they're in a fight for domination. The shareholder will like market domination in the long term rather than immediate profit, since that equals long term profits. Or so I think.
so that's down to a definition of innovation, which is a debate in it's own right. When it comes to microsofts technical innovation the list would be real short though, so that doesn't interest me.
point taken, they don't have the largest sales, I'm not an analyst, I'm an old coder, but a lot of those companies sell computers as well, which microsoft doesn't. However I wasn't talking about the current state of affairs.
I code exclusivelly for linux, and I think windows is a heap of shit. This does not detract from their performance early on, which is where my point was based.
Vendor lock in is a dying strategy, they're trying to extend it, and I hope that they fail, because I *really* don't want to have to make the win32 port of my code a main branch of my development.
I was wondering if my post would make people think I was a microsoft supporter, I'm not. I am however not interested in revisionist history. There was a time when they were the good guys, and IBM were the devil incarnate, and their software was streets ahead of other peoples. They acheived this by killing competition in unfair ways, but in evolutionary terms this is a valid strategy, even if it does suck shit.
I am immensly amused that IBM are the good guys now, that tickles me. SCO are muchly responsible for transforming the public opinion of IBM, although I doubt they are happy with this turn of events.
yes indeed, don't you see that was my point? There were already operating systems, tens of the buggers. The problem was they lacked focus, chasing after each other and trying to trap customers. Go read about the Unix wars, you're history knowledge needs improving.
Vendor lock in was what the Unix wars were all about. Microsoft didn't invent that, they just said 'hey, we have new stuff that's cheaper, and it runs on any pc' They never claimed that other software makers could do better, that didn't make sense back then, co-operation was for losers..
Before microsoft you would buy your computing solution, the software would be custom written for that hardware only, and you were locked completelly to one vendor for both hardware and software, they could and did charge what they liked, and if the software was crap? tough. Microsofts greatest hit was not being tied to a specific hardware set, they could sell their stuff to any computer manufacturer they pleased.
Yes microsoft has software vendor lock in. They emerged in an era where this was an improvement. Besides, all businesses cared about was that it worked, and would be compatible with what other companies were using. This was another problem in the unix wars.
You're making the mistake of taking current events and extrapolating back 20 years, that doesn't work. Yes microsoft aren't so nice now, but have you had a look at what IBM used to get up to? They make microsoft look soft, I'm telling you.
we are supposed to all shout NO!. But they innovated in one critical way. When the Unix wars were in full swing, they came up with a remarkable new business model that utterly crushed all competition and set them as the worlds main desktop and office OS.
Is that innovation? You may argue not, was it nice, nope, but they managed it, and business was so desperate for someone to get of their fat corporate arse and solve their newborn IT problem, that they loved everything microsoft did.
indeed. That is how power works, not just for him, but for everyone.
Money==influence. This has been a constant since money existed. And he need not give to charity, he could set his family up as a powerful dynasty that honestly could be the most influential family in history, certainly the richest, which frankly is the same thing, but he hasn't.
Of course some people will try to make the charitable donations look bad, no matter what, except perhaps the recipients.
Reviled perhaps, but I wonder how much of that is just reflex, and how much is based on the facts of the matter. Ok, microsoft does suck a lot, but I meet people who dislike them without knowing why. That's a bad idea to my mind, it speaks of faith based reasoning moving into the technology sphere, which cannot be a good thing.
I'm in an odd position. I respect Bill gates for his achievements, but dislike Microsoft as it stands (and cannot beleive Ballmer is in chanrge, wtf's up with that?). Barely anyone remembers that Microsoft were once the good guys saving us from the evils of IBM and Unix (back when unix was a million flavors, and they were all damn expensive, before the wonder that is Linux).
Bill is a shark. If he took his business abilities, which are somewhat fearsome, and turned them to politics, then interesting things could result. Look what happened when he turned to Charity, the biggest infusion of private funds into charitable works *in* *history*.
However, is that really what America needs? I don't think so, not right now. Incidentally England was run by businessmen in the 18th and 19th century. The empire wasn't about glory, it was about profit. We did rather well out of it, even though people try and pretend that england was some kind of holy democracy. Remember the Suiz Canal Crisis? Think the motivation was political? Hell no, it was pure business reasoning. Ok it went badly for us, but that was because the climate had changed. The same reasoning had made us the most powerful nation on the planet, but its time had passed.
The fact is that at certain points in history, businessmen have been the right people to run things.
Remember that War of independence you had? Who were the initial group that started it all. Politicians? Nope, Businessmen....
Who were the people who did the most to ensure America's technological dominance and ultimate victory in WWII? Businessmen. When politicians make war armaments decisions entirely you get bad decisions, History showed this clearly. For example, the UK's war spending and research was almost entirely government controlled. That's why we rejected the Jet until the war was almost over. Would a businessman have done that? Oh hell no.
I mean, if all the hackers are working on Vista, surely the current crop of XP worms etc will go out of date, and a properly set up XP box won't be at such risk from a constantly evolving virus enemy
Exeter University, where we have one ongoing (where I am the sole staff researcher, no-one else is interested), but soon Herriot Watt University, when we get our act together.
Ok, when I finish writing the new code we need. The page for the code is here.
However that is out of date, I haven't been able to finalize the new code that we've been using for the last year, or the funky new visualizer, which needs to be moved the QT from plain opengl. Also the manual will take weeks I don't have to write, and I need to complete the new compressed output format.
Other then that it all works. If you fancy the *proper* code to play with, send me a mail c.pridgeon@ex.ac.uk. I know the open source thing is 'release early, release often', but when you have to re-write a huge manual, that's not so easy to achieve. I am bothered that it's been so long since a public update though.
I'm not even slightly interested in star wars space defense stuff. My primary concern is that we not get fossilized by another asteroid impact, who gives a crap about theoretical space dominance wars when we know that sooner or later we are going to get freight-trained by an asteroid.. Understanding more about previous impacts is useful, but I am nowhere near done writing the code I need to model that.
I knew nothing about asteroid path modelling till I said something stupid to my tutor at Uni, that being I wanted to do asteroid interception strategies as my final year project. Then I had a month long panic trying to figure out how on earth I was going to acheive it. Now I have, after producing a double dissertation (which was painfully hard to write) what seems to be the only open source particle particle nbody model that runs on normal pc's, and I've supervised three projects in that field using the software.
And I knew bugger all before I started, not a thing.
Impact modelling is utterly fascinating. I need it to model deflection strategies, hence my book purchases. I hate just reading web pages, I prefer a good textbook.
Its easy to work out the position of tectonic plates at that time, they don't move fast. The question is where were those impact points back then. How to go from that to seasons I don't know.
The idea of a broken up asteroid is, as we know since Shoemaker-levy 9, not only plausible, but apparently common. Common because we saw one, and the chances of us seeing it if they were rare are too big to conceive. if indeed a second fragment hit the traps, then this would add credence to the impact worsening the eruptions. They did worsen, but the argument that shockwaves did it was always a bit dodgy to my mind. A stonking great asteroid smacking into them is far more likely.
Seperation
It will be a long time before I can model impacts, not least because the software is hard to write. When I can it would be fun to try and reverse engineer a double impact of the same scale as the twin impacts you speculate
perhaps trivially fixed, but such would be the task of the people who operate it. Its very easy to say something should be improved, not so easy to be the one doing it.
And yes, Bach does rock, although I've always thought Mussorgsky was under-rated.
I've bought my 12 year old son loads of *18* games. Counterstrike was 18, so was BF2142 I think. Quake 4 was too old for him too apparently, but he has no problems.
On the other hand I rejected the GTA series as soon as I saw it.
without more study I couldn't say. That crater has drifted, so I'd need to see the work they did to work out the original shape. It could be used as a baseline to study though. More recent impacts would be easier to model, but the uplift in the centre of an old crater needs to be reversed, which I suspect is non trivial, and is not present in modern craters.
I've done asteroid path reconstruction, but not asteroid impact reconstruction (though I have just bought the books I need to help me learn the fluid dynamics required for impact modelling, all I need is the time..).
The Yukatan impact seems to have had a secondary explosion caused by the material under the crust in that area (can't remember what, it's early here). That would muddy the picture somewhat.
As I said, it's all very interesting. Whether the work would produce anything considered plausible is another matter.
a bit, but not knowing where in it's rotation the earth was it doesn't narrow it down. You could calculate likely approach vector, but not relate it to an incoming orbit.
it's not very hard to get the aproximate location of earth in the solar system *provided* you can narrow the impact down to a single day, a simple inverted nbody model would acheive that, with a little extra work to predict and correct for model drift over the huge span of time. Time of day and Orientation of the earth is impossible, we just can't be that exact from the archeology.
Then you need mass and impact velocity, plus analysis of the exact angle of impact to determine the likely incoming trajectory of the asteroid (slightly do-able perhaps). I have software I've developed that could extrapolate the likely orbit of the asteroid *if* all the specified data were known (which is impossible, it's just too long ago).
You would be able to use an evolutionary algorithm to generate likely candidates for impact, if you had a sufficiently detailed terrain and impact modelling system, and enough data from the original site. That could give you a likely mass and impact speed/angle. Only aproximations mind.
That's a whole bunch of impossible things, with a tiny smattering of vaguely possible. Shame that, it sounds like a cool project.
they are a de facto standard, just not an open or official standard (although in fact many organisations define it as a standard format for information interchange). Just bandying definitions about does nothing, 99.9999999999% of offices use doc and excel, time to wake up and accept the truth, however you define it, MS doc format, current and later versions *are* the ones most people will use, making them effectivelly standard in the eyes of most people sorry and all.
ODF is an open standard, which is entirely different, it wants to be standard *and* widely used.
Personally I dislike the doc format and adore ODF, I use it extensivelly, along with latex document formatting language, which rocks to a greater extent. However I accept that it will be a very long time before I can dump my copy of office that I keep for compatability with virtually every document I receive.
This does not sound like they are going to carry on with ODF. Ok, perhaps they won't cancell it, but you can bet 'new facts' will emerge that cast doubt, huge discounts will appear, and suddenly ODF won't be as interesting as it once was.
Slashdot Mirror
they're in a fight for domination. The shareholder will like market domination in the long term rather than immediate profit, since that equals long term profits. Or so I think.
so that's down to a definition of innovation, which is a debate in it's own right. When it comes to microsofts technical innovation the list would be real short though, so that doesn't interest me.
point taken, they don't have the largest sales, I'm not an analyst, I'm an old coder, but a lot of those companies sell computers as well, which microsoft doesn't. However I wasn't talking about the current state of affairs.
I code exclusivelly for linux, and I think windows is a heap of shit. This does not detract from their performance early on, which is where my point was based.
Vendor lock in is a dying strategy, they're trying to extend it, and I hope that they fail, because I *really* don't want to have to make the win32 port of my code a main branch of my development.
I was wondering if my post would make people think I was a microsoft supporter, I'm not. I am however not interested in revisionist history. There was a time when they were the good guys, and IBM were the devil incarnate, and their software was streets ahead of other peoples. They acheived this by killing competition in unfair ways, but in evolutionary terms this is a valid strategy, even if it does suck shit.
I am immensly amused that IBM are the good guys now, that tickles me. SCO are muchly responsible for transforming the public opinion of IBM, although I doubt they are happy with this turn of events.
yes indeed, don't you see that was my point? There were already operating systems, tens of the buggers. The problem was they lacked focus, chasing after each other and trying to trap customers. Go read about the Unix wars, you're history knowledge needs improving.
Vendor lock in was what the Unix wars were all about. Microsoft didn't invent that, they just said 'hey, we have new stuff that's cheaper, and it runs on any pc' They never claimed that other software makers could do better, that didn't make sense back then, co-operation was for losers..
Before microsoft you would buy your computing solution, the software would be custom written for that hardware only, and you were locked completelly to one vendor for both hardware and software, they could and did charge what they liked, and if the software was crap? tough. Microsofts greatest hit was not being tied to a specific hardware set, they could sell their stuff to any computer manufacturer they pleased.
Yes microsoft has software vendor lock in. They emerged in an era where this was an improvement. Besides, all businesses cared about was that it worked, and would be compatible with what other companies were using. This was another problem in the unix wars.
You're making the mistake of taking current events and extrapolating back 20 years, that doesn't work. Yes microsoft aren't so nice now, but have you had a look at what IBM used to get up to? They make microsoft look soft, I'm telling you.
we are supposed to all shout NO!. But they innovated in one critical way. When the Unix wars were in full swing, they came up with a remarkable new business model that utterly crushed all competition and set them as the worlds main desktop and office OS.
/sigh...
Is that innovation? You may argue not, was it nice, nope, but they managed it, and business was so desperate for someone to get of their fat corporate arse and solve their newborn IT problem, that they loved everything microsoft did.
If only it hadn't been them that did it
indeed. That is how power works, not just for him, but for everyone.
Money==influence. This has been a constant since money existed. And he need not give to charity, he could set his family up as a powerful dynasty that honestly could be the most influential family in history, certainly the richest, which frankly is the same thing, but he hasn't.
Of course some people will try to make the charitable donations look bad, no matter what, except perhaps the recipients.
Reviled perhaps, but I wonder how much of that is just reflex, and how much is based on the facts of the matter. Ok, microsoft does suck a lot, but I meet people who dislike them without knowing why. That's a bad idea to my mind, it speaks of faith based reasoning moving into the technology sphere, which cannot be a good thing.
I'm in an odd position. I respect Bill gates for his achievements, but dislike Microsoft as it stands (and cannot beleive Ballmer is in chanrge, wtf's up with that?). Barely anyone remembers that Microsoft were once the good guys saving us from the evils of IBM and Unix (back when unix was a million flavors, and they were all damn expensive, before the wonder that is Linux).
Bill is a shark. If he took his business abilities, which are somewhat fearsome, and turned them to politics, then interesting things could result. Look what happened when he turned to Charity, the biggest infusion of private funds into charitable works *in* *history*.
However, is that really what America needs? I don't think so, not right now. Incidentally England was run by businessmen in the 18th and 19th century. The empire wasn't about glory, it was about profit. We did rather well out of it, even though people try and pretend that england was some kind of holy democracy. Remember the Suiz Canal Crisis? Think the motivation was political? Hell no, it was pure business reasoning. Ok it went badly for us, but that was because the climate had changed. The same reasoning had made us the most powerful nation on the planet, but its time had passed.
The fact is that at certain points in history, businessmen have been the right people to run things.
Remember that War of independence you had? Who were the initial group that started it all. Politicians? Nope, Businessmen....
Who were the people who did the most to ensure America's technological dominance and ultimate victory in WWII? Businessmen. When politicians make war armaments decisions entirely you get bad decisions, History showed this clearly. For example, the UK's war spending and research was almost entirely government controlled. That's why we rejected the Jet until the war was almost over. Would a businessman have done that? Oh hell no.
does this mean XP will become safer?
I mean, if all the hackers are working on Vista, surely the current crop of XP worms etc will go out of date, and a properly set up XP box won't be at such risk from a constantly evolving virus enemy
Alert! We have a nit-picker! Stand back, he's gonna blow!!!!
you can't generally snipe at hookers and drug dealers in counterstrike.....
Exeter University, where we have one ongoing (where I am the sole staff researcher, no-one else is interested), but soon Herriot Watt University, when we get our act together.
Ok, when I finish writing the new code we need. The page for the code is here.
http://nmod.sourceforge.net/
However that is out of date, I haven't been able to finalize the new code that we've been using for the last year, or the funky new visualizer, which needs to be moved the QT from plain opengl. Also the manual will take weeks I don't have to write, and I need to complete the new compressed output format.
Other then that it all works. If you fancy the *proper* code to play with, send me a mail c.pridgeon@ex.ac.uk. I know the open source thing is 'release early, release often', but when you have to re-write a huge manual, that's not so easy to achieve. I am bothered that it's been so long since a public update though.
I'm not even slightly interested in star wars space defense stuff. My primary concern is that we not get fossilized by another asteroid impact, who gives a crap about theoretical space dominance wars when we know that sooner or later we are going to get freight-trained by an asteroid.. Understanding more about previous impacts is useful, but I am nowhere near done writing the code I need to model that.
I knew nothing about asteroid path modelling till I said something stupid to my tutor at Uni, that being I wanted to do asteroid interception strategies as my final year project. Then I had a month long panic trying to figure out how on earth I was going to acheive it. Now I have, after producing a double dissertation (which was painfully hard to write) what seems to be the only open source particle particle nbody model that runs on normal pc's, and I've supervised three projects in that field using the software.
And I knew bugger all before I started, not a thing.
Impact modelling is utterly fascinating. I need it to model deflection strategies, hence my book purchases. I hate just reading web pages, I prefer a good textbook.
Its easy to work out the position of tectonic plates at that time, they don't move fast. The question is where were those impact points back then. How to go from that to seasons I don't know.
The idea of a broken up asteroid is, as we know since Shoemaker-levy 9, not only plausible, but apparently common. Common because we saw one, and the chances of us seeing it if they were rare are too big to conceive.
if indeed a second fragment hit the traps, then this would add credence to the impact worsening the eruptions. They did worsen, but the argument that shockwaves did it was always a bit dodgy to my mind. A stonking great asteroid smacking into them is far more likely.
Seperation
It will be a long time before I can model impacts, not least because the software is hard to write. When I can it would be fun to try and reverse engineer a double impact of the same scale as the twin impacts you speculate
perhaps trivially fixed, but such would be the task of the people who operate it. Its very easy to say something should be improved, not so easy to be the one doing it.
And yes, Bach does rock, although I've always thought Mussorgsky was under-rated.
why do people always complain about this. Slashdot isn't perfect, what is? You'd rather get your tech news from msn? Yeah, that'd be great.
I've bought my 12 year old son loads of *18* games. Counterstrike was 18, so was BF2142 I think. Quake 4 was too old for him too apparently, but he has no problems.
On the other hand I rejected the GTA series as soon as I saw it.
It's called being sensible, it's not hard.
without more study I couldn't say. That crater has drifted, so I'd need to see the work they did to work out the original shape. It could be used as a baseline to study though. More recent impacts would be easier to model, but the uplift in the centre of an old crater needs to be reversed, which I suspect is non trivial, and is not present in modern craters.
I've done asteroid path reconstruction, but not asteroid impact reconstruction (though I have just bought the books I need to help me learn the fluid dynamics required for impact modelling, all I need is the time..).
The Yukatan impact seems to have had a secondary explosion caused by the material under the crust in that area (can't remember what, it's early here). That would muddy the picture somewhat.
As I said, it's all very interesting. Whether the work would produce anything considered plausible is another matter.
a bit, but not knowing where in it's rotation the earth was it doesn't narrow it down. You could calculate likely approach vector, but not relate it to an incoming orbit.
it's not very hard to get the aproximate location of earth in the solar system *provided* you can narrow the impact down to a single day, a simple inverted nbody model would acheive that, with a little extra work to predict and correct for model drift over the huge span of time. Time of day and Orientation of the earth is impossible, we just can't be that exact from the archeology.
Then you need mass and impact velocity, plus analysis of the exact angle of impact to determine the likely incoming trajectory of the asteroid (slightly do-able perhaps). I have software I've developed that could extrapolate the likely orbit of the asteroid *if* all the specified data were known (which is impossible, it's just too long ago).
You would be able to use an evolutionary algorithm to generate likely candidates for impact, if you had a sufficiently detailed terrain and impact modelling system, and enough data from the original site. That could give you a likely mass and impact speed/angle. Only aproximations mind.
That's a whole bunch of impossible things, with a tiny smattering of vaguely possible. Shame that, it sounds like a cool project.
actually a frillion of the works population use it, possibly more. Anything else you observe is probably just hallucination.
they are a de facto standard, just not an open or official standard (although in fact many organisations define it as a standard format for information interchange). Just bandying definitions about does nothing, 99.9999999999% of offices use doc and excel, time to wake up and accept the truth, however you define it, MS doc format, current and later versions *are* the ones most people will use, making them effectivelly standard in the eyes of most people sorry and all.
ODF is an open standard, which is entirely different, it wants to be standard *and* widely used.
Personally I dislike the doc format and adore ODF, I use it extensivelly, along with latex document formatting language, which rocks to a greater extent. However I accept that it will be a very long time before I can dump my copy of office that I keep for compatability with virtually every document I receive.
get your tenses right 'were standardising'.
This does not sound like they are going to carry on with ODF. Ok, perhaps they won't cancell it, but you can bet 'new facts' will emerge that cast doubt, huge discounts will appear, and suddenly ODF won't be as interesting as it once was.
that's because there aren't enough seeders.
damn leechers..
thats because the non American readers are all sat hitting refresh and shouting 'FIGHT! FIGHT!'
This one is going to be good...
the simplest way to see if it's going to fail in a dangerous/explosive fashion is to stick a guy in a red shirt next to it then