Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 16:30:33 +0100 From: des@ofug.org (Dag-Erling =?iso-8859-1?q?Sm=F8rgrav?=) To: David Kelly <dkelly@HiWAAY.net> Cc: Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: When does it make sense for a company to open-source its code? Message-ID: <xzpfzpncorq.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> In-Reply-To: <200303152025.23590.dkelly@HiWAAY.net> (David Kelly's message of "Sat, 15 Mar 2003 20:25:23 -0600") References: <20030315225844.GA72313@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <200303152025.23590.dkelly@HiWAAY.net>
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David Kelly <dkelly@HiWAAY.net> writes: > If I'm not mistaken, the I/O hardware for the data collection industry > has pretty much unified and standardized on clones of National > Intruments products? And somehow/someway yours differ? No, he said their system was based on GPIB which is the de facto standard you referred to - but GPIB is not much more than a physical interface and (possibly) a transport protocol. What you do with the data is a whole 'nother cup of tea. For instance, quite often you need to repeat the same experiment or analysis over and over again with different samples and / or slightly different parameters, so you want some kind of GUI that controls the hardware, shows a summary of the results, tells the operator to "insert next sample and press any key to continue", possibly even automates changing the parameters for every run. Such a GUI can make the difference between three and thirty experiments a day, which can be make-or-break for the user (a friend of mine used to work for *the one* lab that analyses soil and manure samples from *all of Norway* every spring, you can imagine the kind of pressure they're under when farmers depend on those results to determine the kind and amount of fertilizers they will need for that year's crop) DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@ofug.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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