Insount - Slashdot User

How To Kill an Open Source Project With New Funding 187

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday October 03, 2008 @02:25PM from the money-still-the-root-of-all-evil dept.

mir42 writes "The OpenSource multimedia authorware project Sophie, formerly hosted by USC Los Angeles, may just have been killed by new funding. The original funding organization, Mellon Foundation, approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company based on their proposal, which is simply an exact description, including the UI and the artwork, of the current Sophie. Being an OpenSource project, this isn't strictly illegal, but let's say, not nice and definitely not innovative, coming from a former sub-sub-contractor on the project. Some of the original, now laid-off developers started OpenSophie.org trying to salvage the project. As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow, it might just be enough to alienate all potential users of Sophie to the point that nobody will even try to use the next version. Have others faced similar situations? How would you deal with a situation like this?"

Comment Sanity check (Score 1) 337

by Insount on Monday February 06, 2006 @09:03PM (#14656068) Attached to: HOWTO, Cook an Egg With Your Cell Phone

a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg

OK, let's do the math. How much energy does it take to boil an egg? Let's say a "large free range egg" weighs 100g. The egg proteins start coagulating at around 65 degrees celsius, i.e., about 40 degrees above room temperature. Heating up the egg by this much would take 100g*40deg = 4000 calories, by definition of calorie, assuming an egg has specific heat close to that of water (actually it's slightly lower). Converting to joule, that's 4000*4.185 = 16739 joule. Since Watt is joule per second, two 2W transmitters will take 16739/(2*2) seconds, i.e., 69 minutes, to output that amount of energy.

So even under ideal conditions and perfect efficiency, it will take the described setup over an hour (rather than "three minutes") to output sufficient energy. Of course, during that time the egg would give up heat to its environment; and anyway, only a tiny portion of the radiation will be absorbed by the egg (most energy won't even radiate in the egg's direction). Realistically, the egg will never heat up by more than a few degrees.

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