I don't think anybody has been asking for more Linux MP3 players.
The office apps to be finished, more work on personal and commercial finance apps, more games - sure. A media player that supports the Sorenson codec - definitely. But more MP3 players? I doubt it somehow.
Sure, if somebody releases another one all power to them, but when good free alternatives exist it's not something to get too excited about.
It's possible the NSA can break PGP encryption if they really want to, but that a) doesn't necessarily mean the part of the FBI that investigates mobsters knows that they can, and b) even if they did, would be prepared to let that fact be revealed in court.
Why not? Simple. If word got out that the US government could break PGP, everyone who cared about securing their communications from the US government would switch to something else. Governments take extraordinary measures to protect outside knowledge of their cypher-breaking capabilities. Go read some books about Enigma (or, if you want the story with a bowlful of Claire Danes, wait for the upcoming movie:) ).
Back in 2.4.10, Linus made a fairly radical change in the virtual memory system - a rather unusual one for a stable kernel. While a lot of people are rather unhappy about it (notably Alan Cox, Rik Van Riel (the maintainer of the existing VM system), from all public accounts so far it seems that the new VM system works considerably better than the old one.
So - - - Is that the case? Has there been any stability problems? Is the performance better (not that it really matters as a workstation user, but ... )
He used to be Australian, but to buy TV stations (I believe, might have been some other media asset) he needed to be a US citizen. Surprise, surprise, he became one.
Re:GPS-guided missiles
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GPS Drawings
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· Score: 2
Fascinating. I'm sure military intelligence agencies the world over would love this kind of data . . . .
Seriously, sure it'd be really cool to look at (particularly if they combined it with some cool 3D imaging so we could have a "virtual missile cam"), but the chances of this kind of data being released before 2030 or so are somewhere are pretty minimal.
Imagine we did read some meaningful data. I guess we can assume that the civilization is already extinct. Ok, so we know that there's chances of life out there - what else is new?
How many examples of extra-terrestrial intelligence have ever existed, as far as we know now? Zero.
If SETI finds a signal, how many examples of extra-terrestrial intelligence have ever existed? At least one.
I dunno about you, but I'd reckon such a discovery would be regarded as pretty damned significant by anybody who bothered to think about the issue for more than a millisecond.
Yes, there are people driving modified Japanese cars who've made modifications purely because they think it makes them look tough. I'm sure the same comments applies to American hot-rods, as well. Anybody who knows or cares can pick the difference.
By the way, not all rice-burners are poseur cars. Try a stock Lancer Evo VI or Subaru Impreza WRX STi (or, seeing you can't get either in the states, fit a Rex with an APS stage II turbo kit). Take it for a drive, preferably along a twisty mountain road, in company with a Mustang or Camaro. But then again, patriotic Americans don't drive on twisty mountain roads. They bulldoze down the mountain and put in a superhighway:)
If you want to get into orbit, or leave Earth entirely, the crucial thing you have to do is go really fast. Altitude is pretty much irrelevant except that aerodynamic drag slows things down more at lower altitudes.
The only difference than launching from a balloon at altitude would be the slightly reduced aerodynamic resistance, negligible compared to the cost, complexity, and risk of building a floating launch platform:)
More to the point, the terrorists succeeded because the passengers on board believed that the best thing to do was to sit tight and wait for the plane to land - a reasonable assumption, given that in the past hijackers have usually landed the plane somewhere. No passenger on a hijacked plane is likely to make the same assumption ever again.
That alone makes the acts of the September 11 terrorists impossible to repeat IMHO.
and GNOMElibraries are mostly LGPL, which makes it possible to write commercial apps on top of GTK royalty-free, whereas you need to pay Trolltech for royalties if you're using QT for a commercial app.
If all you're concerned about is free software, both are quite OK to use (from a legal and pro-free-software perspective). This was not always the case, but it is now.
Instead, we're wasting billions on fusion research welfare for a few academics who spend entire careers doing it, and retire handsomely with no useful results!
Compared to the total amount of money governments around the world piss away on totally useless pork-barrels, the amount of money spent on fusion research is trivial, and the payoffs potentially huge.
A manned mission has a whole lot of capabilities that a robotic mission doesn't have - most importantly, the ability to make and act on simple decisions without spending 20 minutes going back to Earth. Even putting people in Mars orbit and having them control probes (not that that's a particularly sensible mission plan, by the way - if you're going to build a spacecraft to go all the way there and support a crew for a couple of years, landing it's not that much more difficult) would drastically multiply a mission's effectiveness.
Firstly, I'd make the point that, although I qualify as a geek as much as most here, I don't particularly like Star Trek. Secondly, your specfic examples and justfications are bunk (but I'll save my counterarguments till later).
What I'm really trying to say, though, is just because the physics doesn't always match with our current understanding doesn't necessarily make the show bad. Buffy The Vampire Slayer's entire premises are in blatant contravention of just about everybody's personal beliefs about the true nature of the universe, but many here would still reckon it's a cool show.
Star Trek is clearly sci-fi/fantasy rather than hard sci-fi. If viewed as such, the kind of hand-waves and dramatic license that you've pointed out are entirely acceptable.
My personal objection to Star Trek is that it uses such fantastical dodges as ways to cover holes in the plot, rather than putting in the effort to write more plausible scripts.
Fission rockets worked, all the way back in the 1960's, and they produce a "specific impulse" (the amount of thrust per unit time per pound of propellant) about three times the best chemical rockets. Of course, it's doubtful that you'd ever get approval to run one in Earth's atmosphere again.
More directly to the question, rockets waste a lot of energy carrying oxygen, when they spend much of their trip into orbit flying through an atmosphere carrying quite adequate amounts of the stuff. If research into scramjets succeeds, the propellant requirement for launching rockets decreases radically.
Additionally, many of the costs of running space launches are because we do so few of them. If we were doing twenty a day, we'd be able to set up much more efficient production lines for the job. The propellant cost of a space shuttle launch is a tiny fraction of the mission cost.
US most strongly Christian country in first world
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More On Tragedy
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· Score: 2
If you go to Australia, Japan, most of Europe, the UK, you'll find that religion has a far weaker influence on the daily lives of people, and political debate.
I'd go further than you. Aside from the Vatican, there is no country more visibly identified with Christianity as the United States.
Not necessarily. Maybe life got started on Earth and got carried to Mars by a big meteorite impact stirring up chunks of bacteria-containing rock, which then drifted their way to Mars.
Or, possibly, things went the other way from Mars to Earth . . .
Life on Mars would be an amazing find, but if we can show that it most likely came from the same source as Earth it won't say that much about the possibility of life on other solar systems. However, if we can show it evolved independently it would suggest that life will be *really* common wherever you get approximately the right planets in the right climatactic zones (and those climactic zones aren't as precise as some people think).
I'm not going to burn CD's, want to watch an inflight movie (and if I did I might consider ripping it to my hard drive), plug in digital video cameras, or anything like that with my laptop. I want the smallest, lightest, most convenient package that runs Linux and has a full size keyboard so I can touch type when sending mail (so I want good networking abilities).
For me, something like the Vaio picturebook (also with a Crusoe processor) would be ideal.
That doesn't make me right or you wrong, but it means there's room in the market for both. Vive la difference!
Functional programming (map, lambda etc.) is a nice way to work, most of the time. You can often write less code to do the same thing than you would in other languages, and the workings are often clearer.
Scheme makes translating data into an externally writable format, and reading back in again, trivial. It's kinda like instant XML:)
Mixing C and scheme is easy, particularly with the nifty tool g-wrap one of the other GnuCash developer maintains:)
Guile is getting better with every release.
Major downsides to scheme
There's a lot fewer programmers out there who know scheme than, say, Perl. This puts up a bit of a barrier to participation for some people.
The language is sometimes almost too flexible, allowing people to write scheme in idiosyncratic style that's a little hard to read. There's less agreement on the "right way to do things" that you might find in, say, C.
However, it's not an insuperable barrier. Provided people use a bit of common sense and design clean interfaces (and document them) it's generally not too much of a problem.
Guile is constantly being improved:) Seriously, the improvements are all good and necessary, but dealing with version clashes is perhaps more of an issue than with other languages at this stage.
In any case, I'm convinced that using guile has been a big net win for the project.The scope that scheme is used in just keeps growing, because it's just so damn convenient.
Because Robert Elz doesn't give a toss about money. Amongst other things, the guy wrote bits and pieces of BSD Unix, and could have walked out of his job at Melbourne University at any time in the last 20 years and earned many times the franky lousy salary he receives there.
I've met very few people for whom money *really* doesn't matter at all to them. kre was one of them.
About two weeks before the closure was announced, they were flogging 21" monitors for $899 AUD (that's 450 USD). Wish I had have got in at the fire sale price:)
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The office apps to be finished, more work on personal and commercial finance apps, more games - sure. A media player that supports the Sorenson codec - definitely. But more MP3 players? I doubt it somehow.
Sure, if somebody releases another one all power to them, but when good free alternatives exist it's not something to get too excited about.
Why not? Simple. If word got out that the US government could break PGP, everyone who cared about securing their communications from the US government would switch to something else. Governments take extraordinary measures to protect outside knowledge of their cypher-breaking capabilities. Go read some books about Enigma (or, if you want the story with a bowlful of Claire Danes, wait for the upcoming movie :) ).
So - - - Is that the case? Has there been any stability problems? Is the performance better (not that it really matters as a workstation user, but . .. )
He used to be Australian, but to buy TV stations (I believe, might have been some other media asset) he needed to be a US citizen. Surprise, surprise, he became one.
Seriously, sure it'd be really cool to look at (particularly if they combined it with some cool 3D imaging so we could have a "virtual missile cam"), but the chances of this kind of data being released before 2030 or so are somewhere are pretty minimal.
How many examples of extra-terrestrial intelligence have ever existed, as far as we know now? Zero.
If SETI finds a signal, how many examples of extra-terrestrial intelligence have ever existed? At least one.
I dunno about you, but I'd reckon such a discovery would be regarded as pretty damned significant by anybody who bothered to think about the issue for more than a millisecond.
By the way, not all rice-burners are poseur cars. Try a stock Lancer Evo VI or Subaru Impreza WRX STi (or, seeing you can't get either in the states, fit a Rex with an APS stage II turbo kit). Take it for a drive, preferably along a twisty mountain road, in company with a Mustang or Camaro. But then again, patriotic Americans don't drive on twisty mountain roads. They bulldoze down the mountain and put in a superhighway :)
And there are plenty of others you don't hear about either.
Looks like it's moderators on crack day today.
:)
If you want to get into orbit, or leave Earth entirely, the crucial thing you have to do is go really fast. Altitude is pretty much irrelevant except that aerodynamic drag slows things down more at lower altitudes.
The only difference than launching from a balloon at altitude would be the slightly reduced aerodynamic resistance, negligible compared to the cost, complexity, and risk of building a floating launch platform
That alone makes the acts of the September 11 terrorists impossible to repeat IMHO.
Nope, it was a B-25, which is *much* smaller than a B-29.
A google search would do the trick, or you could just read this Wikipedia article I contributed to which should give you some idea.
If all you're concerned about is free software, both are quite OK to use (from a legal and pro-free-software perspective). This was not always the case, but it is now.
Compared to the total amount of money governments around the world piss away on totally useless pork-barrels, the amount of money spent on fusion research is trivial, and the payoffs potentially huge.
A manned mission has a whole lot of capabilities that a robotic mission doesn't have - most importantly, the ability to make and act on simple decisions without spending 20 minutes going back to Earth. Even putting people in Mars orbit and having them control probes (not that that's a particularly sensible mission plan, by the way - if you're going to build a spacecraft to go all the way there and support a crew for a couple of years, landing it's not that much more difficult) would drastically multiply a mission's effectiveness.
From what I heard, nobody was able to reproduce their experiments, which tends to indicate that they were just plain wrong.
What I'm really trying to say, though, is just because the physics doesn't always match with our current understanding doesn't necessarily make the show bad. Buffy The Vampire Slayer's entire premises are in blatant contravention of just about everybody's personal beliefs about the true nature of the universe, but many here would still reckon it's a cool show.
Star Trek is clearly sci-fi/fantasy rather than hard sci-fi. If viewed as such, the kind of hand-waves and dramatic license that you've pointed out are entirely acceptable.
My personal objection to Star Trek is that it uses such fantastical dodges as ways to cover holes in the plot, rather than putting in the effort to write more plausible scripts.
More directly to the question, rockets waste a lot of energy carrying oxygen, when they spend much of their trip into orbit flying through an atmosphere carrying quite adequate amounts of the stuff. If research into scramjets succeeds, the propellant requirement for launching rockets decreases radically.
Additionally, many of the costs of running space launches are because we do so few of them. If we were doing twenty a day, we'd be able to set up much more efficient production lines for the job. The propellant cost of a space shuttle launch is a tiny fraction of the mission cost.
I'd go further than you. Aside from the Vatican, there is no country more visibly identified with Christianity as the United States.
This article claims that there is very large (> 1 billion USD) amounts of gold stored in a vault under the WTC towers.
Or, possibly, things went the other way from Mars to Earth . . .
Life on Mars would be an amazing find, but if we can show that it most likely came from the same source as Earth it won't say that much about the possibility of life on other solar systems. However, if we can show it evolved independently it would suggest that life will be *really* common wherever you get approximately the right planets in the right climatactic zones (and those climactic zones aren't as precise as some people think).
For me, something like the Vaio picturebook (also with a Crusoe processor) would be ideal. That doesn't make me right or you wrong, but it means there's room in the market for both. Vive la difference!
Good things about using guile scheme:
Major downsides to scheme
However, it's not an insuperable barrier. Provided people use a bit of common sense and design clean interfaces (and document them) it's generally not too much of a problem.
In any case, I'm convinced that using guile has been a big net win for the project.The scope that scheme is used in just keeps growing, because it's just so damn convenient.
Disclaimer: speaking for me, not my employer.
I've met very few people for whom money *really* doesn't matter at all to them. kre was one of them.
About two weeks before the closure was announced, they were flogging 21" monitors for $899 AUD (that's 450 USD). Wish I had have got in at the fire sale price :)