Actually, in my case, it's because I don't give two shits about the goal of the projects I work on at work (99% of them are "so sales can make more sales"), whereas for open source projects I only work on things I personally find interesting.
So a solar sail that isn't reflective is impossible? I thought the change in momentum was balanced by the change in heat.. therefore kinetic energy is preserved. Of course, eventually the sail will heat up so much that the material it is made from starts to melt. Maybe that's what will happen to this guy's system too. Certainly looks like it.
Looking at the PDF, it appears he is claiming that he can generate very small amounts of thust for a massive power input. It doesn't appear that he's claiming he can replace cars, trains and launch vehicles.. that was just New Scientist trying to make it look all sexy. Of course, even if the physics was correct, it don't mean shit until he actually makes a product and sells it.
Please excuse my naivity. I havn't done basic physics in 10 years.. the photons have momentum right? They're slaming into matter which is absorbing those photons, thus reducing their momentum, where's the momentum go? It's gotta be conserved right? Obviously it goes into the material that is absorbing the photons.. like a solar sail. If one side of the cavity is bigger than the other then one side is receiving more momentum than the other.. so the cavity should move. I would have thought it would rotate, but this guy seems to think it moves linearly.
Why does everyone keep saying this doesn't conserve energy and momentum? He's got mains power hooked up to a magnatron, he's expending a whole lot of energy and (he claims) he's getting a tiny output of momentum.
I wouldn't tell anyone. I'd maybe show a few keen investors what my prototype could do, but that's it. Then I'd develop a flying car, a launch vehicle, whatever, and insidiously take over existing markets. "So, SpaceX has made you the best offer for launch services eh? I'll beat it." "What kind of safety guarentees can you give us?" "Err, umm, what kind of safety guarentee is SpaceX giving you, I'll beat it!" "Right.. hmm, ok. You don't even have a rocket do you?" "Look, do you want your satelite in orbit or what?" and so on. That's me though, could be this guy just doesn't have balls that big.
$100 is exactly the problem. I can earn $100 in an hour, what makes you think I can write a vpn frontend in an hour? People are not willing to pay market price for their bounties, so no-one bothers collecting them. Now, if you actually started writing a vpn frontend (even if that means just firing up the GIMP and putting together some mockups) and told people what you would doing, you would find you receive a lot of offers for help from people who also want that.
Thing is, if I'm going to pay someone to work on something full time, I can get a lot better value for my money than giving it to a random open source developer. For one, I can hire someone and claim 100% rights over their work. Also, I can hire someone who I know will take orders and do what I want. If you're suggesting that whoever is paying the bills shouldn't demand these two things, I gotta wonder why they would do it. Surely they'd expect to pay the developer less, at least. In which case, the developer is opting to receive less money than they could receive by working somewhere else solely because they're working on open source.. which is just another thing they'll complain about in 6 months time. Another alternative is that I could pay for half a developer and you could pay for the other half. If that was the case I'd expect to pay less than 0.5 of the cost of hiring a whole open source developer because I now don't have exclusivity.. so the only way the developer can make enough money to compete doing open source development is to keep the number of contributors to his pay secret. Knowing all this, I would feel my contribution to his pay was more of a donation than hiring, and as such I'd feel that he'd keep doing this work even if I wasn't paying, so why would I continuing supporting him?
When it is relevant yes. But often you want to take something in a completely different direction to the stated goals of the project. When that happens it's a good thing that the effort is not returned to the parent project.
Ya know what's a better motivator than both money and "social conscience"? Fun. And it's the primary motivator for most open source developers, beating out even need (scratching an itch) and conceit (look how many users I've got!). Developers who code for the fun of it tend to produce the best code too because they're not rushing to meet some deadline or hacking up the first thing that works so they can get the job they actually wanted to do done or adding arbitary features to attract users.
I think musicians are used to paying for everything so they embrace the opportunity to hire a developer to implement their favourite features. I've walked out of many a book/music shop empty handed after seeing the prices that musicians pay. $80 for a book of 5 songs of sheet music? No thanks. It's no wonder so many kids learn to play by ear.
Look, if it aint interesting to you, you shouldn't be working on it. This whole "I'm coding on FOSS to make the world a better place" bullshit is the problem. Suggesting that you should be paid because other people find your playing around valuable is just pretentious, not to mention pernicious. Working on FOSS should be fun. If it aint fun anymore, go work on something else. So long as you are motivated to work on X, you shall never be paid to do X. If you are, think yourself lucky and shut up about it, otherwise the sucker who is paying you will figure out he doesn't have to.
Honestly, I don't think you know what you're talking about. You've obviously never tried to take academic research and make a product from it, so do just bugger off please.
Some of it is useful - to academics. But if what you're trying to do is build a product, most of it is not useful. Most of it is over-optimistic, self-congratulatory, totally disconnected from real applications, pulp. But it's not just academic research that is like this, when it comes to robotics even the commercial labs don't actually produce anything that is useful for building products. The few companies that are actually producing robotics products largely ignore the latest advances in the field, like bipedal walking or vision, cause the research is just too out-there to be useful, right now. Maybe in another 10 years time we'll see products being produced that use the academic research of today, but that will be after 100 grad students have been forced to build on that research so it is reasonably fleshed out.
I've really never found it annoying. You gotta think about this in context. You've been on a plane for 10 hours, someone picks up the phone and calls their loved one, the conversation goes something like this:
"Have you landed yet?" "No." "Err, so how are you calling me?" "There's a phone in the arm rest." "Did you get an upgrade to business class?" "No, it's in every seat." "Wow, that's cool." "Can you hear me alright?" "Yeah."
After being on the plane for 10 hours you're just about ready to talk to anyone about anything, and listening to someone else talk to someone is almost as good.
Personally, I think they need a new class: cryo class. You check in your bags at the airport, they wheel out a pod, you lie down in it and they drug you up with that drug doctors use to induce a coma, lock the pod and throw it in with the other luggage. When you get to your destination the doctors bring you out of the coma, or send you to a local hospital until you come out of it (years or months later), and that's just a chance you take. After flying 56 hours in a single week recently, I'd buy a cryo class ticket.
No. See, in academia, you solve a little reduced set of the problem. To commercialize your research you have to actually expand the work to include real world problems and until you do that, academic research is about a useful as poetry.
Slashdot Mirror
Which suggests that this invention works by the exact same means.
Actually, in my case, it's because I don't give two shits about the goal of the projects I work on at work (99% of them are "so sales can make more sales"), whereas for open source projects I only work on things I personally find interesting.
So a solar sail that isn't reflective is impossible? I thought the change in momentum was balanced by the change in heat.. therefore kinetic energy is preserved. Of course, eventually the sail will heat up so much that the material it is made from starts to melt. Maybe that's what will happen to this guy's system too. Certainly looks like it.
Looking at the PDF, it appears he is claiming that he can generate very small amounts of thust for a massive power input. It doesn't appear that he's claiming he can replace cars, trains and launch vehicles.. that was just New Scientist trying to make it look all sexy. Of course, even if the physics was correct, it don't mean shit until he actually makes a product and sells it.
Please excuse my naivity. I havn't done basic physics in 10 years.. the photons have momentum right? They're slaming into matter which is absorbing those photons, thus reducing their momentum, where's the momentum go? It's gotta be conserved right? Obviously it goes into the material that is absorbing the photons.. like a solar sail. If one side of the cavity is bigger than the other then one side is receiving more momentum than the other.. so the cavity should move. I would have thought it would rotate, but this guy seems to think it moves linearly.
Why does everyone keep saying this doesn't conserve energy and momentum? He's got mains power hooked up to a magnatron, he's expending a whole lot of energy and (he claims) he's getting a tiny output of momentum.
I wouldn't tell anyone. I'd maybe show a few keen investors what my prototype could do, but that's it. Then I'd develop a flying car, a launch vehicle, whatever, and insidiously take over existing markets. "So, SpaceX has made you the best offer for launch services eh? I'll beat it." "What kind of safety guarentees can you give us?" "Err, umm, what kind of safety guarentee is SpaceX giving you, I'll beat it!" "Right.. hmm, ok. You don't even have a rocket do you?" "Look, do you want your satelite in orbit or what?" and so on. That's me though, could be this guy just doesn't have balls that big.
$100 is exactly the problem. I can earn $100 in an hour, what makes you think I can write a vpn frontend in an hour? People are not willing to pay market price for their bounties, so no-one bothers collecting them. Now, if you actually started writing a vpn frontend (even if that means just firing up the GIMP and putting together some mockups) and told people what you would doing, you would find you receive a lot of offers for help from people who also want that.
Thing is, if I'm going to pay someone to work on something full time, I can get a lot better value for my money than giving it to a random open source developer. For one, I can hire someone and claim 100% rights over their work. Also, I can hire someone who I know will take orders and do what I want. If you're suggesting that whoever is paying the bills shouldn't demand these two things, I gotta wonder why they would do it. Surely they'd expect to pay the developer less, at least. In which case, the developer is opting to receive less money than they could receive by working somewhere else solely because they're working on open source.. which is just another thing they'll complain about in 6 months time. Another alternative is that I could pay for half a developer and you could pay for the other half. If that was the case I'd expect to pay less than 0.5 of the cost of hiring a whole open source developer because I now don't have exclusivity.. so the only way the developer can make enough money to compete doing open source development is to keep the number of contributors to his pay secret. Knowing all this, I would feel my contribution to his pay was more of a donation than hiring, and as such I'd feel that he'd keep doing this work even if I wasn't paying, so why would I continuing supporting him?
Basicly, it's the mass version of the prisoner's dilemma.
It's called the Tragedy Of The Commons.
When it is relevant yes. But often you want to take something in a completely different direction to the stated goals of the project. When that happens it's a good thing that the effort is not returned to the parent project.
Ya know what's a better motivator than both money and "social conscience"? Fun. And it's the primary motivator for most open source developers, beating out even need (scratching an itch) and conceit (look how many users I've got!). Developers who code for the fun of it tend to produce the best code too because they're not rushing to meet some deadline or hacking up the first thing that works so they can get the job they actually wanted to do done or adding arbitary features to attract users.
I think musicians are used to paying for everything so they embrace the opportunity to hire a developer to implement their favourite features. I've walked out of many a book/music shop empty handed after seeing the prices that musicians pay. $80 for a book of 5 songs of sheet music? No thanks. It's no wonder so many kids learn to play by ear.
I was kinda of the opinion that taking something, altering it and using it as a base for something else was the point of FOSS.
Hopefully at some stage people start **paying** for stuff that is valuable to them. Unfortunately people grab what they can get for free.
You're the one handing it out for free, what do you expect?
Look, if it aint interesting to you, you shouldn't be working on it. This whole "I'm coding on FOSS to make the world a better place" bullshit is the problem. Suggesting that you should be paid because other people find your playing around valuable is just pretentious, not to mention pernicious. Working on FOSS should be fun. If it aint fun anymore, go work on something else. So long as you are motivated to work on X, you shall never be paid to do X. If you are, think yourself lucky and shut up about it, otherwise the sucker who is paying you will figure out he doesn't have to.
No-one actually collects those bounties. It's a failed experiment.
Honestly, I don't think you know what you're talking about. You've obviously never tried to take academic research and make a product from it, so do just bugger off please.
Some of it is useful - to academics. But if what you're trying to do is build a product, most of it is not useful. Most of it is over-optimistic, self-congratulatory, totally disconnected from real applications, pulp. But it's not just academic research that is like this, when it comes to robotics even the commercial labs don't actually produce anything that is useful for building products. The few companies that are actually producing robotics products largely ignore the latest advances in the field, like bipedal walking or vision, cause the research is just too out-there to be useful, right now. Maybe in another 10 years time we'll see products being produced that use the academic research of today, but that will be after 100 grad students have been forced to build on that research so it is reasonably fleshed out.
We're not talking about breakthroughs here, we're talking about masters and phd students who "build a robot to play chess".
I've really never found it annoying. You gotta think about this in context. You've been on a plane for 10 hours, someone picks up the phone and calls their loved one, the conversation goes something like this:
"Have you landed yet?"
"No."
"Err, so how are you calling me?"
"There's a phone in the arm rest."
"Did you get an upgrade to business class?"
"No, it's in every seat."
"Wow, that's cool."
"Can you hear me alright?"
"Yeah."
After being on the plane for 10 hours you're just about ready to talk to anyone about anything, and listening to someone else talk to someone is almost as good.
Personally, I think they need a new class: cryo class. You check in your bags at the airport, they wheel out a pod, you lie down in it and they drug you up with that drug doctors use to induce a coma, lock the pod and throw it in with the other luggage. When you get to your destination the doctors bring you out of the coma, or send you to a local hospital until you come out of it (years or months later), and that's just a chance you take. After flying 56 hours in a single week recently, I'd buy a cryo class ticket.
written in Perl
Get. Away. From. Me.
I wasn't aware anyone used RCS. Personally I'd rather use bzr or svn, even for local only use.
Ya know what would absolutely rock? OpenMTA. I recently did a survey and there's nothing good with an open license, unless you like Java.
No. See, in academia, you solve a little reduced set of the problem. To commercialize your research you have to actually expand the work to include real world problems and until you do that, academic research is about a useful as poetry.
You already can make calls on international flights, even in cattle class. Just swipe your credit card and call.