophesied to occur at the end of the world.
2. A decisive or catastrophic conflic
Before you mod this "off topic" or rant about another SCO article, think about what the this really means for IT in general, and open source in particular. This is THE final, decisive battle between the forces of good and evil.
MS may have a hundred billion dollars in the bank, but they have passed their zenith, and are now slowly, but surely sliding backwards. Country by country, city by city, company by company they are finally starting to lose. Like a fist full of sand, the harder they sqeeze, the more it slips through their fingers.
I don't think the problem is guys like Darl doesn't get it. He does get it, and it probably keeps him awake at night.
"When (The Santa Cruz Operation) sold us the property, included in the property was a non-compete," McBride told IDG News Service. "Last time I checked, Linux was intended to compete with our core products."
I thought SCO's core product was lawsuits?
Driven through a continuously variable transmission, like those used in many motorcycles. They are more reliable, less prone to breakage than a chain.
I remember seeing bikes with elliptical gears in an old popular mechanics they claimed match the power transfer curve of the human body, that would lower the gear ratio at the point you have less energy to push. They said it was about 20% more efficient or something like that, but I never saw it catch on much. Maybe the patent fees were too high.
We have plenty of more probable ways to destroy civilization. Assuming we do absolutely nothing about the problem for another 1000 years, the change of getting clobbered by "the big one" is still miniscule, and the odds are still much less that we won't detect it in enough time to do something. There have been a few near misses that were not detected until the last moment, but many others were found with decades of warning - enough time to devise a mission from scratch to push the sucker into a slightly different trajectory.
And by that time I predict we will either be i) extinct, ii) living in a second stone age, or iii) have unimaginable technology such as planet wide deflector shields or some super weapon that could take care of the problem in the blink of an eye.
There have been a number of recent articles about solar flare activity, which is more than capable of knocking out satellite electronics. Last time that happened, two of Canada's Anik satellites where affected. as well as a satellite providing pager messaging across the US. So what happens if a gyroscope fails and this the beam drifts over a populated area? If the control circuitry is fried, it might not be able to accept an emergency shutoff command.
Sounds more like a james bond type WMD than a practical power source to me.
'While you are installing your free open source software you may want to write Mrs. Ahmed a check. Her $8.5 million will help pay for the real cost of that free software.'
Should read:
While you are installing your free open source software, you may want to write SCO a cheque, to help pay for the real cost of defending their "stolen" intellectual property which they cannot disclose and will not show to you without an NDA giving SCO exclusive rights to your first born offspring.
No, not a class action suit. Instead, every major kernel contributor (both corporate and individual) should seek a separate injuction in his or her juristdiction barring SCO from distributing whatever potions of the kernel they hold copyright over. Their lawyer will have to fight 1000+ simultaneous cases in jusrisdictions all over the world, or at least all over the USA. If even one of these injuctions are upheld and SCO continues to distribute, they are automatically in contempt.