One interesting characteristic of Diesel engines, especially older ones, is that they aren't very picky as to what fuel they run on. Almost all of them will happily run on biodiesel, and many will run on straight vegetable oil after modification (for which kits are available, ranging in price from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars). Both of these have short CO_2 cycles (you emit the CO_2 that was recently absorbed by the plants used to make the fuel) and reduced emissions of many pollutants, except for NO_x.
Some Diesel engines, as you mentioned, can run on peanut oil, coal dust, and a variety of other things you wouldn't necessarily think to put in your engine. However, recent Diesel engines are generally a lot more picky and may suffer serious damage when the wrong fuel is put in (which may include, for example, the Diesel fuel we had before we got low-sulphur Diesel). My understanding is that this is particularly due to the injection system and the particulate filter.
``Thank you. It is simple as that. So many people after 9/11 beat the war drum, and now almost a decade later are horrified that bad things happen in war.''
This is why I think it's good that people are being shown what actually happens. I watched the video where civilians were shot from a helicopter, and it looks like a honest mistake to me. The message here isn't "OMG the US army is evil! They're killing innocent people!" The message here is "This is what war is like. Innocent people get killed."
People get upset about the horrors of war (and rightly so) while sitting at home in their comfy chairs. Now imagine yourself being in the middle of that. Your enemy's strategy is to stay hidden until you are close, then kill or maim you before you have had the chance to do it to them. When you see something that looks like a threat, are you going to pull that trigger? One moment of hesitation could cost you your life or limbs, or those of your mates. Pulling the trigger will cost life or limbs of whomever you're shooting at, enemy or innocent. Welcome to the "theater".
The fact that what WikiLeaks does is a big deal is telling. If we knew what was really happening out there, there would be nothing that WikiLeaks could do that would be a big deal. It would just be fluff: over the top commentary on something we already knew about. The reason people get so excited about WikiLeaks is that they are actually bringing news. Innocent people are getting killed. Many innocent people are getting killed. By us.
We know what the government said. War on terror. Weapons of mass destruction. We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. We have to help our NATO allies. We are making the world a safer place.
WikiLeaks is showing what is really happening out there. Apparently, it's shocking. Apparently, this was meant to be kept hidden from us. Personally, I am not surprised. I am no military expert at all, but the wars are going pretty much as I had imagined they would. If anything, I am surprised we have been holding on to Afghanistan for so long.
Now that WikiLeaks has shown us what war is really like, I think it's time to answer some questions. All things considered, have these wars been worth it? We know they have cost a lot, and continue to do so, both in terms of money and in terms of suffering, but what have we gained from them? Has the world become a better place because of these wars? Knowing what we know now, if a similar situation presented itself, would we go to war again? And the one I still can't wrap my head around: Why _did_ we invade Iraq? I don't believe for a second it was about weapons of mass destruction, but what was it about?
``Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?''
I can only see one answer to that question: we aren't using anything better because the people who are in a position to make that happen haven't done so.
Apparently, they don't care enough about accountable voting that they have said "Well, the system X that we have isn't good enough, and system Y, which is good enough."
Incompetence or malice, the end result is that voters don't know if their vote has been recorded (much less counted) correctly. I'm surprised that America isn't up in arms about this. Here in the Netherlands, electronic voting went out of the door for that reason. We now vote using paper and pencil.
As an aside, the summary seems to suggest that things would be better if open source software were used instead of closed software. I don't see that. As far as I can see, the issues are largely the same: how do you know that your vote has been recorded correctly, without information that can tie it back to you, and how do you know that the votes are being counted correctly?
With paper ballots filled out by pencil and counted by humans, I understand and can observe every step on the way. With machines and software, this becomes much harder, even if the software is open source.
``We fill in the bubbles ala a standardized test, it gets fed through a scantron machine, with the sheet feeding out into a locked box.''
Can I inspect the sheet that is put in the locked box, to verify that my vote has been correctly recorded and there is no information on it that could be used to identify me? Because I would very much like that. It's good that there is a paper trail that can be used for a recount, but that won't help me if my vote wasn't recorded correctly.
I wish I could help you there. If you're ever in the EU, try the phones.:-) We have them subscription free in practically every shopping mall I've been to.
As for the N900, I have one, and I'm very happy with it, so far. Having said that, I haven't actually used it for very much yet (too busy with other things). The touch screen and keyboard aren't the nicest I've ever had (I liked those on the LG GW620 that I had before it got stolen better), but they're usable. Other than that, it looks nice, responds snappily, and runs a proper Linux, complete with package manager and X server.
The OpenPandora, shame they're sold out. On the other hand, that just goes to show that the success was greater than anticipated - even greater than those who thought it was a good idea had anticipated. Hats off to the people who made this happen!
``If medical research were really as close-to-useless as The Fine Summary claims, we'd be hardly better off with modern Western medicine than with homeopathy and prayer. Clearly, we are''
Oh? I suspect you're right, but I do note that you said that without providing any support for your claim, let alone convincing study results. How, then, is it supposed to be _clear_ that we are better off?
This gets to the heart of the problem. It's easy to claim things, and many people will believe whatever it is you claim, especially if they hear the claim repeated often enough. That doesn't make it true, though. In science, we have established methods for testing claims. If carried out right, scientific studies allow us to make claims that are very unlikely to be wrong, and/or not to be off by much, and/or useful even if they aren't completely correct. The problem is, the methods we have set out are not always applied, and many people don't understand the methods or why they are so important. This allows a lot of people, both well-meaning and malicious, to convince the masses that their solution will make the world a better place, whereas actually, it doesn't.
The article and the summary are worrying, because, either, the aforementioned sort of demagogy is widespread in the medical world, or they are themselves part of exactly such demagogy. In either case, the demagogues have succeeded.
``Keep dreaming. Nobody will care about a FSF endorsement''
I don't know for sure, but I expect the people behind the Linksys WRT54GL, the Nokia N900, a whole bunch of Android devices, OpenPandora, and a lot of microcontrollers and programmable logic devices may not agree with you. The whole appeal of these devices is that they put you in full control, which is precisely what the FSF endorsement is about.
Now more than ever before, we need people to understand the difference between open and locked-down hardware, and to help them make rational choices while shopping.
Translation: The "rational choice" is only the one that I approve of you making.
I didn't read that into the text you quoted. If you did, congratulations. But it's not what the person you are replying to actually said, nor is it necessarily what he meant.
People do understand the difference, they just overwhelming don't care.
I don't know about that. As far as I am able to see, most people don't know how hardware can be locked down and don't think about it. Those who do know and think about this stuff generally fall into 3 categories: (1) those who seek out hardware that they can tinker with, (2) those who will buy locked-down hardware, but then brake the locks, and (3) those who run into the limitations and just shrug and go on with their lives. I would say only those in group (3) understand the difference but don't care, and even that is tenuous: I am sure they _would_ prefer to have hardware that did let them do what they wanted.
To me, it is unthinkable that my personal computers should be remote-controlled by a third party
Then *gasp* don't buy that product. Wow, that was hard, right?
It can require quite a lot of research to find hardware that you get full control over, actually. It would be a lot easier if that hardware were labeled somehow. Hey! That sounds like the subject of this story!
but the crowds are only beginning to wake up to the pain that proprietary platforms are causing them.
If by "the crowds" you mean a bunch of irrelevant whining by some nerds on a few tech sites, then yes, they truly are "waking up".
I don't know. The nerds have been whining about this since at least the 1980s and maybe even before that. More recently, I have seen and heard about many people who weren't interested in free software or unlocked hardware before, who wanted to jailbreak their iPhones, complained about losing features of their Playstation 3s, wanted to watch DVDs on their Wii, install the latest version of Android on their phones, or put a video from YouTube on a CD-R. Maybe it isn't "crowds", but people are finding out the limitations that are imposed on the hardware they buy, and this is exactly what freedom to tinker is about.
``For Christ's sake all the US Govt did was put him on a watch list, which is entirely understandable, given the fact that he facilitated the theft of a large number of confidential military documents.''
Some minor corrections:
1. The story mentions WikiLeaks having been put on the watch list, not Julian Assange
2. This is not "all the US Govt did", but rather all that this story tells you the US gov't did
I agree with you that it doesn't seem so strange that the government would put an organization on a watch list when that organization is known to be in the business of obtaining and publishing information that the government would rather keep secret.
It also doesn't seem too strange to me that a company would rather not do business with an organization that has been put on a watch list by the United States of America.
However, the net effect of this is that it gets harder for WikiLeaks to get funding, and that is what this story is really about.
``Well to be fair, Julian Assange is a massive douche mark.''
Be that as it may, I don't think it affects the issues at hand much. Is WikiLeaks doing good? Is the US government doing good? Is shutting down the donation channel to WikiLeaks a Good Thing?
Our main weakness is that we don't support extensions, and that we are not free software,...
Our two main weaknesses are that we don't support extensions, and that we are not free software, thus preventing inclusion in purely free-software systems and smooth integration in distributions. That, and the fact that few people know us.
Our THREE main weaknesses are... hmm, I'll come in again.
I've found Opera a fantastic browser from the first time I used it, because of its great support for web standards. I used it to test all my web sites. However, I eventually left Opera for a lot of small reasons: no Linux support, then crashes on Linux that wouldn't really go away. Nagging, then ads. And finally, open source browsers became so good that Opera wasn't worth the hassle anymore.
Still, Opera does a great job and is right at the front of innovation. It's also fairly popular in east Europe. Good job, keep it up!
``If you use a commonly used metric to describe an attribute of your car and that commonly used metric doesn't mean anything close to what you're using it for, you're being deceitful.''
Problem is, they couldn't have. The EPA had not established a standard test cycle for the kind of car that the Volt is. So as far as using the commonly used metric the way it's commonly used (i.e. reporting performance on the EPA test cycles), it could not have been done. This has been known pretty much from the beginning. Now, they could have done any number of things. They could have tested their car on one of the already established EPA test cycles. They could have claimed "MPG? For most city driving, you won't be using any gasoline at all!" They could have cooked up some kind of equivalence formula. Or they could have waited for the EPA to come up with a test cycle for their kind of car, and gone with that.
According to manysourcesontheweb, the 230 miles per gallon figure was based on preliminary/draft specifications for a new EPA city test cycle developed specifically for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, with final ratings to be determined by testing after the EPA test cycles for PHEVs would be determined. Does that strike you as GM being deceitful?
The beauty of Git is that you don't actually have to switch to Git to use it. It interoperates with many other version control systems, and even if your organization uses one of those rare systems that Git doesn't interoperate with, you can always still let that system handle things like you normally would. What Git buys you is the ability to perform local commits and other version control operations without affecting anyone else (e.g. you won't break the build). It's one of those features that made me think "How did I ever code without that?" You can also make your local commits available to others, have code reviews on them before committing them to the main repository, etc.
``I think eventually we will get there. I mean I trust the antilock brakes and traction control on my car but those systems are very straightforward with simple goals and it still took a long time to get them right. A car driving itself is ridiculously complex.''
I don't know if you've ever been in the cockpit of an airliner doing an automatic landing under cat IIIb conditions, but it requires nerves of steel. You'll basically be seeing only fog until you're less than 50 feet above the ground. I imagine being in a self-driving car on a crowded highway would give me much the same feeling. Still, I think if we can get this to work, it's a good idea.
``HTTP was never really designed for this sort of thing.''
Exactly. The World Wide Web is good at what it was designed for: static pages with text and hyperlinks. Go to your favorite search engine, type in some keywords to describe what you're looking for, and it will find you pages with information about that. The Web does this better than any other system I know of.
If you want to build interactive, responsive, graphical applications, HTML and HTTP aren't the right tools for the job. This isn't what they were designed for, and they aren't very good at it, either. Add CSS and JavaScript and you can get a long way - provided the user has a browser that handles what you feed it the way you want it, and the user has a PC that is sufficiently overpowered for the task at hand that it will run smoothly, even though it is programmed very inefficiently. HTML 5 intends to give people who want to go this route some more tools to work with, like the canvas element. However, this is just piling on kludges and throwing CPU cycles at it until it kind of sort of works well enough. Still, the success of, for example, Facebook, shows that there is demand for applications that go beyond what HTML and HTTP were made for.
What I have been advocating for years is creating an open technology that really lets people do the things they want to do that are beyond the scope of HTML and HTTP. Pixel-perfect graphics, lightweight two-way network communication, a complete set of GUI widgets, and a runtime to allow safe and efficient remote code execution, complete with a library system to allow for extensions to be written and distributed efficiently and without stepping on each other's toes. Since neither web standards organizations, nor web browser makers have shown eagerness to work in this direction, I have decided to do it myself. I have just recently begun to write down some ideas, under the name Jungle. It does everything I just mentioned, and while I'm at it, I want to throw in 3D graphics and a generic data encoding designed for efficiency and to be easy to parse (because, frankly, HTML is a mess, and XML, while popular, wasn't the best choice at the time it was invented, and certainly isn't a good choice for some of the things it's used for today).
As I said, I have only just started to write these things down, so these aren't complete specifications yet, and there certainly isn't a working implementation yet. I'm trying to get more time to work on this, but if anyone wants to help, that would be greatly appreciated. My plan was to get a more complete picture online before drawing people's attention to it, but this story seems like a good opportunity to get people's attention, so here goes. If you like what you see, I will be delighted. And if you have a better idea, let's hear it! I will be looking for help getting implementations written once the specifications are up, but that is going to take a while. If you would like to help, though, drop me a line and I'll keep you in mind.
``Can you imagine if what is going on now in the mobile space had been happening as personal computing took off during the 80s? We'd have gotten just short of nowhere''
It seems to me that there were plenty of legal hurdles in the early days of the PC, too. Some products (the IBM PC and its clones) made it despite their rights holders (IBM) wanting to keep them exclusive. Some products (the microchannel architecture, IBM OS/2) failed because their rights holders (IBM) wanted to keep them exclusive. There were several lawsuits to go around. For the PC, I reckon the various suits about the IBM BIOS (the proprietary firmware in the IBM PC) were decisive. For modern computing, legalities concerning operating systems and GUIs play a large role. We have no Lisp machines, no IBM OS/2, proprietary Unix is mostly dead, and hardly anybody remembers NeWS anymore. On the other hand, the PC compatible architecture went on to be a major success, as did MS-DOS, Windows (including NT, Microsoft's continuation of OS/2), GNU, and the X Window system. Legalities and lawsuits have a lot to do with this. We got where we are today because of them.
``And at every job I've worked in the past 5 years, management has completely had their head in the sand about it.:-( And none of the developers understood enough about IPv6 to push in an even faintly credible way.:-(''
I think that's testimony to how well IPv4 has worked, and I think that deserves some recognition. Three cheers for IPv4 and those who made it happen!
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations to skwilcox for making such a great chat bot! I think this is really fascinating. Keep it up!
``I have made biodiesel myself(methanol/lye recipe) and our diesel generator loved it at 80Bio/20Die''
Well done!
One interesting characteristic of Diesel engines, especially older ones, is that they aren't very picky as to what fuel they run on. Almost all of them will happily run on biodiesel, and many will run on straight vegetable oil after modification (for which kits are available, ranging in price from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars). Both of these have short CO_2 cycles (you emit the CO_2 that was recently absorbed by the plants used to make the fuel) and reduced emissions of many pollutants, except for NO_x.
Some Diesel engines, as you mentioned, can run on peanut oil, coal dust, and a variety of other things you wouldn't necessarily think to put in your engine. However, recent Diesel engines are generally a lot more picky and may suffer serious damage when the wrong fuel is put in (which may include, for example, the Diesel fuel we had before we got low-sulphur Diesel). My understanding is that this is particularly due to the injection system and the particulate filter.
``Thank you. It is simple as that. So many people after 9/11 beat the war drum, and now almost a decade later are horrified that bad things happen in war.''
This is why I think it's good that people are being shown what actually happens. I watched the video where civilians were shot from a helicopter, and it looks like a honest mistake to me. The message here isn't "OMG the US army is evil! They're killing innocent people!" The message here is "This is what war is like. Innocent people get killed."
People get upset about the horrors of war (and rightly so) while sitting at home in their comfy chairs. Now imagine yourself being in the middle of that. Your enemy's strategy is to stay hidden until you are close, then kill or maim you before you have had the chance to do it to them. When you see something that looks like a threat, are you going to pull that trigger? One moment of hesitation could cost you your life or limbs, or those of your mates. Pulling the trigger will cost life or limbs of whomever you're shooting at, enemy or innocent. Welcome to the "theater".
The fact that what WikiLeaks does is a big deal is telling. If we knew what was really happening out there, there would be nothing that WikiLeaks could do that would be a big deal. It would just be fluff: over the top commentary on something we already knew about. The reason people get so excited about WikiLeaks is that they are actually bringing news. Innocent people are getting killed. Many innocent people are getting killed. By us.
We know what the government said. War on terror. Weapons of mass destruction. We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. We have to help our NATO allies. We are making the world a safer place.
WikiLeaks is showing what is really happening out there. Apparently, it's shocking. Apparently, this was meant to be kept hidden from us. Personally, I am not surprised. I am no military expert at all, but the wars are going pretty much as I had imagined they would. If anything, I am surprised we have been holding on to Afghanistan for so long.
Now that WikiLeaks has shown us what war is really like, I think it's time to answer some questions. All things considered, have these wars been worth it? We know they have cost a lot, and continue to do so, both in terms of money and in terms of suffering, but what have we gained from them? Has the world become a better place because of these wars? Knowing what we know now, if a similar situation presented itself, would we go to war again? And the one I still can't wrap my head around: Why _did_ we invade Iraq? I don't believe for a second it was about weapons of mass destruction, but what was it about?
``Weird. The country with the world-record in political assassination is the US.''
Hmm. Have references for that? And what constitutes political assassination, exactly?
But ... does it run Linux?
I mean, I'm sure there will be a driver to use the card under Linux. But can you run Linux on the card?
``Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages, when clearly we have better alternatives readily available?''
I can only see one answer to that question: we aren't using anything better because the people who are in a position to make that happen haven't done so.
Apparently, they don't care enough about accountable voting that they have said "Well, the system X that we have isn't good enough, and system Y, which is good enough."
Incompetence or malice, the end result is that voters don't know if their vote has been recorded (much less counted) correctly. I'm surprised that America isn't up in arms about this. Here in the Netherlands, electronic voting went out of the door for that reason. We now vote using paper and pencil.
As an aside, the summary seems to suggest that things would be better if open source software were used instead of closed software. I don't see that. As far as I can see, the issues are largely the same: how do you know that your vote has been recorded correctly, without information that can tie it back to you, and how do you know that the votes are being counted correctly?
With paper ballots filled out by pencil and counted by humans, I understand and can observe every step on the way. With machines and software, this becomes much harder, even if the software is open source.
``We fill in the bubbles ala a standardized test, it gets fed through a scantron machine, with the sheet feeding out into a locked box.''
Can I inspect the sheet that is put in the locked box, to verify that my vote has been correctly recorded and there is no information on it that could be used to identify me? Because I would very much like that. It's good that there is a paper trail that can be used for a recount, but that won't help me if my vote wasn't recorded correctly.
I wish I could help you there. If you're ever in the EU, try the phones. :-) We have them subscription free in practically every shopping mall I've been to.
As for the N900, I have one, and I'm very happy with it, so far. Having said that, I haven't actually used it for very much yet (too busy with other things). The touch screen and keyboard aren't the nicest I've ever had (I liked those on the LG GW620 that I had before it got stolen better), but they're usable. Other than that, it looks nice, responds snappily, and runs a proper Linux, complete with package manager and X server.
The OpenPandora, shame they're sold out. On the other hand, that just goes to show that the success was greater than anticipated - even greater than those who thought it was a good idea had anticipated. Hats off to the people who made this happen!
``If medical research were really as close-to-useless as The Fine Summary claims, we'd be hardly better off with modern Western medicine than with homeopathy and prayer. Clearly, we are''
Oh? I suspect you're right, but I do note that you said that without providing any support for your claim, let alone convincing study results. How, then, is it supposed to be _clear_ that we are better off?
This gets to the heart of the problem. It's easy to claim things, and many people will believe whatever it is you claim, especially if they hear the claim repeated often enough. That doesn't make it true, though. In science, we have established methods for testing claims. If carried out right, scientific studies allow us to make claims that are very unlikely to be wrong, and/or not to be off by much, and/or useful even if they aren't completely correct. The problem is, the methods we have set out are not always applied, and many people don't understand the methods or why they are so important. This allows a lot of people, both well-meaning and malicious, to convince the masses that their solution will make the world a better place, whereas actually, it doesn't.
The article and the summary are worrying, because, either, the aforementioned sort of demagogy is widespread in the medical world, or they are themselves part of exactly such demagogy. In either case, the demagogues have succeeded.
``Keep dreaming. Nobody will care about a FSF endorsement''
I don't know for sure, but I expect the people behind the Linksys WRT54GL, the Nokia N900, a whole bunch of Android devices, OpenPandora, and a lot of microcontrollers and programmable logic devices may not agree with you. The whole appeal of these devices is that they put you in full control, which is precisely what the FSF endorsement is about.
I didn't read that into the text you quoted. If you did, congratulations. But it's not what the person you are replying to actually said, nor is it necessarily what he meant.
I don't know about that. As far as I am able to see, most people don't know how hardware can be locked down and don't think about it. Those who do know and think about this stuff generally fall into 3 categories: (1) those who seek out hardware that they can tinker with, (2) those who will buy locked-down hardware, but then brake the locks, and (3) those who run into the limitations and just shrug and go on with their lives. I would say only those in group (3) understand the difference but don't care, and even that is tenuous: I am sure they _would_ prefer to have hardware that did let them do what they wanted.
It can require quite a lot of research to find hardware that you get full control over, actually. It would be a lot easier if that hardware were labeled somehow. Hey! That sounds like the subject of this story!
I don't know. The nerds have been whining about this since at least the 1980s and maybe even before that. More recently, I have seen and heard about many people who weren't interested in free software or unlocked hardware before, who wanted to jailbreak their iPhones, complained about losing features of their Playstation 3s, wanted to watch DVDs on their Wii, install the latest version of Android on their phones, or put a video from YouTube on a CD-R. Maybe it isn't "crowds", but people are finding out the limitations that are imposed on the hardware they buy, and this is exactly what freedom to tinker is about.
``For Christ's sake all the US Govt did was put him on a watch list, which is entirely understandable, given the fact that he facilitated the theft of a large number of confidential military documents.''
Some minor corrections:
1. The story mentions WikiLeaks having been put on the watch list, not Julian Assange
2. This is not "all the US Govt did", but rather all that this story tells you the US gov't did
I agree with you that it doesn't seem so strange that the government would put an organization on a watch list when that organization is known to be in the business of obtaining and publishing information that the government would rather keep secret.
It also doesn't seem too strange to me that a company would rather not do business with an organization that has been put on a watch list by the United States of America.
However, the net effect of this is that it gets harder for WikiLeaks to get funding, and that is what this story is really about.
``Well to be fair, Julian Assange is a massive douche mark.''
Be that as it may, I don't think it affects the issues at hand much. Is WikiLeaks doing good? Is the US government doing good? Is shutting down the donation channel to WikiLeaks a Good Thing?
Infinite XP exploit!
Our main weakness is that we don't support extensions, and that we are not free software, ...
Our two main weaknesses are that we don't support extensions, and that we are not free software, thus preventing inclusion in purely free-software systems and smooth integration in distributions. That, and the fact that few people know us.
Our THREE main weaknesses are ... hmm, I'll come in again.
I've found Opera a fantastic browser from the first time I used it, because of its great support for web standards. I used it to test all my web sites. However, I eventually left Opera for a lot of small reasons: no Linux support, then crashes on Linux that wouldn't really go away. Nagging, then ads. And finally, open source browsers became so good that Opera wasn't worth the hassle anymore.
Still, Opera does a great job and is right at the front of innovation. It's also fairly popular in east Europe. Good job, keep it up!
``If you use a commonly used metric to describe an attribute of your car and that commonly used metric doesn't mean anything close to what you're using it for, you're being deceitful.''
Problem is, they couldn't have. The EPA had not established a standard test cycle for the kind of car that the Volt is. So as far as using the commonly used metric the way it's commonly used (i.e. reporting performance on the EPA test cycles), it could not have been done. This has been known pretty much from the beginning. Now, they could have done any number of things. They could have tested their car on one of the already established EPA test cycles. They could have claimed "MPG? For most city driving, you won't be using any gasoline at all!" They could have cooked up some kind of equivalence formula. Or they could have waited for the EPA to come up with a test cycle for their kind of car, and gone with that.
According to many sources on the web, the 230 miles per gallon figure was based on preliminary/draft specifications for a new EPA city test cycle developed specifically for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, with final ratings to be determined by testing after the EPA test cycles for PHEVs would be determined. Does that strike you as GM being deceitful?
The beauty of Git is that you don't actually have to switch to Git to use it. It interoperates with many other version control systems, and even if your organization uses one of those rare systems that Git doesn't interoperate with, you can always still let that system handle things like you normally would. What Git buys you is the ability to perform local commits and other version control operations without affecting anyone else (e.g. you won't break the build). It's one of those features that made me think "How did I ever code without that?" You can also make your local commits available to others, have code reviews on them before committing them to the main repository, etc.
``I think eventually we will get there. I mean I trust the antilock brakes and traction control on my car but those systems are very straightforward with simple goals and it still took a long time to get them right. A car driving itself is ridiculously complex.''
I don't know if you've ever been in the cockpit of an airliner doing an automatic landing under cat IIIb conditions, but it requires nerves of steel. You'll basically be seeing only fog until you're less than 50 feet above the ground. I imagine being in a self-driving car on a crowded highway would give me much the same feeling. Still, I think if we can get this to work, it's a good idea.
So I guess the question becomes: how do we get better editors? How does one become an editor, for example?
``HTTP was never really designed for this sort of thing.''
Exactly. The World Wide Web is good at what it was designed for: static pages with text and hyperlinks. Go to your favorite search engine, type in some keywords to describe what you're looking for, and it will find you pages with information about that. The Web does this better than any other system I know of.
If you want to build interactive, responsive, graphical applications, HTML and HTTP aren't the right tools for the job. This isn't what they were designed for, and they aren't very good at it, either. Add CSS and JavaScript and you can get a long way - provided the user has a browser that handles what you feed it the way you want it, and the user has a PC that is sufficiently overpowered for the task at hand that it will run smoothly, even though it is programmed very inefficiently. HTML 5 intends to give people who want to go this route some more tools to work with, like the canvas element. However, this is just piling on kludges and throwing CPU cycles at it until it kind of sort of works well enough. Still, the success of, for example, Facebook, shows that there is demand for applications that go beyond what HTML and HTTP were made for.
What I have been advocating for years is creating an open technology that really lets people do the things they want to do that are beyond the scope of HTML and HTTP. Pixel-perfect graphics, lightweight two-way network communication, a complete set of GUI widgets, and a runtime to allow safe and efficient remote code execution, complete with a library system to allow for extensions to be written and distributed efficiently and without stepping on each other's toes. Since neither web standards organizations, nor web browser makers have shown eagerness to work in this direction, I have decided to do it myself. I have just recently begun to write down some ideas, under the name Jungle. It does everything I just mentioned, and while I'm at it, I want to throw in 3D graphics and a generic data encoding designed for efficiency and to be easy to parse (because, frankly, HTML is a mess, and XML, while popular, wasn't the best choice at the time it was invented, and certainly isn't a good choice for some of the things it's used for today).
As I said, I have only just started to write these things down, so these aren't complete specifications yet, and there certainly isn't a working implementation yet. I'm trying to get more time to work on this, but if anyone wants to help, that would be greatly appreciated. My plan was to get a more complete picture online before drawing people's attention to it, but this story seems like a good opportunity to get people's attention, so here goes. If you like what you see, I will be delighted. And if you have a better idea, let's hear it! I will be looking for help getting implementations written once the specifications are up, but that is going to take a while. If you would like to help, though, drop me a line and I'll keep you in mind.
``Can you imagine if what is going on now in the mobile space had been happening as personal computing took off during the 80s? We'd have gotten just short of nowhere''
It seems to me that there were plenty of legal hurdles in the early days of the PC, too. Some products (the IBM PC and its clones) made it despite their rights holders (IBM) wanting to keep them exclusive. Some products (the microchannel architecture, IBM OS/2) failed because their rights holders (IBM) wanted to keep them exclusive. There were several lawsuits to go around. For the PC, I reckon the various suits about the IBM BIOS (the proprietary firmware in the IBM PC) were decisive. For modern computing, legalities concerning operating systems and GUIs play a large role. We have no Lisp machines, no IBM OS/2, proprietary Unix is mostly dead, and hardly anybody remembers NeWS anymore. On the other hand, the PC compatible architecture went on to be a major success, as did MS-DOS, Windows (including NT, Microsoft's continuation of OS/2), GNU, and the X Window system. Legalities and lawsuits have a lot to do with this. We got where we are today because of them.
``we've not had a problem in years that wasn't solved in less than 10 minutes via phone''
Sounds like eagerness to solve problems via phone was one of the things that burned Cryptome here.
Minor correction: I think you mean A record rather than AA. AA is something else ...
``And at every job I've worked in the past 5 years, management has completely had their head in the sand about it. :-( And none of the developers understood enough about IPv6 to push in an even faintly credible way. :-(''
I think that's testimony to how well IPv4 has worked, and I think that deserves some recognition. Three cheers for IPv4 and those who made it happen!