D'oh, you're right. That was an EDO flight; turns out I'd misread the article and it actually flew 14 times, not twice. And yes, it'll extend a mission to 16 days, not 14. That'll teach me to post to Slashdot late at night...
This way, the ISS has an "emergency boat" or escape craft if something goes extremely wrong.
No, it wouldn't. The shuttle's strictly designed for short-term stays in space. Keep it there for more than about ten days and its cryogenics will boil, its fuel cells will run dry, its carbon dioxide scrubbers will saturate, and it'll generally start decaying. Hell, I don't even think it's completely airtight.
It is possible for the shuttle to use the ISS' power bus to reduce the load on the shuttle's own fuel cells. This can extend a shuttle mission up to fourteen days, although it does need to be docked to make it work. NASA was working on a system called the Extended Duration Orbiter for free flying missions. With this, a shuttle could stay in orbit for sixteen days; they built one, and flew it twice. The second time was on Columbia, and it didn't come down.
One of the great things about the Soyuz capsules is that they're designed for long-duration stays in space; they can last for months docked to the space station. That's why they're the preferred option for the ISS lifeboats; they try to keep one docked at all times. NASA was working on its own lifeboat, the X38 lifting body vehicle... it got cancelled, of course. Right now it looks like the next candidate will be the manned Dragon.
Personally, I think they should do an unmanned launch of the last shuttle with the cargo hold crammed full of the dangerous fuel tanks they wouldn't let the shuttle lift after Challenger. This can boost it up into a high orbit --- GEO's probably not possible, but that would be nice --- and there they just let it shut down and rot as an orbiting museum piece. Everyone will be able to see it, on the longest shuttle mission ever. And one day it'll form the core of a real museum of spacecraft, in orbit where they belong.
Any competent navigator knows to treat GPS as a tool for verifying where you are.
Once when sailing with my father in his 7m yacht last year, in Lochcarron, Scotland, I wanted to find our position and without thinking about it grabbed the hand-bearing compass and took a couple of bearings before plotting our location on the chart --- totally forgetting that we had a GPS. The whole process took about 20 seconds. Habit, I suppose (and a good one to get into).
Incidentally, I can recommend to anyone with an interest in maps to learn how to find their position using a hand-bearing compass. It's very easy, dead handy, and gives you a new appreciation for landmarks and sightlines. You'll never see a landscape the same way again.
I run my home server off one --- SMTP, spam filtering, IMAP, a web server, my internal DHCP, DNS, SMB, NFS... it all works beautifully. Even when I become briefly famous and my web server received 80000 hits in one day it didn't even wobble. It's running off a home made SSD made up of four 16GB USB keys and it's dead silent and reliable, running Debian.
But it's not perfect: the USB chipset is a bit dodgy. I have five hard disks, an ethernet widget, and a few other devices hanging off the SheevaPlug's one USB port and it's not happy --- I had to spend some time fiddling with it before it ran reliably, and there's still a nasty bug where every now and again the USB ethernet adapter stops processing packets (although the internal ethernet port is fine). (Replugging the USB ethernet adapter fixes it.)
I've been looking at the GuruPlug with great interest; real eSATA and two USB ports would make my life much easier, but I've held off getting one because of the heat problems. Maybe this DreamPlug will be the solution.
I am also curious to know as to whether the values on the money axis are normalised for spending power --- I suspect not, judging by the initial spread of figures. Simply put, $100 in Africa in 1880 is worth a hell of a lot more than $100 in New York in 2010, and so displaying them in the same place on the graph is misleading.
It would also be kinda nice if whenever he said 'look at this!' they didn't zoom in on his face, so making it impossible to see what we were supposed to be looking at.
All is not lost; JAXA's IKAROS is doing just fine. According to their blog (no link because accurséd Slashdot won't let me paste into text boxes) it did a flyby of Venus a few days ago and is now on its way... nowhere in particular (as a propulsion testbed it's more important that it is going than where it goes). But they've demonstrated deployment, acceleration, attitude control and power generation; it's now a fully functional interplanetary spacecraft powered purely by the sun.
Of course, given that its tiny solar sail produces a thrust of about 1mN, which given IKAROS' 300kg mass comes out at about 3 um/s^2 or approximately 0.0000003g, I don't think it'll be blazing across the solar system any time soon; but it does show that the whole principle works. Now we need a full size one (and JAXA's planning a solar sail-powered Jupiter missing in the late 2010s).
...I couldn't use Emacs or shell editing without it. Beats me why it's labelled 'caps lock', though --- the other control keys on the keyboard are all labelled 'Ctrl'.
Has Microsoft really turned a corner and started offering something people want and need?
It's all thanks to Oracle. They've displaced Microsoft as the Most Evil Company. Now that Microsoft has lost the top spot, the pressure's no longer on them, and they've suddenly realised that they don't have to keep churning out evil products any more and can no concentrate on producing stuff that works.
You just wait: they're already dabbling in open source, and this trend will continue. They'll never outright say they were wrong, but slowly but surely they'll gradually morph into an OS-friendly company like IBM.
I'll admit to not being terribly interested in PDF for niche OSs like Windows --- although on the few occasions I have to boot Windows I admit that I find myself actively enjoying not loading Acrobat Reader --- so I'm more interested in whether PDF viewing is available for Chromium yet. PDFs are hateful, but sometimes I have to read the damned things, and even apps like evince are cumbersome and slow. Chrome's inline PDF viewer is awesome, fast and slick and best of all, largely invisible; PDFs just work, without needing to faff around with downloads and spawning external apps. It doesn't make PDFs any less hateful but it does minimise the pain.
But inline PDF doesn't seem to be available for Linux, and there's very little information about why. I have heard rumours that the PDF code isn't open source. It would be really nice if there was some communication on this...
...but YOU would vanish into the blackness, you'd stop living, you'd die.
This is the fundamental assumption you're making that drives your argument: that the soul is distinct from the body. Go look up 'dualism (philosophy of mind)' on Wikipedia and you can read all about it.
Of course, there's no evidence of this actually happening, as any hypothetical soul is unobservable. Every now and again somebody wraps the same argument up in quasi-scientific terms, usually using the word 'quantum', but right now dualism is a null hypothesis, untestable and therefore fundamentally uninteresting.
However, if the state-of-the-art eventually does allow us to duplicate a brain, suddenly dualism does become testable (at least, provable; not necessarily disprovable).
To make the point more clear, what if I made an identical copy and booted both at the same time. Do you suddenly develop a psychic link with your other self, experiencing both existences at once, living in two different places?... ridiculous.
If dualism is true, then there are three options: firstly, you retain the soul, but the copy has no soul. In this situation the copy won't work (this is an assumption, but if an ensouled brain behaves identically to an unensouled brain, then the soul is irrelevant). This is really interesting, because the body is a fundamentally material construct, and so this gives us a way to investigate how the soul interacts with the body, and could even lead to a science of manipulating souls. (Whether this is a good thing I'll leave up to the ethicists.)
Secondly, the copy gets the same soul as you do. This means both you and the copy end up being the same person. This pretty much leads to, as you say, a psychic link (because otherwise you and the copy would have divergent experiences, making you different people). This is also really interesting, because it gives us another (different) handle on how souls behave. If we separate you from the copy too far, does one of you die because the single soul can't 'stretch' between the two bodies? If so, how far? If not, is there a light-speed lag in information transfer? If there is, how does the soul retain coherence? If not, does this violate causality? What about relativistic effects applied to a single body?
Thirdly, the copy gets a new soul, acquired by whatever mechanism binds souls to infants. This is less interesting, because it's indistinguishable from the non-dualist case (see below). However, if the new individual turns out to differ from you in ways that can't be explained by divergent experiences, it does give us a weaker but still interesting handle on soul/body interactions by investigating why they differ.
If dualism is not true, then the mind is encoded entirely in the state of the brain, which is being duplicated: so what we end up with are two yous, each believing they are you and with continuous memories of being you.
If you're interested in this stuff, I suggest you go out and read Greg Egan's Permutation City. Or Dispora. Or Schild's Ladder. Hell, basically any of his books, although he does explore the question from the non-dualist point of view (but in very interesting ways).
Seriously, it is the most god awful programming environment I've ever had to use, and I have worked with a lot of different mobile operating systems (including some you've never heard of). Symbian has about five different (incompatible!) string classes. Symbian has its own home made exception mechanism built with macros and longjmp() which only allows you to throw integers and doesn't unwind the stack when you throw an exception. But that's okay because Symbian's also got a thing called a 'cleanup stack' which is a complicated and fragile way of allowing you to automatically do the cleanup in only 95% of the code it would have taken to do it manually. The Symbian standard data storage objects allocate memory in their constructors but don't free it again in their destructors. Somewhere, Bjarne Stroustrup is screaming.
The operating system itself is just as bad: it's a microkernel protected mode operating system with a strong emphasis on message passing... but it's also got a big writable shared memory area for use by the kernel, thus meaning it combines the worst aspects of microkernel operating systems (multiple slow context switches when calling OS components), protected mode operating systems (MMU and cache overhead) and unprotected operating systems (bugs can scribble over kernel memory and crash the system).
Let's not talk about the development environment, which is a chronically slow maze of perl scripts and autogenerated makefiles using a badly parsed and badly documented scripting language and which forces you to arrange the source files how it wants them, and not how your project wants them.
Symbian's big problem is chronic Not Invented Here syndrome. Everything is weird and different. It feels like the original designers didn't have enough oversight, and their pet ideas ran away with them and became top-heavy with kludges because nobody forced them to refactor the underlying concept once the problems arose. Those damned strings are a perfect example. Once they invented HBufC (an immutable string which is resizable and assignable!) someone should have said, um, guys, I think you're doing it wrong.
Usually at this point someone pops up and says something like, but C++ didn't have exceptions when Symbian was designed! (There's been solid support for exceptions in C++ compilers for about 15 years now.) Or, but this whole cleanup stack/string descriptor nonsense is needed to make applications run well on low memory systems! (No, good application design make applications run well on low memory systems.) Or, but you can do all those things if you use OpenC++/PIPS! (Unless you want to write code with a GUI.) These are not good reasons why we need to perpetrate such an abomination of an operating system. They are good reasons why it needs to be taken out and shot and stop sucking up programmer time. Even Windows CE is less evil to code for than Symbian, because even though it sucks, it at least allows us to use the programming skills we learnt on other platforms rather than forcing us to learn everything from scratch.
Now: things have gotten a lot better recently. Symbian did do a major push to modernise a lot of this crap with projects such as OpenC++ (real C++ on top of Symbian, although it's not useful for GUI code) and replacing the ghastly Series 60 API with Qt. The Qt stuff is particularly interesting because it also acts as an OS isolation layer, which means you can do things with the sane Qt APIs instead of the insane Symbian APIs. I'll admit that I've never had any contact with this, because our product is really aimed at Series 60, and it is faintly possible that if they do a good enough job they might make Symbian usable again. But if you're going to write code in Qt, why not just target Meego instead? And even if you do use Qt on Symbian, it's still built on top of all the Symbian crap underneath, and as soon as you stray out of Qt's comfort zone you are going to have to start wading through that crap.
Please. Let us work together to make the world a better place and just let Symbian die.
I know that Deep Impact uses its spare time for exoplanet hunting --- apparently, a flaw in its primary telescope mirror makes it ideal for photometric observation of stars --- but does anyone know if it's going anywhere interesting after the Hartley 2 flyby? Nobody seems to have mentioned anything.
You're not talking about 1980's Teletext, are you? An achingly slow way of distributing 1kB information pages by transmitting data during the vertical blanking interval. It was incredibly popular in the UK for television listings, news and (strangely) holidays.
Also made famous by the BBC Micro, which had a teletext chip in it which could be used as an alternative to its framebuffer graphics modes. As teletext allows you to do eight colour text and primitive block graphics while only using 1kB of video RAM, it was really, really popular, which is why a whole generation of programmers today associate 129 with 'red' and 141 with 'double height'. (I wonder if you can still get the video decoder chips used? They'd be great for homebrew computers.)
Right now the ampere is actually defined as the current needed to apply a certain force in newtons to an object between two conductors; and newtons are defined as the force needed to accelerate a mass of 1kg at 1m/s/s. So you can't know what an ampere is unless you also know what a kilogram is.
So, um, does this all really matter? In practice, that is.
Yes, vitally so --- consistent units are the basis for all engineering, and a lot of SI units are defined in terms of the kilogram. As the various IPKs around the world all slowly diverge in mass from each other, it becomes less possible to know what a kilogram actually is. As the error increases, our ability to measure things gradually degrades, which means that there's more and more error in our machining.
Oddly enough, back in about 1780, the US was desperate to switch to the new metric standard that was being developed by France.
The reason why the US didn't go for it was the definition of the metre. Benjamin Franklin, who was a pretty good scientist when he wasn't being distracted by all this political nonsense, was unhappy with the French definition, which was a certain ratio of the Earth's circumference. The trouble with this is that not only is it practically unmeasurable, but it's not even a knowable value, as it changes depending on what you consider to be the Earth's surface. Franklin was aware that industry can always use as much precision as it can get. Events bore him out as the first metre artifact made turned out to be out by 0.2mm.
Instead he advocated an alternate definition based on the swing of a pendulum of a fixed period. This was a knowable value; it could be theoretically calculated to as much precision as your definition of the second. As the second was at the time was based on the length of the average solar day it could be determined as precisely as you could build your telescopes, it was a much more useful definition.
Unfortunately for complicated political reasons France was unwilling to go with this (possibly because their arch enemies, the British, were also considering a pendulum-based definition), so Franklin decided to stay with home-grown units rather than adopting the new metric system.
So if Franklin had been just a little bit more convincing when addressing the committees in Paris, the US might have been one of the driving forces of metricisation, and maybe my web browser would have the word 'metre' in its spellchecker dictionary.
If people are interested in the state of the art in industrial automation, they should watch this video. It's a demo reel for ABB FlexPicker robots, used for food processing --- the sequence of a set of robots carefully arranging sausages on a conveyor belt into rows for packaging is particularly impressive. They seem to use a combination of vacuum picking and conventional manipulators depending on the foodstuff (each production line is customised, of course).
There's lots of other ABB robotics videos, all of which are awesome --- I get the impression they're really proud of their stuff.
Last time I used Enlightenment it was fast, flexible, pleasant to use, and so incredibly full of bugs that I had to switch back to another window manager almost immediately --- such embarrasing things as full-screen windows drifting across the screen and icons disappearing from the system tray. If they'd fixed these things I'd switch back in a moment.
OpenGEU looks very pretty (once I found a video of it), but I'm unsure as to how usable it would be --- I'd want to turn a lot of the effects shown off because they'd annoy me. I also notice that they didn't seem to demo window resizing. It's incredibly hard to make X windows resize gracefully, which is why Ubuntu's default compiz settings disable live resizing completely. Given that resizing windows is one of the most common operations I want to do on my desktop, second only to moving windows, I'd much rather have live resizing and no effects that fancy effects but no live resizing.
Oddly enough, after using both stock Android and Sense, I can't stand Sense and would much, much rather have the standard Android UI. I think Sense is clunky and ugly and full of pointless changes (such as replacing a lot of the standard Android tabbed activities with strange ones with the tabs at the bottom and icons instead of textual labels).
You may be interested to know that a colleague of mine recently reflashed his HTC Desire with a standard Froyo setup using the HTC drivers. He's now getting almost twice the battery life that he was with the HTC firmware.
(Developer rant: Also, HTC just plain broke a lot of stuff with Sense; the different colour scheme, for example, has brightened the background colour of selected tabs so much that any third-party Android application that has designed its icons according to the Froyo style guide is now showing the user white icons against an off-white background, which is not user friendly.)
Well. The author's careful use of the word prairie indicates that it might be talking about Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie (which I've barely heard of and never read), who died in 1957. Or it might instead be talking about Laura Houghtaling Ingalls, pilot, who died in 1967 (who I hadn't heard of). Either way it's a really sodding useless metaphor. Rule #1 of pop culture: make sure your audience knows what the hell you're talking about...
I was faced with precisely this problem a few years ago. I ended up wroting a tool called WordGrinder: it's a console-mode word processor that supports just enough style to be useful (italics, underline, etc) and a clutter-free display. If you run it in a full screen terminal, you can configure it so that the only thing visible on the screen are your words.
It's not a text editor; it's a word processor, which means it's oriented around prose, so it understands paragraphs, wrapping, it renders italics and underline in an appropriate manner (termcap emphasis and underline respectively), it's got word count, paragraph count, etc, it's got some basic features like table-of-contents navigation (allowing to skip around very big documents quickly), subdocuments, scratchpad documents, and so on. The interface is menu-driven but you can rebind any menu item to any hotkey, which means you can configure it pretty much as you like. And it supports Unicode, so you're not limited to writing in English.
I've written about 70k words on it, and it works very well. As far as I know it is the only application in its particular niche for Unices; I get a small but steady stream of downloads. It'll even run on Windows but looks pretty sucky (I've been working on a better GDI renderer for Windows, but, well, the Windows GDI API is pretty sucky too and it's harder than it looks).
Slashdot Mirror
D'oh, you're right. That was an EDO flight; turns out I'd misread the article and it actually flew 14 times, not twice. And yes, it'll extend a mission to 16 days, not 14. That'll teach me to post to Slashdot late at night...
This way, the ISS has an "emergency boat" or escape craft if something goes extremely wrong.
No, it wouldn't. The shuttle's strictly designed for short-term stays in space. Keep it there for more than about ten days and its cryogenics will boil, its fuel cells will run dry, its carbon dioxide scrubbers will saturate, and it'll generally start decaying. Hell, I don't even think it's completely airtight.
It is possible for the shuttle to use the ISS' power bus to reduce the load on the shuttle's own fuel cells. This can extend a shuttle mission up to fourteen days, although it does need to be docked to make it work. NASA was working on a system called the Extended Duration Orbiter for free flying missions. With this, a shuttle could stay in orbit for sixteen days; they built one, and flew it twice. The second time was on Columbia, and it didn't come down.
One of the great things about the Soyuz capsules is that they're designed for long-duration stays in space; they can last for months docked to the space station. That's why they're the preferred option for the ISS lifeboats; they try to keep one docked at all times. NASA was working on its own lifeboat, the X38 lifting body vehicle... it got cancelled, of course. Right now it looks like the next candidate will be the manned Dragon.
Personally, I think they should do an unmanned launch of the last shuttle with the cargo hold crammed full of the dangerous fuel tanks they wouldn't let the shuttle lift after Challenger. This can boost it up into a high orbit --- GEO's probably not possible, but that would be nice --- and there they just let it shut down and rot as an orbiting museum piece. Everyone will be able to see it, on the longest shuttle mission ever. And one day it'll form the core of a real museum of spacecraft, in orbit where they belong.
Once when sailing with my father in his 7m yacht last year, in Lochcarron, Scotland, I wanted to find our position and without thinking about it grabbed the hand-bearing compass and took a couple of bearings before plotting our location on the chart --- totally forgetting that we had a GPS. The whole process took about 20 seconds. Habit, I suppose (and a good one to get into).
Incidentally, I can recommend to anyone with an interest in maps to learn how to find their position using a hand-bearing compass. It's very easy, dead handy, and gives you a new appreciation for landmarks and sightlines. You'll never see a landscape the same way again.
But it's not perfect: the USB chipset is a bit dodgy. I have five hard disks, an ethernet widget, and a few other devices hanging off the SheevaPlug's one USB port and it's not happy --- I had to spend some time fiddling with it before it ran reliably, and there's still a nasty bug where every now and again the USB ethernet adapter stops processing packets (although the internal ethernet port is fine). (Replugging the USB ethernet adapter fixes it.)
I've been looking at the GuruPlug with great interest; real eSATA and two USB ports would make my life much easier, but I've held off getting one because of the heat problems. Maybe this DreamPlug will be the solution.
It would also be kinda nice if whenever he said 'look at this!' they didn't zoom in on his face, so making it impossible to see what we were supposed to be looking at.
All is not lost; JAXA's IKAROS is doing just fine. According to their blog (no link because accurséd Slashdot won't let me paste into text boxes) it did a flyby of Venus a few days ago and is now on its way... nowhere in particular (as a propulsion testbed it's more important that it is going than where it goes). But they've demonstrated deployment, acceleration, attitude control and power generation; it's now a fully functional interplanetary spacecraft powered purely by the sun.
Of course, given that its tiny solar sail produces a thrust of about 1mN, which given IKAROS' 300kg mass comes out at about 3 um/s^2 or approximately 0.0000003g, I don't think it'll be blazing across the solar system any time soon; but it does show that the whole principle works. Now we need a full size one (and JAXA's planning a solar sail-powered Jupiter missing in the late 2010s).
...I couldn't use Emacs or shell editing without it. Beats me why it's labelled 'caps lock', though --- the other control keys on the keyboard are all labelled 'Ctrl'.
He's right about the 'sordid' bit, though...
Has Microsoft really turned a corner and started offering something people want and need?
It's all thanks to Oracle. They've displaced Microsoft as the Most Evil Company. Now that Microsoft has lost the top spot, the pressure's no longer on them, and they've suddenly realised that they don't have to keep churning out evil products any more and can no concentrate on producing stuff that works.
You just wait: they're already dabbling in open source, and this trend will continue. They'll never outright say they were wrong, but slowly but surely they'll gradually morph into an OS-friendly company like IBM.
But inline PDF doesn't seem to be available for Linux, and there's very little information about why. I have heard rumours that the PDF code isn't open source. It would be really nice if there was some communication on this...
...but YOU would vanish into the blackness, you'd stop living, you'd die.
This is the fundamental assumption you're making that drives your argument: that the soul is distinct from the body. Go look up 'dualism (philosophy of mind)' on Wikipedia and you can read all about it.
Of course, there's no evidence of this actually happening, as any hypothetical soul is unobservable. Every now and again somebody wraps the same argument up in quasi-scientific terms, usually using the word 'quantum', but right now dualism is a null hypothesis, untestable and therefore fundamentally uninteresting.
However, if the state-of-the-art eventually does allow us to duplicate a brain, suddenly dualism does become testable (at least, provable; not necessarily disprovable).
To make the point more clear, what if I made an identical copy and booted both at the same time. Do you suddenly develop a psychic link with your other self, experiencing both existences at once, living in two different places? ... ridiculous.
If dualism is true, then there are three options: firstly, you retain the soul, but the copy has no soul. In this situation the copy won't work (this is an assumption, but if an ensouled brain behaves identically to an unensouled brain, then the soul is irrelevant). This is really interesting, because the body is a fundamentally material construct, and so this gives us a way to investigate how the soul interacts with the body, and could even lead to a science of manipulating souls. (Whether this is a good thing I'll leave up to the ethicists.)
Secondly, the copy gets the same soul as you do. This means both you and the copy end up being the same person. This pretty much leads to, as you say, a psychic link (because otherwise you and the copy would have divergent experiences, making you different people). This is also really interesting, because it gives us another (different) handle on how souls behave. If we separate you from the copy too far, does one of you die because the single soul can't 'stretch' between the two bodies? If so, how far? If not, is there a light-speed lag in information transfer? If there is, how does the soul retain coherence? If not, does this violate causality? What about relativistic effects applied to a single body?
Thirdly, the copy gets a new soul, acquired by whatever mechanism binds souls to infants. This is less interesting, because it's indistinguishable from the non-dualist case (see below). However, if the new individual turns out to differ from you in ways that can't be explained by divergent experiences, it does give us a weaker but still interesting handle on soul/body interactions by investigating why they differ.
If dualism is not true, then the mind is encoded entirely in the state of the brain, which is being duplicated: so what we end up with are two yous, each believing they are you and with continuous memories of being you.
If you're interested in this stuff, I suggest you go out and read Greg Egan's Permutation City. Or Dispora. Or Schild's Ladder. Hell, basically any of his books, although he does explore the question from the non-dualist point of view (but in very interesting ways).
...I have this to say about Symbian:
JUST.
DIE.
Seriously, it is the most god awful programming environment I've ever had to use, and I have worked with a lot of different mobile operating systems (including some you've never heard of). Symbian has about five different (incompatible!) string classes. Symbian has its own home made exception mechanism built with macros and longjmp() which only allows you to throw integers and doesn't unwind the stack when you throw an exception. But that's okay because Symbian's also got a thing called a 'cleanup stack' which is a complicated and fragile way of allowing you to automatically do the cleanup in only 95% of the code it would have taken to do it manually. The Symbian standard data storage objects allocate memory in their constructors but don't free it again in their destructors. Somewhere, Bjarne Stroustrup is screaming.
The operating system itself is just as bad: it's a microkernel protected mode operating system with a strong emphasis on message passing... but it's also got a big writable shared memory area for use by the kernel, thus meaning it combines the worst aspects of microkernel operating systems (multiple slow context switches when calling OS components), protected mode operating systems (MMU and cache overhead) and unprotected operating systems (bugs can scribble over kernel memory and crash the system).
Let's not talk about the development environment, which is a chronically slow maze of perl scripts and autogenerated makefiles using a badly parsed and badly documented scripting language and which forces you to arrange the source files how it wants them, and not how your project wants them.
Symbian's big problem is chronic Not Invented Here syndrome. Everything is weird and different. It feels like the original designers didn't have enough oversight, and their pet ideas ran away with them and became top-heavy with kludges because nobody forced them to refactor the underlying concept once the problems arose. Those damned strings are a perfect example. Once they invented HBufC (an immutable string which is resizable and assignable!) someone should have said, um, guys, I think you're doing it wrong.
Usually at this point someone pops up and says something like, but C++ didn't have exceptions when Symbian was designed! (There's been solid support for exceptions in C++ compilers for about 15 years now.) Or, but this whole cleanup stack/string descriptor nonsense is needed to make applications run well on low memory systems! (No, good application design make applications run well on low memory systems.) Or, but you can do all those things if you use OpenC++/PIPS! (Unless you want to write code with a GUI.) These are not good reasons why we need to perpetrate such an abomination of an operating system. They are good reasons why it needs to be taken out and shot and stop sucking up programmer time. Even Windows CE is less evil to code for than Symbian, because even though it sucks, it at least allows us to use the programming skills we learnt on other platforms rather than forcing us to learn everything from scratch.
Now: things have gotten a lot better recently. Symbian did do a major push to modernise a lot of this crap with projects such as OpenC++ (real C++ on top of Symbian, although it's not useful for GUI code) and replacing the ghastly Series 60 API with Qt. The Qt stuff is particularly interesting because it also acts as an OS isolation layer, which means you can do things with the sane Qt APIs instead of the insane Symbian APIs. I'll admit that I've never had any contact with this, because our product is really aimed at Series 60, and it is faintly possible that if they do a good enough job they might make Symbian usable again. But if you're going to write code in Qt, why not just target Meego instead? And even if you do use Qt on Symbian, it's still built on top of all the Symbian crap underneath, and as soon as you stray out of Qt's comfort zone you are going to have to start wading through that crap.
Please. Let us work together to make the world a better place and just let Symbian die.
I know that Deep Impact uses its spare time for exoplanet hunting --- apparently, a flaw in its primary telescope mirror makes it ideal for photometric observation of stars --- but does anyone know if it's going anywhere interesting after the Hartley 2 flyby? Nobody seems to have mentioned anything.
You're not talking about 1980's Teletext, are you? An achingly slow way of distributing 1kB information pages by transmitting data during the vertical blanking interval. It was incredibly popular in the UK for television listings, news and (strangely) holidays.
Also made famous by the BBC Micro, which had a teletext chip in it which could be used as an alternative to its framebuffer graphics modes. As teletext allows you to do eight colour text and primitive block graphics while only using 1kB of video RAM, it was really, really popular, which is why a whole generation of programmers today associate 129 with 'red' and 141 with 'double height'. (I wonder if you can still get the video decoder chips used? They'd be great for homebrew computers.)
Right now the ampere is actually defined as the current needed to apply a certain force in newtons to an object between two conductors; and newtons are defined as the force needed to accelerate a mass of 1kg at 1m/s/s. So you can't know what an ampere is unless you also know what a kilogram is.
So, um, does this all really matter? In practice, that is.
Yes, vitally so --- consistent units are the basis for all engineering, and a lot of SI units are defined in terms of the kilogram. As the various IPKs around the world all slowly diverge in mass from each other, it becomes less possible to know what a kilogram actually is. As the error increases, our ability to measure things gradually degrades, which means that there's more and more error in our machining.
Oddly enough, back in about 1780, the US was desperate to switch to the new metric standard that was being developed by France.
The reason why the US didn't go for it was the definition of the metre. Benjamin Franklin, who was a pretty good scientist when he wasn't being distracted by all this political nonsense, was unhappy with the French definition, which was a certain ratio of the Earth's circumference. The trouble with this is that not only is it practically unmeasurable, but it's not even a knowable value, as it changes depending on what you consider to be the Earth's surface. Franklin was aware that industry can always use as much precision as it can get. Events bore him out as the first metre artifact made turned out to be out by 0.2mm.
Instead he advocated an alternate definition based on the swing of a pendulum of a fixed period. This was a knowable value; it could be theoretically calculated to as much precision as your definition of the second. As the second was at the time was based on the length of the average solar day it could be determined as precisely as you could build your telescopes, it was a much more useful definition.
Unfortunately for complicated political reasons France was unwilling to go with this (possibly because their arch enemies, the British, were also considering a pendulum-based definition), so Franklin decided to stay with home-grown units rather than adopting the new metric system.
So if Franklin had been just a little bit more convincing when addressing the committees in Paris, the US might have been one of the driving forces of metricisation, and maybe my web browser would have the word 'metre' in its spellchecker dictionary.
If people are interested in the state of the art in industrial automation, they should watch this video. It's a demo reel for ABB FlexPicker robots, used for food processing --- the sequence of a set of robots carefully arranging sausages on a conveyor belt into rows for packaging is particularly impressive. They seem to use a combination of vacuum picking and conventional manipulators depending on the foodstuff (each production line is customised, of course).
There's lots of other ABB robotics videos, all of which are awesome --- I get the impression they're really proud of their stuff.
Last time I used Enlightenment it was fast, flexible, pleasant to use, and so incredibly full of bugs that I had to switch back to another window manager almost immediately --- such embarrasing things as full-screen windows drifting across the screen and icons disappearing from the system tray. If they'd fixed these things I'd switch back in a moment.
OpenGEU looks very pretty (once I found a video of it), but I'm unsure as to how usable it would be --- I'd want to turn a lot of the effects shown off because they'd annoy me. I also notice that they didn't seem to demo window resizing. It's incredibly hard to make X windows resize gracefully, which is why Ubuntu's default compiz settings disable live resizing completely. Given that resizing windows is one of the most common operations I want to do on my desktop, second only to moving windows, I'd much rather have live resizing and no effects that fancy effects but no live resizing.
Oddly enough, after using both stock Android and Sense, I can't stand Sense and would much, much rather have the standard Android UI. I think Sense is clunky and ugly and full of pointless changes (such as replacing a lot of the standard Android tabbed activities with strange ones with the tabs at the bottom and icons instead of textual labels).
You may be interested to know that a colleague of mine recently reflashed his HTC Desire with a standard Froyo setup using the HTC drivers. He's now getting almost twice the battery life that he was with the HTC firmware.
(Developer rant: Also, HTC just plain broke a lot of stuff with Sense; the different colour scheme, for example, has brightened the background colour of selected tabs so much that any third-party Android application that has designed its icons according to the Froyo style guide is now showing the user white icons against an off-white background, which is not user friendly.)
Actually he's Indian (go read The Mysterious Island).
Trust Nemo.
Honestly, if you can't trust a fictious post-traumatic stress disorder victim vigilante with his own nuclear-powered submarine, who can you trust?
Well. The author's careful use of the word prairie indicates that it might be talking about Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie (which I've barely heard of and never read), who died in 1957. Or it might instead be talking about Laura Houghtaling Ingalls, pilot, who died in 1967 (who I hadn't heard of). Either way it's a really sodding useless metaphor. Rule #1 of pop culture: make sure your audience knows what the hell you're talking about...
I was faced with precisely this problem a few years ago. I ended up wroting a tool called WordGrinder: it's a console-mode word processor that supports just enough style to be useful (italics, underline, etc) and a clutter-free display. If you run it in a full screen terminal, you can configure it so that the only thing visible on the screen are your words.
It's not a text editor; it's a word processor, which means it's oriented around prose, so it understands paragraphs, wrapping, it renders italics and underline in an appropriate manner (termcap emphasis and underline respectively), it's got word count, paragraph count, etc, it's got some basic features like table-of-contents navigation (allowing to skip around very big documents quickly), subdocuments, scratchpad documents, and so on. The interface is menu-driven but you can rebind any menu item to any hotkey, which means you can configure it pretty much as you like. And it supports Unicode, so you're not limited to writing in English.
I've written about 70k words on it, and it works very well. As far as I know it is the only application in its particular niche for Unices; I get a small but steady stream of downloads. It'll even run on Windows but looks pretty sucky (I've been working on a better GDI renderer for Windows, but, well, the Windows GDI API is pretty sucky too and it's harder than it looks).
Ah, you must be a Feyntube user too!