You don't need a Mars misson for that. All of India's (and China's, too) neighbours are very well aware that the space-faring nations already have the abillity to drop anything they please on them.
No, this mission is an advertising campaign to promote India's already successful space launch industries. The fact that this mission is so much cheaper (if not yet successful: a major factor in the cost of american missions is employing all those 1,000's of staff at western rates of pay. And if the mission does make it to Mars, and continues to run to well past it's planned failure date then the mission just costs more) is part of the "we can launch your satellites AND we have much lower costs" message that the world will hear and take note of.
if an American corporation wants to cut American jobs so they can be done cheaply elsewhere, why would Americans keep buying from them? Loyalty? Pride? Stupidity?
No, none of the above (although that doesn't preclude people from having those qualities). Americans buy from companies that offshore (american) jobs because those companies have lower prices as a result.
You must realise that patriotism comes in a very poor second when the alternative is 5 cents off.
No, there are plenty of unboxed LCD screens available for SBCs. The problem is that the Pi doesn't have enough free GPIO pins to drive them. Cubie and Olimex both offer LCD screens that plug directly into their ARM boards. However the Pi is crippled by it's design, board size and component choices, so none fo the cheap and plentiful LCDs are usable with it.
bring back the spirit of hacking, both software and hardware
And for that the Pi is a failure. It needs an O/S, which makes it difficult as an entry level and it can't even do analog inputs on its own.
The spirit of hacking was alive and as well as could be expected with the Aeduino, before the Pi came along - and it will be just as healthy after the Pi metamorphoses into an overpriced and underpowered LEGO-brick style tablet that doesn't work properly.
Never mind the features, what are the benefits?
on
OpenBSD 5.4 Released
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· Score: 1
Or, to put it another way:
What would I be able to do with a box running this that I couldn't do with <operating system X> for any current, contemporary O/S.
Let's not talk about potential uses - but real, live, switch it on, press buttons and do stuff type of uses. Things that no other O/S or box running that O/S can do? What are they?
Your local utility is only a monopoly as long as your local government makes them one
The problem in the USA is that pressure groups, whether industrial or commercial have no counterbalance. The wrong sort of regulation stunts growth and competition. However zero regulation turns a free market into survival of the fittest with that survivor killing off the rest. Neither situation is good and a regulator who is able to stop consolidation and monopolies would act in the interests of the consumers.
That's what happens in most countries and it's what keeps a competitive market operating. The USA has allowed its corporations to become too influential and too powerful.
How do you get all the network cabling to a floating datacentre? One good gust of wind and the datacentre moves (unless it's like an oil rig, but that doesn't sound like a "floating" datacentre) and the cables stretch and break.
Better to submerge the datacentre. When it's firmly anchored to the seabed it can't move - but it still has all the seawater around it for cooling. You'd probably need something like Stromberg's setup (from 007: The Spy Who Loved Me) in reality, to get peope to & from it.
In addition it has the advantage that not being in any one country's territotial waters, the tax situation could be very beneficial.
That's true. While only a tiny minority of the world is still stuck on imperial units, the plumbing fittings of those sizes seem to be standard. At least in (metric) europe - not just the UK, fittings are available in "inches". Since they're all made in china, it would follow that the sizes are also available globally, too.
On the one hand there are advocates who want it to be used by as many people - ordinary people who neither know nor care about "open" software - as possible. On the other hand, the whole product line is completely dependent on people writing code, who's primary motivation is to show to their peers how clever they are.
Sadly these two groups have little in common. Users don't care about options, flexibility, "free" (of either variety), choice, source code or customising. All they want is TO GET STUFF DONE. For them an operating system is an annoyance and a UI a necessary evil that's difficult to navigate, keeps changing and is badly documented. Both of those layers are seen as stuff that gets in the way of them having the results want.
For developers, users are a pain in the arse. They report bugs, they're resitant to upgrading, they ask stupid questions (which they could answer for themselves if they ever bothered to check the source code) and they complain that features change between releases and they want backwards compatibillity - sometimes all the way back to last year. Worst of all, they don't appreciate the leegance and completixty of the software the developers have written.
the smartest thing the US could do would be to get behind a world government
The USA believe they already are - it's them. It's a constant source of surprise and confusion to americans why the rest of the world keeps arguing with them, rather than doing what they are told to (by the world's most militarised country).
Thank George W Bush junior for destroying the trust in the US around the world
Actually, you can blame the russians. Before the USSR imploded there was another "power" that was able to keep the USA in check - if only with the threat of nuclear annihilation (though everyone knew there was far too much money at stake for that to ever happen). After that, the USA became far more aggressive and awarded itself the role of "global policeman", which basically meant making everyone fall in line with its view of how thongs (and things) should be.
What we're seeing now is that the policeman has far exceeded his authority and has also turned out to be power-crazed and financially impotent. It would be an easy job to simply ignore it, if it weren't for all those pesky nukes and vastly oversized (for it's own protection - verging on paranoia?) armed forces.
The only problem will be, that when the USA does get sidelined and does a "USSR" of its own, what will happen to the munitions? Being the heart of capitalism: selling to the highest bidder is inevitable.
The traditional approach for jamming radar is lots of small slivers of metal foil. In this case nails hammered into the timber frame might do the trick. Maybe even electrical wiring would work (esp. if you carry data over it, too).
I bet this radar is not too clever when metalised insulation panels are used in the wall cavities, either.
Forget the content of the advertisement, it doesn't matter.
The only buying decision that matters is the one where the advertising agency convinces their customer to buy the advertising they are proposing. What the ad tries to sell to the end user is completely irrelevant. By the time the ad gets onto the air, into print or on a website, the sale has already been made - the ad agency has got its money.
Whether advertising is direct, targetted, stuffed under your windscreen wiper, blocked by a program or on the front page of the NYT is just a technique used to sell the advertising - not the product. Once agencies find that one form of advertising no longer convinces the client to part with their cash, they'll find the next "new thing" and the whole world will move on.
Alliances arise out of necessity and mutual benefit
I understand that. But when the US spends as much on its military as the next 19 countries military spending, put together it's difficult to see where the mutuality is. Countries can still arrange trade agreements - as free trade benefits everybody. However that's not the same as alliances and comes back to the point about markets.
The one area where the USA does still need, and exploits,alliances is to give a stamp of respect and credibilty to the actions it wants - and takes. However, the balance (for an example, consider the single-handed taking of a Libyan, from Libyan soil, by the americal military today) is shifting away from asking for, requiring or respecting other countries views or international law to a policy of isolated action with no consideraton of "playing nice" to take your playground mentality.
If the Saudis suddenly stopped selling oil to... it would trash our allies
When you say "allies", are you sure you don't mean "markets"?
I don't think the USA has allies any more - just peoples and countries who depend on it for aid and subsidies and TV programmes.
For an end-user, being open source is irrelevant. Having a few programmable I-O's won't help it. If that was all you needed, you'd buy an Arduino and save £100 on your design (plus the space and power savings, and no messy O/S to worry about).
The BeagleBoard is sort-of OK (I have one), but there are better boards arouns at similar prices and sizes. The same goes for this one: it's about 10 years too late into the small PC market.
And yet it's programming is still far better than that of any of the commercial channels.
Any network could make programmes of BBC quality if they were given the budget the beeb has - and no commercial pressures on how to raise advertising revenue. What the BBC has done is give away for free what all the other channels have to get advertisers for. No commercial organisation could compete on an equal footing in that environment. That's why state aid of industry is deemed anti-competitive and is broadly speaking illegal.
it has no concept of "return" for a particular program
Actually the BBC is extremely conscious of the "return" that a programme produces. The reason is that it is funded from a compulsory (unless you don't have a TV set) fee, backed by prosecution if you refuse or avoid paying - a tax in every respect except name. The BBC is very sensitive to charges of "elitism": i.e. making programmes that are inaccessible (or too difficult) for the average, soap-watching, reality-loving, tabloid-reading viewer.
Oddly, the other end of the spectrum: people with high IQs tend not to be so vociferous about programmes that are simplistic, inconsistent or full of errors - they just find other ways to fill their time. Hence the BBC is pressured into making their programmes simpler and simpler (even though their charter gives them a responsibility to educate: now abandoned as a lost cause) and more and more bland and generic, so as not to offend anyone.
The BBC are also very prone to criticism for wasting money. Since they get billions of pounds each year (c. £3Bn, $5Bn) just dropped into their collective laps, they have never had to learn the discipline of obtaining value. That means they produce some extremely high-value and excellent quality programmes, loved throughout the world (and Dr. Who). But it also means they are profligate and duly get criticised for waste and inefficiency. Cutting programmes is much easier than fixing them, so whenever they feel exposed to criticism the easiest path for the BBC is to remove the offending programme rather than try to justify it, or improve it.
Then when robo-barkeep asks if they'd like another, the drinker would reply "No thank you" and the robot would give them the bill. If in america, it would then hang around until it gets a tip.
I cannot fathom any software system costing that much
It cost that much because that was the amount of money available to pay for it. If there had only been £5Bn in the budget, the project proposals would (magically!) have cost that much - and would STILL offered the same results. And exactly the same final outcome would have been proposed if the budget had been doubled. Success or failure was not a function of the budget, nor of the requirements. Even back in the 2000's when this was still a comparatively young project, I was asked to work on it. I spent a day with some of the project people and knew even than that it didn't stand a chance of ever going live. Mainly due to the intransigence of the NHS workers, especially the doctors and consultants (who all believe the only function of the NHS is to keep them employed - any resulting healthcare is merely a bonus).
The sorts of companies who bid for this work, just like defence contractors, are masters at configuring their projects to consume all available resources for a constant output. The problem is that they are much better at negotiating than government employees (who have no personal investment in the project) and more highly motivated, what with their contuned salaries, bonuses and commissions.
Slashdot Mirror
it tells Pakistan
You don't need a Mars misson for that. All of India's (and China's, too) neighbours are very well aware that the space-faring nations already have the abillity to drop anything they please on them.
No, this mission is an advertising campaign to promote India's already successful space launch industries. The fact that this mission is so much cheaper (if not yet successful: a major factor in the cost of american missions is employing all those 1,000's of staff at western rates of pay. And if the mission does make it to Mars, and continues to run to well past it's planned failure date then the mission just costs more) is part of the "we can launch your satellites AND we have much lower costs" message that the world will hear and take note of.
It might even do some science, too.
if an American corporation wants to cut American jobs so they can be done cheaply elsewhere, why would Americans keep buying from them? Loyalty? Pride? Stupidity?
No, none of the above (although that doesn't preclude people from having those qualities). Americans buy from companies that offshore (american) jobs because those companies have lower prices as a result.
You must realise that patriotism comes in a very poor second when the alternative is 5 cents off.
No, there are plenty of unboxed LCD screens available for SBCs. The problem is that the Pi doesn't have enough free GPIO pins to drive them. Cubie and Olimex both offer LCD screens that plug directly into their ARM boards. However the Pi is crippled by it's design, board size and component choices, so none fo the cheap and plentiful LCDs are usable with it.
bring back the spirit of hacking, both software and hardware
And for that the Pi is a failure. It needs an O/S, which makes it difficult as an entry level and it can't even do analog inputs on its own.
The spirit of hacking was alive and as well as could be expected with the Aeduino, before the Pi came along - and it will be just as healthy after the Pi metamorphoses into an overpriced and underpowered LEGO-brick style tablet that doesn't work properly.
What would I be able to do with a box running this that I couldn't do with <operating system X> for any current, contemporary O/S. Let's not talk about potential uses - but real, live, switch it on, press buttons and do stuff type of uses. Things that no other O/S or box running that O/S can do? What are they?
Your local utility is only a monopoly as long as your local government makes them one
The problem in the USA is that pressure groups, whether industrial or commercial have no counterbalance. The wrong sort of regulation stunts growth and competition. However zero regulation turns a free market into survival of the fittest with that survivor killing off the rest. Neither situation is good and a regulator who is able to stop consolidation and monopolies would act in the interests of the consumers.
That's what happens in most countries and it's what keeps a competitive market operating. The USA has allowed its corporations to become too influential and too powerful.
Better to submerge the datacentre. When it's firmly anchored to the seabed it can't move - but it still has all the seawater around it for cooling. You'd probably need something like Stromberg's setup (from 007: The Spy Who Loved Me) in reality, to get peope to & from it.
In addition it has the advantage that not being in any one country's territotial waters, the tax situation could be very beneficial.
Not so much as retribution, simply because it doesn't apply, any more.
The world is metric
That's true. While only a tiny minority of the world is still stuck on imperial units, the plumbing fittings of those sizes seem to be standard. At least in (metric) europe - not just the UK, fittings are available in "inches". Since they're all made in china, it would follow that the sizes are also available globally, too.
On the one hand there are advocates who want it to be used by as many people - ordinary people who neither know nor care about "open" software - as possible. On the other hand, the whole product line is completely dependent on people writing code, who's primary motivation is to show to their peers how clever they are.
Sadly these two groups have little in common. Users don't care about options, flexibility, "free" (of either variety), choice, source code or customising. All they want is TO GET STUFF DONE. For them an operating system is an annoyance and a UI a necessary evil that's difficult to navigate, keeps changing and is badly documented. Both of those layers are seen as stuff that gets in the way of them having the results want.
For developers, users are a pain in the arse. They report bugs, they're resitant to upgrading, they ask stupid questions (which they could answer for themselves if they ever bothered to check the source code) and they complain that features change between releases and they want backwards compatibillity - sometimes all the way back to last year. Worst of all, they don't appreciate the leegance and completixty of the software the developers have written.
the smartest thing the US could do would be to get behind a world government
The USA believe they already are - it's them. It's a constant source of surprise and confusion to americans why the rest of the world keeps arguing with them, rather than doing what they are told to (by the world's most militarised country).
Thank George W Bush junior for destroying the trust in the US around the world
Actually, you can blame the russians. Before the USSR imploded there was another "power" that was able to keep the USA in check - if only with the threat of nuclear annihilation (though everyone knew there was far too much money at stake for that to ever happen). After that, the USA became far more aggressive and awarded itself the role of "global policeman", which basically meant making everyone fall in line with its view of how thongs (and things) should be.
What we're seeing now is that the policeman has far exceeded his authority and has also turned out to be power-crazed and financially impotent. It would be an easy job to simply ignore it, if it weren't for all those pesky nukes and vastly oversized (for it's own protection - verging on paranoia?) armed forces.
The only problem will be, that when the USA does get sidelined and does a "USSR" of its own, what will happen to the munitions? Being the heart of capitalism: selling to the highest bidder is inevitable.
I bet this radar is not too clever when metalised insulation panels are used in the wall cavities, either.
The only buying decision that matters is the one where the advertising agency convinces their customer to buy the advertising they are proposing. What the ad tries to sell to the end user is completely irrelevant. By the time the ad gets onto the air, into print or on a website, the sale has already been made - the ad agency has got its money.
Whether advertising is direct, targetted, stuffed under your windscreen wiper, blocked by a program or on the front page of the NYT is just a technique used to sell the advertising - not the product. Once agencies find that one form of advertising no longer convinces the client to part with their cash, they'll find the next "new thing" and the whole world will move on.
Alliances arise out of necessity and mutual benefit
I understand that. But when the US spends as much on its military as the next 19 countries military spending, put together it's difficult to see where the mutuality is. Countries can still arrange trade agreements - as free trade benefits everybody. However that's not the same as alliances and comes back to the point about markets.
The one area where the USA does still need, and exploits,alliances is to give a stamp of respect and credibilty to the actions it wants - and takes. However, the balance (for an example, consider the single-handed taking of a Libyan, from Libyan soil, by the americal military today) is shifting away from asking for, requiring or respecting other countries views or international law to a policy of isolated action with no consideraton of "playing nice" to take your playground mentality.
If the Saudis suddenly stopped selling oil to ... it would trash our allies
When you say "allies", are you sure you don't mean "markets"? I don't think the USA has allies any more - just peoples and countries who depend on it for aid and subsidies and TV programmes.
"females"
I think the point is that not all developers are human (male or female).
encroaches on the 1st amendment though
Kenya isn't in the Unisted States. The US consitution and/or amendments don't apply.
the board costs $200 or £135
So it's really just an expensive Mini-ITX board?
For an end-user, being open source is irrelevant. Having a few programmable I-O's won't help it. If that was all you needed, you'd buy an Arduino and save £100 on your design (plus the space and power savings, and no messy O/S to worry about).
The BeagleBoard is sort-of OK (I have one), but there are better boards arouns at similar prices and sizes. The same goes for this one: it's about 10 years too late into the small PC market.
And yet it's programming is still far better than that of any of the commercial channels.
Any network could make programmes of BBC quality if they were given the budget the beeb has - and no commercial pressures on how to raise advertising revenue. What the BBC has done is give away for free what all the other channels have to get advertisers for. No commercial organisation could compete on an equal footing in that environment. That's why state aid of industry is deemed anti-competitive and is broadly speaking illegal.
it has no concept of "return" for a particular program
Actually the BBC is extremely conscious of the "return" that a programme produces. The reason is that it is funded from a compulsory (unless you don't have a TV set) fee, backed by prosecution if you refuse or avoid paying - a tax in every respect except name. The BBC is very sensitive to charges of "elitism": i.e. making programmes that are inaccessible (or too difficult) for the average, soap-watching, reality-loving, tabloid-reading viewer.
Oddly, the other end of the spectrum: people with high IQs tend not to be so vociferous about programmes that are simplistic, inconsistent or full of errors - they just find other ways to fill their time. Hence the BBC is pressured into making their programmes simpler and simpler (even though their charter gives them a responsibility to educate: now abandoned as a lost cause) and more and more bland and generic, so as not to offend anyone.
The BBC are also very prone to criticism for wasting money. Since they get billions of pounds each year (c. £3Bn, $5Bn) just dropped into their collective laps, they have never had to learn the discipline of obtaining value. That means they produce some extremely high-value and excellent quality programmes, loved throughout the world (and Dr. Who). But it also means they are profligate and duly get criticised for waste and inefficiency. Cutting programmes is much easier than fixing them, so whenever they feel exposed to criticism the easiest path for the BBC is to remove the offending programme rather than try to justify it, or improve it.
What about if that's the last one they wanted?
Then when robo-barkeep asks if they'd like another, the drinker would reply "No thank you" and the robot would give them the bill. If in america, it would then hang around until it gets a tip.
If you want to know if someone is ready for another drink, just check whether their glass is empty. Forget body language, just go for the obvious.
I cannot fathom any software system costing that much
It cost that much because that was the amount of money available to pay for it. If there had only been £5Bn in the budget, the project proposals would (magically!) have cost that much - and would STILL offered the same results. And exactly the same final outcome would have been proposed if the budget had been doubled. Success or failure was not a function of the budget, nor of the requirements. Even back in the 2000's when this was still a comparatively young project, I was asked to work on it. I spent a day with some of the project people and knew even than that it didn't stand a chance of ever going live. Mainly due to the intransigence of the NHS workers, especially the doctors and consultants (who all believe the only function of the NHS is to keep them employed - any resulting healthcare is merely a bonus).
The sorts of companies who bid for this work, just like defence contractors, are masters at configuring their projects to consume all available resources for a constant output. The problem is that they are much better at negotiating than government employees (who have no personal investment in the project) and more highly motivated, what with their contuned salaries, bonuses and commissions.
After all, the olympic games cost that much - and they only lasted 2 weeks.