In this case possibly up to a coupla meters. However a cold rock dropped into an atmosphere with a extremely hot pressure gradient ahead of it ablates pretty fast, by the time it comes down to ground level we're talking a total mass of possibly a few tons and likely distributed amongst several objects. For numbers it's gonna hit the atmosphere at 10-70 km/second, at the bottom will be going a couple hundred kph, the same speed as if it had been dropped from a tall building.
You're right if it's city-block size or greater; it's gonna come down, come down hard & our atmosphere ain't gonna do much for us. But for things much smaller life is a lot rougher for them, better for us. For something under 50m the majority of it will burn up in the atmosphere & the local effects will be minimal.
For some more numbers a 3m diameter object of meteoric metals (x3.5 mass of generic terrestrial rock, a stony (chondrite) would be x1.5) could weigh up to 100 tons and upon impact would create a crater 3 - 5m in diameter. It's kinetic energy is the product of the mass and the square of the velocity. Impressive, but not hazardous outside of it's immediate vicinity & certianly of no danger to the county*.
Finally here's a MPEG of a stony coming in through the atmosphere & hitting a parked car in Peekskill NY on Oct. 9, 1992 - it was 12Kg when recovered.
* For non-US readers a "County" is a subsection of a State often encompassing several towns or perhaps a city, not all States have them & their application varies greatly.
We're talking a couple thousand pounds; aerodynamic forces are going to overwhelm any initial velocities this thing has. If we were talking a small mountain then yeah, the atmosphere wouldn't be so much of an issue but in this scale its the largest factor. Meteors don't come in at that great a velocity (and ok I'm cheating - I used to teach this stuff.)
OK - figger this thing was a coupla thousand pounds entering the atmosphere, likely well (!!!) under 2000 pounds total (remember it broke up) when it hit the ground if it did come down in discernable parts. Truth be told it was probably a few pounds total on the ground but we'll be generous.
No take a look at the speed - I don't actually know what the terminal velocity of of rock is but I'm guessing 150-300 MPH. Sounds impressive 'till you realize that there are cars that can hit the low end of that. It's fast but we're talking terrestrial-fast, not astronomical-fast.
So, now figger what damage a sports car going very very fast would do to the county: Not much. Seriously - a sports car weighs around a thousand pounds or so, what would one do if it hit a particularly hard part of the county - say slamming into a cliff along the highway?
Oh, the neighbors might hear the impact or notice the new ditch next door but we're not talking plowing-up-the-earth walls-of-flame call-out-the-Nat'l-Guard stuff here. It's a thud & likely a good thud but still a thud.
Even doubling the speed of the car doesn't do all that much - you just get a stronger thud that would rattle the dishes & crack some plaster on houses close by but that's about it. Now make it a car that's solid all of the way though - still just a big thud. Folks a few blocks away might hear & feel it but still not going to rattle any seismographs in the next state, probably not even ruin any houses it doesn't actually hit up against.
For comparison btw recall that a similar meteor behaved about the same of northern Canada last year and how many parts from it were found on the surface of a frozen lake. Not punched-though but laying on top of the ice melting through slowly - from solar-heat (like any rock on a frozen lake.) Not glowing hot, not punching through the ice, just sitting there.
What do you think they send trained folks out for, to dig furrows? Naw it's folks to help with water systems and modern accounting & yes, bringing the internet out to rural villages.
Concrete boats aren't news - I held stock in a company specializing in them years ago (did well as I recall.)
Boats can be made out of anything that that doesn't dissolve quickly and has the strength to displace the requisite volume of water. Iron, steel, concrete, waterproofed paper-laminate, whatever - they need not float on their own; it's displacing a volume of water of greater mass then their own mass that is key.
Concrete boats are popular in a number of parts of the world. In Africa they're popular as small calm-water ferries for their low cost, durability, and ease of contruction. Often they're a simple mini-barge with a line crossing the river. To power them one either pulls the line directly or employs a simple mechanism, dragging oneself across the water.
As to the concrete being used in this application - it's made with exotic materials as it has exotic requirements. Light-weight, flexible, etc. aren't usually the priorities for a concrete; durable, high compression strength, low cost usually are. None of this is breakthrough as the materials used in the boat wouldn't likely stand up under a season or two of highway or other civil engineering use.
Terrorism is an affront to democracy
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Lessee, a bunch of folks with an agenda they're unable to find popular support for attempting to enforce it upon the rest of us through violent means
Exactly which -isms is this to be acceptable for and which not?
There was no "coverup" at Ruby Ridge - it's all been rather well handled IMHO by the authorities.
As to not deriding the loonies thanks but I'd rather have them ostracized then allowing them to claim any sort of credibility & suck in more victims. If folks were to stop making nice-nice and actually get critical of wacko cults like the Scientologists, Raelians, Aum Shinrikyo, Order of the Solar Temple, Heaven's Gate, etc. they might whither away & the world be a healthier place for it.
Trading in critical thought and honest analysis for "happy news" is not a good long-term strategy (unless you'll looking to raise a generation of McSlave carnation-pushers.)
You're right of course; Java doesn't run "natively" on anything but Sun's Majic chips or in it's VM. What I was trying to communicate is that Java can have lots of seamless access to the MacOS environment and is pretty much a peer to the Cocoa & Carbon layers.
One of the kewl things about Java w/ Swing on MacOS X is that the applications look & behave as if they were any other MacOS X application - no off-look, no odd limitations. Apple has managed to pull off a Java+other-bits implementation that really integrates Java, far more then on other patforms.
That Apple is looking to Java to open up lots of cross-platform opportunities is no secret, but their success hasn't yet been widely noticed. BTW, one of the weird bits is that much of the Java GUI stuff is already hardware accelerated where the Aqua stuff isn't yet - stange to see Java sometimes display faster then the native!
Finally, this strategy is already having payoffs. Apple has yet to port their Airport configuration software to MacOS X, rather pointing folks to the Java implementation already made for other platforms. Why port their native stuff when a universal implementation works and can be standardized upon.
First off kudos to Apple for hiring a great coder. While they've already got some strong talent in-house more can't hurt. Besides which Hubbard's FreeBSD skills should come in great use keeping MacOS X compatible with the BSD's.
For those already posting wild-assed assumptions (like it would kill these folks to look up their own answers - this is the web!) here's a couple of responses bundled up:
FreeBSD is *not* the basis of MacOS X. The kernel is different and the utilities are a hodgepodge from a number of BSD distribs.
Darwin is the MacOS X core and it's freely available. Indeed Apple has ported it to x86 (a platform they don't sell) and provides it the same support they do their PPC implementation. It's Open Source, go grab a copy for yourself.
Darwin is the core of MacOS X - it's NOT all of it. The Classic, Carbon, Quartz, QuickTime, etc. parts remain in house & aren't likely to be released. Some folks whinge on about Apple taking advantage of Open Source - well yeah, that's why folks used the licenses they did. On the other hand Apple's also been contributing back a lot too (unlike MS) and while they may not have released your favorite bits they've been playing fairly.
Yes Apple has rabid lawyers when it gets to things that involve their name & IP, especially their "look". Sure imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, on the other hand they spenty a lot developing their look & it's their trade dress.
There is no "secret agreement" between Apple & MS regarding using x86 (at least that anyone seriously believes.) MS makes good money off of their MacOS products and wouldn't likely be strongly impacted by Apple using x86. On the other hand Apple is very unlikely to do so for a long list of reasons. Finally any such agreement would get MS in to too much hot water.
Porting BSD tools to MacOS X varies in difficulty. For simple command-line stuff it's pretty straightforward, indeed lots of stuff makes just fine already. On the other hand taking advantage of MacOS X's Cocoa OO environment with it's "services", "frameworks", "packages" and other nifty stuff takes a bit more work.
For ports that do GUI there's some work involved in going from X to Quartz but it's entirely doable. X-under-Aqua is available but it's kinda missing the point of running MacOS in the first place. Java-stuff of course runs natively, uses the Aqua GUI via Swing.
What's Hubbard likely to do? There's a spot open for managing the Darwin porting. There's lots of BSD-harmonizing to do. Many parts of MacOS X are still being tuned so any help there is likely to be appreciated. There's also been a push to make MacOS X Server shine so that's also a likely source of work. Finally there's just basic evangelizing and developer relations.
Re:Yes, I *can* brush this off.
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MP3Pro Released
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From a quick search most of the important Barnsley patents appear to be circa 1990-1995 so it'll be a few years before they enter the public domain.
While many/.'ers will disagree the general perception in many businesses these days is that professional attire leads to professional conduct. Not simply in regards to clients & their interactions but on all attitudes & interactions within the workplace.
The argument is that your workplace isn't your home where casual dress / behavior is acceptable but rather a different place where folks are paid to conduct themselves in a specific way and work towards a specific set of goals. Thus by having folks dress in a style that communicates this the message will be brought home to the staff and to those they deal with.
Along with this philosophy comes the no-dogs rules, getting rid of distractions like game rooms and ceasing to bribe employees to attend meetings by offering them food (it's part of their job to attend; they can feed themselves on their own dime.)
Part of the 90's Silicon Valley mantra was "We're here to have fun / let's bond together / we're one happy family / we're a different kind of company in a different kind of world breaking the old paradigms / we need do everything we can to hang on to employees they're our most valuable asset / we're not one of those stodgy old East Coast corporations with rules & hierarchies & parking spots assigned by seniority / we want you to grow as a human being / blah blah blah."
Part of the post-Internet-Bubble world is the focus on the bottom line / we're here to run a business / we'd be sorry to see you go but you're not irreplaceable-mindset. Three years ago the bubble was sucking in techies & everyone else to the extent that everyone had to adopt the startup's philosophies in order to compete, or at least look up-to-the-times.
Now without that pressure to compete and the "New-Economy" image tarnished many businesses are going back to the old ways. Sometimes they're doing it because they honestly do believe they're better, other times because they just want to present a more sober image internally & externally.
Now I can just hear everyone getting ready to rebut all of this with irate tirades: I'm just the messenger. My own views are below.
I have seen the effect that "dressing up" can have on interactions. The best dressed person gets listened to at meetings. The person in the T-shirt, no matter how knowledgeable & no matter how right they may be is operating at a tremendous disadvantage: We all may consciously know better but evolution tells us that the one with the shiny coat is the Alpha Male & should be listened to.
I once held a position that required me to visit branch offices around the USA, a new one every week or so. I'd fly in, spend a week or two on-site then move on. I quickly learned that how I looked made a profound difference in how I was treated. Show up in the $1,000 suit & the receptionist would buzz the General Manager to walk me around & ask if there was anything I needed. Khakis & blue broadcloth shirt got me a chatty receptionist who'd have a secretary come & show me my office for the next week Jeans & anything would get me waved in & asked to take a look at the fax machine when I had a chance. The difference remained to some extant even after I was familier to the locals or even back at my own office.
This can be easily tested by anyone: "Dress up" for a week at work and see if your interactions with folks change. Sure you'll spend the first day or two being asked if you've got an interview - smile it off. But notice how folks respond to you once the shiny new outfit wears off & you become just another person to deal with. Many folks report that their words gain weight, their opinions suddenly become worth more, and random folks in the halls are more deferential. Oftentimes people find themselves behaving somewhat differently too, being more "businesslike."
Of course none of this may be true for you and you may be in an enlightened place where things like this don't make any difference. Academia, R&D, theater, are all environments where dress (and many other social conventions) are less important and indeed casualness & even eccentricity may be respected or possibly encouraged. However outside of these places, and increasingly even in them this is not the case.
So what's my advice?
First decide for yourself how important this is to you & discover how flexible your employer is likely/able to be.
Sound out those above you, get a feel for how strongly this is going to be implemented. Will it be a memo that goes out where everyone plays along for a month then lets the whole thing slide back into obscurity? What kind of attire is expected - good jeans & a shirt with a collar / "business casual" / or the suit-'n-tie route? What can you live with?
Next how will opposition be viewed? Will dissent be respected or will non-conformists be directly rebuked or more subtly considered a "non-cooperative" employee and become marginalized, eventually passed-over for advancement or even candidates for RIFfing? Could it all become a learning-experience where the company listens to the will of it's empoyees? What do you expect from this place and what are your priorities, how important is this to you?
Once you've got this all figured out then make you decisions. Frankly the most important thing I can say is keep it in perspective & remember this is about you - esprit de corps is a lovely thing but all said & done this is your employment you're affecting along with your attire.
Every once in awhile, someone (usually an amurikan) gets the idea that Churchill's latitude would make it excellent for launches... then a little later, they find out it's hard to get rocket scientists to live where it's freakishly cold.:)
Yeah, Baikonur Cosmodrome @ 45.9 N 63.3 E, Plesetsk Cosmodrome @ 62.8 N 40.7 E, Kapustin Yar @ 48.4 N 45.8 E, Svobodny @
5121'N 12808'E have all been total total party zones, kinda the Club-Meds of astronautics.
Er, wasn't that a Mandrake-for-PPC I saw last year?
Frankly while I really like the idea of Mandrake on PPC (again) I'd also like to see them acknowledge that their Sparc & Alpha ports are dead & revise their claims they're going to come out with another release for i486.
Actually first I'd like them to just go through their download page and remove all the sentences that end with "... from here" where the link has been stripped.
Once again/. posts an article that is both inflammatory & innacurate.
Why can't the readers rate the lead article postings the same as the follow-ups?
In the meantime, is/. going through some sort of cash-crunch, gotta up those pageviews? It's almost as bad as when PC Mag's Fred Langa bashes Linux just to get some action going.
Re:That makes no sense.
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Chagrin babbles:
Actually, the flywheel module would be buried. Try visiting the actual link and you'll see that is what is done.
Building an entire structure just to house the flywheel is quite rediculous.
Suggestion: Engage brain before shooting off mouth.
Supporting Argument: This thread is about alternatives to burying flywheels; places where burying isn't a possibility. You try paying attention to the discussion before admonishing others to re-read something.
Resolution: The polite thing would be for you to apologize - are you up to that?
Re:That makes no sense.
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Flywheel Module 36" high x 27" diameter Size--Electronics Module 32" high x 18" wide x 12" deep
Access. While the flywheel module is fairly small presumably folks will want access to it (inspections, replacement, etc.)
Thus I imagine the stucture would resemble a block with a hallway built into it with a right-angle and some good solid doors. Presumably the walls would be free-standing as so to minimize any transmitted impact.
Figuring six inches for the walls, 4-feet of sand and allowing some extra for supports & conduits it should all fit within a cube 15" on a side.
Figure a coder makes US$40,000 a year minimum. That's a LOT of Paypal donations - I've never heard of anything like this happening. This doesn't include the other expenses folks have that are usually supplied by an employer like machines, bandwidth, conferences with hotel & travel, books, etc.
Hosting a popular site costs thousands of dollars a month in bandwidth alone. Great you'll offer up your server - howzabout when it's a few meg for the installable and a few thousand folks dl it, gonna keep offering it up? Whattabout when the script-kiddy vermin start trying to take you down?
Finally what's this about lost code? It's all Open Source - none of the projects you've listed have lost any code. What they've lost is momentum and what was in folks heads, the reasons why decisions were made and the intimate knowledge of the code being worked on day in & out.
Re:That makes no sense.
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How many companies do you know of that can go digging around to make a huge hole to fit 1000 lbs of metal?
First off 1000 lbs of metal isn't that much, it's equivalent to about 5 sysadmins or 4 coders (values may vary depending on your OS & languages.)
The space required to store a flywheel of this size would be about the same as two parking spots. Seriously. An inner concrete wall, an outer concrete wall and a lot of sand in-between. Figure 15' on a side max, two stories high.
One can find that sort of space in any building. Heck, that fits in the machine-rooms of many office towers alongside the water-pumps and transformer; the only issue would be the static load and inertia problems on upper floors.
Furthermore this is about the same volume many mid-size backup generators take when one figures in clearence, muffler, etc. Lots of new tech-buildings are built with platforms in back for these & there's usually a few decks left empty for expansion.
If one didn't want the flywheel inside the building proper (though it would be quite safe) there's always the dead-corner in a local parking structure. Heck, this could create a whole new market for the bottom of elevator-shafts - tuck the flywheels down there.
you imply that since PDF has been "used for three independant windowing systems... [that it]...provides a pretty powerful argument for further consideration..."
That's what you got from my posting? You misimplied me.
First off they're all PostScript-derived implementations, not PDF. Personally I'm not particularly fond of PDF and would prefer a much more OO design, more like what Gosling's PostScript was looking somewhat like. I'd rather see yet another PostScript derivative used for a next-generation windowing system then the awkwardness that is PDF.
As to the conditions that led to the end of NextStep I think that they were unrelated to its windowing system. Next was hobbled by a number of factors including its original steep hardware prices and an endemic shortage of applications. Unable ever to ever really gain momentum it lasted remarkably long considering it's off-the-radar status.
Apple seems to have finally taken that lesson to heart after developers refused to support Rhapsody and has now provided exemplarily support for both modified & unmodified MacOS-before-X applications. That should get it through the new-OS shortage until developers start shipping native ones.
Actually in a very real way Next & NextStep are now Apple & MacOS X: What else can you call it when a business buys it's multi-billion-dollar competition for -400 million, takes over their operations and makes their product the basis for all future products?
As to popularity, as windowing systems its true they haven't been wildly successful. On the other hand look at the ones that are: MS GDI, Apple QuickDraw and X Windows; a small set that isn't particularly impressive these days. X Windows remains problematic, QuickDraw is EOL'd and MS GDI is the only one undergoing rapid development.
In their day the first two PostScript windowing implementations made strong showings in spite of the odds against them and MacOS X looks strong so far. Also PostScript itself remains dominant in printing, PDF is now the cross-platform document standard and SVG has W3C support - these all provide a strong synergy for any more future unified display/printing implementations.
Finally, and a bit off the topic but it does appear that MacOS X is *very* themable - there are already ones available. The UI elements are all standard bitmap formats in easy-to-edit packages. Here are a few MacOS X themes
We're expected to believe someone who hand-wraps their HTML?
Why are you doing that anyhow - it's annoying.
Back to the topic I doubt MSR has any admonition against reading GPL'd code. Certainly many of the folks they hire have read GPL'd code before MSR employment and many are likely exposed to it in the course of their jobs, looking at snippets, holding discussions with peers in academia and other research areas, etc.
No, PDF stands for Portable Document Format, at least according to Adobe.
Furthermore while PDF is PostScript-based it's got a bunch of additionial features like encryption and greater support for embedded bitmaps and other objects, internal & external linking, color-spaces, up & downsampling hints & support, etc.
Actually the best way to think of PDF is as a chunky somewhat object-oriented PostScript derivitive.
Aside from being a cross-platform document format Adobe is positioning PDF as a universal-container for all sorts of document-related presentation & printing information.
MIT was developing Athena with the then #2 computer company, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC.) DEC along with many others provided lots of hardware, software, licenses, staff, and in some cases money to Athena.
MIT wanted a pervasive universal distributed hardware-independent networking environment supplying a large number of versatile tools for use in research & coursework. DEC & others wanted a breakthrough product they could sell to large corporations, universities, and government departments.
Clearly a windowing system was the way to go and all were familiar with NeWS. However MIT already has an in-house project with DEC where'd they'd already begun development of X.
X won out for a bunch of reasons over NeWS:
X was in-house
MIT/DEC were looking forward to putting Athena on lots of platforms and Sun wouldn't likely be open to that
There were licensing issues - licensing NeWS, the non-license from Adobe, etc.
NeWS was perceived as slow (if they'd only known...)
NeWS had a funky interpretation of PS that was problematic when it was used outside of NeWS (it rarely printed properly.)
The basic Sun/DEC rivalry and the fact the DEC was already heavily involved.
Was NeWS better then X? Mebbe, mebbbe not. NeWS was slow and resource-hungry and prone to weirdness. On the other hand X turned out much the same way. Had NeWS been better supported or even made available off of Sun products it likely would have at least given X a good run for it's money.
Interestingly most of the NeWS lovers (and they were legion) were really excited about NeXT. Having already grown to appreciate a unified rendering model they also found many of the Next widgets and conventions to echo their beloved NeWS.
As to Athena - I believe UNC-Chapel Hill (?) bought a Athena-package and of course lots of vendors including DEC made much lucre selling X. Sun finally killed NeWS completely in the mid-90's.
Whats kewler is that living in Canadia I get to see many programs before they're broadcast in the US. Unfortunately this also means I get the same Rosie O'Donnell show from two Provinces and two States all at staggered times (if anything would make someone impact-test their TV...)
Even more kewl is (and getting back to the topic) is that it's legal to view unpaid US satellite TV here, just not Canadian stuff. Presumably it's the same the other way round but most USAians haven't been turned on to the glory that is "North of 60", "Wind at my Back", "The City", or "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" but instead get by on "The Red Green Show" on PBS or Mike Bullard on Comedy Central.
Make friends with folks up North, we'll send you tapes of your favorite shows in advance in return for cheap gas & handguns (oh, keep the latter, it makes your TV news more exciting, we just get car accidents.)
(Allow pause before rabid nationialist-zealots begin required anti-any-country-but-USA rants)
PostScript is generally though of as a Page Display Language however it's been applied as a display rendering layer also.
Sun Microsystems' James Gosling created a displayed PostScript as the basis for NeWS around 1985. This implementation was never particularly Adobe/Apple-PostScript compatible and was only licensed from Adobe shortly before Sun abandoned it. However it was the first use of PostScript for a windowing system.
NeXT then licensed & underwrote development of PostScript into Display PostScript (no direct relation to displayed PostScript.) This was the basis for NeXT's NextStep interface and lives on today in GNUstep.
Apple has recently independantly implemented the PostScript-derived PDF from public specifications for it's Quartz rendering layer in it's recently released MacOS X.
Thus you've a single well known, well documented language that's been used for three independant windowing systems over the course of 15 years, two of them independant of the language's licensors. Add that to it's direct application to printing and it's a pretty powerful argument for further consideration as an X-Window alternative/successor.
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In this case possibly up to a coupla meters. However a cold rock dropped into an atmosphere with a extremely hot pressure gradient ahead of it ablates pretty fast, by the time it comes down to ground level we're talking a total mass of possibly a few tons and likely distributed amongst several objects. For numbers it's gonna hit the atmosphere at 10-70 km/second, at the bottom will be going a couple hundred kph, the same speed as if it had been dropped from a tall building.
You're right if it's city-block size or greater; it's gonna come down, come down hard & our atmosphere ain't gonna do much for us. But for things much smaller life is a lot rougher for them, better for us. For something under 50m the majority of it will burn up in the atmosphere & the local effects will be minimal.
For some more numbers a 3m diameter object of meteoric metals (x3.5 mass of generic terrestrial rock, a stony (chondrite) would be x1.5) could weigh up to 100 tons and upon impact would create a crater 3 - 5m in diameter. It's kinetic energy is the product of the mass and the square of the velocity. Impressive, but not hazardous outside of it's immediate vicinity & certianly of no danger to the county*.
Finally here's a MPEG of a stony coming in through the atmosphere & hitting a parked car in Peekskill NY on Oct. 9, 1992 - it was 12Kg when recovered.
* For non-US readers a "County" is a subsection of a State often encompassing several towns or perhaps a city, not all States have them & their application varies greatly.
We're talking a couple thousand pounds; aerodynamic forces are going to overwhelm any initial velocities this thing has. If we were talking a small mountain then yeah, the atmosphere wouldn't be so much of an issue but in this scale its the largest factor. Meteors don't come in at that great a velocity (and ok I'm cheating - I used to teach this stuff.)
No take a look at the speed - I don't actually know what the terminal velocity of of rock is but I'm guessing 150-300 MPH. Sounds impressive 'till you realize that there are cars that can hit the low end of that. It's fast but we're talking terrestrial-fast, not astronomical-fast.
So, now figger what damage a sports car going very very fast would do to the county: Not much. Seriously - a sports car weighs around a thousand pounds or so, what would one do if it hit a particularly hard part of the county - say slamming into a cliff along the highway?
Oh, the neighbors might hear the impact or notice the new ditch next door but we're not talking plowing-up-the-earth walls-of-flame call-out-the-Nat'l-Guard stuff here. It's a thud & likely a good thud but still a thud.
Even doubling the speed of the car doesn't do all that much - you just get a stronger thud that would rattle the dishes & crack some plaster on houses close by but that's about it. Now make it a car that's solid all of the way though - still just a big thud. Folks a few blocks away might hear & feel it but still not going to rattle any seismographs in the next state, probably not even ruin any houses it doesn't actually hit up against.
For comparison btw recall that a similar meteor behaved about the same of northern Canada last year and how many parts from it were found on the surface of a frozen lake. Not punched-though but laying on top of the ice melting through slowly - from solar-heat (like any rock on a frozen lake.) Not glowing hot, not punching through the ice, just sitting there.
What do you think they send trained folks out for, to dig furrows? Naw it's folks to help with water systems and modern accounting & yes, bringing the internet out to rural villages.
Boats can be made out of anything that that doesn't dissolve quickly and has the strength to displace the requisite volume of water. Iron, steel, concrete, waterproofed paper-laminate, whatever - they need not float on their own; it's displacing a volume of water of greater mass then their own mass that is key.
Concrete boats are popular in a number of parts of the world. In Africa they're popular as small calm-water ferries for their low cost, durability, and ease of contruction. Often they're a simple mini-barge with a line crossing the river. To power them one either pulls the line directly or employs a simple mechanism, dragging oneself across the water.
As to the concrete being used in this application - it's made with exotic materials as it has exotic requirements. Light-weight, flexible, etc. aren't usually the priorities for a concrete; durable, high compression strength, low cost usually are. None of this is breakthrough as the materials used in the boat wouldn't likely stand up under a season or two of highway or other civil engineering use.
Exactly which -isms is this to be acceptable for and which not?
As to not deriding the loonies thanks but I'd rather have them ostracized then allowing them to claim any sort of credibility & suck in more victims. If folks were to stop making nice-nice and actually get critical of wacko cults like the Scientologists, Raelians, Aum Shinrikyo, Order of the Solar Temple, Heaven's Gate, etc. they might whither away & the world be a healthier place for it.
Trading in critical thought and honest analysis for "happy news" is not a good long-term strategy (unless you'll looking to raise a generation of McSlave carnation-pushers.)
One of the kewl things about Java w/ Swing on MacOS X is that the applications look & behave as if they were any other MacOS X application - no off-look, no odd limitations. Apple has managed to pull off a Java+other-bits implementation that really integrates Java, far more then on other patforms.
That Apple is looking to Java to open up lots of cross-platform opportunities is no secret, but their success hasn't yet been widely noticed. BTW, one of the weird bits is that much of the Java GUI stuff is already hardware accelerated where the Aqua stuff isn't yet - stange to see Java sometimes display faster then the native!
Finally, this strategy is already having payoffs. Apple has yet to port their Airport configuration software to MacOS X, rather pointing folks to the Java implementation already made for other platforms. Why port their native stuff when a universal implementation works and can be standardized upon.
For those already posting wild-assed assumptions (like it would kill these folks to look up their own answers - this is the web!) here's a couple of responses bundled up:
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FreeBSD is *not* the basis of MacOS X. The kernel is different and the utilities are a hodgepodge from a number of BSD distribs.
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Darwin is the MacOS X core and it's freely available. Indeed Apple has ported it to x86 (a platform they don't sell) and provides it the same support they do their PPC implementation. It's Open Source, go grab a copy for yourself.
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Darwin is the core of MacOS X - it's NOT all of it. The Classic, Carbon, Quartz, QuickTime, etc. parts remain in house & aren't likely to be released. Some folks whinge on about Apple taking advantage of Open Source - well yeah, that's why folks used the licenses they did. On the other hand Apple's also been contributing back a lot too (unlike MS) and while they may not have released your favorite bits they've been playing fairly.
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Yes Apple has rabid lawyers when it gets to things that involve their name & IP, especially their "look". Sure imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, on the other hand they spenty a lot developing their look & it's their trade dress.
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There is no "secret agreement" between Apple & MS regarding using x86 (at least that anyone seriously believes.) MS makes good money off of their MacOS products and wouldn't likely be strongly impacted by Apple using x86. On the other hand Apple is very unlikely to do so for a long list of reasons. Finally any such agreement would get MS in to too much hot water.
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Porting BSD tools to MacOS X varies in difficulty. For simple command-line stuff it's pretty straightforward, indeed lots of stuff makes just fine already. On the other hand taking advantage of MacOS X's Cocoa OO environment with it's "services", "frameworks", "packages" and other nifty stuff takes a bit more work.
- For ports that do GUI there's some work involved in going from X to Quartz but it's entirely doable. X-under-Aqua is available but it's kinda missing the point of running MacOS in the first place. Java-stuff of course runs natively, uses the Aqua GUI via Swing.
What's Hubbard likely to do? There's a spot open for managing the Darwin porting. There's lots of BSD-harmonizing to do. Many parts of MacOS X are still being tuned so any help there is likely to be appreciated. There's also been a push to make MacOS X Server shine so that's also a likely source of work. Finally there's just basic evangelizing and developer relations.From a quick search most of the important Barnsley patents appear to be circa 1990-1995 so it'll be a few years before they enter the public domain.
The argument is that your workplace isn't your home where casual dress / behavior is acceptable but rather a different place where folks are paid to conduct themselves in a specific way and work towards a specific set of goals. Thus by having folks dress in a style that communicates this the message will be brought home to the staff and to those they deal with.
Along with this philosophy comes the no-dogs rules, getting rid of distractions like game rooms and ceasing to bribe employees to attend meetings by offering them food (it's part of their job to attend; they can feed themselves on their own dime.)
Part of the 90's Silicon Valley mantra was "We're here to have fun / let's bond together / we're one happy family / we're a different kind of company in a different kind of world breaking the old paradigms / we need do everything we can to hang on to employees they're our most valuable asset / we're not one of those stodgy old East Coast corporations with rules & hierarchies & parking spots assigned by seniority / we want you to grow as a human being / blah blah blah."
Part of the post-Internet-Bubble world is the focus on the bottom line / we're here to run a business / we'd be sorry to see you go but you're not irreplaceable-mindset. Three years ago the bubble was sucking in techies & everyone else to the extent that everyone had to adopt the startup's philosophies in order to compete, or at least look up-to-the-times.
Now without that pressure to compete and the "New-Economy" image tarnished many businesses are going back to the old ways. Sometimes they're doing it because they honestly do believe they're better, other times because they just want to present a more sober image internally & externally.
Now I can just hear everyone getting ready to rebut all of this with irate tirades: I'm just the messenger. My own views are below.
I have seen the effect that "dressing up" can have on interactions. The best dressed person gets listened to at meetings. The person in the T-shirt, no matter how knowledgeable & no matter how right they may be is operating at a tremendous disadvantage: We all may consciously know better but evolution tells us that the one with the shiny coat is the Alpha Male & should be listened to.
I once held a position that required me to visit branch offices around the USA, a new one every week or so. I'd fly in, spend a week or two on-site then move on. I quickly learned that how I looked made a profound difference in how I was treated. Show up in the $1,000 suit & the receptionist would buzz the General Manager to walk me around & ask if there was anything I needed. Khakis & blue broadcloth shirt got me a chatty receptionist who'd have a secretary come & show me my office for the next week Jeans & anything would get me waved in & asked to take a look at the fax machine when I had a chance. The difference remained to some extant even after I was familier to the locals or even back at my own office.
This can be easily tested by anyone: "Dress up" for a week at work and see if your interactions with folks change. Sure you'll spend the first day or two being asked if you've got an interview - smile it off. But notice how folks respond to you once the shiny new outfit wears off & you become just another person to deal with. Many folks report that their words gain weight, their opinions suddenly become worth more, and random folks in the halls are more deferential. Oftentimes people find themselves behaving somewhat differently too, being more "businesslike."
Of course none of this may be true for you and you may be in an enlightened place where things like this don't make any difference. Academia, R&D, theater, are all environments where dress (and many other social conventions) are less important and indeed casualness & even eccentricity may be respected or possibly encouraged. However outside of these places, and increasingly even in them this is not the case.
So what's my advice?
First decide for yourself how important this is to you & discover how flexible your employer is likely/able to be.
Sound out those above you, get a feel for how strongly this is going to be implemented. Will it be a memo that goes out where everyone plays along for a month then lets the whole thing slide back into obscurity? What kind of attire is expected - good jeans & a shirt with a collar / "business casual" / or the suit-'n-tie route? What can you live with?
Next how will opposition be viewed? Will dissent be respected or will non-conformists be directly rebuked or more subtly considered a "non-cooperative" employee and become marginalized, eventually passed-over for advancement or even candidates for RIFfing? Could it all become a learning-experience where the company listens to the will of it's empoyees? What do you expect from this place and what are your priorities, how important is this to you?
Once you've got this all figured out then make you decisions. Frankly the most important thing I can say is keep it in perspective & remember this is about you - esprit de corps is a lovely thing but all said & done this is your employment you're affecting along with your attire.
Yeah, Baikonur Cosmodrome @ 45.9 N 63.3 E,
Plesetsk Cosmodrome @ 62.8 N 40.7 E,
Kapustin Yar @ 48.4 N 45.8 E,
Svobodny @ 5121'N 12808'E have all been total total party zones, kinda the Club-Meds of astronautics.
Names & coordinates from FAS
Frankly while I really like the idea of Mandrake on PPC (again) I'd also like to see them acknowledge that their Sparc & Alpha ports are dead & revise their claims they're going to come out with another release for i486.
Actually first I'd like them to just go through their download page and remove all the sentences that end with "... from here" where the link has been stripped.
Why can't the readers rate the lead article postings the same as the follow-ups?
In the meantime, is /. going through some sort of cash-crunch, gotta up those pageviews? It's almost as bad as when PC Mag's Fred Langa bashes Linux just to get some action going.
Supporting Argument: This thread is about alternatives to burying flywheels; places where burying isn't a possibility. You try paying attention to the discussion before admonishing others to re-read something.
Resolution: The polite thing would be for you to apologize - are you up to that?
Thus I imagine the stucture would resemble a block with a hallway built into it with a right-angle and some good solid doors. Presumably the walls would be free-standing as so to minimize any transmitted impact.
Figuring six inches for the walls, 4-feet of sand and allowing some extra for supports & conduits it should all fit within a cube 15" on a side.
Figure a coder makes US$40,000 a year minimum. That's a LOT of Paypal donations - I've never heard of anything like this happening. This doesn't include the other expenses folks have that are usually supplied by an employer like machines, bandwidth, conferences with hotel & travel, books, etc.
Hosting a popular site costs thousands of dollars a month in bandwidth alone. Great you'll offer up your server - howzabout when it's a few meg for the installable and a few thousand folks dl it, gonna keep offering it up? Whattabout when the script-kiddy vermin start trying to take you down?
Finally what's this about lost code? It's all Open Source - none of the projects you've listed have lost any code. What they've lost is momentum and what was in folks heads, the reasons why decisions were made and the intimate knowledge of the code being worked on day in & out.
- PostScript hits the market ~1982
- Project Athena announced 1983
- Project Athena starts 1984
- X (X1) released June 19, 1984
- NeWS is released ~1985
- X11R1 released September 15, 1987
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Be evaluates NeWS as the windowing system for their intended OS in 1991
Interesting posting regarding NeWS & it's history from someone involvedFirst off they're all PostScript-derived implementations, not PDF. Personally I'm not particularly fond of PDF and would prefer a much more OO design, more like what Gosling's PostScript was looking somewhat like. I'd rather see yet another PostScript derivative used for a next-generation windowing system then the awkwardness that is PDF.
As to the conditions that led to the end of NextStep I think that they were unrelated to its windowing system. Next was hobbled by a number of factors including its original steep hardware prices and an endemic shortage of applications. Unable ever to ever really gain momentum it lasted remarkably long considering it's off-the-radar status.
Apple seems to have finally taken that lesson to heart after developers refused to support Rhapsody and has now provided exemplarily support for both modified & unmodified MacOS-before-X applications. That should get it through the new-OS shortage until developers start shipping native ones.
Actually in a very real way Next & NextStep are now Apple & MacOS X: What else can you call it when a business buys it's multi-billion-dollar competition for -400 million, takes over their operations and makes their product the basis for all future products?
As to popularity, as windowing systems its true they haven't been wildly successful. On the other hand look at the ones that are: MS GDI, Apple QuickDraw and X Windows; a small set that isn't particularly impressive these days. X Windows remains problematic, QuickDraw is EOL'd and MS GDI is the only one undergoing rapid development.
In their day the first two PostScript windowing implementations made strong showings in spite of the odds against them and MacOS X looks strong so far. Also PostScript itself remains dominant in printing, PDF is now the cross-platform document standard and SVG has W3C support - these all provide a strong synergy for any more future unified display/printing implementations.
Finally, and a bit off the topic but it does appear that MacOS X is *very* themable - there are already ones available. The UI elements are all standard bitmap formats in easy-to-edit packages. Here are a few MacOS X themes
Why are you doing that anyhow - it's annoying.
Back to the topic I doubt MSR has any admonition against reading GPL'd code. Certainly many of the folks they hire have read GPL'd code before MSR employment and many are likely exposed to it in the course of their jobs, looking at snippets, holding discussions with peers in academia and other research areas, etc.
No, PDF stands for Portable Document Format, at least according to Adobe.
Furthermore while PDF is PostScript-based it's got a bunch of additionial features like encryption and greater support for embedded bitmaps and other objects, internal & external linking, color-spaces, up & downsampling hints & support, etc.
Actually the best way to think of PDF is as a chunky somewhat object-oriented PostScript derivitive.
Aside from being a cross-platform document format Adobe is positioning PDF as a universal-container for all sorts of document-related presentation & printing information.
MIT wanted a pervasive universal distributed hardware-independent networking environment supplying a large number of versatile tools for use in research & coursework. DEC & others wanted a breakthrough product they could sell to large corporations, universities, and government departments.
Clearly a windowing system was the way to go and all were familiar with NeWS. However MIT already has an in-house project with DEC where'd they'd already begun development of X.
X won out for a bunch of reasons over NeWS:
- X was in-house
- MIT/DEC were looking forward to putting Athena on lots of platforms and Sun wouldn't likely be open to that
- There were licensing issues - licensing NeWS, the non-license from Adobe, etc.
- NeWS was perceived as slow (if they'd only known...)
- NeWS had a funky interpretation of PS that was problematic when it was used outside of NeWS (it rarely printed properly.)
- The basic Sun/DEC rivalry and the fact the DEC was already heavily involved.
Was NeWS better then X? Mebbe, mebbbe not. NeWS was slow and resource-hungry and prone to weirdness. On the other hand X turned out much the same way. Had NeWS been better supported or even made available off of Sun products it likely would have at least given X a good run for it's money.Interestingly most of the NeWS lovers (and they were legion) were really excited about NeXT. Having already grown to appreciate a unified rendering model they also found many of the Next widgets and conventions to echo their beloved NeWS.
As to Athena - I believe UNC-Chapel Hill (?) bought a Athena-package and of course lots of vendors including DEC made much lucre selling X. Sun finally killed NeWS completely in the mid-90's.
Whats kewler is that living in Canadia I get to see many programs before they're broadcast in the US. Unfortunately this also means I get the same Rosie O'Donnell show from two Provinces and two States all at staggered times (if anything would make someone impact-test their TV...)
Even more kewl is (and getting back to the topic) is that it's legal to view unpaid US satellite TV here, just not Canadian stuff. Presumably it's the same the other way round but most USAians haven't been turned on to the glory that is "North of 60", "Wind at my Back", "The City", or "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" but instead get by on "The Red Green Show" on PBS or Mike Bullard on Comedy Central.
Make friends with folks up North, we'll send you tapes of your favorite shows in advance in return for cheap gas & handguns (oh, keep the latter, it makes your TV news more exciting, we just get car accidents.)
(Allow pause before rabid nationialist-zealots begin required anti-any-country-but-USA rants)
Sun Microsystems' James Gosling created a displayed PostScript as the basis for NeWS around 1985. This implementation was never particularly Adobe/Apple-PostScript compatible and was only licensed from Adobe shortly before Sun abandoned it. However it was the first use of PostScript for a windowing system.
NeXT then licensed & underwrote development of PostScript into Display PostScript (no direct relation to displayed PostScript.) This was the basis for NeXT's NextStep interface and lives on today in GNUstep.
Apple has recently independantly implemented the PostScript-derived PDF from public specifications for it's Quartz rendering layer in it's recently released MacOS X.
Thus you've a single well known, well documented language that's been used for three independant windowing systems over the course of 15 years, two of them independant of the language's licensors. Add that to it's direct application to printing and it's a pretty powerful argument for further consideration as an X-Window alternative/successor.