Heh, leave it to the tech community to start nitpicking which language was actually used rather than the fact that we're seeing the very rare sight of a computer programmer in political office.
I took a look at the code - yeah, it's really just C code, but that's fine for a tiny project like this. Nice code, very clean and readable, but not very well commented.
Honestly, I don't think Windows 7 -> Windows 10 will be nearly as bad as between Windows XP -> Windows Vista. Windows has been fairly stable under the hood since Vista - the driver model has stayed the same, the internal APIs are fairly similar with only minor additions, and there hasn't been a significant uptick in hardware requirements.
What I think businesses (and many users) hated in Windows 8 was the radically re-designed UI, but as far as I know, there were very few reports of technical incompatibilities. I think the same will be true of Windows 10. As far as UI goes, it mostly looks like an ugly Windows 7 with a few minor differences, but quite a few internal improvements.
In fact, it seems like this time MS is going out of their way to move forward with a lot of features in Windows 10 that will be very attractive for enterprise customers, such as improvements to active directory, built-in two-factor authentication, the ability to do in-place upgrades, etc. I think they've learned their lesson about ignoring the business customer. True, switching platforms may not be a business' first choice, but they sure don't have to jump on the latest OS if it feels like there's no value there.
Hopefully that includes timely patch management, since CyberKeel claims 37% of maritime webservers running Microsoft were not patched and thereby "open to remote control risk." Granted, that risk is about hackers taking over websites, but it could certainly turn into a misinformation mess.
Also, I love the picture used for that article - a coast guard cutter in front of a ship burning on the water in the background - as though it's vulnerable Microsoft-based computer suddenly burst into flames and took the ship with it. Danger! Patch your OS or this could happen to you!
Nope. The term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1955 by John McCarthy. Edward Feigenbaum is considered to be the father of expert systems, and first published a paper about them in 1977.
No, it's apparently compatible with Windows 7 or later. Remember, Office is targeted at business, and most businesses are still using Windows 7, and will be for a considerable time to come.
Microsoft will apparently screw around with consumers by doing things like not back-porting DirectX to older operating systems, but they're not going to risk sales of their bread-and-butter products by unnecessarily tying them to only their newest operating systems.
BTW, I certainly wouldn't consider Windows 10 to be an "OS designed for tablets". I'm a big critic of Windows 8, but Windows 10 has pretty much fixed all that I hated about 8, except for how hideous it looks (IMO).
I'm going to guess that, more than anything, Bard's Tale was just lucky enough to slip under the radar. I don't think it happened because "everyone was a lot less uptight". Videogames were still very much a cottage industry back then, not the multi-billion dollar industry that today rivals Hollywood.
Remember, D&D was famously forced to remove Hobbits and a few other Tolkein-specific terms, and this was back in the seventies.
Unlike proprietary alternatives, Fedora (and other Linux distros with the Gnome desktop) includes accessibility tools out of the box, such as:
Screen reader: A text-to-speech system to read what's on the screen
Magnifier: Helps users with visual impairments who need larger text and images
High-contrast mode: Helps users who have trouble seeing text unless contrast is corrected, such as white text on a black background, or vice versa
Mouse keys: Controls the mouse using the number pad
Sticky keys: Helps users who have trouble pressing multiple keys at once, and users who have use of only one hand
Bounce keys: To ignore rapidly pressed keys or if a key is accidentally held down
On screen keyboard: Helps users who cannot type at all, but who can use a mouse
Visual alerts: Replace system sounds with visual cues
Um... unlike what proprietary systems? He surely can't be talking about Windows, because it has every single one of these features, and has had most of them since Windows 95 two decades ago!
It's great that Linux/Gnome now also includes these features, but the author doesn't really help his cause by misrepresenting (I'm being kind in my choice of words here) the competition's features.
Of course, no one else can say anything about hobbits. The Tolkien estate has sued in order to ensure that. Thus, we have "halflings". Good thing he didn't actually invent all those other terms, or it wouldn't have been possible to blatantly pillage all his ideas and package them as a game. I guess today it's been long enough that we can call it an *homage*.
But to your point, absolutely. The world Tolkein created shaped our modern-day mythos of traditional fantasy. That is, his interpretations of elves and dwarves and wizards were quite new at the time, if you read older myths and legends about these entities, but are now viewed as archtypical. His works are now the standard by which every other fantasy is measured. And as you indicated, as with any other genre-defining work, there are plenty of nitpicks to be had about it, but it doesn't undermine it's importance as a literary classic.
Anyone interested in a good theory on how human intelligence actually works should read Jeff Hawkin's (the guy who invented PalmPilot) On Intelligence. It proposes and describes a rather interesting theory on how our perceptions, reactions, and intelligence all work.
The term "AI" dropped out of favor a decade ago as a result of a lot of over-promising and under-delivering from the decade before that. Remember "expert systems"? Yeah, that was "AI" in a different guise. It looks like the term "AI" is making a bit of a comeback. I'm not sure that's a good thing, because it never really describes these systems adequately, as "intelligence" has very little to do with it.
Keep in mind the problem species mentioned are mostly native to Africa, and it's problematic in more ways than one. Africa is the world's poorest and least developed continent, and that leads to two problems: First, their birth rate is skill sky high, unlike nearly every first-world country where populations are now largely stable or even falling. Second, the poverty and unstable political climate means there's a lot of poaching going on. Third, when you're dirt poor, you're a little less likely to worry about "big picture" issues like species viability, and more likely to do what you can to simply survive and put food on the table.
Essentially, we need Africa to become more economically developed as soon as possible, and when that happens, it's almost certain that they'll follow the same trends that we've seen in happen in other developed countries: stabilizing populations and more serious efforts to protect their natural resources and environment. Unfortunately, we can only encourage these countries to protect their natural assets, but there's really nothing we can do short of that. We just have to hope that the populations don't become nonviable before that happens.
Agreed. There are a bazillion more suitable images one should use nowadays for *technical* reasons to legitimately test compression and processing algorithms. Yes, I'm aware of the history. Not all traditions are worthy of being preserved. Let's move on, and leave it as an interesting historical footnote.
Are people too easily offended by this? Absolutely. After all, the top half of the image is no more risqué than many covers on modern fashion magazine. Some people just don't like the fact that it was an image from a men's magazine, which is naturally associated with a female-hostile work environment. But why go out of your way to offend people when it's really not necessary, and a complete distraction from what you're trying to do anyhow?
When you see a tech demo like this, you can generally assume that this is what the next generation of fighting games will at least approach in terms of fidelity and realism. Demos are a tricky thing, because unlike games, you can get away with rendering only the small environment you're currently looking at, and moreover, you can optimize the environment for viewing it only from that limited perspective, making it appear hyper realistic. This is why fighting games tend to look better than just about anything else out there - they're the closest a videogame will ever come to these tech demos in terms of being able to "cheat" like this.
Which games are at the other end of that spectrum? I'd probably have to say MMOs. By necessity, they end up looking a generation behind the latest state-of-the-art for two important reasons: First, naturally, they tend to set the minimum system requirements a bit lower to be more inclusive and attract a bigger customer base. Second, and more importantly, MMOs spend a ridiculous amount of their rendering budget on drawing the large numbers of unique characters on screen at any one time, as well as all the effects that can be fired off by them, and of course, any NPCs in the area, and finally, a typically spawling, open terrain to explore. As such, you can't expect an MMO to look like a AAA single-player game, because the rendering budget is spent in significantly different ways. So, I guess you can expect MMOs to look this good perhaps in another two to three generations.
As a game developer, was I impressed? Well, yeah, as much as I'm impressed by all our modern technology. Nowadays, it's actually pretty easy to sink your entire rendering budget into a single character (or small numbers of characters) and make her look quite impressive - she still looked good though. I was less impressed with the outdoor shots. Short of simple interiors, bare, rocky terrain is the cheapest and easiest type of terrain to build and render with the best looking relative results.
I'd call this a decent, incremental step forward, and I'd say that's a good thing. Radical leaps means everyone has to re-invent their entire production pipelines, and that takes a lot of focus away from where in needs to be, which is first and foremost in creating a fun game. In terms of creating game assets though, the major steps forward that need to be taken are how to build more high-fidelity assets for less - which right now is insanely expensive because it's nearly all hand crafted, and so far have always needed to be re-created entirely from generation to generation.
I've somehow managed to go my entire career without working on a third party licensed engine. It's always been developed internally by the company I was working for. And even when I went indie, with just me working on my own little game, no commercial engine had the specialized features I wanted, and ended up spending a couple of years writing my own. Plus, I liked the fact that I was able to build my game engine to work exactly the way I wanted it to function.
Using a commercial game engine makes a lot of sense when the game you're developing happens to fall in line with the way those engines are expecting things to work (for instance, a small company making a character-based shooter? You'd be insane to develop your own engine). You need to more or less "drink the kool-aid", as one of my colleagues put it, meaning it's important to work the way the engine developers are expecting you to work.
If you're doing something extremely unusual gameplay-wise that requires some very unusual engine capabilities or stresses the engine in unusual ways, you have to consider the possibility that a commercial engine may end up fighting you and your game's vision, causing your a lot of long-term pain. Moreover, with your own engine, you completely control it's destiny. If you want a feature, or want a specific optimization, or a change in it's behavior, you can make it happen. Technically, you can do this if you have an engine's source code, but doing so puts you on a diverging path with the developers, which is always risky.
Of course, the downside is that creating and maintaining your own engine is a massive engineering cost. You need a dedicated team of engine programmers. That being said, you tend to need *fewer* than a commercial engine, because you can focus specifically on the features needed for your game, rather than all features *possibly* needed.
Anyhow, that's my perspective as a videogame programmer / engine developer. I'm not qualified to discuss the merits of third-party game engines, since I've never used one myself.
Apparently, the patent office initially rejects 90% of patents, but that figure is slightly misleading. The patent submitter simply has to rework, rework, appeal, and you can still get it approved. What percentage of patents are *eventually* approved after the resubmissions and appeals? In 2012 that number was calculated at 90% approved!
Moreover, the patent filing fee is kept even if the patent is rejected, and fees are also required to resubmit or appeal. So, there's financial incentive to first reject the patent a few times, perhaps force an appeal, and then finally approve it.
I'm not saying they're strictly considering revenue here, but... yeah, let's face it. The patent examiners would probably get in big trouble if they made it too difficult to file patents and keep those fees coming it.
Manufacturing businesses with fewer than 500 employees are officially categorized as "small businesses" in the US. For some other types of companies like say, computer services, the amount of revenue is used as a metric, with the cut-off being $21 million average receipts for the past three years. The amount varies by the type of business.
It's because there's currently a rather pronounced backlash against all anti-terrorist provisions right now, because politicians and three-letter agencies keep using it as a "sky is falling, please cede more of your freedoms, privacy, and dignity to the state" excuse. And people are tired of it.
Yes, punishment for "material support" of terrorism is fine in theory, but only if you trust the government to justly apply that charge. And trust in the government is in short supply these days, at least among some demographics.
Okay, shoot, I feel sort of bad now. I thought twenty years was pretty obvious as a joke. Honestly, I have no idea how long this project took.
I've worked on a five year project that easily topped half a million lines of code, maybe more, with well over a hundred developers working on it. And oddly enough, it actually was a videogame (as mentioned later in this thread) - an MMO, which actually shares some characteristics with such a system, I suppose. No one died if the game crashed or calculated something incorrectly, although we certainly took every crash very seriously, especially the game servers. It was still damn hard to get everything working correctly.
It's not unreasonable that an FAA-sponsored project with critical safety tolerances could easily have been a decade in the making or more. I'd say that twenty years, while not out of the realm of possibility, still sounds like an awfully long time though.
Well, yes, but keep in mind they started on this project 20 years ago. It's about time now to start on this new system's replacement, which is scheduled to go operational in 2035.
If you look at the Spark workflow (http://spark.autodesk.com/about) prominent on the list of features is "copyright protection". How exactly this system goes about deciding what you are and are not allowed to print could be quite significant, especially if Microsoft's market share makes it the de facto standard.
Bleh, after looking into this a bit I think it's even worse than that.
Autodesk is calling this an "open platform", but it's most certainly not "open" in the same way we'd usually talk about more permissive "open source" licenses, such as BSD or Apache. So, it's more of a "free as in beer" sort of open, as far as I can tell. They've got a bunch of cloud-related features that (I think) are intended to facilitate transfer of models from design to manufacturing regions, but it looks like it's all very tightly under Autodesk's control, and they're very clear that they're not giving anyone else any control or licensing rights to the code or platform.
Check out the Spark Terms of Service. Open, my ass. How do you get "open" out of that? They're simply defining open as "anyone can use it if they sign up with us", which is about as "open" as Facebook. I was initially hopeful that this might be a good thing for the 3D printing industry, but all it would do is cede a massive amount of control over the 3D printing process to Autodesk, and I can't see how that's a good thing at all.
We did this mainly because our teachers were tortured by this when they were kids and it is their turn to torture us. Continuity and circle of life and all that.
Heh, you know that's true! Thanks for sharing. It's always fun to learn about small cultural differences like that which you normally never learn unless you go live and work in another country.
One of these generations I'm hopeful the US will eventually go metric as well, but we seem to be unusually stubborn about that sort of thing.
Until the microbial life we 'forgot' about infects and destroys another local biome (or creates one in the first place)
Who's "we"? Certainly not NASA.
Anything expecting to make contact with another celestial body undergoes sterilization for exactly this reason, which should take care of most organisms. And of course, it would need to survive the trip and eventual impact, as well as then miraculously be adaptable to Mercury's incredibly hostile climate. In this particular case, the probability of native contamination is deemed so low that only a level I (lowest of five levels) decontamination procedure is needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Only a frothing, maladjusted man-child would post garbage like that. Irritating, I know, but it's best to just ignore the trash.
Heh, leave it to the tech community to start nitpicking which language was actually used rather than the fact that we're seeing the very rare sight of a computer programmer in political office.
I took a look at the code - yeah, it's really just C code, but that's fine for a tiny project like this. Nice code, very clean and readable, but not very well commented.
Honestly, I don't think Windows 7 -> Windows 10 will be nearly as bad as between Windows XP -> Windows Vista. Windows has been fairly stable under the hood since Vista - the driver model has stayed the same, the internal APIs are fairly similar with only minor additions, and there hasn't been a significant uptick in hardware requirements.
What I think businesses (and many users) hated in Windows 8 was the radically re-designed UI, but as far as I know, there were very few reports of technical incompatibilities. I think the same will be true of Windows 10. As far as UI goes, it mostly looks like an ugly Windows 7 with a few minor differences, but quite a few internal improvements.
In fact, it seems like this time MS is going out of their way to move forward with a lot of features in Windows 10 that will be very attractive for enterprise customers, such as improvements to active directory, built-in two-factor authentication, the ability to do in-place upgrades, etc. I think they've learned their lesson about ignoring the business customer. True, switching platforms may not be a business' first choice, but they sure don't have to jump on the latest OS if it feels like there's no value there.
Hopefully that includes timely patch management, since CyberKeel claims 37% of maritime webservers running Microsoft were not patched and thereby "open to remote control risk." Granted, that risk is about hackers taking over websites, but it could certainly turn into a misinformation mess.
Also, I love the picture used for that article - a coast guard cutter in front of a ship burning on the water in the background - as though it's vulnerable Microsoft-based computer suddenly burst into flames and took the ship with it. Danger! Patch your OS or this could happen to you!
Uh, the term 'expert systems' predates 'AI'.
Nope. The term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1955 by John McCarthy. Edward Feigenbaum is considered to be the father of expert systems, and first published a paper about them in 1977.
No, it's apparently compatible with Windows 7 or later. Remember, Office is targeted at business, and most businesses are still using Windows 7, and will be for a considerable time to come.
Microsoft will apparently screw around with consumers by doing things like not back-porting DirectX to older operating systems, but they're not going to risk sales of their bread-and-butter products by unnecessarily tying them to only their newest operating systems.
BTW, I certainly wouldn't consider Windows 10 to be an "OS designed for tablets". I'm a big critic of Windows 8, but Windows 10 has pretty much fixed all that I hated about 8, except for how hideous it looks (IMO).
Actually, your view is a bit dated, as 80 percent of Linux contributions are paid by corporations. The days of Linux being a hobbyist product are long behind us.
I'm going to guess that, more than anything, Bard's Tale was just lucky enough to slip under the radar. I don't think it happened because "everyone was a lot less uptight". Videogames were still very much a cottage industry back then, not the multi-billion dollar industry that today rivals Hollywood.
Remember, D&D was famously forced to remove Hobbits and a few other Tolkein-specific terms, and this was back in the seventies.
Also, from the article:
Unlike proprietary alternatives, Fedora (and other Linux distros with the Gnome desktop) includes accessibility tools out of the box, such as:
Screen reader: A text-to-speech system to read what's on the screen
Magnifier: Helps users with visual impairments who need larger text and images
High-contrast mode: Helps users who have trouble seeing text unless contrast is corrected, such as white text on a black background, or vice versa
Mouse keys: Controls the mouse using the number pad
Sticky keys: Helps users who have trouble pressing multiple keys at once, and users who have use of only one hand
Bounce keys: To ignore rapidly pressed keys or if a key is accidentally held down
On screen keyboard: Helps users who cannot type at all, but who can use a mouse
Visual alerts: Replace system sounds with visual cues
Um... unlike what proprietary systems? He surely can't be talking about Windows, because it has every single one of these features, and has had most of them since Windows 95 two decades ago!
It's great that Linux/Gnome now also includes these features, but the author doesn't really help his cause by misrepresenting (I'm being kind in my choice of words here) the competition's features.
Of course, no one else can say anything about hobbits. The Tolkien estate has sued in order to ensure that. Thus, we have "halflings". Good thing he didn't actually invent all those other terms, or it wouldn't have been possible to blatantly pillage all his ideas and package them as a game. I guess today it's been long enough that we can call it an *homage*.
But to your point, absolutely. The world Tolkein created shaped our modern-day mythos of traditional fantasy. That is, his interpretations of elves and dwarves and wizards were quite new at the time, if you read older myths and legends about these entities, but are now viewed as archtypical. His works are now the standard by which every other fantasy is measured. And as you indicated, as with any other genre-defining work, there are plenty of nitpicks to be had about it, but it doesn't undermine it's importance as a literary classic.
Anyone interested in a good theory on how human intelligence actually works should read Jeff Hawkin's (the guy who invented PalmPilot) On Intelligence. It proposes and describes a rather interesting theory on how our perceptions, reactions, and intelligence all work.
The term "AI" dropped out of favor a decade ago as a result of a lot of over-promising and under-delivering from the decade before that. Remember "expert systems"? Yeah, that was "AI" in a different guise. It looks like the term "AI" is making a bit of a comeback. I'm not sure that's a good thing, because it never really describes these systems adequately, as "intelligence" has very little to do with it.
Keep in mind the problem species mentioned are mostly native to Africa, and it's problematic in more ways than one. Africa is the world's poorest and least developed continent, and that leads to two problems: First, their birth rate is skill sky high, unlike nearly every first-world country where populations are now largely stable or even falling. Second, the poverty and unstable political climate means there's a lot of poaching going on. Third, when you're dirt poor, you're a little less likely to worry about "big picture" issues like species viability, and more likely to do what you can to simply survive and put food on the table.
Essentially, we need Africa to become more economically developed as soon as possible, and when that happens, it's almost certain that they'll follow the same trends that we've seen in happen in other developed countries: stabilizing populations and more serious efforts to protect their natural resources and environment. Unfortunately, we can only encourage these countries to protect their natural assets, but there's really nothing we can do short of that. We just have to hope that the populations don't become nonviable before that happens.
Agreed. There are a bazillion more suitable images one should use nowadays for *technical* reasons to legitimately test compression and processing algorithms. Yes, I'm aware of the history. Not all traditions are worthy of being preserved. Let's move on, and leave it as an interesting historical footnote.
Are people too easily offended by this? Absolutely. After all, the top half of the image is no more risqué than many covers on modern fashion magazine. Some people just don't like the fact that it was an image from a men's magazine, which is naturally associated with a female-hostile work environment. But why go out of your way to offend people when it's really not necessary, and a complete distraction from what you're trying to do anyhow?
When you see a tech demo like this, you can generally assume that this is what the next generation of fighting games will at least approach in terms of fidelity and realism. Demos are a tricky thing, because unlike games, you can get away with rendering only the small environment you're currently looking at, and moreover, you can optimize the environment for viewing it only from that limited perspective, making it appear hyper realistic. This is why fighting games tend to look better than just about anything else out there - they're the closest a videogame will ever come to these tech demos in terms of being able to "cheat" like this.
Which games are at the other end of that spectrum? I'd probably have to say MMOs. By necessity, they end up looking a generation behind the latest state-of-the-art for two important reasons: First, naturally, they tend to set the minimum system requirements a bit lower to be more inclusive and attract a bigger customer base. Second, and more importantly, MMOs spend a ridiculous amount of their rendering budget on drawing the large numbers of unique characters on screen at any one time, as well as all the effects that can be fired off by them, and of course, any NPCs in the area, and finally, a typically spawling, open terrain to explore. As such, you can't expect an MMO to look like a AAA single-player game, because the rendering budget is spent in significantly different ways. So, I guess you can expect MMOs to look this good perhaps in another two to three generations.
As a game developer, was I impressed? Well, yeah, as much as I'm impressed by all our modern technology. Nowadays, it's actually pretty easy to sink your entire rendering budget into a single character (or small numbers of characters) and make her look quite impressive - she still looked good though. I was less impressed with the outdoor shots. Short of simple interiors, bare, rocky terrain is the cheapest and easiest type of terrain to build and render with the best looking relative results.
I'd call this a decent, incremental step forward, and I'd say that's a good thing. Radical leaps means everyone has to re-invent their entire production pipelines, and that takes a lot of focus away from where in needs to be, which is first and foremost in creating a fun game. In terms of creating game assets though, the major steps forward that need to be taken are how to build more high-fidelity assets for less - which right now is insanely expensive because it's nearly all hand crafted, and so far have always needed to be re-created entirely from generation to generation.
I've somehow managed to go my entire career without working on a third party licensed engine. It's always been developed internally by the company I was working for. And even when I went indie, with just me working on my own little game, no commercial engine had the specialized features I wanted, and ended up spending a couple of years writing my own. Plus, I liked the fact that I was able to build my game engine to work exactly the way I wanted it to function.
Using a commercial game engine makes a lot of sense when the game you're developing happens to fall in line with the way those engines are expecting things to work (for instance, a small company making a character-based shooter? You'd be insane to develop your own engine). You need to more or less "drink the kool-aid", as one of my colleagues put it, meaning it's important to work the way the engine developers are expecting you to work.
If you're doing something extremely unusual gameplay-wise that requires some very unusual engine capabilities or stresses the engine in unusual ways, you have to consider the possibility that a commercial engine may end up fighting you and your game's vision, causing your a lot of long-term pain. Moreover, with your own engine, you completely control it's destiny. If you want a feature, or want a specific optimization, or a change in it's behavior, you can make it happen. Technically, you can do this if you have an engine's source code, but doing so puts you on a diverging path with the developers, which is always risky.
Of course, the downside is that creating and maintaining your own engine is a massive engineering cost. You need a dedicated team of engine programmers. That being said, you tend to need *fewer* than a commercial engine, because you can focus specifically on the features needed for your game, rather than all features *possibly* needed.
Anyhow, that's my perspective as a videogame programmer / engine developer. I'm not qualified to discuss the merits of third-party game engines, since I've never used one myself.
Apparently, the patent office initially rejects 90% of patents, but that figure is slightly misleading. The patent submitter simply has to rework, rework, appeal, and you can still get it approved. What percentage of patents are *eventually* approved after the resubmissions and appeals? In 2012 that number was calculated at 90% approved!
Moreover, the patent filing fee is kept even if the patent is rejected, and fees are also required to resubmit or appeal. So, there's financial incentive to first reject the patent a few times, perhaps force an appeal, and then finally approve it.
I'm not saying they're strictly considering revenue here, but... yeah, let's face it. The patent examiners would probably get in big trouble if they made it too difficult to file patents and keep those fees coming it.
In case you haven't seen it yet...
Manufacturing businesses with fewer than 500 employees are officially categorized as "small businesses" in the US. For some other types of companies like say, computer services, the amount of revenue is used as a metric, with the cut-off being $21 million average receipts for the past three years. The amount varies by the type of business.
Typical government... making a simple thing as whether a company is "small" or not into such a complicated issue.
It's because there's currently a rather pronounced backlash against all anti-terrorist provisions right now, because politicians and three-letter agencies keep using it as a "sky is falling, please cede more of your freedoms, privacy, and dignity to the state" excuse. And people are tired of it.
Yes, punishment for "material support" of terrorism is fine in theory, but only if you trust the government to justly apply that charge. And trust in the government is in short supply these days, at least among some demographics.
Okay, shoot, I feel sort of bad now. I thought twenty years was pretty obvious as a joke. Honestly, I have no idea how long this project took.
I've worked on a five year project that easily topped half a million lines of code, maybe more, with well over a hundred developers working on it. And oddly enough, it actually was a videogame (as mentioned later in this thread) - an MMO, which actually shares some characteristics with such a system, I suppose. No one died if the game crashed or calculated something incorrectly, although we certainly took every crash very seriously, especially the game servers. It was still damn hard to get everything working correctly.
It's not unreasonable that an FAA-sponsored project with critical safety tolerances could easily have been a decade in the making or more. I'd say that twenty years, while not out of the realm of possibility, still sounds like an awfully long time though.
Well, yes, but keep in mind they started on this project 20 years ago. It's about time now to start on this new system's replacement, which is scheduled to go operational in 2035.
If you look at the Spark workflow (http://spark.autodesk.com/about) prominent on the list of features is "copyright protection". How exactly this system goes about deciding what you are and are not allowed to print could be quite significant, especially if Microsoft's market share makes it the de facto standard.
Bleh, after looking into this a bit I think it's even worse than that.
Autodesk is calling this an "open platform", but it's most certainly not "open" in the same way we'd usually talk about more permissive "open source" licenses, such as BSD or Apache. So, it's more of a "free as in beer" sort of open, as far as I can tell. They've got a bunch of cloud-related features that (I think) are intended to facilitate transfer of models from design to manufacturing regions, but it looks like it's all very tightly under Autodesk's control, and they're very clear that they're not giving anyone else any control or licensing rights to the code or platform.
Check out the Spark Terms of Service. Open, my ass. How do you get "open" out of that? They're simply defining open as "anyone can use it if they sign up with us", which is about as "open" as Facebook. I was initially hopeful that this might be a good thing for the 3D printing industry, but all it would do is cede a massive amount of control over the 3D printing process to Autodesk, and I can't see how that's a good thing at all.
Meh. Now I'm sort of hoping this dies.
We did this mainly because our teachers were tortured by this when they were kids and it is their turn to torture us. Continuity and circle of life and all that.
Heh, you know that's true! Thanks for sharing. It's always fun to learn about small cultural differences like that which you normally never learn unless you go live and work in another country.
One of these generations I'm hopeful the US will eventually go metric as well, but we seem to be unusually stubborn about that sort of thing.
Until the microbial life we 'forgot' about infects and destroys another local biome (or creates one in the first place)
Who's "we"? Certainly not NASA.
Anything expecting to make contact with another celestial body undergoes sterilization for exactly this reason, which should take care of most organisms. And of course, it would need to survive the trip and eventual impact, as well as then miraculously be adaptable to Mercury's incredibly hostile climate. In this particular case, the probability of native contamination is deemed so low that only a level I (lowest of five levels) decontamination procedure is needed.