Since it is just a theme, and not an alteration of either KDE or GNOME, no flame war should be anticipated. If Red Hat had done this they wouldn't have been flamed either.
This isn't a straight download of the 2.4.21 preX. Mandrake has tested it extensively. No commercial distribution ever ships with a stock kernel, so they all do their own testing.
I would probably mark you down as a troll if I had moderation points today. Someone help me out.
Mandrake is using the latest fontconfig, xft2, and XFree86. It looks better than Windows XP does on the same machine, at least to my eyes. I don't think they are "behind" anyone when it comes to fonts currently.
The reason most of the bugs in that 1459 are in UNCONFIRMED, NEEDINFO, and REOPENED is because of people who are participating in the testing process who don't stay up to date. Since all BugZilla reports are forwarded to the Mandrake cooker mailing list now, they get looked at by many people.
If the bug is UNCONFIRMED, then it was probably seen by only 1 tester, and may not be a bug at all, or may be dependent on an odd hardware setup.
If the bug is NEEDINFO, then the bug reporter never submitted enough information for anyone to duplicate it, so it was impossible to fix, or to confirm the presence of.
If the bug is REOPENED, it probably represents a disagreement between the reporter and Mandrakesoft. Mandrakesoft closed it, either because it duplicated another bug report, or because they felt it was operating as intended.
Having used the current version of cooker from 9.0 thru the 9.1 release, I can tell you that most users won't find any serious problems, and that 1459 bug count is not a useful number to talk about. I think this release was pounded on by a very large number of people, and Mandrakesoft did a great job in clearing out the bugs. My personal view is that there are very few bugs that your average user will see. As always, if you have unusual hardware, you may find something no one else has, but that will always be the case.
In case you were wondering, I am not an employee of Mandrakesoft, but I am a Mandrake Club Silver level member. You could probably even say I was a fan, since I've been consistently selecting their product for several years over the other distributions.
From the announcement. He has consistently refused to even disclose these concerns within the context of the XFree86 Core Team, which makes his membership of that team unviable.
We don't know if that is true or not, and we haven't heard his side of the issue yet. It may be a moot point, because it sounds like he anticipated those ideas would not be welcome, and this announcement probably confirms that notion.
What everyone seems to be saying, is he was the most useful person on the team, at least in terms of generating improvments in the system. All of the things I see attributed to him (like fontconfig and xft work) are the things I looked forward to in the latest release.
All video drivers have to be built for the version of the kernel you are using. NVidia distributes RPM versions for several major distributions, but you will have to build it yourself if you use some other kernel.
Building an NVidia driver from the source is trivial. rpm --rebuild NVIDIA_kernel-XXXX.src.rpm as root. rpm -ivh NVIDIA_kernel-XXXX.rpm as root. rpm -ivh NVIDIA_GLX-XXXX.rpm as root. Fix the "nv" driver name to "nvidia" in/etc/X11/XF86Config-4.
Listen, guys, if someone points out a bug -- and if you take any pride in your work -- then make an attempt to fix it even if the submitter didn't phrase it nicely. After all, do you really give a shit what some pimply faced puke thinks of you?
You interpret that statement differently than I do. I hear the developers saying they will prioritize which bugs get worked on based on more than the opinion of a particular bug reporter. If that person doesn't agree, too bad. This seems very practical to me, since most of the people this comment would apply to probably can't write a decent bug report.
If you want someone to do something for you, especially when they are doing it for free, then don't abuse them. That seems like an easy to understand rule, doesn't it? It's called being polite. People have been doing it for a long time, and it usually works pretty well.
It sounds like you may be one of the people who got ignored, and you probably need to work on your social skills.
Another thing to consider is versatility on stage. Most guitarists already have a bunch of stomp boxes to change their sound, often many times within the same somg.
They probably don't record that way, perhaps using different guitars and amplifiers to get the sound they want in the studio. They really don't have any way to do that on stage, after all, changing guitars and amps during a song is a little difficult to pull off, so they use effects boxes to simulate what they would do in the studio.
I can see the real benefits of doing this type of thing on stage. Let's be honest here, you may be able to hear the difference, but how many people in the audience can, especially at the sound levels they get to listen at?
I respectfully disagree about a few points in your argument. The problem with private corporations is their desire to make short term profits, which are necessary to keep their share holders happy with them. This means they aren't good at doing long term investing and planning.
The normal solution to this is a government program to subsidize them, if and only if they do the things the government wants. There is a surcharge on your phone bill that helps pay for phone service in locations that are uneconomical for the phone company to run. This is the government encouraging the phone company to provide universal service. It evidently worked, because you can have a phone almost anywhere in the US.
The government is typically less efficient that a private corporation when it comes to providing services, because there is little motive to be cost efficient, and they typically have much higher overhead costs. They are very good at getting private corporations to do the right thing, when they really want something.
I think it's all about how many people want to be seen with you. No one wants to be seen with nerds except other nerds. Somehow the football players end up being the school heroes, so people want to be around them.
I agree with the article about most nerds not caring about social status, at least not enough to do anything about it. They just wanted to do the things they were interested in, and not be bothered by the social game.
I like one line from "The Breakfast Club", where a nerd is accused of thinking "the chess club counts" (or something like that), meaning it was not a social club, but an activity club. Nerds joined activity clubs, social climbers joined social clubs, which existed to allow you to associate with other social climbers.
The A list is the people who were most popular in the school. This was frequently populated by football players and cheerleaders. It is not a case of envy, just an observation about who was at the top of the social ladder. As the article says, nerds weren't there on the A list, because they didn't care about being high on the social ladder.
I guess this brings a few questions to mind. Since nerds existed long before video games, and television existed, what does your rant have to do with real life.
Given that there are some examples around right now that fit your description (otherwise known as losers), what does that have to do with the rest of them. The football team had the occasional idiot with lots of physical ability, and as some have pointed out, some people who excelled at everything. You point to one extreme in the group, and say that nerds are all that way. This is called generalization, and is a very dangerous way to look at the world, since it is never a good fit.
The article talked about a situation that tended to bring out social competition in children. As I read it, it didn't lay blame on the children involved, but on the circumstances that created the behavior.
Just as an aside - You come across as a really prejudiced asshole in your commentary. Is this an example of those social skills you developed as a normal person? If that is the case, them I'm damn glad I'm not a normal person like you!
This single article is not the only source of information about the shuttle, or how it's systems work. My point was how fragile the tiles are, you could push your finger through one with little trouble. If your finger touched a tile, you would reduce it's effectiveness greatly, just because of the oils on your skin. That hardly seems like a robust material to use for a vehicle.
The other designs that competed with the current shuttle were all based on a cooled titanium skin. They were not chosen because the cost of making a vehicle that size out of titanium was much higher (several times higher) than the current design, which is primarily constructed of aluminum, very much like most conventional aircraft. NASA was authorized enough money to make 4 shuttles of the current design, or maybe make one of the other designs. They chose the cheaper design, thinking that the risks were managable. They chose solid fuel booster rockets because of cost, with the results we saw in the Challenger. They made cheap shuttles, that are incredibly expensive to keep operating, and very fragile in their operation.
The space plane that everyone has talked about was intended to be designed much differently than the current shuttle, and much more like the competing shuttle designs. No one wants to pay for the development of the next generation of shuttles, because the current ones have been doing the job, however expensively, and most of the satellite launching work has been taken back over by single use rockets, since the shuttle launching rate is unable to keep up with demand.
I am writing based on a knowledge of the history of the shuttle, not just one article about the current shuttle disaster. Do some research, you'll find much of the information I've been talking about. No one wants to say those things, because it doesn't reflect well on NASA.
My point about the thermal tiles was not based on the article. It was an observation about the weak point on the shuttle during re-entry. It is my personal opinion that the question is not if the tiles were part of the problem, since they protect the shuttle from heat, they clearly failed.
The only debate open is why they failed in this particular instance. Was it the foam that fell from the tank during liftoff? That is unknown right now. Were tiles damaged at some point, which cause the shuttle to overheat and fail? This appears very likely. I admit that the leading edge RCC structures are also possible failure points.
My point is that the shuttle has a design that requires some very fragile, difficult to maintain items (tiles in particular), work 100% of the time, or a disaster will happen. It is a fundamentally un-robust design, that costs immense amounts of money to maintain, and is inherently problematic.
The choice of this type of construction, rather than using something like the fluid cooled titanium skin of the SR71, reduced production costs, but reduced safety at the same time. It also increased the cost to maintain the shuttle, which over the life of the vehicle ended up costing far more than the alternative proposals would have.
The tiles may not be the root cause of the Columbia disaster, but I submit that no one will ever build another ship based on the thermal tile technology, and there are a lot of people who wish it had never been used, for many reasons.
If Americans are not good enough to ensure a minimum security in-flight, that should be their problem. Russian are really experts.
NASA never had any problems with conventional space capsules during re-entry, and never lost a crew. The Russians have continued to use a well tested, relatively simple spacecraft, which has served them very reliably. Comparing a Soyuz to a Shuttle is like comparing a calculator to a computer, you can do many of the same things on either one, but they are fundamentally different, and designed for different purposes.
The decision to use fragile thermal tiles for the Shuttle is one that has faced much criticism over the years. It is a decision that is at the core of what happened to the Shuttle on re-entry, whatever the reason that some of those tiles were damaged or lost. The vulnerability to tile damage was known, but NASA thought they had managed the potential issues in a way that assured the safety of the Shuttle. It appears they were wrong, and the problems were not controllable in the long term.
The amazing thing to me is the number of missions they flew before these thermal tiles became an issue. I think the thermal tiles are a fatally flawed system, both because of their susceptability to damage in flight, and because they require huge amounts of expensive upkeep between missions. The fact that NASA flew over 100 missions before this kind of problem occurred is a tribute to their dedication. The fact that this system was selected shows that NASA is not perfect.
I don't particularly see how designing something with a safety factor of 10 is more responsibility than being in charge of a pension fund for 10000 people.
Exactly my point, most people aren't in charge of something that makes them personally responsible for the life or welfare or other people. I mention engineers because I know about the field, not because it has an exclusive claim on responsibility or accountability.
Design a product poorly -> consumers don't want the product -> company makes no money -> people out of work. The management version of that is pick wrong product to manufacture -> market isn't there -> company makes no money -> people out of work.
Most engineers design things. That is why they became engineers. Very few design bridges or buildings, but the same type of thinking applies to other areas. If you are designing a computer, you don't have margins as large as even 2X to play with, they are more like 20% when it comes to timing, if you want to be competitive.
Grade padding removes the personal responsibility and accountability for the grade from the student, which I think is a disaster. Lack of accountability corrupts, absolute lack of accountability corrupts absolutely (John W Campbell Jr.). This is the heart of many problems in our culture at the present time.
Look at the current business scandals, where executives weren't held accountable for their actions until the damage was done (to mention one of your examples). To mention another, if the mechanic doesn't install your brakes correctly he can kill you. If the designer of the car braking system does a bad job, he can kill many more people, so he has more responsibility, but both are accountable for their actions.
If YOU screw up chances are its not just you! I agree, in most cases it would be a process problem on a large project to really let a problem get through. Please note the Kursk, the Apollo capsule fire, the bay area bridges that collapsed during an earthquake, and the skywalk collapse in KC. I doubt that anything other than a person (not a computer program) could have figured out what might be wrong in time to do something, and that didn't happen, in spite of the processes put in place to assure that it did.
You do the math, commit the required resources, and cross your fingers. I have been in your position, and am an EE by training as well. I wasn't saying no one else has to make important decisions. Most people with a college degree will not face that kind of need for correct decision making, either in their job, or their business dealings. Even today, with all of the software assists available, you can have a timing error in your board, an assembly error, or a poor choice of parts, which can lead to huge financial liability (or prison). When you are making a business decision, you are betting on the abilities of the people involved, not the software they use.
I am contracting for a large company right now doing software, and I can tell you that they take forever to make any decisions. The process is so drawn out that many of the steps are done to satisfy a check box on the company process standard, rather than to actually do the process they are supposed to. This happens in other places, and it comes down to the individual to make sure their design is correct, because those other engineers may not spend the time needed to really know what you have done, since they have many other demands on their time. Individual responsibility is the key. You don't get that by padding grades and letting people get by with poor work.
In engineering, if you screw up, at the very least it costs someone a (normally) substantial amount of money to fix the problem, or to pay the lawyers. At the other end of the spectrum, lots of people die (the bridge collapses, the airplane blows up, the submarine sinks). I think that professors in engineering schools take that into account when they assign grades.
An engineer will tell you what the answer is, how accurate it is, and what assumptions were made in getting that answer. In the end, something gets built, and either works or not, entirely based on how closely the engineer understands the problem, and how effective he is at reaching a solution. For the problems that you work on in college, there is very little wiggle room on the correct answers. In few other professions will someone without many years of proven experience be given the kind of responsibilities that many engineers have to deal with. They would rather flunk you out than let you go forward without the skills you need, and the ability to apply those skills.
Many people leave engineering in the first few years of their careers, and decide to follow another career path. This happens because they can't deal with the pressures of trying to solve the problem, within budget, on time, and working properly.
So you are saying that it doesn't appear on the debit side on the accounting ledgers? It is an expense, whatever the benefit you may get from it. Let's keep our terminology correct, if you spend money for it, it's an expense.
Oh, get off your high horse. Microsoft was a monopoly because they controlled the market for PC operating systems. People made bad choices that let them get there, admittedly. No one voted to make Microsoft a monopoly, it was an accident of the market. Once they were there, they made deals that bundled their other software on machines at an attractive price, and made it very costly for a manufacturer like Dell to provide anything else, basically making them pay for Windows, even if they didn't put it on the machine.
You would be annoyed if they charged you for leather seats on your car, even when you didn't get them, wouldn't you? That would be wrong, wouldn't it? How can you defend a company that would make you do that? We don't know what else might be in their contracts in the way of penalties for not shipping Windows on a computer, because the terms are secret. If anyone reveals them, they lose their licnese to sell Windows with their computers. Are you saying that is a normal business practice? What business are you in?
You chose to ignore the multitude of reasons that caused anti-trust action to happen against Microsoft. That is your choice. I chose to see the whole picture. For years I ignored my friends who hated Microsoft, until finally the evidence of their actions was too much for me to ignore.
I'm tired of teaching a history lesson here, especially to someone who sounds like a Microsoft employee. You will note that Microsoft is making itself less and less attractive to businesses as it moves to the annual license mode of operation. Microsoft is aiding the market for alternative operating systems by their own actions, which is only a fitting way for them to end.
explain to me how M$ is a monopoly? Go buy a Dell, HP, or Gateway computer without an operating system. What can you get at Best Buy? You don't have to have 100% control of a market to be a monopoly. Being a monopoly is not what got Microsoft into trouble, it was using that monopoly to kill off their competition (small though they may have been by comparison) that got them in trouble. Most people don't get white box systems, they aren't comfortable with doing that, so they have only one choice, buy a machine with Windows on it. You and I are different, we can pick computer parts, assemble the machine we want, and load whatever OS we choose, but my neighbor can't.
P.S. The court system decided Microsoft was a monopolist, and they used that power in ways they are not allowed to, at least if they don't want anti-trust acton against them. You don't have to agree, although you may be one of the few who would dispute that decision. Everyone else thought that was a given, and the penalty phase was the only interesting part of the whole courtroom drama.
You say that if something doesn't pay for you product, but just steals it, stinks to be you, I guess.
Their product is SCO Unix and Linux. They evidently can't make a living selling them, which suggests they are either bad at business, or technically inferior. I was not referring to any patents they hold when I was talking about their products, which everyone else probably understood!
Can I freely take your car for a spin if I make sure I dn't sign a contract with you?
Sure, it's called grand theft auto, and you can steal it any time I'm not looking. This is a little different. I show you a tuneup trick I invented for your car. I say it's ok to use without paying me anything. I publish a magazine article with the trick in it (they distribute Linux, which has a GPL license), without telling anyone (including the publisher) that it is patented knowledge, and I am going to one day enforce that patent. Years later I threaten to sue you, the magazine publisher, and everyone who read the magazine, if you don't all pay me for that knowledge. That is what SCO is going to do.
is just meant to hurt a commendable company
From the sounds of what they are proposing, we are saying that they will become anything but a commendable company if they go forward with this. We would rather see them close their doors than become another parasite company, providing nothing of value, and taking advantage of a loophole in patent law to rob others.
God forbid your boss walk up to you and say "you know I should not pay you for your work."
I have a contract with my company. If I do the work they request, they owe me the money, they aren't giving anything to me, we are exchanging a service for a fee. If they refuse to honor the contract, they will see me in court, and I will win.
Think about all the overtime you work, do you think you should be paid for it?
If your contract says they have to pay you for overtime, then they owe you the money. If it doesn't say you get paid for overtime, then they don't owe you anything (except some gratitude) for the time. If you don't like that, go work somewhere else.
Someone made something to make money!!!OMG!
Someone found a new scam to try to get money they aren't owed. They have a product, they sell if, their customers pay them for it. They evidently can't make a living doing that. Now they want money for something they didn't do. Something the original patent holders decided not to take any action over, if there are even any actionable patents present here.
but it does share both design and interfaces such as syscalls
This begs several questions. Were parts of the design of Unix patented? Have those patents that exist already run out? Is an interface, like syscalls, even patentable (even with our current broken system). Certainly many elements of Unix can be demonstrated as prior art in places such as other operating systems that existed when Unix was created.
This is not a copyright issue, it is a patent issue.
Part of the issue is a copyright issue. Caldera is/was a Linux vendor. GPL, the terms under which Linux is distributed, requires that Linux (and the parts within it) not be encumbered by patent restrictions. In selling Linux, Caldera certainly implied that any patents they may have held through purchasing SCO were either not applicable, or that they were not going to enforce them, in accordance with the GPL license. Does their agreement to these copyright terms defeat the legal case for any patent claims they may have?
SCO (Caldera) needs to say something substantial about this. What patents exactly do they feel have been violated, and need to be enforced?
You're even hypocritical enough to say "if you can't compete, sue"! Nevermind that Sun, Netscape, and the various states' attorneys lived by the same mantra when they went after Microsoft.
Microsoft is a monopolist who has been convicted of abusing the market, using their position for leverage. Anyone who filed against them before that was an official court ruling was just ahead of the game, which is not surprising, since anti-trust actions tend to be very slow. Taking someone to court over their behavior is the only accepted way most businesses have of dealing with this kind of abuse.
Launching an attack against all other operating systems over ancient (in computer terms) intellectual property, especially when you are a small, financially troubled unix/linux vendor, is another thing completely. This is a form of abuse of the legal system. If you pay me money, you aren't taking the chance that I will sue you over something you probably can't prove you haven't done (which does not mean you did it). Doesn't this sound like the classic protection racket? Either pay me now, or I tie you up in court. The fact that they are going with this option shows that it is time for them to get out of the business.
Slashdot Mirror
Since it is just a theme, and not an alteration of either KDE or GNOME, no flame war should be anticipated. If Red Hat had done this they wouldn't have been flamed either.
This isn't a straight download of the 2.4.21 preX. Mandrake has tested it extensively. No commercial distribution ever ships with a stock kernel, so they all do their own testing.
I would probably mark you down as a troll if I had moderation points today. Someone help me out.
Mandrake is using the latest fontconfig, xft2, and XFree86. It looks better than Windows XP does on the same machine, at least to my eyes. I don't think they are "behind" anyone when it comes to fonts currently.
The reason most of the bugs in that 1459 are in UNCONFIRMED, NEEDINFO, and REOPENED is because of people who are participating in the testing process who don't stay up to date. Since all BugZilla reports are forwarded to the Mandrake cooker mailing list now, they get looked at by many people.
If the bug is UNCONFIRMED, then it was probably seen by only 1 tester, and may not be a bug at all, or may be dependent on an odd hardware setup.
If the bug is NEEDINFO, then the bug reporter never submitted enough information for anyone to duplicate it, so it was impossible to fix, or to confirm the presence of.
If the bug is REOPENED, it probably represents a disagreement between the reporter and Mandrakesoft. Mandrakesoft closed it, either because it duplicated another bug report, or because they felt it was operating as intended.
Having used the current version of cooker from 9.0 thru the 9.1 release, I can tell you that most users won't find any serious problems, and that 1459 bug count is not a useful number to talk about. I think this release was pounded on by a very large number of people, and Mandrakesoft did a great job in clearing out the bugs. My personal view is that there are very few bugs that your average user will see. As always, if you have unusual hardware, you may find something no one else has, but that will always be the case.
In case you were wondering, I am not an employee of Mandrakesoft, but I am a Mandrake Club Silver level member. You could probably even say I was a fan, since I've been consistently selecting their product for several years over the other distributions.
From the announcement.
He has consistently refused to even disclose these concerns within the context of the XFree86 Core Team, which makes his membership of that team unviable.
We don't know if that is true or not, and we haven't heard his side of the issue yet. It may be a moot point, because it sounds like he anticipated those ideas would not be welcome, and this announcement probably confirms that notion.
What everyone seems to be saying, is he was the most useful person on the team, at least in terms of generating improvments in the system. All of the things I see attributed to him (like fontconfig and xft work) are the things I looked forward to in the latest release.
All video drivers have to be built for the version of the kernel you are using. NVidia distributes RPM versions for several major distributions, but you will have to build it yourself if you use some other kernel.
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4.
Building an NVidia driver from the source is trivial. rpm --rebuild NVIDIA_kernel-XXXX.src.rpm as root. rpm -ivh NVIDIA_kernel-XXXX.rpm as root. rpm -ivh NVIDIA_GLX-XXXX.rpm as root. Fix the "nv" driver name to "nvidia" in
The whole process takes about 2 minutes.
Listen, guys, if someone points out a bug -- and if you take any pride in your work -- then make an attempt to fix it even if the submitter didn't phrase it nicely. After all, do you really give a shit what some pimply faced puke thinks of you?
You interpret that statement differently than I do. I hear the developers saying they will prioritize which bugs get worked on based on more than the opinion of a particular bug reporter. If that person doesn't agree, too bad. This seems very practical to me, since most of the people this comment would apply to probably can't write a decent bug report.
If you want someone to do something for you, especially when they are doing it for free, then don't abuse them. That seems like an easy to understand rule, doesn't it? It's called being polite. People have been doing it for a long time, and it usually works pretty well.
It sounds like you may be one of the people who got ignored, and you probably need to work on your social skills.
Another thing to consider is versatility on stage. Most guitarists already have a bunch of stomp boxes to change their sound, often many times within the same somg.
They probably don't record that way, perhaps using different guitars and amplifiers to get the sound they want in the studio. They really don't have any way to do that on stage, after all, changing guitars and amps during a song is a little difficult to pull off, so they use effects boxes to simulate what they would do in the studio.
I can see the real benefits of doing this type of thing on stage. Let's be honest here, you may be able to hear the difference, but how many people in the audience can, especially at the sound levels they get to listen at?
I respectfully disagree about a few points in your argument. The problem with private corporations is their desire to make short term profits, which are necessary to keep their share holders happy with them. This means they aren't good at doing long term investing and planning.
The normal solution to this is a government program to subsidize them, if and only if they do the things the government wants. There is a surcharge on your phone bill that helps pay for phone service in locations that are uneconomical for the phone company to run. This is the government encouraging the phone company to provide universal service. It evidently worked, because you can have a phone almost anywhere in the US.
The government is typically less efficient that a private corporation when it comes to providing services, because there is little motive to be cost efficient, and they typically have much higher overhead costs. They are very good at getting private corporations to do the right thing, when they really want something.
I think it's all about how many people want to be seen with you. No one wants to be seen with nerds except other nerds. Somehow the football players end up being the school heroes, so people want to be around them.
I agree with the article about most nerds not caring about social status, at least not enough to do anything about it. They just wanted to do the things they were interested in, and not be bothered by the social game.
I like one line from "The Breakfast Club", where a nerd is accused of thinking "the chess club counts" (or something like that), meaning it was not a social club, but an activity club. Nerds joined activity clubs, social climbers joined social clubs, which existed to allow you to associate with other social climbers.
The A list is the people who were most popular in the school. This was frequently populated by football players and cheerleaders. It is not a case of envy, just an observation about who was at the top of the social ladder. As the article says, nerds weren't there on the A list, because they didn't care about being high on the social ladder.
I guess this brings a few questions to mind. Since nerds existed long before video games, and television existed, what does your rant have to do with real life.
Given that there are some examples around right now that fit your description (otherwise known as losers), what does that have to do with the rest of them. The football team had the occasional idiot with lots of physical ability, and as some have pointed out, some people who excelled at everything. You point to one extreme in the group, and say that nerds are all that way. This is called generalization, and is a very dangerous way to look at the world, since it is never a good fit.
The article talked about a situation that tended to bring out social competition in children. As I read it, it didn't lay blame on the children involved, but on the circumstances that created the behavior.
Just as an aside - You come across as a really prejudiced asshole in your commentary. Is this an example of those social skills you developed as a normal person? If that is the case, them I'm damn glad I'm not a normal person like you!
Then RTFA
This single article is not the only source of information about the shuttle, or how it's systems work. My point was how fragile the tiles are, you could push your finger through one with little trouble. If your finger touched a tile, you would reduce it's effectiveness greatly, just because of the oils on your skin. That hardly seems like a robust material to use for a vehicle.
The other designs that competed with the current shuttle were all based on a cooled titanium skin. They were not chosen because the cost of making a vehicle that size out of titanium was much higher (several times higher) than the current design, which is primarily constructed of aluminum, very much like most conventional aircraft. NASA was authorized enough money to make 4 shuttles of the current design, or maybe make one of the other designs. They chose the cheaper design, thinking that the risks were managable. They chose solid fuel booster rockets because of cost, with the results we saw in the Challenger. They made cheap shuttles, that are incredibly expensive to keep operating, and very fragile in their operation.
The space plane that everyone has talked about was intended to be designed much differently than the current shuttle, and much more like the competing shuttle designs. No one wants to pay for the development of the next generation of shuttles, because the current ones have been doing the job, however expensively, and most of the satellite launching work has been taken back over by single use rockets, since the shuttle launching rate is unable to keep up with demand.
I am writing based on a knowledge of the history of the shuttle, not just one article about the current shuttle disaster. Do some research, you'll find much of the information I've been talking about. No one wants to say those things, because it doesn't reflect well on NASA.
My point about the thermal tiles was not based on the article. It was an observation about the weak point on the shuttle during re-entry. It is my personal opinion that the question is not if the tiles were part of the problem, since they protect the shuttle from heat, they clearly failed.
The only debate open is why they failed in this particular instance. Was it the foam that fell from the tank during liftoff? That is unknown right now. Were tiles damaged at some point, which cause the shuttle to overheat and fail? This appears very likely. I admit that the leading edge RCC structures are also possible failure points.
My point is that the shuttle has a design that requires some very fragile, difficult to maintain items (tiles in particular), work 100% of the time, or a disaster will happen. It is a fundamentally un-robust design, that costs immense amounts of money to maintain, and is inherently problematic.
The choice of this type of construction, rather than using something like the fluid cooled titanium skin of the SR71, reduced production costs, but reduced safety at the same time. It also increased the cost to maintain the shuttle, which over the life of the vehicle ended up costing far more than the alternative proposals would have.
The tiles may not be the root cause of the Columbia disaster, but I submit that no one will ever build another ship based on the thermal tile technology, and there are a lot of people who wish it had never been used, for many reasons.
If Americans are not good enough to ensure a minimum security in-flight, that should be their problem. Russian are really experts.
NASA never had any problems with conventional space capsules during re-entry, and never lost a crew. The Russians have continued to use a well tested, relatively simple spacecraft, which has served them very reliably. Comparing a Soyuz to a Shuttle is like comparing a calculator to a computer, you can do many of the same things on either one, but they are fundamentally different, and designed for different purposes.
The decision to use fragile thermal tiles for the Shuttle is one that has faced much criticism over the years. It is a decision that is at the core of what happened to the Shuttle on re-entry, whatever the reason that some of those tiles were damaged or lost. The vulnerability to tile damage was known, but NASA thought they had managed the potential issues in a way that assured the safety of the Shuttle. It appears they were wrong, and the problems were not controllable in the long term.
The amazing thing to me is the number of missions they flew before these thermal tiles became an issue. I think the thermal tiles are a fatally flawed system, both because of their susceptability to damage in flight, and because they require huge amounts of expensive upkeep between missions. The fact that NASA flew over 100 missions before this kind of problem occurred is a tribute to their dedication. The fact that this system was selected shows that NASA is not perfect.
I don't particularly see how designing something with a safety factor of 10 is more responsibility than being in charge of a pension fund for 10000 people.
Exactly my point, most people aren't in charge of something that makes them personally responsible for the life or welfare or other people. I mention engineers because I know about the field, not because it has an exclusive claim on responsibility or accountability.
Design a product poorly -> consumers don't want the product -> company makes no money -> people out of work. The management version of that is pick wrong product to manufacture -> market isn't there -> company makes no money -> people out of work.
Most engineers design things. That is why they became engineers. Very few design bridges or buildings, but the same type of thinking applies to other areas. If you are designing a computer, you don't have margins as large as even 2X to play with, they are more like 20% when it comes to timing, if you want to be competitive.
Grade padding removes the personal responsibility and accountability for the grade from the student, which I think is a disaster. Lack of accountability corrupts, absolute lack of accountability corrupts absolutely (John W Campbell Jr.). This is the heart of many problems in our culture at the present time.
Look at the current business scandals, where executives weren't held accountable for their actions until the damage was done (to mention one of your examples). To mention another, if the mechanic doesn't install your brakes correctly he can kill you. If the designer of the car braking system does a bad job, he can kill many more people, so he has more responsibility, but both are accountable for their actions.
If YOU screw up chances are its not just you!
I agree, in most cases it would be a process problem on a large project to really let a problem get through. Please note the Kursk, the Apollo capsule fire, the bay area bridges that collapsed during an earthquake, and the skywalk collapse in KC. I doubt that anything other than a person (not a computer program) could have figured out what might be wrong in time to do something, and that didn't happen, in spite of the processes put in place to assure that it did.
You do the math, commit the required resources, and cross your fingers.
I have been in your position, and am an EE by training as well. I wasn't saying no one else has to make important decisions. Most people with a college degree will not face that kind of need for correct decision making, either in their job, or their business dealings. Even today, with all of the software assists available, you can have a timing error in your board, an assembly error, or a poor choice of parts, which can lead to huge financial liability (or prison). When you are making a business decision, you are betting on the abilities of the people involved, not the software they use.
I am contracting for a large company right now doing software, and I can tell you that they take forever to make any decisions. The process is so drawn out that many of the steps are done to satisfy a check box on the company process standard, rather than to actually do the process they are supposed to. This happens in other places, and it comes down to the individual to make sure their design is correct, because those other engineers may not spend the time needed to really know what you have done, since they have many other demands on their time. Individual responsibility is the key. You don't get that by padding grades and letting people get by with poor work.
In engineering, if you screw up, at the very least it costs someone a (normally) substantial amount of money to fix the problem, or to pay the lawyers. At the other end of the spectrum, lots of people die (the bridge collapses, the airplane blows up, the submarine sinks). I think that professors in engineering schools take that into account when they assign grades.
An engineer will tell you what the answer is, how accurate it is, and what assumptions were made in getting that answer. In the end, something gets built, and either works or not, entirely based on how closely the engineer understands the problem, and how effective he is at reaching a solution. For the problems that you work on in college, there is very little wiggle room on the correct answers.
In few other professions will someone without many years of proven experience be given the kind of responsibilities that many engineers have to deal with. They would rather flunk you out than let you go forward without the skills you need, and the ability to apply those skills.
Many people leave engineering in the first few years of their careers, and decide to follow another career path. This happens because they can't deal with the pressures of trying to solve the problem, within budget, on time, and working properly.
the money spent on the producer is an investment
So you are saying that it doesn't appear on the debit side on the accounting ledgers? It is an expense, whatever the benefit you may get from it. Let's keep our terminology correct, if you spend money for it, it's an expense.
Oh, get off your high horse. Microsoft was a monopoly because they controlled the market for PC operating systems. People made bad choices that let them get there, admittedly. No one voted to make Microsoft a monopoly, it was an accident of the market. Once they were there, they made deals that bundled their other software on machines at an attractive price, and made it very costly for a manufacturer like Dell to provide anything else, basically making them pay for Windows, even if they didn't put it on the machine.
You would be annoyed if they charged you for leather seats on your car, even when you didn't get them, wouldn't you? That would be wrong, wouldn't it? How can you defend a company that would make you do that? We don't know what else might be in their contracts in the way of penalties for not shipping Windows on a computer, because the terms are secret. If anyone reveals them, they lose their licnese to sell Windows with their computers. Are you saying that is a normal business practice? What business are you in?
You chose to ignore the multitude of reasons that caused anti-trust action to happen against Microsoft. That is your choice. I chose to see the whole picture. For years I ignored my friends who hated Microsoft, until finally the evidence of their actions was too much for me to ignore.
I'm tired of teaching a history lesson here, especially to someone who sounds like a Microsoft employee. You will note that Microsoft is making itself less and less attractive to businesses as it moves to the annual license mode of operation. Microsoft is aiding the market for alternative operating systems by their own actions, which is only a fitting way for them to end.
explain to me how M$ is a monopoly?
Go buy a Dell, HP, or Gateway computer without an operating system. What can you get at Best Buy? You don't have to have 100% control of a market to be a monopoly. Being a monopoly is not what got Microsoft into trouble, it was using that monopoly to kill off their competition (small though they may have been by comparison) that got them in trouble. Most people don't get white box systems, they aren't comfortable with doing that, so they have only one choice, buy a machine with Windows on it. You and I are different, we can pick computer parts, assemble the machine we want, and load whatever OS we choose, but my neighbor can't.
P.S. The court system decided Microsoft was a monopolist, and they used that power in ways they are not allowed to, at least if they don't want anti-trust acton against them. You don't have to agree, although you may be one of the few who would dispute that decision. Everyone else thought that was a given, and the penalty phase was the only interesting part of the whole courtroom drama.
You say that if something doesn't pay for you product, but just steals it, stinks to be you, I guess.
Their product is SCO Unix and Linux. They evidently can't make a living selling them, which suggests they are either bad at business, or technically inferior. I was not referring to any patents they hold when I was talking about their products, which everyone else probably understood!
Can I freely take your car for a spin if I make sure I dn't sign a contract with you?
Sure, it's called grand theft auto, and you can steal it any time I'm not looking. This is a little different. I show you a tuneup trick I invented for your car. I say it's ok to use without paying me anything. I publish a magazine article with the trick in it (they distribute Linux, which has a GPL license), without telling anyone (including the publisher) that it is patented knowledge, and I am going to one day enforce that patent. Years later I threaten to sue you, the magazine publisher, and everyone who read the magazine, if you don't all pay me for that knowledge. That is what SCO is going to do.
is just meant to hurt a commendable company
From the sounds of what they are proposing, we are saying that they will become anything but a commendable company if they go forward with this. We would rather see them close their doors than become another parasite company, providing nothing of value, and taking advantage of a loophole in patent law to rob others.
God forbid your boss walk up to you and say "you know I should not pay you for your work."
I have a contract with my company. If I do the work they request, they owe me the money, they aren't giving anything to me, we are exchanging a service for a fee. If they refuse to honor the contract, they will see me in court, and I will win.
Think about all the overtime you work, do you think you should be paid for it?
If your contract says they have to pay you for overtime, then they owe you the money. If it doesn't say you get paid for overtime, then they don't owe you anything (except some gratitude) for the time. If you don't like that, go work somewhere else.
Someone made something to make money!!!OMG!
Someone found a new scam to try to get money they aren't owed. They have a product, they sell if, their customers pay them for it. They evidently can't make a living doing that. Now they want money for something they didn't do. Something the original patent holders decided not to take any action over, if there are even any actionable patents present here.
Your examples are all off the mark.
but it does share both design and interfaces such as syscalls
This begs several questions. Were parts of the design of Unix patented? Have those patents that exist already run out? Is an interface, like syscalls, even patentable (even with our current broken system). Certainly many elements of Unix can be demonstrated as prior art in places such as other operating systems that existed when Unix was created.
This is not a copyright issue, it is a patent issue.
Part of the issue is a copyright issue. Caldera is/was a Linux vendor. GPL, the terms under which Linux is distributed, requires that Linux (and the parts within it) not be encumbered by patent restrictions. In selling Linux, Caldera certainly implied that any patents they may have held through purchasing SCO were either not applicable, or that they were not going to enforce them, in accordance with the GPL license. Does their agreement to these copyright terms defeat the legal case for any patent claims they may have?
SCO (Caldera) needs to say something substantial about this. What patents exactly do they feel have been violated, and need to be enforced?
You're even hypocritical enough to say "if you can't compete, sue"! Nevermind that Sun, Netscape, and the various states' attorneys lived by the same mantra when they went after Microsoft.
Microsoft is a monopolist who has been convicted of abusing the market, using their position for leverage. Anyone who filed against them before that was an official court ruling was just ahead of the game, which is not surprising, since anti-trust actions tend to be very slow. Taking someone to court over their behavior is the only accepted way most businesses have of dealing with this kind of abuse.
Launching an attack against all other operating systems over ancient (in computer terms) intellectual property, especially when you are a small, financially troubled unix/linux vendor, is another thing completely. This is a form of abuse of the legal system. If you pay me money, you aren't taking the chance that I will sue you over something you probably can't prove you haven't done (which does not mean you did it). Doesn't this sound like the classic protection racket? Either pay me now, or I tie you up in court. The fact that they are going with this option shows that it is time for them to get out of the business.