So sure, if you make 146M bucks, yeah, your paying $26M in taxes. But if you take 1460 families that each make $100,000, that's the same 146 million in aggregate, but they each pay ~33k in taxes on average,... or 48M in aggregate. Why do they pay 48M when you only pay 26M?
Because 1,460 families are using more of the services such as schools, hospitals, roads, and all the other things that your tax dollars go towards?
In France over 80% of energy is nuclear and electricity is cheap. I know the UK has high renewable energy targets. It is easier to monitor pollution from a small number of coal/oil plants than emissions from millions of vehicles. I don't think it's ever been reducing pollution and cost of transport that has been the problem with electric/air/hydrogen but the initial purchase cost and the limited range. Especially the latter.
The reason the Tesla can out-accelerate a Ferrari is that there is no loss through a variable transmission, all the torque from an electric motor goes directly to the wheels. I'm not sure about the compressed air car. Both compressed air and electric use no fuel whilst stationary, unlike gasoline cars (except hybrids).
Transmission losses: there is a cost associated with distributing tons of gasoline around.
The efficiency of converting the stored energy into motion of the vehicle: for any kind of combustion engine the maximum efficiency is 40%. For hydrogen fuel cell 100%. As for friction: electric/air = less moving parts = more efficiency.
I'm not going to bother debunking the Hindenburg 'exploding hydrogen' myth, that's been done to death on Slashdot.
You have to be short sighted to think it's not going to happen, it's a question of how and how long. As the saying goes, once you know something is possible then all the rest is simply engineering.
Re:It's fine that the source is closed, for them..
on
Spore Hands-On Preview
·
· Score: 1
Good luck with the game Don. All the people I know are now are shifting or have already shifted to Linux, with a couple going to OS X. Valve won't do Linux native but they do try and ensure their games work with WINE, which is why when I get time I will buy the Orange Box. The pleasure I get out of Linux outweighs not being able to play the occasional game, and I'm sure in a year or two WINE will be hacked enough to run Spore by which point I'll be able to pick it up for 10 bucks. If it gets good reviews I'll keep an eye out for it here: http://appdb.winehq.org/appbrowse.php?iCatId=2
Btw, I know you were just trolling, but I thought this was worth an answer, since desktop databases are a badly misunderstood class of software.
I think the point he was making is that now you can take a database traditionally used for servers, double-click on the install icon (Windows, Linux and Mac) and it just installs and runs like any other application. There are bindings to it already available in every single programming language. You can use it via apps locally but install any web server (or link a library providing one into your app) and suddenly it is simple to develop remote web access to your app. It just makes sense.
This is really useful. At the moment there is the Foxmarks plugin for bookmarks, which is excellent, but it would be nice to have a sync for Firefox / Thunderbird / Sunbird with all my preferences. I could reformat a machine and be mostly operational within seconds (especially if I took the time to create my own custom Ubuntu). Then I would just need to import my Pidgin preferences.
Other than passwords, there aren't any privacy issues for me. If someone hacks my account and discovers my bookmarks or which cookies I reject it's not a problem. With passwords there are some I would like stored, others stored encrypted, and others not at all. Highly confidential passwords should not leave my machine. Generally passwords should be stored encrypted with a key to import. For other lightweight personal email accounts the inconvenience of a hacker obtaining the password are outweighed by not being able to access that account from a remote location through losing or not having the key. So the three options would be good.
I think it's science, and one of the best kinds... inspiring, entertaining, and educational. They do appear to check for documented cases, eg firing a bullet in the air, and where they do find one they admit it must be true even though their results appear contradictory. Coming up with a hypothesis and testing it is good science. If it's shaky then the laws of physics will find find out. As an earlier poster said, if an assumption upon which a hypothesis was made is thought to be flaky, they will go back and retest using everything suggested by the viewers.
For buried alive, they admit in some experiments they have to compromise if it means a high chance they will be killed. They do their best to work around it.
For the black powder engine, as well as the other ancient recreations, it's far simpler than a modern combustion engine. Even there I am impressed how they can take a seized up old car or cement lorry and coax the internal combustion engine back to life within such a short time. Before they destroy it.
You can nit pick a couple of individual experiments out of the hundreds they have done... do it in their forums and they will do another episode for you to prove they can eliminate any holes you can find.
I was really excited about the Hula project, it looked to be a very promising email/calendar server. Then Novell jumped into bed with Microsoft and promptly abandoned it. Very disappointing. I haven't much confidence this scheme isn't going to be abandoned half way through either. The great thing about the GPL is that at least any work that IS done will be forked and continued if any good. For example with Hula becoming Bongo.
they tell him numerous times that if he doesn't place his hands behind his back and comply with the officers' requests that he's going to be tased
Are you for real? A taser is a potentially lethal device that is to be used to protect an officer or member(s) of the public from immediate danger. Torture by electrocution shouldn't be used to "teach someone a lesson". You cannot threaten someone with something that you have no right to do. I'd like to carry around a cattle prod with me, and jab every person that gets in my way or annoys me, but I don't as we have rules in place that I believe enables us to best function as a civilised society.
When the guy asked the skull and crossbones question he'd gone off the deep end into tinfoil hat land.
I thought the question was pretty funny. It's a Family Guy reference, when Chris goes to private school and his grandfather initiates him into the "skull and crossbones society" of which all the US political leaders have been members. Bush would have got the reference and maybe found it amusing, as he is a Simpsons fan and surely watches Family Guy, but I'm not sure Kerry would have got it. Admittedly a bit of a nerdish joke and not particularly appropriate for the forum.
Even just this one thread has plenty of goodies. Being busted by Digg, pointing their MiiVi domain to a random IP to try throwing people off the scent, orders from on high to subvert Wikipedia, and Ben Grodsky's relief that someone other than him is taking all the hate. If you go to the Google Alert - Miivi thread they imply that they post positive comments on Slashdot as fake users.
Later on Ben Grodsky talks about editing Wikipedia, emailing the admins, then making further changes later when no-one is looking, after which he then goes on to say they should lie and misdirect job applicants, denying they are working with MPAA or honeypot traps, just in case they are posing as applicants for more information.
Then to show they haven't learned their lesson, they relaunch miivi.com as www.viide.com. Thanks jrwr00 for the HTML versions of the emails. Thoroughly entertaining read.
I refuse to fly to the States for exactly this reason. Shame as there are a few places there I would like to have visited, but then it's not a great loss as the USA is only a tiny fraction of the world. Pity I didn't get the chance to visit pre-9/11.
If the British refuse to have a national ID card, I can hardly see a national DNA database being implemented. There is not too much danger however, as the UK government would outsource the project to an incompetent contractor who will be years behind schedule, billions over budget, and will deliver something that won't work anyway.
Though the Amiga was well known in the USA, I don't think anyone could dispute a great loss in the UK was the Acorn computer. First the BBC Micro, which drew many of us to IT in the first place and can be credited with making assemble language non-scary, and then the Acorn Archimedes which brought RiscOS in 1989 (which was and remained superior to Windows95 despite over half a decade head start). They booted instantly, were bomb-proof, and encouraged people to tinker under the hood. You could knock up a GUI app in BASIC in minutes, before the idea of VisualBASIC was a gleam in the creators eye. Many of us owe our careers, the idea that IT can be fun and challenging rather than a dull money-making exercise, to Acorn. I just hope that one day in the future Linux will be able to reach the level of UI and productivity that I enjoyed over 15 years ago on my Acorn. (eg note to Beryl developers, can I please hold down my right mouse button on a scroll bar to be able to pan 2-dimensionally at will over a window?). It was to me what I guess the NeXT was to Steve Jobs. RIP Acorn.
When you say RIAA does not care, you make the assumption that the RIAA is represented solely by management only making top-level decisions. However it's not true that only the web hosting company cares what operating system is on a server. In fact the web hosting company reacts to customer demand for either Windows or Linux operating systems. It is the web development team handling the sites that will decide which OS to go with on the server, and there are more considerations that just price, eg is the team used to developing in ASP, PHP or Java, or they prefer to use MySQL or SQL Server? Furthermore, we don't know if the web development team is in-house or has been out-sourced. Even if out-sourced they will have shown the specs, including the OS, to the person in the RIAA that commissioned the project. At some level, the RIAA signed off on running their site on Linux. Finally, even if the site looks like a bunch of static pages which could be plonked into the directory of any shared hosting that is often not the case these days. Most static-looking sites these days have url-rewriting layered on top of their content management system to make the site more search engine friendly.
My Ubuntu installation would feel violated if it was made to be validated as a Microsoft Genuine operating system. Would probably reformat itself in protest.
The EU could also decide that through illegally abusing its monopoly Microsoft has already made enough money at the expense of the EU to cover a license to use file formats / protocols required for interoperability. It's been a terrible drain on the economy and productivity over the years.
A bit late to comment maybe, but I'm just amazed nobody else has! And how on earth did it get +5 insightful?? Let's look at the supposed problems:
There is always a question of building on top of the existing stack, or replacing the stack. Hula choose to replace the stack rather then build on top of industry standards
Huh? Hula implements SMTP, POP3, IMAP, LDAP, HTTP amongst other very well established industry standards. How is that not building on industry standards? Your definition of a 'stack' being a mish-mash or mediocre and difficult to configure applications is a bit odd.
Hula's C++ mail server duplicates sendmail and postfix. That means you loose the time tested nature of sendmail and postfix and replace it with buggy and possibly insecure mail. That's a problem.
This deserves Flamebait all on its own. Sendmail has a history of being the buggiest and most insecure software of all time. Check out the history of security advisories. Replacing it with buggy and possibly insecure mail? I heard Novell's Netmail had a reasonably good reputation. As for the laughable statement "duplicates sendmail and postfix"... wtf? Every server app that implements the SMTP protocol is duplicating sendmail and postfix? Nonsense. Different clients have different needs and complexities of an SMTP server.
That stack also had a proprietary web server. You loose all the work in apache and tomcat.
So you want to install apache and tomcat just to serve up some webmail? Isn't that extreme overkill? You can use Hula for webmail and apache for web on the same machine... each one serving its purpose and appropriately isolated from each other.
Anyone who thinks that Hula had any kind of momentum at all before this announcement is ignoring the fundamental architectural problems that killed the project months and months ago.
I am guessing you aren't particularly well qualified to talk about fundamental architectural problems. Or maybe I am wrong, in which case please enlighten me?
Hula was a great solution for those of us sick of configuring and reconfiguring Postfix/Sendmail/Courier/etc. Hula takes minutes to install, and a few clicks to add users and domains. It provided everything out of the box. I am really disappointed and was really looking forward to Hula with complete CalDav and re-enabled graphical admin. I don't really want the mish-mash of apps combined into expensive 'solutions' such as Zimbra. I guess it's time to dust off the HOW-TOs and feel the pain again.
This looks more like a bunch of gadgets thrown together. I imagine the home of the future to be responsive to the enviromnental and security needs of the occupiers. Doors automatically open and close when you approach, if there isn't someone in that room that desires privacy. The house warns you if there is a window open affecting the efficiency of the heating system. The house learns your arrival times and heats the house just before you are likely to turn up. LED lighting adjusts the mood lighting, for example vibrant colours when you are having a shower to go out but cool soothing colours when having a relaxing bath on the weekend. Music should also match the mood (time of day, looking at your online calendar to see what you have planned, etc), fades out when you are due to sleep and fades in when due to wake. It should order my groceries and pay my bills. It should SMS the cleaner a random access code only valid for the hours she is supposed to be working, and pay her automatically afterwards. I could go on and on... The list would include little of the gimmicks mentioned in the article though.
For my new flat, I have had to scale down drastically my plans due to so little decent home automation stuff being out there. It's either based on the reportedly unreliable X10, or a mess of expensive and incompatible properietary systems. Also I'm not overly fond of this trend to everything being wireless, I prefer hard-wired for reliability. I've designed the computer controlled socket and low-voltage lighting systems but not being off-the-shelf is probably going to be detrimental to the resale value of the flat:-(. Other items are already here, such as cheap ethernet switches, MythTV, affordable plasma screens, VoIP with asterisk, and more I can't wait to integrate all together.
UK police said they could have caused "mass murder on an unimaginable scale".
Even if they blew up ALL 10 planes, and each had 150 people on, then 1,500 people still isn't unimaginable as we saw far worse on 9/11 (and 10x that on the last tsunami which killed over 230,000 people, admittedly not murder but the images were graphic enough not to leave anything to the imagination).
Michael Chertoff, US Director of Homeland Security, said the scheme was "suggestive of an al-Qaeda plot".
Throw in the terrorist buzzword al-Qaeda.
US President George W Bush said the alleged plot was a "stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom".
And if it turns out that the security services were wrong it will be amended to "a stark reminder to what could happen if we let out viligence down..."
etc etc
It's great that our security services are up to their usual standard, but it's sad that the politicians are jumping on the terrorist bandwagon to further their own ends. Even during the peak of the IRA, with brave English and Irish people putting their lives on the line of a daily basis for intelligence, Scotland Yard or whomever would get the occasional pat on the back but none of this sensationalism. The only bright side is Pakistan having the guts to stand up to their extremists publically.
How about I chase you around, trying to shoot you in the head "by accident", and then we'll see how well you accept my humble apologies...
After high-profile suicide bombings the police found a guy (that happened to live next door to the suspect), with a bulky jacket with wires visible poking out (and who happened to be an electrician), and who made a desperate run for it the moment the police tried to ask him to identify himself (and who happened to be working illegaly and thought the police had actually come to arrest him)? We can argue whether or not the police panicked and could have tried to incapacitate him or whether they had no choice in ensuring public safety, but at the end of the day the guy was a VERY unfortunate victim of circumstance.
1) Wrap your legacy libs with SWIG 2) Code a working prototype in Python 3) Profile it (never skip this step) 4) Use SWIG to write the bottle neck parts in C++ 5) Use Valgrind to ensure you are still OK memory wise 6) Profit!!
I'd tweak that slightly to get going more quickly: 1) Dump example output from core C++ functions into text files 2) Code a working prototype in Python using dummy functions that simply read those text files 3) Use SWIG to wrapper your core C++ functions and replace dummy functions 4) All other steps YGringas mentions
This means if you hit an unpredictable-appearing bug towards the end of the prototype development, you aren't left wondering whether the bug is in the Python, the SWIG wrapper, or the core C++ library reacting to some previously unencoutered encoding you are passing it.
Slashdot Mirror
So sure, if you make 146M bucks, yeah, your paying $26M in taxes. But if you take 1460 families that each make $100,000, that's the same 146 million in aggregate, but they each pay ~33k in taxes on average,... or 48M in aggregate. Why do they pay 48M when you only pay 26M?
Because 1,460 families are using more of the services such as schools, hospitals, roads, and all the other things that your tax dollars go towards?
Phillip.
In France over 80% of energy is nuclear and electricity is cheap. I know the UK has high renewable energy targets. It is easier to monitor pollution from a small number of coal/oil plants than emissions from millions of vehicles. I don't think it's ever been reducing pollution and cost of transport that has been the problem with electric/air/hydrogen but the initial purchase cost and the limited range. Especially the latter.
The reason the Tesla can out-accelerate a Ferrari is that there is no loss through a variable transmission, all the torque from an electric motor goes directly to the wheels. I'm not sure about the compressed air car. Both compressed air and electric use no fuel whilst stationary, unlike gasoline cars (except hybrids).
Transmission losses: there is a cost associated with distributing tons of gasoline around.
The efficiency of converting the stored energy into motion of the vehicle: for any kind of combustion engine the maximum efficiency is 40%. For hydrogen fuel cell 100%. As for friction: electric/air = less moving parts = more efficiency.
I'm not going to bother debunking the Hindenburg 'exploding hydrogen' myth, that's been done to death on Slashdot.
You have to be short sighted to think it's not going to happen, it's a question of how and how long. As the saying goes, once you know something is possible then all the rest is simply engineering.
Phillip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov4t1P9bdGw
There are plenty of journalists that have driven a working prototype. Just google Guy Negre or air car.
Phillip.
Good luck with the game Don. All the people I know are now are shifting or have already shifted to Linux, with a couple going to OS X. Valve won't do Linux native but they do try and ensure their games work with WINE, which is why when I get time I will buy the Orange Box. The pleasure I get out of Linux outweighs not being able to play the occasional game, and I'm sure in a year or two WINE will be hacked enough to run Spore by which point I'll be able to pick it up for 10 bucks. If it gets good reviews I'll keep an eye out for it here:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appbrowse.php?iCatId=2
Phillip.
Btw, I know you were just trolling, but I thought this was worth an answer, since desktop databases are a badly misunderstood class of software.
I think the point he was making is that now you can take a database traditionally used for servers, double-click on the install icon (Windows, Linux and Mac) and it just installs and runs like any other application. There are bindings to it already available in every single programming language. You can use it via apps locally but install any web server (or link a library providing one into your app) and suddenly it is simple to develop remote web access to your app. It just makes sense.
Phillip.
This is really useful. At the moment there is the Foxmarks plugin for bookmarks, which is excellent, but it would be nice to have a sync for Firefox / Thunderbird / Sunbird with all my preferences. I could reformat a machine and be mostly operational within seconds (especially if I took the time to create my own custom Ubuntu). Then I would just need to import my Pidgin preferences.
Other than passwords, there aren't any privacy issues for me. If someone hacks my account and discovers my bookmarks or which cookies I reject it's not a problem. With passwords there are some I would like stored, others stored encrypted, and others not at all. Highly confidential passwords should not leave my machine. Generally passwords should be stored encrypted with a key to import. For other lightweight personal email accounts the inconvenience of a hacker obtaining the password are outweighed by not being able to access that account from a remote location through losing or not having the key. So the three options would be good.
Phillip.
So still nothing for me then, as all my computers are 64-bit and Flash isn't available.
Phillip.
I think it's science, and one of the best kinds... inspiring, entertaining, and educational. They do appear to check for documented cases, eg firing a bullet in the air, and where they do find one they admit it must be true even though their results appear contradictory. Coming up with a hypothesis and testing it is good science. If it's shaky then the laws of physics will find find out. As an earlier poster said, if an assumption upon which a hypothesis was made is thought to be flaky, they will go back and retest using everything suggested by the viewers.
I assume if they don't mention a documented case then they couldn't find one. Eg for cell phone at gas station:
http://www.automedia.com/Protecting_Yourself_While_at_the_Pump/dsm20040101sp/3
For buried alive, they admit in some experiments they have to compromise if it means a high chance they will be killed. They do their best to work around it.
For the black powder engine, as well as the other ancient recreations, it's far simpler than a modern combustion engine. Even there I am impressed how they can take a seized up old car or cement lorry and coax the internal combustion engine back to life within such a short time. Before they destroy it.
You can nit pick a couple of individual experiments out of the hundreds they have done... do it in their forums and they will do another episode for you to prove they can eliminate any holes you can find.
It is a TV show. And it IS science.
Phillip.
I was really excited about the Hula project, it looked to be a very promising email/calendar server. Then Novell jumped into bed with Microsoft and promptly abandoned it. Very disappointing. I haven't much confidence this scheme isn't going to be abandoned half way through either. The great thing about the GPL is that at least any work that IS done will be forked and continued if any good. For example with Hula becoming Bongo.
Phillip.
they tell him numerous times that if he doesn't place his hands behind his back and comply with the officers' requests that he's going to be tased
Are you for real? A taser is a potentially lethal device that is to be used to protect an officer or member(s) of the public from immediate danger. Torture by electrocution shouldn't be used to "teach someone a lesson". You cannot threaten someone with something that you have no right to do. I'd like to carry around a cattle prod with me, and jab every person that gets in my way or annoys me, but I don't as we have rules in place that I believe enables us to best function as a civilised society.
Phillip.
When the guy asked the skull and crossbones question he'd gone off the deep end into tinfoil hat land.
I thought the question was pretty funny. It's a Family Guy reference, when Chris goes to private school and his grandfather initiates him into the "skull and crossbones society" of which all the US political leaders have been members. Bush would have got the reference and maybe found it amusing, as he is a Simpsons fan and surely watches Family Guy, but I'm not sure Kerry would have got it. Admittedly a bit of a nerdish joke and not particularly appropriate for the forum.
Phillip.
Even just this one thread has plenty of goodies. Being busted by Digg, pointing their MiiVi domain to a random IP to try throwing people off the scent, orders from on high to subvert Wikipedia, and Ben Grodsky's relief that someone other than him is taking all the hate. If you go to the Google Alert - Miivi thread they imply that they post positive comments on Slashdot as fake users.
Later on Ben Grodsky talks about editing Wikipedia, emailing the admins, then making further changes later when no-one is looking, after which he then goes on to say they should lie and misdirect job applicants, denying they are working with MPAA or honeypot traps, just in case they are posing as applicants for more information.
Then to show they haven't learned their lesson, they relaunch miivi.com as www.viide.com. Thanks jrwr00 for the HTML versions of the emails. Thoroughly entertaining read.
Phillip.
I refuse to fly to the States for exactly this reason. Shame as there are a few places there I would like to have visited, but then it's not a great loss as the USA is only a tiny fraction of the world. Pity I didn't get the chance to visit pre-9/11.
If the British refuse to have a national ID card, I can hardly see a national DNA database being implemented. There is not too much danger however, as the UK government would outsource the project to an incompetent contractor who will be years behind schedule, billions over budget, and will deliver something that won't work anyway.
Phillip.
Though the Amiga was well known in the USA, I don't think anyone could dispute a great loss in the UK was the Acorn computer. First the BBC Micro, which drew many of us to IT in the first place and can be credited with making assemble language non-scary, and then the Acorn Archimedes which brought RiscOS in 1989 (which was and remained superior to Windows95 despite over half a decade head start). They booted instantly, were bomb-proof, and encouraged people to tinker under the hood. You could knock up a GUI app in BASIC in minutes, before the idea of VisualBASIC was a gleam in the creators eye. Many of us owe our careers, the idea that IT can be fun and challenging rather than a dull money-making exercise, to Acorn. I just hope that one day in the future Linux will be able to reach the level of UI and productivity that I enjoyed over 15 years ago on my Acorn. (eg note to Beryl developers, can I please hold down my right mouse button on a scroll bar to be able to pan 2-dimensionally at will over a window?). It was to me what I guess the NeXT was to Steve Jobs. RIP Acorn.
Phillip.
When you say RIAA does not care, you make the assumption that the RIAA is represented solely by management only making top-level decisions. However it's not true that only the web hosting company cares what operating system is on a server. In fact the web hosting company reacts to customer demand for either Windows or Linux operating systems. It is the web development team handling the sites that will decide which OS to go with on the server, and there are more considerations that just price, eg is the team used to developing in ASP, PHP or Java, or they prefer to use MySQL or SQL Server? Furthermore, we don't know if the web development team is in-house or has been out-sourced. Even if out-sourced they will have shown the specs, including the OS, to the person in the RIAA that commissioned the project. At some level, the RIAA signed off on running their site on Linux. Finally, even if the site looks like a bunch of static pages which could be plonked into the directory of any shared hosting that is often not the case these days. Most static-looking sites these days have url-rewriting layered on top of their content management system to make the site more search engine friendly.
Phillip.
My Ubuntu installation would feel violated if it was made to be validated as a Microsoft Genuine operating system. Would probably reformat itself in protest.
Phillip.
The EU could also decide that through illegally abusing its monopoly Microsoft has already made enough money at the expense of the EU to cover a license to use file formats / protocols required for interoperability. It's been a terrible drain on the economy and productivity over the years.
Phillip.
A bit late to comment maybe, but I'm just amazed nobody else has! And how on earth did it get +5 insightful?? Let's look at the supposed problems:
There is always a question of building on top of the existing stack, or replacing the stack. Hula choose to replace the stack rather then build on top of industry standards
Huh? Hula implements SMTP, POP3, IMAP, LDAP, HTTP amongst other very well established industry standards. How is that not building on industry standards? Your definition of a 'stack' being a mish-mash or mediocre and difficult to configure applications is a bit odd.
Hula's C++ mail server duplicates sendmail and postfix. That means you loose the time tested nature of sendmail and postfix and replace it with buggy and possibly insecure mail. That's a problem.
This deserves Flamebait all on its own. Sendmail has a history of being the buggiest and most insecure software of all time. Check out the history of security advisories. Replacing it with buggy and possibly insecure mail? I heard Novell's Netmail had a reasonably good reputation. As for the laughable statement "duplicates sendmail and postfix"... wtf? Every server app that implements the SMTP protocol is duplicating sendmail and postfix? Nonsense. Different clients have different needs and complexities of an SMTP server.
That stack also had a proprietary web server. You loose all the work in apache and tomcat.
So you want to install apache and tomcat just to serve up some webmail? Isn't that extreme overkill? You can use Hula for webmail and apache for web on the same machine... each one serving its purpose and appropriately isolated from each other.
Anyone who thinks that Hula had any kind of momentum at all before this announcement is ignoring the fundamental architectural problems that killed the project months and months ago.
I am guessing you aren't particularly well qualified to talk about fundamental architectural problems. Or maybe I am wrong, in which case please enlighten me?
Phillip.
Hula was a great solution for those of us sick of configuring and reconfiguring Postfix/Sendmail/Courier/etc. Hula takes minutes to install, and a few clicks to add users and domains. It provided everything out of the box. I am really disappointed and was really looking forward to Hula with complete CalDav and re-enabled graphical admin. I don't really want the mish-mash of apps combined into expensive 'solutions' such as Zimbra. I guess it's time to dust off the HOW-TOs and feel the pain again.
Phillip.
This looks more like a bunch of gadgets thrown together. I imagine the home of the future to be responsive to the enviromnental and security needs of the occupiers. Doors automatically open and close when you approach, if there isn't someone in that room that desires privacy. The house warns you if there is a window open affecting the efficiency of the heating system. The house learns your arrival times and heats the house just before you are likely to turn up. LED lighting adjusts the mood lighting, for example vibrant colours when you are having a shower to go out but cool soothing colours when having a relaxing bath on the weekend. Music should also match the mood (time of day, looking at your online calendar to see what you have planned, etc), fades out when you are due to sleep and fades in when due to wake. It should order my groceries and pay my bills. It should SMS the cleaner a random access code only valid for the hours she is supposed to be working, and pay her automatically afterwards. I could go on and on... The list would include little of the gimmicks mentioned in the article though.
:-(. Other items are already here, such as cheap ethernet switches, MythTV, affordable plasma screens, VoIP with asterisk, and more I can't wait to integrate all together.
For my new flat, I have had to scale down drastically my plans due to so little decent home automation stuff being out there. It's either based on the reportedly unreliable X10, or a mess of expensive and incompatible properietary systems. Also I'm not overly fond of this trend to everything being wireless, I prefer hard-wired for reliability. I've designed the computer controlled socket and low-voltage lighting systems but not being off-the-shelf is probably going to be detrimental to the resale value of the flat
Phillip.
UK police said they could have caused "mass murder on an unimaginable scale".
Even if they blew up ALL 10 planes, and each had 150 people on, then 1,500 people still isn't unimaginable as we saw far worse on 9/11 (and 10x that on the last tsunami which killed over 230,000 people, admittedly not murder but the images were graphic enough not to leave anything to the imagination).
Michael Chertoff, US Director of Homeland Security, said the scheme was "suggestive of an al-Qaeda plot".
Throw in the terrorist buzzword al-Qaeda.
US President George W Bush said the alleged plot was a "stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom".
And if it turns out that the security services were wrong it will be amended to "a stark reminder to what could happen if we let out viligence down..."
etc etc
It's great that our security services are up to their usual standard, but it's sad that the politicians are jumping on the terrorist bandwagon to further their own ends. Even during the peak of the IRA, with brave English and Irish people putting their lives on the line of a daily basis for intelligence, Scotland Yard or whomever would get the occasional pat on the back but none of this sensationalism. The only bright side is Pakistan having the guts to stand up to their extremists publically.
Phillip.
In the head. Nine times. Accident, eh?
How about I chase you around, trying to shoot you in the head "by accident", and then we'll see how well you accept my humble apologies...
After high-profile suicide bombings the police found a guy (that happened to live next door to the suspect), with a bulky jacket with wires visible poking out (and who happened to be an electrician), and who made a desperate run for it the moment the police tried to ask him to identify himself (and who happened to be working illegaly and thought the police had actually come to arrest him)? We can argue whether or not the police panicked and could have tried to incapacitate him or whether they had no choice in ensuring public safety, but at the end of the day the guy was a VERY unfortunate victim of circumstance.
Phillip.
Seconded. Lack of a native 64 bit version means that the main feature missing is the ability to run it on any of my machines in the first place.
Phillip.
Personally I find Nautilus to be the single biggest impediment to me using Linux as my primary O/S.
Install ROX: intuitive, lightweight, and lightening fast. It works under any window manager.
Phillip.
1) Wrap your legacy libs with SWIG
2) Code a working prototype in Python
3) Profile it (never skip this step)
4) Use SWIG to write the bottle neck parts in C++
5) Use Valgrind to ensure you are still OK memory wise
6) Profit!!
I'd tweak that slightly to get going more quickly:
1) Dump example output from core C++ functions into text files
2) Code a working prototype in Python using dummy functions that simply read those text files
3) Use SWIG to wrapper your core C++ functions and replace dummy functions
4) All other steps YGringas mentions
This means if you hit an unpredictable-appearing bug towards the end of the prototype development, you aren't left wondering whether the bug is in the Python, the SWIG wrapper, or the core C++ library reacting to some previously unencoutered encoding you are passing it.
Phillip.