It's political. The thing is, the bankers who control the money and the infrastructure necessary to allow this don't really want to do it, or if they do, they want the system to be so intrusive in its monitoring that it offends most of the people who would use such a system. Bankers aren't known to be the most progressive or forward thinking individuals. Or intelligent for that matter.
What you need is a technically savvy banker, and we'll probably get such a critter in about 20-30 years. Takes a while for new thoughts to crank through the squirrell wheel.
There are technical problems as well, but they're a lot easier to solve than the political ones. Most of the systems out there are just too inconvenient to use.
Do you want to go into middle and upper management? If you find that gratifying, and that is your long-term goal, then yes, an MBA from the right school will help you out tremendously. It is possible to get into upper mgt without an MBA, but the odds are against you. Notice I said MBA from the right school, and not just MBA. An MBA from a state university is not going to buy you much compared with what an MBA from Hahvahd will get you. Sort of like law schools, I guess.
If your goal is to write the next generation optimizing compiler or device driver for the set-top box that hasn't hit the market yet, an MBA will help you about as much as a kick in the crotch, and it will be about as much fun.
Personally, I think the world needs a few less managers and few more people who actually do stuff. But what the world needs and what the world rewards are two very different things...
And WATCH the stock market, have some idea of what it's going to do, and bother with the tax consequences, but don't obsess over taxes.
Options are little lottery tickets that may or may not have a winning number. If you like to gamble, there's absolutely nothing wrong with them, but if the risk makes you uncomfortable, by all means go to a company that pays you in cash.
Also keep in mind that you, a lowly engineer, usually come to the table 6 months after all the big boys have eaten their fill. Keep in mind that there may not be much food left of the table, if any, by the time you get there.
If you don't teach your kids to think for themselves, someone else is going to do their thinking for them. Granted, that someone may not hurt them, but you can be assured, they won't have their best interest at heart.
But people who can think for themselves, tend not to buy as much, and they tend to be unpredictable. Why, who knows who an independent thinker will be voting for this election. So the system tends to discourage it. And for some families, critical thought has been missing for at least 2 generations already.
Computers are only relevant, in that they amplify the state you're already in. If you're a critical thinker, a computer is just another sword in your armory. If you can't think, a computer is just another set of chains that bind you to the person(s) who is(are) thinking for you.
I have a homebuilt Athlon running win2k. Most of the compnents are reasonably up to date.
I had no problems installing the game, there was a bug at the very end of the game where it complained about a missing node, but I encountered no other bugs. Bad sectors on disks? Reminds me of the old commodore 64 days. I guess if you wait long enough, everything eventually comes back into fashion. And I guarantee you, that bad sector copy protection will delay the warez d00ds by 8 hours, if that. And it will annoy the hell out of everyone else. The rest of what he's complaining about sounds like out of date hardware. I'm not saying that's right, but sadly, it's all too understandable.
Compared with Riven, Myst III is but a pale echo. There wasn't as much work put into the game design, and it shows. It was fun to play, but the "je ne se quois" that Myst and Riven had just isn't there.
You seem to be the only one who actually read and comprehended the arguments made instead of just reacting.
I find it encouraging that solar cell efficiency has improved. Perhaps with more research, and some conservation, electrical needs can be met without undue hardship. I too would prefer decentralized electricity generation. And I favor a land based solution, as it requires less energy in to set up. But I don't see people changing their ways voluntarily in a mature rational manner. Most of those "ignorant, vested, unimaginatives" are going to be dragged into the new era, kicking and screaming.
So what do you see replacing petroleum? Electricity can cover for it, but not completely.
Re:What's attractive about a palmtop?
on
Palm In Trouble?
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· Score: 1
Fine. But what do you carry your laptop in? Some of us prefer to travel light, and for us, the tradeoff between mass vs. power is a handheld. My dad, who isn't real technical, but travels a lot, comments that a palmtop travels better than a laptop, if you don't need to bang a Word document out.
For me, when I want a real computer, I want a monster N-Ghz desktop machine with lotsa cooling fans on it. Otherwise, when I'm traveling, I want just enough computing power to get me by until I can get to another monster desktop.
And even the cheapest palmtops can hold stacks and stack of notebooks in their memory banks.
Everybody's different. You know that there are cat people and dog people? Makes you wonder sometimes...
They are the question. The answer is no. Read this site's analysis of the solar cells and why they won't work. The basic gist of their argument is that right now, it takes more energy to make a solar cell, than the solar cell will ever produce in its useful life. It's an energy sink. A solar cell would have to more efficient, a lot more efficient just to reach the break even point on energy in/energy out.
I'm afraid our realistic options are what they've always been - petroleum and nuclear. Petroleum production will be peaking in a few years, which leaves nuclear power. But even nuclear fuel supplies are limited. The only real solution is nuclear fusion. I hope the Farnsworth Fusor is the answer, because we're going to need one sooner than you think.
But your obscure reference to the glory days of Usenet just whizzed over the heads of 95% of the Slashdot crowd - most of them aren't old enough to remember those times.
Isn't part of the whole "open source" movement to get as much software, of high enough quality, at as low a price, as possible available to the consumer?
Nope. The free software movement is about being able to write the code you want without anyone telling you to do it differently. That's what the "free" in "free software" means. That's all it means. It's not about "the consumer" and it's not about "high quality". Those things may or may not happen as side effects, but I seriously doubt that the people actually writing the code are thinking like that. They're scratching personal itches, and just playing in the sandbox.
As far as Windows 9x legendary insecurity goes, you can make a system secure or you can make it convenient. The tradeoffs between security and convenience the Windows team made were probably less than optimal, but hindsight is 20/20. At the time Win95 was being developed, MS was barely aware the internet existed. TCP/IP? What's that?
Developing for Win32 is definitely a minefield. If you get too popular, MS will screw you over with a smile. However, there's a lot of niches that are too inconvenient for MS, but still allow opportunities for profit.
I think the future lies with embedded computing. Not that the PC will go away, but its use will be limited to the subset of people who really understand it. The rest of the world will use TiVo's and various "network toasters". And I suspect the OS and API running those things won't belong to MS. MS' future is tied to the PC, and they haven't been able to move away from it all that much.
Think about the long term!
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
Over time, unions tends to become another layer of management. Of course they don't start out that way, but please think about what will happen over a period of decades. Sometimes corporate management is so institutionally inept and feral that you need that extra protective layer.
I would suggest that unless your life or health is seriously threatened by unsafe conditions, to go ahead and push for unionization. Otherwise, think long and hard about it. If your company's management is so inept that a union looks appealing, I'd try to find a better company to work for. If I couldn't find a better company to work for, I'd ask myself if I was the problem, or if there was another line of work I could pursue. It's a lot easier to change yourself than it is the world, or even a moderately-sized corporation.
This is just my opinion, and god knows, others out there disagree!
But if you want to write app code for their OS, they won't stand in your way, at least not initially. They may crush you out of existence later, but they make it easy to write apps for their platforms. IBM, on the other hand, made it hard. And MS had a head start on cultivating developer mindshare. That and the fact that IBM was slower to respond to changing stimuli pretty much sealed the fate of OS/2.
But of course nothing compares to linux, linux may be hard to configure for the average luser, but it's a developer's delight - all the tools are mostly there, and they're all free. Now if linux was easy enough for the average luser to install, there might be a market for 3rd party apps, but I'm not holding my breath.
Anyone who isn't seriously impaired can get a class 3. Costs $70-$90 and a doctor's visit.
I think it would be courteous to file a flight plan, since he is going to "flying" into class Alpha airspace. I'm not sure what the sectional looks like, but it's prolly Class Echo, followed by Class Alpha. However, I think the FAA could cut the poor guy a little slack - as long as he isn't going to be interfering with any airline traffic, let him have his fun. If I was him, I'd just go to Mexico, the FAA can be a real bitch to deal with.
The FAA is to the aviation world, as the IRS is to the business world. Some people bring joy when they arrive, others when they leave, and the FAA definitely brings joy when they're leaving.
I'm sure there is, and like the IBM PC, not many people use it.
There are so many different unix clones out there, it doesn't matter anymore. And from an application layer perspective, it really doesn't matter. When Doom was ported to Linux, it didn't take very much work before it was ported to every other d*mn unix-like food product in existence.
What MacOS X does offer is a easy to install, easy to configure, professional looking UI on top of it all. Now if Apple would port that UI layer and configuration tools over to other unix clones, like say, linux, then linux might have a credible shot at replacing MS on the desktop.
As long as you have to know your monitor's refresh rate to change your screen resolution, linux will never make it.
Information on the parent company mentioned
on
Hi-Tech Repo Man
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· Score: 1
The customer is #1, right? Well, maybe not. Companies are not in business to make the customer happy, they are in business to make money. Generally, making the customer happy leads to making money, but not always.
Tech support is one of those areas where the best interests of the customer and the best interests of the company diverge. Tech support is generally seen as a *cost center*, ie. it is a part of the business that takes in more money than it generates. Sales would be seen as a *profit center*, ie. it is a part of business that takes in less money than it generates. Cost centers are something a business wants to minimize as much as possible. In an ideal world, for the company, it would never ever provide tech support at all. Which is why most companies never seem to have enough tech support people to adequately do the job, from the customer's perspective.
Granted this situation pisses the customer off, but generally the company tries to provide just enough tech support to keep the customer from leaving and going somewhere else. If the company is a monopoly, you the customer, are screwed.
The customer, if he truly wants quality tech support from the manufacturer is going to have to stop buying products from that manufacturer and somehow associate the loss of revenue with crappy tech support. Good luck.
I think that companies will try to move the customer off of this complex beast that needs tech support onto something simpler that doesn't require tech support at all. Something with a few buttons, no access to the OS, and maybe 1 or 2 baked in apps. It'll either work or it won't, and if it doesn't you'll get it exchanged for a new one that does.
Either that, or we'll move to an openly specified complex beast, where your corner technician can diagnose and repair your problem, must like cars are diagnosed and repaired by countless small operators distributed throughout the land.
Anything that makes you want to get into a chopper should begin with you visiting a mental health professional. Rotorcraft are finicky and dangerous.
I'm currently going through the hoops to get a private pilot's, and from what little I've seen of the aviation world, everything that can be analog, is. And there's a fair amount of stuff sitting in front of you that isn't even electric. The gyro indicators run off of engine vacuum! If airplane engineers have suspicions about electricity, forget about ever trusting anything like a computer.
Some of the newer heavy metal is heavily computerized, but outside of that small minority, most general aviation planes are close to 100% hands on. I suspect that even the fuel injected turbo charged engines have no computer control. And I'm not sure you'd get many pilots into a plane that had a computer controlled engine.
About the only thing computerized that has gained any traction are the GPS mapping units. But those just provide information only, and don't affect any vital flight system.
Like everything in engineering, computerized automation provides some tradeoffs. In exchange for removing some complexity from the user, the cost is more overall chaos in the system. For some applications, this makes sense, for others, it doesn't.
They really really bug me. Leaving crappy shortcuts all over my pristine desktop. Signup for this, signup for that. I don't want to sign up for anything, I just want to use TurboTax. AND I DON'T WANT TO SIGN UP FOR AOL, YOU ASSHOLES!
I like TurboTax, and I gues it's worth the hassle, but they really ought to give you the option to opt out of such crap. It's still my machine, right? Right?
Once you do this, once you do that, read the HOWTO, and you can play games. You are seriously overestimating the ability of the average PC luser. All the PC luser knows how to do is locate setup.exe, and double click on it. And that's if the CD isn't set up to autorun when you stick it in the drive. Anything that's more complicated than that isn't going to fly out of the ground effect of the hobbyists and hackers.
If linux is ever going to take over the home user's desktop, it's going to have to change - radically. And if that happens, linux won't be as interesting as it is now for the people who are currently pushing it forward.
Don't get me wrong, I think linux is great - as a server. Configuring dns is a four line modification to the config file. Configuring exim beats the pants off of configuring sendmail. An edit here, and edit there and you're all good. It certainly has come a long way since I last played with it in the early '90s, but it has a long long way to go.
I don't think not having enough AGL would be a problem with that aircraft. If you're going to
fly a rotorcraft, autorotation would be the easier to fly, than if it was powered. No torque, no translational drift, less problems. Still have the dissymmetry of lift to worry about, and I suppose the thing would have vortex ring state issues like all other rotorcraft. Flying any rotorcraft is not for the faint of heart.
I am disturbed by the aerodynamic properties of that fuselage. But I guess that's what test pilots are for...
Doesn't matter what language you've decreed to be used, if all you have are bonehead programmers, you're going to get bonehead code. The, um, quality of the code may be *slightly* different based on the language you've picked, but not enough to matter.
Hire good managers, hire good people, and let them pick the language and write their code.
the most is the ingrained culture of stupidity here in the U.S. Nobody cares about education or knowledge seeking here anymore, outside of a few enclaves. I'd dearly love to live in a country where learning and rationality were top priorities.
You say freedom has declined? I put that in a broader context, where everything has declined ove the past 30 years. We have less of everthing. Less intelligence, less civility, less culture, less money.
I'm not sure moving will solve anything, as this is worldwide decline, and not just local to the U.S. I would take a look at what you like to do best, and find the country that allows you to that better than any other. Maximize your fun!
I think there are more bugs in closed source projects, but they never get publicized. Only the most egregious ones are publicized and fixed, and the customer learns to live with the rest. Have you ever tried to get a company to fix a reproducible bug in their code? It's like pulling teeth. And the non-reproducible ones? Ha ha ha ha ha!
There's been a wealth of knowledge gathered over the years on how to write high quality software. _Writing Solid Code_ and _Code Complete_ are two standard texts that come to mind. This is not a technical problem. It's an organizational problem. I think we're reaching the limits of what the corporate structure will allow us to do, and writing truly good software lies beyond that boundary. Open source represents the first steps beyond that corporate limit.
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It's political. The thing is, the bankers who control the money and the infrastructure necessary to allow this don't really want to do it, or if they do, they want the system to be so intrusive in its monitoring that it offends most of the people who would use such a system. Bankers aren't known to be the most progressive or forward thinking individuals. Or intelligent for that matter.
What you need is a technically savvy banker, and we'll probably get such a critter in about 20-30 years. Takes a while for new thoughts to crank through the squirrell wheel.
There are technical problems as well, but they're a lot easier to solve than the political ones. Most of the systems out there are just too inconvenient to use.
Do you want to go into middle and upper management? If you find that gratifying, and that is your long-term goal, then yes, an MBA from the right school will help you out tremendously. It is possible to get into upper mgt without an MBA, but the odds are against you. Notice I said MBA from the right school, and not just MBA. An MBA from a state university is not going to buy you much compared with what an MBA from Hahvahd will get you. Sort of like law schools, I guess.
If your goal is to write the next generation optimizing compiler or device driver for the set-top box that hasn't hit the market yet, an MBA will help you about as much as a kick in the crotch, and it will be about as much fun.
Personally, I think the world needs a few less managers and few more people who actually do stuff. But what the world needs and what the world rewards are two very different things...
And WATCH the stock market, have some idea of what it's going to do, and bother with the tax consequences, but don't obsess over taxes.
Options are little lottery tickets that may or may not have a winning number. If you like to gamble, there's absolutely nothing wrong with them, but if the risk makes you uncomfortable, by all means go to a company that pays you in cash.
Also keep in mind that you, a lowly engineer, usually come to the table 6 months after all the big boys have eaten their fill. Keep in mind that there may not be much food left of the table, if any, by the time you get there.
If you don't teach your kids to think for themselves, someone else is going to do their thinking for them. Granted, that someone may not hurt them, but you can be assured, they won't have their best interest at heart.
But people who can think for themselves, tend not to buy as much, and they tend to be unpredictable. Why, who knows who an independent thinker will be voting for this election. So the system tends to discourage it. And for some families, critical thought has been missing for at least 2 generations already.
Computers are only relevant, in that they amplify the state you're already in. If you're a critical thinker, a computer is just another sword in your armory. If you can't think, a computer is just another set of chains that bind you to the person(s) who is(are) thinking for you.
I have a homebuilt Athlon running win2k. Most of the compnents are reasonably up to date.
I had no problems installing the game, there was a bug at the very end of the game where it complained about a missing node, but I encountered no other bugs. Bad sectors on disks? Reminds me of the old commodore 64 days. I guess if you wait long enough, everything eventually comes back into fashion. And I guarantee you, that bad sector copy protection will delay the warez d00ds by 8 hours, if that. And it will annoy the hell out of everyone else. The rest of what he's complaining about sounds like out of date hardware. I'm not saying that's right, but sadly, it's all too understandable.
Compared with Riven, Myst III is but a pale echo. There wasn't as much work put into the game design, and it shows. It was fun to play, but the "je ne se quois" that Myst and Riven had just isn't there.
You seem to be the only one who actually read and comprehended the arguments made instead of just reacting.
I find it encouraging that solar cell efficiency has improved. Perhaps with more research, and some conservation, electrical needs can be met without undue hardship. I too would prefer decentralized electricity generation. And I favor a land based solution, as it requires less energy in to set up. But I don't see people changing their ways voluntarily in a mature rational manner. Most of those "ignorant, vested, unimaginatives" are going to be dragged into the new era, kicking and screaming.
So what do you see replacing petroleum? Electricity can cover for it, but not completely.
Whatever happens, things are going to change.
It's called the "Apple Newton". Hope this helps!
Fine. But what do you carry your laptop in? Some of us prefer to travel light, and for us, the tradeoff between mass vs. power is a handheld. My dad, who isn't real technical, but travels a lot, comments that a palmtop travels better than a laptop, if you don't need to bang a Word document out.
For me, when I want a real computer, I want a monster N-Ghz desktop machine with lotsa cooling fans on it. Otherwise, when I'm traveling, I want just enough computing power to get me by until I can get to another monster desktop.
And even the cheapest palmtops can hold stacks and stack of notebooks in their memory banks.
Everybody's different. You know that there are cat people and dog people? Makes you wonder sometimes...
They are the question. The answer is no. Read this site's analysis of the solar cells and why they won't work. The basic gist of their argument is that right now, it takes more energy to make a solar cell, than the solar cell will ever produce in its useful life. It's an energy sink. A solar cell would have to more efficient, a lot more efficient just to reach the break even point on energy in/energy out.
I'm afraid our realistic options are what they've always been - petroleum and nuclear. Petroleum production will be peaking in a few years, which leaves nuclear power. But even nuclear fuel supplies are limited. The only real solution is nuclear fusion. I hope the Farnsworth Fusor is the answer, because we're going to need one sooner than you think.
Heh heh heh,
But your obscure reference to the glory days of Usenet just whizzed over the heads of 95% of the Slashdot crowd - most of them aren't old enough to remember those times.
Nope. The free software movement is about being able to write the code you want without anyone telling you to do it differently. That's what the "free" in "free software" means. That's all it means. It's not about "the consumer" and it's not about "high quality". Those things may or may not happen as side effects, but I seriously doubt that the people actually writing the code are thinking like that. They're scratching personal itches, and just playing in the sandbox.
As far as Windows 9x legendary insecurity goes, you can make a system secure or you can make it convenient. The tradeoffs between security and convenience the Windows team made were probably less than optimal, but hindsight is 20/20. At the time Win95 was being developed, MS was barely aware the internet existed. TCP/IP? What's that?
Developing for Win32 is definitely a minefield. If you get too popular, MS will screw you over with a smile. However, there's a lot of niches that are too inconvenient for MS, but still allow opportunities for profit.
I think the future lies with embedded computing. Not that the PC will go away, but its use will be limited to the subset of people who really understand it. The rest of the world will use TiVo's and various "network toasters". And I suspect the OS and API running those things won't belong to MS. MS' future is tied to the PC, and they haven't been able to move away from it all that much.
Over time, unions tends to become another layer of management. Of course they don't start out that way, but please think about what will happen over a period of decades. Sometimes corporate management is so institutionally inept and feral that you need that extra protective layer.
I would suggest that unless your life or health is seriously threatened by unsafe conditions, to go ahead and push for unionization. Otherwise, think long and hard about it. If your company's management is so inept that a union looks appealing, I'd try to find a better company to work for. If I couldn't find a better company to work for, I'd ask myself if I was the problem, or if there was another line of work I could pursue. It's a lot easier to change yourself than it is the world, or even a moderately-sized corporation.
This is just my opinion, and god knows, others out there disagree!
But if you want to write app code for their OS, they won't stand in your way, at least not initially. They may crush you out of existence later, but they make it easy to write apps for their platforms. IBM, on the other hand, made it hard. And MS had a head start on cultivating developer mindshare. That and the fact that IBM was slower to respond to changing stimuli pretty much sealed the fate of OS/2.
But of course nothing compares to linux, linux may be hard to configure for the average luser, but it's a developer's delight - all the tools are mostly there, and they're all free. Now if linux was easy enough for the average luser to install, there might be a market for 3rd party apps, but I'm not holding my breath.
Anyone who isn't seriously impaired can get a class 3. Costs $70-$90 and a doctor's visit.
I think it would be courteous to file a flight plan, since he is going to "flying" into class Alpha airspace. I'm not sure what the sectional looks like, but it's prolly Class Echo, followed by Class Alpha. However, I think the FAA could cut the poor guy a little slack - as long as he isn't going to be interfering with any airline traffic, let him have his fun. If I was him, I'd just go to Mexico, the FAA can be a real bitch to deal with.
The FAA is to the aviation world, as the IRS is to the business world. Some people bring joy when they arrive, others when they leave, and the FAA definitely brings joy when they're leaving.
I'm sure there is, and like the IBM PC, not many people use it.
There are so many different unix clones out there, it doesn't matter anymore. And from an application layer perspective, it really doesn't matter. When Doom was ported to Linux, it didn't take very much work before it was ported to every other d*mn unix-like food product in existence.
What MacOS X does offer is a easy to install, easy to configure, professional looking UI on top of it all. Now if Apple would port that UI layer and configuration tools over to other unix clones, like say, linux, then linux might have a credible shot at replacing MS on the desktop.
As long as you have to know your monitor's refresh rate to change your screen resolution, linux will never make it.
Yahoo profile on Advanced Wireless
Advanced Wireless home page
The customer is #1, right? Well, maybe not. Companies are not in business to make the customer happy, they are in business to make money. Generally, making the customer happy leads to making money, but not always.
Tech support is one of those areas where the best interests of the customer and the best interests of the company diverge. Tech support is generally seen as a *cost center*, ie. it is a part of the business that takes in more money than it generates. Sales would be seen as a *profit center*, ie. it is a part of business that takes in less money than it generates. Cost centers are something a business wants to minimize as much as possible. In an ideal world, for the company, it would never ever provide tech support at all. Which is why most companies never seem to have enough tech support people to adequately do the job, from the customer's perspective.
Granted this situation pisses the customer off, but generally the company tries to provide just enough tech support to keep the customer from leaving and going somewhere else. If the company is a monopoly, you the customer, are screwed.
The customer, if he truly wants quality tech support from the manufacturer is going to have to stop buying products from that manufacturer and somehow associate the loss of revenue with crappy tech support. Good luck.
I think that companies will try to move the customer off of this complex beast that needs tech support onto something simpler that doesn't require tech support at all. Something with a few buttons, no access to the OS, and maybe 1 or 2 baked in apps. It'll either work or it won't, and if it doesn't you'll get it exchanged for a new one that does.
Either that, or we'll move to an openly specified complex beast, where your corner technician can diagnose and repair your problem, must like cars are diagnosed and repaired by countless small operators distributed throughout the land.
don't make me get up at 8 every morning to do
jumping jacks with the rest of my comrades,
sure, why not?
Anything that makes you want to get into a chopper should begin with you visiting a mental health professional. Rotorcraft are finicky and dangerous.
I'm currently going through the hoops to get a private pilot's, and from what little I've seen of the aviation world, everything that can be analog, is. And there's a fair amount of stuff sitting in front of you that isn't even electric. The gyro indicators run off of engine vacuum! If airplane engineers have suspicions about electricity, forget about ever trusting anything like a computer.
Some of the newer heavy metal is heavily computerized, but outside of that small minority, most general aviation planes are close to 100% hands on. I suspect that even the fuel injected turbo charged engines have no computer control. And I'm not sure you'd get many pilots into a plane that had a computer controlled engine.
About the only thing computerized that has gained any traction are the GPS mapping units. But those just provide information only, and don't affect any vital flight system.
Like everything in engineering, computerized automation provides some tradeoffs. In exchange for removing some complexity from the user, the cost is more overall chaos in the system. For some applications, this makes sense, for others, it doesn't.
They really really bug me. Leaving crappy shortcuts all over my pristine desktop. Signup for this, signup for that. I don't want to sign up for anything, I just want to use TurboTax. AND I DON'T WANT TO SIGN UP FOR AOL, YOU ASSHOLES!
I like TurboTax, and I gues it's worth the hassle, but they really ought to give you the option to opt out of such crap. It's still my machine, right? Right?
Once you do this, once you do that, read the HOWTO, and you can play games. You are seriously overestimating the ability of the average PC luser. All the PC luser knows how to do is locate setup.exe, and double click on it. And that's if the CD isn't set up to autorun when you stick it in the drive. Anything that's more complicated than that isn't going to fly out of the ground effect of the hobbyists and hackers.
If linux is ever going to take over the home user's desktop, it's going to have to change - radically. And if that happens, linux won't be as interesting as it is now for the people who are currently pushing it forward.
Don't get me wrong, I think linux is great - as a server. Configuring dns is a four line modification to the config file. Configuring exim beats the pants off of configuring sendmail. An edit here, and edit there and you're all good. It certainly has come a long way since I last played with it in the early '90s, but it has a long long way to go.
I don't think not having enough AGL would be a problem with that aircraft. If you're going to
fly a rotorcraft, autorotation would be the easier to fly, than if it was powered. No torque, no translational drift, less problems. Still have the dissymmetry of lift to worry about, and I suppose the thing would have vortex ring state issues like all other rotorcraft. Flying any rotorcraft is not for the faint of heart.
I am disturbed by the aerodynamic properties of that fuselage. But I guess that's what test pilots are for...
Doesn't matter what language you've decreed to be used, if all you have are bonehead programmers, you're going to get bonehead code. The, um, quality of the code may be *slightly* different based on the language you've picked, but not enough to matter.
Hire good managers, hire good people, and let them pick the language and write their code.
the most is the ingrained culture of stupidity here in the U.S. Nobody cares about education or knowledge seeking here anymore, outside of a few enclaves. I'd dearly love to live in a country where learning and rationality were top priorities.
You say freedom has declined? I put that in a broader context, where everything has declined ove the past 30 years. We have less of everthing. Less intelligence, less civility, less culture, less money.
I'm not sure moving will solve anything, as this is worldwide decline, and not just local to the U.S. I would take a look at what you like to do best, and find the country that allows you to that better than any other. Maximize your fun!
I think there are more bugs in closed source projects, but they never get publicized. Only the most egregious ones are publicized and fixed, and the customer learns to live with the rest. Have you ever tried to get a company to fix a reproducible bug in their code? It's like pulling teeth. And the non-reproducible ones? Ha ha ha ha ha!
There's been a wealth of knowledge gathered over the years on how to write high quality software. _Writing Solid Code_ and _Code Complete_ are two standard texts that come to mind. This is not a technical problem. It's an organizational problem. I think we're reaching the limits of what the corporate structure will allow us to do, and writing truly good software lies beyond that boundary. Open source represents the first steps beyond that corporate limit.