The above huge block of rant-like text is what I've been trying to tell my girlfriend [2] for the last year or so. She's one of those down-to-earth type of people (which I like), but while she likes to *say* she understands me, I have this nagging feeling that she doesn't. She would like me to spend all of my time with her, which I can theoretically do, except I wouldn't really be happy without x amount of hours in front of a CRT as well... something we both learned the hard way during Christmas break.
I think she believes I'm being overly picky about the type of college I want to attend. Most people outline their young adult lives as such:
goto COLLEGE;
COLLEGE:
for (i = 0; i < 4; i++) { learn(); }
goto WORK;
My particular pseudocode goes as such:
goto COLLEGE
COLLEGE:
if (college == 'good') { learn_something(); }
if (made_friends && learn_something) {
graduate();
}
else {
find_new_college();
}
if (job != "sucking") { work(); }
(And yes, I realize that gotos in actual code are horrendous but sometimes they're an accurate analogy to real life.)
In other words, I want to be a geek, and I want to be happy being one. The only way I can be happy is by continuous learning, not by memorizing the tab-frame layout of the WinNT networking preferences box. Going back to the girlfriend issue, she's not aware yet that the vast majority of educational institutions simply do not offer Computer Science cirriculums for those who actually want to learn and broaden their horizons. Most seem tailored to those who want to learn the basics of Microsoft Networking and then run out and make the big bucks.
Until that times comes, it's back to educating myself and letting my girlfriend get angry at me from time to time. I simply eat, breathe, live, and worship computers and I sincerely hope that will never change while trying to keep my relationship intact.
Sure, there is good money to be made, but in the end, we are all about providing a service, whether that service is constructing a Web site, running a network or administrating a Web discussion board. And while you are providing that service, don't you want to feel proud about the job you are doing?
Hoo boy, that sure sounds nice, but would you please like to join the rest of us in reality? Don't get me wrong, I want an ethical world with ethical businesses just as much as the next guy. Perhaps even more so.
But if the last decade has shown us anything about the human race, it's that we can be damn creative and inventive when it comes to technology, but we still tend to push aside things like ethics, morality, and general kindness in the persuit of our own wealth or power. In other words, I don't see anything changing. But I will continue to fight the good fight as long as it exists or until I perish, whichever comes first.
However, I can think of at least one particular solution to the problem of ethics in computer consulting... a meta-consulting organization of some type analogous to the Better Business Beareau. (Which technically covers consultants anyway.) It merely needs to be a place of authority that businesses can go to and check up on a consultant they are considering to see if complaints have been logged in the past.
Of course, this simple idea would need a lot of work to become useful due to the possibility of abuse. If some consultants are being big enough shysters to go ahead and let a company spend needless millions, is it a far stretch to go logging fictious complains against your competitors? What about those who might be in cahoots with whoever runs the organization? And it need not be limited to computer consultants either. Mayhaps ISPs? PC Service centers? Freelance programmers?
The reason I put a bit of thought into this post is because I might aspire to be a consultant one day (I think I know my kit fairly well) and I don't want to see myself just sitting next to the telephone waiting for it to ring because No One Trusts A Consultant(tm).
There really isn't much value in free," said Miller
Right from the very first sentence of this article, I just had to let out a large belly laugh. Guess I don't actually need to comment much upon this, as the rest of the/. crew knows this statement to be pretty much ridiculous.
Mentioning the "recent security problems" and "lack of key enterprise features," I just have to point out to the doubters that Linux is still (for all intents and purposes) a brand-new operating system. It is at the point now where most people have heard of it, but still haven't seen it let alone bother to check it out. Development is still very much an ongoing project. True Linux supporters and developers have never stated otherwise.
The security problems aren't any particular surprise to me, as it's pretty much obvious that things like there are only going to be discovered until Linux popularity reaches some sort of critical mass and enough people begin tinkering with it.
As for the enterprise-level features not being there, this is an easy case of counting your chickens before they hatch. 2.4.x is just the beginning of the modern linux kernel. The framework is there, now we have to refine things and add in whatever else is desired. Unlike certain other OSes that have *some* of these features but neglect the fact that the framework is fundamentally flawed.
I think those (including M$) that bitch about Linux development being too slow to change need to step back and realize that just a few years ago (in the 2.0.x [where x is a single digit] days) there were many of us who never in their wildest dreams would have imagined that Linux would become a household name.
Clearly, that has changed. And will continue to do so.
Because automatically directing to a server based on location tends to take away people's choices. (This can be worked around, but I'm referring to what is common practice these days.) What happens when the mirror is not up to date? Or the page is gone (404'd)? Or the server is down?
I personally like to select my own mirrors so that I can choose who I download from. In other words, I will almost always choose the server of a for-profit corporate entity than that of a university or non-profit organization when downloading something as large as a kernel tarball.
Plus, the people who run the kernel.org page reason that anyone downloading and building their own kernels ought to be smart enough to figure out to get to a mirror.
I have a similar system and 2.4.0 worked great. The slight boost in kernel performance combined with reiserfs patch makes this Athlon box cook.
But my PII266 laptop is quite another story. 2.4.0 wouldn't detect the pcmcia network card, sound would not work AT ALL (despite it being a 100% SB clone), and the weirdest thing by far was the fact that I would find my BIOS settings cleared every time I rebooted. And this was on a (fairly standard) mobile 440BX chipset. I had to revert to 2.2.18 and everything's been fine since.
So, I think that I have to concur with people who warned folks like me not to upgrade to 2.4 unless they had a good reason to.:P
I think this represents one of the few flaws in the Open Source philosophy. Because developers are working on their own time, they work on whatever suits their fancy. More often than not, this involves some great new feature that's completely unnecessary, but rates high on the "cool-factor". So the things that really need to get done are delayed.
Netscape's programmers are paid to work on Mozilla. I would guess about 80-90% of the Mozilla development team is Netscape employees. So in other words, yes, Mozilla is open source but it is most definitely not a volunteer project. And I can tell you've never visited the bugzilla site, because bugs that interfere with functionality (crashing on startup, etc) always get highest priority and are usually the ones to get fixed first.
I agree with you in that the bloat is excessive, but it's really beyond anyone's control at this point. I can only hope that they continue with the bug fixes long after 1.0 and make it the best damn browser suite they can.
Based on the history of the project, I believe it can be done.
First off, my knowledge and expertise on labor unions themselves is very much limited and I do not claim to be an expert or even to know what I'm talking about. But since this is an open forum, I'd like to add my perspective.
I think it can be agreed that unions exist for the protection of the workers against their employers. I do believe (but am not certain) that unions as we know them today started with the auto industry. Henry Ford, while being the innovator he was, pretty gave not a flying shit about his employees. Working conditions were pretty bad and so the workers fought back and went on strike. A union was created somewhere along the lines and workplace quality went up.
But the coin can be flipped. A union can become strong enough that suddenly the employer is the one in the stranglehold. This is when people starts saying that unions are evil, etc.
Right now, I'd say that the IT industry needs no unions. AFAIK, the good programmers are practically babied and so are some of the bad ones. In general, I would guess that IT workers have it made. Until we start approaching a world something like that in Neal Stephenson's _Snow Crash_, an IT union is a bad idea. We don't want our employers to hate us this early in the game.:P
A few days ago, I just went out and bought myself a Logitech optical mouse. Pretty much identical in funcionality to the M$ IntelliMouse it replaced, except optical To be brief, I love it and can't believe I shunned optical mice for so long.
But you really enlightened me on the surface issue. I've only had this thing for a few days (likely will buy another for a laptop) so I haven't done much experimenting on it. Therefore, the idea of using the mouse on a non-flat or soft surface seemed like crap... until about a minute ago, I tried using my optical mouse *on my lap* and it worked great! Thanks for the tip! Now I'm *definitely buying another for my laptop.
A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I wanted a Logitech Trackman marble. It just looked damn cool and seemed like it would be much funner than a mouse to use. But luckily I tried one before I bought one, and was sadly disappointed at how awkward it was in comparison to a mouse. Well, that and I was just getting good at Quake at the time...
Mice, to me, still seem like a kludgy and hacky implementation of a pointing device. But I guess I can't bitch too much since they do their job and I haven't invented anything better.
Pretty much right on with everything I've mentioned so far. It is refreshing to see someone else on/. who is involved with the military and gets to actually see all of the tremendous effort that goes into defending our country. Most of the people who tend to comment on this sort of thing are the peanut gallery who get their World News Updates(tm) on CNN every night.
These are all very good ideas/questions, and I wish to comment on them. But keep in mind I'm just a nerd following the news as it happens, not a scientist working behind the scenes.
1. The laser could be depoyed indefinitely to the region of conflict at lower cost.
Not neccessarily. A 747 is very expensive, but a boat big enough and fast enough to carry the laser and still fulfill the mission is probably almost as expensive. Further more, a boat probably isn't the best choice strategically, as I'll point out below. (Note however that my expertise is limited to aircraft, not ships. Don't take it as a bias, though.:P)
2. It would also allow the laser to fire while the missile was still slow, full of fuel, and very close to the ground.
Perhaps, but bear in mind that one of the key points of the "airborne" laser is that the missle can be shot down at any point of its trajectory, preferably high up in the atmosphere near its apex, or over the territory of the ones who launched it if such action were justified. An aircraft is probably the preferred vehicle because they can go literally anywhere on the earth's surface (with a ship, you'd be limited to the launch sites that happen to be relatively close to the coast), and they are at least an order of magnitude faster than ships.
3. The larger payload of a ship would allow the laser to be much more powerful than one deployed on a 747.
Very right, but the laser that will be installed on the 747 is already the largest laser in the world. There is the issue of practicality. You may be able to have a higher powered laser on a ship capable of destroying a missle 500 miles away (versus the Airborne Laser's 200), but you run the risk of not getting there on time or at all.
4. The cost and risk of deploying 747s to a theater of operations could be prohibitive.
That's never stopped the Air Force before.:P But seriously, there is always going to be a risk when deploying to an area of escalated conflict. I'd say that the loss of one or two 747's, their technology, and their crew fully justifies defending against the loss of a good chunk of our populace to nuclear attack or biological agents.
1. Would a big, slow ship be more vulnerable to counterattack than a big, slow 747?
Speaking relatively, I'd say a ship would be MUCH slower and therefore vulnerable to attack than a 747. Airplanes can attack ships effectively and ships can attack ships effectively, but the only thing that can attack airplanes effectively is airplanes. (If that made much sense...)
2. Would water vapor present at the surface diffract the beam so much it became unusable? For that matter, what about inclement weather?
Good question... I'm inclined to believe that things on the surface such as water vapour and weather would lessen the power of such a weapon. Whereas at high altitudes above the clouds, you let little else than clean and thin air.
All that aside, putting a laser weapon system on a ship in the future could very well be a good strategy. Probably not for shooting down global-reach missles, but for shooting down enemy aircraft overhead (remember, lasers track quite well) or for attacking other ships.
(Still need to find a way to get at those damn submarines!)
I am an enlisted member of the Air Force and first wish to note that I am not a member or participant of this project. I have no affiliation with it whatsoever. However, it is interesting use of technology to me and I've been following it very closely.
To be blunt, this isn't new news. It's been in design for a couple years now and they're just now getting ready to test fly the actual aircraft with the laser onboard pretty soon now. It's undergoing preliminary testing at the base I'm currently stationed at. (Kirtland AFB, NM)
The slashdotter's concern that a computer controls the laser should come as a surprise to no one. Almost every part of every aircraft and space vehicle is controlled primary by computers, to include weapons systems.
Perhaps there is the concern that this plane will go up, fly itself, and indiscriminately shoot down whatever it finds. That is bull. It will be flown by experienced pilots with expertly trained individuals operating the laser weapon systems. The computer *has* to be the one to "pull the trigger" because the calculations are far to numerous for humans to do. But the computer is always being operated by a person.
How it works is rather interesting. The crew first receives news of a missle launch somehow and it's approximate coordinates. The fly to the approximate area of the missle and try to identify it. Based on the type of missle it is, the computer picks out a specific spot to fire the high-powered laser at on the missle, (such as the fuel tank) to ensure its destruction. A tracking laser locks on to the missle while the high powered laser fires and destroys the missle within seconds. This is, of course, greatly simplified.
Hemos noted that this hasn't appeared on slashdot before.. that's partially correct. It's never been an actual story, but the conversation has come up many times before in the comments where discussion has been on the topic of US defense against global weapons. I know I've mentioned the airborne laser at least once to prove my point.
I agree, it *is* stupid. But I expect they'll have something this major cleaned up before 1.0.
About the installation of plugins and such... I think it should be perfectly possible to just have users be able to download their own plugins and things (to be stored in their.mozilla directories) if the sysadmin's Mozilla install doesn't already include it.
This isn't quite what it sounds like. What they mean is that whoever runs Mozilla for the very first time on a given machine needs to have write access to wherever you installed it. For most of us, this will be the user 'root'. This is due to the fact that Mozilla automatically generates a few files in it's own directory the first time it's loaded. After that, anyone can run it harmlessly.
This is probably derived from Win32 way of developing things, but I'm confident that most of the developers are just as concerned with the Linux platform as well and it will be fixed or worked around somehow before 1.0.
0.6 was on it's way to becoming my primary browser until some bugs in the history code reared their ugly head. First, clicking on a link sometimes did *weird* things. (It would try to load the right page on the wrong server.:P) Second, Mozilla would nuke the history and stop adding pages to it, making it look like I had the history completely turned off.
It's things like this that I'm sure are a major pain in the ass for the Mozilla developers, but once their ironed out, it should turn out to be a really nice browser.
Well, it's not entirely impossible to just install a newer distro and download 2.4. I've got a Mandrake 7.0 laptop that I've done extensive upgrades to without any major problems. (kernel 2.2.18, gnome 1.2.1, other stuff)
Slashdot Mirror
The above huge block of rant-like text is what I've been trying to tell my girlfriend [2] for the last year or so. She's one of those down-to-earth type of people (which I like), but while she likes to *say* she understands me, I have this nagging feeling that she doesn't. She would like me to spend all of my time with her, which I can theoretically do, except I wouldn't really be happy without x amount of hours in front of a CRT as well... something we both learned the hard way during Christmas break.
I think she believes I'm being overly picky about the type of college I want to attend. Most people outline their young adult lives as such:
goto COLLEGE;
COLLEGE:
for (i = 0; i < 4; i++) { learn(); }
goto WORK;
My particular pseudocode goes as such:
goto COLLEGE
COLLEGE:
if (college == 'good') { learn_something(); }
if (made_friends && learn_something) {
graduate();
}
else {
find_new_college();
}
if (job != "sucking") { work(); }
(And yes, I realize that gotos in actual code are horrendous but sometimes they're an accurate analogy to real life.)
In other words, I want to be a geek, and I want to be happy being one. The only way I can be happy is by continuous learning, not by memorizing the tab-frame layout of the WinNT networking preferences box. Going back to the girlfriend issue, she's not aware yet that the vast majority of educational institutions simply do not offer Computer Science cirriculums for those who actually want to learn and broaden their horizons. Most seem tailored to those who want to learn the basics of Microsoft Networking and then run out and make the big bucks.
Until that times comes, it's back to educating myself and letting my girlfriend get angry at me from time to time. I simply eat, breathe, live, and worship computers and I sincerely hope that will never change while trying to keep my relationship intact.
I do fail to see how you expect "privacy" in the middle of a football field with hundreds of thousands of fans watching your every move.
I *would*, however, expect (nay, demand) some privacy on my crapper.
Then why did you?
Felon.
Sure, there is good money to be made, but in the end, we are all about providing a service, whether that service is constructing a Web site, running a network or administrating a Web discussion board. And while you are providing that service, don't you want to feel proud about the job you are doing?
Hoo boy, that sure sounds nice, but would you please like to join the rest of us in reality? Don't get me wrong, I want an ethical world with ethical businesses just as much as the next guy. Perhaps even more so.
But if the last decade has shown us anything about the human race, it's that we can be damn creative and inventive when it comes to technology, but we still tend to push aside things like ethics, morality, and general kindness in the persuit of our own wealth or power. In other words, I don't see anything changing. But I will continue to fight the good fight as long as it exists or until I perish, whichever comes first.
However, I can think of at least one particular solution to the problem of ethics in computer consulting... a meta-consulting organization of some type analogous to the Better Business Beareau. (Which technically covers consultants anyway.) It merely needs to be a place of authority that businesses can go to and check up on a consultant they are considering to see if complaints have been logged in the past.
Of course, this simple idea would need a lot of work to become useful due to the possibility of abuse. If some consultants are being big enough shysters to go ahead and let a company spend needless millions, is it a far stretch to go logging fictious complains against your competitors? What about those who might be in cahoots with whoever runs the organization? And it need not be limited to computer consultants either. Mayhaps ISPs? PC Service centers? Freelance programmers?
The reason I put a bit of thought into this post is because I might aspire to be a consultant one day (I think I know my kit fairly well) and I don't want to see myself just sitting next to the telephone waiting for it to ring because No One Trusts A Consultant(tm).
There really isn't much value in free," said Miller
Right from the very first sentence of this article, I just had to let out a large belly laugh. Guess I don't actually need to comment much upon this, as the rest of the
Mentioning the "recent security problems" and "lack of key enterprise features," I just have to point out to the doubters that Linux is still (for all intents and purposes) a brand-new operating system. It is at the point now where most people have heard of it, but still haven't seen it let alone bother to check it out. Development is still very much an ongoing project. True Linux supporters and developers have never stated otherwise.
The security problems aren't any particular surprise to me, as it's pretty much obvious that things like there are only going to be discovered until Linux popularity reaches some sort of critical mass and enough people begin tinkering with it.
As for the enterprise-level features not being there, this is an easy case of counting your chickens before they hatch. 2.4.x is just the beginning of the modern linux kernel. The framework is there, now we have to refine things and add in whatever else is desired. Unlike certain other OSes that have *some* of these features but neglect the fact that the framework is fundamentally flawed.
I think those (including M$) that bitch about Linux development being too slow to change need to step back and realize that just a few years ago (in the 2.0.x [where x is a single digit] days) there were many of us who never in their wildest dreams would have imagined that Linux would become a household name.
Clearly, that has changed. And will continue to do so.
Because automatically directing to a server based on location tends to take away people's choices. (This can be worked around, but I'm referring to what is common practice these days.) What happens when the mirror is not up to date? Or the page is gone (404'd)? Or the server is down?
I personally like to select my own mirrors so that I can choose who I download from. In other words, I will almost always choose the server of a for-profit corporate entity than that of a university or non-profit organization when downloading something as large as a kernel tarball.
Plus, the people who run the kernel.org page reason that anyone downloading and building their own kernels ought to be smart enough to figure out to get to a mirror.
I have a similar system and 2.4.0 worked great. The slight boost in kernel performance combined with reiserfs patch makes this Athlon box cook.
But my PII266 laptop is quite another story. 2.4.0 wouldn't detect the pcmcia network card, sound would not work AT ALL (despite it being a 100% SB clone), and the weirdest thing by far was the fact that I would find my BIOS settings cleared every time I rebooted. And this was on a (fairly standard) mobile 440BX chipset. I had to revert to 2.2.18 and everything's been fine since.
So, I think that I have to concur with people who warned folks like me not to upgrade to 2.4 unless they had a good reason to.
I count seven minutes between the initial annoucement and the "go ahead" post.
I think this represents one of the few flaws in the Open Source philosophy. Because developers are working on their own time, they work on whatever suits their fancy. More often than not, this involves some great new feature that's completely unnecessary, but rates high on the "cool-factor". So the things that really need to get done are delayed.
Netscape's programmers are paid to work on Mozilla. I would guess about 80-90% of the Mozilla development team is Netscape employees. So in other words, yes, Mozilla is open source but it is most definitely not a volunteer project. And I can tell you've never visited the bugzilla site, because bugs that interfere with functionality (crashing on startup, etc) always get highest priority and are usually the ones to get fixed first.
I agree with you in that the bloat is excessive, but it's really beyond anyone's control at this point. I can only hope that they continue with the bug fixes long after 1.0 and make it the best damn browser suite they can.
Based on the history of the project, I believe it can be done.
Eh? Must be a slow day at slashdot. Rice Genome. Good grief.
First off, my knowledge and expertise on labor unions themselves is very much limited and I do not claim to be an expert or even to know what I'm talking about. But since this is an open forum, I'd like to add my perspective.
I think it can be agreed that unions exist for the protection of the workers against their employers. I do believe (but am not certain) that unions as we know them today started with the auto industry. Henry Ford, while being the innovator he was, pretty gave not a flying shit about his employees. Working conditions were pretty bad and so the workers fought back and went on strike. A union was created somewhere along the lines and workplace quality went up.
But the coin can be flipped. A union can become strong enough that suddenly the employer is the one in the stranglehold. This is when people starts saying that unions are evil, etc.
Right now, I'd say that the IT industry needs no unions. AFAIK, the good programmers are practically babied and so are some of the bad ones. In general, I would guess that IT workers have it made. Until we start approaching a world something like that in Neal Stephenson's _Snow Crash_, an IT union is a bad idea. We don't want our employers to hate us this early in the game.
A few days ago, I just went out and bought myself a Logitech optical mouse. Pretty much identical in funcionality to the M$ IntelliMouse it replaced, except optical To be brief, I love it and can't believe I shunned optical mice for so long.
But you really enlightened me on the surface issue. I've only had this thing for a few days (likely will buy another for a laptop) so I haven't done much experimenting on it. Therefore, the idea of using the mouse on a non-flat or soft surface seemed like crap... until about a minute ago, I tried using my optical mouse *on my lap* and it worked great! Thanks for the tip! Now I'm *definitely buying another for my laptop.
Yep, key phrase there, "NEC Japan."
Might be a better idea to try http://www.nec.jp" instead.
A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I wanted a Logitech Trackman marble. It just looked damn cool and seemed like it would be much funner than a mouse to use. But luckily I tried one before I bought one, and was sadly disappointed at how awkward it was in comparison to a mouse. Well, that and I was just getting good at Quake at the time...
Mice, to me, still seem like a kludgy and hacky implementation of a pointing device. But I guess I can't bitch too much since they do their job and I haven't invented anything better.
Pretty much right on with everything I've mentioned so far. It is refreshing to see someone else on
Thank you, that is exactly how I wanted to put it.
These are all very good ideas/questions, and I wish to comment on them. But keep in mind I'm just a nerd following the news as it happens, not a scientist working behind the scenes.
1. The laser could be depoyed indefinitely to the region of conflict at lower cost.
Not neccessarily. A 747 is very expensive, but a boat big enough and fast enough to carry the laser and still fulfill the mission is probably almost as expensive. Further more, a boat probably isn't the best choice strategically, as I'll point out below. (Note however that my expertise is limited to aircraft, not ships. Don't take it as a bias, though.
2. It would also allow the laser to fire while the missile was still slow, full of fuel, and very close to the ground.
Perhaps, but bear in mind that one of the key points of the "airborne" laser is that the missle can be shot down at any point of its trajectory, preferably high up in the atmosphere near its apex, or over the territory of the ones who launched it if such action were justified. An aircraft is probably the preferred vehicle because they can go literally anywhere on the earth's surface (with a ship, you'd be limited to the launch sites that happen to be relatively close to the coast), and they are at least an order of magnitude faster than ships.
3. The larger payload of a ship would allow the laser to be much more powerful than one deployed on a 747.
Very right, but the laser that will be installed on the 747 is already the largest laser in the world. There is the issue of practicality. You may be able to have a higher powered laser on a ship capable of destroying a missle 500 miles away (versus the Airborne Laser's 200), but you run the risk of not getting there on time or at all.
4. The cost and risk of deploying 747s to a theater of operations could be prohibitive.
That's never stopped the Air Force before.
1. Would a big, slow ship be more vulnerable to counterattack than a big, slow 747?
Speaking relatively, I'd say a ship would be MUCH slower and therefore vulnerable to attack than a 747. Airplanes can attack ships effectively and ships can attack ships effectively, but the only thing that can attack airplanes effectively is airplanes. (If that made much sense...)
2. Would water vapor present at the surface diffract the beam so much it became unusable? For that matter, what about inclement weather?
Good question... I'm inclined to believe that things on the surface such as water vapour and weather would lessen the power of such a weapon. Whereas at high altitudes above the clouds, you let little else than clean and thin air.
All that aside, putting a laser weapon system on a ship in the future could very well be a good strategy. Probably not for shooting down global-reach missles, but for shooting down enemy aircraft overhead (remember, lasers track quite well) or for attacking other ships.
(Still need to find a way to get at those damn submarines!)
I am an enlisted member of the Air Force and first wish to note that I am not a member or participant of this project. I have no affiliation with it whatsoever. However, it is interesting use of technology to me and I've been following it very closely.
The official website: Airborne Laser.
To be blunt, this isn't new news. It's been in design for a couple years now and they're just now getting ready to test fly the actual aircraft with the laser onboard pretty soon now. It's undergoing preliminary testing at the base I'm currently stationed at. (Kirtland AFB, NM)
The slashdotter's concern that a computer controls the laser should come as a surprise to no one. Almost every part of every aircraft and space vehicle is controlled primary by computers, to include weapons systems.
Perhaps there is the concern that this plane will go up, fly itself, and indiscriminately shoot down whatever it finds. That is bull. It will be flown by experienced pilots with expertly trained individuals operating the laser weapon systems. The computer *has* to be the one to "pull the trigger" because the calculations are far to numerous for humans to do. But the computer is always being operated by a person.
How it works is rather interesting. The crew first receives news of a missle launch somehow and it's approximate coordinates. The fly to the approximate area of the missle and try to identify it. Based on the type of missle it is, the computer picks out a specific spot to fire the high-powered laser at on the missle, (such as the fuel tank) to ensure its destruction. A tracking laser locks on to the missle while the high powered laser fires and destroys the missle within seconds. This is, of course, greatly simplified.
Hemos noted that this hasn't appeared on slashdot before.. that's partially correct. It's never been an actual story, but the conversation has come up many times before in the comments where discussion has been on the topic of US defense against global weapons. I know I've mentioned the airborne laser at least once to prove my point.
I agree, it *is* stupid. But I expect they'll have something this major cleaned up before 1.0.
About the installation of plugins and such... I think it should be perfectly possible to just have users be able to download their own plugins and things (to be stored in their
Actually, I am wrong... That isn't the bug in question. In fact, I think I agree... that's a pretty stupid bug.
Interestingly enough, bug 46588 seems to have something to do with pasting rather than installing... weird.
This isn't quite what it sounds like. What they mean is that whoever runs Mozilla for the very first time on a given machine needs to have write access to wherever you installed it. For most of us, this will be the user 'root'. This is due to the fact that Mozilla automatically generates a few files in it's own directory the first time it's loaded. After that, anyone can run it harmlessly.
This is probably derived from Win32 way of developing things, but I'm confident that most of the developers are just as concerned with the Linux platform as well and it will be fixed or worked around somehow before 1.0.
0.6 was on it's way to becoming my primary browser until some bugs in the history code reared their ugly head. First, clicking on a link sometimes did *weird* things. (It would try to load the right page on the wrong server.
It's things like this that I'm sure are a major pain in the ass for the Mozilla developers, but once their ironed out, it should turn out to be a really nice browser.
It has been promised that reiserfs will show up in 2.4.1.
There is already a reiser patch for 2.4.0 on
ftp://ftp.namesys.com/pub/2.4/
Well, it's not entirely impossible to just install a newer distro and download 2.4. I've got a Mandrake 7.0 laptop that I've done extensive upgrades to without any major problems. (kernel 2.2.18, gnome 1.2.1, other stuff)
The first thing I did when I found out 2.4 was out was head over to Namesys to see about that. From the FTP site:
- 306954 Jan 5 09:49 linux-2.4.0-reiserfs-3.6.24-patch.gz
It's there. Gtab it. Have fun. A link for the impatient: ftp://ftp.namesys.com/pub/2.4/linux-2.4.0-reiserf