Comment Re:But it's all physics? *snark* (Score 1) 978
Are you suggesting that the human body somehow violates the laws of thermodynamics? Because that would be much stupider than what you seem to be mocking.
Comment Wrong audience (Score 5, Funny) 407
Slashdot is a great engineering community; what other insights do you have on the bridge situation?
No, Slashdot is mostly made up of computer janitors; the greatest insight you'll get out of most of the posters here is, "hurrr durr, the bridge must've been running Windoze! LOL!", with maybe a little "omg the twin towers were collapsed by EXPLOSIVES!!!!"-style conspiracy theory and "THE GOVERNMENT IS BAD!!!" braindead libertarianism thrown in for color.
Comment Re:Modeling cooperation as laminar flow (Score 0) 199
Laminar flow? Where do you see boundary layer phenomena here? And tripping "boundary layers" of people into "turbulent flow"? Do you even think about things before you just blurt them out on the internet?
Comment Re:Is it like aerodynamic spoilers on cars? (Score 1) 199
Absolutely not. Next question.
Comment Re:Just what we need (Score 1) 287
Which UAV? There isn't just one design of UAV, there's a whole slew of them in service, on the market or in design. Some of them are rather large, think roughly the size of an A-10. There's no fundamental reason that something the size of a 747 cannot be flown in an unmanned configuration.
Comment Re:Dumb. (Score 1) 513
who mails cheques these days, cheques died out ten years ago
Clearly, you've not been to the United States in the past ten years. We still make almost all of our non-retail payments with checks here in the financial Third World. My company, for example, still issues checks for expense reimbursement.
Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1) 65
Yes, but your assumption (CPU speed is no object) is ridiculous.
Comment Re:It will be a very difficult project (Score 1) 154
All of those can be accomplished in Fortran 90/95. There is even direct language support for the third requirement (private members of derived types), and I do it all the time; it works just like other public/private declarations, just placed inside the type definition. Inheritance and polymorphism (I'm guessing this is what dynamic binding means from a quick look at Wikipedia) are a bit trickier, but the techniques have been worked out and documented by these fellows (Viktor Decyk's page is also quite helpful). If you prefer to avoid typing out a certain necessary amount of boilerplate to do this, you could use Drew McCormack's forpedo preprocessor (described in detail on MacResearch). So, it's not necessary to wait for 2003, and in fact, many people haven't but have managed to write and maintain very large codes in Fortran 90/95. Good luck!
Comment Re:Government interfearence screws up everything (Score 1) 284
You don't even know that there were two presidents named "Roosevelt"? I hope you're not American, because that would be shockingly stupid.
Comment Re:Blowing doors of competition (Score 5, Funny) 164
Don't you mean the door population?
Comment Impressive. (Score -1, Troll) 111
It's only a matter of time now before Indians discover Lawn Darts and color television!
Submission + - Demonology '08 (kuro5hin.org)
Guilty Rim Loon writes: "In the new year the Berkeley Software Distribution family of Unix-like operating systems is growing at a phenomenal rate and excitement over the possibilities for this operating system family is in the air. After unprecedented development and adoption as well as major shifts in the marketplace, it's time to take a look at what's new with this demonic family of operating systems. Don't fear, the word demon means Unix goodness at just the right price."
Submission + - Why do people jump to conclusions?
the_B0fh writes: "http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/8/2/15233/84896 claims that Theo accepted lots of $$ from AMD to say bad things about Intel. Theo denies that AMD has given him money. History tells us that Theo has never been reticent about speaking out, even if it hurts his funding (re: Darpa's $2mil grant). So, what is the kuro5hin author basing his opinions on? And why is there a Microsoft link in that page? In the comments section, someone mentioned Matt Dillon's analysis which seems to be in agreement with Theo's analysis. In fact, the only statements I've seen from Linus is only about one of the erratas, and not the others (especially nice things such as second core not obeying the NX bit and so on).
Do people just not read and analyze what others say, and blindly accept opinions? Ah, nevermind."
Feed The Economist On Apple Innovations: Not Inventive, Just Innovative (techdirt.com)
We've suggested in the past that Apple's iPhone perfect demonstrates the difference between invention and innovation (i.e., there's nothing really "new" in the iPhone, but what's impressive is how Apple packaged all of it in a way that consumers find appealing). The Economist has picked up on this, apparently, with a cover story on how Apple innovates, where it notes that Apple isn't particularly inventive, but knows how to package up a bunch of outside inventions and make them useful. This is important, since so many discussions around innovation tend to confuse innovation and invention, and it can greatly distort policy debates when you think that the two are the same (or even that one is a proxy for the other). With that in mind, it's nice to see the Economist highlight the difference at Apple.
Feed Apple: no ZFS for Leopard (engadget.com)
Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Storage
Much to the dismay of those Macheads who've started hitting size limits in Tiger's HFS+ file system (all ten of you), Apple has confirmed to InformationWeek that Leopard will not in fact adopt the more capacious ZFS alternative as promised last week by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Senior director of product marketing for the Mac OS Brian Croll told IW point blank that "ZFS is not happening," contradicting Schwartz's assertion that his company's 128-bit file system would be bringing goodies like built-in data integrity and virtual storage to the iMac and friends. Meanwhile, Sun had no comment on the matter. Of course for most users creating an average Word or Photoshop document, this reversal really doesn't mean much, and may in fact be beneficial when we consider the higher processing demands made by the so-called 'Zettabyte File System." For changes in Leopard that are actually, like, real, you can check out our roundup of the new features right here.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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