Welcome to the 2010s. DS1 and Hayabusa are done, Dawn is the ion-propelled spacecraft that's buzzing about the asteroid belt breaking records these days.
Note: Buzzing around the freaking asteroid belt. It's orbited Vesta for a few months, then deorbited, and is now on its way to Ceres. Will be first probe ever to orbit two different bodies in deep space (i.e. past the moon), and the spacecraft itself (not the launch vehicle) has already thrust over 7km/s. If that's not remarkable progress from 1982, you're brain-dead.
Yeah, I intentionally listed the first ion thruster probes and wrote "...like Deep Space 1...". And I wouldn't call Dawn exactly buzzing, but still, why do you think I don't think it is remarkable? Didn't I spend an entire paragraph saying that flying probes with ion thrusters is the only encouraging thing I could think of? Still, considering that electrostatic ion thrusters have flown already in the 60's SERT 1 mission, this is just getting back on track. The time between SERT 2 and Deep Space 1 is awfully long... I can't help wondering, a bit sadly, where that tech would be if it would have been pushed just a bit more agressively during the decades between...
I don't give two shits about my co-workers health. If they don't want to get sick, maybe they should take a day off.
Seriously, your co-worker should take off a day to avoid getting your plague? So I guess you also don't care if co-worker Foobar makes you and everyone else at your workplace sick, since by symmetry Foobar shouldn't give two shits about anyone else's health either. Or are you somehow special? Golden rule much?
Well, didn't he spell it out. He doesn't care if he's sick, he'll still come to work.
And in any case, keeping bad enough personal hygiene will have most external germs eaten before they have a chance to infect you, not to mention it will keep co-workes far enough to make infection unlikely. Washing hands before eating and going to toilet will help too. Staying healthy is just a matter having the right attitude!;)
I'd say it's either a publicity stunt, or just getting pissed off and blowing some steam before thinking it through. First would be pretty shrewd, not to mention risky when going against something like M$. The latter would indicate serious lack of business sense, and need for some introspectiong, and perhaps some new public announcement rules for the company.
Is it just me, or does deploying 20 satellites with 1 rocket sound like we're still actually getting somewhere, even when it sometimes feels like space tech progress stopped 30 years ago?
Yes, it's just you. I guess you missed the nuclear powered remote control truck on Mars. Or the constellation of satellites that beam a constant signal down to the computer in your pocket with such precision as to be able to tell you where you are within a few feet. Or the pair of satellites flying in perfect tandem, mapping the gravitational pull of the Moon. Oh look...we might have found water ice in Mercury.
But you're right. I guess we haven't done anything in the last 30 years.
Well, we have certainly done stuff, some of which is pretty amazing, like Opportunity still operating. But apart from the bad-ass landing scheme of Curiosity, Mars rovers are not that different from a merger of Lunahod rovers and Viking landers, for example. GPS development started in the '70s. I don't think finding water ice on Mercury is something we couldn't have done with '80s tech already, easily. All this mostly feels like stuff we could have done 30 years ago, we just didn't get around to it until now, and thanks to the tech getting gradually cheaper, we still get to do this stuff even with dwindling science budgets.
The only truly encouraing thing I can think of right now is actually using ion thursters in real missions like Deep Space 1 and Hayabusa. But give me something like high-thrust electric propulsion or nuclear propulsion in an interplanetary probe, then I'll say we're really going somewhere, again. Or to put it another way, give me a sample return mission from the surface of Titan, for example.
The whole point of the GPL is to force anyone who voluntarily chooces to use fruits of somebody elses work for free, when it is GPLed code to GPL their associated code as well.
Is it just me, or does deploying 20 satellites with 1 rocket sound like we're still actually getting somewhere, even when it sometimes feels like space tech progress stopped 30 years ago?
Of course, this is thanks to microelectronic revolution, not thanks to advances of rocketry, but still...
And yeah, I hope even those microsats have means to deorbit... Shouldn't take that much hydrazine (or whatever) to change the orbit to be elliptical enough to get them burn up (or down, as it were).
In the real world, accepted final grades that get you to the better school are what matter to the individual student. How you got the grades does not matter, as long as you got them. Those who are blind to this simple reality, be they teachers trying to prevent cheating, or students refusing to cheat while not having the talent or determination to succeed without cheating and lacking the courage to tell on cheaters, are the ones who suffer (well, teacher may not suffer, possibly the opposite if their students score higher on average...).
So if you want to get off the planet, you've got to fix the planet first.
You gotta know how to keep things from going bad, but fixing this planet... Problem is, it is full if other people, with conflicting views on just about everything. A small group (say, just some hundred million people) has no chanse of fixing the planet, but getting a select few dozen/hundred/thousand to start anew, that's humanly possible as soon as it is technologically possible.
I always find it amusing when a believer does not understand the difference between religious faith and believing in something non-spiritual. I guess one can't know the difference between true faith and lack of it without losing the faith. Surprisingly, gaining such faith makes people forget time without it most of the time.
And no, life without faith isn't any worse than life with faith... Neither is it better, necessarily, it depends on personality and circumstances and other people, if faith makes happy or miserable.
1. Discourage MS from trying to WinRTize their future state-of-the-art APIs and allow them only in their own walled garden, possibly with restrictions for 3rd party developers (like they have prevented competing javascript engines and thus non-IE browsers on WinRT tablets).
2. Not be caught pants down if MS takes hard line and blocks Steam games from using some APIs or engines.
What ever you do, learn using state of the art IDEs well (autocompletion/intellisense, immediate reference popups, refactoring tools), as well as google and stackoverflow.com. In the olden days, you could learn APIs, and you were expected to learn as you go. These days you are expected to be more efficient, all the while APIs have gotten huge, and there are thousands of proven patterns for doing different things right. Also learn to use various coding style checkers (like checkstyle for Java), static analysis tools (ctc) and running program analyzers (valgrind), they will help you create quality code even with languages you don't know very well (as long as you are good coder to begin with). Also, most wheels have been invented countless time, take advantage!
Having run Debian [typing on it] for over 12 years, APT-GET is nothing like the App Store. In fact, the App Store doesn't have dependency issues that puke out fairly often and force one to manipulate around the bonehead mistakes package owners forget to test against and thus send out other revisions of an App all because they screwed up the packaing. APT-GET is not the end-all-to-be all and neither is Aptitude [ncurses front end], nor DPKG and anything else.
...maybe I'm totally off base and out of line here, but the way you mention apt-get, aptitude and dpkg here makes me wonder, if you're really a long-time Debian user? Also, the way you don't mention if you're running stable, testing or unstable makes your above statement dubious. But if you're being honest, and assuming you're not running Debian stable, I suggest you switch to some other Debian-based distro, like Ubuntu, which provide a more up-to-date experience without the problems implied by the very names of Debian testing or unstable.
That's still not isolated events and "Gambler's fallacy" still does not apply. On the contrary the likelyhood of having smaller earthquakes after a big one is pretty high, up to 100% depending on what you count as earthquake.
Aspartame does not have "issues", I realize it's one of the more popular conspiracy chemicals that morons discuss to try and sound smart and/or informed.
Aspartame, or at least most products sweetened with it, sure have issues. Their taste is somehow off, they're not very enjoyable to enjoy... YMMV of course, and being obese as an alternative has issue too, no doubt about that.
For you, I suggest two-pronged approach to C++. First of all you have libraries and frameworks. They take full advantage of C++ features, but hide them. Then you have the actual application code that uses these libraries, and is much simpler, ideally readable by somebody who only knows Java or C#.
The difference to doing the same in C is, in C you'll use macros and have poor type safety, ugly-looking code and get obscure macro related errors when when you put bad stuff as macro arguments.
In short, the trick with C++ is, you don't use most of the features, unless you really have to. Note that you can write your current C code as C++ code, except use whatever subset of C++ features you think will make your C-like code better, and only when it actually makes it better. Limiting yourself to pure C is, IMNSHO, just stupid, unless you're coding for a small embedded system and don't want to include C++ runtime in it.
There's a group of people I want to stake my income on... the ones that find fault with everything and use that to justify enjoying your work without paying you.
Well, looking at who's opinions the TFS/TFA is about... id software pretty much did just that, had "the right spirit". In their case it meant, a shareware version which was not crippleware, freedom for the fan base to create their own mods. And then they've released the code of their old games as open source.
I'd call that right spirit. I'd also say, that most game development businesses only dream of being as financially successful as them.
It's been a very good month for me, +5-wise, so I can afford to say this:
"I don't know what Carmack is talking about -- Linus is a hell of a game market: there are hundreds of thousands of Linux users, each one of which is ready to bittorrent the games."
...and some of them would be more than happy to pay for the games too, as long as games are offered in the right spirit. It's not totally implausible, that ratio would be better for game publishers than current bought-pirated ratio in Windows gaming world is.
Where there's will (money and more money to be made), there's a way.
I could easily imagine similar discussion than this about radio or telephone communications just before they became technologically feasible. If you described our mobile phone networks to engineers and scientists of late 19th century, they probably would not believe such technology is even possible, given the hard physical limitations of radio spectrum.
I'm sure there's a religion which classifies snails as insects. So it's not just arguable, it's religiously arguable. Better watch out, or you'll meet a gruesome end (probably involving fire and/or stones) of a heretic.
Hmm, this leads me to wonder, what happens when GPL software is used in a company's internal systems and installed into company PCs, and then there's a spin-off or other splitting. Now the parent company needs to essentially distribute the software to the spin-off, and can do so only under the GPL, essentially giving the spin-off, which is now a separate legal entity, all the rights granted by GPL... Or they can not distribute the software to the spin-off, which might be problematic if it's a mission-critical application. Of course this is no problem as long as same people decide what spin-off does with the GPL-licensed software it received from parent company, but generally spin-offs might get sold, and new owners might decide to take advantage of the now-GPL internal software of the original company.
Conclusion: if it's a mission-critical (or just important) application for company internal use, which you're not willing to make public later on, or which uses other components which have GPL-incompatible license, do not use GPLed software components in it. What starts as internal use, allowed by GPL, may turn into distribution.
So you should just be entitled to other people's work for free, because you can't be bothered to write it yourself? Talk about an entitlement mentality.
If you want to take from the community, then you should give back to the community. That's the basic philosophy of the GPL. Take it or leave it.
Yes, I take it when I can, and don't take it when I can't. But about giving back, it's as much in BSD license too. Even if I use GPL code, but don't actively participate, in practice it means diddly it's GPL. If I make the code available only over postal order, it's almost guaranteed nobody will ever want to see it. If I make it available online, there's a remote chance somebody will look at it, but very unlikely they'll find the original and run a diff.
To give back, I have to actively file bugs, submit patches to upstream, stuff like that.
Obviously GPL has great value in some cases, such as forcing Android kernel sources to be open. But it's a two-edget sword, some other company than Google would have outright rejected Linux because of GPL. Google would probably have rejected Linux if kernel had GPLv3. Now if Google would have chosen a BSD kernel instead, it would have been a great loss both for GPL and for Linux, compared to what we have now. It's kind of a gamble.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to the 2010s. DS1 and Hayabusa are done, Dawn is the ion-propelled spacecraft that's buzzing about the asteroid belt breaking records these days.
Note: Buzzing around the freaking asteroid belt. It's orbited Vesta for a few months, then deorbited, and is now on its way to Ceres. Will be first probe ever to orbit two different bodies in deep space (i.e. past the moon), and the spacecraft itself (not the launch vehicle) has already thrust over 7km/s. If that's not remarkable progress from 1982, you're brain-dead.
Yeah, I intentionally listed the first ion thruster probes and wrote "...like Deep Space 1...". And I wouldn't call Dawn exactly buzzing, but still, why do you think I don't think it is remarkable? Didn't I spend an entire paragraph saying that flying probes with ion thrusters is the only encouraging thing I could think of? Still, considering that electrostatic ion thrusters have flown already in the 60's SERT 1 mission, this is just getting back on track. The time between SERT 2 and Deep Space 1 is awfully long... I can't help wondering, a bit sadly, where that tech would be if it would have been pushed just a bit more agressively during the decades between...
I don't give two shits about my co-workers health. If they don't want to get sick, maybe they should take a day off.
Seriously, your co-worker should take off a day to avoid getting your plague? So I guess you also don't care if co-worker Foobar makes you and everyone else at your workplace sick, since by symmetry Foobar shouldn't give two shits about anyone else's health either. Or are you somehow special? Golden rule much?
Well, didn't he spell it out. He doesn't care if he's sick, he'll still come to work.
And in any case, keeping bad enough personal hygiene will have most external germs eaten before they have a chance to infect you, not to mention it will keep co-workes far enough to make infection unlikely. Washing hands before eating and going to toilet will help too. Staying healthy is just a matter having the right attitude! ;)
I'd say it's either a publicity stunt, or just getting pissed off and blowing some steam before thinking it through. First would be pretty shrewd, not to mention risky when going against something like M$. The latter would indicate serious lack of business sense, and need for some introspectiong, and perhaps some new public announcement rules for the company.
Is it just me, or does deploying 20 satellites with 1 rocket sound like we're still actually getting somewhere, even when it sometimes feels like space tech progress stopped 30 years ago?
Yes, it's just you. I guess you missed the nuclear powered remote control truck on Mars. Or the constellation of satellites that beam a constant signal down to the computer in your pocket with such precision as to be able to tell you where you are within a few feet. Or the pair of satellites flying in perfect tandem, mapping the gravitational pull of the Moon. Oh look...we might have found water ice in Mercury.
But you're right. I guess we haven't done anything in the last 30 years.
Well, we have certainly done stuff, some of which is pretty amazing, like Opportunity still operating. But apart from the bad-ass landing scheme of Curiosity, Mars rovers are not that different from a merger of Lunahod rovers and Viking landers, for example. GPS development started in the '70s. I don't think finding water ice on Mercury is something we couldn't have done with '80s tech already, easily. All this mostly feels like stuff we could have done 30 years ago, we just didn't get around to it until now, and thanks to the tech getting gradually cheaper, we still get to do this stuff even with dwindling science budgets.
The only truly encouraing thing I can think of right now is actually using ion thursters in real missions like Deep Space 1 and Hayabusa. But give me something like high-thrust electric propulsion or nuclear propulsion in an interplanetary probe, then I'll say we're really going somewhere, again. Or to put it another way, give me a sample return mission from the surface of Titan, for example.
The whole point of the GPL is to force anyone who voluntarily chooces to use fruits of somebody elses work for free, when it is GPLed code to GPL their associated code as well.
FTFY
Is it just me, or does deploying 20 satellites with 1 rocket sound like we're still actually getting somewhere, even when it sometimes feels like space tech progress stopped 30 years ago?
Of course, this is thanks to microelectronic revolution, not thanks to advances of rocketry, but still...
And yeah, I hope even those microsats have means to deorbit... Shouldn't take that much hydrazine (or whatever) to change the orbit to be elliptical enough to get them burn up (or down, as it were).
PayPal will take every opportunity to steal your money.
And this is different from other financial institutions... how?
In the real world, accepted final grades that get you to the better school are what matter to the individual student. How you got the grades does not matter, as long as you got them. Those who are blind to this simple reality, be they teachers trying to prevent cheating, or students refusing to cheat while not having the talent or determination to succeed without cheating and lacking the courage to tell on cheaters, are the ones who suffer (well, teacher may not suffer, possibly the opposite if their students score higher on average...).
It's a cruel world out there...
"The dealers say they are defending state franchise laws, which require manufacturers to sell cars through dealers they do not own"
Is this Republican or Democrat kind of free market capitalism in action?
So if you want to get off the planet, you've got to fix the planet first.
You gotta know how to keep things from going bad, but fixing this planet... Problem is, it is full if other people, with conflicting views on just about everything. A small group (say, just some hundred million people) has no chanse of fixing the planet, but getting a select few dozen/hundred/thousand to start anew, that's humanly possible as soon as it is technologically possible.
I always find it amusing when a believer does not understand the difference between religious faith and believing in something non-spiritual. I guess one can't know the difference between true faith and lack of it without losing the faith. Surprisingly, gaining such faith makes people forget time without it most of the time.
And no, life without faith isn't any worse than life with faith... Neither is it better, necessarily, it depends on personality and circumstances and other people, if faith makes happy or miserable.
Valve wants two things.
1. Discourage MS from trying to WinRTize their future state-of-the-art APIs and allow them only in their own walled garden, possibly with restrictions for 3rd party developers (like they have prevented competing javascript engines and thus non-IE browsers on WinRT tablets).
2. Not be caught pants down if MS takes hard line and blocks Steam games from using some APIs or engines.
What ever you do, learn using state of the art IDEs well (autocompletion/intellisense, immediate reference popups, refactoring tools), as well as google and stackoverflow.com. In the olden days, you could learn APIs, and you were expected to learn as you go. These days you are expected to be more efficient, all the while APIs have gotten huge, and there are thousands of proven patterns for doing different things right. Also learn to use various coding style checkers (like checkstyle for Java), static analysis tools (ctc) and running program analyzers (valgrind), they will help you create quality code even with languages you don't know very well (as long as you are good coder to begin with). Also, most wheels have been invented countless time, take advantage!
Having run Debian [typing on it] for over 12 years, APT-GET is nothing like the App Store. In fact, the App Store doesn't have dependency issues that puke out fairly often and force one to manipulate around the bonehead mistakes package owners forget to test against and thus send out other revisions of an App all because they screwed up the packaing. APT-GET is not the end-all-to-be all and neither is Aptitude [ncurses front end], nor DPKG and anything else.
...maybe I'm totally off base and out of line here, but the way you mention apt-get, aptitude and dpkg here makes me wonder, if you're really a long-time Debian user? Also, the way you don't mention if you're running stable, testing or unstable makes your above statement dubious. But if you're being honest, and assuming you're not running Debian stable, I suggest you switch to some other Debian-based distro, like Ubuntu, which provide a more up-to-date experience without the problems implied by the very names of Debian testing or unstable.
Sharks won't touch 'em... Professional courtesy.
Nah. A bit of blood in the water, and I'm pretty sure all traces of professional courtesy are forgotten. This probably applies to sharks, too.
When software patents are tossed, everybody wins ... except maybe some lawyers, but they should be force-fed to the sharks anyway.
There, fixed that for you.
That's still not isolated events and "Gambler's fallacy" still does not apply. On the contrary the likelyhood of having smaller earthquakes after a big one is pretty high, up to 100% depending on what you count as earthquake.
Aspartame does not have "issues", I realize it's one of the more popular conspiracy chemicals that morons discuss to try and sound smart and/or informed.
Aspartame, or at least most products sweetened with it, sure have issues. Their taste is somehow off, they're not very enjoyable to enjoy... YMMV of course, and being obese as an alternative has issue too, no doubt about that.
For you, I suggest two-pronged approach to C++. First of all you have libraries and frameworks. They take full advantage of C++ features, but hide them. Then you have the actual application code that uses these libraries, and is much simpler, ideally readable by somebody who only knows Java or C#.
The difference to doing the same in C is, in C you'll use macros and have poor type safety, ugly-looking code and get obscure macro related errors when when you put bad stuff as macro arguments.
In short, the trick with C++ is, you don't use most of the features, unless you really have to. Note that you can write your current C code as C++ code, except use whatever subset of C++ features you think will make your C-like code better, and only when it actually makes it better. Limiting yourself to pure C is, IMNSHO, just stupid, unless you're coding for a small embedded system and don't want to include C++ runtime in it.
"Offered in the right spirit"?
There's a group of people I want to stake my income on... the ones that find fault with everything and use that to justify enjoying your work without paying you.
Well, looking at who's opinions the TFS/TFA is about... id software pretty much did just that, had "the right spirit". In their case it meant, a shareware version which was not crippleware, freedom for the fan base to create their own mods. And then they've released the code of their old games as open source.
I'd call that right spirit. I'd also say, that most game development businesses only dream of being as financially successful as them.
It's been a very good month for me, +5-wise, so I can afford to say this:
"I don't know what Carmack is talking about -- Linus is a hell of a game market: there are hundreds of thousands of Linux users, each one of which is ready to bittorrent the games."
...and some of them would be more than happy to pay for the games too, as long as games are offered in the right spirit. It's not totally implausible, that ratio would be better for game publishers than current bought-pirated ratio in Windows gaming world is.
Where there's will (money and more money to be made), there's a way.
I could easily imagine similar discussion than this about radio or telephone communications just before they became technologically feasible. If you described our mobile phone networks to engineers and scientists of late 19th century, they probably would not believe such technology is even possible, given the hard physical limitations of radio spectrum.
Snails (arguably not an insect)
Arguably???
I'm sure there's a religion which classifies snails as insects. So it's not just arguable, it's religiously arguable. Better watch out, or you'll meet a gruesome end (probably involving fire and/or stones) of a heretic.
Hmm, this leads me to wonder, what happens when GPL software is used in a company's internal systems and installed into company PCs, and then there's a spin-off or other splitting. Now the parent company needs to essentially distribute the software to the spin-off, and can do so only under the GPL, essentially giving the spin-off, which is now a separate legal entity, all the rights granted by GPL... Or they can not distribute the software to the spin-off, which might be problematic if it's a mission-critical application. Of course this is no problem as long as same people decide what spin-off does with the GPL-licensed software it received from parent company, but generally spin-offs might get sold, and new owners might decide to take advantage of the now-GPL internal software of the original company.
Conclusion: if it's a mission-critical (or just important) application for company internal use, which you're not willing to make public later on, or which uses other components which have GPL-incompatible license, do not use GPLed software components in it. What starts as internal use, allowed by GPL, may turn into distribution.
So you should just be entitled to other people's work for free, because you can't be bothered to write it yourself? Talk about an entitlement mentality.
If you want to take from the community, then you should give back to the community. That's the basic philosophy of the GPL. Take it or leave it.
Yes, I take it when I can, and don't take it when I can't. But about giving back, it's as much in BSD license too. Even if I use GPL code, but don't actively participate, in practice it means diddly it's GPL. If I make the code available only over postal order, it's almost guaranteed nobody will ever want to see it. If I make it available online, there's a remote chance somebody will look at it, but very unlikely they'll find the original and run a diff.
To give back, I have to actively file bugs, submit patches to upstream, stuff like that.
Obviously GPL has great value in some cases, such as forcing Android kernel sources to be open. But it's a two-edget sword, some other company than Google would have outright rejected Linux because of GPL. Google would probably have rejected Linux if kernel had GPLv3. Now if Google would have chosen a BSD kernel instead, it would have been a great loss both for GPL and for Linux, compared to what we have now. It's kind of a gamble.