There could be a "Linux Upgrade Advisor" that could scan your hardware and settings and use this information to either generate a couple files that could be used when setting up Linux or be sent back to some sponsor who would map the hardware people are using Windows on and that would like to try Linux.
There is already a Debian installer for Windows... That could be a nice feature to add.
Of course I remember the cold war - I have grown up during it. Still, the threat of "Soviet aggression" never materialized, the cold war passed calmly into the History books.
The US has every right to defend its frontiers, but this right end there - at the frontiers.
As for the new South America dictators, it worries me too. Hugo Chavez is a danger to Venezuela, but I insist we all must deal with these populist dictatorships within the limits of the law. If we use dictators like this as an excuse to do or condone illegal or immoral acts, we are not much better than them.
As for disappointments, Bush being re-elected was not something to be proud of. Mishaps like these only show what George Bernard Shaw once said, that "Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve." Happily, as long as we uphold sane laws, their mandates can expire safely.
In fact, the F-22 is an admirable piece of technology. One to be really proud of.
Unfortunately, projects like this get funded by politicians and, for them, PR is important - for far too many, it is _the_most_important_thing_. Stakes get high and, in this setting, mistakes are made more frequently. In this case, one that perhaps resulted in an incomplete spec that allowed a GPS simulator that didn't accurately simulate the real unit thus causing a blind spot in tests (thanks to the other guy who pointed out the GPS problem). This error should be studied so it cannot happen again. This is bad and it is good if it's embarrassing because such embarrassment may help perfecting the process.
Again - we should test things in simulators _before_ we fly them and then, we test the flying ones before we start deploying them. Someone obviously thought it was not necessary to test them as thoroughly as they should be. Maybe it was a missed deadline, maybe it was a budget overrun - I don't know. But such problems arise in any complex project at various degrees of magnitude and I have witnessed them more than once. This is not restricted to government or weapons.
I have the utmost admiration for all the technical staff involved in projects of such complexity. I sure understand this is much more complex than any consumer electronics you could buy. But I also understand the value of good testing.
Working on a project for the government (I worked in the electronic voting system we use in Brazil) is prone to political pressures that should be avoided. Cutting corners is one of the mistakes that are easily made in this setting.
And if such mistakes should be avoided when it comes to a device that will sit calmly on a desk (even if they will determine the outcome of an election), sure they should be avoided with devices that fly at supersonic speeds while loaded with explosive things and with a guy inside it.
As for Feynman, those people who worked the shuttle were also bright and honest. Still, wrong assumptions were made due to organizational pressure and those mistakes resulted in a catastrophic failure.
Thanks to the US "help" many countries here in South America (Chile, Argentina, Brazil etc) had right-wing military dictatorships that employed the most gruesome methods of repression. They also left the economy and political system in ruins after their time had passed. It took a long and painful process to get back to where we were before the aforementioned help.
Those dictators were largely funded and their police often trained by the US.
Now we even have a communist president and, guess what, we don't look that much like Cuba.
Because we always were quite capable of avoiding it with our own legal system. It's highly unlikely João Goulart (the excuse for the military coup of 1964) would have been able to pull a Cuba here.
Brazil may be an atypical case, but this doctrine of intervention has brought more headaches to the US than many Cubas would.
And, I would also like to point out, the US-endorsed bloody dictatorship of the Shah ultimately resulted in the theocratic state in Iran and the US-supported Saddam was such an embarrassment he had to be removed from power under false information - the only threat he posed was exactly that: of public embarrassment.
Don't get me wrong - I love the ideals of your Founding Fathers and I truly try, like many fellow countrymen, to live by and propagate those values.
But might doesn't make right and this mindset of yours has proved to be very dangerous both to the US and to the world at large.
You are wrong. Clearly you don't know about these things. I, having been in the Air Force, do. Every new platform has problems. You think the F-16 is great, right? Well, it was our first fly-by-wire jet, and it had problems with it's wire harnesses that led to a lot of crashes. There was even a Hollywood movie that dramatized one event; I forget the name. I hate to say it, but this is normal.
While I don't design or build warplanes, I have worked long as an engineer in the consumer electronics industry and I can tell you this is a stupid failure.
This may even be common, but it shouldn't happen. Our example (wire harness malfunction) is why you fly prototypes, then build a small first run, fly them apart and then, when planes stop crashing for stupid reasons (or, at the very least, when you are pretty sure you figured out why they keep crashing and how to stop it), you order a lot of them and start deploying.
Let's go farther back. The B-24 Liberator was a great bomber of WWII. We built thousands of them. In the beginning, they killed dozens of pilots, from training accidents, that it was called a widow-maker. Or, the venerable P-51, that was crap until we put in the British Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, after that, it became the best fighter we produced in the war, and arguably one of the best ever.
During a war, it's understandable that you cut some corners. You need to have something flying even if it's not perfectly safe (and flying a plane loaded with bombs into enemy fire is hardly safe). OTOH, there is not a pressing need to deploy incomplete F-22s that could possibly malfunction during combat.
I could go on and on. The point is that these are complicated machines, and not everything can be tested out in the lab. That's why we do flight and deployment tests. You can't think of everything ahead of time.
It's not about testing them in simulators or labs. It's about flying prototypes, testing the limits of the systems _before_ you start counting on them.
Testing is not overhead - it's about ensuring quality exists within the design process. Having a couple high-quality systems fully testes at hand and ready to be integrated into other platforms is also a great money saver.
This is a very serious malfunction. I really don't care what caused it - if it was a simple to correct bug or a very complex real-time interaction of a dozen different systems. Plain and simple, no malfunction should render the plane blind and deaf. The pilots were lucky they could fly the planes back to safety.
This is why we have those Tiger Teams. It's the most effective way to solve problems. But, you may not have read the article.
The Tiger Teams are probably a great way to solve problems, but it olny drives attention away from the fact that they should never been allowed to happen. If such a basic problem was detected at such a late stage, I can only wonder what else lies within that code.
The big thing that I'm railing against here is this attitude that things should be perfect coming out of the design facility. Sure one could do that, but it would take so long it would not be worth it. Some risk is okay, but then the acceptance of that is why I enjoy such things as downhill skiing, swimming in the ocean, driving. I don't like it when people talk about a no risk. This is not a computer lab!
Perfection may never come out of the design facility and there are unavoidable risks in any endeavour and those that could and should be avoided. This one is, clearly, one that should have been discovered long ago, when the first prototypes were built. The problem is one of attitude - someone is not taking his/her job seriously enough and, by saying that some mistakes are unavoidable, you make the problem look less serious. Worse: It makes any report on how flawed the process is sound like a criticism on the whole air-force and be dismissed as such.
As Richard Feynman put it so brilliantly, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.". Stating that failures such as this are unavoidable is pure PR.
It is the fact of life. In the modern computer age.
It sure doesn't need to be like that.
Our desktop computers crash because we can tolerate crashes. There is some redundancy - if my notebook crashes, I reboot it and, in a couple minutes, I am back to work. If it breaks, I grab another computer and continue.
A plane, on the other hand, should work at all times. When lives depend on some equipment, one should enforce much higher standards than we do on desktop or even mission-critical busines software. Nobody dies if your sales people have a 5 minute outage. Nobody dies if you can't create a patient record. People die when the computers a plane relies upon fail.
It's completely unacceptable - and quite alarming - to see a plane malfunction like that on its first deployment.
Things like that should have been exercised years ago. By now, the code should be rock-stable. Whant kind of quality assurance they did?
Apple won't show OSX in its ads because the message is that it's really irrelevant.
The idea goes like "You want to do some work, play with your photos and not have to mind the computer that you are using". While Windows Vista is positioned as an end in itself, OSX and the Mac are means to do stuff. The Mac provides for this without the constant fear of viruses, malware or someone highjacking your banking account. Macs are not about what you have but about what you do with them.
Plus, the ads reinforce the idea that Windows PC users are somewhat dull and that Mac users are cool - the idea that, while Windows users may be invited to birthdays, Mac users are the ones at the really good parties.
Geeks may look at the translucent title bars on Vista or the wobbling effect in Beryl, but most users will barely notice that.
I use to remind people I don't have games in my PC (I run Linux) and I really don't want them. When I want to play, I go outside.
It's not a huge overstatement - we are very vulnerable.
The Middle Age was caused not by a natural disaster but nothing more that the socio-economic collapse of an empire. That's orders of magnitude less than an event like, say, the Black Plague.
If we imagine our climate to be a little more unstable than it is, or if we imagine to have about 10% more Earth-crossing objects or even a slightly larger possibility of having two of these improbable mishaps at once (a huge mountain in space during a half-century socio-economic collapse or a nuclear exchange after a prolonged war - a scenario I have grown up with) we would be hard pressed to survive and to stand close to where we are now.
While I would love to believe we could survive anything by tapping our huge brains, I am not very sure we would.
And, while some species of shark may become extinct, the "general idea" of a shark is still going strong. And that's another somewhat disturbing thought - that the Homo sapiens may not be the one that is really successful, but that the "general idea of a man" may prove to be a good one.
Yet, an intelligent species can still be killed or severely crippled by climate change, an asteroid, a disease or even economic suicide, going back to its pre-civilized period for centuries.
We have stagnated for a good couple centuries during the Middle Age and all that was required was the collapse of an empire. Our own over-dependence on industrial goods and food supplies is not good for our survivability.
Intelligence, while a great asset, is no "Chuck Norris" card by which you win the game instantly and forever;-)
Still, if we bankrupt ourselves back to stone age, if we sneeze ourselves to extinction or if we are vaporized by a mountain from space, sharks will still be doing just fine.
I hate to try to end your discussion but I must remind you it takes exactly the same amount of faith to say a god exists and created man as it takes to say no god exists and the universe happened by itself.
The correct answer is "we don't know and we can never know for sure because this hypothesis, that there is a god, cannot be disproved".
I side with those without any faith - I simply don't know if a god exists. I will be happy if a good and benevolent one does and, if when I die I end up in a nice place it will be a really nice surprise, but I won't live my life saying there is a god because it's a tall statement I feel unable to back up.
Colonization is only one way to overcome scarcity.
One other is to become space-borne and learn how to live off the raw materials you can find in asteroids (which offer the added bonus of almost no gravity).
And there must be a lot of other ways. Several of them much easier than to terraform someone else's place.
This, as someone else put it, is a xeno-psychology thing, not a technology one.
Colonization is likely only if the civilization visiting considers it desirable.
If you are a nearly immortal living spaceship (or an alien who was born in space - maybe bred to live in space) why would you want to settle down on a warm planet with a semi-corrosive atmosphere populated with semi-intelligent, self-replicating bags of jelly? It's not likely you would consider green grass under a blue sky something worth exploring.
To rephrase the question in human terms, why would you want to hop off your car in the middle of your trip to work, settle down and start a new life in a cold mud pond?
Keep in mind they would have to remember that "potential revisit" record for a couple billion years. Not an easy task.
I suppose their civilization would also have to remain relatively still for all those billions of years to keep themselves interested in the same thing - in this case, rocky planets with liquid water.
Remember we are talking about remaining interested in the same things for a good couple billion years.
It is easy to imagine extra-terrestrial civilizations that come by, visit the Oort cloud or maybe one or two gaseous giants and label them as "possible source of raw materials" and leave an automated beacon marking the place for others to come.
I imagine our own existence as organic lifeforms will last less than a thousand years more. Our machines will far outsmart us in much shorter time and, eventually, we will either merge or be succeeded by a smarter, more resilient offspring. If they share our values, they will cross the oceans of space and will explore and learn more about other worlds but will have even less in common with the creatures of alien lands than they had with us or what we share with an ape.
Slashdot Mirror
Dressing like a cow reduces the chances of being shot.
You just gave me an idea...
There could be a "Linux Upgrade Advisor" that could scan your hardware and settings and use this information to either generate a couple files that could be used when setting up Linux or be sent back to some sponsor who would map the hardware people are using Windows on and that would like to try Linux.
There is already a Debian installer for Windows... That could be a nice feature to add.
Well... Sometimes, an idiot is really an idiot.
Because in Soviet America, America hates you.
(sorry - couldn't resist)
No. BSD is not the enemy.
;-)
In fact, it is friendly to everyone, including Microsoft
In a sense, it choses its friends very poorly.
"Your mother is a Java programmer."
That one DID hurt!
Of course I remember the cold war - I have grown up during it. Still, the threat of "Soviet aggression" never materialized, the cold war passed calmly into the History books.
The US has every right to defend its frontiers, but this right end there - at the frontiers.
As for the new South America dictators, it worries me too. Hugo Chavez is a danger to Venezuela, but I insist we all must deal with these populist dictatorships within the limits of the law. If we use dictators like this as an excuse to do or condone illegal or immoral acts, we are not much better than them.
As for disappointments, Bush being re-elected was not something to be proud of. Mishaps like these only show what George Bernard Shaw once said, that "Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve." Happily, as long as we uphold sane laws, their mandates can expire safely.
Mike,
I am not saying people don't care.
In fact, the F-22 is an admirable piece of technology. One to be really proud of.
Unfortunately, projects like this get funded by politicians and, for them, PR is important - for far too many, it is _the_most_important_thing_. Stakes get high and, in this setting, mistakes are made more frequently. In this case, one that perhaps resulted in an incomplete spec that allowed a GPS simulator that didn't accurately simulate the real unit thus causing a blind spot in tests (thanks to the other guy who pointed out the GPS problem). This error should be studied so it cannot happen again. This is bad and it is good if it's embarrassing because such embarrassment may help perfecting the process.
Again - we should test things in simulators _before_ we fly them and then, we test the flying ones before we start deploying them. Someone obviously thought it was not necessary to test them as thoroughly as they should be. Maybe it was a missed deadline, maybe it was a budget overrun - I don't know. But such problems arise in any complex project at various degrees of magnitude and I have witnessed them more than once. This is not restricted to government or weapons.
I have the utmost admiration for all the technical staff involved in projects of such complexity. I sure understand this is much more complex than any consumer electronics you could buy. But I also understand the value of good testing.
Working on a project for the government (I worked in the electronic voting system we use in Brazil) is prone to political pressures that should be avoided. Cutting corners is one of the mistakes that are easily made in this setting.
And if such mistakes should be avoided when it comes to a device that will sit calmly on a desk (even if they will determine the outcome of an election), sure they should be avoided with devices that fly at supersonic speeds while loaded with explosive things and with a guy inside it.
As for Feynman, those people who worked the shuttle were also bright and honest. Still, wrong assumptions were made due to organizational pressure and those mistakes resulted in a catastrophic failure.
I am writing from Brazil.
Thanks to the US "help" many countries here in South America (Chile, Argentina, Brazil etc) had right-wing military dictatorships that employed the most gruesome methods of repression. They also left the economy and political system in ruins after their time had passed. It took a long and painful process to get back to where we were before the aforementioned help.
Those dictators were largely funded and their police often trained by the US.
Now we even have a communist president and, guess what, we don't look that much like Cuba.
Because we always were quite capable of avoiding it with our own legal system. It's highly unlikely João Goulart (the excuse for the military coup of 1964) would have been able to pull a Cuba here.
Brazil may be an atypical case, but this doctrine of intervention has brought more headaches to the US than many Cubas would.
And, I would also like to point out, the US-endorsed bloody dictatorship of the Shah ultimately resulted in the theocratic state in Iran and the US-supported Saddam was such an embarrassment he had to be removed from power under false information - the only threat he posed was exactly that: of public embarrassment.
Don't get me wrong - I love the ideals of your Founding Fathers and I truly try, like many fellow countrymen, to live by and propagate those values.
But might doesn't make right and this mindset of yours has proved to be very dangerous both to the US and to the world at large.
Believe it or not, going to space is almost easier than going that deep.
IIRC, they had no windows and just touched the bottom before releasing ballast and returning to the surface.
While I don't design or build warplanes, I have worked long as an engineer in the consumer electronics industry and I can tell you this is a stupid failure.
This may even be common, but it shouldn't happen. Our example (wire harness malfunction) is why you fly prototypes, then build a small first run, fly them apart and then, when planes stop crashing for stupid reasons (or, at the very least, when you are pretty sure you figured out why they keep crashing and how to stop it), you order a lot of them and start deploying.
Let's go farther back. The B-24 Liberator was a great bomber of WWII. We built thousands of them. In the beginning, they killed dozens of pilots, from training accidents, that it was called a widow-maker. Or, the venerable P-51, that was crap until we put in the British Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, after that, it became the best fighter we produced in the war, and arguably one of the best ever.During a war, it's understandable that you cut some corners. You need to have something flying even if it's not perfectly safe (and flying a plane loaded with bombs into enemy fire is hardly safe). OTOH, there is not a pressing need to deploy incomplete F-22s that could possibly malfunction during combat.
I could go on and on. The point is that these are complicated machines, and not everything can be tested out in the lab. That's why we do flight and deployment tests. You can't think of everything ahead of time.It's not about testing them in simulators or labs. It's about flying prototypes, testing the limits of the systems _before_ you start counting on them.
Testing is not overhead - it's about ensuring quality exists within the design process. Having a couple high-quality systems fully testes at hand and ready to be integrated into other platforms is also a great money saver.
This is a very serious malfunction. I really don't care what caused it - if it was a simple to correct bug or a very complex real-time interaction of a dozen different systems. Plain and simple, no malfunction should render the plane blind and deaf. The pilots were lucky they could fly the planes back to safety.
This is why we have those Tiger Teams. It's the most effective way to solve problems. But, you may not have read the article.The Tiger Teams are probably a great way to solve problems, but it olny drives attention away from the fact that they should never been allowed to happen. If such a basic problem was detected at such a late stage, I can only wonder what else lies within that code.
The big thing that I'm railing against here is this attitude that things should be perfect coming out of the design facility. Sure one could do that, but it would take so long it would not be worth it. Some risk is okay, but then the acceptance of that is why I enjoy such things as downhill skiing, swimming in the ocean, driving. I don't like it when people talk about a no risk. This is not a computer lab!Perfection may never come out of the design facility and there are unavoidable risks in any endeavour and those that could and should be avoided. This one is, clearly, one that should have been discovered long ago, when the first prototypes were built. The problem is one of attitude - someone is not taking his/her job seriously enough and, by saying that some mistakes are unavoidable, you make the problem look less serious. Worse: It makes any report on how flawed the process is sound like a criticism on the whole air-force and be dismissed as such.
As Richard Feynman put it so brilliantly, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.". Stating that failures such as this are unavoidable is pure PR.
"these people are responsible for our national defense, our lives are literally in their hands"
;-)
I am quite relieved they are not responsible for my country's national defense.
BTW, I am quite happy my country barely needs a national defense.
It sure doesn't need to be like that.
Our desktop computers crash because we can tolerate crashes. There is some redundancy - if my notebook crashes, I reboot it and, in a couple minutes, I am back to work. If it breaks, I grab another computer and continue.
A plane, on the other hand, should work at all times. When lives depend on some equipment, one should enforce much higher standards than we do on desktop or even mission-critical busines software. Nobody dies if your sales people have a 5 minute outage. Nobody dies if you can't create a patient record. People die when the computers a plane relies upon fail.
It's completely unacceptable - and quite alarming - to see a plane malfunction like that on its first deployment.
Things like that should have been exercised years ago. By now, the code should be rock-stable. Whant kind of quality assurance they did?
I am quite sure no Windows fanboy is waking up with women in their beds, much less beautiful ones.
As for the dangerous ones, there are always desperate guys that may give them a shot.
Apple won't show OSX in its ads because the message is that it's really irrelevant.
The idea goes like "You want to do some work, play with your photos and not have to mind the computer that you are using". While Windows Vista is positioned as an end in itself, OSX and the Mac are means to do stuff. The Mac provides for this without the constant fear of viruses, malware or someone highjacking your banking account. Macs are not about what you have but about what you do with them.
Plus, the ads reinforce the idea that Windows PC users are somewhat dull and that Mac users are cool - the idea that, while Windows users may be invited to birthdays, Mac users are the ones at the really good parties.
Geeks may look at the translucent title bars on Vista or the wobbling effect in Beryl, but most users will barely notice that.
I use to remind people I don't have games in my PC (I run Linux) and I really don't want them. When I want to play, I go outside.
You know... There is a whole world there.
We need to MD5 and SHA1 the files so they can't be tampered with (or, at least, we can easily show which ones were).
Better yet, do it with the files themselves and then with the archive, so nobody can spread fake versions.
I won't try, but I could quickly write a Lisp program that could spit out each one that made sense ;-)
My hair is still brown, but it worked.
It's not a huge overstatement - we are very vulnerable.
The Middle Age was caused not by a natural disaster but nothing more that the socio-economic collapse of an empire. That's orders of magnitude less than an event like, say, the Black Plague.
If we imagine our climate to be a little more unstable than it is, or if we imagine to have about 10% more Earth-crossing objects or even a slightly larger possibility of having two of these improbable mishaps at once (a huge mountain in space during a half-century socio-economic collapse or a nuclear exchange after a prolonged war - a scenario I have grown up with) we would be hard pressed to survive and to stand close to where we are now.
While I would love to believe we could survive anything by tapping our huge brains, I am not very sure we would.
And, while some species of shark may become extinct, the "general idea" of a shark is still going strong. And that's another somewhat disturbing thought - that the Homo sapiens may not be the one that is really successful, but that the "general idea of a man" may prove to be a good one.
Yet, an intelligent species can still be killed or severely crippled by climate change, an asteroid, a disease or even economic suicide, going back to its pre-civilized period for centuries.
;-)
We have stagnated for a good couple centuries during the Middle Age and all that was required was the collapse of an empire. Our own over-dependence on industrial goods and food supplies is not good for our survivability.
Intelligence, while a great asset, is no "Chuck Norris" card by which you win the game instantly and forever
Still, if we bankrupt ourselves back to stone age, if we sneeze ourselves to extinction or if we are vaporized by a mountain from space, sharks will still be doing just fine.
While it is sensible to assume there is no god, it will take faith to be sure. ;-)
Guys...
I hate to try to end your discussion but I must remind you it takes exactly the same amount of faith to say a god exists and created man as it takes to say no god exists and the universe happened by itself.
The correct answer is "we don't know and we can never know for sure because this hypothesis, that there is a god, cannot be disproved".
I side with those without any faith - I simply don't know if a god exists. I will be happy if a good and benevolent one does and, if when I die I end up in a nice place it will be a really nice surprise, but I won't live my life saying there is a god because it's a tall statement I feel unable to back up.
Colonization is only one way to overcome scarcity.
One other is to become space-borne and learn how to live off the raw materials you can find in asteroids (which offer the added bonus of almost no gravity).
And there must be a lot of other ways. Several of them much easier than to terraform someone else's place.
This, as someone else put it, is a xeno-psychology thing, not a technology one.
Colonization is likely only if the civilization visiting considers it desirable.
If you are a nearly immortal living spaceship (or an alien who was born in space - maybe bred to live in space) why would you want to settle down on a warm planet with a semi-corrosive atmosphere populated with semi-intelligent, self-replicating bags of jelly? It's not likely you would consider green grass under a blue sky something worth exploring.
To rephrase the question in human terms, why would you want to hop off your car in the middle of your trip to work, settle down and start a new life in a cold mud pond?
Keep in mind they would have to remember that "potential revisit" record for a couple billion years. Not an easy task.
I suppose their civilization would also have to remain relatively still for all those billions of years to keep themselves interested in the same thing - in this case, rocky planets with liquid water.
Remember we are talking about remaining interested in the same things for a good couple billion years.
It is easy to imagine extra-terrestrial civilizations that come by, visit the Oort cloud or maybe one or two gaseous giants and label them as "possible source of raw materials" and leave an automated beacon marking the place for others to come.
I imagine our own existence as organic lifeforms will last less than a thousand years more. Our machines will far outsmart us in much shorter time and, eventually, we will either merge or be succeeded by a smarter, more resilient offspring. If they share our values, they will cross the oceans of space and will explore and learn more about other worlds but will have even less in common with the creatures of alien lands than they had with us or what we share with an ape.
Or a cockroach.