They have lost the money that they would have made on the sale of that product
Ah, but you see, the ability to make money from the sale of a product is not an inaliable right
If you are basing a business on the sales of a product that can be easily duplicated, with no loss to any of the parties involved and at minimal cost to the parties involved, then your business model is based on a false assumption.
The sales model of the market depends on scarcity of the product. Once written, that is not true of software (or indeed, anything digital) It's like trying to sell air.
The for-sale model of a software business is fundimentally broken. It depends on a legal definition to support it. It makes as much sense as a law requiring that a buggy whip be sold with the purchase of every car (can't let that newfangled horseless carriage bankrupt the buggy whip industry!)
This is a done deal. The genie is out of the bottle, and all the legislation and propeganda in the world can't possibly stuff it back in.
Gandalf - before the events in Moria - is not particularly powerful. He is subordinate to Saruman, in rank, wisdom, and power.
The bridge at Moria is were we first get a glimpse that Gandalf may be more than he appears to be.
After his return, the gloves are off - he becomes the new head of his order, given that Saruman has derelicted the post - and I suspect you'll see a lot more "ass kicking superbeing" and a lot less "kindly old wizard".
To be honest, I'm suprised and amazed at just how deeply Sir Ian and Jackson grokked Gandalf's character.
My primary system is a Pentium I 233MMX, 64 MB RAM, Linux 2.4.14 box. It's based on a Baby AT format case, so any processor upgrades are a case + motherboard + processor deal, and I've been just too damn lazy & cheap to bother.
The graphics card built with this system was a Matrox Mill II - so no 3D acceleration to speak of.
Playing Quake and Quake 2 on this system was Just Fine, but anything more modern was just not possible. I tried playing the Quake 3 demo, but was getting something on the order of 1 FPM, so I've been pretty well shut out of all the 3D stuff.
Then the other day, I noticed that the price on an XTacy GeForce MX400 PCI card (no AGP!) was like $150 CAN - so what the hell, I bought it.
It turned out to be DOA (system would not POST) so I exchanged it for the only other PCI card they had in stock, an XTacy MX200 card (which was like $120 CAN)
They also happened to have Quake3 (in the tin box, no less) SoF, and Descent3, all the Loki ports, in the bargin bin for like $10 each, so I got those too.
Stick in the card, grab NVidia's drivers, configure XFree to use them, fire up Q3 - and bam! Playable! Just like that.
Things get a little choppy if more than about 10 people are in a room shooting at each other, and SoF and Descent3 (played in 800x600 with full textures) will "skip" once and a while, but for the most part, the game experience has been just fine.
Interestingly enough, when I turned on the frame rate display on Q3, I was getting anywhere from 10 fps to about 27 fps, with an average of about 15 - and the play experience is just fine. Faster framerates would be nice, but this IS old hardware, and really, it'd just be gravy. I don't particularly find myself wishing that the framerate was higher than it is - in fact, before I turned on the fps display, I thought I was making 30 fps. To see the average was about half that was a real suprise.
I can't help but wonder if the processor or bus is the bottleneck, or if the MX400 card had've worked the display might be a touch faster - but it doesn't really matter. The MX200 is "good enough".
So now, given the theta angle, we can transform the car-coodinates accelerations into world-coordinates accelerations, and then we process the Verlet algorithm to get positions.
Soooo then... how to determine the theta angle, given that there is no compass on the vehicle?
I don't think I've defined the problem clearly enough:
Imagine you have a car, parked on a flat plane of infinate size. The car is stationary, at the origin, with the nose aligned with the Y axis (so, for the moment, the car axis and the world axis are aligned)
Inside the car is a pair of accelerometers (one along the car's x axis, the other along the car's y axis), and a speedometer (which provides car-y-axis velocity) The car is then driven around in a path, while the accelerometers and speedometer record values at a fixed sample rate.
Given the resulting data stream, and assuming no slip, give the stream of world (x,y) coordinates that correspond to each car (x-accel, y-accel, y-velocity) coordinate.
I agree with you on the ever-compounding inaccuracy of dead-reckoning.
The good news is that I only have to do it for 30-60 second stretches.
I've also heard that one can correct somehow the wander/error from the integrated acceleration values by examining the forward speed value (which is produced by a separate sensor) - ie, work out the velocity from the accelerometers, and then compare the magnitude to the forward speed sensor, and correct the ground track from that. I haven't a clue on how that works, but I've seen evidence that it can be done.
As for what the project is... see farnorthracing.com:)
Maybe this book has an answer to a question that's been on my back burner for a while, and for which I've been unable to find a good answer for while surfing.
Suppose you have a device that records lateral acceleration, longnitudnal acceleration, and forward velocity, with 100 samples per second, and stores them in a text file, one sample per line, one value per column.
Given the file parsing routine is a gimme and thus provided the values for elapsed_time, LatG, LongG, and FwdV, produce a function that will return the current X and Y co-ordinates of the vehicle, so that its ground track can be represented in a diagram.
Anybody got any good sources of information (or better yet, an existing library) for how to do this?
It seems, from the outside, that you are in a position similar to the "Gambler's Ruin" fallecy.
(For those not familliar with this, it works like this: Bob goes to a casino. He bets $2 on a game of chance. If he loses, he plays again with $4, and with $8, $16, $32 etc, doubling his bet each time he loses. The idea is that if he wins, he wins back all the money he lost up to that point, and the odds of his losing streak continuing very deep - assuming reasonable house advantage - are pretty small.
The "fallecy" par crops up in that the casino has access to far greater resources than Bob. Bob's bet gets pretty big in a hurry (and the amount spent is culmulative, until he wins) so the odds are that for reasonable values of Bob's bankroll, the casino can outlast him and take his money in the end)
The RIAA (and Microsoft, and Hollywood studios, and similar offenders) have very deep pockets, whereas individuals like Dr Felten are close to Bob. The problem seems to be that any of these rich organizations can keep the legal battle going indefinately (spending money on lawyer's fees all the while) and eventually bleed Bob (or Dr Felten) dry.
Dr Felten, based on your recent experience
1) Do you agree with this analogy, and
2) How can you expect not to be bled dry, financially, by the process?
What is stopping you, now that you have your subscriber model up and running, from re-licencing all your code BSD and immediately merging it back into the WINE main tree?
The people who began the WINE project - for better or worse - chose the BSD licence for their code. Why will you not respect that decision, and do the same for your portion?
Open Source projects, irregardless of the actual licence, are community efforts towards providing free and functional software. Nowhere is it implied that there is any fundimental right to make money doing it. It is, at its very core, a philantropical operation. Code is _donated_ to serve the greater cause.
If you can find some way to do this for a living, as have many developers who work for Red Hat, hey, more power to you. There's no fundimental right to make money off your work, but neither is there a prohibition _against_ making money either.
Except where your business model, designed to generate that money, collides with the values of the community you are a part of.
Has TransGaming contributed to the WINE project? Of course they have. But without the thousands of hours of DONATED time and effort done by other people working on the core of WINE, TransGaming would have nothing to base its work on. TransGaming (from what I have seen) cannot exist without WINE, but WINE can very happily exist without TransGaming. Developmental progress might be slower, but at least portions of the project wouldn't be held hostage.
What gives TransGaming the right to demand payment for its contributions, when so many more people have contributed as much or more and expecting no payment in return?
As a potential patron of TransGaming, I am willing to contribute financially to see coders employed working on a project I have an interest in. I cannot pay a whole salary, but I can make some small contributions, expecting that others will do the same, and that the net effect is that TransGaming can continue to do effective work full-time. Not a problem. Not an issue. In fact, I wish I had MORE opportunity to do this sort of contribution on projects I want to see done, but don't have time to work on myslef.
But the road that TranGaming has chosen I find distasteful and borderline extortive. How do you justify this behaviour?
If TransGaming have said that once they reach a certain level of subscriptions, they will remove the restrictions on their code (I didn't see that on their site, but I'll take your word for it) then they have re-invented Patronage - and that's a good thing.
Patronage - "pay us money so that we can continue to work on this code and release it to the community where you can benefit" - is an entirely appropriate and decent business model for this kind of activity.
Hard to enforce? Absolutely. Patonage by definition relies upon the goodwill of others. And sad as it is, there are lots of people who will choose to reap the reward without contibuting.
But TransGaming have it backwards. As it sits, their current methods are closer to extortion "If you ever want to see the code released without strings, pay us money" than true patronage "If you want to see us continue to contribute quality code, pay us money".
Patronage I support. If they were to release their code under the WINE licence today, I'd cut them a cheque immediately.
Extortion I do not support. Do the right thing FIRST, get paid LATER. Do not expect my support at the point of a sword.
Any piece of software, in order to be forever useful, needs three essential freedoms:
1) Universal availibility of source
2) Freedom to modify that source
3) Freedom to redistribute that modified source, under any terms you (as the modifier) wish, as long as those terms do not infringe any of these three freedoms.
Lose any of these Three Freedoms, and the project is irrevocably harmed.
Using a "looser" licence may help the adoption rate, initially, but you run the signifigant risk of having one of these adopters modify the code and refuse to fold those modifications back into the main tree. Once you have done that, then the project has forked, and it's whole purpose (a common standard that is sure to work anywhere) has been compromised.
Far better that the adoption rate be slower, if by doing so it ensures universal compatibility and the retention of the project's Freedom.
Go with the LGPL. The leading "L" allows those who would use your library to remain proprietary, if they so choose (ie, the use of your library does not force the GPL on them - the freedom to choose not to adopt the GPL at project start is important too) but ensures that the library itself remains Free and useful.
I've been following the WINE project for quite some time now, and I've been cheering for them from the sidelines the whole time. They've picked exactly the right way to go about their project (provide a Linux version of the Win APIs, not emulate Windows) and once complete, they will have contributed a signifigant service to the community.
But I wonder about their choice of licence.
The nature of WINE is that it is very modular; it's not so much a great big tool, as a toolbox full of little tools, where each "tool" is another successfully ported Windows API call. Wine will be "complete" when every possible Windows API is duplicated in Linux-native code.
As such, it's a program that is very responsive to massive development parallelism - once you have a certain core functionality established, you can hand off large chunks of the API-space to other developers, and they can hack away at it at their leisure. Once they have a given API call working, it can be folded back into the main tree.
It's analogous to the SETI@Home or Distributed.net efforts, where an "API call" is a "work unit" Once the entire API "search space" has been completed, the project is done.
(Of course, this is an over-simplification. Windows itself is not so nicely modularized, with APIs calling APIs and lots of undocumented side-effects. But at a course level, WINE does suit parallel development pretty well)
But WINE is licenced BSD. As such, there is no compelling mechanism that requires that any "work units" be re-submitted back into the main project. It is entirely possible for aome entity to port a core series of Windows APIs, and then withold the source from the WINE community. Entirely legal, but very, very bad form.
And yet, that appears to be what TransGaming is doing. They are working on (from what I can tell from their website) porting the DirectX APIs - absolutely essential for getting games (probably the most compelling reason for using WINE in the first place) to function. They have staked out a key, core component of the WINE project "search space".
And they have licenced their portion of the work in such a way that it taints the entire project. In a nutshell, you are prohibited from _selling_ any product that uses WINE and their source. So if you want to write a DirectX Linux app, and sell it, you're FUBARed.
Furthermore, you can't use any of their source as examples or help in porting other APIs that may be related, because of the tainting effect.
The end result is very much like Microsoft's "Shared Source" where you can see the source code, but you can't actually _use_ it in any meaningful way.
It's worth retelling the story that lead to the creation of the GPL - Stallman was having problems getting a printer to work. He knew that if he had access to the source, he could get the printer to work, and that he could pass out copies so that everyone with a similar printer could get it to work too. The manufacturer refused to provide source, on the grounds that they made their money selling the drivers.
Which is more important, a company making money, or people getting their stuff working?
There are 3 essential aspects of software freedom: Universal availibility of source, Freedom to modify that source, and Freedom to redistribute modified source any way you want (as long as these freedoms are not denied to those further down the chain) TransGaming is providing the first two, but steps on the third - and by doing so, sabotages a worthy community effort.
If only WINE had been been released under the GPL, then this situation could not have occurred!
And a big, HUGE thumbs down to TransGaming, for taking this step in the first place! Yes, they are simply trying to protect their business model, and I understand that. But I offer than any business model that requires poisoning a community effort in this way in order to ensure its success is a business model that should not have been attempted in the first place.
I will not be making use of TransGaming's code, and I encourage others to do the same.
I actually have very little opinion one way or the other on Mr. Martin Luther as an individual or on his beliefs - I'm an Athiest myself.
But his effects on the Christian religion are profound and undenible.
Pre Martin Luther, Christianity was a monolithic, monopolistic, autocratic entity - and the analogy of the Catholic Church => Microsoft is very compelling.
Post Martin Luther, the Catholic Church no longer held a monopoly on Christianity, and was greatly reduced in power and influence.
MR. GATES: Let me start out, really the reason that you see open source there at all is
because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and
millions of machines, and the bios of that should be open to everybody to use, and all the
extensibility should be there. And so it was very predictable that once we had gotten the
PC going, and going and gotten hundreds of millions of machines out there, that it had
always been sort of free software and the universities would flourish and there would be
more of that. We certainly accept free software as part of the software ecosystem. In
fact, there's a very virtuous cycle where people do free things, some people find that
adequate, sometimes companies will take that work and turn it into commercial products,
those companies will hire people, pay taxes. And so you see the free software and the
commercial software existing together.
There is a particular approach that breaks the cycle called the GPL that is not worth
getting into today, but I don't think there is much awareness about how so-called free
software foundations designed that to break that cycle
In terms of getting people excited about software and building communities around them,
yes, that is a key to success. Nobody has done that more effectively than we have with
Windows. Are there ways that we can do that better? Are there aspects of this where we're
actually learning from all our different competitors out there? I think it's fair to say
yes.
In the free-software vision is that there would be no jobs in the software industry, there
would be no testers, no engineers, no taxes paid, or anything of that notion. So I
certainly don't agree with the full sort of free software foundation view that there
should be no jobs in this area, and that the kind of commercial advances and risk taking
that we've been able to do you can't get that, you can't get things like speech
recognition on a tablet computer coming out of that kind of a paradigm. You can get things
that follow along, you can get some smaller software, and so we embraced the idea of the
free software paradigm and the commercial software paradigm moving forward in really a
self-reinforcing way.
Sounds like ol' Billy has seen his doom coming, and it's the GPL!
Take a good hard look at that rambling morass of a quote, and you see the strategy (and the enormous depth of self-delusion) that will be driving Microsoft forward. Free-as-in-Beer, Good! Free-as-in-Speech, Bad!
In Bill's world, Free Software is fine as a toy, an interim solution, and educational tool, but it takes a company to turn it into something useful! Nothing good ever comes out of the commons!
Except, of course, the "Microsoft Commons". Funny, when was the last time community work became part of Microsoft, except by force?
And gee, where have we seen this attitude before?
How about in the actions of every tin-pot political dictator who tried to buy off the goodwill of his oppressed subjects with free goodies! The barbarians are howling at the Gates, and Bill is offering Microsoft's shareholders bread and circuses!
Funny thing Bill, those dictators don't have much of a track record....
Stallman (for all his faults and foibles) is the Martin Luther of the information age, and bill is the Pope. Quick - who can name the Pope who was in service when Luther nailed his manifesto to the door of the cathedral?
I'm all for improvements in the calandar system, and there are some pretty compelling arguments for a (13X28) + (1 "festival") day calendar.
But ye gods, that site you linked sure has its messages mixed.
I fail to see how changing the calendar would have any effect on the state of human nature - so the claim that changing the calendar would bring about world peace is just a little bit farfetched.
One of the things that I've noticed from my self-study work is that understanding what all the gobbledygook really _means_ is a whole lot easier when you are using it to some practical end, rather than just regurgitating it for an exam.
That's a crucial advantage.
When self-taught, it works sorta like this:
Have problem -> identify problem -> identify skill needed to solve problem -> study relevant material -> use new skills to solve problem -> get real-world feedback that problem is really solved (or not)
You've got a vested interest in seeing the material through, and you've got hands-on examples for you to play with.
In the acadmic world, it's more like: Study material -> solve exam questions -> go looking for applications of material later in life.
There's not the feedback and vested interest in learning the stuff that you get with the self-taught approach.
I went to a Canadian Military College (a loose analogue of West Point) Studied Computer Science (Systems)
The first:
Along the way, I took a course in Military and Strategic Studies, and discovered, belatedly, that that was where my true interests lay. I've since made it a point to read every single book on the MilStud required reading list, plus a large number of the other books written by the authors of those books, plus books written by the professors.
I've also toured some battlefields (seeing the actual ground reveals much the books don't) and have the experience of over 10 years of military service that I can apply to my readings.
I'd lay money that I could pass the 4th year MilStud final exams.
The Second:
After I retired from the Army, I took up building and driving race cars. Shortly thereafter, I took up a self-study of Automotive Engineering, through a mixture of buying textbooks, completing the exercises, and then hands-on applying the concepts to my own race car.
You want obscure formulae? Try reading Miliken!
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560915269/thedsmautocropag/107-8499798-0210907)
I had a step up here, as there's a lot of crossover at the 101 level courses of physics and math between engineering and computer science, but I'd bet that I could hold my own at Batchlor-level engineering exams.
If there's an interest in the subject, and you're willing to get your hands dirty, you can learn a hell of a lot on your own.
As a brief aside, you've fallen into the trap than many non-students of military history often discover when they discuss the war in Vietnam - that old chestnut about how "you cannot defeat guerillas".
The truth is actually much more complicated and subtle than that.
The war in Vietnam was not conducted as a "pure war", ie, a conflict in which a military force is instructed to defeat the enemy by any means possible (within the boundries of what the laws of warfare delimit).
Examples of these types of wars would be the Gulf War, and WWII.
Vietnam was played out on the stage of the Cold War, which imposed a large number of arbitrary (and conflicting) limitations on the types of operations that the American military could carry out. They were never given the opportunity to fight with their full capacity. Instead, they were subject to restrictions imposed by the political side of their government.
No military professional in their right mind would re-fight the Vietnam war on those terms. It gave far too much advantage to the enemy - an enemy, it must be said, that had an astute awareness of the political situation in which they were operating and who played it to full effect.
Whenever the US Army and North Vietnemese regulars met in open battle with the gloves off, the North Vietnamese were soundly defeated. It is not at all unreasonable to presume then, that had the US Army been given free reign to persue open battle in all conditions, that they would have defeated the North Vietnamese and won the war.
The Americans had similar successes against the Vetcong, (the "terrorist" arm of the conflict) whenever the 'Cong were within reach. The failure there was not a superiority of the 'Cong's fighting ability or tactics, but rather the limitations placed on the American forces that prevented them from striking at the bases that these units operated out of.
Vietnam was a political loss, not a military one.
Those circumstances do not exist today in modern Afganistan. There are some simularities - most noteably, in the harshness of the terrain - but the political situation is entirely different. An invasion of Afganistan could succeed in accomplishing its goals, as there is no political necessity to limit the scale or type of military actions taken.
One final point - I think you'll find that the military professionals who are planning and conducting these strikes are very much aware of the situation on the ground. Vietnam taught many lessons. There will be no indiscriminate carnage. Instead, strikes will be conducted against verifiable targets of known military signifigance. Civillian casulties will undoubtably occur, but they will be minimised as much as possible within the framework of the mission at hand.
The civillians killed on 9/11 were not granted such accomodations. Do not forget that.
The Original Series Star Trek really had nothing at all to do with superheroes or the like. It was Gene's morality play, a means of examining 20th century problems and issues.
The whole space travel thing was just to make it easier for the settings of each issue to be different each week - a new planet, a new problem to be examined. And each of those problems reflecting a problem relating to the 1960's - racism, war (cold and overt), the place of technology in society, and so on and so forth.
Ever notice how all other worlds in the Trek universe are so one-note?
Even the characters were broken down into metaphors - Spock was cold science and reason, McCoy emotion and compassion, and Kirk was Everyman, walking a line between the two.
Some have even broken this down on Freudian lines, with each of the Big Three representing Ego, Superego, and Id.
It was never intended to be taken at face value, any more than Aesop intended one to believe in talking foxes.
The later series lost track of this (especially Voyager) and degenerated into parodies of themselves - although DS9 managed to have a pretty powerful story arc, once it found its centre.
It'll be interesting to see where this series goes.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but you see, the ability to make money from the sale of a product is not an inaliable right
If you are basing a business on the sales of a product that can be easily duplicated, with no loss to any of the parties involved and at minimal cost to the parties involved, then your business model is based on a false assumption.
The sales model of the market depends on scarcity of the product. Once written, that is not true of software (or indeed, anything digital) It's like trying to sell air.
The for-sale model of a software business is fundimentally broken. It depends on a legal definition to support it. It makes as much sense as a law requiring that a buggy whip be sold with the purchase of every car (can't let that newfangled horseless carriage bankrupt the buggy whip industry!)
This is a done deal. The genie is out of the bottle, and all the legislation and propeganda in the world can't possibly stuff it back in.
Gandalf - before the events in Moria - is not particularly powerful. He is subordinate to Saruman, in rank, wisdom, and power.
The bridge at Moria is were we first get a glimpse that Gandalf may be more than he appears to be.
After his return, the gloves are off - he becomes the new head of his order, given that Saruman has derelicted the post - and I suspect you'll see a lot more "ass kicking superbeing" and a lot less "kindly old wizard".
To be honest, I'm suprised and amazed at just how deeply Sir Ian and Jackson grokked Gandalf's character.
.
My primary system is a Pentium I 233MMX, 64 MB RAM, Linux 2.4.14 box. It's based on a Baby AT format case, so any processor upgrades are a case + motherboard + processor deal, and I've been just too damn lazy & cheap to bother.
The graphics card built with this system was a Matrox Mill II - so no 3D acceleration to speak of.
Playing Quake and Quake 2 on this system was Just Fine, but anything more modern was just not possible. I tried playing the Quake 3 demo, but was getting something on the order of 1 FPM, so I've been pretty well shut out of all the 3D stuff.
Then the other day, I noticed that the price on an XTacy GeForce MX400 PCI card (no AGP!) was like $150 CAN - so what the hell, I bought it.
It turned out to be DOA (system would not POST) so I exchanged it for the only other PCI card they had in stock, an XTacy MX200 card (which was like $120 CAN)
They also happened to have Quake3 (in the tin box, no less) SoF, and Descent3, all the Loki ports, in the bargin bin for like $10 each, so I got those too.
Stick in the card, grab NVidia's drivers, configure XFree to use them, fire up Q3 - and bam! Playable! Just like that.
Things get a little choppy if more than about 10 people are in a room shooting at each other, and SoF and Descent3 (played in 800x600 with full textures) will "skip" once and a while, but for the most part, the game experience has been just fine.
Interestingly enough, when I turned on the frame rate display on Q3, I was getting anywhere from 10 fps to about 27 fps, with an average of about 15 - and the play experience is just fine. Faster framerates would be nice, but this IS old hardware, and really, it'd just be gravy. I don't particularly find myself wishing that the framerate was higher than it is - in fact, before I turned on the fps display, I thought I was making 30 fps. To see the average was about half that was a real suprise.
I can't help but wonder if the processor or bus is the bottleneck, or if the MX400 card had've worked the display might be a touch faster - but it doesn't really matter. The MX200 is "good enough".
So overall, I'm a happy camper.
.
This is in fact a real-world problem - thus all the extra work.
Math and processor time are cheaper than sensors, especially things like electronic compasses and high-res, high-sample-rate GPS.
.
So now, given the theta angle, we can transform the car-coodinates accelerations into world-coordinates accelerations, and then we process the Verlet algorithm to get positions.
Soooo then... how to determine the theta angle, given that there is no compass on the vehicle?
I don't think I've defined the problem clearly enough:
Imagine you have a car, parked on a flat plane of infinate size. The car is stationary, at the origin, with the nose aligned with the Y axis (so, for the moment, the car axis and the world axis are aligned)
Inside the car is a pair of accelerometers (one along the car's x axis, the other along the car's y axis), and a speedometer (which provides car-y-axis velocity) The car is then driven around in a path, while the accelerometers and speedometer record values at a fixed sample rate.
Given the resulting data stream, and assuming no slip, give the stream of world (x,y) coordinates that correspond to each car (x-accel, y-accel, y-velocity) coordinate.
Seems like we're modt of the way there...
.
I think I just figured out why my ground tracks are such a bloody mess.
The acceleration values I have are taken _with respect to the vehicle's axis_ not the world co-ordinates' axis.
So I somehow have to translate the co-ordinate systems before I can apply the acceleration to the vehicle....
Any ideas on how to do that?
.
I agree with you on the ever-compounding inaccuracy of dead-reckoning.
:)
The good news is that I only have to do it for 30-60 second stretches.
I've also heard that one can correct somehow the wander/error from the integrated acceleration values by examining the forward speed value (which is produced by a separate sensor) - ie, work out the velocity from the accelerometers, and then compare the magnitude to the forward speed sensor, and correct the ground track from that. I haven't a clue on how that works, but I've seen evidence that it can be done.
As for what the project is... see farnorthracing.com
.
Hrm, m/"Calculus" and "simple"/"oxymoron"/ for some people, including me.
My attempts at reproducing this from my old numerical methods textbook produced unrecognisable squiggles
Assume the start position is the origin. Can you post (or link to) example code?
.
Maybe this book has an answer to a question that's been on my back burner for a while, and for which I've been unable to find a good answer for while surfing.
;)
Suppose you have a device that records lateral acceleration, longnitudnal acceleration, and forward velocity, with 100 samples per second, and stores them in a text file, one sample per line, one value per column.
Given the file parsing routine is a gimme and thus provided the values for elapsed_time, LatG, LongG, and FwdV, produce a function that will return the current X and Y co-ordinates of the vehicle, so that its ground track can be represented in a diagram.
Anybody got any good sources of information (or better yet, an existing library) for how to do this?
No, this is not an exam question.
DG
Oi, this:
"In the language of Klingons of Star Trek:
elDa'joHmeHvaD chalbingDaq wej Qeb
nawqo'joHmeHvaD naghjuHmeychajDaq Soch
HumanmeyvaD jubbe' HeghmeH qichbogh Hut
joHvaD Hurgh quSDajDaq Hurgh wa'
Qotbogh Qibmey morDor puHDaq
Hoch che'meH wa' Qeb, tu'meH wa' Qeb
Hoch qemmeH lan HurghDaq baghmeH je wa' Qeb
Qotbogh Qibmey morDor puHDaq"
has to be THE geekiest thing, as in slobbering-fanboy geeky, that I have ever seen or read.
Yeesh! Quelque chose scent du fromage ici!
.
Here's another interesting graph:
Compare LNUX vs RHATAnd yet another:
LNUX vs MSFTVA Linux is perhaps an under-performer, but the general trends can be seen in all the graphs.
Dr. Felten,
It seems, from the outside, that you are in a position similar to the "Gambler's Ruin" fallecy.
(For those not familliar with this, it works like this: Bob goes to a casino. He bets $2 on a game of chance. If he loses, he plays again with $4, and with $8, $16, $32 etc, doubling his bet each time he loses. The idea is that if he wins, he wins back all the money he lost up to that point, and the odds of his losing streak continuing very deep - assuming reasonable house advantage - are pretty small.
The "fallecy" par crops up in that the casino has access to far greater resources than Bob. Bob's bet gets pretty big in a hurry (and the amount spent is culmulative, until he wins) so the odds are that for reasonable values of Bob's bankroll, the casino can outlast him and take his money in the end)
The RIAA (and Microsoft, and Hollywood studios, and similar offenders) have very deep pockets, whereas individuals like Dr Felten are close to Bob. The problem seems to be that any of these rich organizations can keep the legal battle going indefinately (spending money on lawyer's fees all the while) and eventually bleed Bob (or Dr Felten) dry.
Dr Felten, based on your recent experience
1) Do you agree with this analogy, and
2) How can you expect not to be bled dry, financially, by the process?
.
Let me ask you this, then:
What is stopping you, now that you have your subscriber model up and running, from re-licencing all your code BSD and immediately merging it back into the WINE main tree?
The people who began the WINE project - for better or worse - chose the BSD licence for their code. Why will you not respect that decision, and do the same for your portion?
Open Source projects, irregardless of the actual licence, are community efforts towards providing free and functional software. Nowhere is it implied that there is any fundimental right to make money doing it. It is, at its very core, a philantropical operation. Code is _donated_ to serve the greater cause.
If you can find some way to do this for a living, as have many developers who work for Red Hat, hey, more power to you. There's no fundimental right to make money off your work, but neither is there a prohibition _against_ making money either.
Except where your business model, designed to generate that money, collides with the values of the community you are a part of.
Has TransGaming contributed to the WINE project? Of course they have. But without the thousands of hours of DONATED time and effort done by other people working on the core of WINE, TransGaming would have nothing to base its work on. TransGaming (from what I have seen) cannot exist without WINE, but WINE can very happily exist without TransGaming. Developmental progress might be slower, but at least portions of the project wouldn't be held hostage.
What gives TransGaming the right to demand payment for its contributions, when so many more people have contributed as much or more and expecting no payment in return?
As a potential patron of TransGaming, I am willing to contribute financially to see coders employed working on a project I have an interest in. I cannot pay a whole salary, but I can make some small contributions, expecting that others will do the same, and that the net effect is that TransGaming can continue to do effective work full-time. Not a problem. Not an issue. In fact, I wish I had MORE opportunity to do this sort of contribution on projects I want to see done, but don't have time to work on myslef.
But the road that TranGaming has chosen I find distasteful and borderline extortive. How do you justify this behaviour?
.
If TransGaming have said that once they reach a certain level of subscriptions, they will remove the restrictions on their code (I didn't see that on their site, but I'll take your word for it) then they have re-invented Patronage - and that's a good thing.
Patronage - "pay us money so that we can continue to work on this code and release it to the community where you can benefit" - is an entirely appropriate and decent business model for this kind of activity.
Hard to enforce? Absolutely. Patonage by definition relies upon the goodwill of others. And sad as it is, there are lots of people who will choose to reap the reward without contibuting.
But TransGaming have it backwards. As it sits, their current methods are closer to extortion "If you ever want to see the code released without strings, pay us money" than true patronage "If you want to see us continue to contribute quality code, pay us money".
Patronage I support. If they were to release their code under the WINE licence today, I'd cut them a cheque immediately.
Extortion I do not support. Do the right thing FIRST, get paid LATER. Do not expect my support at the point of a sword.
Any piece of software, in order to be forever useful, needs three essential freedoms:
1) Universal availibility of source
2) Freedom to modify that source
3) Freedom to redistribute that modified source, under any terms you (as the modifier) wish, as long as those terms do not infringe any of these three freedoms.
Lose any of these Three Freedoms, and the project is irrevocably harmed.
Using a "looser" licence may help the adoption rate, initially, but you run the signifigant risk of having one of these adopters modify the code and refuse to fold those modifications back into the main tree. Once you have done that, then the project has forked, and it's whole purpose (a common standard that is sure to work anywhere) has been compromised.
Far better that the adoption rate be slower, if by doing so it ensures universal compatibility and the retention of the project's Freedom.
Go with the LGPL. The leading "L" allows those who would use your library to remain proprietary, if they so choose (ie, the use of your library does not force the GPL on them - the freedom to choose not to adopt the GPL at project start is important too) but ensures that the library itself remains Free and useful.
Good luck!
Hmmm...
I've been following the WINE project for quite some time now, and I've been cheering for them from the sidelines the whole time. They've picked exactly the right way to go about their project (provide a Linux version of the Win APIs, not emulate Windows) and once complete, they will have contributed a signifigant service to the community.
But I wonder about their choice of licence.
The nature of WINE is that it is very modular; it's not so much a great big tool, as a toolbox full of little tools, where each "tool" is another successfully ported Windows API call. Wine will be "complete" when every possible Windows API is duplicated in Linux-native code.
As such, it's a program that is very responsive to massive development parallelism - once you have a certain core functionality established, you can hand off large chunks of the API-space to other developers, and they can hack away at it at their leisure. Once they have a given API call working, it can be folded back into the main tree.
It's analogous to the SETI@Home or Distributed.net efforts, where an "API call" is a "work unit" Once the entire API "search space" has been completed, the project is done.
(Of course, this is an over-simplification. Windows itself is not so nicely modularized, with APIs calling APIs and lots of undocumented side-effects. But at a course level, WINE does suit parallel development pretty well)
But WINE is licenced BSD. As such, there is no compelling mechanism that requires that any "work units" be re-submitted back into the main project. It is entirely possible for aome entity to port a core series of Windows APIs, and then withold the source from the WINE community. Entirely legal, but very, very bad form.
And yet, that appears to be what TransGaming is doing. They are working on (from what I can tell from their website) porting the DirectX APIs - absolutely essential for getting games (probably the most compelling reason for using WINE in the first place) to function. They have staked out a key, core component of the WINE project "search space".
And they have licenced their portion of the work in such a way that it taints the entire project. In a nutshell, you are prohibited from _selling_ any product that uses WINE and their source. So if you want to write a DirectX Linux app, and sell it, you're FUBARed.
Furthermore, you can't use any of their source as examples or help in porting other APIs that may be related, because of the tainting effect.
The end result is very much like Microsoft's "Shared Source" where you can see the source code, but you can't actually _use_ it in any meaningful way.
It's worth retelling the story that lead to the creation of the GPL - Stallman was having problems getting a printer to work. He knew that if he had access to the source, he could get the printer to work, and that he could pass out copies so that everyone with a similar printer could get it to work too. The manufacturer refused to provide source, on the grounds that they made their money selling the drivers.
Which is more important, a company making money, or people getting their stuff working?
There are 3 essential aspects of software freedom: Universal availibility of source, Freedom to modify that source, and Freedom to redistribute modified source any way you want (as long as these freedoms are not denied to those further down the chain) TransGaming is providing the first two, but steps on the third - and by doing so, sabotages a worthy community effort.
If only WINE had been been released under the GPL, then this situation could not have occurred!
And a big, HUGE thumbs down to TransGaming, for taking this step in the first place! Yes, they are simply trying to protect their business model, and I understand that. But I offer than any business model that requires poisoning a community effort in this way in order to ensure its success is a business model that should not have been attempted in the first place.
I will not be making use of TransGaming's code, and I encourage others to do the same.
Hey John, have you seen this spec yet?
What do you think?
DG
Luther was a pretty screwed up individual.
And Stallman isn't? :)
I actually have very little opinion one way or the other on Mr. Martin Luther as an individual or on his beliefs - I'm an Athiest myself.
But his effects on the Christian religion are profound and undenible.
Pre Martin Luther, Christianity was a monolithic, monopolistic, autocratic entity - and the analogy of the Catholic Church => Microsoft is very compelling.
Post Martin Luther, the Catholic Church no longer held a monopoly on Christianity, and was greatly reduced in power and influence.
So Luther => Stallman from that perspective.
Take a gander at this excerpt: (emphasis added)
Sounds like ol' Billy has seen his doom coming, and it's the GPL!
Take a good hard look at that rambling morass of a quote, and you see the strategy (and the enormous depth of self-delusion) that will be driving Microsoft forward. Free-as-in-Beer, Good! Free-as-in-Speech, Bad!
In Bill's world, Free Software is fine as a toy, an interim solution, and educational tool, but it takes a company to turn it into something useful! Nothing good ever comes out of the commons!
Except, of course, the "Microsoft Commons". Funny, when was the last time community work became part of Microsoft, except by force?
And gee, where have we seen this attitude before?
How about in the actions of every tin-pot political dictator who tried to buy off the goodwill of his oppressed subjects with free goodies! The barbarians are howling at the Gates, and Bill is offering Microsoft's shareholders bread and circuses!
Funny thing Bill, those dictators don't have much of a track record....
Stallman (for all his faults and foibles) is the Martin Luther of the information age, and bill is the Pope. Quick - who can name the Pope who was in service when Luther nailed his manifesto to the door of the cathedral?
Me neither.
I'm all for improvements in the calandar system, and there are some pretty compelling arguments for a (13X28) + (1 "festival") day calendar.
But ye gods, that site you linked sure has its messages mixed.
I fail to see how changing the calendar would have any effect on the state of human nature - so the claim that changing the calendar would bring about world peace is just a little bit farfetched.
A little.
Were I offered the job, the overriding priority would be manned missions to Mars, starting with exploration, and ending with colonization.
No question about it.
DG
One of the things that I've noticed from my self-study work is that understanding what all the gobbledygook really _means_ is a whole lot easier when you are using it to some practical end, rather than just regurgitating it for an exam.
That's a crucial advantage.
When self-taught, it works sorta like this:
Have problem -> identify problem -> identify skill needed to solve problem -> study relevant material -> use new skills to solve problem -> get real-world feedback that problem is really solved (or not)
You've got a vested interest in seeing the material through, and you've got hands-on examples for you to play with.
In the acadmic world, it's more like: Study material -> solve exam questions -> go looking for applications of material later in life.
There's not the feedback and vested interest in learning the stuff that you get with the self-taught approach.
And not just once, but twice.
9 /thedsmautocropag/107-8499798-0210907)
I went to a Canadian Military College (a loose analogue of West Point) Studied Computer Science (Systems)
The first:
Along the way, I took a course in Military and Strategic Studies, and discovered, belatedly, that that was where my true interests lay. I've since made it a point to read every single book on the MilStud required reading list, plus a large number of the other books written by the authors of those books, plus books written by the professors.
I've also toured some battlefields (seeing the actual ground reveals much the books don't) and have the experience of over 10 years of military service that I can apply to my readings.
I'd lay money that I could pass the 4th year MilStud final exams.
The Second:
After I retired from the Army, I took up building and driving race cars. Shortly thereafter, I took up a self-study of Automotive Engineering, through a mixture of buying textbooks, completing the exercises, and then hands-on applying the concepts to my own race car.
You want obscure formulae? Try reading Miliken!
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/156091526
I had a step up here, as there's a lot of crossover at the 101 level courses of physics and math between engineering and computer science, but I'd bet that I could hold my own at Batchlor-level engineering exams.
If there's an interest in the subject, and you're willing to get your hands dirty, you can learn a hell of a lot on your own.
As a brief aside, you've fallen into the trap than many non-students of military history often discover when they discuss the war in Vietnam - that old chestnut about how "you cannot defeat guerillas".
The truth is actually much more complicated and subtle than that.
The war in Vietnam was not conducted as a "pure war", ie, a conflict in which a military force is instructed to defeat the enemy by any means possible (within the boundries of what the laws of warfare delimit).
Examples of these types of wars would be the Gulf War, and WWII.
Vietnam was played out on the stage of the Cold War, which imposed a large number of arbitrary (and conflicting) limitations on the types of operations that the American military could carry out. They were never given the opportunity to fight with their full capacity. Instead, they were subject to restrictions imposed by the political side of their government.
No military professional in their right mind would re-fight the Vietnam war on those terms. It gave far too much advantage to the enemy - an enemy, it must be said, that had an astute awareness of the political situation in which they were operating and who played it to full effect.
Whenever the US Army and North Vietnemese regulars met in open battle with the gloves off, the North Vietnamese were soundly defeated. It is not at all unreasonable to presume then, that had the US Army been given free reign to persue open battle in all conditions, that they would have defeated the North Vietnamese and won the war.
The Americans had similar successes against the Vetcong, (the "terrorist" arm of the conflict) whenever the 'Cong were within reach. The failure there was not a superiority of the 'Cong's fighting ability or tactics, but rather the limitations placed on the American forces that prevented them from striking at the bases that these units operated out of.
Vietnam was a political loss, not a military one.
Those circumstances do not exist today in modern Afganistan. There are some simularities - most noteably, in the harshness of the terrain - but the political situation is entirely different. An invasion of Afganistan could succeed in accomplishing its goals, as there is no political necessity to limit the scale or type of military actions taken.
One final point - I think you'll find that the military professionals who are planning and conducting these strikes are very much aware of the situation on the ground. Vietnam taught many lessons. There will be no indiscriminate carnage. Instead, strikes will be conducted against verifiable targets of known military signifigance. Civillian casulties will undoubtably occur, but they will be minimised as much as possible within the framework of the mission at hand.
The civillians killed on 9/11 were not granted such accomodations. Do not forget that.
The Original Series Star Trek really had nothing at all to do with superheroes or the like. It was Gene's morality play, a means of examining 20th century problems and issues.
The whole space travel thing was just to make it easier for the settings of each issue to be different each week - a new planet, a new problem to be examined. And each of those problems reflecting a problem relating to the 1960's - racism, war (cold and overt), the place of technology in society, and so on and so forth.
Ever notice how all other worlds in the Trek universe are so one-note?
Even the characters were broken down into metaphors - Spock was cold science and reason, McCoy emotion and compassion, and Kirk was Everyman, walking a line between the two.
Some have even broken this down on Freudian lines, with each of the Big Three representing Ego, Superego, and Id.
It was never intended to be taken at face value, any more than Aesop intended one to believe in talking foxes.
The later series lost track of this (especially Voyager) and degenerated into parodies of themselves - although DS9 managed to have a pretty powerful story arc, once it found its centre.
It'll be interesting to see where this series goes.