I know they have less shuttles, but not because they planned it that way.
As for funding private sector projects, I can only say that whatever amount they are wasting on the Shuttle fleet could be used elsewhere with proper funding and productive information sharing that NASA could stop being a top-to-bottom space agency and take on a leadership/management role instead. Unfortunately, many of its projects are intimately tied to the military (and the handful of vendors who service them) that extricating the space agency from the military research agency would be pretty difficult.
I'm just an armchair quarterback, so my opinion means squat, of course.
NASA needs less shuttle. NASA needs to be pared back or reorganized such that it uses its funds funding private sector projects rather than trying to do all its research in house.
As someone above mentioned, instrumenting all the code with debug checks would bring the system to a crawl. However, with compiler settings set to Release instead of Debug, it should be possible to give end users an optimized version without any debug code to slow it down.
They seem to be taking system stats and system uptimes and presenting it in a hard to understand table. Is that tracking testing?
If I turn on my computer and don't touch it for a year, it will have excellent uptime, but it doesn't really test very much. Same too, if I just start up Apache and let it do its thing.
Testing is a very important part of any development cycle and testing metrics are very useful in determining the quality of the delivered product. However, I've never heard of "testing time" used as a metric. Maybe "coverage" or "bugs over time", but the amount of time itself is never really a concern.
From what I've seen of the Linux kernel (just downloading the source from kernel.org and browsing through it), there doesn't seem to be much in the way of actual debug code thoughtfully and diligently placed throughout the code. There are a few litterings of debug code here and there, but for the most part, it seems like the developers just expect it to work without error.
Nothing wrong with that attitude, if reality backs it up. And luckily, with Linux, reality is right there to prove the developers correct.
Mea culpa. I knew I should have paid more attention in Geology. I'm looking at the USGS photo glossary and can't seem to find the term for this mound (lava dome doesn't seem to fit).
There's no actual cinder cone being formed here, so that doesn't fit. I wonder, then, what you would call this. (bulge?)
Can't leave this state for a few more years. But I've been out that way in the past and really enjoyed the woodsiness of the state. I took a drive through the Cascade loop and down through The Dalles and on through to California and wrapped up with a retrace from San Francisco up to the Olympic penninsula along the 101. It took a week and a half and it was stunning. This was back in 1997, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but I remember being awed at the sights.
A shield volcano is formed when a large pool of magma forms and pushes the land above it upwards. These types are not likely to erupt, though they will erupt violently if the magma is able to push through the surface (kind of like a giant geologic pimple). These volcanos are great for tourism because of the typically accompanying hot springs and year-round greenery.
I like Oregon a lot. I just wish it were easier to get to.
The article (advertisement) is pretty short and doesn't explain the technology in much detail. I wonder how much a "full tank" of hydrogen pellets would cost. And would the extra weight of the pellets be significantly detrimental to the car's performance?
When you go to the pump, do you swap pellets with the gas station attendant? How flammable are these things?
Do you have proof of this? Do you have examples of devices running Windows CE 4.x+ (I believe that the Pocket PC still runs v3.0, but I may not be up to date on this) that have stability problems?
Well, heh. I didn't think I was coming off so enthusiastically for WindowsCE. Looks like I'm somehow intimately involved in the product or something.
Anyway, my point that I was (badly) trying to make was that blind allegiance or blind hatred should not be your guiding motivation for accepting or dismissing a technology out of hand.
Linux, CE, VxWorks, they are all great and work wonderfully. It's just as scary to fly with a VxWorks-controlled cabin pressure system as it is with a CE-controlled system. Which is to say, not at all.
One of his quotes is that he would feel very uneasy riding in an airplane where WindowsCE was controlling the cabin pressure. I realize that he is a diehard anti-Microsoft person, as his long history with Apple and recent history with Open Source suggests, but I wonder if he is taking his gut feeling about the company and judging the technical worth of its products sight unseen.
I'm no fan of WindowsCE. I think that it has a lot of warts, though these have been smoothed over in recent releases as Microsoft seems to be moving away from "it's just like Windows!" and more towards a real embedded OS. But it's still pretty slow in scheduling ISRs and requires a fair bit of fiddling to get power management working correctly in the drivers. But all-in-all it isn't a bad system. It's not prone to crashes any more than any other embedded system is, and it's much more resistant to crashes than desktop Windows is.
For something as straightforward as cabin pressure and lights in an airplane, something like WindowsCE is actually pretty easy to implement and use. I, for one, wouldn't worry a bit about it running such systems.
As for the first link, whatever you may have thought, and whatever the moderators may have thought, such is the way things go. I have since closed my PayPal accounts as a result. It seems that there was no problem with the actual account, and that I was very lucky.
The second one just states the obvious. Mac computers have had a very limited role in the "corporate desktop". I ought to have put quotes around that in my original post, I can't think of why I didn't. Most computer systems that sit on people's desks at their office are Windows terminals. Unless, as I mentioned in the post, you belong to certain very specific industries such as media creation (design houses, advertising houses, music or movie production, etc) or academia, you will be hard pressed to find a Macintosh computer anywhere. Maybe your experience is different and you live in a world where Apple computers are so prevalent that trying to walk without tripping over one is a burden. I don't know. I certainly don't live in that world.
I wouldn't be surprised if you're one of the Adequacy-era trolls, still looking for a home.
Well, you've got me at a disadvantage, then. I haven't got the slightest idea what you are talking about.
I don't comment here for your edification. You're free to ignore my posts to your heart's content.
As I seem to be getting this sort of reaction quite a bit lately, I ask you to list those things for which I "misinformed" which was corrected by a commenter in a reply to which I did not respond with acknowledgement of my error.
There is no intent to misinform here. (Maybe in this case to make a little fun at the expense of the story. After all, the site isn't reachable.) Just to provide my opinion and any information I have regarding the topic at hand.
Please, let me know how I have formed a "genuine pattern to misinform". I will see what I can do about avoiding anything that seems like such.
Unless you're just a greenthumb, I'm willing to bet that being "a part of" a company that went public isn't really that big a deal nor as uncommon as you'd think. From several years before the turn of the century, companies were going public all the time. Many of us had a boatload of stock options and watched as those options slowly go underwater.
I don't know what you mean about being part of "practically everything", but if you'd care to share some examples from what I've written, that would be cool.
As I recall, even back in the early 1970s, SALT was one of the key planks of Nixon's presidential strategy. I was under the impression that SALT succeeded and was only finally done away with when GWB took office, but to see that it is still working is very cool.
I saw Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Rings and was not impressed. Sure, I was impressed with the quality of the cinematography and the absolutely wonderful scenery. I wasn't impressed with the story, though. I didn't think there was any character growth except for the times when the director felt it necessary to beat the audience about the head with cliched obviousness. Frodo doesn't grow as a character, neither do any of the other characters. They all start out in their one-dimensional roles and stay that way the whole time.
Then you get battle scene after battle scene. I suppose if I was 12 years old I might have thought it really cool, but at this age I found it tedious.
None of the peripheral characters were explained to any depth. There was a very weird and out of place scene where an "angel/elf" flips out for two seconds and looks like she's going to eat Frodo, then the next moment she's back to normal. What was that all about?
The story itself doesn't seem to go anywhere, though the characters are supposed to be on some very important journey. Instead of story, we get fight scenes. Instead of character development, we get characters introduced then forgotten. Instead of storytelling, we get computer graphics.
The movie was a total wreck when removed from its fancy computer-aided trappings. It offers the viewer nothing but great scenery, but that can't possibly hold a movie together for 3 hours.
Sam Kinison once said
on
TrollTech to IPO?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
DON'T DO IT!!!!!
He was talking about getting married or something. I don't remember.
But going public has been the ruin of many poor companies, and God knows I've been part of some. It ties you to the stockholders and limits the ways in which you can reasonably spend your capital. It also risks you losing some of your top talent who may just decide that being rich and staying at home is better than sticking around to watch the stock prices fall through the floor while they slave away 12 hours a day.
Trolltech has a very good business model. They sell Qt licenses to embedded device makers (in addition to selling software licenses to desktop application developers). Since Gartner expects devices like cellphones and other devices not normally built with graphical UIs to be overtaken in the coming years by "smart" devices that need a solid GUI, not to mention easily programmable APIs, Trolltech is positioned very well in this area.
But don't go IPO, man. Keep it small, keep it lean, and don't let your eyes glaze over with dollar signs.
It's nice to see a successful government project, even if it is something as relatively minor as a computer systems switch. Yes, okay, switching computer systems is a pretty big deal if you are a system administrator or applications developer for those systems. But from the general public (the ones whom the system is meant to serve) perspective, it should all be pretty transparent.
To see such a move going so well that they intend to do more of it is certainly heartening. I know that I wish the American government would allocate its funds better. Switching to low-cost, high-quality solutions like Linux provides us taxpayers with more bang for our buck.
Let's see how well it goes in Germany and see what lessons we can take away from it!
Captain America Didn't they do this one and it sucked?
The Avengers A facless hero clan. I can't even name a single hero in this group.
Nick Fury I guess because the Punisher movie worked so well...
Black Panther Ah, a hero named after a hyper-racist group. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Ant-Man Honey, I shrunk the superhero!
Cloak & Dagger Not that Cloak was a completely contrived character, or that Dagger wore far too little clothing, but how could this movie possibly be interesting?
Dr. Strange Who?
Hawkeye Ah, Daredevil without charisma, but empowered with a ridiculous costume.
Power Pack Never heard of them.
Shang-Chi Is this like the token Asian guy?
I think they probably need to stick with their franchise heros and stay away from these B and C-list zeroes.
Let's say in the future that people find some value in electronic-format reading materials. EBooks is one idea that fits that category but hasn't quite taken off. Just assume for the moment that something suddenly became widely useful like that.
It would be beneficial to the device if it could play video/audio inline. A very rough parallel would be cutscenes in games. You'd read a passage, then there would be a video to take you deeper into the world of the narrative.
Something like this in textbooks would be extremely valuable. You could have the normal dry text followed by a well-done audio/visual presentation of the presented concepts.
Obviously these are totally off the top of my head, but there have to be more and better ideas out there for such a technology.
Now think of yourself as Microsoft, publisher of the biggest word processor of them all. Are you going to let yourself be hamstrung by "standards" which force your users to *not* use the full capabilities of the format? If you were really interested in progressing, you'd just keep throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the product and seeing what sticks and what can be shelved.
The best thing you can do is put those features in and let your users decide whether to use them or not. The worst thing to do is to think you are smarter than your users and artificially limit them in the name of standardization.
Slashdot Mirror
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
I know they have less shuttles, but not because they planned it that way.
As for funding private sector projects, I can only say that whatever amount they are wasting on the Shuttle fleet could be used elsewhere with proper funding and productive information sharing that NASA could stop being a top-to-bottom space agency and take on a leadership/management role instead. Unfortunately, many of its projects are intimately tied to the military (and the handful of vendors who service them) that extricating the space agency from the military research agency would be pretty difficult.
I'm just an armchair quarterback, so my opinion means squat, of course.
NASA needs less shuttle. NASA needs to be pared back or reorganized such that it uses its funds funding private sector projects rather than trying to do all its research in house.
Just my opinion, or course.
Anyone ever notice that the Gmail Notifier takes up 10 megs of memory? What is it doing with all that memory?
I use AVG on all my machines. It just makes sense, like F-Prot did back in the DOS days.
Cool! I'll have to look at this some more, I only took the briefest of glances at it. I found this diagram to be very illuminating:
d ium.jpg
http://ltp.sourceforge.net/images/2.6.8-poster-me
As someone above mentioned, instrumenting all the code with debug checks would bring the system to a crawl. However, with compiler settings set to Release instead of Debug, it should be possible to give end users an optimized version without any debug code to slow it down.
They seem to be taking system stats and system uptimes and presenting it in a hard to understand table. Is that tracking testing?
If I turn on my computer and don't touch it for a year, it will have excellent uptime, but it doesn't really test very much. Same too, if I just start up Apache and let it do its thing.
Testing is a very important part of any development cycle and testing metrics are very useful in determining the quality of the delivered product. However, I've never heard of "testing time" used as a metric. Maybe "coverage" or "bugs over time", but the amount of time itself is never really a concern.
From what I've seen of the Linux kernel (just downloading the source from kernel.org and browsing through it), there doesn't seem to be much in the way of actual debug code thoughtfully and diligently placed throughout the code. There are a few litterings of debug code here and there, but for the most part, it seems like the developers just expect it to work without error.
Nothing wrong with that attitude, if reality backs it up. And luckily, with Linux, reality is right there to prove the developers correct.
Mea culpa. I knew I should have paid more attention in Geology. I'm looking at the USGS photo glossary and can't seem to find the term for this mound (lava dome doesn't seem to fit).
There's no actual cinder cone being formed here, so that doesn't fit. I wonder, then, what you would call this. (bulge?)
Can't leave this state for a few more years. But I've been out that way in the past and really enjoyed the woodsiness of the state. I took a drive through the Cascade loop and down through The Dalles and on through to California and wrapped up with a retrace from San Francisco up to the Olympic penninsula along the 101. It took a week and a half and it was stunning. This was back in 1997, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but I remember being awed at the sights.
A shield volcano is formed when a large pool of magma forms and pushes the land above it upwards. These types are not likely to erupt, though they will erupt violently if the magma is able to push through the surface (kind of like a giant geologic pimple). These volcanos are great for tourism because of the typically accompanying hot springs and year-round greenery.
I like Oregon a lot. I just wish it were easier to get to.
If a dog laps up some spilled gasoline at a service station, he will get very sick.
If a child eats a dropped pellet (it looks like a Smarties tablet) at a service station, it would be nice that she didn't die.
It's not the best name Microsoft ever thought of, that's for sure.
The article (advertisement) is pretty short and doesn't explain the technology in much detail. I wonder how much a "full tank" of hydrogen pellets would cost. And would the extra weight of the pellets be significantly detrimental to the car's performance?
When you go to the pump, do you swap pellets with the gas station attendant? How flammable are these things?
What if I swallow one? Is it non-toxic?
Do you have proof of this? Do you have examples of devices running Windows CE 4.x+ (I believe that the Pocket PC still runs v3.0, but I may not be up to date on this) that have stability problems?
Well, heh. I didn't think I was coming off so enthusiastically for WindowsCE. Looks like I'm somehow intimately involved in the product or something.
Anyway, my point that I was (badly) trying to make was that blind allegiance or blind hatred should not be your guiding motivation for accepting or dismissing a technology out of hand.
Linux, CE, VxWorks, they are all great and work wonderfully. It's just as scary to fly with a VxWorks-controlled cabin pressure system as it is with a CE-controlled system. Which is to say, not at all.
One of his quotes is that he would feel very uneasy riding in an airplane where WindowsCE was controlling the cabin pressure. I realize that he is a diehard anti-Microsoft person, as his long history with Apple and recent history with Open Source suggests, but I wonder if he is taking his gut feeling about the company and judging the technical worth of its products sight unseen.
I'm no fan of WindowsCE. I think that it has a lot of warts, though these have been smoothed over in recent releases as Microsoft seems to be moving away from "it's just like Windows!" and more towards a real embedded OS. But it's still pretty slow in scheduling ISRs and requires a fair bit of fiddling to get power management working correctly in the drivers. But all-in-all it isn't a bad system. It's not prone to crashes any more than any other embedded system is, and it's much more resistant to crashes than desktop Windows is.
For something as straightforward as cabin pressure and lights in an airplane, something like WindowsCE is actually pretty easy to implement and use. I, for one, wouldn't worry a bit about it running such systems.
As for the first link, whatever you may have thought, and whatever the moderators may have thought, such is the way things go. I have since closed my PayPal accounts as a result. It seems that there was no problem with the actual account, and that I was very lucky.
The second one just states the obvious. Mac computers have had a very limited role in the "corporate desktop". I ought to have put quotes around that in my original post, I can't think of why I didn't. Most computer systems that sit on people's desks at their office are Windows terminals. Unless, as I mentioned in the post, you belong to certain very specific industries such as media creation (design houses, advertising houses, music or movie production, etc) or academia, you will be hard pressed to find a Macintosh computer anywhere. Maybe your experience is different and you live in a world where Apple computers are so prevalent that trying to walk without tripping over one is a burden. I don't know. I certainly don't live in that world.
I wouldn't be surprised if you're one of the Adequacy-era trolls, still looking for a home.
Well, you've got me at a disadvantage, then. I haven't got the slightest idea what you are talking about.
I don't comment here for your edification. You're free to ignore my posts to your heart's content.
As I seem to be getting this sort of reaction quite a bit lately, I ask you to list those things for which I "misinformed" which was corrected by a commenter in a reply to which I did not respond with acknowledgement of my error.
There is no intent to misinform here. (Maybe in this case to make a little fun at the expense of the story. After all, the site isn't reachable.) Just to provide my opinion and any information I have regarding the topic at hand.
Please, let me know how I have formed a "genuine pattern to misinform". I will see what I can do about avoiding anything that seems like such.
Unless you're just a greenthumb, I'm willing to bet that being "a part of" a company that went public isn't really that big a deal nor as uncommon as you'd think. From several years before the turn of the century, companies were going public all the time. Many of us had a boatload of stock options and watched as those options slowly go underwater.
I don't know what you mean about being part of "practically everything", but if you'd care to share some examples from what I've written, that would be cool.
As I recall, even back in the early 1970s, SALT was one of the key planks of Nixon's presidential strategy. I was under the impression that SALT succeeded and was only finally done away with when GWB took office, but to see that it is still working is very cool.
I saw Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Rings and was not impressed. Sure, I was impressed with the quality of the cinematography and the absolutely wonderful scenery. I wasn't impressed with the story, though. I didn't think there was any character growth except for the times when the director felt it necessary to beat the audience about the head with cliched obviousness. Frodo doesn't grow as a character, neither do any of the other characters. They all start out in their one-dimensional roles and stay that way the whole time.
Then you get battle scene after battle scene. I suppose if I was 12 years old I might have thought it really cool, but at this age I found it tedious.
None of the peripheral characters were explained to any depth. There was a very weird and out of place scene where an "angel/elf" flips out for two seconds and looks like she's going to eat Frodo, then the next moment she's back to normal. What was that all about?
The story itself doesn't seem to go anywhere, though the characters are supposed to be on some very important journey. Instead of story, we get fight scenes. Instead of character development, we get characters introduced then forgotten. Instead of storytelling, we get computer graphics.
The movie was a total wreck when removed from its fancy computer-aided trappings. It offers the viewer nothing but great scenery, but that can't possibly hold a movie together for 3 hours.
DON'T DO IT!!!!!
He was talking about getting married or something. I don't remember.
But going public has been the ruin of many poor companies, and God knows I've been part of some. It ties you to the stockholders and limits the ways in which you can reasonably spend your capital. It also risks you losing some of your top talent who may just decide that being rich and staying at home is better than sticking around to watch the stock prices fall through the floor while they slave away 12 hours a day.
Trolltech has a very good business model. They sell Qt licenses to embedded device makers (in addition to selling software licenses to desktop application developers). Since Gartner expects devices like cellphones and other devices not normally built with graphical UIs to be overtaken in the coming years by "smart" devices that need a solid GUI, not to mention easily programmable APIs, Trolltech is positioned very well in this area.
But don't go IPO, man. Keep it small, keep it lean, and don't let your eyes glaze over with dollar signs.
It's nice to see a successful government project, even if it is something as relatively minor as a computer systems switch. Yes, okay, switching computer systems is a pretty big deal if you are a system administrator or applications developer for those systems. But from the general public (the ones whom the system is meant to serve) perspective, it should all be pretty transparent.
To see such a move going so well that they intend to do more of it is certainly heartening. I know that I wish the American government would allocate its funds better. Switching to low-cost, high-quality solutions like Linux provides us taxpayers with more bang for our buck.
Let's see how well it goes in Germany and see what lessons we can take away from it!
Do you read Marvel comics?
Not since I was a kid. Do you still read them?
Just my impressions of the list:
Captain America
Didn't they do this one and it sucked?
The Avengers
A facless hero clan. I can't even name a single hero in this group.
Nick Fury
I guess because the Punisher movie worked so well...
Black Panther
Ah, a hero named after a hyper-racist group. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Ant-Man
Honey, I shrunk the superhero!
Cloak & Dagger
Not that Cloak was a completely contrived character, or that Dagger wore far too little clothing, but how could this movie possibly be interesting?
Dr. Strange
Who?
Hawkeye
Ah, Daredevil without charisma, but empowered with a ridiculous costume.
Power Pack
Never heard of them.
Shang-Chi
Is this like the token Asian guy?
I think they probably need to stick with their franchise heros and stay away from these B and C-list zeroes.
Let's say in the future that people find some value in electronic-format reading materials. EBooks is one idea that fits that category but hasn't quite taken off. Just assume for the moment that something suddenly became widely useful like that.
It would be beneficial to the device if it could play video/audio inline. A very rough parallel would be cutscenes in games. You'd read a passage, then there would be a video to take you deeper into the world of the narrative.
Something like this in textbooks would be extremely valuable. You could have the normal dry text followed by a well-done audio/visual presentation of the presented concepts.
Obviously these are totally off the top of my head, but there have to be more and better ideas out there for such a technology.
Now think of yourself as Microsoft, publisher of the biggest word processor of them all. Are you going to let yourself be hamstrung by "standards" which force your users to *not* use the full capabilities of the format? If you were really interested in progressing, you'd just keep throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the product and seeing what sticks and what can be shelved.
The best thing you can do is put those features in and let your users decide whether to use them or not. The worst thing to do is to think you are smarter than your users and artificially limit them in the name of standardization.