Well, I would like to click a link in a PowerPoint presentation or Word document and actually get it to open the back in the browser I use, and defined as default, rather than IE, IE, IE!
Sorry, you are correct. Boh. Using data from here the volumetric energy density of Kerosene is 33 MJ/l while for LH2 it is 10 MJ/l. This is more than 2x as much. When I say "Kerosene" I am talking about something like RP-1 or Jet-A fuel. The volumetric energy density is 3x better than for LH2. Plus you do not need expensive tanks with heavy insulation to store it.
Actually storing natural gas (CH4) is not done all the time. It is either done sparingly or not at all. Qatar is building a gas to liquids plant because it is very expensive to ship natural gas by tanker. Usually natural gas is piped to homes. Stored gas is usually denser propane (C3H8) which is a higher density hydrocarbon.
Storing hydrogen at good density is an issue. As an example.
Liquid hydrogen (LH2): Fuel Density: 0.071 g/cc. Fuel Freezing Point: -259 deg C. Fuel Boiling Point: -253 deg C.
Liquid natural gas (LCH4): Fuel Density: 0.424 g/cc. Fuel Freezing Point: -184 deg C. Fuel Boiling Point: -162 deg C.
So to store the same weight in LH2 you need a storage tank ~6x bigger. Plus you need a storage tank that is always cooler than -253 deg C to prevent boiloff at that fuel density, that is, less than 20.15 deg K, which is fucking *cold*. That is colder than the surface of Pluto. Compare this with Kerosene, a hydrocarbon that is used for aviation fuel and is similar to diesel:
Kerosene: Fuel Density: 0.806 g/cc. Fuel Freezing Point: -73 deg C. Fuel Boiling Point: 147 deg C.
Kerosene needs a storage tank ~12x smaller than liquid hydrogen, and is storable at ambient temperatures.
The major problem with a hydrogen economy is storage, followed by fuel cell cost.
Air powered... compressed air? Everyone is trying to get rid of hydraulics when possible, e.g. in aviation. Compressed air solutions have low power/weight even compared to batteries.
Interoperability? When you cannot write a desktop application in.NET without using APIs outside the ECMA spec? Should just as well use Java. No wonder web applications have picked up, while traditional desktop apps are fading.
C# is less productive than languages like PHP or Python, which are used at places such as Google and Yahoo, so it is hardly a panacea for business apps.
The open source world never saw the point of implementing a runtime with a bytecode language before, because if you have the source code, you can compile your code to run in any platform. So you can compile GIMP to run in ARM, PowerPC, X86 or whatever using GCC. Same deal with Apache.
The "professional" software world has been using Java for a long time. C# is well known for its non-portability. Unless you mean portability in the Microsoft sense, i.e. across Windows versions.
Uhm, and why is that relevant? Once it's compiled it could have been written in any language. Also, C# can be machine translated to unmanaged C++, so I really don't see what the problem is.
Any application which doesn't evolve is dead. Besides, no need for.NET or machine translation, since someone already did a human translation to plain C++: Gnote. Better to use just that instead.
Of course you can, see for example the GTK# that implements an totally different layer to Windows.Forms. By the way, Tomboy is not a winforms application anyways.
Is GTK# an ECMA standard? No. So you are wrong. And when you are writing an application for.NET using an API that the vast majority of the people using the platform does not support, what does that mean for interoperability? Which was the point for creating.NET to begin with.
ECMA as a standards body does not demand that patents involving the current standards are provided on a royalty free basis. Why the heck do you think Red Hat avoids Mono like the plague? They know better than to tie corporate policy to a tainted technology by a convicted monopolist.
There are plenty of patent issues, and you cannot write desktop apps without using APIs outside the.NET ECMA specs.
C# is important to the discussion because Tomboy, the application Debian decided it must have, is written in C#.
GNU does not have to provide any alternative to.NET. Java is free software and Sun has released all necessary patents..NET is a copycat of Java. It is better than Java at some things, worse at others, but both are evolving. Java is not encumbered, so why the hell should free software use patent encumbered.NET?
Stallman does not see free software implementations of.NET as a problem since they provide interoperability with non-free software written for other platforms. He just claims free software should not be constrained by such limitations, and I for one agree with him.
Mono implements WinForms, for one, which is not ECMA spec. The ECMA spec is mostly static and the.NET platform and its languages, like C#, have kept evolving. You cannot implement a GUI application without using APIs which are not ECMA spec. How many of those are you interested in developing or using that couldn't be done just as well in another language?.NET is a trap, and only an idiot thinks otherwise.
RMS mentioned C# because that is the language that the application Debian decided was so important they needed to include in their distribution, Tomboy, was written in. Mono has many possible patent issues, for example, it implements WinForms. Experience with past MS behavior in the past means they shouldn't be trusted to keep the platform vendor neutral.
No. If you actually took the trouble of reading what RMS wrote, he said specifically that *any*.NET platform implementation will have the same problem as Mono. He says free software developers should not develop apps that use the.NET platform, but that it is ok to have.NET platforms to run other existing.NET apps.
You already can watch anime outside the US. But North American (I say this because many series are made in Canada) series online are pretty much US only.
This is a talk about mobile devices. No one in their right mind will do CAD in one of those and you will not find one for your iPhone or Windows Mobile device either.
Most people I know in the media business have been switching to MacOS X for quite some time. There are exceptions, like the movie industry, where they use Linux quite a lot. This is why you see 3D modeling software such as Autodesk Maya on Linux, while LightWave is being ported. On the OSS front there is Blender, which despite its interface has gained quite a following. For 2D image editing there is the GIMP. You do not need CMYK support to do video or web work. But we are talking niches here. Either of those are niche products most people will not use. What I find interesting is that I have been keeping a count of the number of applications I install on Windows and found the list of OSS applications keeps increasing, while the list of closed source applications keeps decreasing. Firefox, WinSCP, 7-zip, Putty, TeX, TortoiseSVN, X-Chat, Vim, DOSBox (because Microsoft cannot even emulate their own OS properly), OpenOffice.org, Media Player Classic are just some examples. FWIW I mostly run Windows for playing games. Yes, I use Windows as a glorified video console.
JPEG was actually designed so it was not patented. Of course some jokers show up trying to milk royalties every once in a while, but their claims have been invalidated time and again.
I have looked at some clips posted with both VLC and Media Player Classic using CCCP. Theora sucks versus H.264. The amount of noise in the captions and images, it is like the difference between looking at an extremely compressed and noisy JPEG, and a slightly blurred PNG. So what gives? Does my player suck, or is this really the best its supposed to do? Sure it looks better than the blocky H.263, but that isn't saying much.
Not just politics. The Hermes project was a disaster. They kept redesigning the vehicle until it was so big it couldn't be launched with an Ariane 5 any more. AFAIK nothing got out of it but reams of paper at the cost of $2 billion USD. After that crap the French decided they needed to scale back their efforts and try something less complex, so they launched their ARD reentry capsule demonstrator. Which worked just fine and didn't cost a bundle. After which they promptly shafted the whole effort because there was no destination to go to at the time.
The Soviet lunar space program was underfunded. Funding was scarce and came late.
The USSR also had less advanced propulsion technology in many regards (no working LOX/LH2 engines, no working large LOX/Kerosene engines like the F1 used in the Saturn V). This meant they had to use many small engines in their N1 lunar rocket which made it horribly complex. They also had less advanced computer technology at the time which meant control for that complex rocket was quite an issue. To compound the situation the government provided no funding to unit test the vehicle, so the first test was the first launch. The launch of course failed because the propellant lines blew up from shoddy construction and bolts went down to the engines, which exploded in succession.
Chrome is just yet another browser which uses Webkit/KHTML. Better to use the proper names. The problem with Gecko (Firefox) is that they used to advertise it as compact, but it grew into a huge bloated mess fairly quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I would like to click a link in a PowerPoint presentation or Word document and actually get it to open the back in the browser I use, and defined as default, rather than IE, IE, IE!
Actually storing natural gas (CH4) is not done all the time. It is either done sparingly or not at all. Qatar is building a gas to liquids plant because it is very expensive to ship natural gas by tanker. Usually natural gas is piped to homes. Stored gas is usually denser propane (C3H8) which is a higher density hydrocarbon.
Storing hydrogen at good density is an issue. As an example.
Liquid hydrogen (LH2): Fuel Density: 0.071 g/cc. Fuel Freezing Point: -259 deg C. Fuel Boiling Point: -253 deg C.
Liquid natural gas (LCH4): Fuel Density: 0.424 g/cc. Fuel Freezing Point: -184 deg C. Fuel Boiling Point: -162 deg C.
So to store the same weight in LH2 you need a storage tank ~6x bigger. Plus you need a storage tank that is always cooler than -253 deg C to prevent boiloff at that fuel density, that is, less than 20.15 deg K, which is fucking *cold*. That is colder than the surface of Pluto. Compare this with Kerosene, a hydrocarbon that is used for aviation fuel and is similar to diesel:
Kerosene: Fuel Density: 0.806 g/cc. Fuel Freezing Point: -73 deg C. Fuel Boiling Point: 147 deg C.
Kerosene needs a storage tank ~12x smaller than liquid hydrogen, and is storable at ambient temperatures.
The major problem with a hydrogen economy is storage, followed by fuel cell cost.
Air powered... compressed air? Everyone is trying to get rid of hydraulics when possible, e.g. in aviation. Compressed air solutions have low power/weight even compared to batteries.
HTC makes a couple of Android phones which look interesting. They are about to start selling the HTC Hero too.
Interoperability? When you cannot write a desktop application in .NET without using APIs outside the ECMA spec? Should just as well use Java. No wonder web applications have picked up, while traditional desktop apps are fading.
C# is less productive than languages like PHP or Python, which are used at places such as Google and Yahoo, so it is hardly a panacea for business apps.
The open source world never saw the point of implementing a runtime with a bytecode language before, because if you have the source code, you can compile your code to run in any platform. So you can compile GIMP to run in ARM, PowerPC, X86 or whatever using GCC. Same deal with Apache.
The "professional" software world has been using Java for a long time. C# is well known for its non-portability. Unless you mean portability in the Microsoft sense, i.e. across Windows versions.
Uhm, and why is that relevant? Once it's compiled it could have been written in any language. Also, C# can be machine translated to unmanaged C++, so I really don't see what the problem is.
Any application which doesn't evolve is dead. Besides, no need for .NET or machine translation, since someone already did a human translation to plain C++: Gnote. Better to use just that instead.
Of course you can, see for example the GTK# that implements an totally different layer to Windows.Forms. By the way, Tomboy is not a winforms application anyways.
Is GTK# an ECMA standard? No. So you are wrong. And when you are writing an application for .NET using an API that the vast majority of the people using the platform does not support, what does that mean for interoperability? Which was the point for creating .NET to begin with.
ECMA as a standards body does not demand that patents involving the current standards are provided on a royalty free basis. Why the heck do you think Red Hat avoids Mono like the plague? They know better than to tie corporate policy to a tainted technology by a convicted monopolist.
Tell that to TomTom. That "joke" cost them dearly.
C# is important to the discussion because Tomboy, the application Debian decided it must have, is written in C#.
GNU does not have to provide any alternative to .NET. Java is free software and Sun has released all necessary patents. .NET is a copycat of Java. It is better than Java at some things, worse at others, but both are evolving. Java is not encumbered, so why the hell should free software use patent encumbered .NET?
Stallman does not see free software implementations of .NET as a problem since they provide interoperability with non-free software written for other platforms. He just claims free software should not be constrained by such limitations, and I for one agree with him.
Mono implements WinForms, for one, which is not ECMA spec. The ECMA spec is mostly static and the .NET platform and its languages, like C#, have kept evolving. You cannot implement a GUI application without using APIs which are not ECMA spec. How many of those are you interested in developing or using that couldn't be done just as well in another language? .NET is a trap, and only an idiot thinks otherwise.
Cleanroom implementations protect you from copyright infringement. Not software patent infringement.
RMS mentioned C# because that is the language that the application Debian decided was so important they needed to include in their distribution, Tomboy, was written in. Mono has many possible patent issues, for example, it implements WinForms. Experience with past MS behavior in the past means they shouldn't be trusted to keep the platform vendor neutral.
No. If you actually took the trouble of reading what RMS wrote, he said specifically that *any* .NET platform implementation will have the same problem as Mono. He says free software developers should not develop apps that use the .NET platform, but that it is ok to have .NET platforms to run other existing .NET apps.
You already can watch anime outside the US. But North American (I say this because many series are made in Canada) series online are pretty much US only.
Tongue print... biometrics... I guess you never saw the Demolition Man.
Most people I know in the media business have been switching to MacOS X for quite some time. There are exceptions, like the movie industry, where they use Linux quite a lot. This is why you see 3D modeling software such as Autodesk Maya on Linux, while LightWave is being ported. On the OSS front there is Blender, which despite its interface has gained quite a following. For 2D image editing there is the GIMP. You do not need CMYK support to do video or web work. But we are talking niches here. Either of those are niche products most people will not use. What I find interesting is that I have been keeping a count of the number of applications I install on Windows and found the list of OSS applications keeps increasing, while the list of closed source applications keeps decreasing. Firefox, WinSCP, 7-zip, Putty, TeX, TortoiseSVN, X-Chat, Vim, DOSBox (because Microsoft cannot even emulate their own OS properly), OpenOffice.org, Media Player Classic are just some examples. FWIW I mostly run Windows for playing games. Yes, I use Windows as a glorified video console.
I still remember when ASUS sold AMD motherboards in plain white boxes so Intel wouldn't be all pissy.
JPEG was actually designed so it was not patented. Of course some jokers show up trying to milk royalties every once in a while, but their claims have been invalidated time and again.
I have looked at some clips posted with both VLC and Media Player Classic using CCCP. Theora sucks versus H.264. The amount of noise in the captions and images, it is like the difference between looking at an extremely compressed and noisy JPEG, and a slightly blurred PNG. So what gives? Does my player suck, or is this really the best its supposed to do? Sure it looks better than the blocky H.263, but that isn't saying much.
This is why many games today use Vorbis for sound. To not pay MP3 patent royalties.
Not just politics. The Hermes project was a disaster. They kept redesigning the vehicle until it was so big it couldn't be launched with an Ariane 5 any more. AFAIK nothing got out of it but reams of paper at the cost of $2 billion USD. After that crap the French decided they needed to scale back their efforts and try something less complex, so they launched their ARD reentry capsule demonstrator. Which worked just fine and didn't cost a bundle. After which they promptly shafted the whole effort because there was no destination to go to at the time.
The USSR also had less advanced propulsion technology in many regards (no working LOX/LH2 engines, no working large LOX/Kerosene engines like the F1 used in the Saturn V). This meant they had to use many small engines in their N1 lunar rocket which made it horribly complex. They also had less advanced computer technology at the time which meant control for that complex rocket was quite an issue. To compound the situation the government provided no funding to unit test the vehicle, so the first test was the first launch. The launch of course failed because the propellant lines blew up from shoddy construction and bolts went down to the engines, which exploded in succession.
Like Linus would care about what other people think. He doesn't and has proven it time and again.
Many games in Windows use OpenAL. Mass Effect to name one.
Chrome is just yet another browser which uses Webkit/KHTML. Better to use the proper names. The problem with Gecko (Firefox) is that they used to advertise it as compact, but it grew into a huge bloated mess fairly quickly.