While I would agree that the capsule itself was always intended to be an orbital craft, the launch of the original Mercury missions were done on a Redstone rocket, and there was never any doubt that it would never make it into space. It took further development of the Atlas rocket before it was man-rated and allowed to launch people into space.
Alan Shepard was clearly honored for the first American into space, even if he didn't achieve orbit until a much later flight.
You know, I've thought a little about this myself. Could I (or you in this case) be a certified "correspondant" for Slashdot? I've had news stories published on the front page, and am a regular contributor to the "body" of Slashdot. Is that sufficient for a press pass?
I'm certain that if you were able to publish the photos of this on a (hopfully high bandwidth) server, it would make the front page of/.
The trick is to find out who does the issuance of credentials (this is who at Scaled Composites does the issuance, not/., although if you are "officially" representing/. you should ask one of the powers that be first before you claim that title as well).
For example, I live fairly close to the Federal court house where the SCO stuff is going on, and if it ever goes to trial, it would be fun for me to be a "press representative" of/. there. This has been done by other/. regulars in the past in a quasi-relationship, although I don't know of any that used/. to gain the credentials in the first place.
I don't even buy the argument that a nuclear reactor should be off-limits. Sure, it should be regulated so far as to determine if you have the proper knowledge of what you are dealing with and know, possibly on an expert level what the hazards are for working with radioactive materials, but it shouldn't be denied simply because it is dangerous. Ham radio operators come to mind with people that are dealing with sometimes dangerous levels of current, broadcasting them into the air, and able to cause quite a bit of mayhem if they are allowed to do whatever they want. They are licensed, and have certain restrictions that keep their activities under control, that should be sufficient. That is what should be called regulation of an industry (although it usually gets mucked up by political motives as well).
I totally agree that as long as you've bought a piece of equipment, software, music, home video, what have you, that it is yours to use and break, destroy, open up, reverse engineer, and more as long as what you do stays on your property or at your home/workshop. When you start to distribute it to others perhaps copyright/patent issues should come into play, but even then it should be encouraged to "further progress in the arts & sciences", rather than simply stuff the wallets of a couple of companies who are living on past glories and can't seem to produce anything worthwhile lately.
I've been particluarly disappointed with the congress critters who think it is perfectly normal to prohibit radio interception. Any law enforcement agency or defense agency who is worth their salt will be preventing this anyway with solid encryption, rather than relying on legislative means that only prevent honest people from monitoring the government rather than determined enemies who don't care about the laws in the first place. Stopping the interception of commercial communications should be just as open, and if they want to provide an "unbreakable" encryption scheme to stop broadcasts, let the companies who do this try.
God help us if the OnStar starts to disable the operation of your car simply because you havn't paid the monthly service fee or you happen to have your name associated with one of those evil folks from the Free Software Foundation. (Choose you favorite alternative crackpot group and substitute for FSF).
First of all, you can't find an intelligent American who really thinks about it where you know you can bring the cost down even more than it already is. The reason why prices are as high as they are right now in the U.S.A. has much more to do with politics than with market forces. If it weren't for taxes and politics, I could have been paying as low as $0.50/gallon just a couple of years ago. Even now it should be about $1.50/gallon.
Also in the Western U.S.A., the cities and transportation systems were built on the concept of the automobile. This has been dealt with extensively in/. in the past, but the issue remains. When it is cheaper for a government to provide a free public Taxi service instead of bus service to neighborhoods, you know that something is seriously screwed up. This isn't going to change much in the future. Most often, you don't even have an alternative than personal motorized ground transportation, and a gasoline-based car is really the only choice at that. Distances that people in the U.S.A. travel to commute to work would put you in different countries in most of Europe. I'm sure that western Canada is also complaining about this, and they do, for the same reasons. There is quite a bit of oil around Edmonton, and other than the usual gripes about production systems and the environment, oil and gasoline should be just as cheap around there as it is in Texas or Wyoming.
Also, people like to moan and complain about stuff in general. Being a democracy, we complain about everything, even if it is working just fine. Gasoline happens to be something that almost everybody uses, from grandmothers to High School seniors, and is an easy target when things just aren't working out for you.
Inc() is an inline function, which means it is just as efficient as an operator in terms of a compiled code perspective. You don't have to worry about function call overhead if you use it in this fashion. BTW, if you use x:= x + 1 using Turbo Pascal (or Delphi), it optimizes to be the same thing as Inc(x), because the optimizer does pick out stuff like that and reduce it to a simple increment instruction in the assembly code.
Object Pascal (as defined by Borland) offers a few shortcuts that C programmers usually take for granted but if you use "Standard Pascal" you really can't live without. Things like strings (not a part of standard Pascal), or being able to call a function without having the function be assigned to a variable (IMHO a "bug" in the Pascal definition that I'm glad Borland got rid of).
In (almost) all seriousness, I thought I saw a Perl extension that included the INTERCAL interleave, select, unary and, or, & xor. Basically all of the unique Intercal operators. I think that would have to be a whole new column in this periodic table if they were included. It has been demonstrated that you can perform all normal calculations using these operators, but it does produce some messy code if you want to do "ordinary" bit manipulation. There are time I do wish for a select operator in my favorite compiler.
This table doesn't have the overprinted characters (that have two characters symbols printed in the same space, like the cents symbol (aka "change"), or the hookwork (which I though was its own EBDIC symbol on the old IBM 370's, but I might be mistaken). I know this is a/. limitation, and not an oversight on your part.
If Microsoft succeeds and puts out a product that everybody wants, what's the position of ReactOS?
ReactOS would then become a fork in the development of Windows. That is all. ReactOS is probabaly going to become more and more Linux-like in terms of support for interfaces like GTK or Gnome, allowing Linux drivers, and running open-source applications. Much of this is already written.
As has been discussed elsewhere, ReactOS as an embedded kernel is particularly attractive right now. I need to play with it some more, but there is an embedded system I'm working with right now that I'm trying ot look for a good operating system. The current out-of-the-box view is that we want to use DOS (some flavor... currently we are looking at FreeDOS) because of its simplicity and very small footprint. We are having some problems with suppliers who are willing to let us have SDK environments that support DOS, so a variant of Windows like ReactOS would be fantastic.
I have no doubt that Longhorn (Windows 2005, or whatever they will call it) will be a "commercial success". There are just too many places that are committed either through the MSDN licenses or software assurance to totally ignore this new environment. Miguel de Icaza has spoken extensively about this subject, including postings here on/. The solution is more along the lines of Mono and other open source varients of the dotNet architecture that will compete directly with Longhorn. The underlying OS beneath Longhorn is still going to be NT, unless they really want to piss off their developer base.
I think that the OS under Longhorn will be more along the line of the way Windows '95 was on top of MS-DOS 7.0 (it even reported it was 7.0 for versioning), but the majority of applications used the new gee-whiz tools (in this case dotNET) and tended to ignore the old-time software interfaces like the INT 21 protocols in DOS. In fact, I have no doubt that very soon Microsoft will totally abandon the Win32 API, and have told their developers that exactly that is going to happen. This doesn't mean that Win32 applications are going to go away, or that you should not develop a Win32 P.E. file, it is just that Microsoft is no longer going to support files that are compiled using that format.
This switch is already happening, and if you are used to the performance bonuses of native IA32 applications, you should be looking at supporting ReactOS. If you don't mind the performance hit of using CLR and the compiled byte codes of dotNET (which many applications developers, particularly the Quick & Dirty(tm) applications programmers that usually use Windows as an environment this way) are going to migrate to Longhorn. Visual Studio already supports this philosophy, so it should be no surprise.
Now the question is, when the next round of Visual Studio has deliberate bugs in it so applications written in that environment won't run under ReactOS or Mono, will people still buy that compiler suite?
I think the question could possibly be turned into:
Will Longhorn be relevant at the time ReactOS 1.0 is released?
I can't even begin to tell you how many developers and companies are currently stuck at Windows 2000, in part because they don't like the "extensions" done to Windows XP. A few that have moved into XP may make that their last Microsoft OS as well. Just because it has the Microsoft logo on the distribution box doesn't mean everybody is going to jump up and down trying to get it.
Keep in mind when Microsoft relesed Windows 2.0 (also called Windows 286... it had other names as well), it almost sank Microsoft as a company. With a huge investment of company resources, it really didn't sell. The same could be said about Windows NT versions 3.5 and earlier. Both of these products didn't have widespread industry support and were in many cases considered jokes because of bugs and other issues they were facing. The fact that MS-DOS version 6 was successful during this time was perhaps the only reason they are still a company now. That Microsoft did turn both product lines around is primarily due to deep pockets and a strong threat from competition that very easily could have kicked Microsoft totally out of the picture.
Issues that put MS in the gravy train with the current round of releases for Windows, keeping competitors out of the picture, simply don't apply to groups like ReactOS. Government agencies are going to stop the "bundling" contracts that gave MS a boost, and giving away the product for free (in typical open source fashion) means they can't underbid, or even buy out ReactOS. An attempt to buy out the ReactOS foundation (if it were possible) would only delay the release of an Open Source Windows-compatable operating system.
Longhorn has some interesting ideas, but many of them are being worked on by the Mono group. Most of the new stuff is dotNet-related. Those that Microsoft decides to push to a monopoly position through patent protection will only wither and die, because it will be obvious the usage terms of it will have (and must have) draconian licensing agreements. No intelligent software manager or CIO type is going to agree to use those software systems except for a few die-hard Microsoft fans, and even that only has a certain amount of momentum.
With Microsoft abandoning Windows '98 (there still is a huge installed base out there of '98 machines) there already is a market for a lean, clean Win32 environment that doesn't require a rewrite of the current software base. Longhorn is only going to be marginally backward compatable (like Windows '95 claimed to be but wasn't) and for the most part is a clean break from their past operating systems. This in part is why it has been delayed so much on release, because it really is essentially a whole new operating system from scratch, not a gradual refinement of previous systems.
This is a legitamate question. First of all, please visit the ReactOS website (not in the parent news story), as this an many other FAQs are answered there. (Sorry, it got slashdotted apparently even without the link, but the FAQs are there, really.)
This is more of a case of options, rather than why one is better than the other. As was mentioned clearly in the interview, ReactOS and Wine are working together, and there is quite a bit of mutual support they can give each other. It is not one or the other, but rather many efforts can help both projects at the same time. In fact, as Wine is moving to support more Windows applications, it is necessary to work with even more kernel services.
These two projects are attacking the same problem, but from different directions. This is why the cross-pollenation efforts are even more valuable, because each group sees a different set of problems and finds good solutions often when the other group isn't quite looking there yet.
In terms of re-inventing Windows, this is the only group that I've seen that has succeeded. There have been other groups in the past that have tried, but almost all of their efforts have been folded into ReactOS in terms of active developers and design ideas. The unsung hero with all of this is Jason Filby, who has done a remarkable job of keeping this project going through litterally years of effort when even a command prompt was not available. He is the driving force that is keeping everything together, and a very approachable person as well. When this project succeeds, he is certainly somebody who deserves strong kudos from the open source community.
Why a free software version of Windows? I think this will be very important to think about when Longhorn comes out, but Microsoft show little to no support for legacy applications, and is more than willing to abandon platforms when it serves their purposes. This is a matter choice, and this project will give more options, not fewer.
If you are not familiar with the NT kernel, there really is some amazing architecture that from an OS viewpoint should be studied. It is more like the difference between a GM engine and a Ford engine (for those few amature auto mechanics out there who know what I'm talking about). Each has it own fans and critics, but comparing Unix to NT shows some significant design choices in the basic fundimentals of the operating system. Microsoft has muddied up the picture in part because there hasn't been (until ReactOS) an independent implementation of the NT kernel or with the exception of Wine an implementation of the Win32 API library.
This really is more the debate of propritary vs. open source, which is probably why this news posting on/. hasn't generated more responses. ReactOS is on the side of Free Software, and everything in it can be compiled and used with exclusively open source tools. As was pointed out in the interview, ReactOS can compile and develop ReactOS (it is self-hosting), but all of the little annoying things that a typical developer doesn't likes havn't been worked out yet.
If you want to see something really neat, try and get ReactOS running with Mono. Mono is aiming more for Linux compatability right now, but with ReactOS handling some of the Windows API issues, ReactOS+Mono will run many of dotNET applications that won't run under Linux. All of the command-line Mono development tools will currently run in ReactOS, and I think this is another untapped combination that hasn't really been followed.
I think you miss the point. By using ReactOS, you cut out the software bloat that MS throws in, and you can pare down the kernel to the bare elements. ReactOS allows you to work at a command-prompt only level, so if you have an application like a server or embedded controller that doesn't need a GUI, ReactOS is perfect. While I don't think this is a deliberate goal of this project, it would not be all that difficult to make a single floppy version of ReactOS, like QNX has done.
The really nice thing about this is if you have components you are adding to an embedded system, and the manufacturer has Windows device drivers, ReactOS will recognize them and they don't even need to be recompiled. This opens up a whole range of equipment options that would not normally be available under embedded Linux (although most embedded equipment companies are supporting Linux now... this wasn't always the case).
I don't know what is cheaper than free software, and the point here is that this increases flexability. I don't know about what you mean with hardware requirement, but I don't see too many 386 CPUs anymore, even among embedded systems. ReactOS will run on most of the common CPU systems found in embedded systems, particularly if you are already looking at a Linux-based system as well. This is an option, not a requirement.
If you are talking about using the Microsoft version of the NT 4.0 kernel in an embedded system, I would have to totally agree it is a mistake. I would still be careful about the "uneducated developers" you are thowing stones at, because there is a huge difference between the NT kernel and Windows CE (which truly is for the clueless developers). On raw technical merits, I would stand behind an NT-based kernel as much if not more than a unix-based kernel (like Linux).
There are a couple of reasons why this hasn't happened:
Open Source/Free Software Leaders - the people who are doing the advocating of open source software really don't seem to care about the standards. This isn't even a remote priority, although there are some exceptions. I got into a "fight" with Richard Stallman over this issue, and he was essentially unconcerned that standards and specifications would "work themselves out". I disagree. Specification comittees are the "tools that make the tools" in regards to software design.
Software Patents - This issue more than anything else is the real kicker. While you may be able to get a group together and come up with a standard, any software patents can kill even the most altruistic motives. Compuserve was not interested in making any money off of the GIF standard, and they encouraged the dissemination of the specifications documents far and wide. It was only when Unisys came along that Compuserv had to back off, and that was only to cover their own behind. Software patents have such shaky ground anyway that it amazes me that any get successful prosecuted in court. The Free Software Foundation can and ought to obtain patents regarding free software, if for nothing more than to give the FSF a "patent library" that they can use in a defensive posture. If you have a patent, I don't think the FSF would turn down having it assigned to them.
Selling Open Standards - Some notable open/free standards have been widely accepted. Notably TCP/IP together with all of the RFC's regarding the internet are free to publish and distribute, and are largely patent-free as well. The PNG group, in large part as a reaction to the issues regarding the GIF standard, set out to purposely make a patent-free standard. How this group came together and what they accomplished is simply amazing, and I'm grateful that their standard is available free for use. The Ogg folks have also done a very impressive job, and my initial complaints about their licensing scheme have been fixed, and the standards are beginning to gain acceptance. What must be done is to get people to know these standards do exists.
Encouraging Commercial Acceptance - In this regards, I think that Eric Raymond has it correct. If you want to get something widely accepted, you have to speak the language of the C.E.O.s and graduates from business schools. For just the DVD-Video standard, it is $10,000 + $1,000 per seat just to be able to use the standard, and that is if you happen to kiss the right people and not make any enemies along the way. Showing an alternative format that can be used for no royalties (those are on top of the original "investments" into the standard) can make or break the release of a product, provided the libraries are available at resonable prices (or released as Open Source software). If you think DVD-Video is bad, try doing a search on the PCI-bus standard, or even RS-232. Licensing on either of these "standards" is incredibly difficult, and at best you can only get unofficial information. Indeed, one "expert" had the guts to suggest the best source for learning about PCI driver development was to read the source code of the Linux Kernel directly. That should show you the sad state of documentation for these important "standards" and that is just for software development.
Getting Groups Organized - This is much harder than simply throwing a web server out and saying "Hello!, Come Join Our Group!". Not only do you need to get people to come along, but you need at least a couple of real dedicated people (partially insane?) who are willing to take arrows in the back and put the TIME into getting everything put together. I actually put together an open disc standards group, but since I had other "REAL LIFE(tm)" issues come up, I wasn't able to keep the thing sustained. Most of the group folded over into Ogg Theora anyway, so I didn't consider it too muc
I would hope that it would take on more the flavor of the old time passenger cruise lines of the late 19th & early 20th Centuries. Still, once space travel starts to really emerge, it is going to be a very capital intensive business. Almost all of the capital that Wall Street & other exchanges can dig up is going to help fuel this next economic expansion.
I predict that over the next 15-25 years you will see Wall Street (especially once the X-Prize has been won) get into space in a major way. You will see the whole dot Bomb thing happen all over again, unfortunately, with fly-by-night companies that do little but promise the Moon (this time in a more litteral fashion). Some companies are going to emerge and become very successful, but many others are going to take a whole lot of money from people and throw it down the drain.
If the X-Prize team list is an indication with over 26 different teams listed, once it has been proven to be a practical business you will see many others jump into the business. Companies like Boeing, Airbus, and Thiokol (all companies you seemed to miss) are more than likely going to come in and join the party as well. They all have some sort of rocketry/avaition experience, deep pockets, and an aire of respectability when they start producing spacecraft.
In this regard it would be more like the P.C. industry, where it started in a bunch of garages and small industrial parks, where severalmillionaires arose from relatively modest beginnings. In this case we have a few "modest" millionaires who are perhaps going to turn this into billions.
The "sailing" effect of a solar sail is due to the Photoelectric Effect, the only real theory by Einstein that got him a Nobel Prize. Relativity was considered so radical and (at the time) unprovable that it was in a league of its own. BTW, this theory has absolutely nothing to do with Relativity... it was just another idea that Einstein played around with. Yes, this is the theory behind what makes photovoltaic cells work as well.
Getting back to solar sailing: Photons (not solar wind) hit the solar sails and raw energy from the photons in sunlight is directly converted into knetic energy that pushes the sail away from the sun. If anything, the solar wind actually increases drag to slow the craft down, but the photoelectric effect more than compensates for that issue. This isn't a contradiction of physics and Thomas Gold has been debunked.
A practical example of this effect and how it has already been used was with the launch of the Echo series of satellites. (More information can also be found here) Besides the ISS, these are the largest man-made objects ever to be launched into space, and that was back in 1960 & 1964. While these web pages say that they re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, my understanding was that they were pushed out of Earth orbit by solar forces, due to their low mass/area ratio. Certainly there were some significant effects on their orbits from solar activity, and this was carefully studied.
I want to let you know, publicly, that I have totally appreciated your efforts at (trying) to work with ICANN and the whole process and fiasco of the elected board members at ICANN.
Most of the problems relating to domain names would have been resolved had ICANN been much more responsive to ordinary internet users. Yeah, a "democratic" ICANN would have injected a political flavor to the internet that currently isn't here, but I would prefer that over the current self-appointed monarchy that seems to be running the internet. It is unfortunate that the U.S. government also felt that democracy was a failed institution. At least certain members of that government (particularly the U.S. Dept. of Commerce) back elsewhen before the current setup.
You've gone over all this before, including on your website, so I don't want to take more bandwidth. Even so, thanks for all you've done.
France comes to mind. --Not in that there is no political corruption; no nation seems free of it these days, --although I somehow doubt you'd have much problem with extradition. Spain also seems like a nice choice. I hear their government has shifted political polarities recently. . . (Ahem.)
Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands also look like good bets.
My ancestors left Europe because of the huge mess that it was in. Yeah, that was 150+ years ago, and I will admit that Europe has changed some since then, but I really don't see how moving to Europe is really going to be that much of a solution. Certainly (as you seem to be advocating) a mass migration of Americans to Germany, for example, would create even more messes then it currently solves. BTW, my family is originally from Germany, and subtle aspects of how my family deals with issues still has a strongly German flavor.
I will say that I think that the E.U. is an interesting political movement, and has the potential of stabilizing a region of the world that will be beneficial.
Every person I know that has ever gone to France (I'm not talking about news reports... these are actual people and in most cases very close relatives like direct siblings or in-laws) has always noted how rude the people in France are. And this isn't just a sterotype. France seems to have a very difficult time assimilating immigrants, as evidenced by the current issues regarding the Muslim population there. I just can't see France willing to let my family come there, together with any sizable number of other Americans, without some sort of incredibly strong anti-American backlash far worse than the "Mexicans go home" attitude seen in many U.S. cities. Even by going to France, learning to speak French fluently, and adopting the culture there as my own I'm still going to have residual left over culture from America that would be resented by most people in France.
In general I'm not so sure I'd like the socialist governments in Europe, and I don't trust that the E.U. is going to stay together. WWII is just too recent of a memory to trust my life and that of my children/grandchildren to be able to face that kind of potential danger.
I wouldn't mind moving to Siberia (I'm not kidding here either), because at least it has wide open spaces, is under populated, wealth of resources, and it appears as though Russia is taking Civil Rights much more seriously than the U.S.A. If a group of 5,000 to 10,000 Americans moved as a group to build a community (Russia has history of peoples doing this in the past, just like similar settlements like this in the U.S.A.) that preserves some American culture but with loyalty to the Russian Government, that is at least a viable alternative IMHO. My complaint is that what the U.S.A. had in the past was wonderful, and it has been lost. I don't know how to regain that.
*cough* Sorry, did you say, 'Fight' corruption and work with the systems to make change? What fighting have you done recently? What fighting do you plan to do? Vote Kerry? Come on. You're dreaming. The freight train has already passed the point of no return
While on the national level it does seem hopeless, I have in the past, and continue to get involved in politics at the local level. I have been in shouting matches with the Mayor, attend city council meetings, attend the local caucus meetings to get involved in local party poltics, and worked with city council representitives to get some things changed at the local level. I have also sat down and lobbied with state legislators to discuss issues that I find personally importnat. Does that qualify as trying to fight the system?
I think that the war in Iraq is illegal, but for some different reasons than the current anti-war activists view it. President Bush, together with the U.S. Congress, should have declared a state of war in order to go into Iraq. That has sp
If you are suggesting that American citizens abandon their country, I would have to ask this most important question:
"Go where?"
In presuming that the reason why you would want to leave is because you are wearing a tin hat and afraid of the U.S. Government getting involved in your life, I would also have to ask, where else in the world could you go that you could escape from a corrupt tyrinical U.S. Government? Cuba? Syria? Iran? North Korea?
From my viewpoint, the list is very small and reads like a list of enemies of the U.S.A. that I would give a better than 50% probability that they will be invaded some time before the end of this century, also presuming a corrupt U.S. Government. Either that or internal political revolution (sponsored or not sponsored by the CIA...it doesn't matter for you personally) that would make the government friendly to the U.S.
If you wanted to escape I can't think of any place on this planet, including Antarctica, that would be safe from U.S. extradition and being able to bring you back to the U.S.A. unless you were always on the run like Osama bin Laden. And I wouldn't feel comfortable watching hundreds of people die from misguided attempts to kill me.
If you quietly leave the U.S.A. before you do anything to upset the U.S. Government, perhaps you would be safe from suspicion. But then, why are you leaving?
I'll admit that IMHO America has in some ways lost its promise of being the "Shining Beacon of Liberty", but despite all of the corruption, I've seen worse in other countries and at least usually the law works. There really are good judges that do really administer justice, and many others that are genuine in trying to make this country work. The question then becomes, Do you want to stay here, fight corruption, and work within the systems to make change, or have you given up (like Fantastic Lad) and hope that the corruption will lead to collapse, with ultimately thousands or millions dying in the process?
Also, it is much more realistic and easier to run to somewhere than run away from somewhere. That is why the question of where to go is so important. What country on the Earth offers the combination of freedom, domestic protection from war, and economic opportunites better than the U.S.A.?
If you are thinking about avoiding the military draft in the U.S.A., just make sure that the country you are moving to also isn't going to be trying to get you into their army. In the 1940's Canada would not have been a good place to try and dodge the military draft. They were more likely to send you to war than even the U.S.A., and as an outsider you would be a quick target. I even know U.S. citizens, because of their ancestry not because of their place of birth, must avoid going to certain countries because they will be drafted the minute they step into those countries. My brother-in-law is one of those, and he is the third generation removed from that country. What makes you certain that the U.S. Government won't eventually try that on you or your children?
Atheism has about as many variants as Christianity... probabally more.
Perhaps I could use a term a little more appropriate, like Secular-Humanism, which is much more specific in terms of theological viewpoint than simply the concept of somebody who rejects diety or any other sort of supernaturalism. These do indeed have organizations, even aspects that could be called in other context a "sacrament".
Some atheists I've seen go so far as to form "clubs" of common social groups of this particular viewpoint, mainly to take advantage of the social aspects of an organized religion without the theological overtones. Sometimes this is just for a beer and a round of Poker, but even these can take varied forms. If you've never heard about this before, then you are sheltered.
BTW, I did see a survey of Unitarian ministers that claimed over 65% of the ministers didn't believe in the existance of a God.
Although the U.S.S.R. was officially "atheist", it did indeed have a pantheon of "heros" that were "sacred", and if you ever went to visit Lenin's Tomb it was as much of a religious experience as any I've ever heard about or seen. I had a close friend who brought a camera into there (Lenin's tomb) pre-falling of the Berlin Wall, and he got a very interesting tour of Moscow in the back of a KGB car for over six hours. The only reason he came home was because he was the son of an American politican and they didn't want to turn it into an international incident.
BTW, you wanted me to point to at least "one religion that does not rely on supernatural mechanism for its existance". It can be argued that worship of the GNU/Linux gods can be a cult, but (un)fortunately most of the gods of that religious movement are still alive and able to tell you you are out of your mind to deal with the Church of Emacs as anything but a joke. It does fit the definition you were talking about, however.
You can also say that watching "Monday Night Football" can also be a religous experience for some people, with regular meeting times and requisite sacramental offerings. What I think of people that worship John Madden is another story.
Even then, you would probabally need to get permission from the nation who is the official registrar of that ship you are floating in. Almost all ships in the ocean, and all commercial vessels, are registered to a specific country, mainly to deal with maritime law and other subtle legal issues such as what country a child belongs to when they are born aboard ship, if a crime happens what country has juristiction, and should that ship be allowed to trade in a given port or not.
Ships registered to the U.S.A. are given protection of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, and an attack against an American flag ship is considered an act of war against the U.S.A., with all of the consequences that follow from that.
There are nations that do a "flag of convience" like Liberia, who only charge a modest licensing fee and do practically no inspections. (An inspection consisiting of "Yeah, the ship is there" is probabally a little bit too much for Liberia) Of course, the Liberian Navy isn't exactly going to go out of their way to help you out either.
The point here is that if you launch from a ship, even in international waters, you need to get permission from the government who you have the ship registered to. That is why I've suggested in the past that the Liberian Space Agency might end up with the largest fleet of space going craft, but even so you have to deal with at least some sort of government.
Who knows, maybe this can be a source of revenue for Nauru to suppliment their income from domain sales.
I think you are dismissing the Apollo flights too lightly. They were indeed ground breaking, widely talked about among the many people in the world (unlike the other explorations you mention with the Chinese and Vikings), and new techniques and technologies were developed to accomplish the missions.
At this point, we know that not only can you land on another planetary body, but its been done. Simply knowing it is possible is half of the battle when trying to do R&D. What would be sad is if the "Apollo is a hoax" crowd is able to take over the history lesson books, making future generations think it really is impossible to accomplish.
Viking settlement failed in part because technologically they were about equal with the Inuit people in north-eastern Canada. Indeed, the Inuit were actually better adapted for the local environment than the Vikings. There is strong reason to believe that the two groups (Vikings & natives peoples) more or less merged together into one society for sheer survival, with the dominating culture coming from the Inuit, rather than the more traditional pattern of being dominated by the Europeans.
The Chinese are, IMHO, a classic demonstration of what potential could be thrown away by a superpower when there is no other competition. Besides "uncivilized" people on the borders of China, there really wasn't anybody that could challenge the Chinese Emperors, and they turned inward to domestic problems.
Lunar lunology (geology on the moon), environmental conditions during the Apollo flights (including a lucky break that they took place during a solar minimum part of the sunspot cycle) and other factors made the Apollo flights truly historic.
That America has also turned inward like China did a millenia ago is true, but in this case modern China, together with India, Russia, the E.U., and other groups of people that can and do compete with America is going to keep America from staying too complacent. Japan has done far more to modernize American production techniques than could ever be possible without that country's technological drive.
I just can't let this pass. This sort of thinking is so wrong headed that I can't sit back idly and let it pass unanswered.
When humans first migrated from the warm climates of Africa, the cold climates of the north (eg. Europe) and south were quite hostile. But humans managed to colonize those areas, using their cutting-edge technologies of fire, shelter, clothing, agriculture, etc.
All of this can be produced locally. Moreover, there was never any great barrier. People could spread outwards at whatever rate was convenient (and generally migrated in order to follow herds of animals; migrating was actually safer than staying put). With Mars, on the other hand, there is essentially nothing in the way of natural resources. Everything has to be brought with us. Moroever this is not an organic expansion but a conciously planned and very difficult expansion.
Everything that a human needs for survival, except for some DNA in the form of seeds and genetic diversity of the people living on Mars, can be found on Mars. The only thing you really need to bring to Mars is the tools to make the tools that make the tools. While you are busy trying to build up the infrastructure to get this all to happen, yes, some initial supplies will have to be sent from Earth, and it may take decades or even centuries for Mars to be fully self-sufficient, but there is no doubt that the supplies are there. The basic elements of life, C-H-O-N (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen) are all found with abundance on Mars. Yes, not the same proportions that you find them and in the form you find them on Earth, but that just means you have to use your imagination to make them come together in a form that is more useful.
Other elements, like Iron and Silicon, are also found in great abundance on Mars, and even current industrial processes on Earth can extract them from minerals found on Mars. I doubt (but I may be surprised on this one) that you will find Coal deposits on Mars, but the truth is we don't know what we will find there. Mars has water ice and other elements.
In terms of natural organic expansion, I have no doubt that despite all of the precautions that NASA has done to deliberately decontaminate the space probes that have gone to Mars, that some form of Earth bacteria and blue-green algae have already made it to Mars. The real trick is to see what will happen if that is done deliberately. Life is already there, even if it wasn't there before.
As for a great barrier, travel across the seas has always been a great barrier. I have heard it suggested that it was sea travel from people in Australia that could most likely be considered the current "ancenstor" of modern mankind, not Africa. In order to navigate across the islands of south-east Asia, people needed to develop the intelligence and skills necessary to build boats that could travel across bodies of water where you couldn't see the shore on the other side. I don't see tranoceanic travel any different from that viewpoint than interplanetary travel, and indeed from a technological viewpoint we are well ahead of what our ancestors had to deal with in this sort of travel. Diseases like scurvy didn't make sense for early sea travllers, and often the early tranoceanic voyages would have people dying by dozens due to new environments they weren't used to. When the British Royal Navy insisted that each seaman eat one half of a Lime per day when at sea, they finally were able to eliminate this dreadful disease (of a lack of Vitimin C). We already know many of the physiological problems people will be facing when going to Mars, even before people have done it. To know more, we simply need to go. Transit times for going to Mars are in many ways very similar to transit times for travel between Europe and America in the 18th Century, and communication time is considerably less. King George III of England would have killed for a 1-3 hour method of communication with the Americas in the 1770's
Re:SCOX at $5.15 - Where's the bottom
on
Groklaw Turns One
·
· Score: 1
The big deal about being listed is that, for the moment, SCO is currently a publicly traded company, so certain SEC regulations and sections of related laws apply to SCO and their behavior.
Once they get delisted, these rules no longer apply to them.
At the same time, if SCO gets delisted, it could bring about class-action lawsuits from the shareholders against the top company executives, and they would not get the coporate limited liability protection either. Delisting is an obvious and actionable cause that has specific legal consequences, and the SCO executives may not want to see that happen on their watch.
Still, as it looks like Baystar is going to have a majority stock interest in the company real soon (turning SCO into one of their subsideraires), I don't think that stock price is really going to matter much.
Re:Clean Sheet Commercial Application
on
XVID 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
You are right, I'm not really going to care about the audio so much. In fact, I'm just going to store PCM data at first, but I'd like to do at least some compression with audio because it is relatively easy and there is no point in killing HD (& other archival data storage) space when at least some simple compression can make a huge difference.
The embedded controller is indeed going to be a full-featured PC (on a PC104 board), and there is a range of options to hook onto this platform. This is still pretty compact, about the size of the disc drive I used on the Apple ][ back elsewhen, even including floppy disc drive and I/O ports like keyboard, VGA video, and serial connectors. The final unit may not even have the floppy drive (used only for updating "firmware", and that can be done through the serial connector).
I'm a little vague on the specs in part because every thing else in this project is still in flux. I'm also having to deal with some non-technical people (who have the purse strings) that really don't know what they want either, so I'm trying to help in the specification arena where possible. They trust my recommendations, and I've already had a "thumbs up" for making a custom FPGA or other hardware core that will eventually be used for compression, but that is a long-term solution. The short-term solution is to make a cheap software-only application that can take advantage of existing off-the-shelf equipment.
I want to thank you and others who have responded to this request. I was reading through the responses earlier and people were saying "there aren't any commercial applications built using this codec yet", and I was thinking "I'm looking for a new video codec. Could this one work for me?" This project I'm working on has the potential of putting together many different talents and experiences I've had throughout my life, and I'm in a unique position that I can also bring open source specifications into the equation where normally closed specs like MPEG-4 would have normally been the rule of thumb. If I'm successful, this could bring a relatively obscure video codec like XviD into a more mainstream presence.
Clean Sheet Commercial Application
on
XVID 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I just happen to be a software developer looking for new video codecs/encoding schemes and for me the sky is the limit. This will be a major commercial application in what ever form it finally takes place.
Maybe this should be an "Ask Slashdot" thing, but since many video folks are looking on this site, I might as well ask in this story.
(Without going into specifics of the project) I am starting with a totally clean sheet of paper here. What I need to do is be able to record several hours of video in a form that should be as lossless as possible (lossy formats are O.K., but it needs to have very good fidelity when the image size is restored). The video capture is going to happen in an embedded system, but playback will happen on a standard P.C. Playback is going to be a custom written application anyway, so it doesn't matter if it is currently supported by any common player.
Since I'm doing this as a clean sheet project, I'm also trying to use as many Open Source/Free Software tools as I can, although libraries in this case can only be LGPL (the main app will be totally propritary software, unless something else happens. This is still a possibility, so I am going to try and give back).
At the moment, due to some cheap hardware, we are implemented an MPEG-1 encoder for the system. This does a fair job, but I'd like to try and improve it.
I've thought about using PNG/MNG data files (MJPEG was also discussed), but the MNG spec isn't quite up to speed on A/V syncronization issues and the direction of the MNG group isn't quite where I like it to go. Still, I like the fairly good compression, lossless algorithms in the format and it is still an option.
MPEG-2 is an option I've looked at, mainly because I would be able to put it onto DVD players. Some plusses and minuses, but it really is more convience if this is the option we will use.
The Ogg formats are also something to look into, and they are more for full A/V quality compression. Certainly a candidate for me.
I'm not really all that familiar with MPEG-4, but it seems a huge jumble to me and means a lot of things to a lot of people, together with a bunch of misunderstanding fostered by equipment salesmen. (This is the coolest thing around, why don't you upgrade from that lousy MPEG-2 system to our new and improved MPEG-4 system!)
This system (XviD) does look interesting, and I like the open specifications of it particularly. Closed-specifications (where you have to pay $10,000 just to get a poorly written technical manual with NDA) are totally out of the question.
I guess I've looked around and would like to get some feedback as to what video encoding would you use on a totally clean sheet application if you had to encode video? Any takers?
It wasn't so much the strength, but with the very localized north & south poles (like I said, dozens of "poles", sometimes only 10 km apart.), it makes for a very different magnetic field than what you find right now on the Earth.
Originally planetary astronomers were looking for a classical Magnetosphere like is found on the Earth and Jupiter, but Mars simply doesn't have that because it isn't organized on a planetary scale.
An interesting side-effect to the paper suggested by the parent article is that planets may mean something more significant than simply a rock to anchor your building to. If a planetary body (like Mars or Veuns) can capture a portion of the solar wind and form a magnetic barrier to Cosmic Radiation, it might be more valuable than trying to make cities and settlements on smaller bodies that this effect wouldn't be nearly so strong, such as building in the Asteroids or even building Human constructed bodies such as the classical L-5 space habitats, at least until space born populations start becoming significant.
Several people have suggested that Mars is a dead-end for human settlement due to the fact that it too is at the bottom of a signficant gravity well. It is nice to see that potentially some theories that might support a manned Martian presence are being brought forth.
Mars does indeed have a significant magnetic field, it is just that it has several dozen north and south poles, which is the current theory about what will happen during the transition phase when the poles switch:
At first the poles weaken in strength.
New "North" & "South" poles start to appear in strage places, like in equatorial regions.
For a geologically brief period of time there are dozens to hundreds of magnetic "poles" scattered throughout the planet.
Eventually the number of poles start to drop, and the new magnetic "North" & "South" poles become more established and start to gain more strength. At this point the reversal is complete.
Mars appears to have gone geologically dead during the middle of one of these pole reversals, so Mars is also being used to provide a "snapshot" as to what the Earth might be like in the next 500 years.
Slashdot Mirror
While I would agree that the capsule itself was always intended to be an orbital craft, the launch of the original Mercury missions were done on a Redstone rocket, and there was never any doubt that it would never make it into space. It took further development of the Atlas rocket before it was man-rated and allowed to launch people into space.
Alan Shepard was clearly honored for the first American into space, even if he didn't achieve orbit until a much later flight.
You know, I've thought a little about this myself. Could I (or you in this case) be a certified "correspondant" for Slashdot? I've had news stories published on the front page, and am a regular contributor to the "body" of Slashdot. Is that sufficient for a press pass?
/.
/., although if you are "officially" representing /. you should ask one of the powers that be first before you claim that title as well).
/. there. This has been done by other /. regulars in the past in a quasi-relationship, although I don't know of any that used /. to gain the credentials in the first place.
I'm certain that if you were able to publish the photos of this on a (hopfully high bandwidth) server, it would make the front page of
The trick is to find out who does the issuance of credentials (this is who at Scaled Composites does the issuance, not
For example, I live fairly close to the Federal court house where the SCO stuff is going on, and if it ever goes to trial, it would be fun for me to be a "press representative" of
I don't even buy the argument that a nuclear reactor should be off-limits. Sure, it should be regulated so far as to determine if you have the proper knowledge of what you are dealing with and know, possibly on an expert level what the hazards are for working with radioactive materials, but it shouldn't be denied simply because it is dangerous. Ham radio operators come to mind with people that are dealing with sometimes dangerous levels of current, broadcasting them into the air, and able to cause quite a bit of mayhem if they are allowed to do whatever they want. They are licensed, and have certain restrictions that keep their activities under control, that should be sufficient. That is what should be called regulation of an industry (although it usually gets mucked up by political motives as well).
I totally agree that as long as you've bought a piece of equipment, software, music, home video, what have you, that it is yours to use and break, destroy, open up, reverse engineer, and more as long as what you do stays on your property or at your home/workshop. When you start to distribute it to others perhaps copyright/patent issues should come into play, but even then it should be encouraged to "further progress in the arts & sciences", rather than simply stuff the wallets of a couple of companies who are living on past glories and can't seem to produce anything worthwhile lately.
I've been particluarly disappointed with the congress critters who think it is perfectly normal to prohibit radio interception. Any law enforcement agency or defense agency who is worth their salt will be preventing this anyway with solid encryption, rather than relying on legislative means that only prevent honest people from monitoring the government rather than determined enemies who don't care about the laws in the first place. Stopping the interception of commercial communications should be just as open, and if they want to provide an "unbreakable" encryption scheme to stop broadcasts, let the companies who do this try.
God help us if the OnStar starts to disable the operation of your car simply because you havn't paid the monthly service fee or you happen to have your name associated with one of those evil folks from the Free Software Foundation. (Choose you favorite alternative crackpot group and substitute for FSF).
I think there are several things going on.
/. in the past, but the issue remains. When it is cheaper for a government to provide a free public Taxi service instead of bus service to neighborhoods, you know that something is seriously screwed up. This isn't going to change much in the future. Most often, you don't even have an alternative than personal motorized ground transportation, and a gasoline-based car is really the only choice at that. Distances that people in the U.S.A. travel to commute to work would put you in different countries in most of Europe. I'm sure that western Canada is also complaining about this, and they do, for the same reasons. There is quite a bit of oil around Edmonton, and other than the usual gripes about production systems and the environment, oil and gasoline should be just as cheap around there as it is in Texas or Wyoming.
First of all, you can't find an intelligent American who really thinks about it where you know you can bring the cost down even more than it already is. The reason why prices are as high as they are right now in the U.S.A. has much more to do with politics than with market forces. If it weren't for taxes and politics, I could have been paying as low as $0.50/gallon just a couple of years ago. Even now it should be about $1.50/gallon.
Also in the Western U.S.A., the cities and transportation systems were built on the concept of the automobile. This has been dealt with extensively in
Also, people like to moan and complain about stuff in general. Being a democracy, we complain about everything, even if it is working just fine. Gasoline happens to be something that almost everybody uses, from grandmothers to High School seniors, and is an easy target when things just aren't working out for you.
Inc() is an inline function, which means it is just as efficient as an operator in terms of a compiled code perspective. You don't have to worry about function call overhead if you use it in this fashion. BTW, if you use x := x + 1 using Turbo Pascal (or Delphi), it optimizes to be the same thing as Inc(x), because the optimizer does pick out stuff like that and reduce it to a simple increment instruction in the assembly code.
Object Pascal (as defined by Borland) offers a few shortcuts that C programmers usually take for granted but if you use "Standard Pascal" you really can't live without. Things like strings (not a part of standard Pascal), or being able to call a function without having the function be assigned to a variable (IMHO a "bug" in the Pascal definition that I'm glad Borland got rid of).
In (almost) all seriousness, I thought I saw a Perl extension that included the INTERCAL interleave, select, unary and, or, & xor. Basically all of the unique Intercal operators. I think that would have to be a whole new column in this periodic table if they were included. It has been demonstrated that you can perform all normal calculations using these operators, but it does produce some messy code if you want to do "ordinary" bit manipulation. There are time I do wish for a select operator in my favorite compiler.
/. limitation, and not an oversight on your part.
This table doesn't have the overprinted characters (that have two characters symbols printed in the same space, like the cents symbol (aka "change"), or the hookwork (which I though was its own EBDIC symbol on the old IBM 370's, but I might be mistaken). I know this is a
ReactOS would then become a fork in the development of Windows. That is all. ReactOS is probabaly going to become more and more Linux-like in terms of support for interfaces like GTK or Gnome, allowing Linux drivers, and running open-source applications. Much of this is already written.
As has been discussed elsewhere, ReactOS as an embedded kernel is particularly attractive right now. I need to play with it some more, but there is an embedded system I'm working with right now that I'm trying ot look for a good operating system. The current out-of-the-box view is that we want to use DOS (some flavor... currently we are looking at FreeDOS) because of its simplicity and very small footprint. We are having some problems with suppliers who are willing to let us have SDK environments that support DOS, so a variant of Windows like ReactOS would be fantastic.
I have no doubt that Longhorn (Windows 2005, or whatever they will call it) will be a "commercial success". There are just too many places that are committed either through the MSDN licenses or software assurance to totally ignore this new environment. Miguel de Icaza has spoken extensively about this subject, including postings here on
I think that the OS under Longhorn will be more along the line of the way Windows '95 was on top of MS-DOS 7.0 (it even reported it was 7.0 for versioning), but the majority of applications used the new gee-whiz tools (in this case dotNET) and tended to ignore the old-time software interfaces like the INT 21 protocols in DOS. In fact, I have no doubt that very soon Microsoft will totally abandon the Win32 API, and have told their developers that exactly that is going to happen. This doesn't mean that Win32 applications are going to go away, or that you should not develop a Win32 P.E. file, it is just that Microsoft is no longer going to support files that are compiled using that format.
This switch is already happening, and if you are used to the performance bonuses of native IA32 applications, you should be looking at supporting ReactOS. If you don't mind the performance hit of using CLR and the compiled byte codes of dotNET (which many applications developers, particularly the Quick & Dirty(tm) applications programmers that usually use Windows as an environment this way) are going to migrate to Longhorn. Visual Studio already supports this philosophy, so it should be no surprise.
Now the question is, when the next round of Visual Studio has deliberate bugs in it so applications written in that environment won't run under ReactOS or Mono, will people still buy that compiler suite?
I think the question could possibly be turned into:
Will Longhorn be relevant at the time ReactOS 1.0 is released?
I can't even begin to tell you how many developers and companies are currently stuck at Windows 2000, in part because they don't like the "extensions" done to Windows XP. A few that have moved into XP may make that their last Microsoft OS as well. Just because it has the Microsoft logo on the distribution box doesn't mean everybody is going to jump up and down trying to get it.
Keep in mind when Microsoft relesed Windows 2.0 (also called Windows 286... it had other names as well), it almost sank Microsoft as a company. With a huge investment of company resources, it really didn't sell. The same could be said about Windows NT versions 3.5 and earlier. Both of these products didn't have widespread industry support and were in many cases considered jokes because of bugs and other issues they were facing. The fact that MS-DOS version 6 was successful during this time was perhaps the only reason they are still a company now. That Microsoft did turn both product lines around is primarily due to deep pockets and a strong threat from competition that very easily could have kicked Microsoft totally out of the picture.
Issues that put MS in the gravy train with the current round of releases for Windows, keeping competitors out of the picture, simply don't apply to groups like ReactOS. Government agencies are going to stop the "bundling" contracts that gave MS a boost, and giving away the product for free (in typical open source fashion) means they can't underbid, or even buy out ReactOS. An attempt to buy out the ReactOS foundation (if it were possible) would only delay the release of an Open Source Windows-compatable operating system.
Longhorn has some interesting ideas, but many of them are being worked on by the Mono group. Most of the new stuff is dotNet-related. Those that Microsoft decides to push to a monopoly position through patent protection will only wither and die, because it will be obvious the usage terms of it will have (and must have) draconian licensing agreements. No intelligent software manager or CIO type is going to agree to use those software systems except for a few die-hard Microsoft fans, and even that only has a certain amount of momentum.
With Microsoft abandoning Windows '98 (there still is a huge installed base out there of '98 machines) there already is a market for a lean, clean Win32 environment that doesn't require a rewrite of the current software base. Longhorn is only going to be marginally backward compatable (like Windows '95 claimed to be but wasn't) and for the most part is a clean break from their past operating systems. This in part is why it has been delayed so much on release, because it really is essentially a whole new operating system from scratch, not a gradual refinement of previous systems.
This is a legitamate question. First of all, please visit the ReactOS website (not in the parent news story), as this an many other FAQs are answered there. (Sorry, it got slashdotted apparently even without the link, but the FAQs are there, really.)
/. hasn't generated more responses. ReactOS is on the side of Free Software, and everything in it can be compiled and used with exclusively open source tools. As was pointed out in the interview, ReactOS can compile and develop ReactOS (it is self-hosting), but all of the little annoying things that a typical developer doesn't likes havn't been worked out yet.
This is more of a case of options, rather than why one is better than the other. As was mentioned clearly in the interview, ReactOS and Wine are working together, and there is quite a bit of mutual support they can give each other. It is not one or the other, but rather many efforts can help both projects at the same time. In fact, as Wine is moving to support more Windows applications, it is necessary to work with even more kernel services.
These two projects are attacking the same problem, but from different directions. This is why the cross-pollenation efforts are even more valuable, because each group sees a different set of problems and finds good solutions often when the other group isn't quite looking there yet.
In terms of re-inventing Windows, this is the only group that I've seen that has succeeded. There have been other groups in the past that have tried, but almost all of their efforts have been folded into ReactOS in terms of active developers and design ideas. The unsung hero with all of this is Jason Filby, who has done a remarkable job of keeping this project going through litterally years of effort when even a command prompt was not available. He is the driving force that is keeping everything together, and a very approachable person as well. When this project succeeds, he is certainly somebody who deserves strong kudos from the open source community.
Why a free software version of Windows? I think this will be very important to think about when Longhorn comes out, but Microsoft show little to no support for legacy applications, and is more than willing to abandon platforms when it serves their purposes. This is a matter choice, and this project will give more options, not fewer.
If you are not familiar with the NT kernel, there really is some amazing architecture that from an OS viewpoint should be studied. It is more like the difference between a GM engine and a Ford engine (for those few amature auto mechanics out there who know what I'm talking about). Each has it own fans and critics, but comparing Unix to NT shows some significant design choices in the basic fundimentals of the operating system. Microsoft has muddied up the picture in part because there hasn't been (until ReactOS) an independent implementation of the NT kernel or with the exception of Wine an implementation of the Win32 API library.
This really is more the debate of propritary vs. open source, which is probably why this news posting on
If you want to see something really neat, try and get ReactOS running with Mono. Mono is aiming more for Linux compatability right now, but with ReactOS handling some of the Windows API issues, ReactOS+Mono will run many of dotNET applications that won't run under Linux. All of the command-line Mono development tools will currently run in ReactOS, and I think this is another untapped combination that hasn't really been followed.
I think you miss the point. By using ReactOS, you cut out the software bloat that MS throws in, and you can pare down the kernel to the bare elements. ReactOS allows you to work at a command-prompt only level, so if you have an application like a server or embedded controller that doesn't need a GUI, ReactOS is perfect. While I don't think this is a deliberate goal of this project, it would not be all that difficult to make a single floppy version of ReactOS, like QNX has done.
The really nice thing about this is if you have components you are adding to an embedded system, and the manufacturer has Windows device drivers, ReactOS will recognize them and they don't even need to be recompiled. This opens up a whole range of equipment options that would not normally be available under embedded Linux (although most embedded equipment companies are supporting Linux now... this wasn't always the case).
I don't know what is cheaper than free software, and the point here is that this increases flexability. I don't know about what you mean with hardware requirement, but I don't see too many 386 CPUs anymore, even among embedded systems. ReactOS will run on most of the common CPU systems found in embedded systems, particularly if you are already looking at a Linux-based system as well. This is an option, not a requirement.
If you are talking about using the Microsoft version of the NT 4.0 kernel in an embedded system, I would have to totally agree it is a mistake. I would still be careful about the "uneducated developers" you are thowing stones at, because there is a huge difference between the NT kernel and Windows CE (which truly is for the clueless developers). On raw technical merits, I would stand behind an NT-based kernel as much if not more than a unix-based kernel (like Linux).
I would hope that it would take on more the flavor of the old time passenger cruise lines of the late 19th & early 20th Centuries. Still, once space travel starts to really emerge, it is going to be a very capital intensive business. Almost all of the capital that Wall Street & other exchanges can dig up is going to help fuel this next economic expansion.
I predict that over the next 15-25 years you will see Wall Street (especially once the X-Prize has been won) get into space in a major way. You will see the whole dot Bomb thing happen all over again, unfortunately, with fly-by-night companies that do little but promise the Moon (this time in a more litteral fashion). Some companies are going to emerge and become very successful, but many others are going to take a whole lot of money from people and throw it down the drain.
If the X-Prize team list is an indication with over 26 different teams listed, once it has been proven to be a practical business you will see many others jump into the business. Companies like Boeing, Airbus, and Thiokol (all companies you seemed to miss) are more than likely going to come in and join the party as well. They all have some sort of rocketry/avaition experience, deep pockets, and an aire of respectability when they start producing spacecraft.
In this regard it would be more like the P.C. industry, where it started in a bunch of garages and small industrial parks, where several millionaires arose from relatively modest beginnings. In this case we have a few "modest" millionaires who are perhaps going to turn this into billions.
I think you don't understand solar sails.
The "sailing" effect of a solar sail is due to the Photoelectric Effect, the only real theory by Einstein that got him a Nobel Prize. Relativity was considered so radical and (at the time) unprovable that it was in a league of its own. BTW, this theory has absolutely nothing to do with Relativity... it was just another idea that Einstein played around with. Yes, this is the theory behind what makes photovoltaic cells work as well.
Getting back to solar sailing: Photons (not solar wind) hit the solar sails and raw energy from the photons in sunlight is directly converted into knetic energy that pushes the sail away from the sun. If anything, the solar wind actually increases drag to slow the craft down, but the photoelectric effect more than compensates for that issue. This isn't a contradiction of physics and Thomas Gold has been debunked.
A practical example of this effect and how it has already been used was with the launch of the Echo series of satellites. (More information can also be found here) Besides the ISS, these are the largest man-made objects ever to be launched into space, and that was back in 1960 & 1964. While these web pages say that they re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, my understanding was that they were pushed out of Earth orbit by solar forces, due to their low mass/area ratio. Certainly there were some significant effects on their orbits from solar activity, and this was carefully studied.
Karl,
I want to let you know, publicly, that I have totally appreciated your efforts at (trying) to work with ICANN and the whole process and fiasco of the elected board members at ICANN.
Most of the problems relating to domain names would have been resolved had ICANN been much more responsive to ordinary internet users. Yeah, a "democratic" ICANN would have injected a political flavor to the internet that currently isn't here, but I would prefer that over the current self-appointed monarchy that seems to be running the internet. It is unfortunate that the U.S. government also felt that democracy was a failed institution. At least certain members of that government (particularly the U.S. Dept. of Commerce) back elsewhen before the current setup.
You've gone over all this before, including on your website, so I don't want to take more bandwidth. Even so, thanks for all you've done.
My ancestors left Europe because of the huge mess that it was in. Yeah, that was 150+ years ago, and I will admit that Europe has changed some since then, but I really don't see how moving to Europe is really going to be that much of a solution. Certainly (as you seem to be advocating) a mass migration of Americans to Germany, for example, would create even more messes then it currently solves. BTW, my family is originally from Germany, and subtle aspects of how my family deals with issues still has a strongly German flavor.
I will say that I think that the E.U. is an interesting political movement, and has the potential of stabilizing a region of the world that will be beneficial.
Every person I know that has ever gone to France (I'm not talking about news reports... these are actual people and in most cases very close relatives like direct siblings or in-laws) has always noted how rude the people in France are. And this isn't just a sterotype. France seems to have a very difficult time assimilating immigrants, as evidenced by the current issues regarding the Muslim population there. I just can't see France willing to let my family come there, together with any sizable number of other Americans, without some sort of incredibly strong anti-American backlash far worse than the "Mexicans go home" attitude seen in many U.S. cities. Even by going to France, learning to speak French fluently, and adopting the culture there as my own I'm still going to have residual left over culture from America that would be resented by most people in France.
In general I'm not so sure I'd like the socialist governments in Europe, and I don't trust that the E.U. is going to stay together. WWII is just too recent of a memory to trust my life and that of my children/grandchildren to be able to face that kind of potential danger.
I wouldn't mind moving to Siberia (I'm not kidding here either), because at least it has wide open spaces, is under populated, wealth of resources, and it appears as though Russia is taking Civil Rights much more seriously than the U.S.A. If a group of 5,000 to 10,000 Americans moved as a group to build a community (Russia has history of peoples doing this in the past, just like similar settlements like this in the U.S.A.) that preserves some American culture but with loyalty to the Russian Government, that is at least a viable alternative IMHO. My complaint is that what the U.S.A. had in the past was wonderful, and it has been lost. I don't know how to regain that.
While on the national level it does seem hopeless, I have in the past, and continue to get involved in politics at the local level. I have been in shouting matches with the Mayor, attend city council meetings, attend the local caucus meetings to get involved in local party poltics, and worked with city council representitives to get some things changed at the local level. I have also sat down and lobbied with state legislators to discuss issues that I find personally importnat. Does that qualify as trying to fight the system?
I think that the war in Iraq is illegal, but for some different reasons than the current anti-war activists view it. President Bush, together with the U.S. Congress, should have declared a state of war in order to go into Iraq. That has sp
If you are suggesting that American citizens abandon their country, I would have to ask this most important question:
"Go where?"
In presuming that the reason why you would want to leave is because you are wearing a tin hat and afraid of the U.S. Government getting involved in your life, I would also have to ask, where else in the world could you go that you could escape from a corrupt tyrinical U.S. Government? Cuba? Syria? Iran? North Korea?
From my viewpoint, the list is very small and reads like a list of enemies of the U.S.A. that I would give a better than 50% probability that they will be invaded some time before the end of this century, also presuming a corrupt U.S. Government. Either that or internal political revolution (sponsored or not sponsored by the CIA...it doesn't matter for you personally) that would make the government friendly to the U.S.
If you wanted to escape I can't think of any place on this planet, including Antarctica, that would be safe from U.S. extradition and being able to bring you back to the U.S.A. unless you were always on the run like Osama bin Laden. And I wouldn't feel comfortable watching hundreds of people die from misguided attempts to kill me.
If you quietly leave the U.S.A. before you do anything to upset the U.S. Government, perhaps you would be safe from suspicion. But then, why are you leaving?
I'll admit that IMHO America has in some ways lost its promise of being the "Shining Beacon of Liberty", but despite all of the corruption, I've seen worse in other countries and at least usually the law works. There really are good judges that do really administer justice, and many others that are genuine in trying to make this country work. The question then becomes, Do you want to stay here, fight corruption, and work within the systems to make change, or have you given up (like Fantastic Lad) and hope that the corruption will lead to collapse, with ultimately thousands or millions dying in the process?
Also, it is much more realistic and easier to run to somewhere than run away from somewhere. That is why the question of where to go is so important. What country on the Earth offers the combination of freedom, domestic protection from war, and economic opportunites better than the U.S.A.?
If you are thinking about avoiding the military draft in the U.S.A., just make sure that the country you are moving to also isn't going to be trying to get you into their army. In the 1940's Canada would not have been a good place to try and dodge the military draft. They were more likely to send you to war than even the U.S.A., and as an outsider you would be a quick target. I even know U.S. citizens, because of their ancestry not because of their place of birth, must avoid going to certain countries because they will be drafted the minute they step into those countries. My brother-in-law is one of those, and he is the third generation removed from that country. What makes you certain that the U.S. Government won't eventually try that on you or your children?
Atheism has about as many variants as Christianity... probabally more.
Perhaps I could use a term a little more appropriate, like Secular-Humanism, which is much more specific in terms of theological viewpoint than simply the concept of somebody who rejects diety or any other sort of supernaturalism. These do indeed have organizations, even aspects that could be called in other context a "sacrament".
Some atheists I've seen go so far as to form "clubs" of common social groups of this particular viewpoint, mainly to take advantage of the social aspects of an organized religion without the theological overtones. Sometimes this is just for a beer and a round of Poker, but even these can take varied forms. If you've never heard about this before, then you are sheltered.
BTW, I did see a survey of Unitarian ministers that claimed over 65% of the ministers didn't believe in the existance of a God.
Although the U.S.S.R. was officially "atheist", it did indeed have a pantheon of "heros" that were "sacred", and if you ever went to visit Lenin's Tomb it was as much of a religious experience as any I've ever heard about or seen. I had a close friend who brought a camera into there (Lenin's tomb) pre-falling of the Berlin Wall, and he got a very interesting tour of Moscow in the back of a KGB car for over six hours. The only reason he came home was because he was the son of an American politican and they didn't want to turn it into an international incident.
BTW, you wanted me to point to at least "one religion that does not rely on supernatural mechanism for its existance". It can be argued that worship of the GNU/Linux gods can be a cult, but (un)fortunately most of the gods of that religious movement are still alive and able to tell you you are out of your mind to deal with the Church of Emacs as anything but a joke. It does fit the definition you were talking about, however.
You can also say that watching "Monday Night Football" can also be a religous experience for some people, with regular meeting times and requisite sacramental offerings. What I think of people that worship John Madden is another story.
Even then, you would probabally need to get permission from the nation who is the official registrar of that ship you are floating in. Almost all ships in the ocean, and all commercial vessels, are registered to a specific country, mainly to deal with maritime law and other subtle legal issues such as what country a child belongs to when they are born aboard ship, if a crime happens what country has juristiction, and should that ship be allowed to trade in a given port or not.
Ships registered to the U.S.A. are given protection of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, and an attack against an American flag ship is considered an act of war against the U.S.A., with all of the consequences that follow from that.
There are nations that do a "flag of convience" like Liberia, who only charge a modest licensing fee and do practically no inspections. (An inspection consisiting of "Yeah, the ship is there" is probabally a little bit too much for Liberia) Of course, the Liberian Navy isn't exactly going to go out of their way to help you out either.
The point here is that if you launch from a ship, even in international waters, you need to get permission from the government who you have the ship registered to. That is why I've suggested in the past that the Liberian Space Agency might end up with the largest fleet of space going craft, but even so you have to deal with at least some sort of government.
Who knows, maybe this can be a source of revenue for Nauru to suppliment their income from domain sales.
I think you are dismissing the Apollo flights too lightly. They were indeed ground breaking, widely talked about among the many people in the world (unlike the other explorations you mention with the Chinese and Vikings), and new techniques and technologies were developed to accomplish the missions.
At this point, we know that not only can you land on another planetary body, but its been done. Simply knowing it is possible is half of the battle when trying to do R&D. What would be sad is if the "Apollo is a hoax" crowd is able to take over the history lesson books, making future generations think it really is impossible to accomplish.
Viking settlement failed in part because technologically they were about equal with the Inuit people in north-eastern Canada. Indeed, the Inuit were actually better adapted for the local environment than the Vikings. There is strong reason to believe that the two groups (Vikings & natives peoples) more or less merged together into one society for sheer survival, with the dominating culture coming from the Inuit, rather than the more traditional pattern of being dominated by the Europeans.
The Chinese are, IMHO, a classic demonstration of what potential could be thrown away by a superpower when there is no other competition. Besides "uncivilized" people on the borders of China, there really wasn't anybody that could challenge the Chinese Emperors, and they turned inward to domestic problems.
Lunar lunology (geology on the moon), environmental conditions during the Apollo flights (including a lucky break that they took place during a solar minimum part of the sunspot cycle) and other factors made the Apollo flights truly historic.
That America has also turned inward like China did a millenia ago is true, but in this case modern China, together with India, Russia, the E.U., and other groups of people that can and do compete with America is going to keep America from staying too complacent. Japan has done far more to modernize American production techniques than could ever be possible without that country's technological drive.
Everything that a human needs for survival, except for some DNA in the form of seeds and genetic diversity of the people living on Mars, can be found on Mars. The only thing you really need to bring to Mars is the tools to make the tools that make the tools. While you are busy trying to build up the infrastructure to get this all to happen, yes, some initial supplies will have to be sent from Earth, and it may take decades or even centuries for Mars to be fully self-sufficient, but there is no doubt that the supplies are there. The basic elements of life, C-H-O-N (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen) are all found with abundance on Mars. Yes, not the same proportions that you find them and in the form you find them on Earth, but that just means you have to use your imagination to make them come together in a form that is more useful.
Other elements, like Iron and Silicon, are also found in great abundance on Mars, and even current industrial processes on Earth can extract them from minerals found on Mars. I doubt (but I may be surprised on this one) that you will find Coal deposits on Mars, but the truth is we don't know what we will find there. Mars has water ice and other elements.
In terms of natural organic expansion, I have no doubt that despite all of the precautions that NASA has done to deliberately decontaminate the space probes that have gone to Mars, that some form of Earth bacteria and blue-green algae have already made it to Mars. The real trick is to see what will happen if that is done deliberately. Life is already there, even if it wasn't there before.
As for a great barrier, travel across the seas has always been a great barrier. I have heard it suggested that it was sea travel from people in Australia that could most likely be considered the current "ancenstor" of modern mankind, not Africa. In order to navigate across the islands of south-east Asia, people needed to develop the intelligence and skills necessary to build boats that could travel across bodies of water where you couldn't see the shore on the other side. I don't see tranoceanic travel any different from that viewpoint than interplanetary travel, and indeed from a technological viewpoint we are well ahead of what our ancestors had to deal with in this sort of travel. Diseases like scurvy didn't make sense for early sea travllers, and often the early tranoceanic voyages would have people dying by dozens due to new environments they weren't used to. When the British Royal Navy insisted that each seaman eat one half of a Lime per day when at sea, they finally were able to eliminate this dreadful disease (of a lack of Vitimin C). We already know many of the physiological problems people will be facing when going to Mars, even before people have done it. To know more, we simply need to go. Transit times for going to Mars are in many ways very similar to transit times for travel between Europe and America in the 18th Century, and communication time is considerably less. King George III of England would have killed for a 1-3 hour method of communication with the Americas in the 1770's
The big deal about being listed is that, for the moment, SCO is currently a publicly traded company, so certain SEC regulations and sections of related laws apply to SCO and their behavior.
Once they get delisted, these rules no longer apply to them.
At the same time, if SCO gets delisted, it could bring about class-action lawsuits from the shareholders against the top company executives, and they would not get the coporate limited liability protection either. Delisting is an obvious and actionable cause that has specific legal consequences, and the SCO executives may not want to see that happen on their watch.
Still, as it looks like Baystar is going to have a majority stock interest in the company real soon (turning SCO into one of their subsideraires), I don't think that stock price is really going to matter much.
You are right, I'm not really going to care about the audio so much. In fact, I'm just going to store PCM data at first, but I'd like to do at least some compression with audio because it is relatively easy and there is no point in killing HD (& other archival data storage) space when at least some simple compression can make a huge difference.
The embedded controller is indeed going to be a full-featured PC (on a PC104 board), and there is a range of options to hook onto this platform. This is still pretty compact, about the size of the disc drive I used on the Apple ][ back elsewhen, even including floppy disc drive and I/O ports like keyboard, VGA video, and serial connectors. The final unit may not even have the floppy drive (used only for updating "firmware", and that can be done through the serial connector).
I'm a little vague on the specs in part because every thing else in this project is still in flux. I'm also having to deal with some non-technical people (who have the purse strings) that really don't know what they want either, so I'm trying to help in the specification arena where possible. They trust my recommendations, and I've already had a "thumbs up" for making a custom FPGA or other hardware core that will eventually be used for compression, but that is a long-term solution. The short-term solution is to make a cheap software-only application that can take advantage of existing off-the-shelf equipment.
I want to thank you and others who have responded to this request. I was reading through the responses earlier and people were saying "there aren't any commercial applications built using this codec yet", and I was thinking "I'm looking for a new video codec. Could this one work for me?" This project I'm working on has the potential of putting together many different talents and experiences I've had throughout my life, and I'm in a unique position that I can also bring open source specifications into the equation where normally closed specs like MPEG-4 would have normally been the rule of thumb. If I'm successful, this could bring a relatively obscure video codec like XviD into a more mainstream presence.
I just happen to be a software developer looking for new video codecs/encoding schemes and for me the sky is the limit. This will be a major commercial application in what ever form it finally takes place.
Maybe this should be an "Ask Slashdot" thing, but since many video folks are looking on this site, I might as well ask in this story.
(Without going into specifics of the project) I am starting with a totally clean sheet of paper here. What I need to do is be able to record several hours of video in a form that should be as lossless as possible (lossy formats are O.K., but it needs to have very good fidelity when the image size is restored). The video capture is going to happen in an embedded system, but playback will happen on a standard P.C. Playback is going to be a custom written application anyway, so it doesn't matter if it is currently supported by any common player.
Since I'm doing this as a clean sheet project, I'm also trying to use as many Open Source/Free Software tools as I can, although libraries in this case can only be LGPL (the main app will be totally propritary software, unless something else happens. This is still a possibility, so I am going to try and give back).
At the moment, due to some cheap hardware, we are implemented an MPEG-1 encoder for the system. This does a fair job, but I'd like to try and improve it.
I've thought about using PNG/MNG data files (MJPEG was also discussed), but the MNG spec isn't quite up to speed on A/V syncronization issues and the direction of the MNG group isn't quite where I like it to go. Still, I like the fairly good compression, lossless algorithms in the format and it is still an option.
MPEG-2 is an option I've looked at, mainly because I would be able to put it onto DVD players. Some plusses and minuses, but it really is more convience if this is the option we will use.
The Ogg formats are also something to look into, and they are more for full A/V quality compression. Certainly a candidate for me.
I'm not really all that familiar with MPEG-4, but it seems a huge jumble to me and means a lot of things to a lot of people, together with a bunch of misunderstanding fostered by equipment salesmen. (This is the coolest thing around, why don't you upgrade from that lousy MPEG-2 system to our new and improved MPEG-4 system!)
This system (XviD) does look interesting, and I like the open specifications of it particularly. Closed-specifications (where you have to pay $10,000 just to get a poorly written technical manual with NDA) are totally out of the question.
I guess I've looked around and would like to get some feedback as to what video encoding would you use on a totally clean sheet application if you had to encode video? Any takers?
It wasn't so much the strength, but with the very localized north & south poles (like I said, dozens of "poles", sometimes only 10 km apart.), it makes for a very different magnetic field than what you find right now on the Earth.
Originally planetary astronomers were looking for a classical Magnetosphere like is found on the Earth and Jupiter, but Mars simply doesn't have that because it isn't organized on a planetary scale.
An interesting side-effect to the paper suggested by the parent article is that planets may mean something more significant than simply a rock to anchor your building to. If a planetary body (like Mars or Veuns) can capture a portion of the solar wind and form a magnetic barrier to Cosmic Radiation, it might be more valuable than trying to make cities and settlements on smaller bodies that this effect wouldn't be nearly so strong, such as building in the Asteroids or even building Human constructed bodies such as the classical L-5 space habitats, at least until space born populations start becoming significant.
Several people have suggested that Mars is a dead-end for human settlement due to the fact that it too is at the bottom of a signficant gravity well. It is nice to see that potentially some theories that might support a manned Martian presence are being brought forth.
Mars does indeed have a significant magnetic field, it is just that it has several dozen north and south poles, which is the current theory about what will happen during the transition phase when the poles switch:
At first the poles weaken in strength.
New "North" & "South" poles start to appear in strage places, like in equatorial regions.
For a geologically brief period of time there are dozens to hundreds of magnetic "poles" scattered throughout the planet.
Eventually the number of poles start to drop, and the new magnetic "North" & "South" poles become more established and start to gain more strength. At this point the reversal is complete.
Mars appears to have gone geologically dead during the middle of one of these pole reversals, so Mars is also being used to provide a "snapshot" as to what the Earth might be like in the next 500 years.