Fortunately is 100% OK to speak of a field in which you are not an expert. If that were forbidden, then there would be no journalist, no news, extremely few and specialized books, and people would have extremely boring conversation.
You as a listener are also 100% free to take home whatever message you want, if any.
Exactly. Bobby Fisher had an influence far above the mere game of chess. Not so long ago he was hailed as a hero. He has contributed a little more than most regarding the question of what mere humans are intellectually capable of doing.
At the same time his chess brilliance came at an enormous price which he had to pay all by himself. This is extremely sad.
Really? Clearly these radio comments come not from a very sane man. Unfortunately brilliance and madness are not very far apart, and it must not be very comfortable.
I'll wager that history will forget his unfortunate racist comments, but remember forever his chess games.
Carmack has been almost religiously devoted in the past at maintaining various rendering paths in Id's engines. They are one of the very few games companies that continue programming for OpenGL. I don't particularly like Id's games, but their engines have been consistently very good.
It would make sense for Id to develop a high-quality engine for OS/X, complete with in-house enhancements to Apple's OpenGL implementation, exactly as the GP suggested. They would thereby own the OS/X gaming arena.
Actually, the guy is amazing, but he is not that fast, in spite of the supposed advantage (and contrary to the FA). I think the IOC doesn't want to set a precedent. His times are comparable to 1920's world records for 100m, 200m and 400m, which is still pretty damn good ! (look up wikipedia for all details). I'm not sure what the qualifying times are for the olympics, but I'm not positive he would make them.
Of course he is also the world record holder in these 3 distances in the paralympics.
Yes, 10MW, that's what I read. This is less than 1% of the capacity of a new nuclear plant (say). 80MW is better, but does solar scale much further ?. Not that I particularly like nuclear, mind you, but you need lots and lots of the 10MW solar plant variety to run a desalination plant with any capacity.
So the answer to the original discussion is : why doesn't Australia build large solar powerplants in the desert for all their energy needs? because one know how to do that yet, check back in a decade.
The parent wrote that, essentially, if you want to take best advantage of the video card in your Mac, crappy or high-level though that card may be, you need to run DirectX. Apple does not provide drivers, code example and extra software needed for new, serious game developement compared to Windows/DX. Apple's OpenGL drivers are not even up to spec with what Nvidia provides in their driver for Linux.
Hence a port of any game to OS/X is going to be painful and run slowly anyway. It doesn't just suck for games authors, but for users as well. Apple is not seriously interested in games and have shown it over and over again.
In general Apple is very annoying in the way they control their hardware. They don't even let Nvidia or ATI provide an independent driver for OS/X. It's very obvious that Apple's drivers implement only a subset of the cards capabilities. This also explain why Apple never rushes to the latest and greatest graphic cards even for their PowerMac workstations : their driver is incapable of taking full advantage of them.
Is there any example of an actually working, decent-size, efficient AC solar plant ?
AFAIK, there are some tiny AC solar plants in Australia and elsewhere, but apparently the tech is costly and doesn't scale that well. Also it's not really worth it to build hundreds of kilometers of cable from a 10MW plant. It's OK if the plant is near the grid.
Solar desalination plants works by letting the sun evaporate the salt water. Using PV cells to generate electricity is already inefficient, converting the low voltage DC current to high-voltage AC is possible, but even more inefficient. I don't think this idea flies at all.
Because it's like, the desert? you know, the places where there isn't any water there?
So, you would have to bring the salt water hundreds of mile inland, then the freshwater elsewhere and the byproducts back to the ocean. Sounds expensive.
In practice most desalination plants are coastal, for obvious reasons. The freshwater produced is also very expensive. It's a matter of whether Australians are willing to pay more, and pollute more, for the privilege to wash their cars and fill their pools. Drinking water is not so much a problem today.
Australians are not in favour of nuclear power, by and large, and they are starting to realize that outputting carbon has detrimental effects, like droughts. So somehow the idea of a large coal-powered desalination plant in a populated, coastal area to trade freshwater for CO2 is not popular. Go figure.
I have never seen any open source software that's better than a commercial competitor, nor any that has a feature that commercial software don't have and it's good.
You must not have looked very far.
TeX (or LaTeX) simply has no competitor. You should try it sometime. Open source since the late 1970s. Ever used apache? Perl, Python or Ruby? Since you are mentionning Java, perhaps you've noticed that Java is open-source ?
I said I had been involved with designing medical and bio-medical instruments, I didn't say I made the rules, nor did I say I approved of them. Talk about jumping the gun.
For the record, I publish OSS and I'm not with a company. I merely explain why OSS is not popular with medical instrument designers: it makes more work for them. The onus is generally on the user to prove OSS suitable for their instrument, whereas for COTS this is not quite the case.
Some software has been certified for use in a particular instrument if it has been shown to reliably yield the correct answer for the correct input. There is no practical way to certified a decent-size program bug-free, only that it performs as expected in a test bed. Some well known fellow has proved that no trivial program can be proved even to simply terminate.
As far as FDA is concerned, source code is of no intrinsic value. The user still has to certify its usage. OSS is no better than in-house developed software, often worse because the in-house developers do not know it.
Yes OSS is auditable, which means it *must* be audited, by the user. This is a liability if you are trying to push an instrument out of the door and make money.
Bugs by themselves are not really a problem, as long as they are documented. Validated usage will routinely work around known bugs.
Rest assured that medical instrument makers are sued all the time, FDA rules are here to limit liabilities.
As far as I'm aware, no bugs in Excel has yet killed anybody in a medical instrument. COTS usage in medical instruments is very limited to, as much as possible, known behaviour, unlike usage on the desktop.
In the end everyone tries to do their best. The rules are not favourable to OSS vs. COTS, but this will presumably change in the future, for example due to popularity. I should expect some instruments to eventually include the Linux kernel. This may already be the case in fact.
I've been involved in the design and implementation of a few medical and bio-medical instruments.
All software used in medical instruments submitted to the FDA, whether commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), OSS, proprietary or otherwise must be validated for use in the instrument. This usually includes extensive documented testing.
COTS software is usually considered easier to validate for a variety of reasons : if it is a largely used piece of software (say Excel), it is likely its usage in other medical instruments has been validated before. This validation procedure can ususally be reused. Also third party companies or entities can provide the validation. It comes out cheaper for integrators to pay a relatively cheap validation fee to such companies rather than go through the validating themselves. As well, COTS software does not change too often, and integrators are not desktop users: they are happy to use an old, validated piece of software for a long time. Finally, only black-box testing is sufficient, since FDA understands that, say Microsoft, will not as a rule divulge trade secrets like source code to mere medical instruments companies.
In contrast, OSS varies a lot and often. Each version is different for the FDA, and must be validated separately. Since the source is available, black-box testing may not be seen as sufficient by the FDA. OSS is often seen the same as in-house developed software. When used, OSS comes in often in the shape of libraries and very tightly integrated to the rest of the special-purpose software. Indeed FDA does not have a special category for OSS, whereas it does for COTS.
The killer is that while it is possible for a medical instrument company to set up its software development business so that it can meet FDA standards, it has no power over third party OSS. As a result, OSS is used extremely sparingly, if at all. So it's not prejudice against OSS, it's history. FDA has to be somewhat lenient with respect to COTS, because otherwise instruments would cost too much do design if everyone had to reinvent the spreadsheet and validate it.
Apple hardware is OK if you don't mind the compromise they make. However if you want, say, a (relatively) cheap laptop with a dedicated graphics card and a card reader, or, say, another laptop at any price that includes eSata and a BlueRay/HD drive, you are out of luck. As well, no laptop for you under $1000.
In the PC world, there are more hardware choices, including excellent top-end designs.
How is wikipedia failing, exactly? In spite of his well-publicized shortcomings, it still provides high-quality references. I use it daily (not on its own, for sure), but I never ever use Britannica even though I paid for it. Wikipedia is up to date, comprehensive, and provided the topic is not controversial, usually correct. There are plenty of links to external sources, I don't know which page you've been reading.
Apparently some people are not so hung up on getting credit about something. Not the whole human race is dead set about competition and ego comparisons, you know.
Anyway, who cares if you diss it. It's there, it's not going away, it might not get really better, but it's not something I'd like to do without anymore. If it creates a need for services of a different nature, so much the better.
That would be an excellent idea, but win2k is not secure anymore, not even as (in)secure as XP is. It would be a lot of effort to put back win2k on the "maintained" list and I'm sure would do wonders for the morale of MS employees who spent years on Vista.
You are correct citing Arnold Toynbee. Like he wrote, civilizations grow if they take on challenges successfully : the romans conquered the whole of the Mediterranean. The Catholic church successfully united the whole occident under one religion. If they ever get content and idle, they whither and die.
Now Microsoft has largely met their challenge of a Windows O/S on every desktop. They have nowhere to go and no vision. They end is going to be long, drawn up and painful. Next.
Glass and concrete don't necessarily last 30k years. Chernobyl was a terrible design, but what set it off was a series of human errors. The Hiroshma and Nagasaki bombs were set off at an altitude as well. There is no crater there. In fact the Hiroshima town hall at ground zero is still standing to this day.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately is 100% OK to speak of a field in which you are not an expert. If that were forbidden, then there would be no journalist, no news, extremely few and specialized books, and people would have extremely boring conversation.
You as a listener are also 100% free to take home whatever message you want, if any.
Exactly. Bobby Fisher had an influence far above the mere game of chess. Not so long ago he was hailed as a hero. He has contributed a little more than most regarding the question of what mere humans are intellectually capable of doing.
At the same time his chess brilliance came at an enormous price which he had to pay all by himself. This is extremely sad.
Really? Clearly these radio comments come not from a very sane man. Unfortunately brilliance and madness are not very far apart, and it must not be very comfortable.
I'll wager that history will forget his unfortunate racist comments, but remember forever his chess games.
Carmack has been almost religiously devoted in the past at maintaining various rendering paths in Id's engines. They are one of the very few games companies that continue programming for OpenGL. I don't particularly like Id's games, but their engines have been consistently very good.
It would make sense for Id to develop a high-quality engine for OS/X, complete with in-house enhancements to Apple's OpenGL implementation, exactly as the GP suggested. They would thereby own the OS/X gaming arena.
Actually, the guy is amazing, but he is not that fast, in spite of the supposed advantage (and contrary to the FA). I think the IOC doesn't want to set a precedent. His times are comparable to 1920's world records for 100m, 200m and 400m, which is still pretty damn good ! (look up wikipedia for all details). I'm not sure what the qualifying times are for the olympics, but I'm not positive he would make them.
Of course he is also the world record holder in these 3 distances in the paralympics.
Yes, 10MW, that's what I read. This is less than 1% of the capacity of a new nuclear plant (say). 80MW is better, but does solar scale much further ?. Not that I particularly like nuclear, mind you, but you need lots and lots of the 10MW solar plant variety to run a desalination plant with any capacity.
So the answer to the original discussion is : why doesn't Australia build large solar powerplants in the desert for all their energy needs? because one know how to do that yet, check back in a decade.
A "true port" would not help at all.
The parent wrote that, essentially, if you want to take best advantage of the video card in your Mac, crappy or high-level though that card may be, you need to run DirectX. Apple does not provide drivers, code example and extra software needed for new, serious game developement compared to Windows/DX. Apple's OpenGL drivers are not even up to spec with what Nvidia provides in their driver for Linux.
Hence a port of any game to OS/X is going to be painful and run slowly anyway. It doesn't just suck for games authors, but for users as well. Apple is not seriously interested in games and have shown it over and over again.
In general Apple is very annoying in the way they control their hardware. They don't even let Nvidia or ATI provide an independent driver for OS/X. It's very obvious that Apple's drivers implement only a subset of the cards capabilities. This also explain why Apple never rushes to the latest and greatest graphic cards even for their PowerMac workstations : their driver is incapable of taking full advantage of them.
Is there any example of an actually working, decent-size, efficient AC solar plant ?
AFAIK, there are some tiny AC solar plants in Australia and elsewhere, but apparently the tech is costly and doesn't scale that well. Also it's not really worth it to build hundreds of kilometers of cable from a 10MW plant. It's OK if the plant is near the grid.
Solar is not easy.
Solar desalination plants works by letting the sun evaporate the salt water. Using PV cells to generate electricity is already inefficient, converting the low voltage DC current to high-voltage AC is possible, but even more inefficient. I don't think this idea flies at all.
And the salt water, where do you find it in the desert? What about the brine? It's not exactly fine to let it pile there I think.
If you go that way, iso9660 is not either. Someone wrote the data on that CD :-)
The UDF filesystem on a commercial film DVD is definitely read-only.
Because it's like, the desert? you know, the places where there isn't any water there?
So, you would have to bring the salt water hundreds of mile inland, then the freshwater elsewhere and the byproducts back to the ocean. Sounds expensive.
In practice most desalination plants are coastal, for obvious reasons. The freshwater produced is also very expensive. It's a matter of whether Australians are willing to pay more, and pollute more, for the privilege to wash their cars and fill their pools. Drinking water is not so much a problem today.
Australians are not in favour of nuclear power, by and large, and they are starting to realize that outputting carbon has detrimental effects, like droughts. So somehow the idea of a large coal-powered desalination plant in a populated, coastal area to trade freshwater for CO2 is not popular. Go figure.
You must not have looked very far.
TeX (or LaTeX) simply has no competitor. You should try it sometime. Open source since the late 1970s.
Ever used apache? Perl, Python or Ruby?
Since you are mentionning Java, perhaps you've noticed that Java is open-source ?
I see I'm not getting through, must be me.
I said I had been involved with designing medical and bio-medical instruments, I didn't say I made the rules, nor did I say I approved of them. Talk about jumping the gun.
For the record, I publish OSS and I'm not with a company. I merely explain why OSS is not popular with medical instrument designers: it makes more work for them. The onus is generally on the user to prove OSS suitable for their instrument, whereas for COTS this is not quite the case.
Some software has been certified for use in a particular instrument if it has been shown to reliably yield the correct answer for the correct input.
There is no practical way to certified a decent-size program bug-free, only that it performs as expected in a test bed. Some well known fellow has proved that no trivial program can be proved even to simply terminate.
As far as FDA is concerned, source code is of no intrinsic value. The user still has to certify its usage. OSS is no better than in-house developed software, often worse because the in-house developers do not know it.
Yes OSS is auditable, which means it *must* be audited, by the user. This is a liability if you are trying to push an instrument out of the door and make money.
Bugs by themselves are not really a problem, as long as they are documented. Validated usage will routinely work around known bugs.
Rest assured that medical instrument makers are sued all the time, FDA rules are here to limit liabilities.
As far as I'm aware, no bugs in Excel has yet killed anybody in a medical instrument. COTS usage in medical instruments is very limited to, as much as possible, known behaviour, unlike usage on the desktop.
In the end everyone tries to do their best. The rules are not favourable to OSS vs. COTS, but this will presumably change in the future, for example due to popularity. I should expect some instruments to eventually include the Linux kernel. This may already be the case in fact.
We are talking about certification here :
linky
Hello,
I've been involved in the design and implementation of a few medical and bio-medical instruments.
All software used in medical instruments submitted to the FDA, whether commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), OSS, proprietary or otherwise must be validated for use in the instrument. This usually includes extensive documented testing.
COTS software is usually considered easier to validate for a variety of reasons : if it is a largely used piece of software (say Excel), it is likely its usage in other medical instruments has been validated before. This validation procedure can ususally be reused. Also third party companies or entities can provide the validation. It comes out cheaper for integrators to pay a relatively cheap validation fee to such companies rather than go through the validating themselves. As well, COTS software does not change too often, and integrators are not desktop users: they are happy to use an old, validated piece of software for a long time. Finally, only black-box testing is sufficient, since FDA understands that, say Microsoft, will not as a rule divulge trade secrets like source code to mere medical instruments companies.
In contrast, OSS varies a lot and often. Each version is different for the FDA, and must be validated separately. Since the source is available, black-box testing may not be seen as sufficient by the FDA. OSS is often seen the same as in-house developed software. When used, OSS comes in often in the shape of libraries and very tightly integrated to the rest of the special-purpose software. Indeed FDA does not have a special category for OSS, whereas it does for COTS.
The killer is that while it is possible for a medical instrument company to set up its software development business so that it can meet FDA standards, it has no power over third party OSS. As a result, OSS is used extremely sparingly, if at all. So it's not prejudice against OSS, it's history. FDA has to be somewhat lenient with respect to COTS, because otherwise instruments would cost too much do design if everyone had to reinvent the spreadsheet and validate it.
Many more details here.
Only the windows license disallows virtualization. I'm not sure Microsoft can enfore that provision.
Cue to endless hardware comparison threads.
Apple hardware is OK if you don't mind the compromise they make. However if you want, say, a (relatively) cheap laptop with a dedicated graphics card and a card reader, or, say, another laptop at any price that includes eSata and a BlueRay/HD drive, you are out of luck. As well, no laptop for you under $1000.
In the PC world, there are more hardware choices, including excellent top-end designs.
I'm typing this on a Mac, mind you.
Music is very easy, it's only a matter of hitting the right keys at the right time.
J.S. Bach
How is wikipedia failing, exactly? In spite of his well-publicized shortcomings, it still provides high-quality references. I use it daily (not on its own, for sure), but I never ever use Britannica even though I paid for it. Wikipedia is up to date, comprehensive, and provided the topic is not controversial, usually correct. There are plenty of links to external sources, I don't know which page you've been reading.
Apparently some people are not so hung up on getting credit about something. Not the whole human race is dead set about competition and ego comparisons, you know.
Anyway, who cares if you diss it. It's there, it's not going away, it might not get really better, but it's not something I'd like to do without anymore. If it creates a need for services of a different nature, so much the better.
Dads too. My point exactly.
Actually, for most babies (and mums) the nipple is hard at first. Bit of a learning curve, you know.
:-)
However, the anus and the urethra are usually no problem. There, I said it
That would be an excellent idea, but win2k is not secure anymore, not even as (in)secure as XP is. It would be a lot of effort to put back win2k on the "maintained" list and I'm sure would do wonders for the morale of MS employees who spent years on Vista.
You are correct citing Arnold Toynbee. Like he wrote, civilizations grow if they take on challenges successfully : the romans conquered the whole of the Mediterranean. The Catholic church successfully united the whole occident under one religion. If they ever get content and idle, they whither and die.
Now Microsoft has largely met their challenge of a Windows O/S on every desktop. They have nowhere to go and no vision. They end is going to be long, drawn up and painful. Next.
Glass and concrete don't necessarily last 30k years. Chernobyl was a terrible design, but what set it off was a series of human errors. The Hiroshma and Nagasaki bombs were set off at an altitude as well. There is no crater there. In fact the Hiroshima town hall at ground zero is still standing to this day.