I don't think anyone literate in aviation history has ever disputed that people have "flown" before the Wrights.
Langley's aerodrome is typical of the breed.
It was meant to be catapulted into the air and fly a straight line path like the model airplanes it was based on.
The "pilot" was the engineer responsible for the plane's remarkable engine. I've found nothing online to suggest that he had ever flown a glider --- which makes it certain that he would have crashed the plane even if the controls had been properly designed.
You are leaving out of the story a singular example of fraud and collusion between the Smithsonian and Glenn Curtiss.
With Smithsonian approval, Glenn Curtiss extensively modified the Aerodrome and made a few short flights in it in 1914, as part of an unsuccessful attempt to bypass the Wright Brothers' patent on aircraft and to vindicate Langley. Based on these flights, the Smithsonian displayed the Aerodrome in its museum as the first heavier-than-air manned, powered aircraft "capable of flight." This action triggered a feud with Orville Wright (Wilbur Wright had died in 1912), who accused the Smithsonian of misrepresenting flying machine history. Orville backed up his protest by refusing to donate the original 1903 Kitty Hawk Flyer to the Smithsonian, instead donating it to extensive collections of the Science Museum of London in 1928. The dispute finally ended in 1942 when the Smithsonian published details of the Curtiss modifications to the Aerodrome and recanted its claims for the aircraft.
Langley's simple approach was merely to scale up the unpiloted Aerodromes to human-carrying proportions. This would prove to be a grave error, as the aerodynamics, structural design, and control system of the smaller aircraft were not adaptable to a full-sized version. Langley's primary focus was the power plant. The completed engine, a water-cooled five-cylinder radial that generated a remarkable 52.4 horsepower, was a great achievement for the time.
Despite the excellent engine, the Aerodrome A, as it was called, met with disastrous results, crashing on takeoff on October 7, 1903, and again on December 8. Langley blamed the launch mechanism. While this was in some small measure true, there is no denying that the Aerodrome A was an overly complex, structurally weak, aerodynamically unsound aircraft. This second crash ended Langley's aeronautical work entirely.
Sixty years ago comics were distributed indiscriminately through news stands, cigar stores, and other outlets. The soft core bondage porn of True Detective on sale a half step away from Archie and Donald Duck.
The hard core stuff sold under the counter.
Crime and horror comics tried to reach out to older teens and adults who had discovered the 25 cent pulp fiction paperback novels of the rough-cut Mickey Spillane --- but it was pretty crude and exploitive stuff, no matter how collectible the cover art looks now.
I would be absolutely amazed if Google can deliver a competitive codec before HEVC/H.265 becomes entrenched.
H.264's great strength is that it reaches far beyond the web.
Theatrical production. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution. Home video. Industrial applications and so on. WebM is for all practical purposes a transcode for YouTube and that in the end is simply not enough.
he believes people working out of their homes is entirely natural; that this is how things were done for thousands of years before the industrial revolution.
Divide and conquer.
If you were producing for a market, home work was piece work --- with no labor laws or labor unions to prevent abuses.
When the textile mills of New England began opening jobs to young women --- their first taste of independence, education, organization and a real, substantial, pay check --- girls abandoned the rustic life and never looked back.
If you're willing to move her to Win7 and away from AOL software, why not just move her to Linux?
No one ever posts a story here explaining how and why trying to move his Mom or Dad to Linux blew up in his face. But I am betting it happens more a lot more often then the geek is willing to admit.
There is nothing that cuts deeper or wounds the elderly more than being treated like a snot-nosed kid.
Fix what needs to be fixed.
Do it quietly, do it simply, Leave everything else alone.
Corporations are not people, and do not get natural rights such as the right to free speech.
Corporations are organized by people who do have the constitutional right to speak collectively, to do business collectively, and so on.
Forums like Slashdot can exist only where those who fund them are not personally responsible for all the debts of the organizations which manage them.
This is basic.
This is part of what gives meaning to freedom of speech, freedom of association.
The EFF is a corporation.
Not-For-Profit, but still a corporation.
The Declaration of Independence is framed in terms of natural law. The US Constitution is not --- and there is a reason for that. The Constitution is a legal document and not a philosophical argument.
It is all about setting the rules and boundaries for collective action.
"We the people" get to make the big decisions --- and take the country in any direction we choose to go.
If you think about that for a second, you'll realize it's kind of dumb. If a behemoth like AT&T was capable of innovation, they wouldn't have been caught flat-footed by the new technology of the Internet.
Does the geek have any notion of the extraordinary debt --- the full debt --- he owes to the "old" AT&T and Bell Labs? The monopoly which among other things did pioneering research in long distance communications and mobile. The first papers on cellular radio.
At its peak, Bell Laboratories was the premier facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language and the C++ programming language. Seven Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
1937: Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.
1956: John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the first transistors.
1977: Philip W. Anderson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing an improved understanding of the electronic structure of glass and magnetic materials.
1978: Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Penzias and Wilson were cited for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, a nearly uniform glow that fills the Universe in the microwave band of the radio spectrum.
1997: Steven Chu shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.
1998: Horst Stormer, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Tsui, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect/
2009: Willard S. Boyle, George E. Smith shared the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Charles K. Kao. Boyle and Smith were cited for the invention of charge-coupled device (CCD) semiconductor imaging sensors.
The Turing Award has twice been won by Bell Labs researchers:
1968: Richard Hamming for his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes.
1983: Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for their work on operating systems theory, and their development of Unix.
During the 1920s, the one-time pad cipher was invented by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne at the laboratories. Bell Labs' Claude Shannon later proved that it is unbreakable....
If a company with 1000 seats downloads Ubuntu once and uses that single download to install it on all 1000 PCs...
....it is a locked down tight enterprise-wide distribution that doesn't include Steam, and, in that environment. more likely to be Red Hat than Ubuntu.
It is not the user's choice and not a popularity contest either.
Yes more people use Windows, but when XP and 7 finally have their support ended, the people using those Microsoft platforms will be forced into using precisely what they are avoiding, the 'modern' interface. It's going to be interesting to watch if they move to Mac, Linux or suck up to Microsoft and push themselves into that new UI.
Ten percent of Steam gamers are running Windows 8 ---
five times Win 8's broader market share.
I'll take that as a more than a hint that gamers are not having a problem with the Modern UI.
Why should they? Games not running under a browser are almost always running full screen --- and each has its own UI.
The Modern Start page is filled with tiles that have an always active online component. It isn't hard to see that PC gaming is headed in the same direction.
Wow, so you think that "normal users" only work for companies that "support Microsoft's Home Use Program"?
I don't think that at all.
I do think that MS Office remains the global standard for office work --- and that the core market for Office as a consumer product is the middle class. White collar workers and professionals.
It's telling that Apple doesn't even pretend to compete on this ground.
It's March and income tax software tops the software bestseller lists for the PC and the Mac --- and you can't get more middle class than Turbo Tax.
But you won't have to dig very far down to find MS Office.
So for normal people, it means the price of Office went through the roof.
No it doesn't.
If your employer supports Microsoft's Home Use Program, Office 2013 Pro is a $10 download.
If you are a college or university student, Office 365 Academic is $80 for a four year subscription. Office 365 Home Premium is $99 a year for 5 PCS/Macs/Phones. Both include Office on Demand. Sign in anywhere from a Win 7 PC or higher and you are good to go.
But let's be honest about one thing.
The core retail market for MS Office is far from "normal."
It is populated by people who work with words and numbers every hour of every working day.
In trades and professions which can pay very, very well.
White Male, Born 1930, 58 Years
Black Male, Born 1930, 47 Years
White Male, Born 2010, 76 Years
Black Male, Born 2010, 72 Years
-----
US Census Data
US Population 1930, 122,775,046
US Population 2010, 308,745,538 US Population 2020, 337 million (est.)
"In 2019, when the last of the baby boomers (those born between 1949 and 1964) have reached age 55, nearly twenty-nine percent of the total United States population will be age 55 and older." Source: Government Accountability Office, "Older Workers: Demographic Trends Post Challenges for Employers and Workers," 2001
-----
The time isn't far off when we will have 100 million seniors to care for.
Then there is the problem of providing medical care to the poor of all ages. The politics of health care. Red and Blue.
Best and worst states on unmet health needs
The states with the highest percentages of residents who had unmet health care needs due to cost in 2010 were in the South, according to a new study.
Most coding the commercial world wants is boring. Your home projects may be fun but most of the work out there is not.
The same thing can be said of every other trade or profession you could name.
There is something to be said for the guy who will take on whatever job that needs doing that will provide him with a living and still give it his best.
The military justice system actually has a more stringent speedy trial standard than civilian law.
The price of that is less time to prepare and mount a successful defense.
The function of a courts-martial is to maintain order and discipline within the armed forces while fairly and properly deciding the fate of a particular defendant.
MS Office is too featured and too expensive for most users.
I don't think the geek understands the market for MS Office as a consumer product.
There are no casual users.
People chose MS Office because it is a mature product and the global standard for office work.
It integrates smoothly with their third party accounting program and countless other applications and resources --- which in themselves are the standard tools of their trade or profession.
And nobody tell the guys that the titanic had -from memory- at least one sistership who went on with her own commercial career without anykind of troubles...
There were two, Olympic, in service on the North Atlantic run for 24 years, and the Britannic, lost to a mine or torpedo while in service as a hospital ship in World War I
There are some parts of the old ship that most definitely should NOT be replicated on the new one.
Olympic, Titanic's twin sister, was in service for 24 years on the North Atlantic run.
I don't see any problem with the engines.
If your complaint is about the inefficacies of coal or the manning requirements and working conditions aboard a coal-fired ship, take it up with Winston Churchill. Naval innovation: From coal to oil
If you are First Lord of the Admiralty. you can make these things happen.
You would think that after Geohot showed the way (not!), that people would leave Sony alone to wither on the vine.
At any odds you would care to name, I would bet that 99.8% of users upgraded their PS3 firmware (currently at rev. 4.31) without giving a second's thought to Geohot or Linux on the console.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon pulled SimCity from its store due to poor customer reception.
The download is back on line, and, at the time of this posting, No. 3 in sales of gaming software and hardware at Amazon.com.
It's ranking in sales unchanged despite all the negative publicity,
Sales of the retail box are down a little.
I wonder why.
R2-D2 communicates with other devices (C-3PO) using beeps
It makes a good joke. But "Insightful?"
Fantasy, no matter how provocative and suggestive of what might be possible, doesn't count as prior art.
I don't think anyone literate in aviation history has ever disputed that people have "flown" before the Wrights.
Langley's aerodrome is typical of the breed.
It was meant to be catapulted into the air and fly a straight line path like the model airplanes it was based on.
The "pilot" was the engineer responsible for the plane's remarkable engine. I've found nothing online to suggest that he had ever flown a glider --- which makes it certain that he would have crashed the plane even if the controls had been properly designed.
With Smithsonian approval, Glenn Curtiss extensively modified the Aerodrome and made a few short flights in it in 1914, as part of an unsuccessful attempt to bypass the Wright Brothers' patent on aircraft and to vindicate Langley. Based on these flights, the Smithsonian displayed the Aerodrome in its museum as the first heavier-than-air manned, powered aircraft "capable of flight." This action triggered a feud with Orville Wright (Wilbur Wright had died in 1912), who accused the Smithsonian of misrepresenting flying machine history. Orville backed up his protest by refusing to donate the original 1903 Kitty Hawk Flyer to the Smithsonian, instead donating it to extensive collections of the Science Museum of London in 1928. The dispute finally ended in 1942 when the Smithsonian published details of the Curtiss modifications to the Aerodrome and recanted its claims for the aircraft.
Langley Aerodrome
Langley's simple approach was merely to scale up the unpiloted Aerodromes to human-carrying proportions. This would prove to be a grave error, as the aerodynamics, structural design, and control system of the smaller aircraft were not adaptable to a full-sized version. Langley's primary focus was the power plant. The completed engine, a water-cooled five-cylinder radial that generated a remarkable 52.4 horsepower, was a great achievement for the time.
Despite the excellent engine, the Aerodrome A, as it was called, met with disastrous results, crashing on takeoff on October 7, 1903, and again on December 8. Langley blamed the launch mechanism. While this was in some small measure true, there is no denying that the Aerodrome A was an overly complex, structurally weak, aerodynamically unsound aircraft. This second crash ended Langley's aeronautical work entirely.
Langley Aerodrome A
Achieving dynamic control in three dimensions was the Wrights' great obsession.
They were as intensely focused on learning how to fly as they were on the evolution and refinement of their mechanical designs.
Sixty years ago it was comic books
Sixty years ago comics were distributed indiscriminately through news stands, cigar stores, and other outlets. The soft core bondage porn of True Detective on sale a half step away from Archie and Donald Duck.
The hard core stuff sold under the counter.
Crime and horror comics tried to reach out to older teens and adults who had discovered the 25 cent pulp fiction paperback novels of the rough-cut Mickey Spillane --- but it was pretty crude and exploitive stuff, no matter how collectible the cover art looks now.
While Fisher seems to have confirmed it. Can't see Hamill has anything else to do.
Mark Hamill has become one of the most successful and sought after vocal talents in the business.
Film and television animation, video games, audio books and so on. The definitive voice of The Joker.
If you now deliver VP8 content over the internet, or support it in your browser, you aren't going to get sued into the ground by MPEG-LA
But the quality of the codec still matters. Hardware support still matters.
If H.265 delivers on its promises, distributing video at all resolutions is going to become dramatically less expensive.
Perhaps you should be paying a bit more attention to matters outside of Microsoft. This is about WebRTC and VOIP in the browser.
H.284 is significant in video conferencing.
That makes it a legitimate candidate as a codec for VoIP in the browser.
I would be absolutely amazed if Google can deliver a competitive codec before HEVC/H.265 becomes entrenched.
H.264's great strength is that it reaches far beyond the web.
Theatrical production. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution. Home video. Industrial applications and so on. WebM is for all practical purposes a transcode for YouTube and that in the end is simply not enough.
he believes people working out of their homes is entirely natural; that this is how things were done for thousands of years before the industrial revolution.
Divide and conquer.
If you were producing for a market, home work was piece work --- with no labor laws or labor unions to prevent abuses.
When the textile mills of New England began opening jobs to young women --- their first taste of independence, education, organization and a real, substantial, pay check --- girls abandoned the rustic life and never looked back.
In union they found strength.
If you're willing to move her to Win7 and away from AOL software, why not just move her to Linux?
No one ever posts a story here explaining how and why trying to move his Mom or Dad to Linux blew up in his face. But I am betting it happens more a lot more often then the geek is willing to admit.
There is nothing that cuts deeper or wounds the elderly more than being treated like a snot-nosed kid.
Fix what needs to be fixed.
Do it quietly, do it simply, Leave everything else alone.
Corporations are not people, and do not get natural rights such as the right to free speech.
Corporations are organized by people who do have the constitutional right to speak collectively, to do business collectively, and so on.
Forums like Slashdot can exist only where those who fund them are not personally responsible for all the debts of the organizations which manage them.
This is basic.
This is part of what gives meaning to freedom of speech, freedom of association.
The EFF is a corporation.
Not-For-Profit, but still a corporation.
The Declaration of Independence is framed in terms of natural law. The US Constitution is not --- and there is a reason for that. The Constitution is a legal document and not a philosophical argument.
It is all about setting the rules and boundaries for collective action.
"We the people" get to make the big decisions --- and take the country in any direction we choose to go.
Google doesn't sell your info to companies. Google delivers ads to target demographics.
I'll take that as a distinction without a difference.
Setting aside for the moment any questions about how Google uses this information to market its own products and services to users.
If you think about that for a second, you'll realize it's kind of dumb. If a behemoth like AT&T was capable of innovation, they wouldn't have been caught flat-footed by the new technology of the Internet.
Does the geek have any notion of the extraordinary debt --- the full debt --- he owes to the "old" AT&T and Bell Labs? The monopoly which among other things did pioneering research in long distance communications and mobile. The first papers on cellular radio.
At its peak, Bell Laboratories was the premier facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language and the C++ programming language. Seven Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
1937: Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.
1956: John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the first transistors.
1977: Philip W. Anderson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing an improved understanding of the electronic structure of glass and magnetic materials.
1978: Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Penzias and Wilson were cited for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, a nearly uniform glow that fills the Universe in the microwave band of the radio spectrum.
1997: Steven Chu shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.
1998: Horst Stormer, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Tsui, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect/
2009: Willard S. Boyle, George E. Smith shared the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Charles K. Kao. Boyle and Smith were cited for the invention of charge-coupled device (CCD) semiconductor imaging sensors.
The Turing Award has twice been won by Bell Labs researchers:
1968: Richard Hamming for his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes.
1983: Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for their work on operating systems theory, and their development of Unix.
During the 1920s, the one-time pad cipher was invented by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne at the laboratories. Bell Labs' Claude Shannon later proved that it is unbreakable....
Bell Labs
This list is endless, really. You could fill pages with this stuff and only scratch the surface.
If a company with 1000 seats downloads Ubuntu once and uses that single download to install it on all 1000 PCs...
....it is a locked down tight enterprise-wide distribution that doesn't include Steam, and, in that environment. more likely to be Red Hat than Ubuntu.
It is not the user's choice and not a popularity contest either.
Yes more people use Windows, but when XP and 7 finally have their support ended, the people using those Microsoft platforms will be forced into using precisely what they are avoiding, the 'modern' interface. It's going to be interesting to watch if they move to Mac, Linux or suck up to Microsoft and push themselves into that new UI.
Ten percent of Steam gamers are running Windows 8 ---
five times Win 8's broader market share.
I'll take that as a more than a hint that gamers are not having a problem with the Modern UI.
Why should they? Games not running under a browser are almost always running full screen --- and each has its own UI.
The Modern Start page is filled with tiles that have an always active online component. It isn't hard to see that PC gaming is headed in the same direction.
Wow, so you think that "normal users" only work for companies that "support Microsoft's Home Use Program"?
I don't think that at all.
I do think that MS Office remains the global standard for office work --- and that the core market for Office as a consumer product is the middle class. White collar workers and professionals.
It's telling that Apple doesn't even pretend to compete on this ground.
It's March and income tax software tops the software bestseller lists for the PC and the Mac --- and you can't get more middle class than Turbo Tax.
But you won't have to dig very far down to find MS Office.
So for normal people, it means the price of Office went through the roof.
No it doesn't.
If your employer supports Microsoft's Home Use Program, Office 2013 Pro is a $10 download.
If you are a college or university student, Office 365 Academic is $80 for a four year subscription. Office 365 Home Premium is $99 a year for 5 PCS/Macs/Phones. Both include Office on Demand. Sign in anywhere from a Win 7 PC or higher and you are good to go.
But let's be honest about one thing.
The core retail market for MS Office is far from "normal."
It is populated by people who work with words and numbers every hour of every working day.
In trades and professions which can pay very, very well.
Oh and while you are at it do something about malpractice tort reform - the major cause of excessive medical costs.
No matter how thin you slice it...
Life Expectancy at Birth by Race and Sex, 1930---2010
White Male, Born 1930, 58 Years
Black Male, Born 1930, 47 Years
White Male, Born 2010, 76 Years
Black Male, Born 2010, 72 Years
-----
US Census Data
US Population 1930, 122,775,046
US Population 2010, 308,745,538
US Population 2020, 337 million (est.)
"In 2019, when the last of the baby boomers (those born between 1949 and 1964) have reached age 55, nearly twenty-nine percent of the total United States population will be age 55 and older." Source: Government Accountability Office, "Older Workers: Demographic Trends Post Challenges for Employers and Workers," 2001
-----
The time isn't far off when we will have 100 million seniors to care for.
Then there is the problem of providing medical care to the poor of all ages. The politics of health care. Red and Blue.
Best and worst states on unmet health needs
The states with the highest percentages of residents who had unmet health care needs due to cost in 2010 were in the South, according to a new study.
Five highest
Mississippi: 26.0%
Texas: 25.3%
Florida: 25.1%
Louisiana: 23.9%
Georgia: 22.6%
Five lowest
North Dakota: 8.2%
Massachusetts: 8.7%
Hawaii: 9.7%
Iowa: 9.9%
Vermont: 10.5%
Source: ''Virtually Every State Experienced Deteriorating Access to Care for Adults over the Past Decade,'' Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Nearly every state showed health access declines in 2010
Most coding the commercial world wants is boring. Your home projects may be fun but most of the work out there is not.
The same thing can be said of every other trade or profession you could name.
There is something to be said for the guy who will take on whatever job that needs doing that will provide him with a living and still give it his best.
The military justice system actually has a more stringent speedy trial standard than civilian law.
The price of that is less time to prepare and mount a successful defense.
The function of a courts-martial is to maintain order and discipline within the armed forces while fairly and properly deciding the fate of a particular defendant.
It has never been easy to keep things in balance.
MS Office is too featured and too expensive for most users.
I don't think the geek understands the market for MS Office as a consumer product.
There are no casual users.
People chose MS Office because it is a mature product and the global standard for office work.
It integrates smoothly with their third party accounting program and countless other applications and resources --- which in themselves are the standard tools of their trade or profession.
And nobody tell the guys that the titanic had -from memory- at least one sistership who went on with her own commercial career without anykind of troubles...
There were two, Olympic, in service on the North Atlantic run for 24 years, and the Britannic, lost to a mine or torpedo while in service as a hospital ship in World War I
There are some parts of the old ship that most definitely should NOT be replicated on the new one.
Olympic, Titanic's twin sister, was in service for 24 years on the North Atlantic run.
I don't see any problem with the engines.
If your complaint is about the inefficacies of coal or the manning requirements and working conditions aboard a coal-fired ship, take it up with Winston Churchill. Naval innovation: From coal to oil
If you are First Lord of the Admiralty. you can make these things happen.
I don't see any problems with the kitchens.
Last Dinner On the Titanic: Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner, in print since 1997, and a particularly fine example of the cookbook as art and history, is far from obsessed with the first class service alone.
You would think that after Geohot showed the way (not!), that people would leave Sony alone to wither on the vine.
At any odds you would care to name, I would bet that 99.8% of users upgraded their PS3 firmware (currently at rev. 4.31) without giving a second's thought to Geohot or Linux on the console.