2. FLIR Equipment not rated for -40 deg
My problem with this is, working in automotive systems, we regularly see this requirement, and it's more of a "spec" thing. Most electronics are fine in cold weather... short of devices with moving parts (hard drive, for example). Just because the FLIR is not "rated" at -40 doesn't mean it can't handle such temperatures, only that one or more components (chips, capacitors, resistors, etc...) in the system are not CERTIFIED to operate at the wide range of temperatures. Certification for this requirement is often an expensive process and often, certified and uncertified parts are identical in everything but price (or availability, more often). I think he's a little bit out there on this one.
The problem with this insightful analysis is that you're in automotive systems, not marine systems or avionics. You're assuming that FLIR is made up of the sort of consumer-grade electronics that you find in cars. As a US Air Force avionics technician, I can tell you that it just ain't so.
Practically every piece of equipment that gets installed on a ship or plane in the US military has to be composed only of parts that conform to strict military specifications. Even something as trivial as a resistor has to be designed, manufactured, and rigorously tested to ensure that it can survive and operate properly in all conceivable temperature, pressure, and humidity extremes.
Why? Because lives may depend on that one resistor properly doing its job in extreme environments.
Second, FLIR is not just another piece of equipment, it's actually composed of some of the most high-tech sensors we have. FLIR is not something you build in your garage over the weekend. It's hard and expensive to develop a military-grade FLIR system at all, let alone one that operates in -40, which is probably why Lockheed Martin went with -5 instead and hoped that nobody would notice the difference. What would happen if one of these boats ended up in arctic waters at night and needed FLIR in the middle of an attack? Not being able to see in the dark sounds like a pretty huge defensive disadvantage, if you ask me.
Indeed. I was putting together a computer for my mostly computer illiterate father-in-law and tried the two most newbie-friendly Linux distributions I could find: Kubuntu and Linspire. Kubuntu was still in its early stages and not really suitable for daily use. Linspire was great, though. Tons of hand-holding and everything just seemed to work.
Linspire would have ended up on the box too, if Click and Run didn't require a subscription. I would have easily shelled for a version of Linspire that allowed full and free access to CNR if it meant keeping Windows off the box. But there's no way I can stomach the very idea of having to pay a subscription fee just to download and install open source software that's free everywhere else. Kinda goes against my principles. Plus, I don't know how I would have explained it to the in-laws. "Sure, you can get that version of solitaire, but first you have to pay a monthly subscription to this one company..."
Wired has an excellent analysis of Sony as it struggles to overcome the failures of the 1990s
Sorry, what? I admit I only skimmed the article, but I don't recall Sony's video game business in the 90's being any kind of failure. I can clearly remember the whole video game community having itself a good hearty laugh when it was first announced that Sony wanted to sell its own video game console. Many tried to challenge the market domination of Nintendo and Sega before, and all had failed. Then the Playstation comes out and Nintendo and Sega are forced to take a few steps back, asses in hand.
The Playstation was a smashing success. It was only after Sony proved that an "outsider company," with no previous experience in video games, could dominate the scene that Microsoft decided to give it a go. (The MS definition of "innovation.")
I really hope the Wii does well. Nintendo has a long history of revolutionizing the gaming industry and it will be good to see something original again. I skipped the whole Dreamcast/PSX2/XBox generation of consoles partly because I grew up and partly because it was just a wholesale rehash of the 32-bit generation with a few more polygons.
This is why I prefer 800MHz or 900MHz cordless phones. They cause less intereference with other equipment and their signal seems to penetrate objects better. My guess is that these lower frequency ranges have to be licensed from the FCC. The manufacturers would rather skip the licensing fees even if it means selling phones that only make it to about 30 feet from the base station without too many walls in between.
Ten years ago, my dad bought a cordless Sony phone that he used to carry with him down to the beach 1/2 mile away and still hold an intereference-free conversation on it.
Gentle Slashdot readers, please do not take the parent poster's (rather offensive) remarks as representative of the open source development community. A very good number of us neither want nor ask for monetary compensation for our efforts. We work on open source software to satisfy our own software needs, to improve the quality of the projects we choose to work on, and to contribute something back to the community that makes it possible to do what we do for free. But mostly, we do it for fun. Yes, sometimes a project is so popular that there's a certain amount of infrastructure that needs to be paid for (web servers, etc), but by and large, nobody becomes an open source developer for the money.
Bothering people at home with unsolicited calls after 7PM doesn't make you patriotic, it makes you a fucktard. I don't care if you're doing it for free or a million dollars, you deserve every hang-up and explitive you get.
Um, sure I'll pay 2x-3x more for 1/8 the voice quality and a legally-binding contract just to be interrupted more often by friends and family than telemarketers.
And mark my words, it won't be long now until the cell phone companies notice that they'll make all kinds of money by selling their subscriber list to telemarketers. They get to charge the telemarketers for the list *and* their customers for answering each call!
Here's a brief article (and a picture) of the US's current standard. There's also a graph showing that the US standard tends to be replaced roughly every 5-10 years.
Well, I can't speak for Slashdot, but I have some interesting stats on one of my sites. This site is 100% entertainment-related. (Haha, no not pron.) Doesn't have a thing to do with the Internet, open source, geekery in general, or neither does it target a specific age group or gender. Thus, I often consider these stats as accurately representing your average web user. The problem is, my stats always show consistently higher Firefox usage than what the latest round of news articles seem to proclaim and I can't figure out why. (Apologies for the crappy formatting, but there's no good way to make a table on Slashdot. Just imagine that the numbers at the far right of the list are actually in their own column. And of course, any attempt to make it halfway readable results in the slashcode rejecting the submission due to too many "junk characters".)
Internet Explorer 6.x 53.0%
Mozilla Firefox 1.x 35.8%
Safari 1.x 3.3%
Internet Explorer 7.x 2.6%
Opera 9.x 1.3%
Mozilla 1.x 1.3%
Netscape 7.x 0.7%
Netscape 3.x 0.7%
Unknown 1.3%
According to this, it won't be long before IE is stripped of the popular vote. (Also, which two of you are actually still using Netscape 3.x and sweet lord why?)
Not to be abusive, abrasive, or hostile in any way, but Romero hasn't had any "good works" since he left id and not even id has been able to equal the greatness of the titles of that era.
Say I make (ast an hourly rate of my annual salary) $50 an hour. Not unresaonable for a consultant.
I am distributing a baby distro and I do the source via DVD and postal request since I cannot afford a lot of bandwidth.
Sir, if you're making $50 an hour, you certainly can afford the bandwidth.
"Yes, you can have the whole source tree from my upstream and the 2K of diffs I have added - the reasonable cost for this source is $94.37 per CD"
Is that the right answer?
Maybe choose instead to bother with it in the evening or on the weekend when your time isn't so costly? If one is not prepared to fulfill his obligations under the GPL, one should not license his code under the GPL.
I personally license most of my stuff under the BSD license or put it into the public domain for this reason. For my crappy little substandard projects, the GPL is way overkill. Nobody's going to rip them off and if they do, I hardly care. If I ever wanted to use the GPL, it would only be for code written in an "interpreted" language like Python where the executable and the source code are the same thing.
Those were the days - further I can recall back to is the Voodoo 2, anyone have any further fond memories of the mid 1990s GPU situation?
Oh yes indeedy. I had a Packard Hell Pentium 100MHz and after discovering QuakeWorld, bugged my mom ruthlessly to get me a Canopus Pure3D video accelerator. That card was the only thing I got for Christmas that year. (This is all going from memory, so nobody shoot me if I've gotten some facts wrong. Better yet, just correct me.)
Not long after Quake was released, id (or some trusted source close to the employees at id) produced a variant called GLQuake that utilized OpenGL acceleration on hardware that supported it. I do believe at that time such video hardware ran upwards of $2000 and was accompanied only by high end SGI workstations and the like. But Quake still looked damn cool on them things.
Then the 3Dfx Voodoo chip came out and all hell broke loose. Suddenly, extremely powerful and affordable 3D acceleration was available to the unwashed masses. The Voodoo chip and GLQuake single-handedly started the 3D-accelerated FPS revolution. The interesting thing about the Voodoo chip is that it did not do any 2D graphics modes. For those who weren't around 3D gaming at this point or may have forgotten, there was actually a pass-through cable that connected between your old 2D VGA output and into the accelerator card. When not playing a 3D game, the card simply piped the 2D graphics through the accelerator, bypassing the Voodoo chip. When you launched Quake or any other 3D game, the Voodoo chip cut off the 2D signal to send its own to the monitor. Crazy, but it worked and it's probably one of the main reasons that the cards were so cheap. Oh, and the Voodoo had exactly one output resolution and color depth: 640x480x16k.
Now back to the Canopus Pure3D. The Pure3D, in its day, was the cadillac of Voodoo cards. If I recall, every single Voodoo card on the market had 2MB of framebuffer and 2MB of texture memory. The Pure3D had 4MB of texture memory, but the only game that could take advantage of it was Quake. (Every other game developer hard-coded their games to use only 2MB of texture memory due to the sheer volume of 2MB Voodoo cards on the market. id has always let you tweak everything.) The Pure3D also had a video-out jack, something unheard of on such a cheap card. But obviously it only worked in "3D mode," so it wasn't really all that useful. Few people would buy a 3D card capable of displaying high-resolution graphics only to display them on a crappy low-resolution TV.
Ah, the wonderful days of yore where I'd spend entire weekends playing QuakeWorld with the Team Fortress mod over 33.6 dialup. When I wasn't gaming, I was browsing Blue's News or Planet Quake. The Pentium 100 and Pure3D combo couldn't quite handle Quake II all that well, but I was still quite happy enough with good old Quake for at least a couple years.
Slashdot Mirror
2. FLIR Equipment not rated for -40 deg
My problem with this is, working in automotive systems, we regularly see this requirement, and it's more of a "spec" thing. Most electronics are fine in cold weather... short of devices with moving parts (hard drive, for example). Just because the FLIR is not "rated" at -40 doesn't mean it can't handle such temperatures, only that one or more components (chips, capacitors, resistors, etc...) in the system are not CERTIFIED to operate at the wide range of temperatures. Certification for this requirement is often an expensive process and often, certified and uncertified parts are identical in everything but price (or availability, more often). I think he's a little bit out there on this one.
The problem with this insightful analysis is that you're in automotive systems, not marine systems or avionics. You're assuming that FLIR is made up of the sort of consumer-grade electronics that you find in cars. As a US Air Force avionics technician, I can tell you that it just ain't so.
Practically every piece of equipment that gets installed on a ship or plane in the US military has to be composed only of parts that conform to strict military specifications. Even something as trivial as a resistor has to be designed, manufactured, and rigorously tested to ensure that it can survive and operate properly in all conceivable temperature, pressure, and humidity extremes.
Why? Because lives may depend on that one resistor properly doing its job in extreme environments.
Second, FLIR is not just another piece of equipment, it's actually composed of some of the most high-tech sensors we have. FLIR is not something you build in your garage over the weekend. It's hard and expensive to develop a military-grade FLIR system at all, let alone one that operates in -40, which is probably why Lockheed Martin went with -5 instead and hoped that nobody would notice the difference. What would happen if one of these boats ended up in arctic waters at night and needed FLIR in the middle of an attack? Not being able to see in the dark sounds like a pretty huge defensive disadvantage, if you ask me.
AT&T Call Center Operator: Sir, may I ask you why you're choosing to cancel your service with us today?
Me: Well, let's see, first there was that whole Internet tapping thing.
AT&T: I'm not sure which Internet tapping situation you're referring to...
Me: GOOD GOD, THERE'S MORE THAN ONE?! Hold on, let me pull up my blog!
AT&T: No, sir, I meant I'm not personally aware of any Internet tapping. I assure you that AT&T values your privacy...
Me: And then you cooperated with the NSA in their illegal domestic spying project.
AT&T: While I can't offer any comments on that, I'd just like to state that your privacy is our first concern...
Me: Then you wouldn't mind explaning how just last weekend, you let slip the personal information of over 19,000 customers?
AT&T: Sir, I assure that incidents like this are very...
Me: STRIKE THREE, YOU'RE OUT! *click*
Indeed. I was putting together a computer for my mostly computer illiterate father-in-law and tried the two most newbie-friendly Linux distributions I could find: Kubuntu and Linspire. Kubuntu was still in its early stages and not really suitable for daily use. Linspire was great, though. Tons of hand-holding and everything just seemed to work.
Linspire would have ended up on the box too, if Click and Run didn't require a subscription. I would have easily shelled for a version of Linspire that allowed full and free access to CNR if it meant keeping Windows off the box. But there's no way I can stomach the very idea of having to pay a subscription fee just to download and install open source software that's free everywhere else. Kinda goes against my principles. Plus, I don't know how I would have explained it to the in-laws. "Sure, you can get that version of solitaire, but first you have to pay a monthly subscription to this one company..."
Wired has an excellent analysis of Sony as it struggles to overcome the failures of the 1990s
Sorry, what? I admit I only skimmed the article, but I don't recall Sony's video game business in the 90's being any kind of failure. I can clearly remember the whole video game community having itself a good hearty laugh when it was first announced that Sony wanted to sell its own video game console. Many tried to challenge the market domination of Nintendo and Sega before, and all had failed. Then the Playstation comes out and Nintendo and Sega are forced to take a few steps back, asses in hand.
The Playstation was a smashing success. It was only after Sony proved that an "outsider company," with no previous experience in video games, could dominate the scene that Microsoft decided to give it a go. (The MS definition of "innovation.")
I really hope the Wii does well. Nintendo has a long history of revolutionizing the gaming industry and it will be good to see something original again. I skipped the whole Dreamcast/PSX2/XBox generation of consoles partly because I grew up and partly because it was just a wholesale rehash of the 32-bit generation with a few more polygons.
Looks like they've now cached the missing-screenshots version. :(
Please oh please be joking...
This is why I prefer 800MHz or 900MHz cordless phones. They cause less intereference with other equipment and their signal seems to penetrate objects better. My guess is that these lower frequency ranges have to be licensed from the FCC. The manufacturers would rather skip the licensing fees even if it means selling phones that only make it to about 30 feet from the base station without too many walls in between.
Ten years ago, my dad bought a cordless Sony phone that he used to carry with him down to the beach 1/2 mile away and still hold an intereference-free conversation on it.
You, sir, overestimate the American sheeple.
from the don't-copy-that-floppy dept.
Zonk. When has music *ever* come on a floppy?
Dear Sir,
See my sig for further details.
Remind me to never buy something that can be taken from me...remotely.
Then you might be interested in this and/or this, depending on your level of expertise.
Jesus, how did you get that thing through the lameness filter?
Both of which Unix has been doing for years...
Gentle Slashdot readers, please do not take the parent poster's (rather offensive) remarks as representative of the open source development community. A very good number of us neither want nor ask for monetary compensation for our efforts. We work on open source software to satisfy our own software needs, to improve the quality of the projects we choose to work on, and to contribute something back to the community that makes it possible to do what we do for free. But mostly, we do it for fun. Yes, sometimes a project is so popular that there's a certain amount of infrastructure that needs to be paid for (web servers, etc), but by and large, nobody becomes an open source developer for the money.
Bothering people at home with unsolicited calls after 7PM doesn't make you patriotic, it makes you a fucktard. I don't care if you're doing it for free or a million dollars, you deserve every hang-up and explitive you get.
Um, sure I'll pay 2x-3x more for 1/8 the voice quality and a legally-binding contract just to be interrupted more often by friends and family than telemarketers.
And mark my words, it won't be long now until the cell phone companies notice that they'll make all kinds of money by selling their subscriber list to telemarketers. They get to charge the telemarketers for the list *and* their customers for answering each call!
Here's a brief article (and a picture) of the US's current standard. There's also a graph showing that the US standard tends to be replaced roughly every 5-10 years.
According to this, it won't be long before IE is stripped of the popular vote. (Also, which two of you are actually still using Netscape 3.x and sweet lord why?)
Which is fine, but it shouldn't have the legitimacy of other web content.
Heh, in that case, neither should Slashdot comments.
Not to be abusive, abrasive, or hostile in any way, but Romero hasn't had any "good works" since he left id and not even id has been able to equal the greatness of the titles of that era.
Fragged their web server!
Say I make (ast an hourly rate of my annual salary) $50 an hour. Not unresaonable for a consultant.
I am distributing a baby distro and I do the source via DVD and postal request since I cannot afford a lot of bandwidth.
Sir, if you're making $50 an hour, you certainly can afford the bandwidth.
"Yes, you can have the whole source tree from my upstream and the 2K of diffs I have added - the reasonable cost for this source is $94.37 per CD"
Is that the right answer?
Maybe choose instead to bother with it in the evening or on the weekend when your time isn't so costly? If one is not prepared to fulfill his obligations under the GPL, one should not license his code under the GPL.
I personally license most of my stuff under the BSD license or put it into the public domain for this reason. For my crappy little substandard projects, the GPL is way overkill. Nobody's going to rip them off and if they do, I hardly care. If I ever wanted to use the GPL, it would only be for code written in an "interpreted" language like Python where the executable and the source code are the same thing.
And maybe even override their boot sector!
Those were the days - further I can recall back to is the Voodoo 2, anyone have any further fond memories of the mid 1990s GPU situation?
Oh yes indeedy. I had a Packard Hell Pentium 100MHz and after discovering QuakeWorld, bugged my mom ruthlessly to get me a Canopus Pure3D video accelerator. That card was the only thing I got for Christmas that year. (This is all going from memory, so nobody shoot me if I've gotten some facts wrong. Better yet, just correct me.)
Not long after Quake was released, id (or some trusted source close to the employees at id) produced a variant called GLQuake that utilized OpenGL acceleration on hardware that supported it. I do believe at that time such video hardware ran upwards of $2000 and was accompanied only by high end SGI workstations and the like. But Quake still looked damn cool on them things.
Then the 3Dfx Voodoo chip came out and all hell broke loose. Suddenly, extremely powerful and affordable 3D acceleration was available to the unwashed masses. The Voodoo chip and GLQuake single-handedly started the 3D-accelerated FPS revolution. The interesting thing about the Voodoo chip is that it did not do any 2D graphics modes. For those who weren't around 3D gaming at this point or may have forgotten, there was actually a pass-through cable that connected between your old 2D VGA output and into the accelerator card. When not playing a 3D game, the card simply piped the 2D graphics through the accelerator, bypassing the Voodoo chip. When you launched Quake or any other 3D game, the Voodoo chip cut off the 2D signal to send its own to the monitor. Crazy, but it worked and it's probably one of the main reasons that the cards were so cheap. Oh, and the Voodoo had exactly one output resolution and color depth: 640x480x16k.
Now back to the Canopus Pure3D. The Pure3D, in its day, was the cadillac of Voodoo cards. If I recall, every single Voodoo card on the market had 2MB of framebuffer and 2MB of texture memory. The Pure3D had 4MB of texture memory, but the only game that could take advantage of it was Quake. (Every other game developer hard-coded their games to use only 2MB of texture memory due to the sheer volume of 2MB Voodoo cards on the market. id has always let you tweak everything.) The Pure3D also had a video-out jack, something unheard of on such a cheap card. But obviously it only worked in "3D mode," so it wasn't really all that useful. Few people would buy a 3D card capable of displaying high-resolution graphics only to display them on a crappy low-resolution TV.
Ah, the wonderful days of yore where I'd spend entire weekends playing QuakeWorld with the Team Fortress mod over 33.6 dialup. When I wasn't gaming, I was browsing Blue's News or Planet Quake. The Pentium 100 and Pure3D combo couldn't quite handle Quake II all that well, but I was still quite happy enough with good old Quake for at least a couple years.