That is funny. I programmed a C# project (for Windows) and submitted it to SourceForge, with no problems at all.
If you check the list of the top SourceForge projects, most are for Windows only, or have a Windows version available. If there are few C# projects, it is because it is perceived as a language to write in-house business app crapola by developers and users.
CodePlex does not support GPLv3. Why? Is it really that different from Eclipse Public License or Microsoft Public License? Or is this some kind of holy war? They support GPLv2.
Remember like 10 years ago when Intel was claiming Ovonyx memory was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread? Yeah.
It was going to be the non-volatile memory that would replace hard disks! Then it never happened and Flash memory kept getting cheaper and better. Kinda makes you wonder if this wasn't another trick by the Intel Capital folks to pump up the stock. Then again Ovshinsky basically invented CD-RW/DVD-RW amorphous phase change materials and NiMH batteries so everyone figured out it could actually happen. But it never did. Amorphous silicon solar (a-Si) panels never sold that well either.
Nobody's quite sure what prompted the Apple/Adobe divorce
It's fairly simple. First, Apple made expensive hardware, with a crap OS that was like Windows 3.1 (albeit with a better interface), while Microsoft was selling Windows NT for low-cost workstations using the Pentium Pro processor.
Then Apple started selling Final Cut Pro. That was about the time Adobe decided they would not bother to make software that ran on a competitor vendor's hardware. I guess it did not help that Adobe had years of software written in C++, while Steve Jobs wanted everyone to program in Objective-C for Ma OS X, either. Apple later developed Objective-C++, but for quite a while they lost developer mindshare when they switched to MacOS X.
The IBM POWER 6 and POWER 7 processors are masterpieces on their own right. Expensive? Yes. But also remember that the top 3 shipping games consoles all use their processors (PS3, Xbox 360, Wii).
As you said they still do some nifty R&D as well. The folks they have in the 'consulting' business I have met so far are top notch as well.
Their consumer products... what consumer products? They sold all those divisions off so they could keep margins up.
It is fairly stupid to treat the janitors poorly if you work at the place. Keep in mind janitors are one of the few people in a building which usually have keys to every single door in it. Once I forgot something inside a meeting room, the people who opened it (and had key access) had left a long time ago. I just asked the janitor and he opened me the door.
The US has large coal and oil shale reserves. This is the main factor hampering nuclear energy deployment in the US. Nuclear only is cheaper than coal when coal sources are far away, and transport costs dominate (coal is very bulky per kWh compared to nuclear). So no, the US does not have an energy source problem. At worst it has an infrastructure problem in extracting and refining such energy into a usable form. You can convert coal and/or shale into gasoline and diesel if necessary.
Most of the EU is stuffed into using Russian natural gas. Coal reserves are lower in quantity and quality as well. France is one of the few countries in the EU which actually managed to base their electrical energy generation around nuclear power, plus they have an extensive rail network, but they still need to fill the tank in their cars with something.
Trade barriers? Currency pegged to the dollar to increase exports? Nothing new. Japan did it decades ago.
I really doubt we will see a real estate bubble in China during the next decade. They are starting from a much different position. Many people from the country are still moving to the cities. Housing materials are not something that is exactly scarce either. Most of the costs are in construction labor which is something there is little shortage of in China.
That leaves the possibility of an energy crisis. Mind you the chinese are investing in every form of energy you can possibly think of, plus they have vast reserves of cheap coal. So if worst comes to worst, they can ramp up the construction of coal-to-liquids plants (they already have one) and use that instead of oil. They also still have enough of a command economy to rapidly ramp up construction of such plants if necessary. Their economy is quite far from reaching a point of diminishing returns on investment. The gap with "western" countries is still too wide.
The US also does ok with energy having large coal and shale reserves. The areas with the largest problem regarding their energy supply are Japan and the EU.
I doubt the Cuban regime will last long. The leadership seems too inbred. At least Chinese leadership seems to have a diverse enough pool of people to choose from.
South Africa got regime changed because they disenfranchised a large part of their own population by having apartheid.
Intel and IBM still have most of their chip manufacturing plants in the US. CPU design work is also mostly centered in the US. Although there is some work done elsewhere. Chip packaging is usually done in places where labor is dirt cheap. IIRC the main manufacturer of lithography equipment is ASML, a company with its HQ in the Netherlands. The competition being mostly Japanese... But you still have companies like Applied Materials working in the semiconductor manufacturing tools business.
This is for CPUs. The memory business has mostly left the US for a long time. A lot (really) of the ASICs and other things like GPUs are usually manufactured at places like TSMC (Taiwan).
AFAIK anything that burns rapidly in a confined space can explode. The explosion is composed of flying bits of the container. Powder lithium, magnesium, titanium, aluminum burn very well. Aluminum is cheap enough to be used as the propellant in solid rocket engines.
Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?
on
Cygwin 1.7 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Last time I tried installing SFU it failed so badly I could not even do an 'ls'.
Besides, if it does not have X11 and all the trimmings of a Linux distro it is not that much use. You need both a working SFU and something like darwinports or fink. Which does not exist AFAIK.
Oh, also, the Cygwin GCC can compile native Win32 programs if you choose it so, which will run on machines without Cygwin installed. That makes it useful all in itself. Before Visual C++ Express was available GCC was the only decent free compiler you could get. It still matters if you have a complex cross-platform application you want to compile using GCCisms (e.g. AT&T assembly notation, C99).
It was non-US projects mostly which had problems getting a launch site: e.g. OTRAG, Aurora. In order to not have this problem Sea Launch used a mobile sea platform for rocket launch.
I do know SpaceX considered it enough of a problem that they preferred having multiple launch sites (Kawelejian, Omelek, Vandenberg). AFAIK they were all but kicked out from Vandenberg, allegedly because authorities were concerned an exploding Falcon 1 would drop on top of the Atlas V launch pad. Had they not those extra launch sites, they would probably be out of business by now. It remains to be seen if there will not be trouble with them launching Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral... AFAIK there is a Delta IV pad in there.
The basic technology to solve reusable reentry has been developed a long time ago. It is a matter of applying it. How to you think rocket engines manage not to melt during flight?
Large R&D costs, very tight regulations, conservative customers. More than one launch company has failed because it could not secure a launch site. More than one launch company has failed because prospective clients vanished.
The first Soyuz flight was in 1966. The first Shuttle flight was in 1982. So its 16 years, not 50.
Just because something is newer does not mean it is better for all cases, or will keep being better. When was the last time you saw a plane with variable-sweep wings? Or hydroplanes for that matter.
If the vehicle is reusable, you do not have that many parts to test. If you have more than one launch vehicle design, you can stop some from flying while the others are being debugged. Same thing as with cars or airplanes.
So you will "fix" the licensing problem by making changes so it will use a quagmire of different product licenses. That's just awesome. How is the MS-PL license any "better" than GPL, since redistribution is only permitted under the MS-PL? Oh right. Because Microsoft wrote the license.
$9 billion is barely enough to develop a new medium rocket, which might scale to heavy lift if using parallel staging with some more cash. But not super heavy lift.
$9 billion buys you a new engine design and work on a 1st stage, plus integration work with an existing 2nd stage (such as Centaur). i.e. something like what SpaceX will have by H1 2010.
Slashdot Mirror
That is funny. I programmed a C# project (for Windows) and submitted it to SourceForge, with no problems at all.
If you check the list of the top SourceForge projects, most are for Windows only, or have a Windows version available. If there are few C# projects, it is because it is perceived as a language to write in-house business app crapola by developers and users.
CodePlex does not support GPLv3. Why? Is it really that different from Eclipse Public License or Microsoft Public License? Or is this some kind of holy war? They support GPLv2.
It was going to be the non-volatile memory that would replace hard disks! Then it never happened and Flash memory kept getting cheaper and better. Kinda makes you wonder if this wasn't another trick by the Intel Capital folks to pump up the stock. Then again Ovshinsky basically invented CD-RW/DVD-RW amorphous phase change materials and NiMH batteries so everyone figured out it could actually happen. But it never did. Amorphous silicon solar (a-Si) panels never sold that well either.
Oh, did you mean microprocessors?
It's fairly simple. First, Apple made expensive hardware, with a crap OS that was like Windows 3.1 (albeit with a better interface), while Microsoft was selling Windows NT for low-cost workstations using the Pentium Pro processor.
Then Apple started selling Final Cut Pro. That was about the time Adobe decided they would not bother to make software that ran on a competitor vendor's hardware. I guess it did not help that Adobe had years of software written in C++, while Steve Jobs wanted everyone to program in Objective-C for Ma OS X, either. Apple later developed Objective-C++, but for quite a while they lost developer mindshare when they switched to MacOS X.
As you said they still do some nifty R&D as well. The folks they have in the 'consulting' business I have met so far are top notch as well.
Their consumer products... what consumer products? They sold all those divisions off so they could keep margins up.
It is fairly stupid to treat the janitors poorly if you work at the place. Keep in mind janitors are one of the few people in a building which usually have keys to every single door in it. Once I forgot something inside a meeting room, the people who opened it (and had key access) had left a long time ago. I just asked the janitor and he opened me the door.
They also have cheaper smartphones like 5530 XpressMusic. You can buy like 2-3 of those for the price of an iPhone 3G/3GS.
Most of the EU is stuffed into using Russian natural gas. Coal reserves are lower in quantity and quality as well. France is one of the few countries in the EU which actually managed to base their electrical energy generation around nuclear power, plus they have an extensive rail network, but they still need to fill the tank in their cars with something.
I really doubt we will see a real estate bubble in China during the next decade. They are starting from a much different position. Many people from the country are still moving to the cities. Housing materials are not something that is exactly scarce either. Most of the costs are in construction labor which is something there is little shortage of in China.
That leaves the possibility of an energy crisis. Mind you the chinese are investing in every form of energy you can possibly think of, plus they have vast reserves of cheap coal. So if worst comes to worst, they can ramp up the construction of coal-to-liquids plants (they already have one) and use that instead of oil. They also still have enough of a command economy to rapidly ramp up construction of such plants if necessary. Their economy is quite far from reaching a point of diminishing returns on investment. The gap with "western" countries is still too wide.
The US also does ok with energy having large coal and shale reserves. The areas with the largest problem regarding their energy supply are Japan and the EU.
South Africa got regime changed because they disenfranchised a large part of their own population by having apartheid.
This is for CPUs. The memory business has mostly left the US for a long time. A lot (really) of the ASICs and other things like GPUs are usually manufactured at places like TSMC (Taiwan).
The Crusades were a backlash against prior Muslim invasions, I would not put them in the same bag as the Conquest of the Americas.
Jews aren't supposed to eat bacon either.
AFAIK anything that burns rapidly in a confined space can explode. The explosion is composed of flying bits of the container. Powder lithium, magnesium, titanium, aluminum burn very well. Aluminum is cheap enough to be used as the propellant in solid rocket engines.
Besides, if it does not have X11 and all the trimmings of a Linux distro it is not that much use. You need both a working SFU and something like darwinports or fink. Which does not exist AFAIK.
Oh, also, the Cygwin GCC can compile native Win32 programs if you choose it so, which will run on machines without Cygwin installed. That makes it useful all in itself. Before Visual C++ Express was available GCC was the only decent free compiler you could get. It still matters if you have a complex cross-platform application you want to compile using GCCisms (e.g. AT&T assembly notation, C99).
I do know SpaceX considered it enough of a problem that they preferred having multiple launch sites (Kawelejian, Omelek, Vandenberg). AFAIK they were all but kicked out from Vandenberg, allegedly because authorities were concerned an exploding Falcon 1 would drop on top of the Atlas V launch pad. Had they not those extra launch sites, they would probably be out of business by now. It remains to be seen if there will not be trouble with them launching Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral... AFAIK there is a Delta IV pad in there.
The basic technology to solve reusable reentry has been developed a long time ago. It is a matter of applying it. How to you think rocket engines manage not to melt during flight?
Large R&D costs, very tight regulations, conservative customers. More than one launch company has failed because it could not secure a launch site. More than one launch company has failed because prospective clients vanished.
Just because something is newer does not mean it is better for all cases, or will keep being better. When was the last time you saw a plane with variable-sweep wings? Or hydroplanes for that matter.
If the vehicle is reusable, you do not have that many parts to test. If you have more than one launch vehicle design, you can stop some from flying while the others are being debugged. Same thing as with cars or airplanes.
Anyway, you can build rockets without using any of this. LOX/Kerosene, LOX/LH2 are pretty clean.
The Internet wasn't built on GPL, but the Internet as we know it today was. Corporations like Google wouldn't exist if it wasn't for GPLed software.
Actually Java is GPLed now. Perl is multi-licensed one of the licenses being the GPL.
So you will "fix" the licensing problem by making changes so it will use a quagmire of different product licenses. That's just awesome. How is the MS-PL license any "better" than GPL, since redistribution is only permitted under the MS-PL? Oh right. Because Microsoft wrote the license.
$9 billion buys you a new engine design and work on a 1st stage, plus integration work with an existing 2nd stage (such as Centaur). i.e. something like what SpaceX will have by H1 2010.