It's not NASA's fault that they lost the technology used to put the first people on the Moon. It's the fault of the government of the USA. They are the ones who set NASA's goals. They killed manned space exploration with the Space Shuttle, which was a compromise designed by committee for the purposes of putting up and bringing down spy satellites and to "build the space station."
After the Challenger disaster (a direct consequence of the Shuttle's poor design), the spy satellites went up on different vehicles.
How long did it take them to design a space station? It must have been the better part of a decade that they spent arguing about it before any of it got built.
As people keep saying, they could have build it with about 3 launches of a Saturn V.
The space shuttle is an over-engineered, fragile, over-complicated, unreliable piece of design by politics. It's an exemplary lesson in how not to design things.
Politicians, as usual, ruined manned space exploration.
But why should it be up to the Americans on their own to put human beings in space? Yes, Russia and China have done it, but I'm very ashamed that ESA hasn't done it yet.
If China were to announce plans for a semi-permanently staffed Moon base by 2022, say, things would become interesting again. Go China.
Russia should not be overlooked too. They have huge gas reserves, and if they stop being aggressive towards their potential customers, they could make huge amounts of money out of it to fund their space programme.
99% (I'm totalling making this no. up, but you get the point) of people don't even know what Linux is
They don't need to know.
What they have is a small, convenient computer, that runs for a long time on batteries, is very light (easy to carry), boots up very quickly and can be used for web browsing, email, instant messaging, light word processing and spreadsheet work, doesn't get viruses, doesn't randomly forget its configuration every so often, can play music and video...
What else do they need?
If they really are married to Microsoft's applications, and PC games, then they need to spend about three times as much and buy a laptop from Dell.
1. The new company will exists solely to produce systems without Microsoft's software, therefore will not be subject to Microsoft's bullying with respect to pricing since it won't be needing to do any business with Microsoft, unlike all of the other companies that need to sell some Microsoft stuff, and thus end up selling only Microsoft stuff.
2. I can't. No one can. But it's a risk worth taking. It might serve to limit Microsoft's power, thus making the rest of the market more free. Prices will come down as competition is allowed to happen. Microsoft could counter by price dumping, but that's anti-competitive and would further expose them for the shower of crooks and bullies that they are.
What these companies need to to is to club together to form a new "independent" company that makes netbooks. This company would only sell non-Microsoft netbooks (whether that was Linux or some other new-fangled OS) and thus be immune to Microsoft's mafia tactics.
Why would google care about firefox and other Free/Open Source browsers? After all, google has its own browser now to take on the likes of IE.
Google is the biggest influence on the Internet these days, and is positioning itself to take over completely. Google is the new Microsoft.
"Do no evil" my foot! Look out, here comes a new monopoly.
Google cares as much about Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Seamonkey, Amaya, lynx, links, and so on only as long as it still has a competitor. As TFAs all say, Google owns virtually all internet video so it has no competitor.
Assuming they exist at all...which has not yet been proven.
It's incredibly unlikely that they don't, since otherwise the entire universe doesn't work and is just a movie show put on by the Illuminati to keep us preoccupied while they take all our money and bring the antichrist. I blame Prince Philip. He's Greek. And the Queen is German.
The fact that commercial entities, who had the motivations and money to do major work, had to share their Linux improvements certainly led to major advances that have created a feedback cycle whose power is obvious at this point. This cycle continues not because the software is free as in freedom, but because it is not -- it comes at the cost of technology cross-licensing.
Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. The real freedom is for the end-user in GNU software, as opposed to BSD where it is freedom for the developer.
It's been wildly successful. Linux's success (the kernel and distributions) is testament to that. The thing is, there are still people out there who don't get it:-)
Solaris is a specific case of original, commercial unix which went open source a few years ago.
Back in the '90s, when Linux distributions started to get really popular, the Linux kernel and the distributions overtook many of the old commercial unices (e.g. SCO Unix, AIX, IRIX...) and effectively killed them.
Linux was cheaper (free), the user-land was more user-friendly (GNU tools, GNOME, KDE...), and truly cross-platform.
Linux's and GNU's openness and freedom was and is the key to its success. There are now millions of people around the world proficient in Linux/Unix who wouldn't have been for this very reason. There are people like me who made it all the way to being a Software Engineer simply by having a Linux system in the home to learn on.
Solaris is still ahead by a long way on high-end technical features like ZFS and is quite possibly the only commercial unix that has a future now.
I have 3 Solaris 11 UltraSPARC boxes in my house just now: a SunBlade 100 and two Ultra 80s (4 CPU).
Please provide me one example of a free/OSS platform implementation of a commercial product that is inarguable BETTER than the original proprietary version
Find me people who are 100% abstinent and monogamous, and then we'll see how many of them there are as a proportion of the general population. As an exercise for the interested reader, we can then work out the probability of any two of them of opposite genders meeting and falling in love to form a life-long monogamous relationship.
That should be both interesting and enlightening.
Or perhaps that relationship should be based upon social pressure (law, religion, custom) rather than love?
People have been preaching abstinence and monogamy for thousands of years. I don't see any evidence of it having worked.
People are people. They make mistakes from time to time even if they are trying to follow one of these prescriptive, backward religions.
Combine that with the willful spreading of ignorant, superstitious beliefs in Africa and you have a monumental disaster.
It's time the straight-laced preachers of this world and their arm-chair proponents looked at the reality of human nature and thought of something compatible with it that might help instead of berating and condescending.
I know, I know, I was being facetious/sarcastic. It was an old cliche that musicians always died of a drug (usually heroin) overdose, and often at the age of 27. It was a 60s/70s thing.
Having said that, the older I get, the less surprised I am when I hear about yet another musician dying or becoming seriously ill and the result of drug abuse.
I've never needed any drugs myself to appreciate the more psychedelic stuff (Ozric Tentacles, Smashing Pumpkins). I used to have a pretty fertile imagination.
Dave Mustaine was a junkie and one point, Araya and Hanneman were coke-heads, goodness knows what Metallica got up to (Master of Puppets was obviously at least partially autobiographical).
It's none of my business what other people get up to, and I suppose they wouldn't thank me for worrying about them on their behalf. It just really saddens me to see talented, intelligent people who can really do something well damaging themselves to the point of death.
If it's not illegal drugs, it can be alcohol.
Do the habits of musicians reflect those of society, or are musicians more susceptible to drug abuse?
Slashdot Mirror
but xterm doesn't fit very well into the visual style.
So buy a Mac.
It's not NASA's fault that they lost the technology used to put the first people on the Moon. It's the fault of the government of the USA. They are the ones who set NASA's goals. They killed manned space exploration with the Space Shuttle, which was a compromise designed by committee for the purposes of putting up and bringing down spy satellites and to "build the space station."
After the Challenger disaster (a direct consequence of the Shuttle's poor design), the spy satellites went up on different vehicles.
How long did it take them to design a space station? It must have been the better part of a decade that they spent arguing about it before any of it got built.
As people keep saying, they could have build it with about 3 launches of a Saturn V.
The space shuttle is an over-engineered, fragile, over-complicated, unreliable piece of design by politics. It's an exemplary lesson in how not to design things.
Politicians, as usual, ruined manned space exploration.
But why should it be up to the Americans on their own to put human beings in space? Yes, Russia and China have done it, but I'm very ashamed that ESA hasn't done it yet.
If China were to announce plans for a semi-permanently staffed Moon base by 2022, say, things would become interesting again. Go China.
Russia should not be overlooked too. They have huge gas reserves, and if they stop being aggressive towards their potential customers, they could make huge amounts of money out of it to fund their space programme.
You should stop using deodorant while there are children dieing of hunger you insensitive clod.
This is slashdot. You are preaching to the converted.
99% (I'm totalling making this no. up, but you get the point) of people don't even know what Linux is
They don't need to know.
What they have is a small, convenient computer, that runs for a long time on batteries, is very light (easy to carry), boots up very quickly and can be used for web browsing, email, instant messaging, light word processing and spreadsheet work, doesn't get viruses, doesn't randomly forget its configuration every so often, can play music and video...
What else do they need?
If they really are married to Microsoft's applications, and PC games, then they need to spend about three times as much and buy a laptop from Dell.
And which kinds of users would be in the target market of these "Non-microsoft netbooks"?
Everyone.
1. The new company will exists solely to produce systems without Microsoft's software, therefore will not be subject to Microsoft's bullying with respect to pricing since it won't be needing to do any business with Microsoft, unlike all of the other companies that need to sell some Microsoft stuff, and thus end up selling only Microsoft stuff.
2. I can't. No one can. But it's a risk worth taking. It might serve to limit Microsoft's power, thus making the rest of the market more free. Prices will come down as competition is allowed to happen. Microsoft could counter by price dumping, but that's anti-competitive and would further expose them for the shower of crooks and bullies that they are.
What these companies need to to is to club together to form a new "independent" company that makes netbooks. This company would only sell non-Microsoft netbooks (whether that was Linux or some other new-fangled OS) and thus be immune to Microsoft's mafia tactics.
No turnips required.
Is that like in the Jerk, where he has his own private disco?
Why would google care about firefox and other Free/Open Source browsers? After all, google has its own browser now to take on the likes of IE.
Google is the biggest influence on the Internet these days, and is positioning itself to take over completely. Google is the new Microsoft.
"Do no evil" my foot! Look out, here comes a new monopoly.
Google cares as much about Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Seamonkey, Amaya, lynx, links, and so on only as long as it still has a competitor. As TFAs all say, Google owns virtually all internet video so it has no competitor.
Assuming they exist at all...which has not yet been proven.
It's incredibly unlikely that they don't, since otherwise the entire universe doesn't work and is just a movie show put on by the Illuminati to keep us preoccupied while they take all our money and bring the antichrist. I blame Prince Philip. He's Greek. And the Queen is German.
With a nice cup of tea, of course, and a selection of biscuits and cakes.
Next question?
The fact that commercial entities, who had the motivations and money to do major work, had to share their Linux improvements certainly led to major advances that have created a feedback cycle whose power is obvious at this point. This cycle continues not because the software is free as in freedom, but because it is not -- it comes at the cost of technology cross-licensing.
Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. The real freedom is for the end-user in GNU software, as opposed to BSD where it is freedom for the developer.
It's been wildly successful. Linux's success (the kernel and distributions) is testament to that. The thing is, there are still people out there who don't get it :-)
Solaris is a specific case of original, commercial unix which went open source a few years ago.
Back in the '90s, when Linux distributions started to get really popular, the Linux kernel and the distributions overtook many of the old commercial unices (e.g. SCO Unix, AIX, IRIX...) and effectively killed them.
Linux was cheaper (free), the user-land was more user-friendly (GNU tools, GNOME, KDE...), and truly cross-platform.
Linux's and GNU's openness and freedom was and is the key to its success. There are now millions of people around the world proficient in Linux/Unix who wouldn't have been for this very reason. There are people like me who made it all the way to being a Software Engineer simply by having a Linux system in the home to learn on.
Solaris is still ahead by a long way on high-end technical features like ZFS and is quite possibly the only commercial unix that has a future now.
I have 3 Solaris 11 UltraSPARC boxes in my house just now: a SunBlade 100 and two Ultra 80s (4 CPU).
Please provide me one example of a free/OSS platform implementation of a commercial product that is inarguable BETTER than the original proprietary version
Linux > Unix.
Thank you.
Bovine excrement.
Linux is for people who want to get something done, and get it done their way.
I dare say BSD is too, but it's very conservative.
In the early days of Linux (15 years ago) the code wasn't very well written compared to BSD, but since the late '90s, that's changed.
Abstinence and monogamy have a 100% success rate.
Find me people who are 100% abstinent and monogamous, and then we'll see how many of them there are as a proportion of the general population. As an exercise for the interested reader, we can then work out the probability of any two of them of opposite genders meeting and falling in love to form a life-long monogamous relationship.
That should be both interesting and enlightening.
Or perhaps that relationship should be based upon social pressure (law, religion, custom) rather than love?
Seriously, this is about the dumbest idea I've ever heard of.
Here in the UK, we have the dumbest politicians you've ever heard of.
He doesn't get credited at www.slackware.com.
Slamd64 provided us with a good Slackware port to AMD64 while Pat was busy with IBM/390 ports.
People have been preaching abstinence and monogamy for thousands of years. I don't see any evidence of it having worked.
People are people. They make mistakes from time to time even if they are trying to follow one of these prescriptive, backward religions.
Combine that with the willful spreading of ignorant, superstitious beliefs in Africa and you have a monumental disaster.
It's time the straight-laced preachers of this world and their arm-chair proponents looked at the reality of human nature and thought of something compatible with it that might help instead of berating and condescending.
Yes, but the BBC thinks that you do.
Excellent taste. What do you think of Coroner?
They rule. We were in York last summer and went to Hellraiser Records and they had a Coroner CD, RIP, so I bought it.
Back in about 1990, I had a copy on tape of No More Colour which I really liked but could never find any originals in the record shops.
Very, very intricate playing.
I know, I know, I was being facetious/sarcastic. It was an old cliche that musicians always died of a drug (usually heroin) overdose, and often at the age of 27. It was a 60s/70s thing.
Having said that, the older I get, the less surprised I am when I hear about yet another musician dying or becoming seriously ill and the result of drug abuse.
I've never needed any drugs myself to appreciate the more psychedelic stuff (Ozric Tentacles, Smashing Pumpkins). I used to have a pretty fertile imagination.
Dave Mustaine was a junkie and one point, Araya and Hanneman were coke-heads, goodness knows what Metallica got up to (Master of Puppets was obviously at least partially autobiographical).
It's none of my business what other people get up to, and I suppose they wouldn't thank me for worrying about them on their behalf. It just really saddens me to see talented, intelligent people who can really do something well damaging themselves to the point of death.
If it's not illegal drugs, it can be alcohol.
Do the habits of musicians reflect those of society, or are musicians more susceptible to drug abuse?
and i'm going to try and check out the one i've not heard of (Bohlen-Pierce) - sounds worth at least a listen to find out
My sig. contains a link to a B-P MP3.
Do you still need to be a junkie to be a musician these days? Maybe that explains why my guitar playing is no bad.