It's actually not that hard. NASA is very generous to first-year teams, paying the entry fee that gets you the box of parts from which you can build a working robot. The kit includes the controller, motors, air compressor, etc., you need, plus enough wheels, bearings and metal to build a simple robot. Scrap metal and hand tools, with some ingenuity, will get you a competitive robot. We basically built their example robot base and put mechanisms on top of that, and had a very competitive robot, at least locally.
After your rookie year, NASA is less generous, but then you have a robot you can show off and use to raise funds. No, money doesn't rain from the sky, but there are lots of companies and individuals that are willing to donate to help students learn once they've demonstrated they are interested and willing to work.
Lots of teams make do with small donations and fund raisers. If you're willing to do some research and put in some work, you can make a team work.
This was our rookie year. We placed 5th out of 36 at our regional competition. We had the NASA money, plus smaller donations from the school, the booster club and a couple of local companies. A week after the competition, we showed our robot to a local educational foundation and got $7,000 toward next year's program. We did get help from some with robot experience, but only one was an actual engineer. He helped us figure out how to implement what we decided to build, but then the students built the vast majority of the robot, which just a little bit of machine work done by a mentor.
You don't start a football team and expect to win state, much less nationals, your first year. The same is true with FIRST. It takes years and lots of work to get a team established. Along the way, students learn about how to invent and build something. Even if it doesn't win, they've learned something useful.
Somehow I expect that the Pringles-up-the-nose experiment has been done, probably multiple times per day in elementary schools around the world. If Pringles-up-his-nose really wants to do the experiment, by all means, but somehow I expect NASA won't be interested in funding it.
But perhaps the parent post is trying to make the point that not every new thing is worth doing. Certainly, limited resources means scientific experiments have to be prioritized. Fortunately, Pringles-up-his-nose and others of that level of sophistication haven't been in charge of prioritizing humanity's scientific pursuits through the ages, or we would all still be shivering in caves at night.
Don't rechargeable electric razors have the same problem?
SoniCare toothbrushes definitely do, check out their policy. They use NiCd batteries, and their page on battery replacement says that when the batteries die, break the toothbrush base in half and remove the batteries for proper recycling before throwing the rest away! It's a good thing you can't make movies with a toothbrush or the Neistat brothers would be all over this.
I just got my dual G5 Thursday. I run two instances of the command line version via cron tasks. So far, it has cranked out 39 units in a bit less than three days, averaging 2.93 CPU hours per unit. My 2.5 GHz P4 Dell does one unit every 2.78 CPU hours running the Windows command line client.
The dual G5 puts out nearly 16 units a day, which is about the same as my other machines combined (dual 500 MHz G4, dual 800 MHz G4, 500 MHz PowerBook G4, 2.5 GHz P4, 266 MHz G3 iMac).
If the VT cluster was working on nothing but SETI, it should be able to do about 750 work units per hour, requiring something like 250 MB of transfer per hour. So, that and a decent DSL connection and you're set!
I work at a local school district, where most of the teachers are appropriately computer literate. (By that I mean that they know how to do the things they need to do, but they don't have any burning need to spend a significant portion of their lives learning the inner workings of their computers.)
Most of them are using Windows, but there are a few who are still using their old Macs. When the ILOVEYOU virus was making the rounds, the email servers were crushed by the volume of mail generated by people who fell for the joke. Despite messages from the IT folks to not open attachments, people kept doing it. In fact at least one Mac user complained to the tech support group that they couldn't open the ILOVEYOU attachment in an email message.
After this fiasco, the IT folks were talking about having the email servers filter out ALL attachments. I successfully argued that they should only filter the types that have been exploited to carry malicious code. Since they implemented filtering the obvious file types, there hasn't been another infestation.
After that I was no longer sure which was worse: clueless end users or clueless IT people.
That's a pretty funny statement. The service packs are bug releases, hence they contain required changes that were not originally planned. How can Microsoft claim this is the last one that will be needed? Does this mean Microsoft will just abandon all of their users still running older versions of Windows?
I suggest this is just laying the groundwork for FUD to force users to pay Microsoft to "upgrade" their OS in order to replace the latest IE security vulnerability with a whole new set of problems, vulnerabilities, incompatibilities and restrictions.
When I checked, the only 3.08 versions available were the GUI versions for Windows and Mac OS 9 (not OS X), and the two command line versions mentioned above (x86 Linux and Sparc Solaris). The ones I personally care about, the command line versions for WinNT and OS X, were not there yet.
Seriously, what law was broken here? If the university left a list of student/faculty names and SSNs on the sidewalk and someone picked it up, with no intent to commit fraud etc., would that be crime?
Suppose someone from the school administration had memorized everyone's SSN and sat in the student union and would answer questions of the form, "do you know who has xxx-xx-xxxx as their SSN?" If students (or others) asked questions of this form and eventually learned a list of SSNs, would this be a crime? And who would be guilty, the questioners, or the idiot that was giving out confidential information without the owner's consent?
In this case the moron who created the web site was answering this question indirectly over the Internet. Who's at fault? The guy who took the time to ask the questions, or the dork who made it possible to get the answers?
In going through some old papers from my grad school days, I found my carbon copy of a grade report which lists student names and SSNs (along with their grades in the class I taught). Am I guilty of a crime for possessing that list? Clearly, I was trusted with that information because I was hired to teach a class, so isn't it my responsibility to keep that information confidential? It seems to me the web author has the same responsibility.
Obviously, it's a very different situation if someone does something illegal with the list, but just building the list from publicly available information doesn't seem like a crime to me. Making the list easy to publicly deduce seems like the real crime in this case.
My purpose in listing the minor problem with our initial home automation program was not to characterize my programming or design skills, but rather to point out that even a seemingly simple rule custom written for a specific home and its occupants with their patterns of use can work perfectly for months and yet have unexpected effects when conditions change.
This was a single simple rule that was trivial to understand and fix. However, in a mass-produced system with much more complex rules which are not fully understood by the users, home automation will introduce undesired behavior that will be very frustrating for those users.
My wife and I are nerds and have designed automation into our home. We have systems for security, lighting control, media equipment control and HVAC all talking to each other via serial and Ethernet. We are programming everything ourselves, because we can and because we think we'll do a better job than anyone we could hire.
We've been in the house for six months and haven't finished the lighting controls. It takes a while to figure out how you want things to work. Everything works reasonably well and some things are really cool.
However, anything more complex than having a button that turns out all of the lights when you're ready to shutdown for the evening gets surprisingly subtle.
For example, we programmed the system to automatically turn on the hall lights when we get home. The rule is simple enough, if this door opens, and it's between sunset and sunrise, turn on this light. But then, we have a warm winter and get a lot of bugs on the entry and when I take out the garbage, I turn off the light so the bugs don't swarm into the house, then open the door and the light comes back on!
We easily fixed this, but what happens to tomorrow's consumers who buy a mass-produced system that tries to be a LOT more clever than what I just described and it goes wrong? These are the people who couldn't figure out to set the time on their VCR, who don't know how to turn off Word's autoformatting "features" and instead have to learn how to work around them. How are they going to live in a home that is complex beyond their comprehension and that does things they don't want and can't fix?
The answer is they won't. This high-tech home automation for the masses is a fantasy. Software is going to have to get orders of magnitude better before it's even thinkable.
Have you ever had first hand direct knowledge of a story being reported in the media? Did they make glaring errors? They have in every instance I've been able to judge directly.
People in the media don't know anything, they just know how to ask questions and transcribe the answers into something marginally readable by the average clown.
As soon as I found out what had happened and listened to what NASA had to say, I came to SlashDot to get better information. Sure, I have to think about what I'm reading and take responsibility to filter the good information from the crap, but at least the good information is there.
The Washington Post article mentioned is actually pretty lame. If you strip out the boring "real chaos" vs. "math chaos" jokes and the explanation of chaos theory that is pretty much what Jeff Goldblum's character said in the _first_ Jurassic Park film, there's almost nothing there.
The article also mentions a Simpsons episode which relates to chaos theory, but didn't bother to mention that it was a take-off on Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder," a short story written in 1951, well before chaos theory had a name.
Why is it that even the Washington Post can't scrape up a numerate reporter? Would they send an illiterate reporter to interview the winner of the Nobel prize in literature?
I remember watching JFK's funeral on TV and my mom crying while we watched. At the time, I had no idea why it was so upsetting to see this procession with a horse drawn-buggy. I was about 10 months old then. Years later, I saw video of the funeral and recognized it.
Maybe it's a manufactured memory, but I don't know how that would have happened.
My next oldest memory was from when I was three or four years old.
If you run fiber, there's a chance you'll never use it. Since a big part of the cost of fiber is the termination, if you want to run fiber just run the cable and wait to pay for termination until you're ready to actually use it.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
During the time of the writing of the constitution, personal ownership of guns was far from common, if not rare. The guns used by the militias were rounded up after the revolutionary war, not left in people's homes. It wasn't until after the civil war that private ownership of guns became widespread. I doubt the framers of the constitution anticipated every idiot in the county having the right to carry a hidden weapon, or even weapons that enable one person to easily and quickly kill many others or weapons that a child could operate to easily kill other children.
Of all the rights that are getting trampled right now, erosion of the second amendment "rights" seem like the least of our worries.
> How come that the way technology or science is depicted on screen
> (computers, technology, sci-fi) hardly ever gets proofread in Hollywood
> scripts? You seem to be a tech-nerd - do you ever correct something
> in a script? (If you know a script-writer who needs a proofreader,
> give him my e-mail address:-)
If you really want a job as a technical editor, try proofreading you own posts.
[GPLd software] "makes it impossible for a commercial company to use any of that work or build on any of that work."
I wonder if Bill Gates has heard of Mac OS X?
The BSD open source license didn't stop Apple from putting a proprietary GUI on top of an open source foundation. While it remains to be seen if it will be successful, Apple has much improved the appeal of their operating system for a broad range of users. Apple stands a good chance of soon becoming the largest distributor of an open source Unix-based OS.
By melding the server-side features of a modern and wildly popular OS foundation with a GUI that runs tens of thousands of commercial apps, plus an equally staggering number of open source apps, Apple has the real potential of taking market share away from Microsoft.
Maybe Mac OS X is *why* Microsoft is suddenly going all out attacking open source. They are genuinely afraid of open source now that they've seen a new and obviously threatening use of open source resources. If Apple can do it, what other Microsoft competitors could do exactly what Gates says is impossible to do with open source? They need to get out there and doublespeak their way out of a crisis.
Spelling is a prerequisite to writing
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
If you can't spell, or can't be bothered to check your spelling, I don't see how you can criticize the writing of others.
Timothy should learn the difference between "its" and "it's"; he got it wrong two times out of three.
At least in theory, there's a big advantage in using the telco as the ISP: it avoids one level of mutual finger pointing when things go wrong. Switching to MSN, which only supports Windows, will be yet another way to deny customers the possibility of choosing another OS.
I've had the experience of trying to solve a problem with Qwest DSL support. The problem was clearly that the DSL line was too noisy to carry the signal. The diagnostics from the DSL adapter told me that. But, since I was using a Macintosh to run their diagnostic software, I had to waste 15 minutes convincing the guy that the problem wasn't with my computer. I was using the latest version of the OS on the newest PowerBook and he claimed their stuff wouldn't work with my machine because it was too old. The model was three months old, but since it wasn't on his list, it wasn't supported. He had no idea that every PowerBook for many years has had a built-in Ethernet port, which is the only required hardware.
When Qwest switches to MSN for their ISP service, what do you think will happen to support for MacOS, Linux or anything not Windows? How many more people will think they have to buy a Windows PC in order to use broadband?
How can Apple solve the chicken and egg problem? Apple can't ensure a solid OS release until there's a broad selection of apps in use and software companies don't want to release their products until the OS ships (no one wants to support a broadly used app on a beta OS).
So, what's the solution? Call the second beta a shipping release. Make it a pretty solid release with support for the stuff that really matters. Now Adobe and Microsoft can't hide behind a beta OS as an excuse for not releasing their apps.
Several months later, apps start rolling out and Apple releases 1.1 which fixes the bugs found and gets the polish features working.
How else could this possibly work? Even if the March 24th release were perfect in every sense, it would still not be worth switching to most people until critical apps start shipping.
Either way, the 24th release is for developers, hobbyists, Mac zealots, sys admins, curious Linux users, etc. The 1.1 release this summer is the first one that regular consumers should consider buying.
I worked at Microsoft as a developer for over 10 years in the Office group. I participated in the hiring process and was a manager. We were constantly looking to hire, train and retain the best possible people for the job, regardless of race, gender, personality or anything else not directly related to getting the job done.
Very early in my tenure, the hiring criteria was explained to me thus: "it doesn't matter if the candidate goes and pees in the corner of your office in the middle of the interview, if the candidate is a brilliant programmer, we hire him or her". The foolishness of racism or gender bias was even clearer by implication and made explicit through HR training.
Apart from the obvious moral and legal issues, racism is stupid and self-destructive. Success means a lot at Microsoft and discrimination reduces your competitiveness. In my experience, stupid people don't last long at Microsoft.
Obviously Microsoft is a huge company which I left several years ago, and I don't know the specific people involved, but I doubt the corporate culture has changed that much since I was there.
Microsoft's applications business could easily make Linux versions of applications such as Word and Excel available with scant development costs. That would open up an entirely new market for an existing product line.
Plotkin isn't the first person to make this sort of statement, nearly everyone who comments on the MSFT break-up jumps right to the Office folks being free to port to Linux.
Office is big, complex and dependant on Windows APIs. Getting it to work well on another platform would be a huge undertaking. Getting Windows Word 2.0 to compile and sort of run on the Macintosh was quick work (after the compatibility libraries were built), but getting it into shrink-wrap took a huge team of developers, testers and program managers several years and the result was the poorly-received Mac Word 6.0.
The Mac version had a lot going for it that a Linux port would not. Word had been on the Mac for years, with varying amounts of shared code in existence prior to the switch to full shared source for Word 6.0. Also the Mac is a pretty simple platform to support - there's basically only one hardware vendor. There are far fewer print drivers to work with and video driver problems don't exist. This boils down to it's a lot less work to build and test for compatibility on the Mac than it is on Windows.
The opposite is true for Linux. In addition to the usual print driver nightmares, the hardware, the OS, everything comes in n! flavors. Getting Office to work well on all Linux distributions is unthinkable.
If Microsoft picked one Linux distro, or even rolled their own *BSD, then dictated platform standards and created a certification program for third-party hardware and drivers so rank and file Office users could have some slim hope of getting everything to work well with Office, how would that be different from Windows? Most Windows users wouldn't care because they'd be terrified of switching to another OS. Linux users wouldn't care because it wouldn't be their preferred Linux. In short, it would be an extremely expensive gamble with little chance of commercial success.
Despite all of the above, Microsoft has already announced that they are going to release a version of Office written specifically to run on a BSD Unix distribution - Mac OS X. Strangely, this gets remarkably little attention. Much the same would happen if Microsoft were to port Office to run on *their* Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, now I realize I misunderstood what you were responding to.
Congratulations on the great rookie year!
It's actually not that hard. NASA is very generous to first-year teams, paying the entry fee that gets you the box of parts from which you can build a working robot. The kit includes the controller, motors, air compressor, etc., you need, plus enough wheels, bearings and metal to build a simple robot. Scrap metal and hand tools, with some ingenuity, will get you a competitive robot. We basically built their example robot base and put mechanisms on top of that, and had a very competitive robot, at least locally.
After your rookie year, NASA is less generous, but then you have a robot you can show off and use to raise funds. No, money doesn't rain from the sky, but there are lots of companies and individuals that are willing to donate to help students learn once they've demonstrated they are interested and willing to work.
Lots of teams make do with small donations and fund raisers. If you're willing to do some research and put in some work, you can make a team work.
This was our rookie year. We placed 5th out of 36 at our regional competition. We had the NASA money, plus smaller donations from the school, the booster club and a couple of local companies. A week after the competition, we showed our robot to a local educational foundation and got $7,000 toward next year's program. We did get help from some with robot experience, but only one was an actual engineer. He helped us figure out how to implement what we decided to build, but then the students built the vast majority of the robot, which just a little bit of machine work done by a mentor.
You don't start a football team and expect to win state, much less nationals, your first year. The same is true with FIRST. It takes years and lots of work to get a team established. Along the way, students learn about how to invent and build something. Even if it doesn't win, they've learned something useful.
Somehow I expect that the Pringles-up-the-nose experiment has been done, probably multiple times per day in elementary schools around the world. If Pringles-up-his-nose really wants to do the experiment, by all means, but somehow I expect NASA won't be interested in funding it.
But perhaps the parent post is trying to make the point that not every new thing is worth doing. Certainly, limited resources means scientific experiments have to be prioritized. Fortunately, Pringles-up-his-nose and others of that level of sophistication haven't been in charge of prioritizing humanity's scientific pursuits through the ages, or we would all still be shivering in caves at night.
Don't rechargeable electric razors have the same problem?
SoniCare toothbrushes definitely do, check out their policy. They use NiCd batteries, and their page on battery replacement says that when the batteries die, break the toothbrush base in half and remove the batteries for proper recycling before throwing the rest away! It's a good thing you can't make movies with a toothbrush or the Neistat brothers would be all over this.
I just got my dual G5 Thursday. I run two instances of the command line version via cron tasks. So far, it has cranked out 39 units in a bit less than three days, averaging 2.93 CPU hours per unit. My 2.5 GHz P4 Dell does one unit every 2.78 CPU hours running the Windows command line client.
The dual G5 puts out nearly 16 units a day, which is about the same as my other machines combined (dual 500 MHz G4, dual 800 MHz G4, 500 MHz PowerBook G4, 2.5 GHz P4, 266 MHz G3 iMac).
If the VT cluster was working on nothing but SETI, it should be able to do about 750 work units per hour, requiring something like 250 MB of transfer per hour. So, that and a decent DSL connection and you're set!
I work at a local school district, where most of the teachers are appropriately computer literate. (By that I mean that they know how to do the things they need to do, but they don't have any burning need to spend a significant portion of their lives learning the inner workings of their computers.)
Most of them are using Windows, but there are a few who are still using their old Macs. When the ILOVEYOU virus was making the rounds, the email servers were crushed by the volume of mail generated by people who fell for the joke. Despite messages from the IT folks to not open attachments, people kept doing it. In fact at least one Mac user complained to the tech support group that they couldn't open the ILOVEYOU attachment in an email message.
After this fiasco, the IT folks were talking about having the email servers filter out ALL attachments. I successfully argued that they should only filter the types that have been exploited to carry malicious code. Since they implemented filtering the obvious file types, there hasn't been another infestation.
After that I was no longer sure which was worse: clueless end users or clueless IT people.
> IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.
That's a pretty funny statement. The service packs are bug releases, hence they contain required changes that were not originally planned. How can Microsoft claim this is the last one that will be needed? Does this mean Microsoft will just abandon all of their users still running older versions of Windows?
I suggest this is just laying the groundwork for FUD to force users to pay Microsoft to "upgrade" their OS in order to replace the latest IE security vulnerability with a whole new set of problems, vulnerabilities, incompatibilities and restrictions.
The WinNT command line version is now available.
Still no OS X version.
You can check check to see what's avaiable here: ftp://alien.ssl.berkeley.edu/pub/
You can just FTP to ftp://alien.ssl.berkeley.edu/pub/ and see for yourself what's there.
When I checked, the only 3.08 versions available were the GUI versions for Windows and Mac OS 9 (not OS X), and the two command line versions mentioned above (x86 Linux and Sparc Solaris). The ones I personally care about, the command line versions for WinNT and OS X, were not there yet.
Seriously, what law was broken here? If the university left a list of student/faculty names and SSNs on the sidewalk and someone picked it up, with no intent to commit fraud etc., would that be crime?
Suppose someone from the school administration had memorized everyone's SSN and sat in the student union and would answer questions of the form, "do you know who has xxx-xx-xxxx as their SSN?" If students (or others) asked questions of this form and eventually learned a list of SSNs, would this be a crime? And who would be guilty, the questioners, or the idiot that was giving out confidential information without the owner's consent?
In this case the moron who created the web site was answering this question indirectly over the Internet. Who's at fault? The guy who took the time to ask the questions, or the dork who made it possible to get the answers?
In going through some old papers from my grad school days, I found my carbon copy of a grade report which lists student names and SSNs (along with their grades in the class I taught). Am I guilty of a crime for possessing that list? Clearly, I was trusted with that information because I was hired to teach a class, so isn't it my responsibility to keep that information confidential? It seems to me the web author has the same responsibility.
Obviously, it's a very different situation if someone does something illegal with the list, but just building the list from publicly available information doesn't seem like a crime to me. Making the list easy to publicly deduce seems like the real crime in this case.
My purpose in listing the minor problem with our initial home automation program was not to characterize my programming or design skills, but rather to point out that even a seemingly simple rule custom written for a specific home and its occupants with their patterns of use can work perfectly for months and yet have unexpected effects when conditions change.
This was a single simple rule that was trivial to understand and fix. However, in a mass-produced system with much more complex rules which are not fully understood by the users, home automation will introduce undesired behavior that will be very frustrating for those users.
My wife and I are nerds and have designed automation into our home. We have systems for security, lighting control, media equipment control and HVAC all talking to each other via serial and Ethernet. We are programming everything ourselves, because we can and because we think we'll do a better job than anyone we could hire.
We've been in the house for six months and haven't finished the lighting controls. It takes a while to figure out how you want things to work. Everything works reasonably well and some things are really cool.
However, anything more complex than having a button that turns out all of the lights when you're ready to shutdown for the evening gets surprisingly subtle.
For example, we programmed the system to automatically turn on the hall lights when we get home. The rule is simple enough, if this door opens, and it's between sunset and sunrise, turn on this light. But then, we have a warm winter and get a lot of bugs on the entry and when I take out the garbage, I turn off the light so the bugs don't swarm into the house, then open the door and the light comes back on!
We easily fixed this, but what happens to tomorrow's consumers who buy a mass-produced system that tries to be a LOT more clever than what I just described and it goes wrong? These are the people who couldn't figure out to set the time on their VCR, who don't know how to turn off Word's autoformatting "features" and instead have to learn how to work around them. How are they going to live in a home that is complex beyond their comprehension and that does things they don't want and can't fix?
The answer is they won't. This high-tech home automation for the masses is a fantasy. Software is going to have to get orders of magnitude better before it's even thinkable.
Have you ever had first hand direct knowledge of a story being reported in the media? Did they make glaring errors? They have in every instance I've been able to judge directly.
People in the media don't know anything, they just know how to ask questions and transcribe the answers into something marginally readable by the average clown.
As soon as I found out what had happened and listened to what NASA had to say, I came to SlashDot to get better information. Sure, I have to think about what I'm reading and take responsibility to filter the good information from the crap, but at least the good information is there.
The Washington Post article mentioned is actually pretty lame. If you strip out the boring "real chaos" vs. "math chaos" jokes and the explanation of chaos theory that is pretty much what Jeff Goldblum's character said in the _first_ Jurassic Park film, there's almost nothing there.
The article also mentions a Simpsons episode which relates to chaos theory, but didn't bother to mention that it was a take-off on Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder," a short story written in 1951, well before chaos theory had a name.
Why is it that even the Washington Post can't scrape up a numerate reporter? Would they send an illiterate reporter to interview the winner of the Nobel prize in literature?
I remember watching JFK's funeral on TV and my mom crying while we watched. At the time, I had no idea why it was so upsetting to see this procession with a horse drawn-buggy. I was about 10 months old then. Years later, I saw video of the funeral and recognized it.
Maybe it's a manufactured memory, but I don't know how that would have happened.
My next oldest memory was from when I was three or four years old.
I don't know where you get data to support your statement, or why knowledge of Unix command line programs equates with programming skill.
I'm a Unix novice, but it's plain to me that your solution is wrong. Consider:
file1:
one
one
two
file3:
two
three
four
output from "sort file1 file2 | uniq -d":
one
two
correct answer:
two
If you run fiber, there's a chance you'll never use it. Since a big part of the cost of fiber is the termination, if you want to run fiber just run the cable and wait to pay for termination until you're ready to actually use it.
The second amendment says:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
During the time of the writing of the constitution, personal ownership of guns was far from common, if not rare. The guns used by the militias were rounded up after the revolutionary war, not left in people's homes. It wasn't until after the civil war that private ownership of guns became widespread. I doubt the framers of the constitution anticipated every idiot in the county having the right to carry a hidden weapon, or even weapons that enable one person to easily and quickly kill many others or weapons that a child could operate to easily kill other children.
Of all the rights that are getting trampled right now, erosion of the second amendment "rights" seem like the least of our worries.
> How come that the way technology or science is depicted on screen :-)
> (computers, technology, sci-fi) hardly ever gets proofread in Hollywood
> scripts? You seem to be a tech-nerd - do you ever correct something
> in a script? (If you know a script-writer who needs a proofreader,
> give him my e-mail address
If you really want a job as a technical editor, try proofreading you own posts.
[GPLd software] "makes it impossible for a commercial company to use any of that work or build on any of that work."
I wonder if Bill Gates has heard of Mac OS X?
The BSD open source license didn't stop Apple from putting a proprietary GUI on top of an open source foundation. While it remains to be seen if it will be successful, Apple has much improved the appeal of their operating system for a broad range of users. Apple stands a good chance of soon becoming the largest distributor of an open source Unix-based OS.
By melding the server-side features of a modern and wildly popular OS foundation with a GUI that runs tens of thousands of commercial apps, plus an equally staggering number of open source apps, Apple has the real potential of taking market share away from Microsoft.
Maybe Mac OS X is *why* Microsoft is suddenly going all out attacking open source. They are genuinely afraid of open source now that they've seen a new and obviously threatening use of open source resources. If Apple can do it, what other Microsoft competitors could do exactly what Gates says is impossible to do with open source? They need to get out there and doublespeak their way out of a crisis.
If you can't spell, or can't be bothered to check your spelling, I don't see how you can criticize the writing of others.
Timothy should learn the difference between "its" and "it's"; he got it wrong two times out of three.
At least in theory, there's a big advantage in using the telco as the ISP: it avoids one level of mutual finger pointing when things go wrong. Switching to MSN, which only supports Windows, will be yet another way to deny customers the possibility of choosing another OS.
I've had the experience of trying to solve a problem with Qwest DSL support. The problem was clearly that the DSL line was too noisy to carry the signal. The diagnostics from the DSL adapter told me that. But, since I was using a Macintosh to run their diagnostic software, I had to waste 15 minutes convincing the guy that the problem wasn't with my computer. I was using the latest version of the OS on the newest PowerBook and he claimed their stuff wouldn't work with my machine because it was too old. The model was three months old, but since it wasn't on his list, it wasn't supported. He had no idea that every PowerBook for many years has had a built-in Ethernet port, which is the only required hardware.
When Qwest switches to MSN for their ISP service, what do you think will happen to support for MacOS, Linux or anything not Windows? How many more people will think they have to buy a Windows PC in order to use broadband?
How can Apple solve the chicken and egg problem? Apple can't ensure a solid OS release until there's a broad selection of apps in use and software companies don't want to release their products until the OS ships (no one wants to support a broadly used app on a beta OS).
So, what's the solution? Call the second beta a shipping release. Make it a pretty solid release with support for the stuff that really matters. Now Adobe and Microsoft can't hide behind a beta OS as an excuse for not releasing their apps.
Several months later, apps start rolling out and Apple releases 1.1 which fixes the bugs found and gets the polish features working.
How else could this possibly work? Even if the March 24th release were perfect in every sense, it would still not be worth switching to most people until critical apps start shipping.
Either way, the 24th release is for developers, hobbyists, Mac zealots, sys admins, curious Linux users, etc. The 1.1 release this summer is the first one that regular consumers should consider buying.
I worked at Microsoft as a developer for over 10 years in the Office group. I participated in the hiring process and was a manager. We were constantly looking to hire, train and retain the best possible people for the job, regardless of race, gender, personality or anything else not directly related to getting the job done.
Very early in my tenure, the hiring criteria was explained to me thus: "it doesn't matter if the candidate goes and pees in the corner of your office in the middle of the interview, if the candidate is a brilliant programmer, we hire him or her". The foolishness of racism or gender bias was even clearer by implication and made explicit through HR training.
Apart from the obvious moral and legal issues, racism is stupid and self-destructive. Success means a lot at Microsoft and discrimination reduces your competitiveness. In my experience, stupid people don't last long at Microsoft.
Obviously Microsoft is a huge company which I left several years ago, and I don't know the specific people involved, but I doubt the corporate culture has changed that much since I was there.
Microsoft's applications business could easily make Linux versions of applications such as Word and Excel available with scant development costs. That would open up an entirely new market for an existing product line.
Plotkin isn't the first person to make this sort of statement, nearly everyone who comments on the MSFT break-up jumps right to the Office folks being free to port to Linux.
Office is big, complex and dependant on Windows APIs. Getting it to work well on another platform would be a huge undertaking. Getting Windows Word 2.0 to compile and sort of run on the Macintosh was quick work (after the compatibility libraries were built), but getting it into shrink-wrap took a huge team of developers, testers and program managers several years and the result was the poorly-received Mac Word 6.0.
The Mac version had a lot going for it that a Linux port would not. Word had been on the Mac for years, with varying amounts of shared code in existence prior to the switch to full shared source for Word 6.0. Also the Mac is a pretty simple platform to support - there's basically only one hardware vendor. There are far fewer print drivers to work with and video driver problems don't exist. This boils down to it's a lot less work to build and test for compatibility on the Mac than it is on Windows.
The opposite is true for Linux. In addition to the usual print driver nightmares, the hardware, the OS, everything comes in n! flavors. Getting Office to work well on all Linux distributions is unthinkable.
If Microsoft picked one Linux distro, or even rolled their own *BSD, then dictated platform standards and created a certification program for third-party hardware and drivers so rank and file Office users could have some slim hope of getting everything to work well with Office, how would that be different from Windows? Most Windows users wouldn't care because they'd be terrified of switching to another OS. Linux users wouldn't care because it wouldn't be their preferred Linux. In short, it would be an extremely expensive gamble with little chance of commercial success.
Despite all of the above, Microsoft has already announced that they are going to release a version of Office written specifically to run on a BSD Unix distribution - Mac OS X. Strangely, this gets remarkably little attention. Much the same would happen if Microsoft were to port Office to run on *their* Linux.