On the flip side, the fact that we have BOTH Gnome and KDE is itself a manifestation of the effect. KDE fans diss Gnome and Gnome fans diss KDE, and Ubuntu ships with Gnome but there's Kubuntu which uses KDE instead.

No, upstream forking and people starting a new project instead of working to finish or improve existing stuff IS the problem. Whether it's caused by the original project's developers being unable to play nice or new developers deciding they can do better by starting over, either way you end up with a dozen half-baked programs competing for the same uses with overlapping but sometimes mutually exclusive feature sets. Then the distros are stuck having to pick from this mess, and sometime throw in 2 or 3 just because there's no single one that does what people want to use the computer to do.

Yes, but let's not make it out to be more than it is. The DSQU was just a mass simulator and in that respect not much more than the dummy payload of the Ares 1X. But at least it made it to orbit and didn't go into a flat spin after separating at a lower-than-planned altitude.

Nixon and the idea of one-size-fits-all aerospace hardware. Remember the F-111 (Kennedy-era development) anyone? The Shuttle as it ended up tried to satisfy all the customers of manned and unmanned orbital spacecraft in one. Engineering decisions were trumped by political considerations.

I'm not disputing your technical assessment PNG. But why are RAW and DNG included already? I can make the same argument about Shotwell's lack of support for them as for PNG. It's the 21st century and this is Linux. Link in a few libraries, add a VERY small bit more code to manage the application code's interface to them, and you can have as many image formats as anyone could want. Even more to my other point, if someone wants to be purist about formats and never use PNG, don't exclude it from the application on philosophical basis when the implementation is so brain-dead simple.

But ask first, *why* are there little-to-no civilian demands for the SRBs? Could it be that they are a marginally useful product with known flaws that are overpriced? That's the free market calling. Sure, they sometimes throw in a few smaller solids with Atlas V and Delta IV boosters, and Ariane 5 uses solids, but they are expendables and in the case of Ariane, conspicuously not ATK products.

I'm not disputing that part. What I am noting is that dissing Falcon 9 by saying it replicates what NASA did in 1964 is disingenuous, at best, when NASA itself is having trouble replicating 1950s-era accomplishments, even while spending many times more of American tax dollars.

I wouldn't be quite so sweeping -- NASA as mismanaged today, shoveling money at contractors more interested in a jobs program and congressional pork than a space program -- certainly is the wrong agency. Right now politically-minded upper level managers cut from the corporate CEO cloth run the show. It could be done by a NASA driven by engineering considerations the way it was until the Space Shuttle program came along.

Yep. There's a reason why some folks referred to Ares as Porklauncher I.

I cringed when I heard Alalbama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, say the launch of Falcon 9 as a display merely replicating what "NASA accomplished in 1964." I guess he forgot that Ares IX didn't even accomplish that -- nor even equalling the accomplishment of the 1960 flight of Mercury-Redstone 1A. Ares IX took an extra shuttle SRB (not the actual 5-segment solid booster planned for Ares I), avionics from an Atlas V, and a leftover roll-control system from a Peacekeeper missile. This Frankenrocket was topped with a fake 2nd stage and capsule and was a suborbital plink.

Falcon 9 had a fully new 2-stage rocket with all the pieces -- engines, avionics, control -- in place except a payload, and it achieved orbit to within a high degree of accuracy on its first flight. And the whole Falcon 9 development program came for less than the cost of JUST the Ares I Mobile Service Tower.

The sooner the Constellation work ends the sooner NASA can start spending that money on something that will get us somewhere.

If nothing else, the Constellation program will have served the useful purpose of distracting ATK and other folks who were milking the program away from the shuttle long enough for that obsolete program to be shut down gracefully. Management at ATK has been hinting that the company will virtually shut down without Ares or the shuttle. Memo from Free Enterprise to ATK management: if you depend on a single customer to sustain your company, you deserve to go bankrupt.

They don't do PNG? What, are they writing their own image handling codecs from scratch? What kind of half-assed project doesn't build on the existing available libraries to handle low-level things like image formats? Even the first draft release of an image app should be able to just collapse all the format stuff behind an abstraction and get all of them in one swoop. Sure, they might not handle at the application user's level all the odd bits and extensions and tricky stuff (alpha transparency comes to mind, for example) but to just not support it? Sounds like someone needs to review a college first year CS textbook.

This is the single biggest failing of the FOSS ecosystem.

Someone starts a piece of software and gets some of the desired features working. Shortly after that, someone else, either working on the project or using it, decides one of several problems plague the program. Either it's development is too slow, it has crummy architecture, someone else thinks they can do better, philosophically or technically, or they are half-baked programmers who look at existing code, can't figure it out, and decide to start over from scratch. Or maybe the project's lead(s) decide that their way of doing things, technically or philosophically, is the only "right" way, and hit would-be contributors over the head with attitude (I'm looking at for example developers of VLC and cdparanoia, not to mention the issue of Linux kernel schedulers and sound subsystem).

So we end up with multiple half-baked programs all doing sort of the same thing in different ways but none of them doing the whole job. Naturally, when someone sees the situation, the first reaction is "All this mess! I'm going to start a NEW project and do it RIGHT this time!"

If we FOSS users and developers are lucky, eventually there will be a tipping point when a majority gravitate to one project and things get more or less sorted out. If not, well, we can always use ANOTHER, say, media player; some college CS major can tackle it as a senior project, release it, and then forget all about it. If Amarok, Audacious, Beep, BMPx, Banshee, Kaffeine, Miro, Rhythmbox, VLC, Winamp, XMMS, xine and whatever else I'm forgetting don't offer enough choice for you.

Glad to see that yet another category of software is joining the party.

My ideal journal would be narrow horizontal lines on light green or yellow paper with pale vertical lines making a grid if I need them. Sometimes I want to draw freehand, too, and ideally the lines would be just visible enough to allow writing while light enough to not distract for drawing. I try to keep my writing in professional lab notebook format, too.

100% true. Mild grumblings when schools required students to have laptops, but Windows was assumed. Now schools want students to have a computer that isn't subject to endless streams of malware and doesn't require 1 full time person per user to hand-hold through the garbage that is MS software and suddenly it's a BIG DEAL.

I had to bootstrap gcc once. I was simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the magical contortions required to go from no compiler to full compiler with libraries and toolchain.

Oh, and you kids GIT OFF MAH LAWN!