Virgin Galactic's marketing department defines space as 80km.
Most of the rest of us define it as the Karman line, which is 100km.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I've been a mac user since 1984. My current laptop is a 2010 MacBook Air, which still feels like a solid machine. Of course, I can't upgrade to the latest macOS, and my MacBook is past the 5 year lifespan I originally expected. So what is next?
I use macOS and Ubuntu Linux on a daily basis. I never liked Windows, for reasons, and for years, all of the new software I've installed on my MacBook has been open source. And I'm increasingly using software that depends on OpenGL, which has been deprecated by macOS.
Up to now, I have been super happy with my MacBook -- the hardware is brilliant, and open source software mostly just works (I use homebrew). But that's no longer the case for what Apple currently offers. Although I consider the MacBook pro trackpad to be best in class, the keyboard issues are troubling, and the loss of OpenGL will be a show stopper. The MacBook Pro is no longer the premium, best in class laptop that it used to be, and is still priced as. Although I don't feel the need to run the very latest hardware, the lack of hardware updates on Mac computers is a signal that Apple doesn't give a shit, and you would be buying in to a dying ecosystem.
Suppose Windows 10 linux emulation supported graphics out of the box, so I could run X11 apps, Wayland apps, any of the desktop environments like KDE or Gnome, and OpenGL apps. And suppose I could disable all the Windows spyware. Then I'd seriously consider a Windows laptop. Microsoft just bought Github, so we can hope that they will eventually get a clue and fix these problems. But that's still years away, I would guess.
So I'm going to replace my old MacBook with a Linux ultrabook. Right now, the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition looks like the overall best replacement for a 13" mac laptop. Other options I've looked at: System 76 Galago Pro and Purism Librem 13.
The story hasn't been picked up by Canadian media at all, and by hardly anybody in the US. However, in England, the BBC and the Guardian are running this story.
The situation might be different if this was taking place in China; then it would be reported by N.A. media as a human rights story.
Bitstream Cyberbit was closed source, and had a license incompatible with GPL. Noto is free and open source. The source files for the fonts, and the build tools, are all open.
Noto is an ongoing open source project that will continue to track the Unicode standard, while Cyberbit implemented Unicode 1.0.1 and then just stopped.
Noto has Sans and Serif variants in a range of weights and styles, unlike Cyberbit, which had only a single style and weight (serif).
So that's more than just "the same thing all over again".
Ion thrusters aren't the best for Mars colonization, because then it takes too long to get to Mars. The trip to Mars is very dangerous, due to space radiation and the effects of microgravity on human health. For actual colonization, as opposed to just an Apollo-like exploration mission, you want to minimize the transit time. In Andy Weir's "The Martian" (he worked out a realistic plan for a Mars mission and did all the math), ion engines are used, but the travel time is 250 days. In Musk's plan, powerful rockets are used, and the travel time is 90 days.
I agree that nuclear rockets would be even better, if the political problems could be overcome. (Maybe we'll have to mine uranium from the asteroid belts before we have manned, nuclear interplanetary travel. Or maybe China will do it.)
If you are an advanced alien race that needs more living space, it's much more practical to construct a partial dyson sphere in your own back yard, than to colonize other star systems. Our galaxy is big enough that there should be multiple inhabited star systems out there, and possibly multiple partial dyson spheres. But the laws of physics make visits from flesh and blood aliens highly unlikely.
ZFS on Linux consists of two parts. The ZFS part is independent of Linux (not a "derivative work"), and uses the Solaris kernel API. The other part is SPL (Solaris porting layer), which implements the Solaris API using Linux. The SPL is Linux dependent, but it has a GPL licence.
An AC said: "Which could get Canonical into hot water with the GPL."
Whether or not this is a licence violation depends on Linus Torvalds and The Linux Foundation. They are the ones that set the terms for how Linux is licensed. Under U.S. law at least, it's the copyright owner's intent that matters, and not some third party interpretation interpretation of the licence text.
Torvalds has previously stated that a kernel module can't violate the kernel licence agreement unless it is a derivative work of the kernel (and the module licence violates the GPL). At the very least, it needs to have been designed with knowledge of the Linux internals. Since ZFS was developed independent of Linux, it seems unlikely that The Linux Foundation will be suing Canonical.
If you want to thoroughly understand the issues, you could read Eben Moglen's opinion (he's the lawyer behind the GPL 3): https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2016/linux-kernel-cddl.html
Seriously, if you google "GNU Guix", you'll see that system startup scripts will be written in Lisp, the package manager will use Lisp to describe packages. Also, I note that the microkernel architecture will allow code that is traditionally part of the kernel to run in user mode and be written in Lisp.
It looks to me that they are building a new system that combines the best aspects of Unix and the legendary Lisp Machine. Which would be kind of cool.
One of the hackers at my makerspace has successfully used lost-PLA casting to cast steel. The result was a functional part used in a battle bot. That's using a standard consumer 3D printer.
Jewelers have been using 3D printers for lost-wax casting for years; there are specialized 3D printers sold for this.
The slide at 24:49 in the video summarizes the argument: * Open Hardware licensing attempts to work using copyright but is unsuccessful in doing so. (You can't actually enforce an Open Hardware license in the courts, where the mechanism is a copyright on an electronic circuit. You can't really copyright a circuit.) * Open Hardware licensing only works as the developers would have it work when there is a *patent* on the design. * Patents are expensive to pursue, and not particularly attractive to people who work on Open things. * If the law was changed to allow electronic circuits to be copyrighted, that would actually cause more harm to the community than good. (The reasons for this are discussed later in the video.) We could, through our own actions, make that happen.
No, LLVM/clang is all about having a superior architecture to GCC, so that a lot of new applications become possible. One of the key ideas is that the optimizer and code generator are libraries with a C++ API. One cool application of this is that you can use the LLVM library to implement a JIT compiler for your interpreted language: you generate the machine code directly into memory (instead of to a file), then execute it.
LLVM has many more developers than GCC, and is evolving and improving more quickly than GCC can. This is because of the licence: it turns out that corporations like Apple are more willing to provide developer resources for this open source project if the licence isn't copyleft. For this particular project, this means that the BSD license is more successful than the GPL. Of course, there are other projects for which the GPL produces better results in the real world.
If you want to make a GPL fork of LLVM just for the pure pleasure of fucking over the original project due their heresy in choosing a license you don't approve of, well, good luck with that.
Here in Canada, "bespoke" is used by businesses to mean custom designed solutions and products. That's how I know the word. This is is the first I heard that the word is only used in Britain.
Rust has already been around for 10 years. The project started in 2006 as a hobby project, and "went big" in 2009 when people could play with a working Rust compiler, and Mozilla sponsored it. There are currently 1200 contributers to the Rust project. Given all the momentum, it will likely be around 10 years from now.
1) The Rust project is not controlled by Mozilla. Just look at the copyrights on the rust source code. It's permissive open source, with copyright shared by ~1200 individuals, and Mozilla is not on that list. So this is like spreading FUD by warning people that Linux is controlled by the Linux Foundation (Linus's employer)--hint, it isn't.
2) Mozilla and Oracle are quite different. The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, open source organization that exists to provide a public benefit through the creation of open source software. The Mozilla Corporation (employer of some of the Rust developers) is a wholly owned subsidiary that donates all of its profit to the foundation. By contrast, Oracle is known for being one of the most rapaciously greedy software organizations in existence: just consider the Oracle article on Slashdot right now, about how Oracle rips off customers via "traps" in the opaque licencing terms.
3) How can you be sure that Rachael Craig and Nicolette Verlinden are cisgender males? They have female names and photos.
So yeah, I'm pretty sure the parent is a troll, and I fell for the bait.
1st paragraph is false, due to the rather extraordinary design process that Rust went through.
designers also go off on an ego-trip, introducing numerous gratuitous syntactic changes, overlooking important features in their predecessor language they didn't understand
The Rust community is quite large, including many skilled language designers. The Rust github repository has ~1200 contributers. With that pool of talent, there are no features of C/C++ that the designers don't understand. With this kind of community, and a formal change review/feature addition process, there's not much danger of a single ego-tripping designer messing up the language.
adding features few people actually need
The project transitioned from a hobby project to an official Mozilla project in 2009. During the 6 years from 2009 to 2015 (when the Rust 1.0 design was stabilized and released), a lot of Rust code was written. Features that seemed like a good idea at the time, but which had little practical use, were removed before 1.0.
3rd paragraph is also incorrect. The main feature of Rust is guaranteed memory safety, without a garbage collector, enforced by compile time type checking rather than by introducing run-time overhead. This memory safety includes a guarantee that shared global data can't be corrupted by simultaneous writes from different threads, something that no other language offers. C++ doesn't offer this today, no other language does.
I agree that Rust will influence future languages, but I don't think it will have much effect on C. The C++ community is already looking at Rust and trying to figure out how to compete with what it offers.
Slashdot Mirror
Virgin Galactic's marketing department defines space as 80km. Most of the rest of us define it as the Karman line, which is 100km. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I've been a mac user since 1984. My current laptop is a 2010 MacBook Air, which still feels like a solid machine. Of course, I can't upgrade to the latest macOS, and my MacBook is past the 5 year lifespan I originally expected. So what is next?
I use macOS and Ubuntu Linux on a daily basis. I never liked Windows, for reasons, and for years, all of the new software I've installed on my MacBook has been open source. And I'm increasingly using software that depends on OpenGL, which has been deprecated by macOS.
Up to now, I have been super happy with my MacBook -- the hardware is brilliant, and open source software mostly just works (I use homebrew). But that's no longer the case for what Apple currently offers. Although I consider the MacBook pro trackpad to be best in class, the keyboard issues are troubling, and the loss of OpenGL will be a show stopper. The MacBook Pro is no longer the premium, best in class laptop that it used to be, and is still priced as. Although I don't feel the need to run the very latest hardware, the lack of hardware updates on Mac computers is a signal that Apple doesn't give a shit, and you would be buying in to a dying ecosystem.
Suppose Windows 10 linux emulation supported graphics out of the box, so I could run X11 apps, Wayland apps, any of the desktop environments like KDE or Gnome, and OpenGL apps. And suppose I could disable all the Windows spyware. Then I'd seriously consider a Windows laptop. Microsoft just bought Github, so we can hope that they will eventually get a clue and fix these problems. But that's still years away, I would guess.
So I'm going to replace my old MacBook with a Linux ultrabook. Right now, the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition looks like the overall best replacement for a 13" mac laptop. Other options I've looked at: System 76 Galago Pro and Purism Librem 13.
No problem, they can replace the audience with robots.
The story hasn't been picked up by Canadian media at all, and by hardly anybody in the US. However, in England, the BBC and the Guardian are running this story.
The situation might be different if this was taking place in China; then it would be reported by N.A. media as a human rights story.
Bitstream Cyberbit was closed source, and had a license incompatible with GPL. Noto is free and open source. The source files for the fonts, and the build tools, are all open.
Noto is an ongoing open source project that will continue to track the Unicode standard, while Cyberbit implemented Unicode 1.0.1 and then just stopped.
Noto has Sans and Serif variants in a range of weights and styles, unlike Cyberbit, which had only a single style and weight (serif).
So that's more than just "the same thing all over again".
Ion thrusters aren't the best for Mars colonization, because then it takes too long to get to Mars. The trip to Mars is very dangerous, due to space radiation and the effects of microgravity on human health. For actual colonization, as opposed to just an Apollo-like exploration mission, you want to minimize the transit time. In Andy Weir's "The Martian" (he worked out a realistic plan for a Mars mission and did all the math), ion engines are used, but the travel time is 250 days. In Musk's plan, powerful rockets are used, and the travel time is 90 days.
I agree that nuclear rockets would be even better, if the political problems could be overcome. (Maybe we'll have to mine uranium from the asteroid belts before we have manned, nuclear interplanetary travel. Or maybe China will do it.)
If you are an advanced alien race that needs more living space, it's much more practical to construct a partial dyson sphere in your own back yard, than to colonize other star systems. Our galaxy is big enough that there should be multiple inhabited star systems out there, and possibly multiple partial dyson spheres. But the laws of physics make visits from flesh and blood aliens highly unlikely.
Nah. Your machine will still be forced to upgrade, but after reboot, the machine won't operate until you enter a valid credit card number.
"What kind of software removes files from a local disk without even asking for user confirmation?"
Malware.
ZFS on Linux consists of two parts. The ZFS part is independent of Linux (not a "derivative work"), and uses the Solaris kernel API. The other part is SPL (Solaris porting layer), which implements the Solaris API using Linux. The SPL is Linux dependent, but it has a GPL licence.
An AC said: "Which could get Canonical into hot water with the GPL."
Whether or not this is a licence violation depends on Linus Torvalds and The Linux Foundation. They are the ones that set the terms for how Linux is licensed. Under U.S. law at least, it's the copyright owner's intent that matters, and not some third party interpretation interpretation of the licence text.
Torvalds has previously stated that a kernel module can't violate the kernel licence agreement unless it is a derivative work of the kernel (and the module licence violates the GPL). At the very least, it needs to have been designed with knowledge of the Linux internals. Since ZFS was developed independent of Linux, it seems unlikely that The Linux Foundation will be suing Canonical.
If you want to thoroughly understand the issues, you could read Eben Moglen's opinion (he's the lawyer behind the GPL 3): https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2016/linux-kernel-cddl.html
It includes ZFS as a standard supported file system. That's the most interesting new feature from my perspective.
Seriously, if you google "GNU Guix", you'll see that system startup scripts will be written in Lisp, the package manager will use Lisp to describe packages. Also, I note that the microkernel architecture will allow code that is traditionally part of the kernel to run in user mode and be written in Lisp.
It looks to me that they are building a new system that combines the best aspects of Unix and the legendary Lisp Machine. Which would be kind of cool.
One of the hackers at my makerspace has successfully used lost-PLA casting to cast steel. The result was a functional part used in a battle bot. That's using a standard consumer 3D printer.
Jewelers have been using 3D printers for lost-wax casting for years; there are specialized 3D printers sold for this.
The Kopimashin is illegal in England:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/17/high-court-quashes-regulations-copy-cds-musicians
It might be illegal in other jurisdictions as well? And that's kind of the point of building it.
The slide at 24:49 in the video summarizes the argument:
* Open Hardware licensing attempts to work using copyright but is unsuccessful in doing so. (You can't actually enforce an Open Hardware license in the courts, where the mechanism is a copyright on an electronic circuit. You can't really copyright a circuit.)
* Open Hardware licensing only works as the developers would have it work when there is a *patent* on the design.
* Patents are expensive to pursue, and not particularly attractive to people who work on Open things.
* If the law was changed to allow electronic circuits to be copyrighted, that would actually cause more harm to the community than good. (The reasons for this are discussed later in the video.) We could, through our own actions, make that happen.
No, LLVM/clang is all about having a superior architecture to GCC, so that a lot of new applications become possible. One of the key ideas is that the optimizer and code generator are libraries with a C++ API. One cool application of this is that you can use the LLVM library to implement a JIT compiler for your interpreted language: you generate the machine code directly into memory (instead of to a file), then execute it.
LLVM has many more developers than GCC, and is evolving and improving more quickly than GCC can. This is because of the licence: it turns out that corporations like Apple are more willing to provide developer resources for this open source project if the licence isn't copyleft. For this particular project, this means that the BSD license is more successful than the GPL. Of course, there are other projects for which the GPL produces better results in the real world.
If you want to make a GPL fork of LLVM just for the pure pleasure of fucking over the original project due their heresy in choosing a license you don't approve of, well, good luck with that.
Clang can compile to the LLVM "IR" format, which is a mostly machine-independent Intermediate Representation. Kind of like bytecode.
The IR file format has two variations: a human readable text format, and a more compact binary format.
Given an IR file, you can optimize it, which produces another IR file, or you can compile it into an object file.
Here in Canada, "bespoke" is used by businesses to mean custom designed solutions and products. That's how I know the word. This is is the first I heard that the word is only used in Britain.
www.bespokedesign.ca
bespokesuits.ca
www.bespokedecor.ca
https://web.archive.org/web/20150618010547/http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2015/05/29/community-council-statement-jonathan-riddell/
I'm not taking sides, just providing extra information that's not in the original post.
Rust has already been around for 10 years. The project started in 2006 as a hobby project, and "went big" in 2009 when people could play with a working Rust compiler, and Mozilla sponsored it. There are currently 1200 contributers to the Rust project. Given all the momentum, it will likely be around 10 years from now.
The Rust compiler and runtime system are written in Rust.
The compiler uses the LLVM library for code generation, which is a C++ library, so there is a bit of C++ glue code to interface the compiler to LLVM.
The runtime uses parts of the C library to make system calls, so there is a bit of C glue code to interface the runtime to the C library.
1) The Rust project is not controlled by Mozilla. Just look at the copyrights on the rust source code. It's permissive open source, with copyright shared by ~1200 individuals, and Mozilla is not on that list. So this is like spreading FUD by warning people that Linux is controlled by the Linux Foundation (Linus's employer)--hint, it isn't.
2) Mozilla and Oracle are quite different. The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, open source organization that exists to provide a public benefit through the creation of open source software. The Mozilla Corporation (employer of some of the Rust developers) is a wholly owned subsidiary that donates all of its profit to the foundation. By contrast, Oracle is known for being one of the most rapaciously greedy software organizations in existence: just consider the Oracle article on Slashdot right now, about how Oracle rips off customers via "traps" in the opaque licencing terms.
3) How can you be sure that Rachael Craig and Nicolette Verlinden are cisgender males? They have female names and photos.
So yeah, I'm pretty sure the parent is a troll, and I fell for the bait.
1st paragraph is false, due to the rather extraordinary design process that Rust went through.
designers also go off on an ego-trip, introducing numerous gratuitous syntactic changes, overlooking important features in their predecessor language they didn't understand
The Rust community is quite large, including many skilled language designers. The Rust github repository has ~1200 contributers. With that pool of talent,
there are no features of C/C++ that the designers don't understand. With this kind of community, and a formal change review/feature addition process, there's not much danger of a single ego-tripping designer messing up the language.
adding features few people actually need
The project transitioned from a hobby project to an official Mozilla project in 2009. During the 6 years from 2009 to 2015 (when the Rust 1.0 design was stabilized and released), a lot of Rust code was written. Features that seemed like a good idea at the time, but which had little practical use, were removed before 1.0.
3rd paragraph is also incorrect. The main feature of Rust is guaranteed memory safety, without a garbage collector, enforced by compile time type checking rather than by introducing run-time overhead. This memory safety includes a guarantee that shared global data can't be corrupted by simultaneous writes from different threads, something that no other language offers. C++ doesn't offer this today, no other language does.
I agree that Rust will influence future languages, but I don't think it will have much effect on C. The C++ community is already looking at Rust and trying to figure out how to compete with what it offers.
The SpineJS repository has 4 contributors. The Rust/Lang repository has 1,188 contributors. (on github)