The first properly documented mechanical flight on a heavier-than-air machine was performed in France by Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian. This page has a lot of information about it. In all fairness, Here's the dissenting view. In the American rebuttal to the claims of the backers of Santos-Dumont, they admit, en passant, that the French Clement Ader was actually the first to fly.
I don't mean to discredit the Wright brothers as aviation pioneers. Also, I won't enter in the discussion of "who invented the airplane", because the fact is that the design was being perfected for a many years by a number of groups.
As a Brazilian, I am very proud of Santos-Dumont's contribution, especially as he was a sort of "open-source/open-access pioneer" also. While the Wright brothers applied for patents for their inventions, Santos-Dumont published openly the plans of his most successful aircraft:
He turned to monoplanes and produced four unsuccessful models, but the fifth -- the Demoiselle, first flown in 1909 -- was a winner. Tiny and quick, it was the first practical light aircraft, although pilots reported that it was a handful in the air. In a grand and magnanimous gesture, Santos Dumont offered the plans to the public free of charge. They were published worldwide -- in America, they appeared in Popular Mechanics -- enabling hopeful young aviators of limited means to get into the air inexpensively. In this way, Santos Dumont and his Demoiselle helped fuel the phenomenal growth of aviation in the years before World War 1.
"Eager for a job" != "Willing to go anywhere to get it".
Then that's not eager enough in my book. Meanwhile, there are some people who are eager enough for a job to go to the other side of the world to get it.
At any top tech company, you're going to find not only people from all over the world, but also from all over the country. Woody Allen once said that "80% of success is just showing up".
I'm not part of the "the name is GNU/Linux" crowd (I call it Linux -- actually I prefer to refer to the specific distro whenever possible), but apparently RMS is right in that a lot of people really don't know how to differentiate an operating system from a kernel. *sigh*
I'll take RMS's word for it when I see him give the world an operating system
Well, chances are your whole operating system was compiled with his compiler. So I'd take his word for it, if I were you. I'll agree that "artists determine culture, not critics", but RMS is no Roger Ebert. Heck, if Linus were Stanley Kubrick, RMS would be Orson freaking Welles.
Do you think the BK license required Linus to promise to never write a competing product for the rest of his life?
Amazingly, yes. Apparently, the original license did not specify a time frame, so it could be interpreted as valid for undetermined time. The revised license seems to specify 1 year as the no-compete clause.
No. Git isn't an SCM, it's just a file system for which an SCM can sit over.
Nah, that's just smart wording. Linus is using Git by itself now, not "under an SCM". And what it he using it for? To manage source code! Isn't that what SCM (Source Code Management) tools are for?
But of course, Larry McVoy won't sue. Linus' public endorsement of BitKeeper is a precious asset -- how many people would even know of BitMover if it wasn't for Linus? It's a shame that apparently the license does not apply fairly to everyone, though.
Yes, the park may be private and owned by Larry, but Tridge never got inside the park. He just walked around the park, occasionally taking notes of who walked in and out of it. And that, like the grandparent post says, "he had the legal right to do".
Unix, Books, Linux, okay... But any idea why they added the Windows icon to this story?? Because those shells run under Cygwin? Wouldn't then at least make as much sense to put BSD and even Apple icons as well?
No, he probably just hit on "View Page Source" and copied from there. Still there's a tiny amount of work there, but it's still a low attitude by any standards. Well, guess I finally have a use for the Foe feature of Slashdot.
...then Brain Boost really scored. I was thinking of some question to try it out, and (based on what's playing on BBC 6music right now -- Friday's funk show) I came up with this question, not really realizing how tricky it is:
Who wrote Sex Machine?
This is what I got: a result pointing to an article saying that William "Bootsy" Collins (of Funkadelic fame) co-wrote the James Brown song.
Am I only searching? Prefetch them!
Am I doing too many things at the same time? Leave it all alone, maybe the search isn't my primary task.
Which is exactly what Firefox does (see questions "How is browser idle time determined?" and "What if I'm downloading something in the background?" on the Mozilla FAQ linked on the story).
But sure, it has no way to know you're running wget in a terminal...
Your code snippet is nice pseudocode, but I doubt a real-world version would be that clean, even in C++. His C code, even if uglier, actually compiles and works. I'd be curious to see a Gtkmm version of the same thing.
If it's a Beatles cd, that dollar is going towards Michael Jackson's kid-touching defense.
Last I heard, Jackson took a loan from Sony (who co-owns/used to co-own the rights with him) and if he didn't pay, Sony would get the rights. Since everybody seems to be saying out there that MJ's current financial situation is at best flaky, I expect him to lose the Beatles rights soon (if he hasn't already).
Your portrayal of the situation in Brazil is at the very least unfair.
The Brazilian government is spending on developing the code base that will save them millions, but I'm sure government management software does not make Slashdot headlines like "a tool for hacking GTK+". Migrating to a Free Software platform does not involve only installing Linux distros; migrating the actual systems that run on top of the platform is the most substantial work.
Brazilian involvement with Free Software started in my home state, Rio Grande do Sul, where the state government started a big push for free software in its IT agency. The systems of the state's public bank were migrated to free software, and its very pleasant sight to see Tux in the ATM's wallpapers. Incidentally, it is also in Rio Grande do Sul that the International Forum on Free Software takes place (and where the World Social Forum was created). The party who was in state government when these initiatives took place has now won the federal elections, so these developments are now starting to take place in national scale. Brazil spends billions every year in proprietary software licenses -- yes, spend money installing free software is a great move, especially in the long run.
In my personal experience as a Brazilian from Rio Grande do Sul, I can say that the development of a culture of Free Software there is as important as funding coding. The Forums served as a great incentive to the FS project I'm involved with, the GoboLinux distribution, a project born in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. It was also in the Forums that I was exposed to another Brazilian Free Software project, the Lua language, which I now took part in my MsC project, funded by -- you guess -- the Brazilian government. So there's your "big project the Brazilian government funded on FOSS". Of course, we could use more research grants, but that's a more general problem of low incentive to science R&D (a recurring problem in the so-called Third World). At least, now, the grants are given by the government with the explicit condition that research results are made available under an OSI-approved license. To me, that's a great thing.
Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate
on
IE7 Details Emerge
·
· Score: 1
Did you ever try mcedit? It's shipped as part of mc, the old-school Midnight Commander file-manager. It's "friendly", less limited than pico, and, on the Linux console, even shift-arrows work.
Watch out, not KDE 3.4-final screenshots
on
KDE 3.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The screenshot gallery linked by the parent comment features KDE 3.4 Release Candidate, not the final version.
(Yes, I realize it's probably very similar, but I went through a few screens thinking "well, seems like it hasn't changed a bit from the RC I'm running here" until I noticed the gallery title.)
You are right. It was pretty well done, too. It had lots of animations, as well as interactive "demos" where you could practice things such as resizing or moving a window, etc. "Now resize this window so that it fits inside that dotted frame", things like that.
In general, I think the help files from Windows 3.1 were way more complete than those from Windows 95 (perhaps before 95 contained so much more stuff to document, and 3.1 was so mich simpler). Anyway, I have memories of learning stuff reading Windows 3.1 help, and memories of frustration going through the wizard-like help of 95 ("Did this solve your hardware conflict? No? Then try this...")
3) Apple will take a big risk in 2005. This could be in the form of a major acquisition. With almost $6 billion in cash, Steve Jobs hinted to a group of employees not long ago that he might want to buy something big, though I am at a loss right now for what that might be. Or Apple might decide to throw some of that cash into the box along with new computers by deliberately losing some money on each unit in order to buy market share.
We might see that as early as next week with the rumored introduction of an el-cheapo Mac without a display. The price for that box is supposed to be $499, which would give customers a box with processor, disk, memory, and OS into which you plug your current display, keyboard, and mouse. Given that this sounds a lot like AMD's new Personal Internet Communicator, which will sell for $185, there is probably plenty of profit left for Apple in a $499 price. But what if they priced it at $399 or even $349? Now make it $249, where I calculate they'd be losing $100 per unit. At $100 per unit, how many little Macs could they sell if Jobs is willing to spend $1 billion? TEN MILLION and Apple suddenly becomes the world's number one PC company. Think of it as a non-mobile iPod with computing capability. Think of the music sales it could spawn. Think of the iPod sales it would hurt (zero, because of the lack of mobility). Think of the more expensive Mac sales it would hurt (zero, because a Mac loyalist would only be interested in using this box as an EXTRA computer they would otherwise not have bought). Think of the extra application sales it would generate and especially the OS upgrade sales, which alone could pay back that $100. Think of the impact it would have on Windows sales (minus 10 million units). And if it doesn't work, Steve will still have $5 billion in cash with no measurable negative impact on the company. I think he'll do it.
So, $249 was a bit of wishful thinking in Bob's part...;)
Re:Change the pronounciation
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Second is the name. It needs to change. This is not about being PC, it's about reaching out to as many people as possible, and getting them to try out the GIMP. Will universities ever teach classes in a program that's called 'the gimp?' Will companies ever take seriously an employee who says that he wants to install 'the gimp' on his computer? Y'all have to have gotten the same weird looks as me when you've suggested that people try 'the gimp'. Have you ever told it to someone who uses a cane or crutches or is in a wheelchair?
If you have, you probably felt like a real jerk right after it slipped out of your mouth.
Well, as a non-native speaker, I never knew the word "gimp" had a meaning in the English language. Just looked up m-w.com... gimp means cripple,
but it also means spirit and, curiously, vim (which is also a word!).
If you feel bad saying "gimp" as ['gimp], I suggest you to pronunce the "g" as in "ginger", making it ['jimp]. I've already heard people saying it like that; it's not that weird.
Slashdot Mirror
The first properly documented mechanical flight on a heavier-than-air machine was performed in France by Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian. This page has a lot of information about it. In all fairness, Here's the dissenting view. In the American rebuttal to the claims of the backers of Santos-Dumont, they admit, en passant, that the French Clement Ader was actually the first to fly.
I don't mean to discredit the Wright brothers as aviation pioneers. Also, I won't enter in the discussion of "who invented the airplane", because the fact is that the design was being perfected for a many years by a number of groups.
As a Brazilian, I am very proud of Santos-Dumont's contribution, especially as he was a sort of "open-source/open-access pioneer" also. While the Wright brothers applied for patents for their inventions, Santos-Dumont published openly the plans of his most successful aircraft:
"Eager for a job" != "Willing to go anywhere to get it".
Then that's not eager enough in my book. Meanwhile, there are some people who are eager enough for a job to go to the other side of the world to get it.
At any top tech company, you're going to find not only people from all over the world, but also from all over the country. Woody Allen once said that "80% of success is just showing up".
Also, very little of the code in Linux is Linus', nowadays.
RMS hasn't made an operating system. Linus has.
I'm not part of the "the name is GNU/Linux" crowd (I call it Linux -- actually I prefer to refer to the specific distro whenever possible), but apparently RMS is right in that a lot of people really don't know how to differentiate an operating system from a kernel. *sigh*
I can now download Firefox at a blazing 6.7kbps.
Well, I really doubt you mean kilobits per second (download meters usually measure in kB/s -- kilobytes per second). 6.7kbps would be reeeally slow.
Meanwhile, lots of people in the world reading your post at 56kbps can only wish they could download software at 6.7kB/s...
I'll take RMS's word for it when I see him give the world an operating system
Well, chances are your whole operating system was compiled with his compiler. So I'd take his word for it, if I were you. I'll agree that "artists determine culture, not critics", but RMS is no Roger Ebert. Heck, if Linus were Stanley Kubrick, RMS would be Orson freaking Welles.
Do you think the BK license required Linus to promise to never write a competing product for the rest of his life? Amazingly, yes. Apparently, the original license did not specify a time frame, so it could be interpreted as valid for undetermined time. The revised license seems to specify 1 year as the no-compete clause.
Isn't this exactly what Linus has just done?
No. Git isn't an SCM, it's just a file system for which an SCM can sit over.
Nah, that's just smart wording. Linus is using Git by itself now, not "under an SCM". And what it he using it for? To manage source code! Isn't that what SCM (Source Code Management) tools are for?
But of course, Larry McVoy won't sue. Linus' public endorsement of BitKeeper is a precious asset -- how many people would even know of BitMover if it wasn't for Linus? It's a shame that apparently the license does not apply fairly to everyone, though.
Yes, the park may be private and owned by Larry, but Tridge never got inside the park. He just walked around the park, occasionally taking notes of who walked in and out of it. And that, like the grandparent post says, "he had the legal right to do".
Google is the new Soviet Russia/All Your Base/Natalie Portman/Beowulf Cluster.
And the wrong tags in the rendering of links within messages on "Basic HTML" view.
:)]
[Oops -- just before I posted I double-checked to see if the bug was still there and it isn't anymore. Well, I agree with you then.
Unix, Books, Linux, okay... But any idea why they added the Windows icon to this story?? Because those shells run under Cygwin? Wouldn't then at least make as much sense to put BSD and even Apple icons as well?
No, he probably just hit on "View Page Source" and copied from there. Still there's a tiny amount of work there, but it's still a low attitude by any standards. Well, guess I finally have a use for the Foe feature of Slashdot.
...then Brain Boost really scored. I was thinking of some question to try it out, and (based on what's playing on BBC 6music right now -- Friday's funk show) I came up with this question, not really realizing how tricky it is:
Who wrote Sex Machine?
This is what I got: a result pointing to an article saying that William "Bootsy" Collins (of Funkadelic fame) co-wrote the James Brown song.
Compare the results from Google and Ask Jeeves.
Now all I need is to configure a bb: shortcut in Konqueror's Enhanced Browsing dialog...
...leave your drier on for hours straight, do you?
Am I only searching? Prefetch them! Am I doing too many things at the same time? Leave it all alone, maybe the search isn't my primary task.
Which is exactly what Firefox does (see questions "How is browser idle time determined?" and "What if I'm downloading something in the background?" on the Mozilla FAQ linked on the story).
But sure, it has no way to know you're running wget in a terminal...
pretending that a C++ version of the gtk header exists
...since, of course, there are no such things as C++ bindings for GTK+.
Your code snippet is nice pseudocode, but I doubt a real-world version would be that clean, even in C++. His C code, even if uglier, actually compiles and works. I'd be curious to see a Gtkmm version of the same thing.
If it's a Beatles cd, that dollar is going towards Michael Jackson's kid-touching defense.
Last I heard, Jackson took a loan from Sony (who co-owns/used to co-own the rights with him) and if he didn't pay, Sony would get the rights. Since everybody seems to be saying out there that MJ's current financial situation is at best flaky, I expect him to lose the Beatles rights soon (if he hasn't already).
Your portrayal of the situation in Brazil is at the very least unfair.
The Brazilian government is spending on developing the code base that will save them millions, but I'm sure government management software does not make Slashdot headlines like "a tool for hacking GTK+". Migrating to a Free Software platform does not involve only installing Linux distros; migrating the actual systems that run on top of the platform is the most substantial work.
Brazilian involvement with Free Software started in my home state, Rio Grande do Sul, where the state government started a big push for free software in its IT agency. The systems of the state's public bank were migrated to free software, and its very pleasant sight to see Tux in the ATM's wallpapers. Incidentally, it is also in Rio Grande do Sul that the International Forum on Free Software takes place (and where the World Social Forum was created). The party who was in state government when these initiatives took place has now won the federal elections, so these developments are now starting to take place in national scale. Brazil spends billions every year in proprietary software licenses -- yes, spend money installing free software is a great move, especially in the long run.
In my personal experience as a Brazilian from Rio Grande do Sul, I can say that the development of a culture of Free Software there is as important as funding coding. The Forums served as a great incentive to the FS project I'm involved with, the GoboLinux distribution, a project born in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. It was also in the Forums that I was exposed to another Brazilian Free Software project, the Lua language, which I now took part in my MsC project, funded by -- you guess -- the Brazilian government. So there's your "big project the Brazilian government funded on FOSS". Of course, we could use more research grants, but that's a more general problem of low incentive to science R&D (a recurring problem in the so-called Third World). At least, now, the grants are given by the government with the explicit condition that research results are made available under an OSI-approved license. To me, that's a great thing.
Did you ever try mcedit? It's shipped as part of mc, the old-school Midnight Commander file-manager. It's "friendly", less limited than pico, and, on the Linux console, even shift-arrows work.
The screenshot gallery linked by the parent comment features KDE 3.4 Release Candidate, not the final version.
(Yes, I realize it's probably very similar, but I went through a few screens thinking "well, seems like it hasn't changed a bit from the RC I'm running here" until I noticed the gallery title.)
You are right. It was pretty well done, too. It had lots of animations, as well as interactive "demos" where you could practice things such as resizing or moving a window, etc. "Now resize this window so that it fits inside that dotted frame", things like that.
In general, I think the help files from Windows 3.1 were way more complete than those from Windows 95 (perhaps before 95 contained so much more stuff to document, and 3.1 was so mich simpler). Anyway, I have memories of learning stuff reading Windows 3.1 help, and memories of frustration going through the wizard-like help of 95 ("Did this solve your hardware conflict? No? Then try this...")
3) Apple will take a big risk in 2005. This could be in the form of a major acquisition. With almost $6 billion in cash, Steve Jobs hinted to a group of employees not long ago that he might want to buy something big, though I am at a loss right now for what that might be. Or Apple might decide to throw some of that cash into the box along with new computers by deliberately losing some money on each unit in order to buy market share.
We might see that as early as next week with the rumored introduction of an el-cheapo Mac without a display. The price for that box is supposed to be $499, which would give customers a box with processor, disk, memory, and OS into which you plug your current display, keyboard, and mouse. Given that this sounds a lot like AMD's new Personal Internet Communicator, which will sell for $185, there is probably plenty of profit left for Apple in a $499 price. But what if they priced it at $399 or even $349? Now make it $249, where I calculate they'd be losing $100 per unit. At $100 per unit, how many little Macs could they sell if Jobs is willing to spend $1 billion? TEN MILLION and Apple suddenly becomes the world's number one PC company. Think of it as a non-mobile iPod with computing capability. Think of the music sales it could spawn. Think of the iPod sales it would hurt (zero, because of the lack of mobility). Think of the more expensive Mac sales it would hurt (zero, because a Mac loyalist would only be interested in using this box as an EXTRA computer they would otherwise not have bought). Think of the extra application sales it would generate and especially the OS upgrade sales, which alone could pay back that $100. Think of the impact it would have on Windows sales (minus 10 million units). And if it doesn't work, Steve will still have $5 billion in cash with no measurable negative impact on the company. I think he'll do it.
So, $249 was a bit of wishful thinking in Bob's part... ;)
Second is the name. It needs to change. This is not about being PC, it's about reaching out to as many people as possible, and getting them to try out the GIMP. Will universities ever teach classes in a program that's called 'the gimp?' Will companies ever take seriously an employee who says that he wants to install 'the gimp' on his computer? Y'all have to have gotten the same weird looks as me when you've suggested that people try 'the gimp'. Have you ever told it to someone who uses a cane or crutches or is in a wheelchair?
If you have, you probably felt like a real jerk right after it slipped out of your mouth.
Well, as a non-native speaker, I never knew the word "gimp" had a meaning in the English language. Just looked up m-w.com... gimp means cripple, but it also means spirit and, curiously, vim (which is also a word!).
If you feel bad saying "gimp" as ['gimp], I suggest you to pronunce the "g" as in "ginger", making it ['jimp]. I've already heard people saying it like that; it's not that weird.
A sad day it will be when we actually need to explain what GTK is on Slashdot. Hopefully, this day has not arrived yet.
(Sorry about the rant, but I just had to. I guess posts like the parent are the sign of the times... :-\ )