Blinking 12 o'clockers: Designers of electronics who arrogantly assume they should demand the users attention because their devices clock hasn't been set, despite the fact that the time of day may be utterly irrelevant to the operation of the device in question.
There's just no excuse for an engineer who designs a blinking 12:00. Include a receiver for one of the various radio-based time sources if your device needs the time badly enough to justify that. Otherwise, shut up, display something neutral, and wait for the user to set the time when they bloody well feel like it. (Which, if your device is a microwave in a kitchen with 3 other clock displays, well, let's not hold our breath OK?)
DHS has extensive rule-making authority. These rules have the force of law. You seem to be implying that these rules won't become legal requirements without action by Congress. In this, you are incorrect.
As far as who deserves to have their rights protected, everyone vs. just citizens, I think Jefferson addressed that better than I could.
"they had good reasons for not releasing Java which were because of the threat of forking Java"
Which would be bad for Sun, yes, exactly. They wanted to maintain control, because they thought that would be better for them.
I don't know why everyone gets all defensive and horrified when it is pointed out that Sun is a for-profit enterprise that should and does act in its own self interest. Sure, Sun is great, hooray. In seeking to understand Suns motivations and probable future actions, one should not confuse Sun with the FSF (for example).
Linus's posts clearly illustrate that he is a geek who says what's on his mind without worrying over-much about whether he's offending anyone. He probably figures his "real friends" can take it.
Um, actually I was just trying to describe what I saw as the main thrust of Linus' post. You are free of course to disagree with Linus, as it seems you do.
"...which Sun as an entity donated more code to than any other company or organization"
I think the University of California and AT&T might debate you there, though total code donated is neither measurable nor necessarily relevant.
Whatever the case, Linus seems to feel that Sun is mostly interested in burnishing their OpenSource credentials to the extent that it helps Sun; rather than helping OpenSource just to be helpful. He also seems to feel this is expected and OK.
"One of the intentions was allegedy for it to be used for construction in space."
I doubt that intention was seriously advanced by engineers who know anything about it. To build something in space needs the parts (as pre-assembled on the ground as possible) and someone to bolt them together. A different big thing to build first isn't a great idea.
"Clearly there are advantages to being able to build spacecraft and such not intended for travel through atmosphere."
Next to the advantages of getting to do the building on the ground? You're going to build the biggest modules you can lift and design them to bolt together with as little work done in space as possible; just as they have with the ISS. Coming back from Mars in a vehicle without heat shielding and meeting a re-entry vehicle in earth orbit is a fine idea, but you don't need a station for that.
"For a mars mission especially, it would need to house what is basically a mission control center, as the radio delays to Houston would cause significant problems."
What?!? Radio delays between the ISS and Mars vs. the ground and Mars are not significantly different, nor even consistenly positive. On the scale of going to Mars, the ISS is at Earth. Heck the ISS would be behind the earth half the time, unable to broadcast to Mars at all.
"So why has that space construction capability all but been scrapped? "
There never was any such capability. The ISS is a construction PROJECT. The construction CAPABILITY is provided by the shuttle.
"Without that it is little more than a really expensive version of a normal space station."
A "normal" space station? The ISS is currently the *only* space station. Hard to get more normal than that. It sucks not because it's suckier than other space stations, but because space stations don't have a worthwhile role in our current space activities.
Re:not for a launch point but ..
on
ISS Computer Failure
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Meeting up with a reentry capsule in earth orbit is an excellent idea. The ISS doesn't do anything useful here though. You can just meet the capsule.
Certainly, re-licensing a significant code base with lots of contributors is not trivial; it is a good point, if one Linus is pretty obviously already aware of. But Linus' point is that historically, announcements from Sun about the great things their going to contribute to the open source community significantly outstrip the amount of great things that have eventually become available for inclusion in GPL(2) licensed projects like the Linux kernel. This is not a point that can be convincingly countered with a blog post explaining why things are still coming in the future, no matter how good the reasons.
There's no flaming in either post, nor really much at all in Schwartz's.
Someone on the LKML was talking about how Sun says lots of nice things about what their going to do with open source. Linus said essentially, "Looking at their history, they say lots of nice things, but only do anything substantive when it's in their self interest, as you'd expect."
Then Schwartz responded by.... saying lots of nice things.
What in the world are you talking about? The 9x11 rule books in question are all hard cover, full-color, glossy paper. Or on some you can get the extra-fancy leather bound edition.
Some guy printing up his stuff at the local Kinkos might save money by going with a specific format, which I asume is the deal with "Starfire".
But we're talking about Wizards of the Coast, a division of Hasbro. They can go with whatever size they want. I'd say they usually go with 9x11 because it's the industry standard, but actually it's the other way around; the industry standard is whatever they say it is.
I generally agree with everything you said, but it's not really open-source that's the problem there. It's poorly focused development. This is certainly more prevalent in the open-source world, but it's not required. "Battle for Wesnoth", for example, maintains a well focused development effort despite being open-source, and is quite excellent.
"The modern software world is pretty much ruled by GCC"
What color is the sky in your world? GCC is a mighty fine thing, but it's not remotely the only (or even the dominant) compiler out there.
"It would be interesting to see what happens when that one's license changes to GPL3."
Why? It won't effect programs compiled by it any more than the current license does. Even in your fantasy-land where GCC is a major player in commercial software development, it going to v3 wouldn't make any difference.
Correction: He's got the legal ability. If Bush wants to fire federal prosecutors because they won't push cases against Democrats in order to sway an election, he can legally do that. Whether it is "right" to politicize the Justice department is up to each of us to decide for themselves.
Lying about it to congress is still illegal though, and a pretty good hint whether they think there was anything wrong with it.
"and me adding that it does not apply to startup in question" Which was not the startup in question in my comment, yes, got it, if we were talking about the same thing this might be interesting.
Calling them "churchgoers" is probably over the top. It simply appears to me that space-elevator enthusiasts are drawn to space elevators mostly because the concept is really cool (which it is). It appears to me they are less inspired by realistic comparisons of the technical and economic feasibility of a space elevator vs. other technologies. By the time a space elevator is anywhere close, other technologies will have advanced as well. Gushing explanations of how much better an imagined elevator will be than current rockets get annoying after a while.
"working" on a space elevator today is not analagous to working on an 80 core CPU today. It is analagous to working on an 80 core CPU as a follow-up to UNIVAC.
Make a cable that is within two orders of magnitude on strength, length, weight and cost. Do that, and you'll still have a very long way to go, just on the cable, but maybe it will be worth even thinking about any other aspects.
The point you are ignoring is that I don't care and haven't said squat about Laine. I posted in response to someone elses assertion that a space elevator needed only one "breakthrough"; such assertion being made in response to mention of Gordon Bells assertion that startups should not depend on more than two breakthroughs. At the level of breakthrough Bell is talking about, the space elevator is too far off to reasonably count how many you would need.
As for your comparison of space-elevator enthusiasts to church-goers, I cannot argue it. Both are motivated to believe in something out of a desire that it be so rather than by evidence. For what it's worth, compared to most religions, I rather like the creed "A space elevator would be really cool". I'm unconvinced an elevator will be technically feasible soon or economically feasible ever.
"If you explain that with more laws which create the next set of laws, then how did those laws come into being? Surely it's not turtles all the way down."
Why not? Is it somehow better to just stop looking for explanations and utter your favorite monosyllable? It's not that we miss the "deeper questions"; it's that we think they amount to asking "How about if we stop asking questions?" And our answer is "No thanks."
"people would take less precautions to prevent spreading"
You're assuming any precautions at all are being taken (or could be taken). Herbicide-resistant GM corn was initially approved only for crops to be used as animal feed. After less then a decade this restriction was lifted, because the genes had spread into the vast majority of human-consumption corn anyway.
The only reasonable assumption is that if you plant it outdoors you can't control its spread.
Terminator genes are entirely useless here: some plants that cross with the GM plants will inherit the other modified genes and not the terminator ones. If those other genes are beneficial (to the plants) they'll spread.
Mentioning Terminator genes as possibly helping here is obvious nonsense, and these guys know it; they're just trying to sow confusion and make it less obvious that selling more seeds next year is all it's about.
No, it appears they're doing something cool but fairly technical. A description of it so simplified that it misses the point has been written, and this has then been summarized to remove any shred of meaningful information, leaving "hardware and software solve problems together".
This is pretty par for the course when you apply a couple dumbing-down passes to the description of something that is fundamentally only interesting for its non-dumbed-down technical details.
"We can of course argue that every insight an engineer has as to how to evolve the technology a bit further (how to make 1.2 TB harddrive instead of existing 1TB ones) is a 'breakthrough', but that would be a pointless semantic debate."
That would indeed be pointless, as I'm not talking about whatever level of whatever we want to call a breakthrough. I'm talking specifically about the level of "breakthrough" Gordon Bell is refering to when he says a startup should not depend on more than two of them if they expect to be successful. These are not "fundamental" breakthroughs. These are things that one fully expects are totally doable right now, but that nobody happens to be doing yet. This is not an argument about whether a space elevator will ever be possible or when, but about whether it makes sense to start up a company to build one today. And the answer is no; not remotely. If/when the materials science gets anywhere close, it might make sense to start up a company because you've got some cool idea how to make wheels for the climber that will get good traction on it. Or to solve any one of the (I still say hundreds) of other little problems that will need solving in such a mamoth project, and to sell your solution to the mammoth corp that's going to build the thing.
But fundamentally, this is what I'm talking about: Don't invest today in a company that doesn't expect any payoff until they get a space elevator operational. It's not at a reasonable point to be starting such companies.
Gordon Bell means a startup should only be depend on making 2 breakthroughs that involve doing things nobody does now, but that seem like you could probably do them if you hire a bunch of smart people and give them a year or so to work on it. Building a space elevator would require hundreds of breakthroughs of that magnitude. It would also require one breakthrough (the materials science) that looks like it might just be impossible period, but if you hired a bunch of smart people and put them to work for a decade or so, they might be able to tell you for sure it was impossible, or to guess how many more decades it would take.
Taking investments in a space elevator company today is just fraud.
Yes, large successful companies are constantly doing incredibly stupid things yet bizarrely remaining successful. It must be true, I read about it in a slashdot post. Really adds to your credibility to say "a certain large DB vendor."... Oooh, we're talking about spoooky conspiracy stuff now kids! Could you make it sound any more like you're making shit up and/or credulously passing along someone elses?
Where did it happen? How'd you hear about it? Something that dumb at a big name company would be newsworthy, let's have a link to the story, could we?
Slashdot Mirror
Blinking 12 o'clockers: Designers of electronics who arrogantly assume they should demand the users attention because their devices clock hasn't been set, despite the fact that the time of day may be utterly irrelevant to the operation of the device in question.
There's just no excuse for an engineer who designs a blinking 12:00. Include a receiver for one of the various radio-based time sources if your device needs the time badly enough to justify that. Otherwise, shut up, display something neutral, and wait for the user to set the time when they bloody well feel like it. (Which, if your device is a microwave in a kitchen with 3 other clock displays, well, let's not hold our breath OK?)
Wouldn't the same argument for not going open source apply to most every project? Forking is bad, so keep the source closed.
I actually think MS gained a lot from Suns refusal to open Java. An open Java might have taken much more of the space C# now occupies.
In anycase, I think you've got a tough case to make if you want to say keeping Java closed longer was better for open source.
"so what branch of government is DHS again"
It's part of the Executive branch.
"and when did they get to create/codify law?"
DHS has extensive rule-making authority. These rules have the force of law. You seem to be implying that these rules won't become legal requirements without action by Congress. In this, you are incorrect.
As far as who deserves to have their rights protected, everyone vs. just citizens, I think Jefferson addressed that better than I could.
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..."
JFK encouraged us to do hard things; not to do them stupidly. The ISS is stupid, though not particularly hard.
"they had good reasons for not releasing Java which were because of the threat of forking Java"
Which would be bad for Sun, yes, exactly. They wanted to maintain control, because they thought that would be better for them.
I don't know why everyone gets all defensive and horrified when it is pointed out that Sun is a for-profit enterprise that should and does act in its own self interest. Sure, Sun is great, hooray. In seeking to understand Suns motivations and probable future actions, one should not confuse Sun with the FSF (for example).
Linus's posts clearly illustrate that he is a geek who says what's on his mind without worrying over-much about whether he's offending anyone. He probably figures his "real friends" can take it.
Um, actually I was just trying to describe what I saw as the main thrust of Linus' post. You are free of course to disagree with Linus, as it seems you do.
"...which Sun as an entity donated more code to than any other company or organization"
I think the University of California and AT&T might debate you there, though total code donated is neither measurable nor necessarily relevant.
Whatever the case, Linus seems to feel that Sun is mostly interested in burnishing their OpenSource credentials to the extent that it helps Sun; rather than helping OpenSource just to be helpful. He also seems to feel this is expected and OK.
"One of the intentions was allegedy for it to be used for construction in space."
I doubt that intention was seriously advanced by engineers who know anything about it. To build something in space needs the parts (as pre-assembled on the ground as possible) and someone to bolt them together. A different big thing to build first isn't a great idea.
"Clearly there are advantages to being able to build spacecraft and such not intended for travel through atmosphere."
Next to the advantages of getting to do the building on the ground? You're going to build the biggest modules you can lift and design them to bolt together with as little work done in space as possible; just as they have with the ISS. Coming back from Mars in a vehicle without heat shielding and meeting a re-entry vehicle in earth orbit is a fine idea, but you don't need a station for that.
"For a mars mission especially, it would need to house what is basically a mission control center, as the radio delays to Houston would cause significant problems."
What?!? Radio delays between the ISS and Mars vs. the ground and Mars are not significantly different, nor even consistenly positive. On the scale of going to Mars, the ISS is at Earth. Heck the ISS would be behind the earth half the time, unable to broadcast to Mars at all.
"So why has that space construction capability all but been scrapped? "
There never was any such capability. The ISS is a construction PROJECT. The construction CAPABILITY is provided by the shuttle.
"Without that it is little more than a really expensive version of a normal space station."
A "normal" space station? The ISS is currently the *only* space station. Hard to get more normal than that. It sucks not because it's suckier than other space stations, but because space stations don't have a worthwhile role in our current space activities.
Meeting up with a reentry capsule in earth orbit is an excellent idea. The ISS doesn't do anything useful here though. You can just meet the capsule.
"It could be converted from a pure research facility to more of a way station."
If anybody had ever come up with any mission for which a "way station" served any purpose whatsoever.
But they haven't.
I actually have asked a few NASA engineers I know, and their (private) opinion is unanimous: drop the pointless money-suck into the ocean, ASAP.
Certainly, re-licensing a significant code base with lots of contributors is not trivial; it is a good point, if one Linus is pretty obviously already aware of. But Linus' point is that historically, announcements from Sun about the great things their going to contribute to the open source community significantly outstrip the amount of great things that have eventually become available for inclusion in GPL(2) licensed projects like the Linux kernel. This is not a point that can be convincingly countered with a blog post explaining why things are still coming in the future, no matter how good the reasons.
There's no flaming in either post, nor really much at all in Schwartz's.
Someone on the LKML was talking about how Sun says lots of nice things about what their going to do with open source. Linus said essentially, "Looking at their history, they say lots of nice things, but only do anything substantive when it's in their self interest, as you'd expect."
Then Schwartz responded by.... saying lots of nice things.
What in the world are you talking about? The 9x11 rule books in question are all hard cover, full-color, glossy paper. Or on some you can get the extra-fancy leather bound edition.
Some guy printing up his stuff at the local Kinkos might save money by going with a specific format, which I asume is the deal with "Starfire".
But we're talking about Wizards of the Coast, a division of Hasbro. They can go with whatever size they want. I'd say they usually go with 9x11 because it's the industry standard, but actually it's the other way around; the industry standard is whatever they say it is.
I generally agree with everything you said, but it's not really open-source that's the problem there. It's poorly focused development. This is certainly more prevalent in the open-source world, but it's not required. "Battle for Wesnoth", for example, maintains a well focused development effort despite being open-source, and is quite excellent.
"The modern software world is pretty much ruled by GCC"
What color is the sky in your world? GCC is a mighty fine thing, but it's not remotely the only (or even the dominant) compiler out there.
"It would be interesting to see what happens when that one's license changes to GPL3."
Why? It won't effect programs compiled by it any more than the current license does. Even in your fantasy-land where GCC is a major player in commercial software development, it going to v3 wouldn't make any difference.
"He's got the right"
Correction: He's got the legal ability. If Bush wants to fire federal prosecutors because they won't push cases against Democrats in order to sway an election, he can legally do that. Whether it is "right" to politicize the Justice department is up to each of us to decide for themselves.
Lying about it to congress is still illegal though, and a pretty good hint whether they think there was anything wrong with it.
"and me adding that it does not apply to startup in question"
Which was not the startup in question in my comment, yes, got it, if we were talking about the same thing this might be interesting.
Calling them "churchgoers" is probably over the top. It simply appears to me that space-elevator enthusiasts are drawn to space elevators mostly because the concept is really cool (which it is). It appears to me they are less inspired by realistic comparisons of the technical and economic feasibility of a space elevator vs. other technologies. By the time a space elevator is anywhere close, other technologies will have advanced as well. Gushing explanations of how much better an imagined elevator will be than current rockets get annoying after a while.
"working" on a space elevator today is not analagous to working on an 80 core CPU today. It is analagous to working on an 80 core CPU as a follow-up to UNIVAC.
Make a cable that is within two orders of magnitude on strength, length, weight and cost. Do that, and you'll still have a very long way to go, just on the cable, but maybe it will be worth even thinking about any other aspects.
The point you are ignoring is that I don't care and haven't said squat about Laine. I posted in response to someone elses assertion that a space elevator needed only one "breakthrough"; such assertion being made in response to mention of Gordon Bells assertion that startups should not depend on more than two breakthroughs. At the level of breakthrough Bell is talking about, the space elevator is too far off to reasonably count how many you would need.
As for your comparison of space-elevator enthusiasts to church-goers, I cannot argue it. Both are motivated to believe in something out of a desire that it be so rather than by evidence. For what it's worth, compared to most religions, I rather like the creed "A space elevator would be really cool". I'm unconvinced an elevator will be technically feasible soon or economically feasible ever.
"If you explain that with more laws which create the next set of laws, then how did those laws come into being? Surely it's not turtles all the way down."
Why not? Is it somehow better to just stop looking for explanations and utter your favorite monosyllable? It's not that we miss the "deeper questions"; it's that we think they amount to asking "How about if we stop asking questions?" And our answer is "No thanks."
"people would take less precautions to prevent spreading"
You're assuming any precautions at all are being taken (or could be taken). Herbicide-resistant GM corn was initially approved only for crops to be used as animal feed. After less then a decade this restriction was lifted, because the genes had spread into the vast majority of human-consumption corn anyway.
The only reasonable assumption is that if you plant it outdoors you can't control its spread.
Terminator genes are entirely useless here: some plants that cross with the GM plants will inherit the other modified genes and not the terminator ones. If those other genes are beneficial (to the plants) they'll spread.
Mentioning Terminator genes as possibly helping here is obvious nonsense, and these guys know it; they're just trying to sow confusion and make it less obvious that selling more seeds next year is all it's about.
"There people are looking for money, right?"
No, it appears they're doing something cool but fairly technical. A description of it so simplified that it misses the point has been written, and this has then been summarized to remove any shred of meaningful information, leaving "hardware and software solve problems together".
This is pretty par for the course when you apply a couple dumbing-down passes to the description of something that is fundamentally only interesting for its non-dumbed-down technical details.
"We can of course argue that every insight an engineer has as to how to evolve the technology a bit further (how to make 1.2 TB harddrive instead of existing 1TB ones) is a 'breakthrough', but that would be a pointless semantic debate."
That would indeed be pointless, as I'm not talking about whatever level of whatever we want to call a breakthrough. I'm talking specifically about the level of "breakthrough" Gordon Bell is refering to when he says a startup should not depend on more than two of them if they expect to be successful. These are not "fundamental" breakthroughs. These are things that one fully expects are totally doable right now, but that nobody happens to be doing yet. This is not an argument about whether a space elevator will ever be possible or when, but about whether it makes sense to start up a company to build one today. And the answer is no; not remotely. If/when the materials science gets anywhere close, it might make sense to start up a company because you've got some cool idea how to make wheels for the climber that will get good traction on it. Or to solve any one of the (I still say hundreds) of other little problems that will need solving in such a mamoth project, and to sell your solution to the mammoth corp that's going to build the thing.
But fundamentally, this is what I'm talking about: Don't invest today in a company that doesn't expect any payoff until they get a space elevator operational. It's not at a reasonable point to be starting such companies.
Gordon Bell means a startup should only be depend on making 2 breakthroughs that involve doing things nobody does now, but that seem like you could probably do them if you hire a bunch of smart people and give them a year or so to work on it. Building a space elevator would require hundreds of breakthroughs of that magnitude. It would also require one breakthrough (the materials science) that looks like it might just be impossible period, but if you hired a bunch of smart people and put them to work for a decade or so, they might be able to tell you for sure it was impossible, or to guess how many more decades it would take.
Taking investments in a space elevator company today is just fraud.
I'm fairly confident that the feature you want is one Google is trying very hard to provide. I doubt adding a switch somewhere is the problem.
It's plausible because it fits your worldview?
Yes, large successful companies are constantly doing incredibly stupid things yet bizarrely remaining successful. It must be true, I read about it in a slashdot post. Really adds to your credibility to say "a certain large DB vendor."... Oooh, we're talking about spoooky conspiracy stuff now kids! Could you make it sound any more like you're making shit up and/or credulously passing along someone elses?
Where did it happen? How'd you hear about it? Something that dumb at a big name company would be newsworthy, let's have a link to the story, could we?
Or not, because he's right: cloudy days are not a huge problem for solar cells.