It is just the nature of a combined software / hardware solution that hardware teams tend to win. They have tangible manufacturing, costs and physical limitations that managers understand. While software has very different kinds of limitations -- often human limitations -- that managers don't understand.

Basically so, yes. Although - and I say this as a software person - there's good reason for that to be the case. Hardware incurs per-unit costs, so any design change that makes it cheaper to build will be paid back million-fold. If that increases the cost/time of developing the software you have to show that increase is higher than all the money you save in manufacturing. Unless the hardware changes are truly extreme, that is unlikely to be the case with a volume consumer product. Software has no unit margin cost, so the same logic doesn't apply in reverse.

The Rashomon reference was not an idle one, by the way. No matter how honest and well-intentioned, you're unlikely to have an unbiased or particularly correct view of what happened if you were involved directly in something. It's great to hear the point of view - but that's what it is, a point of view. Other teams and people at other levels certainly have others, and it'd be foolhardy to try to understand what happened based on ony one or two of them.

I'll take a wild stab in the dark here and guess that you possibly were in the software team? I wonder what a hw team members version of this would read like. Or that of a manager overseeing both teams.

Rashomon is a really good movie, apropos nothing in particulal.

I have been building my home automation system since the first iteration of Vera came out (still using my original Vera controller, which is woefully underpowered.) I initially bought it to control the plant lights by having the duration of supplemental lighting follow the duration of the actual day, providing seasonally appropriate lighting which causes the plants to bloom on schedule. It has been much more reliable at keeping track of the time than I ever was, and our plant growth has been much improved as a result. That was the initial outlay; further additions included automating lights, coordinating indoor and outdoor lighting without having to rewire the house, and the additions of temperature and water sensors. In terms of money, though, I don't know that any of those qualify as a "savings". At best, they've been a cost avoidance (one of the sensors alerted me to a water leak before the basement flooded.)

In terms of my time spent, like you, it's a hobby for me. I'm learning what works, what doesn't, and playing with various things to see if I get interesting or valuable results. Home automation has long claimed to have potential, but it's going to take a lot of real world examples to prove it.

where on earth did you get the impression that india was an advanced industrial civilisation thousands of years ago? have you read any of the legends - the mahabarata and so on? it was *backwards*! only the people in power had the kinds of unlimited wealth similar to governments and large corporations of today. and - as now - they keep things incredibly secret. the advantage that they had then over today is the total lack of communication. the people in power at the time were so far removed in terms of wealth and knowledge and resources that they were commonly viewed - quite literally - as living gods.

so no, there *was* no advanced industrial civilisation in india. there were a few incredibly wealthy powerful people with access to machines, scared of letting the knowledge out of their hands of how those machines worked in case their enemies got hold of them (a situation not dissimilar to today...) and then there was everyone else, eking out medieval-style subsistence existence.

thinking that through, there could be a series of compounded reasons why not, and we can summarise at the end with an analogy.

firstly, the people who _did_ make these flying machines were the ruling class of india at the time. they had reputations as "living gods" (how if they could quotes fly quotes would the ordinary person believe otherwise?). in other words, they were incredibly wealthy. so they had access to thousands or tens of thousands of workers if they needed them, to go out and find the metals and other resources.

secondly, fast-forwarding to our "modern" times, we have some texts - written in the context of science at the time - which are in sanskrit, and the context is lost. it takes a *lot* of research to work out the missing information that the original authors would have known. the classic funny story here is that the bible was written in hebrew and was translated to greek by someone who didn't *actually* understand the idiomatic hebrew of the time. so he made some hilarious "literal" translations - the eye of the needle is the most well-known one but there are many others that two famous religious scholars collaborated together to uncover, on the basis that neither of them tried to convert the other away from their respective religions :)

thirdly, we have the "cranks and myths and conspiracy" brigade who like to make a hell of a lot of noise, increasing the probability that even rational people will steer clear of the entire area, *especially* if they are in a quotes renowned quotes scientific established career.

lastly, that analogy. imagine that we are talking about... say... fighter jets, not ancient flying vehicles. let's imagine that you've _heard_ about fighter jets (never seen one). you might have access to the internet, but you've never seen a "fighter jet" go over your head, making an enormous amount of noise. but you heard on the internet that they exist. in the context of a remote country, isolated from the rest of the world, ask yourself the question "why hasn't anyone in *our* country built one of these fighter jets?".

and that really helps hammer it home, that these projects are *expensive*.... even if people believe they are practical (not a complete fabrication, at all, thanks to the cranks, in the first place). i went through the list of materials (the metallurgy section): there are *sixty* types of alloys that need to be made!

so, yeah, i can fully understand why it hasn't been done in today's modern society.

honestly i have no idea if they had primitive glider-type planes: the surviving sanskrit texts don't describe such.

i didn't say "proof", i effectively said "*after* reading the sanskrit documents (or their available translations), make a judgement for yourself". about what you've written: think about this - how, in a country where there is no internet, no telephones, no long-distance communication of *any* kind, would there be any kind of "backup" record? we're lucky that even the vimanas documents survived.

cast your mind back thousands of years. most people you know - most people you've *ever* known - are subsistence farmers. the stories you hear - which became legend - are of the "gods" battling in flying chariots. pretty incredible, huh? and yet there are people who come back from battles who tell you these amazing tales... ... how many of those people would have writing skills? or know about electricity? (or even care)

now compare that situation to today. do you know about electricity? do you know about something called "chemistry"? of course you do, and you have something called "the internet" where you could even teach yourself about those things. ... but the people in power at the time? they would have had extraordinary wealth, and extraordinary power. they would have had scholars, and engineers and much more - and the important thing is that in order to keep the knowledge they learned from falling into the hands of their enemies, they would have kept that knowledge *secret*, wouldn't they? and that would be easy to do: have a bunch of guys with great memories whom you keep an eye on (you can always kill them if you get attacked, whereas books could be stolen).

so it is not too hard to imagine that:

a) there could be secretive development of scientific knowledge
b) that knowledge could be kept from everyone outside of the immediate power base
c) that it would be so unbelievably far advanced from the rest of the society that they would consider it to be "magic", and the people controlling it to be "gods".

does that make any sense? and is there anything unreasonable or irrational about either a, b or c, given what we know about the history of india around that era?

now, regarding the "interpretation" comment: again, i can only say read the texts yourself. make the interpretation yourself". if you don't have time to do that, and are still interested, find someone that you trust who has.

one thing i did find fascinating about that link i sent: the sanskrit texts apparently describe pilot clothing and diet! the clothing is designed to be fire-proof as well as extremely warm, and the recommended diet is five (!) meals a day. the texts also describe knowledge of different layers to our atmosphere (five are given names). the author of the analysis at the link i sent says that he had asked an airforce pilot to review the text, and he mentions that it is well-known amongst pilots - especially combat ones - that the physical toll of combat aircraft is extremely high. modern medical professionals therefore recommend that combat pilots eat small very frequent meals,. it is also a taboo in military airforce circles to fly on an empty stomach.

question. how would they know this? a simple "glider" in no way puts its pilot through signifncant physical stress. gliders simply do not reach the required altitude. and how would they know that there are different regions to our atmosphere unless someone had actually been up there?

*think* - please, for goodness sake.

People are all panicky about smart meters, and they imagine they're some kind of Big Brother device that reports on their TV watching habits, or know exactly what kinds of subversive web sites they visit based on their power usage, and report their pr0n habits to the gubbamint. But "smart meters" are not "omniscient meters". They just measure your home's overall consumption of electricity, same as your current meter.

Smart meters essentially work like what you're talking about. The difference is they are in near constant communication with the utility, so they broadcast a rate schedule to your home's appliances that advertise the current and near future electric rates, and they can report overall house consumption on a near-real-time basis. And that's about it.

The utility can predict "At 4:00 today it will be very hot, so we will be bringing on supplemental generators at that time to meet all the extra A/C demand." They also know that regular electricity normally goes for $0.08/kWh, but supplemental generators cost them $3.00/kWh. They then tell the meters the rate schedule for today is $0.50/kWh from 12:00 to 3:00; $0.60/kWh for the first 2kW from 3:01 to 8:00, but $5.00/kWh for everything above 2kW; and $0.20/kWh from 8:01 to 12:00. The meter then announces the price schedule to your home appliances. You may choose to have your washing machine configured to run only if the cost of your electricity is less than $0.25/kWh; you may have your thermostat set to reduce air conditioner use when the cost is greater than $0.75/kWh; and you may set your electric water heater and pool pump to switch completely off if the cost is greater than $1.00/kWh. It's all your choice, how you want to manage your consumption remains up to you. You simply have to know you'll pay more when overall demand is greater.

Your electricity usage today is not a secret. Your meter already reports usage to your utility company so you can pay for what you use. But today, your dumb meter can't tell what time of day the electricity was consumed, and it doesn't know the rate in effect when you consume it, so your utility company has to front-load everyone's rates with the predicted cost of supplemental generation, the future cost of fuel, etc, and they only change the rate on a monthly or annual basis. What will change with smart meters is the rate you pay will depend on the rate in effect when you consume it; the meter will know the current rate and you will be charged accordingly. Even after smart meters roll out, how you choose to use the energy your house consumes is still up to you, and whether or not you're spending it on a dishwasher or indoor pot-growing farm is still not the utility company's business.

here is an english translation of the papers: http://www.bibliotecapleyades....

random moderators: BEFORE considering hitting "-1" please read the full text below.

if you look up the papers they apparently had mercury-based plasma ion drives (which i hear NASA and the JPL have been researching for some time) as well as highly destructuve beam weapons (which i hope *nobody* in modern times has been researching). the papers are thousands of years old, and have been well-known for a considerable amount of time, mostly for the metallurgy as the papers go through absolutely every single detail required, from sourcing the materials to creating the crucibles and kilns, to making the garments needed to deal with altitude. there's a story on the internet that someone in india, during victorian times, actually recreated one of these machines, directly from the instructions. when the british heard about it they had it destroyed.

doing a quick google search.... yes, this is the vedic "vimanas" being presented at this conference: it's actually nothing "new", it's just that peoples' reactions are... well, if one wants to put it charitably, it's just surrounded with an amazing amount of incredulity and disbelief, but if we are honest the better way to put it is that it is absolute pure arrogance to think that our current level of technology is the first and only peak of technological capability on the planet: it's just that we are far more connected now than we were before, so word of new discoveries tends to get around.

that "incredulity" you can counteract by simply reviewing the documents for yourself. i recommend focussing on the sections covering the science that *has* been re-discovered since the techniques were lost, for example the mining and metallurgy sections. once you have at least verified that these sections correspond precisely with modern techniques, is it so hard a stretch of one's mind to consider that the other sections and instructions might be correct as well?

I block Javascript, and everything except the video displays just fine.

pions are basically made up of quarks just like the neutron and the proton: there's nothing magical about it, and has absolutely nothing to do with gravitons (if such even exist except as a mathematical concept). the difference is that pions only contain two quarks (rather than three) and so they're not stable. imagine throwing two magnets into the air very very carefully and having them spin around each other for a very brief period of time. if they fly apart, splat no more particle: if they touch, splat no more particle. but for that incredibly short duration where the two quarks successfully spin around each other in close orbit, there you have a "pion".

wait... floppy disks are a particularly coarse-grained media, meaning that they are quite likely to survive (in storage) for a very long time. also, they don't contain silicon ICs. does anyone remember the great idea of SD Cards with built-in OSes and a WIFI antenna, and how those have been used as spyware tools? likewise USB sticks could have absolutely anything in them. so i don't think it's such a good idea for the whitehouse to move away from floppy disks.

blackberries on the other hand, i heard a story back in 2007 that the entire email infrastructure at the time ran off of *two* machines (two physical machines). one for the US, one for the rest of the world. i trust that the whitehouse email doesn't go through a single server. that would be... bad.

normally one would google that and it would come up with instances where people have installed GNU/Linux OSes on the specific hardware in question, and the older the hardware and the more popular it is, the larger the chance of finding someone else who has done exactly that and created a report (or five). unfortunately however, at this very moment, the search engine results show a huge number of interfering references to a site known as "slashdot", as well as RSS syndicated links to the same.

so you can either just risk it and try it, then get on one of the popular forums, or you can wait for things to calm down a bit and the google searches which include slashdot syndication of its front-page drop off the pagerank a bit (should take a couple of days).

that having been said: it looks like it's a standard laptop with an x86 chipset, so it should almost certainly boot. touchpanels tend to use all the same chipsets, and those have been supported in the linux kernel for some time due to GPL compliance, so you should be fine.

They have four partner universities and several other research institutions, most or all of who already have one or more full-time staff dedicated to help projects with their grant application process.

Yes, EU grant applications are big and cumbersone - though the payoff is commensurate - but the process is not going to be the main hurdle. With all the available expertise at their disposal, if they can't navigate the application process then they're unlikely to successfully steer a major project over several years either.

I look at it as a methodology to spread the risk.

We've had a few packages dominate the landscape, and each of them has had some of the best and the brightest people looking at it, reviewing it, analyzing it, looking for flaws, running code analysis, fuzzers, everything. We've done exactly what you've said: we dedicated resources to develop a single (or few) libraries. Yet they still have flaws.

I don't believe the perfection-alone-model works, because there is no evidence that it does. So far we have evidence that every commercial-grade protocol and implementation has had some kind of security flaw. Therefore we need to stop believing that we can engineer our way out of the situation, because we haven't. We need a completely different and complementary approach. We need to better manage the risk of failure.

To me it doesn't matter why someone would choose a particular library over another, only that we don't all put our eggs in the one basket. The evidence suggests they're all going to fail at some point; it's only a matter of when.

let's be clear about a couple of things. one: our vision is designed by natural evolution, and staring continuously at objects only 0.5 to 1 metre away is not part of nature's remit. two: our vision *does not* deteriorate with age, it deteriorates with *misuse* or more specifically *lack* of use: more specifically *lack of training*. eyes have *muscles*. fail to train those muscles and guess what happens?

there is a guy who decided he did not want to be enlisted in the vietnam draft, so two weeks prior to the eye exam he borrowed some glasses from a friend who had terrible vision. the deterioration in his vision as a result was so poor that he failed the eye exam, and so was ineligible for the draft.

now, afterwards, he reasoned that if it took only two weeks to turn his vision so disastrously badly wrong, it would, logically, be perfectly reasonable to attempt some eye exercises to get his formerly perfect vision back. the result: after some experimentation with some exercises, he got his perfect vision back.

now aged over 70 years old this person - who has written a book about the exercises that keep your eyes healthy - has twenty FORTY vision.

why am i mentioning this?

because aged 10 i was given prescription glasses. i had discovered computers a few years beforehand and had begun to spend significant hours in front of computers. every few years, as required and advised, i returned to the opticians. my eyes - EVERY TIME I RETURNED - were described to be "worse than before".

so aged 10 i had something like - 0.5 diopters, but by aged 36 i had -4.0 in one eye, -3.5 in the other and an astigmatism on top of that of -1. i spent $USD 1,000 on two pairs of glasses: one was +1 diopters less than the other. driving to holland, in the dark, i wore the "distance" glasses for 15 minutes and got such a massive headache from them that i had to wear the "reading" glasses.

so that was 2005. i realised that, after being told by opticians at the time "oh, people who are short-sighted are used to seeing perfectly at long distance so we give them an extra -0.25 just to help", that the problem was that i was being given glasses each and every single time that were too strong, but not only that, that i was having my vision "corrected" to distance, was then looking at objects only 0.5 to 1.0 metres away and my eyes were AUTOMATICALLY ADJUSTING.

at some point i then made the stupid mistake of getting a 24in iMac. huge wide screen, i thought it was fantastic. except that over the next three years using it, because i was sitting (unavoidably) close to it, my eyes trained themselves to deal with the wide angle... by going *prism*.

now when i look rapidly to the left or right at any object a distance further away than 2 metres, i CANNOT FOCUS ON IT. i see double for a good couple of seconds. in the dark, lights over two metres away i cannot bring into focus at all. however if the object is only 0.5 to 1 metre away, i am able to *really rapidly* flick my eyes backwards and forwards, focussing successfully within fractions of a second, absorbing the information on-screen.

in other words, guess what? my eyes *keep adjusting* to the conditions that i put them through.

now i have stopped getting prescription glasses entirely: i am absolutely fed up with the ignorant optician industry screwing up my vision. if i go to an optician, they think they know better and they damn well don't. they tell you that your eyes deteriorate with age, but that is absolute rubbish: the muscles around your eyes are just like any other muscle: they need *exercise*.

so that's what this old guy advocates: eye exercise. several times a day, stop what you are doing and look in the distance for 8 to 10 minutes. if you want to get rid of short-sightedness, pick two objects, one just at the edge of your "blurry" vision and one just inside it. look at the first, look at the second, look at the first, look at the second - focus on each as you do so. then, move the two objects (your thumbs will do) ever so slightly further away. repeat the exercise. very quickly you will get a *CONSCIOUS* feel for what it takes for your eye muscles to "focus" in the distance and, importantly, you are *exercising* those muscles, making them stronger. those muscles will become more capable, and you *will* be able to control them, just like any other muscle. i've done this successfully: it took a couple of weeks, and i had improved vision.

now i've also taken up tennis, and i go every day for around 20 minutes or more, even just to hit a ball against a wall. it's enough to teach me the importance of looking after my eyes, as i don't like seeing two balls coming towards me, because i can't hit either of them.

so, to our anonymous writer, i tell you this: DO NOT get progressive glasses, for goodness sake. i assume you are already taking breaks (to look after your wrists): please when you get up, go outside and look in the distance. if you don't want to walk, sit out on the porch or at the window, and look down the street if you don't have a garden. get a smaller higher-resolution screen: i now have a macbook pro (which i instantly destroyed the proprietary spyware-ridden OS on and replaced it with debian), and it has a 13in 2560x1900 LCD. i run the standard xterm font (around 9pt) and it is doing my eyes a hell of a lot of good, forcing them to focus *clearly*. i make my eye muscles *work*. i now look at other screens and i notice all the faults! in fact this only took 4 hours. and, importantly, with the screen width being smaller i am not forcing my eyes to different focal lengths quite as badly as that 24in widescreen.

if you absolutely must use 2 or more screens, *please* consider getting 1280x1024 (4:3 aspect ratio) or 1600x1200 or whatever, or if you do lots of programming run the 16:9 screens at 9:16 (sideways) - GNU/Linux OSes can do this perfectly well. make the screens form an arc rather than a straight line: no matter where you sit they should be directly head-on.

the basic critical point of all this: please *exercise* your eyes. don't trust any optician that is ignorant of this simple fact. you know you need to give all your *other* muscles a work-out rather than sitting there in a chair all day: why would those in your eyes be any different? and if you don't do that, then is it any surprise that the lenses in your eyes become "stiff" as well?