On the other hand Maxtor has a bunch of Linux-based projects going on including their Quantum QuickView DVR streaming technology (think TiVo.)
They're a big company & I don't think you can go judging them by one product line. Sure they put Win on this product but they've other product lines. In a world where many businesses have server bays full of Wintel boxes and legions of MS trained staff it seems reaonable to sell a pruduct tuned to that mentality. Plus Maxtor appartently got the tech from MS for next to nothing.
Right now it's still a bit of a black art getting BSD & Linux boxes to be peers with NDS & Active Directory. That this is a problem for some businesses isn't a suprise, particularly for what are essentially plug-in/set-up/forget appliances.
In the days of the original Star Trek, men were men and women were women, and Mankind was travelling outwards to explore the galaxy.
Thats right! Women should be barefoot, pregnant & in front of the food replicator! Commanding Starships, exploring he Galaxy, what kind of progressive poppycock is this! Next they'll have inter-racial kissing & perhaps someday reconizably gay characters....
In the meantime bring on more 20th-century Earth references that even the aliens recognize and use, offer us more bubble-haired green chicks in heat for Shatner's studly charms, and of course never forget this weeks new bit of st-jargon ("Ohmygoodness the omicron-multiphase-inverter-particles have discombobulated the interociter! Eject the core!")
Frankly I'd appreciate some more characters that weren't sicky-sweet, who did have personal lives more substantial then the cardbord props and plot-lines that weren't direct from Ethics-101 or badly reinterpreted sf-staples.
If going back to before the beginning is what it takes to get themselves out of the mess they've written themselves in to so much the better. Lets see what brought this Federation about and how all these folks got to be such good pals. Finally, lets get a few more aliens that don't have bad nose-jobs but are Horta rock-eating-blobs or whatnot.
Oh, seat-belts, air-bags, chairs without wheels, circuit-breakers, spare oxygen supplies, The-Club-for-Starships and a damn manual-override on the Holdodeck (perhaps a big red button mounted on a nearby bulkhead?) would all also be appreciated.
Finally, if they bring Shatner back on more time I want his toupee to get screen-credit, perhaps as a Tribble-pelt.
In the 60's there was a fork in aircraft design: super-fast (Concorde) or super-large (Boeing 747).
Both developments were underwritten by governments, UK/France for Concorde & US's DOD for 747.
The market went with super-large. Why? Primarily efficiency; Super-large turned out to be more economical in a fleet then super-fast. Cost per passenger-mile was lower as was cost per passenger-hour. As a primary limiting factor is gate access it proved easier to get a (then) gate-and-a-half for a single 747 boarding then three or four for equivalant Concorde flights. Finally after supersonic flight was banned over land many of the planned Concorde routes were closed to it (I remember the Concorde gate at the Kansas City airport sitting empty for years.)
The Soviets did fly their Concordski for many years though I believe they went out of service awhile ago. Aside from that no one has been able to figure out a model that would support wide-spread use of supersonic fight enough to underwrite development costs (Concorde has certianly never paid back it's R&D expenses.) Many countries have done extensive research on next-gen supersonic aircraft but none have shown a compelling economic advantage.
Indeed aside from Canada underwriting Bombardier's progress in mid-size/mid-haul aircraft (& revitalizing that market) the only major development is Airbus's mega-development A380 with 555 seats. Promising to out-jumbo the 747 it has a several customers signed up & is going ahead with production development. Boeing has responded with yet another extension of it's 747 platform but has declined to commit to an entirely new aircraft.
Many of the R&D projects on supersonic flights have now begun to be curtailed. As the industry moves further and further to giant aircraft and the problems of economical supersonic flight remain intractable a next-generation successor to Concorde becomes more & more unlikely. With it EOL'd at 2010 you better start saving now before the era is over.
I was told once, and I now think it a lie, that GSM worked by communicating to low orbit satellites and hence was global. I don't know if that's true, but I'd hope that either sprint pcs, or GSM would be widely available over the entirety of your course.
You're confusing GSM with Iridium, the Motorola-backed lowflying satelite constellation that went bust & is now on US Dept. of Defense life support.
GSM is simply a set of frequencies & protocols. It's a European standard that's been extremely succesful, there's some of it on the NA coasts in dense areas but not much outside them. It's digital, uses towers like everyone else, nothing particularly exotic except for it being common most everywhere else and often using a small card for transferring the users network identity between phones. The only provider I can think of off-hand was Voicestream (who knows what brand they are this week.)
PCS is slightly more likely to be availaible but not much. Also primarily availiable in metropolitan areas it's a digital format that does oftentimes have provisions for reasonably fast data transmission (depends on the local service provider.) Generally this simply requires an overpriced serial-to-phone cable or in some cases an infrared link.
The third option would be of course good ole analog cellphone service. This has the widest distribution, the greatest range, and although it's slower then the other options it'll get through more of the time. Here you really are using a modem and it's just like plugging into a landline, albeit a very poor quality one.
Since most long-distance races take place away from metropolitan areas and since it's unlikely that a racer can stop to transmit when conditions are best it looks like analog is a must. It has the greatest chance of getting through when the racers are having a break and are free to mess about with this sort of stuff.
Of course there are many dual and tri mode phones so it's not an either/or proposition (my Motorola 7868W is 2 analog / 1 PCS channel.) If you're really interested in doing this then cut a deal with a provider with good local coverage and ask for a phone, airtime, & tech support in return for putting a link to them on the website.
Finally many companies have mobile relays for deployment at events like fairs, sports events, etc. where there will be lots of customers but only intermittantly and not worth a permanent relay. You may well be able to get the provider to shadow the race with their mobile realy truck providing service to all of the riders & support folks.
Look, there's no point in talking to you if you're bound and determined to go with Minix. Go ahead by the HP thingie, start cross-compiling and port Minix to it. Be my guest.
If you actually want to know why not a dozen folks have told you why. REAL (tm) Linux is already doable and ucLinux and Elks are at least, as you said, cousins.
Minix is like the birth-parent who left the baby on the street-corner, never wanted to see it then when it grew up and made something of themselves came around knocking, sniffin' for money. I'd rather port to a cousin then some kinda freaky relative like that.
There's a dozen decent OS's I can think of that are already appropriate or could be with the same effort as Minix would require. The point is that they're not what folks want (well, outside of OS-stalwarts.)
Linux now has brand-recognition. Management has heard of it, the geeks are enthused, there's applications everywhere for it. It's a known quantity. Heck even Accounting now knows what catagory to list it in.
MS sold folks on the idea of one OS scalable throughout the company - Data Center / File Server / Database Server / Mail Server / Terminal Server / Firewall / Desktop / Laptop / Palmtop / Home / Embedded.
Linux is doing the same thing - one OS (and one skillset, one codebase) scalable up and down. HP knows it can sell this the same way MS pushed WinWhatever and they're going for it.
Furthermore it's trivial to strip down a Linux kernel. Sure it might not be as lean as some others but we're reaching the point where leanness isn't the main criterion. CPU cycles and RAM aren't as limited as they were even 6 months or a year ago, the next generation will be faster / more memory, etc. There's more value in having the aforementioned base of applications and brand-recognition then there is in having some special-purpose OS.
Finally HP isn't necc. selling this for today's market. They're looking a year or two down the line. Linux will clearly still be going strong with lots of development - Minix et al will almost surely not be recieving the same kind of support. At that point running something other then Linux or an entrenched product (Symbios, PalmOS, WinCE) on tomorrow's super-palmtop would have been a short-term gain for a long-term handicap.
1cm^2 of LCD might have 250 elements. 2cm^2 will therefore have 1000. Basic mathematics. That means that much more circuity, that much more engineering required, that many more places for an errant bit of particulate to glitch the screen.
Now scale as needed. After awhile the materials become too unwieldy. Imagine trying to keep two very flat panes of material at extremely precise tolerences apart over large distances in a consumer product... This is exactly what the manufacturers must do. Furthermore the error rate becomes so numerous the product becomes economically impractical. They probably could be made but the manufacturer is better off making more smaller screens for greater profit.
Even if someone does go for making them visualize the flexing in the front panel when the panel is moved around during manufacturing & shipping. You thougt the rainbows on a samaller screen were bad when you touched it consider trying to build a 24"+ pane that doesn't flex.
As manufacturing technologies improve the yields do go up and the defect rates are kept under ontrol but it's still a difficult market. There's also the problem that the market is a moving target: your US$250 million plant that you built last year for 12" screen is a has-been in today's 13" world, gotta recoup that money fast.
It used to be some manufacturers would only replace a screen if one had >2 defects within the radius of a US quarter coin.
Finally we're eventually going to run into things like bandwidth problems. It'll require some impressive technology to control some enormous number of pixels by some enormous number of pixels all with some high number of possible color combinations at the speeds required.
The more adventuresome will now want to jump in with predictions of distributed rendering and local processing etc.)
Thankfully The Economist understands the value of paragraphs.
Aside from that your posting is primarily a political screed - it's fine as such but I don't see any need to elaborate upon it other then "I disagree". I disagree with both your political & your economic analysis.
It is not "illegal to engage in private spacefaring." There's a large launch-services industry (SeaLaunch being one notable one.)
There are the usual government regulations about not putting up things like other nation's spysats & weapons & preventing technology transfers but there's nothing preventing you from going & launching your own vehicle provided you get all the proper paperwork signed (again mostly safety & export regs.)
Indeed there's a number of groups (rapidly dwindling) competing for a series of prizes regaring different types of launches.
As to the US Government protecting some sort of NASA monopoly no, that's not the case either.
NASA has pretty much gotten out of the launch-for-hire business for other gov't departments and indeed doesn't even always launch it's own missions when private industry is cost-effective.
I'm dissapointed in how the system is currently structured, yes. NASA has always been in a quandry due to it's untenable status. It's funding is completely at the whim of each administration and subject to a great deal of external manipulation & "adjustment".
On the other hand as I noted I don't see any supposed "privitization" being preferable. Already many STS services are privately managed yet there seems little cost savings.
Is this odd? No - I don't think going to an extreme, particularly an extreme I consider an innapropriate response to be the optimal solution. Rather I see changing the status of NASA or some successor agency to a more stable one with a more reliable budget as being an answer.
Tell me, do you find it odd that you assert falsehoods, competely disregard the point of much of my posting then misrepresent my position ?
Of course now we're left relying on the Shuttles: Conceived in the 50's, designed in the 60's, built in the 70's, and now flying since the 80's.
Refurbishing the vehicles can only go so far - the original design was a test and we've never moved beyond it. We've learnt a lot about high-performance hydrogen motors, thermal insulation, airframe requirements, etc. but it's all for naught if none of it is ever applied to a version two.
Limiting the Shuttle fleet to 6 flights a year won't help things much. Sure it's less wear & tear but they're still getting long in the tooth and could be greatly improved on. Unfortunately there's been a requirement for some sort of great-leap-forward when really much of what's required is a simple evolution and refinement.
Much of the basic question of course is why we're in space and what our goals are. I (and yes I'm not alone on this, no need for a poll) believe that there's incredible opportunity there. I also believe that a national program is a good because many of the costs are larger then industry is willing to pay (most of the supposed privatization is pay-us-we'll-do-it-for-you.)
I don't entirely believe the folks that claim privatization is the solution-to-all-problems (Ride British railways lately? Electricity in California?) If commercial space flight truly *is* viable then why aren't more companies investing their own dollars into it and not trying to pry open the public purse?
This seems one of those areas that public investment will yield benefits for everyone, much like hydro projects and managed public lands. Too big & long-term for companies to pursue independently but suited to governments.
I don't see it being too long before we'll be able to 'capture' one of the closer asteroids (presumably one whose orbit brings it near to Earth) and eventually steer it someplace convenient. with it in place as a source of material we'd be able to construct nifty things like cost-effective power satellites and tele-operated mining & refining of materials for use on Earth.
All of this requires however that we have a reasonable means of getting reliably and regularly to at least low Earth orbit and that is slowly slipping through our fingers. We know there's something like a.1% chance of an accident every launch, with only 4 aging orbiters we're putting a lot of eggs in very few baskets.
The STS was built in order to supply a station, not the other-way round. It being the transport to/from a station was always an explicit part of it's design from the very beginning. It was only when that station was cut that it was ostensably repurposed. You're right, without there being a station STS's reason de etre are much weaker.
The STS is comparatively "cheap & reusable" 'cause the avionics, hull, and hydrogen engines are reused. The SRBs probably are some savings but not much. There was never any reason to save the ET, it's basically just a big cheap thermos. Much of the cost of a launch are testing / verification / staffing, these wouldn't change with a disposable system.
We don't have any more Sat V's, can't build any more Sat V's, threw all of that tech away to the extent of trashing the already-built ones we had and destroying some blueprints. It would cost an awesome amount to rebuild that kind of tech plus the STS hydrogen engines are far better then the Kerosene ones in the Sat. series.
For extended manned-flight mission assembling modules in orbit, testing them, and then launching the main vehicle on a gravity-assist loop to accelerate would be optimal. Once it's up to speed it can swing back by and pick up the majority of it's crew. This is far preferable to trying to get the whole thing off the ground in one giant manned piece of metal. Even if we had booster that could do this sort of thing (and no one does) it still wouldn't be a good strategy.
Most of any station station COULD NOT be sent up on a single monolithic launch. It would take multiple launches just like Mir, and so far the US launch systems have greater relaibility the others (rember you're launching US$billion modules.)
As to the US$200 million, it may be noise but it could be a couple of schools upgraded someplace. I'm not saying it wouldn't be money well spent, but once you start calling stuff "noise" then you're opening the gates to funding everything / anything (a hundred million here, a hundread million , there, afterawhile it adds up to some real money!)
Check out http://www.slipstick.com (too lazy to make it a clickable link) for comments on Net Folders. Briefly they're quirky, unreliable, prone to dying for no apparent reason, etc. Nice idea but has never actually worked in a useful fashion.
Scheduling: Set up a FTP server where on which the users can exchange their Free/Busy data
That's a joke right? Hmm let's see. Old Mrs Secretary (60 year old bitty), assistant to the vice president and handles all his scheduling, is going to FTP to a server and read/update dozens of TEXT files to see if anyone has a conflict so she can schedule a 3pm meeting next Thursday. After that she needs to schedule about 10 more meetings/lunches/vacations. Yeah, that sounds like a real possibility!
You haven't got a clue about what you're talking about, do you?
"Free/Busy data" is a file MS Outlook can be set to create on an FTP site, automatically updated every few minutes. It contains the person's schedule, at least the publically listed ones and "blocked off" times. That "bitty" (who probably knows more about business then you've yet to learn and will likely crush you like a bug if you cross her (those elder Exec. Secs are powerhouses - in their day they couldn't become mangers so they became the power brokers)) need never touch FTP, it's all behind the scenes / built into the Outlook client.
So please, next time before posting try to know what the hell you're pontificating about, don't be so down on old ladies, and get a clue.
-- Michael
Yeah, that posting irked me - it's just *so* smug & so rude and so plain without-a-clue-of-what-he's-bullshitting-about.
Hate crimes are more dangerous then random violdence as they're directed at an specific population of persons en masse. While an individual may be the only direct victim the intent is to intimidate a or otherwise manipulate an entire population of persons.
Thus the crime is perpetrated upon more then the individual lying broken / bloodied / dead but rather upon the catagory / class / community of persons who were targetted; and the penalties reflect this.
While ignorent folks try and claim it's some sort of "special protection" to be a member of a community listed under many hate-crime ordinances it's entirely irrelavant unless the crime was committed upon the basis of the victems being a *whatever*.
Before going spouting off it's oftentimes enlighening to do a bit of research first and discover the reasoning behind a set of laws rather then spouting off an ignorant opinion.
As to this being a strike against Austin - it is. A former employer attempted to move me there upon which I had to explain was not an option: I was not going to move to a place where my legal protections were lessened.
And they don't try and take credit for the BSD layer, dumbass. Mac OS X is so much more, and so much better, than any other Unix-based desktop, that the BSD core is hardly the most crucial thing about it.
Take, for example, the unified configuration management system. Or Quartz. Or Netinfo. Or the simple fact that I'll finally be able to run applications that don't suck (like Photoshop) next to a native windowing Emacs and CMUCL. No other Unix allows anything like the usability of Mac OS X.
(jfb)
A: How to make yourself into a no-life looser - go name calling on/.
B:"...next to a native windowing Emacs" - Have you seen this? Is there really a native port of Emacs to MacOS X or are you just blowing hot air? By native I mean running within Aqua using PDF-based cut-n-paste and all of the other MacOS X-specific technologies.
Actually I believe it was soon-to-be but close enough. If one looks at the number of active Macs out there (they have a lifetime longer then most PCs & price only seems part of the reason) and compare it to their other unix brethren you'll see that there are more.
Presuming some large number switch over to MacOS X then yes, it'll have the largest installed base of unix boxes.
Of course MacOS X has yet to ship so we'll see it's reception but back to the original posting; many/.'ers seem stuck in their disdain of all things Apple which is ironic considering what Apple is doing and how it's affecting the industry.
Right, MacOS X hasn't shipped yet. On the other hand the installed base of Macs is greater then those listed in toto so it stands to reason as (if) users move to MacOS X it'll become larger.
There's more then the Australian project, the USA's NASA has
been working on this in-house for years. Originally the National Aerospace
Plane (NASP) program it was retooled into the Hyper-X program when NASP proved
to be infeasible; too many blue-sky ideas in one box, all stepping on each
other's toes.
Here are some Hyper-X links:
Now, before everyone goes getting all starry-eyed over this
stuff there's a few caveats:
There's a 20-30 year evolution period in civil aviation.
This is not a plug-and-play technology. It won't bolt on to anything we've got
flying now like a new turbo-prop might. It requires all new hardware from the
airframe up.
You'll likely to see this technology developed first for
militaries then later adapted for civilian use. However it is likely that an
unmanned "courier" version will be used before anything carrying folks for when
it really-really "absolutely positively has to get there overnight" (or
depending on locations even yesterday.)
There are legitimate questions about how much material the
upper atmosphere can absorb. Pumping out quantities of hot steam at high
altitude may have a negative long-term impact. There's already a good deal of
evidence that civil and military contrails lead to increased cloud-formation,
what effects would be at even higher altitudes is not yet known.
There's also the question of long-term economics: Will it
really be cost-effective to build a craft with the various types of engines and
structure and cooling required to get it to a height and altitude where these motors
can operate to get around the planet in half to an eith the time it might take
otherwise? Supersonic aircraft have yet to prove economically viable (the
Concord only flies due to it's development being underwritten at great loss by
the UK & France.)
Next, yes these aircraft are a staple of many SF stories,
we've all read them too thank you very much, no need to recite from your
favorites (I hate when every freshman feels a need to relate every/. article to a Gibson et al story.)
All of that aside this is really neat technology. I admit
however I wonder where this material will land? Is there a nice rabbit warren
the Aussies have picked out for ground-zero? Mmmm, impacted coney a la hydrogen
flambé?
"Steve Jobs is (insert some random extreme opinion) and should I ever meet him I'll give him a dirty look".
"Only lam3r d00dz uze 1-button m1ce".
C'mon, frankly the level of discussion on/. regarding the existing biggest commercial competition to MS & the soon to be largest unix vender is reliably sophmoric.
Apple is an independent billion-dollar corporation that has reliably innovated and is moving unix into the consumer market faster then anyone else yet all we hear is the same whining crap from/.'ers repeating the same urban-legends about Xerox PARC and Apple not giving away QuickTime yadda yadda yadda.
PDF is PostScript *based*, however it's not nearly the same thing as Display Postscript (wasn't bicapitalized yet) nor is it PostScript.
Besides, there's a world of difference between a one-line marketing gloss like you quoted and the specifics or architecture and implementation.
Again, PDF is not DPS, nor is it even DPS v.2. It's clearly based on DPS (and PS) but it's different enough one can't claim direct descent. Heck, if one could then I expect Adobe would be claiming infringement (which they're not.)
Well, right except that Next used Display Postscript and Apple(Next) is using PDF.
While PDF is a descendant of DP they're different enough (really different in some ways) that I don't believe one can claim continuity.
As to Berlin - after all of these years and all of the talk they've produced nothing remotely usable. It's easy to be fully buzzword-compatable when you're vaporware, heck this posting supports anti-aliased text in a syntactically structured environment!
Invariably when a topic like this gets posted a half-hundred folks post the same questions about the topic, another half-hundred rush off to make fist-post without bothering to read the material and the rest of us get stuck wading through much redundant material.
Slashdot Mirror
They're a big company & I don't think you can go judging them by one product line. Sure they put Win on this product but they've other product lines. In a world where many businesses have server bays full of Wintel boxes and legions of MS trained staff it seems reaonable to sell a pruduct tuned to that mentality. Plus Maxtor appartently got the tech from MS for next to nothing.
Right now it's still a bit of a black art getting BSD & Linux boxes to be peers with NDS & Active Directory. That this is a problem for some businesses isn't a suprise, particularly for what are essentially plug-in/set-up/forget appliances.
Sometimes a bit of subtlety is wasted on folks...
In the meantime bring on more 20th-century Earth references that even the aliens recognize and use, offer us more bubble-haired green chicks in heat for Shatner's studly charms, and of course never forget this weeks new bit of st-jargon ("Ohmygoodness the omicron-multiphase-inverter-particles have discombobulated the interociter! Eject the core!")
Frankly I'd appreciate some more characters that weren't sicky-sweet, who did have personal lives more substantial then the cardbord props and plot-lines that weren't direct from Ethics-101 or badly reinterpreted sf-staples.
If going back to before the beginning is what it takes to get themselves out of the mess they've written themselves in to so much the better. Lets see what brought this Federation about and how all these folks got to be such good pals. Finally, lets get a few more aliens that don't have bad nose-jobs but are Horta rock-eating-blobs or whatnot.
Oh, seat-belts, air-bags, chairs without wheels, circuit-breakers, spare oxygen supplies, The-Club-for-Starships and a damn manual-override on the Holdodeck (perhaps a big red button mounted on a nearby bulkhead?) would all also be appreciated.
Finally, if they bring Shatner back on more time I want his toupee to get screen-credit, perhaps as a Tribble-pelt.
Both developments were underwritten by governments, UK/France for Concorde & US's DOD for 747.
The market went with super-large. Why? Primarily efficiency; Super-large turned out to be more economical in a fleet then super-fast. Cost per passenger-mile was lower as was cost per passenger-hour. As a primary limiting factor is gate access it proved easier to get a (then) gate-and-a-half for a single 747 boarding then three or four for equivalant Concorde flights. Finally after supersonic flight was banned over land many of the planned Concorde routes were closed to it (I remember the Concorde gate at the Kansas City airport sitting empty for years.)
The Soviets did fly their Concordski for many years though I believe they went out of service awhile ago. Aside from that no one has been able to figure out a model that would support wide-spread use of supersonic fight enough to underwrite development costs (Concorde has certianly never paid back it's R&D expenses.) Many countries have done extensive research on next-gen supersonic aircraft but none have shown a compelling economic advantage.
Indeed aside from Canada underwriting Bombardier's progress in mid-size/mid-haul aircraft (& revitalizing that market) the only major development is Airbus's mega-development A380 with 555 seats. Promising to out-jumbo the 747 it has a several customers signed up & is going ahead with production development. Boeing has responded with yet another extension of it's 747 platform but has declined to commit to an entirely new aircraft.
Many of the R&D projects on supersonic flights have now begun to be curtailed. As the industry moves further and further to giant aircraft and the problems of economical supersonic flight remain intractable a next-generation successor to Concorde becomes more & more unlikely. With it EOL'd at 2010 you better start saving now before the era is over.
GSM is simply a set of frequencies & protocols. It's a European standard that's been extremely succesful, there's some of it on the NA coasts in dense areas but not much outside them. It's digital, uses towers like everyone else, nothing particularly exotic except for it being common most everywhere else and often using a small card for transferring the users network identity between phones. The only provider I can think of off-hand was Voicestream (who knows what brand they are this week.)
PCS is slightly more likely to be availaible but not much. Also primarily availiable in metropolitan areas it's a digital format that does oftentimes have provisions for reasonably fast data transmission (depends on the local service provider.) Generally this simply requires an overpriced serial-to-phone cable or in some cases an infrared link.
The third option would be of course good ole analog cellphone service. This has the widest distribution, the greatest range, and although it's slower then the other options it'll get through more of the time. Here you really are using a modem and it's just like plugging into a landline, albeit a very poor quality one.
Since most long-distance races take place away from metropolitan areas and since it's unlikely that a racer can stop to transmit when conditions are best it looks like analog is a must. It has the greatest chance of getting through when the racers are having a break and are free to mess about with this sort of stuff.
Of course there are many dual and tri mode phones so it's not an either/or proposition (my Motorola 7868W is 2 analog / 1 PCS channel.) If you're really interested in doing this then cut a deal with a provider with good local coverage and ask for a phone, airtime, & tech support in return for putting a link to them on the website.
Finally many companies have mobile relays for deployment at events like fairs, sports events, etc. where there will be lots of customers but only intermittantly and not worth a permanent relay. You may well be able to get the provider to shadow the race with their mobile realy truck providing service to all of the riders & support folks.
Look, there's no point in talking to you if you're bound and determined to go with Minix. Go ahead by the HP thingie, start cross-compiling and port Minix to it. Be my guest.
If you actually want to know why not a dozen folks have told you why. REAL (tm) Linux is already doable and ucLinux and Elks are at least, as you said, cousins.
Minix is like the birth-parent who left the baby on the street-corner, never wanted to see it then when it grew up and made something of themselves came around knocking, sniffin' for money. I'd rather port to a cousin then some kinda freaky relative like that.
There's a dozen decent OS's I can think of that are already appropriate or could be with the same effort as Minix would require. The point is that they're not what folks want (well, outside of OS-stalwarts.)
Linux now has brand-recognition. Management has heard of it, the geeks are enthused, there's applications everywhere for it. It's a known quantity. Heck even Accounting now knows what catagory to list it in.
MS sold folks on the idea of one OS scalable throughout the company - Data Center / File Server / Database Server / Mail Server / Terminal Server / Firewall / Desktop / Laptop / Palmtop / Home / Embedded.
Linux is doing the same thing - one OS (and one skillset, one codebase) scalable up and down. HP knows it can sell this the same way MS pushed WinWhatever and they're going for it.
Furthermore it's trivial to strip down a Linux kernel. Sure it might not be as lean as some others but we're reaching the point where leanness isn't the main criterion. CPU cycles and RAM aren't as limited as they were even 6 months or a year ago, the next generation will be faster / more memory, etc. There's more value in having the aforementioned base of applications and brand-recognition then there is in having some special-purpose OS.
Finally HP isn't necc. selling this for today's market. They're looking a year or two down the line. Linux will clearly still be going strong with lots of development - Minix et al will almost surely not be recieving the same kind of support. At that point running something other then Linux or an entrenched product (Symbios, PalmOS, WinCE) on tomorrow's super-palmtop would have been a short-term gain for a long-term handicap.
Now scale as needed. After awhile the materials become too unwieldy. Imagine trying to keep two very flat panes of material at extremely precise tolerences apart over large distances in a consumer product... This is exactly what the manufacturers must do. Furthermore the error rate becomes so numerous the product becomes economically impractical. They probably could be made but the manufacturer is better off making more smaller screens for greater profit.
Even if someone does go for making them visualize the flexing in the front panel when the panel is moved around during manufacturing & shipping. You thougt the rainbows on a samaller screen were bad when you touched it consider trying to build a 24"+ pane that doesn't flex.
As manufacturing technologies improve the yields do go up and the defect rates are kept under ontrol but it's still a difficult market. There's also the problem that the market is a moving target: your US$250 million plant that you built last year for 12" screen is a has-been in today's 13" world, gotta recoup that money fast.
It used to be some manufacturers would only replace a screen if one had >2 defects within the radius of a US quarter coin.
Finally we're eventually going to run into things like bandwidth problems. It'll require some impressive technology to control some enormous number of pixels by some enormous number of pixels all with some high number of possible color combinations at the speeds required.
The more adventuresome will now want to jump in with predictions of distributed rendering and local processing etc.)
Aside from that your posting is primarily a political screed - it's fine as such but I don't see any need to elaborate upon it other then "I disagree". I disagree with both your political & your economic analysis.
However I do appreciate The Economist.
There are the usual government regulations about not putting up things like other nation's spysats & weapons & preventing technology transfers but there's nothing preventing you from going & launching your own vehicle provided you get all the proper paperwork signed (again mostly safety & export regs.)
Indeed there's a number of groups (rapidly dwindling) competing for a series of prizes regaring different types of launches.
As to the US Government protecting some sort of NASA monopoly no, that's not the case either.
NASA has pretty much gotten out of the launch-for-hire business for other gov't departments and indeed doesn't even always launch it's own missions when private industry is cost-effective.
I'm dissapointed in how the system is currently structured, yes. NASA has always been in a quandry due to it's untenable status. It's funding is completely at the whim of each administration and subject to a great deal of external manipulation & "adjustment".
On the other hand as I noted I don't see any supposed "privitization" being preferable. Already many STS services are privately managed yet there seems little cost savings.
Is this odd? No - I don't think going to an extreme, particularly an extreme I consider an innapropriate response to be the optimal solution. Rather I see changing the status of NASA or some successor agency to a more stable one with a more reliable budget as being an answer.
Tell me, do you find it odd that you assert falsehoods, competely disregard the point of much of my posting then misrepresent my position ?
Refurbishing the vehicles can only go so far - the original design was a test and we've never moved beyond it. We've learnt a lot about high-performance hydrogen motors, thermal insulation, airframe requirements, etc. but it's all for naught if none of it is ever applied to a version two.
Limiting the Shuttle fleet to 6 flights a year won't help things much. Sure it's less wear & tear but they're still getting long in the tooth and could be greatly improved on. Unfortunately there's been a requirement for some sort of great-leap-forward when really much of what's required is a simple evolution and refinement.
Much of the basic question of course is why we're in space and what our goals are. I (and yes I'm not alone on this, no need for a poll) believe that there's incredible opportunity there. I also believe that a national program is a good because many of the costs are larger then industry is willing to pay (most of the supposed privatization is pay-us-we'll-do-it-for-you.)
I don't entirely believe the folks that claim privatization is the solution-to-all-problems (Ride British railways lately? Electricity in California?) If commercial space flight truly *is* viable then why aren't more companies investing their own dollars into it and not trying to pry open the public purse?
This seems one of those areas that public investment will yield benefits for everyone, much like hydro projects and managed public lands. Too big & long-term for companies to pursue independently but suited to governments.
I don't see it being too long before we'll be able to 'capture' one of the closer asteroids (presumably one whose orbit brings it near to Earth) and eventually steer it someplace convenient. with it in place as a source of material we'd be able to construct nifty things like cost-effective power satellites and tele-operated mining & refining of materials for use on Earth.
All of this requires however that we have a reasonable means of getting reliably and regularly to at least low Earth orbit and that is slowly slipping through our fingers. We know there's something like a .1% chance of an accident every launch, with only 4 aging orbiters we're putting a lot of eggs in very few baskets.
Check out http://www.slipstick.com (too lazy to make it a clickable link) for comments on Net Folders. Briefly they're quirky, unreliable, prone to dying for no apparent reason, etc. Nice idea but has never actually worked in a useful fashion.
Thus the crime is perpetrated upon more then the individual lying broken / bloodied / dead but rather upon the catagory / class / community of persons who were targetted; and the penalties reflect this.
While ignorent folks try and claim it's some sort of "special protection" to be a member of a community listed under many hate-crime ordinances it's entirely irrelavant unless the crime was committed upon the basis of the victems being a *whatever*.
Before going spouting off it's oftentimes enlighening to do a bit of research first and discover the reasoning behind a set of laws rather then spouting off an ignorant opinion.
As to this being a strike against Austin - it is. A former employer attempted to move me there upon which I had to explain was not an option: I was not going to move to a place where my legal protections were lessened.
A: How to make yourself into a no-life looser - go name calling on /.
B:"...next to a native windowing Emacs" - Have you seen this? Is there really a native port of Emacs to MacOS X or are you just blowing hot air? By native I mean running within Aqua using PDF-based cut-n-paste and all of the other MacOS X-specific technologies.
Actually I believe it was soon-to-be but close enough. If one looks at the number of active Macs out there (they have a lifetime longer then most PCs & price only seems part of the reason) and compare it to their other unix brethren you'll see that there are more.
Presuming some large number switch over to MacOS X then yes, it'll have the largest installed base of unix boxes.
Of course MacOS X has yet to ship so we'll see it's reception but back to the original posting; many /.'ers seem stuck in their disdain of all things Apple which is ironic considering what Apple is doing and how it's affecting the industry.
Right, MacOS X hasn't shipped yet. On the other hand the installed base of Macs is greater then those listed in toto so it stands to reason as (if) users move to MacOS X it'll become larger.
"I'd never buy a fruity-colored computer"
"Steve Jobs is (insert some random extreme opinion) and should I ever meet him I'll give him a dirty look".
"Only lam3r d00dz uze 1-button m1ce".
C'mon, frankly the level of discussion on /. regarding the existing biggest commercial competition to MS & the soon to be largest unix vender is reliably sophmoric.
Apple is an independent billion-dollar corporation that has reliably innovated and is moving unix into the consumer market faster then anyone else yet all we hear is the same whining crap from /.'ers repeating the same urban-legends about Xerox PARC and Apple not giving away QuickTime yadda yadda yadda.
Is talking about the floral-prints any different?
PDF is PostScript *based*, however it's not nearly the same thing as Display Postscript (wasn't bicapitalized yet) nor is it PostScript.
Besides, there's a world of difference between a one-line marketing gloss like you quoted and the specifics or architecture and implementation.
Again, PDF is not DPS, nor is it even DPS v.2. It's clearly based on DPS (and PS) but it's different enough one can't claim direct descent. Heck, if one could then I expect Adobe would be claiming infringement (which they're not.)
While PDF is a descendant of DP they're different enough (really different in some ways) that I don't believe one can claim continuity.
As to Berlin - after all of these years and all of the talk they've produced nothing remotely usable. It's easy to be fully buzzword-compatable when you're vaporware, heck this posting supports anti-aliased text in a syntactically structured environment!
Check out Orbital Debris Quarterly News, a publication of NASA/JSC. Lots of details including a useful FAQ, all of it up to date.
Here's some answers
So please, before guessing or making wild-assed assumptions or making statements based on the *beta* how about just doing a reality-check first.