I'm not surprised that NASA was unable to develop funding to convert / analyze this data. After working with them for a few years, and with the 'Military Industrial Complex" for more than that, I can clearly say: "If it isn't in the requirements document, it's not going to get done, no matter how simple or beneficial it is."
I worked on a project back in the early 80's. We were launching missles on a test range. I was responsible for the telemetry recording. We used a massive Honeywell tape drive and a bunch of telemetry circuitry to record at 1MHz. After designing the circuitry to measure and feed the data (all analog, BTW) to the drives, I asked my boss where the specs were for the circuitry to read the data back off the tapes for analysis.
I was told there wasn't any. It wasn't a requirement. And I had better leave it at that. I kind of freaked- how the hell can we spend $100K in hardware and time to record tapes that can never, ever be read ?
The answer ? It was basically butt covering. If something happened they would ask the gummint to fund a project to read the data off the tapes.
I went ahead and designd and built a playback system on the side, nights and weekends. We went ahead and launched missles. We had guidance failures. I was asked to read the tapes. I pulled out my breadboarded setup, and read the tapes. The project team was happy, problems were solved, etc.
And I was put on the next layoff list for 'failing to obey orders'. So I got a better job, and quit before the axe fell (large defense contractor axes fell sloowly back then- lots of little clerk types had to spent their quality time with each piece of paper).
The Moral ? Never underestimate the stupidity of large organizations- governmental or otherwise.
I would NOT consider support for AOl's implementation of non-standard protocols to be a plus. Nor would I consider it to be a good thing to continue to support AOl's overpriced dialup solution.
Oh, and of course Apple's solution is bigger. It's older. Your sexy little laptop used to be a lot bigger too, back when the concept was developed.
After seeing the flood of speculation and information based misunderstanding so endemic to a/. discussion, I thought I'd add a personal comment.
My brother is 45 years old, and has had severe epilepsy since he was 3 years old. He is also learning disabled and orthopedically handicapped. Epilepsy, as you may or may not know, is the brain's equivalent of a 'lightning storm'. The cause varies, and the most common treatment is a combination of drugs and surgery to reduce either the beginning of the epileptic seizure or slow the propagation of the wave of activity across the cereberal cortex.
In many patients, drug therapy has to be regularly fine-tuned or completely changed. Think of it as regular security patches, because the brain figures ways to hack around the chemical defenses. In some patients, the brain is so good at hacking through the barriers that drug therapy loses effectiveness. This happened to my brother.
An FDA approved treatment for patients in this condition is the use of a Vagal Nerve Stimulator (VNS). He has a controller/power source implanted in his shoulder, a wire threaded up inside his neck, and the eletrode implanted next to the Vagal Nerve. This nerve is down in the brain stem / 'hindbrain'. Every 5 minutes the controller sends a signal(started at 250mv, it's up to 500mv) for 30 seconds into this electrode. If we want to, we can command a pulse our of sequence by passing a strong magnet over the controller.
The results have not been Science Fiction Movie class miraculous, but they have been visible. For the first few days he would physically react to the pulses (facial tick/jerk, shoulder hunch, etc..). After three months, he no longer reacts as visibly.
But, his grand mal seizure activity has dropped. His petit mal seizure activity has dropped as well. He's improving ! He is more alert, vocal, communicative, and is cracking jokes once again.
I don't know how it will work on depression, but I can tell you from personal observation that it seems to work for epilepsy !
"ou pull your house off of the grid, and you can do whatever you want to with the wiring in your house. " Well, no. Your connection to the grid has nothing to do with electrical codes, zoning laws, inspections, building permits, etc. Those rules are all established by your local despotic government. The more despotic, the more the rules. The more unionized the area, the less likely you are going to be able to do any work other than plug in a UL certified extension cord in your own domicile.
Oh, and the 'safety codes' ? They come from the Insurance Industry, NOT government or the Electrical Power industry. Governments can choose to accept the codes or not. Or take the code and then add all kinds of spiffy crap to it to make sure their idiot brother-in-law who invented the lefthanded wattsamatteru switch gets money out of the deal.
Just thought you oughta know, before you go and do something that will get your house condemned.
My corporation doesn't do this sort of thing much any more. We're too busy trying to avoid getting our assets kicked by foreign competitors to waste time with 90's corporatespeak.
Aside from some expected sloganeering on annual reports and such, do any corporations still waste time and serious money on crap like this ? I was under the impression it was a side effect of the 80's and 90's MBA-centric culture.
Oh, and check out the MBA's 'hire rate' these days- it's around 40% right out of school.. heh heh heh.
Yes, I'm aware of those basic facts. But it's design methods like this that have made NASA a hidebound organization. There is no flexibility. The direct cost of putting mass in orbit is completely buried in the Bureacracy and Bullsh*t that keeps the people on the ground busy.
Hey, I used to design stuff to NASA specs. I've been there. It's not the cost of the material, it's the cost of the bureacracy. You CAN solve the basic engineering problems associated with increased mass on the ISS. It was originally designed with shuttle parking in mind, at least back when it was conceptualized in the 70's and 80's.
But now that our Congress has saddled NASA with even more stupid rules and regulations, they are less and less likely to be creative with the resources they have. Hence the growth of the 'private' space industry.
Want proof ? Ok, here's my favourite example of rampant bureacracy. I worked for a small company that made satellite subsystems. We met with the lead contractor on this job. We had four engineers on our team. They came with 20 !
Their Thermal effects guy said "OK, we need to review this with your Thermal effects guy. Who is he ?" I raised my hand. And answered his questions.
Their Nuclear effects guy said "OK, we need to disuss Nuclear effects. Who do I talk to". I raised my hand, and gave the right info.
When you talk to NASA, you're talking to a horde of pencil pushers. Creativity is beaten out of these poor guys, and the lead scientists are so busy filling out this report and that that they can't get any real science done.
They need a good space race / space war to put the fire back in their bellies.
Why would this vehicle be allowed to plunge into the ocean if severely damaged ? Why can't it be used to increase useful space in the ISS ? Typical short sightedness...
C'mon- how about the great NorthEast US blackout ? It didn't happen in the middle ages, guys. We have no right to act superior. Infrastructure systems like power, telcom, water, etc. are all built on the backs of earlier systems. I mean, some water systems in EU still use elements of acqueducts that the Romans laid. Like a chain, the infrastructures are as strong as the weakest link. Netting and redundancy are all very nice, but most governments don't have the funds to do it. Would you be willing to pay 90% taxes so that your local govt could tear out all your old wires, pipes, etc. and put in shining new triple redundant systems ? No. So we plan for the occasional outage, and move on.
Am I the only one who thinks we should rename Microsoft "Elmer" the way they keep dishing out the FUD ?
Of course, then there's that vision of Ballmer dressed in Wagnerian Valkyrie garb singing "Killed the Google, Killed the Google, Killed the Google, Killed the Gooooooo gleeeeee." And somehow, I think he would...
Yah- I remember an experimental F-5 radar that emitted 40Kilo Watts (take that, Pentiummmm!). It was about the cubic of a full tower ATX case. Aluminum case, machined heat sinks on the inside, the outside was mounted to a cold plate that was chilled with turbine bleed air. The R/T was mounted inside the case in a three dimensional kind of array of solid state and passive components. Fluorinert filled the cavity. Screwed the lid on, and it went to work. Heat flowed pretty well (thermal sensors built in to the circuitry at various spots) so straight convection was used (no fan, etc.). Worked great !
You know, within the budget for the special effects in Hollywood movies they can see into your shorts from Geosynchronous orbit. If Hollywood can do it, why can't Bush's huge Defense Budget ? And Where the hell are the flying cars and Daily Space Ships to the Moon base ? Huh ? Huh ?
lus3r:= whois(userdoman) case lus3r
microsoft.com: execute goodguys
apple.com: execute sick-em
redhat.com: execute sick-em
*torvald*: execute kill-em end case sub sick-em
execute upload michael_jackson_home_movies
execute call_Homeland_security end sub sub kill-em
execute upload gates_kids_home_movies
execute call_interpol end sub sub goodguys
execute grant_more_stock_options
execute ballmer_happy_dance end sub
OK, here's a concept. If data center location isn't such a problem as long as we have high speed data lines, locate the data center someplace nice and cold. Like Manitoba, or Minnesota, or Alaska, or Siberia. Heat the work area with the flow from the data center. Hire your local population to maintain the data center. Profit !
Hmm- Insightful note, and generally true, except.... Since "All Operating Systems are essentially emulators", I'd tend to claim that it still is truly backwards compatible. Classic mode is what I would call a "Quasi-Emulator"- it's sufficiently embedded into OSX that its performance does not suffer the common emulator problems.
In the same respect, Windows XP is backwards compatible to DOS, so it's not a Mac vs. PC argument.
Yes, this is not a new concept. And yes, it's been on every science fiction writer's radarscope since the concept of a calculating machine was considered. And it's still science fiction because:
- Language is situational, societal, and emotional
- Most people doing this sort of work communicate in English. So they assume English is a good place to start from. Unfortunately, it's one seriously illogical language to start from.
There have been attempts to create 'natural language' programming languages. And in the main they HAVE been successful. Sure, they are inefficient. But so is human communication.
Every psuedo-code compiler / interpreter that I've ever seen (since the 1970's) has simply been a programming language. Sure, maybe they're a little nicer to look at, but they will always fail the Turing test.
Want TRUE natural language programming ?
Develop a computer that works linguistically, not logically.
Brookhaven Naval Laboratory is in Long Island. The Relatavistic Heavy Ion Collider lives there. And no, my comment was that the 'black hole' claimed does NOT exist- this guy said that because something was happening that was 'black hole like' (specific type of energy emission)that it was a black hole.
It's like claiming that the little light bulb in your headlight is powered by Nuclear Fusion because it emits light in the same general spectra as the Sun. Of course, if you say it with a butt-load of incredible equations, and then give the paper a hugely sensational title, the media whores are gonna run all over the world with it.
Which is what happened.
There's one born every minute, and they all work for the media during sweeps week.
In this case an RTFA and then search for media hysteria relevant to this (Scientists cause End of the Universe, film at 11 !) does less good than bad. You can read Dr. Nastase's paper here .
While I cannot claim to understand the math, the text provides some clues. The claim presented here is NOT that "A Black Hole Was Formed", and the hysterial headline "Long Island Sucks, and it's gonna kill is all !" is just so much media whoring bullshit.
The observations attempted to use existing mathematical models of black hole behaviours and develop an analog for the behaviour of the Quark Gluon Plasma experiment's behavior.
Please note also that Dr. Nastase was beating these same drums back in 99. I expect that this paper is science politics- at that level you don't want anyone to think you were wrong, so you will spend significant effort at proving your predictions right, despite evidence to the contrary. Oh, and he's not even on the project- he's sucking down other people's results after the fact.
Notes is simply a bad execution of a rather grandiose design full of not-quite-thought-through components. It takes a great effort and experience in order not to fall into its various pitfalls and frankly that effort would be better spent elsewhere.
Very well put, and I tend to agree. The main cost issue with many systems is the concept of legacy maintenance. As developers, many of us don't consider that. (Old version ? It's crap ! Don't use it! Delete those data files !). Backwards compatibility is something most systems don't consider.
IMHO, like any other architectured overwhelmingly centralized system, the suckiness of Notes systems depends on the implementers and users. I've used Notes since '96, and developed in Notes since '96 too. Sure, it sucks compared to Apache/PHP/SQL combos etc. But it's a backwards compatible one stop shopping solution for content creation, management, dissemination. And yeah, it's been web enabled since like 1995, but most corps don't use that functionality cause the application's interface is pretty atrocious through the web side, security, blah, blah, blah.
M$'s "Exchange" isn't a centralized solution per se- it depends on all the other M$ crap working together. Notes can stand alone, and IT RUNS ON Linux !
I hope IBM Keeps maintaining Notes, but I have an ugly feeling that they're going to let it obsolete and be replaced with... a general mess of loosely cooperative stuff that/. ers will just loove making tons of money playing with. Oh well.
I remember that tech. The concept was somewhat sound, but it really did not result in a clean x-y translation solution. You could roll up and down, and then slide from side to side, but the finger movements required were not ergonomic. If you want to be able to truly move X-Y cleanly, a combined axis that works with the hand/arm/wrist is cleaner.
The most productive OS depends on what you use it for. If you're a lUs3r, you're going to be using it for the basics- file management, peripheral management, finding and launching applications, etc.
Sure, coders and developers need different things out of their OS, but once the app is done, the critical aspects of the OS become the user's main needs. And yes, I'm assuming your app calls the OS in an organized fashion.
Then you get into the societal aspects- what is the user used to, what is the learning curve, etc... That said, from what I've observed with my family members and their experiences with Apple ][, DOS, Win 3, Win 9x, WinXP, Mac OS 6-X, and leeetle bit of *x.... Well, I get less calls on the Macs than I do anything else. So I vote OSX.
Silly Walks Director: Mr. Stagback, the very real problem is what I find out. You see, there's defense, education, housing, health, social security, silly walks. They're all supposed to get the same. But last year the government spent less on Silly Walks than they did on industrial organisation. We're supposed to get 348 millions pounds a year to cover our entire Silly Walks proposal. Coffee?
Silly Walks Applicant: Yes, please.
Silly Walks Director: Hello, uh, Mrs. Twolumps, uhm, could we have two cups of coffee, please.
Mrs. Twolumps: Yes, Mr. Teabag.
Silly Walks Director: Mad as a hatter. You see, the Israelis they have a man who can take his own left leg off and swallow it with every alternate step, whereas the Japanese, cunning electronically obsessed little...
Even when the article has been/.tted. Gee- how about the old 'age of steam', if transistors and tubes didn't work. Fabs would be gear hobbing factories. You could tell hardcore programmers from the missing tips of their fingers and the gear lube on their clothes. Gamers would have found a way to visualize graphics by a changing sea of itty bitty colored wheels (or some sort of Rubik's cube thingmajig).
Sure- large, monolithic projects often fail. For the same reasons that large, monolithic anything often fails. IT projects, development projects, governments, all have this in common. Despite all the highly paid consultants and theorists (who seem to specialize in incompetence and high billing rates), this basic fact of human nature still keeps keepin on.
Smaller projects succeed more often, involve smaller risks, shorter schedules, and faster results. Open source software development projects are an interesting combination of small and large projects- essentially a small project (one coder, one mission, one plan) turned into a large project by the overall project environment.
I'd like to see Gartner Group say something about that, but I know they won't. The don't get any consulting coin from the OS community...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not surprised that NASA was unable to develop funding to convert / analyze this data. After working with them for a few years, and with the 'Military Industrial Complex" for more than that, I can clearly say:
"If it isn't in the requirements document, it's not going to get done, no matter how simple or beneficial it is."
I worked on a project back in the early 80's. We were launching missles on a test range. I was responsible for the telemetry recording. We used a massive Honeywell tape drive and a bunch of telemetry circuitry to record at 1MHz. After designing the circuitry to measure and feed the data (all analog, BTW) to the drives, I asked my boss where the specs were for the circuitry to read the data back off the tapes for analysis.
I was told there wasn't any. It wasn't a requirement. And I had better leave it at that. I kind of freaked- how the hell can we spend $100K in hardware and time to record tapes that can never, ever be read ?
The answer ? It was basically butt covering. If something happened they would ask the gummint to fund a project to read the data off the tapes.
I went ahead and designd and built a playback system on the side, nights and weekends. We went ahead and launched missles. We had guidance failures. I was asked to read the tapes. I pulled out my breadboarded setup, and read the tapes. The project team was happy, problems were solved, etc.
And I was put on the next layoff list for 'failing to obey orders'. So I got a better job, and quit before the axe fell (large defense contractor axes fell sloowly back then- lots of little clerk types had to spent their quality time with each piece of paper).
The Moral ? Never underestimate the stupidity of large organizations- governmental or otherwise.
I would NOT consider support for AOl's implementation of non-standard protocols to be a plus. Nor would I consider it to be a good thing to continue to support AOl's overpriced dialup solution.
Oh, and of course Apple's solution is bigger. It's older. Your sexy little laptop used to be a lot bigger too, back when the concept was developed.
After seeing the flood of speculation and information based misunderstanding so endemic to a /. discussion, I thought I'd add a personal comment.
My brother is 45 years old, and has had severe epilepsy since he was 3 years old. He is also learning disabled and orthopedically handicapped. Epilepsy, as you may or may not know, is the brain's equivalent of a 'lightning storm'. The cause varies, and the most common treatment is a combination of drugs and surgery to reduce either the beginning of the epileptic seizure or slow the propagation of the wave of activity across the cereberal cortex.
In many patients, drug therapy has to be regularly fine-tuned or completely changed. Think of it as regular security patches, because the brain figures ways to hack around the chemical defenses. In some patients, the brain is so good at hacking through the barriers that drug therapy loses effectiveness. This happened to my brother.
An FDA approved treatment for patients in this condition is the use of a Vagal Nerve Stimulator (VNS). He has a controller/power source implanted in his shoulder, a wire threaded up inside his neck, and the eletrode implanted next to the Vagal Nerve. This nerve is down in the brain stem / 'hindbrain'. Every 5 minutes the controller sends a signal(started at 250mv, it's up to 500mv) for 30 seconds into this electrode. If we want to, we can command a pulse our of sequence by passing a strong magnet over the controller.
The results have not been Science Fiction Movie class miraculous, but they have been visible. For the first few days he would physically react to the pulses (facial tick/jerk, shoulder hunch, etc..). After three months, he no longer reacts as visibly.
But, his grand mal seizure activity has dropped. His petit mal seizure activity has dropped as well. He's improving ! He is more alert, vocal, communicative, and is cracking jokes once again.
I don't know how it will work on depression, but I can tell you from personal observation that it seems to work for epilepsy !
"ou pull your house off of the grid, and you can do whatever you want to with the wiring in your house.
"
Well, no. Your connection to the grid has nothing to do with electrical codes, zoning laws, inspections, building permits, etc. Those rules are all established by your local despotic government. The more despotic, the more the rules. The more unionized the area, the less likely you are going to be able to do any work other than plug in a UL certified extension cord in your own domicile.
Oh, and the 'safety codes' ? They come from the Insurance Industry, NOT government or the Electrical Power industry. Governments can choose to accept the codes or not. Or take the code and then add all kinds of spiffy crap to it to make sure their idiot brother-in-law who invented the lefthanded wattsamatteru switch gets money out of the deal.
Just thought you oughta know, before you go and do something that will get your house condemned.
My corporation doesn't do this sort of thing much any more. We're too busy trying to avoid getting our assets kicked by foreign competitors to waste time with 90's corporatespeak.
Aside from some expected sloganeering on annual reports and such, do any corporations still waste time and serious money on crap like this ? I was under the impression it was a side effect of the 80's and 90's MBA-centric culture.
Oh, and check out the MBA's 'hire rate' these days- it's around 40% right out of school.. heh heh heh.
Yes, I'm aware of those basic facts. But it's design methods like this that have made NASA a hidebound organization. There is no flexibility. The direct cost of putting mass in orbit is completely buried in the Bureacracy and Bullsh*t that keeps the people on the ground busy.
Hey, I used to design stuff to NASA specs. I've been there. It's not the cost of the material, it's the cost of the bureacracy. You CAN solve the basic engineering problems associated with increased mass on the ISS. It was originally designed with shuttle parking in mind, at least back when it was conceptualized in the 70's and 80's.
But now that our Congress has saddled NASA with even more stupid rules and regulations, they are less and less likely to be creative with the resources they have. Hence the growth of the 'private' space industry.
Want proof ? Ok, here's my favourite example of rampant bureacracy. I worked for a small company that made satellite subsystems. We met with the lead contractor on this job. We had four engineers on our team. They came with 20 !
Their Thermal effects guy said "OK, we need to review this with your Thermal effects guy. Who is he ?" I raised my hand. And answered his questions.
Their Nuclear effects guy said "OK, we need to disuss Nuclear effects. Who do I talk to". I raised my hand, and gave the right info.
When you talk to NASA, you're talking to a horde of pencil pushers. Creativity is beaten out of these poor guys, and the lead scientists are so busy filling out this report and that that they can't get any real science done.
They need a good space race / space war to put the fire back in their bellies.
Oh, and they need the Germans back too.
Why would this vehicle be allowed to plunge into the ocean if severely damaged ? Why can't it be used to increase useful space in the ISS ? Typical short sightedness...
C'mon- how about the great NorthEast US blackout ? It didn't happen in the middle ages, guys.
We have no right to act superior.
Infrastructure systems like power, telcom, water, etc. are all built on the backs of earlier systems. I mean, some water systems in EU still use elements of acqueducts that the Romans laid.
Like a chain, the infrastructures are as strong as the weakest link. Netting and redundancy are all very nice, but most governments don't have the funds to do it. Would you be willing to pay 90% taxes so that your local govt could tear out all your old wires, pipes, etc. and put in shining new triple redundant systems ?
No. So we plan for the occasional outage, and move on.
Am I the only one who thinks we should rename Microsoft "Elmer" the way they keep dishing out the FUD ?
." And somehow, I think he would...
Of course, then there's that vision of Ballmer dressed in Wagnerian Valkyrie garb singing "Killed the Google, Killed the Google, Killed the Google, Killed the Gooooooo gleeeeee
Yah- I remember an experimental F-5 radar that emitted 40Kilo Watts (take that, Pentiummmm!). It was about the cubic of a full tower ATX case. Aluminum case, machined heat sinks on the inside, the outside was mounted to a cold plate that was chilled with turbine bleed air. The R/T was mounted inside the case in a three dimensional kind of array of solid state and passive components. Fluorinert filled the cavity. Screwed the lid on, and it went to work. Heat flowed pretty well (thermal sensors built in to the circuitry at various spots) so straight convection was used (no fan, etc.). Worked great !
You know, within the budget for the special effects in Hollywood movies they can see into your shorts from Geosynchronous orbit. If Hollywood can do it, why can't Bush's huge Defense Budget ? And Where the hell are the flying cars and Daily Space Ships to the Moon base ? Huh ? Huh ?
lus3r:= whois(userdoman)
case lus3r
microsoft.com: execute goodguys
apple.com: execute sick-em
redhat.com: execute sick-em
*torvald*: execute kill-em
end case
sub sick-em
execute upload michael_jackson_home_movies
execute call_Homeland_security
end sub
sub kill-em
execute upload gates_kids_home_movies
execute call_interpol
end sub
sub goodguys
execute grant_more_stock_options
execute ballmer_happy_dance
end sub
OK, here's a concept.
If data center location isn't such a problem as long as we have high speed data lines, locate the data center someplace nice and cold.
Like Manitoba, or Minnesota, or Alaska, or Siberia. Heat the work area with the flow from the data center.
Hire your local population to maintain the data center.
Profit !
Hmm- Insightful note, and generally true, except.... Since "All Operating Systems are essentially emulators", I'd tend to claim that it still is truly backwards compatible. Classic mode is what I would call a "Quasi-Emulator"- it's sufficiently embedded into OSX that its performance does not suffer the common emulator problems.
In the same respect, Windows XP is backwards compatible to DOS, so it's not a Mac vs. PC argument.
Alas, the model breaks here. Mac OS stuff is deeply backwards compatible- like OSX.x can run Mac software written back to 1985 in most cases.
Yes, this is not a new concept. And yes, it's been on every science fiction writer's radarscope since the concept of a calculating machine was considered.
And it's still science fiction because:
- Language is situational, societal, and emotional
- Most people doing this sort of work communicate in English. So they assume English is a good place to start from. Unfortunately, it's one seriously illogical language to start from.
There have been attempts to create 'natural language' programming languages. And in the main they HAVE been successful. Sure, they are inefficient. But so is human communication.
Every psuedo-code compiler / interpreter that I've ever seen (since the 1970's) has simply been a programming language. Sure, maybe they're a little nicer to look at, but they will always fail the Turing test.
Want TRUE natural language programming ?
Develop a computer that works linguistically, not logically.
It's like claiming that the little light bulb in your headlight is powered by Nuclear Fusion because it emits light in the same general spectra as the Sun. Of course, if you say it with a butt-load of incredible equations, and then give the paper a hugely sensational title, the media whores are gonna run all over the world with it.
Which is what happened.
There's one born every minute, and they all work for the media during sweeps week.
Want more ? Here is the Home page-Science Lite for the STAR detector
Please note also that Dr. Nastase was beating these same drums back in 99. I expect that this paper is science politics- at that level you don't want anyone to think you were wrong, so you will spend significant effort at proving your predictions right, despite evidence to the contrary. Oh, and he's not even on the project- he's sucking down other people's results after the fact.
Very well put, and I tend to agree. The main cost issue with many systems is the concept of legacy maintenance. As developers, many of us don't consider that. (Old version ? It's crap ! Don't use it! Delete those data files !). Backwards compatibility is something most systems don't consider.
M$'s "Exchange" isn't a centralized solution per se- it depends on all the other M$ crap working together. Notes can stand alone, and IT RUNS ON Linux !
I hope IBM Keeps maintaining Notes, but I have an ugly feeling that they're going to let it obsolete and be replaced with... a general mess of loosely cooperative stuff that /. ers will just loove making tons of money playing with. Oh well.
PS- I don't think you're a troll- you just suffered with bad implementations, like everyone else. You know the drill- you can write spaghetti code in any language
I remember that tech. The concept was somewhat sound, but it really did not result in a clean x-y translation solution. You could roll up and down, and then slide from side to side, but the finger movements required were not ergonomic. If you want to be able to truly move X-Y cleanly, a combined axis that works with the hand/arm/wrist is cleaner.
Sure, coders and developers need different things out of their OS, but once the app is done, the critical aspects of the OS become the user's main needs. And yes, I'm assuming your app calls the OS in an organized fashion.
Then you get into the societal aspects- what is the user used to, what is the learning curve, etc... That said, from what I've observed with my family members and their experiences with Apple ][, DOS, Win 3, Win 9x, WinXP, Mac OS 6-X, and leeetle bit of *x.... Well, I get less calls on the Macs than I do anything else. So I vote OSX.
Silly Walks Director: Mr. Stagback, the very real problem is what I find out. You see, there's defense, education, housing, health, social security, silly walks. They're all supposed to get the same. But last year the government spent less on Silly Walks than they did on industrial organisation. We're supposed to get 348 millions pounds a year to cover our entire Silly Walks proposal. Coffee?
Silly Walks Applicant: Yes, please.
Silly Walks Director: Hello, uh, Mrs. Twolumps, uhm, could we have two cups of coffee, please.
Mrs. Twolumps: Yes, Mr. Teabag.
Silly Walks Director: Mad as a hatter. You see, the Israelis they have a man who can take his own left leg off and swallow it with every alternate step, whereas the Japanese, cunning electronically obsessed little...
Even when the article has been /.tted.
Gee- how about the old 'age of steam', if transistors and tubes didn't work. Fabs would be gear hobbing factories. You could tell hardcore programmers from the missing tips of their fingers and the gear lube on their clothes. Gamers would have found a way to visualize graphics by a changing sea of itty bitty colored wheels (or some sort of Rubik's cube thingmajig).
Smaller projects succeed more often, involve smaller risks, shorter schedules, and faster results. Open source software development projects are an interesting combination of small and large projects- essentially a small project (one coder, one mission, one plan) turned into a large project by the overall project environment.
I'd like to see Gartner Group say something about that, but I know they won't. The don't get any consulting coin from the OS community...