You might look at some game engines, they have decent GUI's these days and are designed to handle large data sets. They usually have multi-lingual support also so you can work in a few languages.

I did a few projects in Irrlicht and ogre3d and was really impressed - I was able to work in Java, C# and C++ in the same project with some work and message passing.

Good luck

Don't get me wrong - I love the idea of a wide-open creative environment. But I'm also a software developer who has worked in science, journalism and various businesses - and when you're marketing a message to business you have to understand the mentality and value of productivity.

You can't market a product as a creative environment to general business period. They will buy two for their marketing and graphics departments. That's it. Apple labored for years to move the Mac from a creative product to a consumer product. Same thing with Commodore Amiga, and thousands of other great products.

Most businesses operate essentially as habitual processes - they do something over and over again and make money. The lasting businesses out there have learned to adapt and change these habits, but it's incremental and slow.

If you want to sell into a business, you need to have a base of functionality that supports those habitual processes. I'm not sure how that would be for the Courier, but hopefully you can see my point.

I got out before interconnect became monetized - we looked up numbers by prefix and shot those messages out by email to the subscribers's gateway. Obviously, this was before number portability... I didn't realize they were charging so much for interconnect!

Agreed - during my worst sinus infections I crave Thai food and horseradish.

The only thing medicinally that has worked for me is the cortisone shot, but that's not a viable long-term solution.

It was a disaster waiting to happen. While it was certainly cool in the eye-candy department, it relied heavily on handwriting recognition which is still pretty bad. Until you can OCR 99% of the handwriting out there, this is way too cumbersome to have to fix mistakes every few words.

Secondly, the journal is cool and all - but how do you index all that information? An interface that uses handwriting naturally penalizes the tagging of that information. Secondly,there didn't seem to be a way to organize journals into folders and books - I don't want random friends going through my creative thought stream or notes about my bank loan. A bit of common sense security would have gone a long way.

Lastly, Courier relied heavily on free-form design and data management. This appeals greatly to artist and visual type folks, but the other 50% of people out there want to have forms, tables and structure. Adding the ability to build structure would have greatly enhanced the experience.

I prefer "I lerve you!" myself...

That's not true at all - I've built messaging systems in telecom and delivering texts reliably and swiftly is a fairly large proposition. First, there's protocol gateways that must interconnect with wireless, email and web systems. Secondly, there's the network of fault-tolerent messaging systems that are custom-developed and maintained by a team of developers and network admins. These systems are spread out geographically and are expected to be available 100% of the time.

The texting load is actually pretty small, peaking around 2600 texts/second in a large metropolitan area. But delivering a message reliably means that you need on-site staff and equipment designed for reliability.

That said - it sure as hell isn't worth 25 a pop. I think 5 or 10 cents would be pretty high. As it is, texting is pretty much gravy profit.

You are (mostly) correct, sir. However, message passing is certainly being used on all new developments rather than IPC. Certainly there has been a long-term adherence to RTOS development in military avionics, but commercial avionics has moved strongly to VM based systems as the recovery is faster and debugging critical software components is easier. Additionally, hardware can be allowed to advance without requiring total rewrites for software.

I've already seen java run on the F-35 platform - and I'm pretty sure you'll see much more as time goes.

I attended 10 different public/private schools between kindergarten and college. The only two maybe's from that list are #2 and #3. The first one suffers from too many unknowns concerning testing regimes and near-term exposure of material. It doesn't capture long-term education and it doesn't factor in differences between language and culture - they're just scores.

I can only speak as a student, as I attended some of the worst schools in the area, but I also attended a couple of top-ten schools ranked in the nation. I will not "name names" because that would simply distract from what I see as commonalities of good schools.

First, parental involvement. You need parents at the school through high school. You need parents at home that expect study and work from their kids. I *don't* think most parents should be teaching, but as aids and cafeteria help they are a watchful eye. They also free-up money for more teachers and materials. Parents should have a background check done, they should be qualified to be in the environment, and they should have to take a few classes on behavior and expectations.

Secondly, standardized scores are meaningless until about 9th or 10th grade. In fact, many schools that feed into high-ranking high schools have mediocre to low scores. The reason is that young children have **varied abilities and different strengths** - schools that "teach to the test" are wasting valuable time to only teach a subset of abilities that will earn good marks. Those high-income, lower scoring schools could give a shit less about funding and instead use the class time for individual learning.

Third, teacher-student ratios DO matter, but only through middle school. If you want to grow an amazing student body, then throw all your resources at the elementary schools. If there is any place where you truly need individual attention - it is in elementary school. If you want your students to acquire the skills to succeed, throw your money at elementary school. Kids at that age are desperate to learn, they are information sponges. But they also need lots of art classes, sports and playtime. Having a bunch of jittery kids with no emotional outlets is bad.

Lastly, high school should be *hard*. Earning a degree should require effort and challenge. A great majority of schools don't teach ANYTHING the last two years. Students should be allowed to track into subjects that matter to them and go as far as possible. At my "top-ten" school, in the last two years we were given two open-curriculum classes which were all project/result based. Teachers were allowed to move the proverbial ball as far as they wanted - and it was great. Students picked from a list of topics and we were allowed to study as far as possible - at the end we turned in notes, reports and projects to earn grades.

We know a great deal about memory and learning from neurology and the psycho sciences. For instance, we know that memorizing things *CONTRARILY* requires us to nearly forget things. If you've ever learned a language, you know that you can't bang your head on vocabulary in one day - you must do it once, take time away and then experience it again in hours, then days, and then weeks. Yet our materials and teaching style still has kids banging their heads. Why?

Our curriculums are designed to move through a set of information - and kids often wait a WHOLE YEAR to see the subject material again. It's no wonder that THEY DON'T LEARN IT. Basic knowledge of how we learn tells us that ramping and repetition are the keys to retention. Unit studies should be spread out and scattered through the year. Vocabulary tests should have the difficult words from weeks before until they get it. Vocabulary tests should happen daily, on a computer, where they can track results and rapidly move students forward.

We have computers for god's sake! Teachers should be keeping detailed track of positive and negative retention question-by-question. Students should have their retention times quantified and they should be tracked together in groups. How often have people said they "don't remember anything" from their classes - well that's because their memory was good enough to hold information until the test, after which they promptly forgot it. That's not education.

Lastly math education is just pissy and awful. I can teach *ANY* kindergartener multiplication in week. My 6th grader knows 50 different detailed football plays, but has trouble with word problems. The problem is that we don't teach our kids about sets, time, probability, and patterns progressions. Most importantly, we don't teach them classic logic from a young age. How many test questions have you seen which require ANY thinking beyond rote memorization or single-step outcomes? Problem solving requires imagining the outcomes from several possibilities - this is classical logic. It doesn't have to be Aristotle, but some quality philosophy and logic should be given in middle school and up.

Lastly, if your child is doing badly in school, it should be required that you sit in on classes for a time. Parents most importantly need to know what and how their child is doing or not doing. They should also shut up and observe - no helicopter parenting allowed. What matters here is that parents can see how their children act, how they learn, and how they can contribute.

Spock out...

There's hardware to deal with that - a watchdog timer can reboot the system quickly.

Assuming the system comes back up with a working CPU and RAM, then the main computer should be able to work around bad peripheral or components on the bus. I think that's what the article is getting at.

On military aircraft, they use VM's to run the OS and software. Communicate between systems is passed synchronously and requires that each module know the state of the other modules. There is never an assumption that the other system will just work - all messages require acknowledgement and verification of results.