Hmm. I am the person who created that Tumblr. I'm not trying to "debunk" anything. Just showing what it really is: sometimes it's nonsense, sometimes it's there's an amusing juxtaposition, sometimes it's a fun Easter Egg.
Tim Robinson, the man behind the Meccano construction you link to, is a trustee of the Plan 28 charity mentioned above.
You are quite correct that we have not built a single demo part. In the two years since I started talking about this project the following has happened:
1. Persuaded the Science Museum to digitize all of Babbage's plans and notebooks (this in itself was a non-trivial task involving a great deal of effort at all levels and they should be thanked for taking on the task).
2. Got the leading Babbage experts to join and work with me (Doron Swade who built the Difference Engine No. 2 and Tim Robinson)
3. Started a UK-based charity (again these things take time as there are legal requirements and the recruitment of a board of trustees)
4. Started research on the Babbage archive itself
5. Begun fund-raising.
No. 4 is non-trivial because there are literally thousands of pages of notes and > 230 large scale plans to decipher. Plus there's a hardware description language to work with. And the archive is not well documented. There are a number of different cross references that conflict with each other. I realize that all this stuff is boring and people would like to see an immediate result, but that's not going to happen. It's years of work to properly study this stuff and build a historically accurate machine.
Note that we have not proposed building the 1,000 memory location machine. That's far too much to demonstrate that it would work and would add to the cost and size. As for the number of parts, until we've deciphered all the plans and come up with a definitive plan that it's hard to answer but we believe there will be roughly 40,000 to 50,000 components to be made.
You are correct that I care about the PR side of things. I need to because I need to raise a substantial amount of money.
But it's far from all PR. There's now a registered British charity with a board of trustees and the pre-eminent Babbage expert, Doron Swade, who built the Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum is running the technical side of the project.
Study of the digitized plans has been underway since February and some first results will be announced this summer. We actively want to build a 3D working model in a tool like Autodesk.
I'm not saying your usage is erroneous. In some contexts it does make sense. This just isn't one of them. When you use language, you need to be sensitive to context, you can't just blinding plug in whatever definition suits you.
Unless you're in politics, of course...
Never ask any question here that essentially asks: "Am I shit because I use Windows?". You will always get plenty of "yes"'s here.
Fortunately, being a geek has nothing to do with what Slashdotters think of you.
Actually, the best way to fight piracy is to make a product pirates aren't interested in.
You are running a software built by said commercial 3rd-party company. They don't need that server in the middle to see all of those things.
So there's no increase in capability if they are malicious. There is an increase in risk if they are incompetent - and do something like cache requests/responses containing that data.
now you have steve watching every single thing you do on his computer, you will pay 130$ for service packs, and good luck getting parts or repair on that mac (which has a very high chance of failure within the first year)
Try using Apple HW instead of just bashing it. There are a lot of MB/MBP out there running MS crap because they are so reliable, and actually run software without machinations. Rating a new version of an OS as a service pack is ludicrous. Maybe you ought to actually use a permissions based OS before you run your keys the next time
My friend is way into horoscopes, and I point out to her a lot that horoscopes are actually, quite bogus. That they have some 80% accuracy rates because they don't get specific, and then people are forgetting some 80% of it anyways. So you're presented with a person, who is mostly recreating memories when thinking back about it, reinterpreting the facts to be more important, more significant and more potent than it was before.
Ah. Yeah, I understand you now. Sort of like the old wives’ tricks for telling whether you’re going to have a boy or a girl... people will swear by them, but in fact they’re bound to be correct 50% of the time, and people don’t remember the times they were wrong.
Terrible ideas. Just terrible.
Why?
In any event, hiding the dialogs when GIMP loses focus makes a hell of a lot more sense than dialogs that won’t minimize or hide at all. When I want to see the desktop, I want to see it without any stupid unhideable dialogs in the way.
They have made a single window mode available, that's what we're talking about.
I don’t want a single window mode. I want the things I mentioned. Unless I maximize the window, and then perhaps yes a single-window mode would be better than letting the floating palettes overlap the image window.
And we're all eager to enable whatever DRM Microsoft deems to push onto our computers. In the form of 'updates.' Oh joy.
Yes, we're really eager for that, and it's good that the self styled experts at Slashdot agree that it's in our best interest to bend over and smile whenever Redmond chooses to install whatever they wish.
If they disable the Internet access to their local community then we have less traffic to deal with. This, in my humble opinion, is a win for the rest of the enlightened world in the US
Air pollution is really making us pay through the nose.
