because 'the people' really don't have much of a say about how 'their' money is spent.
They do, albeit indirectly. Politicians in a democracy want to be (re-)elected, so they won't spend huge amounts of money for unpopular goals, if they have a choice. With manned space travel, you do have a choice (nobody absolutely *needs* people in space). If the public opinion becomes opposed to manned space flights, politicians who oppose manned space flights will get elected, and they will put an end to the manned space program. Now, it just so happens that a majority of the people in the U.S. approves manned space exploration, and that is why the U.S. has a manned space program.
What I'm interested in -- how hard was it to port this over to Linux? What about the DirectX->OpenGL transition? How was this done? How much of the source code could be reused? Is there a common code base at all, and if so, will future Windows/Mac/Linux versions of Google Earth be developed (and released) based on that from now on? And how hard would it be to provide binaries for non-x86 Linux, and/or other Unixes?
Any non-classified information on those things?:-)
Whatever you do, you can obviously never please a Linux user.
[...]
I've been using Linux for years now and I love open source software
[...]
So, thanks Google for the great job!
Thanks for making a point, and then disproving it!:-P
Couldn't they have agreed upon some binding settlement on what to do with the source code -- before starting to build the thing? Any 3-employees software business sets up contracts beforehand about what should happen with the source code later on -- only the Royal Air Force starts thinking about it when the $543210 fantastillion plane is almost complete:-D
Now, with Vista and its least-privileged-user feature, they're shooting for securing systems run by the sort of user who go out of their way to download random CuteKitties.exe screensavers.
They only way to do that might be to run those "CuteKitties.exe screensavers" themselves in such a "least-privileged-user feature" sandbox. Otherwise you're just frustrating the users by requiring them to move the screensaver over to their normal user account.
The world population has *stopped* growing exponentially back in the 60s or so. Since then, it's been growing more or less linearly, and according to all serious studies, even that growth isn't going to hold up for very long anymore either.
I take it that this will only be a fly-by of Pluto, i.e. it won't enter an orbit. So I guess you have just one or two days for close-up observation tasks, and you can only watch/map a narrow strip of the surface as you pass over it. Why do they do this? Is the atmosphere unsuitable for aerobraking? Or are the observations of the outer solar system/Kuiper Belt that important, despite the fact that the are already a couple of probes there, with the possibility to send more if desired?
LINQ introduces anonymous and higher-order functions like filter, map etc. (a circa-1970 innovation) to C#, plus a syntax hack that allows you to write something like
var seniorNames = from p in people where p.age>40 order by p.age select p.name;
to make people think that this is something completely new (me, I would prefer the 2nd version),
plus an introspection hack that can *sometimes* translate this to SQL/XSLT if "people" is a database table/XML node (as you can imagine, this can't work with more complicated code in the Select/Order etc. code pieces because the implementation actually has to go out and take apart and try to "understand" that code in order to be able to translate it to SQL/XSLT). (no, integrating.NET into the database server directly won't do away with this problem)
Now, it seems the implementation is also pretty decent for cases where "people" is a normal.NET collection object ("deferred execution"), but still, decent OSS languages have had HOFs for years, and this isn't something that's particularly new or hard to do despite some PHBs who now start foaming on the mouth fantasizing how Microsoft is going to revolutionize the way we deal with data in programming languages...
You think that the US paid for all the backbones, corporate networks, computing centers, host computers, and content, all over the world, that the Internet is made of? Think again.
Wrong. They invented most of the underlying protocols (albeit -- 90% of the end users equate the internet with the WWW, whose underlying protocol was was invented by a Briton in Switzerland). "The internet" was created (and paid for) by thousands of backbone providers, ISPs, hosters, other corporations, and individuals around the world. By keeping control over the DNS TLDs, the US are effectively controlling access to infrastructure they did not create or pay for.
OpenBSD shares a similar (albeit more human than mechanical) focus on correctness over performance, but nobody seems to think it is doomed to failure because of that.
For simple cases that's true. If you're doing more complex, dynamic queries that's not really accurate. In particular, conditionally specifying clauses for WHERE and HAVING, and additional fields for ORDER BY, is annoying.
In any decent programming language it's a two-or-less-hours-job to hack up a library that makes code along the lines of
stmt = new SqlStatement("select foo,bar from table where x=")+x+" and y="+y if (something) { stmt += " and (hi="+hi+" or ho="+ho+")" } stmt += " order by bar"
dbconn.execute(stmt)
work, including automatic quoting of all the parameters (hint: overwrite "+" on the "SqlStatement" class). Unless the language/library already has some such facility.
I even did this in Java once, and while that didn't end up as syntactically pleasing as the above, it was still straightforward to write and use.
If you have to introduce 1 leap hour or 3600 leap seconds in 600 years, all that means is that the *average* length of the mean solar day during that time was 1hour/600years=~2e-7 longer than 86400 sec. How much of that elongation was actually caused by the earths's rotation slowing down, and how much was caused by, say, the fact that the rotation was a bit too slow from the start, is a different question.
Now, AFAIK it happens to be the case that the definition of the second in the 1960s was indeed a bit too short with respect to the length of the mean solar day even back then, so the fact that the earth's rotation was too slow from the start will be the dominating contributor to the introduction of leap seconds for the next few centuries at least.
Does the windows registry provide a standardized solution for the if-else problem or the "setting variables and using them later" problem? Nope. The text-based philosophy can support this without much effort for the programmer: Just use an existing scripting language as your config file format. The registry cannot support this level of flexibility. It is more or less confined to configurations that are simple sets of key-value pairs. It doesn't scale to anything much bigger. And this wouldn't change much if it was saved as plain text instead of binary. The IIS configuration isn't saved in the registry (although it was until v 4.0 or so), but in the filesystem (in a pile called the "Metabase" or so). Microsoft apparently is in the process of (partly?) phasing out the registry as the place where configuration data is stored. They'll know why.
This "libconfig" idea comes up three times per week or so, and projects like KDE and Gnome have provided such things, but they are too specific to be accepted as a "universal" solutions and used everywhere. There is a "built-in" API for configuration file access: open(2), read(2), close(2) etc. For anything more specific, it appears the requirements are too diverse.
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As long as you don't deliberately try to write cryptic or code, the association holds.
They do, albeit indirectly. Politicians in a democracy want to be (re-)elected, so they won't spend huge amounts of money for unpopular goals, if they have a choice. With manned space travel, you do have a choice (nobody absolutely *needs* people in space). If the public opinion becomes opposed to manned space flights, politicians who oppose manned space flights will get elected, and they will put an end to the manned space program. Now, it just so happens that a majority of the people in the U.S. approves manned space exploration, and that is why the U.S. has a manned space program.
What I'm interested in -- how hard was it to port this over to Linux? What about the DirectX->OpenGL transition? How was this done? How much of the source code could be reused? Is there a common code base at all, and if so, will future Windows/Mac/Linux versions of Google Earth be developed (and released) based on that from now on? And how hard would it be to provide binaries for non-x86 Linux, and/or other Unixes?
Any non-classified information on those things? :-)
Now that I come to think of it, there's no point in getting quick directions either, because we're all gonna die in the end anyway...
Thanks for making a point, and then disproving it! :-P
Improved mail virus scriptability? :D
They did -- and then chose that name deliberately to hurt some innocent Open Source project :-)
This technology enables many more people to be simultaneously stuck at 4Mbps down/256Kbps up.
Couldn't they have agreed upon some binding settlement on what to do with the source code -- before starting to build the thing? Any 3-employees software business sets up contracts beforehand about what should happen with the source code later on -- only the Royal Air Force starts thinking about it when the $543210 fantastillion plane is almost complete :-D
They only way to do that might be to run those "CuteKitties.exe screensavers" themselves in such a "least-privileged-user feature" sandbox. Otherwise you're just frustrating the users by requiring them to move the screensaver over to their normal user account.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World_populatio n_increase_history.png
I take it that this will only be a fly-by of Pluto, i.e. it won't enter an orbit. So I guess you have just one or two days for close-up observation tasks, and you can only watch/map a narrow strip of the surface as you pass over it. Why do they do this? Is the atmosphere unsuitable for aerobraking? Or are the observations of the outer solar system/Kuiper Belt that important, despite the fact that the are already a couple of probes there, with the possibility to send more if desired?
Now, it seems the implementation is also pretty decent for cases where "people" is a normal .NET collection object ("deferred execution"), but still, decent OSS languages have had HOFs for years, and this isn't something that's particularly new or hard to do despite some PHBs who now start foaming on the mouth fantasizing how Microsoft is going to revolutionize the way we deal with data in programming languages...
well...
You think that the US paid for all the backbones, corporate networks, computing centers, host computers, and content, all over the world, that the Internet is made of? Think again.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Wrong. They invented most of the underlying protocols (albeit -- 90% of the end users equate the internet with the WWW, whose underlying protocol was was invented by a Briton in Switzerland). "The internet" was created (and paid for) by thousands of backbone providers, ISPs, hosters, other corporations, and individuals around the world. By keeping control over the DNS TLDs, the US are effectively controlling access to infrastructure they did not create or pay for.
I do.
I even did this in Java once, and while that didn't end up as syntactically pleasing as the above, it was still straightforward to write and use.
How? These days Pluto is farther away from Voyager 1 than from earth :)
Now, AFAIK it happens to be the case that the definition of the second in the 1960s was indeed a bit too short with respect to the length of the mean solar day even back then, so the fact that the earth's rotation was too slow from the start will be the dominating contributor to the introduction of leap seconds for the next few centuries at least.
Well, this is NASA, so I guess they have analyzed this to death already :)
This "libconfig" idea comes up three times per week or so, and projects like KDE and Gnome have provided such things, but they are too specific to be accepted as a "universal" solutions and used everywhere. There is a "built-in" API for configuration file access: open(2), read(2), close(2) etc. For anything more specific, it appears the requirements are too diverse.
I thought it was quantum foam at really high resolution.
Couldn't they somehow use the repulsion of the gamma rays directly, instead of using them to heat up hydrogen?