You're missing one point, the OpenGL entry points on Windows are owned by Microsoft and they haven't updated in years and won't.
wglGetProcAddress is pretty much it or you could use one of the popular extension wrappers, like teh wrangler.
Feel free to try to get every app that calls OpenGL on windows to distribute a new interface, after getting all the hardware vendors to agree on this of course as Microsoft tries to muscle people out of cooperating.
Re:Why no comparison with D3D?
on
OpenGL 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Hardware tends not to be very object oriented and C++ can quite happily call C.
While I agree OO has advantages in some situations with a low level graphics API I don't think that's the case the only real omission in OpenGL caused by the C interface is function overloading for the various argument types to a few functions. That would clean up a few things.
In 3D graphics OO really kicks into it's own when it comes to higher level APIs like scene graphs and there are numerous examples. These can and do benefit greatly from OO design but nobody has come up with a compelling low level hardware interface that justified OO. Sure you could wrap a few things in a class or two but there's no compelling architectural justification and attepmts to wrap OpenGL in a trivial namespace class and call it OO are horribly naive and misguided.
No, YOU try putting it into perspective. Your argument is exactly what is wrong with profligate spending in America. "A billion dollard here, a billion dollars there and pretty soon you're talking about big money". 260 million bucks is 260 million bucks and toothpaste has a significant health benefit and a return on investment. The spending in this case was pure money down the drain.
This thread is full of sheep willing to blindly accept this failure as a difficult job well done. That frankly is F#@&*ing unmitigated *bullshit*.
NASA could screw up all day long at the most trivial of tasks and these sheep would sit around pumping money into their coffers patting them on the back.
There are plenty of examples of this working better elsewhere, just look at Burt Rutan, now admittedly that doesn't scale, but you don't have to scale it, what's the point of scaling it if you end up with a frikin boondoggle like NASA?
I understand statistics very well that is why I said it suggests it is less than reliable, I quoted no percentages so quit trying repeatedly to misrepresent what I've written. Reading your text you are clearly a dishonest scoundrel who can't hold a reasonable discussion. You have consistently misrepresented what I have written.
Suggesting you're only quoting reliable engineering principals and I'm writing nonsense is utter hogwash and you know it. It is exactly the kind of B.S. I expect from a NASA shill. Tell me do you count failures as safety margin during your day job?
Re:Why no comparison with D3D?
on
OpenGL 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You really have no idea what you're talking about do you. OpenGL vs D3D flamewars have been raging for years, FYI D3D started out well behind OpenGL feature for feature and gradually added OpenGL features, each generation of D3D we had to listen to Microsoft claim that all the interesting features of OpenGL were already in D3D and OpenGL had no advantage, only for them to add more in the next release.
D3D is a proprietary windows programming API owned by Microsoft and designed for games with some incredibly ugly and arduous API semantics, OpenGL is an open, extensible cross platform industry standard controlled by a board of interested industry specialists that anyone may join. The rendering and dispatch API semqantics have been optimized by the vendors in a standard way. If there was a need for any particular feature the vendors would add it as an extension either individually (something they can do and have done on their own) or they could collaborate on shared extensiosn for a common API. Red herring features that do not make any sense or map to real hardware have no place in a programming interface explicitly designed to sit close to the metal like OpenGL.
From the article the first cut was never released, it was re-edited in a completely different form. From my recollection the original theatrical release actually won an Oscar for Best Film Editing in 1977.
The third party would sent their voter to cast their ballot for that State's college, they might even swing a deal to pick a candidate or just toss it away on their own 3rd runner. Hmm... I never realized that a 3rd party might hold this much influence until now.
There's no reasoning with you if you're going to continue with specious examples. Air bags may occasionally malfunction but the *vast* majority operate just fine, Let's say the failure rate (and it's probably an exaggeration) is 0.1%, and this is for a range of impacts under varying unpredictable conditions not designed and determined conditions, the failure rate with a single sample admittedly of NASA's pyrotechnic parachute deployment on this craft is 100%, suggesting it is at very least unlikely to be reliable. The point is that extreme conditions are encountered and designed for just fine on a daily basis and sitting inert for years and then just working is a common everyday occurence contrary to your specious argument.
Let's face it reguardless of your hyperbole, you started by implying it's an amazingly difficult thing to sit inert for years then just work untested, without even going into how inaccurate your 'untested' assertion is I've shown that you, like others in this thread are throwing any old specious and unsupported arguments up.
Your new assertion to cover the fallacy of your original point is now that there are millions of everyday items made and tested through trial and error, that may be so however an air bag doesn't cost tens of millions of dollars. That kind of money is paid for bespoke spacecraft components to cover competent design work and testing, not half assed failures.
Your claims of my ignorance do not make your case. Examples like Burt Rutan show NASA for the moribund dysfunctional organization it has become. So much talk about the difficulty of the task does not excuse NASA's inability to get a simply pyrotechnic device to fire after reentry. It's the zenith of incompetence and instead of pointing this out we have apologists citing 'scarey space' jibberish. Using unsupportable assertions about the incredible difficulty of certain magical things the amazing NASA had to do to get this right. That's all just garbage and under other ciscumstances the conditions encountered by this craft are mundane and encountered every day in other design domains, some of them without thousands of trial and error examples. NASA has become plain bad at it's job.
It's not disingenuous, go read my earlier post, where I even mention temperature gradients, it was exactly my intent and the text makes it clear. I *still* stand by my assertions. Go read my other posts for additional thoughts on all this extreme environment nonsense we get fed every time NASA screws up. Space is rather predictable at this stage, it's just NASA's engineering that's unreliable.
It is utterly disingenuous to suggest that these systems are expected to work without testing. That's like saying car airbags are stored inert for years and are expected to work without testing. The obvious answer to that is yes, big deal, car airbags work reliably every day. And while I'm not equating the two I'm using my example to illustrate how riddiculous your argument is.
Geeze, there are people lining up to point out how difficult every single aspect of mission design is, as if when they screw up there's always an acceptable excuse. Your "stored inert and work without testing" nonsense is just another example. I could look at the daily operation of a baseball and describe the enormous forces it is subject too, or do the same with a car tire or the blades in a jet turbine, but ultimately these things work because they have been correctly designed and tested. These missions are designed at great expense and NASA seems unable to get even simple systems to work, and I'm SICK of hearing specious arguments about how difficult the environment is and how NASA should be excused for screwing up yet another design/mission.
And all you have is some blind faith that these failures are doing a good job, because space is a scarey unknown. I'm not saying it's like monster garage, and at a quarter of a billion bucks it shouldn't be. I'll tell you what, let's split the difference, fire them all and give me my frikin tax dollars back. I'd rather see a few more X Prize developments than waste money with these dolts embarrassing the country. You're quick to point out how strange and scary space is but with your philosophy we'd accept failure ad nauseum. This is NOT some exotic unforseen crap that went wrong, they never got their frikin parachute to deploy, that's just one critical system you work on and review to death guaranteeing that that system works. Yes I'm frikin pissed at yet another NASA screw up.
Your scarey space excuse is exactly the problem with continuing to fund NASA. If Burt Rutan worked there with all the middle management dopes that run the place he'd never have done what he has at scaled composites, not even with 10 times the funding. NASA is an institutional albatross around the U.S. aerospace industry's neck.
I've SEEN how NASA operates and how the subcontractors work. If there's a moribund slow assed expensive way to do something, that's how they do it. Layers of middle managers build empires internally and suggest that a reduction in their head count or reassignment of staff might be a good idea because they don't happen to be doing anything relevant 10 years after their groups primary mission has been completed.
Oh the irony, I think that 30g would have been pulled had the drogue deployed so it's a bit rich to suggest it as a cause. Moreover it was designed to pull 30g, that was a *conscious decision* a choice made by the designers to impose a load of 30g. As for 3000F pfftt big deal, every craft that's reentered has tken similar thermal loads and modest shielding can comfortably handle it, in fact NASA is the only institution that seems to have issues with reentry these days having perfected it decades ago they're now unable to reliably deliver a manned or unmanned vehicle to the surface.
Yes I do, however to pretend that these are the enormous challenges that make parachute deployment impossible is frankly, pathetic.
The crafts whole function was to sit in those solar flares collecting particles. The way you're talking about this you'd think it had all come as a surprise.
I said some aspects are benign, don't misquote me. There is no oxygen and no corrosion and for the most part there is absolutely no load on any components for the *vast* majority of the misison.
Nope not me although a bit of competition is good IMHO.
I find it utterly riddiculous that you can't make a criticism of the monstrous beaurocracy that is NASA without some dingbat saying "were you one of these guys in the 80s and 90s who applauded when..."
The fact is there are many organizational systems that can be made to work when designing a relatively simple mission like this capsule. NASA appears incapable of implementing any of them. All their expensive procedures and tripple anal checks don't seem to stop them screwing up in the most basic and obvious ways. They're just institutionally incompetent. Can I be one of those guys who applaud when NASA is shut down in the 00's, please?
There you go falling for that crap. Space does have it's hardships but in some respects it is quite benign, most of that space time is spend floating around weightless in the cold dark, or with constant radiated heat gains on one side of the craft. They knew what the conditions would be, they've spend hundreds of billions researching those conditions. Don't tell me it's tricky to design a moderately robust package to withstand that, it has been established that it is not. OK we know NASA can't but I'm speculating about what a competent organization could do.
I love that title, "Chutes Blamed". Unless Chutes is the name of program manager or the guy who designed the parachute deployment system, there's something off teh mark about this.
This mission was NOT cheap, it was infinitely expensive on the cost/benefit scale. That is NOT a good thing, it's a bloody tragedy.
Having accountability is a good thing. How tricky is it to deploy a frikin parachute? Missions been doing this for years on all sorts of craft, I do it a dozen times on the weekend, and NASA can't get this right? I'm frustrated and annoyed. A quarter of a billion dollars down the Swanee because they can't get a frikin pyro to fire. Damned idiots, what happened to checking/testing mission critical systems?
NASA seemse to be continuously outdoing itself these days in it's level of incompetence.
The timeline isn't aggressive (in CA it was set years out by the judge, but this memo was in reference to another state) and the work involved is almost trivial if you ask a competent tech, *and* Diebold has products already that use printers so one presumes they have the meagre expertise required. What Diebold did is called gouging and this memo shows a really shitty attitude by employees there and a desire to impose unnecessarily punitive sanctions against customers who ask for a feature.
The printer was a requirement because so many security concerns were raised over Diebold's automated systems. In addition requesting a feature to be added to a recently aquired system, especially in such a new area should not be greeted with such inflexibility, it was Diebold who initially offered these systems without any paper trail and avoided all mention, as the 'expert' vendor they should and did know darned well about public calls for paper audit trails. So, you keep dreaming that Diebold are OK in charging over a grand per system for a printer feature, and keep dreaming that selling systems so riddled with security holes that they had to be decertified is the customers fault. I'm pretty sure a jury won't see it that way. If you buy a car and it turns out that it has numerous dangerous design deficiencies, the customer is not to blame for those deficiencies, Diebold are bout to discover this.
It'll only be treason after they orchestrate a coup, and even then only if they get caught failing. Until then it's just business:-)
Seriously though, I'm not one of the hysterical anti-Diebold mob, but there are a number of troubling things about this company and these systems. That said there will always be issues with any system and people crying that the sky is falling, but in this case there's enough substance and evasion by Diebold to cause some serious concerns. The case for code auditing and an open software model seems to have a great deal of appeal. I can't help but think we're rushing into this in a compressed timeframe and installing expensive systems early that will leave a technological legacy for future elections and systems to deal with. You'd have hoped that someone with a clue would have sat down and started some reasonable standards process and a software engineering effort to go along with it. OK this has happened to a limited degree but it has been steamrollered by a drive to do this in haste with intense lobbying in some areas, now what was this lawsuit about again?.
This is going to be entertaining. The developer memo that Diebold should "Charge them Out the Ying-Yang" for paper copies because it was a new feature will surely come back to haunt the company. Such a disgusting attempt to exploit the customer over product deficiencies will not sit well with a jury.
I think the damages in this case may be "Out the Ying-Yang". That's a phrase that really grows on you when the shoe is on the other foot. Come on say it with me Diebold, "Out the Ying-Yang".
Don't turn your companies first encounter with Linux into a science project with your favourite distro. Even if you've heard it can be 'persuaded' to work. You're on a salary as are others, keep it sweet & simple and don't waste your own time, because that creates an impression too.
Go with a flavor of Linux that IBM supports, then later when you're feeling adventurous introduce a Debian box or two. Making the Linux transition any more difficult than it has to be seems utterly pointless, especially inside a conservative organization. Make sure they take the right lessons away from this, not some ambiguous point confused by distro issues.
Muddying the waters with unsupported distro complications is just bad judgement.
Unfortunately the moderators need to learn this too, because the post is now 5 Interesting.
Some people just want to be enslaved, and think that we should all lock our codecs into proprietary vendors formats and ban reverse engineering so a few companies can monopolize the market through completely artificial software & format barriers. They can pretend it's about technology but anyone with a clue can see this for what it is, lock up your cash.
It's just amazing how this Apple thing has turned rational people into drooling proprietary codec loving anti-freedom freaks.
Given the ongoing struggle for control of content distribution via proprietary formats, do you see any hope for more vendor neutral formats that don't tie customers to one particular 'technology'? It seems that constantly changing formats often have more to do with vendor lockin than genuine technological differentiation. What is Real doing to improve this situation and are other vendors likely to cooperate?
Actually they don't, they are diverse but some folks keep lumping issues, just as you assume people don't have diverse political opinions because they may associate with one party or another.
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You're missing one point, the OpenGL entry points on Windows are owned by Microsoft and they haven't updated in years and won't.
wglGetProcAddress is pretty much it or you could use one of the popular extension wrappers, like teh wrangler.
Feel free to try to get every app that calls OpenGL on windows to distribute a new interface, after getting all the hardware vendors to agree on this of course as Microsoft tries to muscle people out of cooperating.
Hardware tends not to be very object oriented and C++ can quite happily call C.
While I agree OO has advantages in some situations with a low level graphics API I don't think that's the case the only real omission in OpenGL caused by the C interface is function overloading for the various argument types to a few functions. That would clean up a few things.
In 3D graphics OO really kicks into it's own when it comes to higher level APIs like scene graphs and there are numerous examples. These can and do benefit greatly from OO design but nobody has come up with a compelling low level hardware interface that justified OO. Sure you could wrap a few things in a class or two but there's no compelling architectural justification and attepmts to wrap OpenGL in a trivial namespace class and call it OO are horribly naive and misguided.
No, YOU try putting it into perspective. Your argument is exactly what is wrong with profligate spending in America. "A billion dollard here, a billion dollars there and pretty soon you're talking about big money". 260 million bucks is 260 million bucks and toothpaste has a significant health benefit and a return on investment. The spending in this case was pure money down the drain.
This thread is full of sheep willing to blindly accept this failure as a difficult job well done. That frankly is F#@&*ing unmitigated *bullshit*.
NASA could screw up all day long at the most trivial of tasks and these sheep would sit around pumping money into their coffers patting them on the back.
There are plenty of examples of this working better elsewhere, just look at Burt Rutan, now admittedly that doesn't scale, but you don't have to scale it, what's the point of scaling it if you end up with a frikin boondoggle like NASA?
I understand statistics very well that is why I said it suggests it is less than reliable, I quoted no percentages so quit trying repeatedly to misrepresent what I've written. Reading your text you are clearly a dishonest scoundrel who can't hold a reasonable discussion. You have consistently misrepresented what I have written.
Suggesting you're only quoting reliable engineering principals and I'm writing nonsense is utter hogwash and you know it. It is exactly the kind of B.S. I expect from a NASA shill. Tell me do you count failures as safety margin during your day job?
You really have no idea what you're talking about do you. OpenGL vs D3D flamewars have been raging for years, FYI D3D started out well behind OpenGL feature for feature and gradually added OpenGL features, each generation of D3D we had to listen to Microsoft claim that all the interesting features of OpenGL were already in D3D and OpenGL had no advantage, only for them to add more in the next release.
D3D is a proprietary windows programming API owned by Microsoft and designed for games with some incredibly ugly and arduous API semantics, OpenGL is an open, extensible cross platform industry standard controlled by a board of interested industry specialists that anyone may join. The rendering and dispatch API semqantics have been optimized by the vendors in a standard way. If there was a need for any particular feature the vendors would add it as an extension either individually (something they can do and have done on their own) or they could collaborate on shared extensiosn for a common API. Red herring features that do not make any sense or map to real hardware have no place in a programming interface explicitly designed to sit close to the metal like OpenGL.
From the article the first cut was never released, it was re-edited in a completely different form. From my recollection the original theatrical release actually won an Oscar for Best Film Editing in 1977.
The third party would sent their voter to cast their ballot for that State's college, they might even swing a deal to pick a candidate or just toss it away on their own 3rd runner. Hmm... I never realized that a 3rd party might hold this much influence until now.
It was a typo, it should have read "never suggest".
There's no reasoning with you if you're going to continue with specious examples. Air bags may occasionally malfunction but the *vast* majority operate just fine, Let's say the failure rate (and it's probably an exaggeration) is 0.1%, and this is for a range of impacts under varying unpredictable conditions not designed and determined conditions, the failure rate with a single sample admittedly of NASA's pyrotechnic parachute deployment on this craft is 100%, suggesting it is at very least unlikely to be reliable. The point is that extreme conditions are encountered and designed for just fine on a daily basis and sitting inert for years and then just working is a common everyday occurence contrary to your specious argument.
Let's face it reguardless of your hyperbole, you started by implying it's an amazingly difficult thing to sit inert for years then just work untested, without even going into how inaccurate your 'untested' assertion is I've shown that you, like others in this thread are throwing any old specious and unsupported arguments up.
Your new assertion to cover the fallacy of your original point is now that there are millions of everyday items made and tested through trial and error, that may be so however an air bag doesn't cost tens of millions of dollars. That kind of money is paid for bespoke spacecraft components to cover competent design work and testing, not half assed failures.
Your claims of my ignorance do not make your case. Examples like Burt Rutan show NASA for the moribund dysfunctional organization it has become. So much talk about the difficulty of the task does not excuse NASA's inability to get a simply pyrotechnic device to fire after reentry. It's the zenith of incompetence and instead of pointing this out we have apologists citing 'scarey space' jibberish. Using unsupportable assertions about the incredible difficulty of certain magical things the amazing NASA had to do to get this right. That's all just garbage and under other ciscumstances the conditions encountered by this craft are mundane and encountered every day in other design domains, some of them without thousands of trial and error examples. NASA has become plain bad at it's job.
It's not disingenuous, go read my earlier post, where I even mention temperature gradients, it was exactly my intent and the text makes it clear. I *still* stand by my assertions. Go read my other posts for additional thoughts on all this extreme environment nonsense we get fed every time NASA screws up. Space is rather predictable at this stage, it's just NASA's engineering that's unreliable.
It is utterly disingenuous to suggest that these systems are expected to work without testing. That's like saying car airbags are stored inert for years and are expected to work without testing. The obvious answer to that is yes, big deal, car airbags work reliably every day. And while I'm not equating the two I'm using my example to illustrate how riddiculous your argument is.
Geeze, there are people lining up to point out how difficult every single aspect of mission design is, as if when they screw up there's always an acceptable excuse. Your "stored inert and work without testing" nonsense is just another example. I could look at the daily operation of a baseball and describe the enormous forces it is subject too, or do the same with a car tire or the blades in a jet turbine, but ultimately these things work because they have been correctly designed and tested. These missions are designed at great expense and NASA seems unable to get even simple systems to work, and I'm SICK of hearing specious arguments about how difficult the environment is and how NASA should be excused for screwing up yet another design/mission.
And all you have is some blind faith that these failures are doing a good job, because space is a scarey unknown. I'm not saying it's like monster garage, and at a quarter of a billion bucks it shouldn't be. I'll tell you what, let's split the difference, fire them all and give me my frikin tax dollars back. I'd rather see a few more X Prize developments than waste money with these dolts embarrassing the country. You're quick to point out how strange and scary space is but with your philosophy we'd accept failure ad nauseum. This is NOT some exotic unforseen crap that went wrong, they never got their frikin parachute to deploy, that's just one critical system you work on and review to death guaranteeing that that system works. Yes I'm frikin pissed at yet another NASA screw up.
Your scarey space excuse is exactly the problem with continuing to fund NASA. If Burt Rutan worked there with all the middle management dopes that run the place he'd never have done what he has at scaled composites, not even with 10 times the funding. NASA is an institutional albatross around the U.S. aerospace industry's neck.
I've SEEN how NASA operates and how the subcontractors work. If there's a moribund slow assed expensive way to do something, that's how they do it. Layers of middle managers build empires internally and suggest that a reduction in their head count or reassignment of staff might be a good idea because they don't happen to be doing anything relevant 10 years after their groups primary mission has been completed.
It's time to put down this sick hairy dog.
Oh the irony, I think that 30g would have been pulled had the drogue deployed so it's a bit rich to suggest it as a cause. Moreover it was designed to pull 30g, that was a *conscious decision* a choice made by the designers to impose a load of 30g. As for 3000F pfftt big deal, every craft that's reentered has tken similar thermal loads and modest shielding can comfortably handle it, in fact NASA is the only institution that seems to have issues with reentry these days having perfected it decades ago they're now unable to reliably deliver a manned or unmanned vehicle to the surface.
Yes I do, however to pretend that these are the enormous challenges that make parachute deployment impossible is frankly, pathetic.
The crafts whole function was to sit in those solar flares collecting particles. The way you're talking about this you'd think it had all come as a surprise.
I said some aspects are benign, don't misquote me. There is no oxygen and no corrosion and for the most part there is absolutely no load on any components for the *vast* majority of the misison.
Nope not me although a bit of competition is good IMHO.
I find it utterly riddiculous that you can't make a criticism of the monstrous beaurocracy that is NASA without some dingbat saying "were you one of these guys in the 80s and 90s who applauded when..."
The fact is there are many organizational systems that can be made to work when designing a relatively simple mission like this capsule. NASA appears incapable of implementing any of them. All their expensive procedures and tripple anal checks don't seem to stop them screwing up in the most basic and obvious ways. They're just institutionally incompetent. Can I be one of those guys who applaud when NASA is shut down in the 00's, please?
There you go falling for that crap. Space does have it's hardships but in some respects it is quite benign, most of that space time is spend floating around weightless in the cold dark, or with constant radiated heat gains on one side of the craft. They knew what the conditions would be, they've spend hundreds of billions researching those conditions. Don't tell me it's tricky to design a moderately robust package to withstand that, it has been established that it is not. OK we know NASA can't but I'm speculating about what a competent organization could do.
I love that title, "Chutes Blamed". Unless Chutes is the name of program manager or the guy who designed the parachute deployment system, there's something off teh mark about this.
No, let's blame.
This mission was NOT cheap, it was infinitely expensive on the cost/benefit scale. That is NOT a good thing, it's a bloody tragedy.
Having accountability is a good thing. How tricky is it to deploy a frikin parachute? Missions been doing this for years on all sorts of craft, I do it a dozen times on the weekend, and NASA can't get this right? I'm frustrated and annoyed. A quarter of a billion dollars down the Swanee because they can't get a frikin pyro to fire. Damned idiots, what happened to checking/testing mission critical systems?
NASA seemse to be continuously outdoing itself these days in it's level of incompetence.
The timeline isn't aggressive (in CA it was set years out by the judge, but this memo was in reference to another state) and the work involved is almost trivial if you ask a competent tech, *and* Diebold has products already that use printers so one presumes they have the meagre expertise required. What Diebold did is called gouging and this memo shows a really shitty attitude by employees there and a desire to impose unnecessarily punitive sanctions against customers who ask for a feature.
The printer was a requirement because so many security concerns were raised over Diebold's automated systems. In addition requesting a feature to be added to a recently aquired system, especially in such a new area should not be greeted with such inflexibility, it was Diebold who initially offered these systems without any paper trail and avoided all mention, as the 'expert' vendor they should and did know darned well about public calls for paper audit trails. So, you keep dreaming that Diebold are OK in charging over a grand per system for a printer feature, and keep dreaming that selling systems so riddled with security holes that they had to be decertified is the customers fault. I'm pretty sure a jury won't see it that way. If you buy a car and it turns out that it has numerous dangerous design deficiencies, the customer is not to blame for those deficiencies, Diebold are bout to discover this.
It'll only be treason after they orchestrate a coup, and even then only if they get caught failing. Until then it's just business :-)
Seriously though, I'm not one of the hysterical anti-Diebold mob, but there are a number of troubling things about this company and these systems. That said there will always be issues with any system and people crying that the sky is falling, but in this case there's enough substance and evasion by Diebold to cause some serious concerns. The case for code auditing and an open software model seems to have a great deal of appeal. I can't help but think we're rushing into this in a compressed timeframe and installing expensive systems early that will leave a technological legacy for future elections and systems to deal with. You'd have hoped that someone with a clue would have sat down and started some reasonable standards process and a software engineering effort to go along with it. OK this has happened to a limited degree but it has been steamrollered by a drive to do this in haste with intense lobbying in some areas, now what was this lawsuit about again?.
This is going to be entertaining. The developer memo that Diebold should "Charge them Out the Ying-Yang" for paper copies because it was a new feature will surely come back to haunt the company. Such a disgusting attempt to exploit the customer over product deficiencies will not sit well with a jury.
I think the damages in this case may be "Out the Ying-Yang". That's a phrase that really grows on you when the shoe is on the other foot. Come on say it with me Diebold, "Out the Ying-Yang".
Don't turn your companies first encounter with Linux into a science project with your favourite distro. Even if you've heard it can be 'persuaded' to work. You're on a salary as are others, keep it sweet & simple and don't waste your own time, because that creates an impression too.
Go with a flavor of Linux that IBM supports, then later when you're feeling adventurous introduce a Debian box or two. Making the Linux transition any more difficult than it has to be seems utterly pointless, especially inside a conservative organization. Make sure they take the right lessons away from this, not some ambiguous point confused by distro issues.
Muddying the waters with unsupported distro complications is just bad judgement.
Unfortunately the moderators need to learn this too, because the post is now 5 Interesting.
Some people just want to be enslaved, and think that we should all lock our codecs into proprietary vendors formats and ban reverse engineering so a few companies can monopolize the market through completely artificial software & format barriers. They can pretend it's about technology but anyone with a clue can see this for what it is, lock up your cash.
It's just amazing how this Apple thing has turned rational people into drooling proprietary codec loving anti-freedom freaks.
Given the ongoing struggle for control of content distribution via proprietary formats, do you see any hope for more vendor neutral formats that don't tie customers to one particular 'technology'? It seems that constantly changing formats often have more to do with vendor lockin than genuine technological differentiation. What is Real doing to improve this situation and are other vendors likely to cooperate?
Actually they don't, they are diverse but some folks keep lumping issues, just as you assume people don't have diverse political opinions because they may associate with one party or another.