Domain: astahost.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to astahost.com.
Comments · 9
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Re:I have a special relativity simulatorIf you want something newer there are a few other options:
Real time relativity is fairly complete and free, but limited to a moving observer in a static world
http://realtimerelativity.org/
Relspace is unfortunately commercial. It seems to be more intent on showing you what space looks like than educating on the concepts of SR, so accelerations are limited to extremely huge rather than insanely huge:
http://www.relspace.astahost.com/
My own (incomplete and probably still slightly incorrect) offering, based on html 5
http://schroedingers-hat.github.com/jsphys/jsphys.html
If you would be interested in collaborating on something that shows some general relativistic effects at some point in the future, I'm all ears.
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Epic quality of the failure not just epic quantity
where exactly is the ps3 a top seller? not here: http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/npd-1108-a.png
M$ "me-too" entry in the console market continues in last place, sixth out of six as of August 2009:
- 01 Nintendo Wii - 95,357
- 02 Nintendo DS - 85,737
- 03 PlayStation Portable - 33,049
- 04 PlayStation 3 - 8760
- 05 PlayStation 2 - 3617
- 06 Xbox 360 - 3552
PS2, PSP, and PS3 fluctuate a bit, but Wii keeps climbing albeit not steadily.
The Red Ring o Death we all passed in the stores whenever Xbox was on display is only minor compared to the quality and duration of the eipc failure. The M$ console hardware failures have been around forever, on about as long as the unit has been on the market. It's not just bricked units and years of scotched discs. It's been four or five years of property damage and even occasional injury and death, with fires in many countries.
But, hey, if defective M$ hardware burns down your family, it's your fautlt. To be fair M$ is right about that: The buyers were warned in prior to purchase by the M$ brand clearly marked on the packaging. C'mon, M$ hardware is as poor as M$ software. The fault lies with those who decided to deploy xbox instead of one of the top-selling game consoles like Wii, PS2, or PS3.
Games are optional. Other activities are not. At some point families will ask the courts to ask how hospitals decided to deploy M$ products like C#-based gewgaws or for-novelty-purposes-only systems like XP on the desktop or server instead of functinal Java- or Python-based applications or systems actually designed for a networked environemnt, such as Solaris and Linux. The Microsofot brand is a warning, those who ignore that warning and deploy the product anyway are in the wrong. Multiple counts of { voluntary | criminally negligent } manslaughter. Who goes to the gas chamber, the techs deploying the known defective technology or the administrators who bullied them into doing so? "Just following orders" is not a valid defense for any politically motivated group, even one with heavy marketing and lobbying.
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Re:The whole thing is sillyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_xp_tablet_pc_edition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOW64 Windows 64 bit edition it has to say
...Similar to previous alternate architecture ports of Windows (Windows NT 4.0 for PowerPC, MIPS R4x00, and Alpha) Windows XP 64-Bit Edition can run lower-bit-depth (in this case standard x86 32-bit) applications through its WOW64 (Windows-on-Windows 64 bit) emulation layer. While the original Itanium processor contains an on-chip IA-32 decoder, it was deemed far too slow for serious use (running at about 400 MHz), so Microsoft and Intel wrote a software 32 to 64 bit translator dubbed the IA-32 Execution Layer. It allows real time translation of x86 32 bit instructions into IA-64 instructions, allowing 32 bit applications to run (albeit significantly slower than native code).
About its replacement XP Pro 64 bit edition
Known issues There are some common issues that arise with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Driver compatibility; Only 64 bit kernel mode drivers are supported. This means that devices for which there are no 64 bit Windows XP drivers available cannot be used. This includes a lot of common hardware, but the amount of unsupported hardware is falling due to the proliferation of x64 Vista. Any 32 bit Windows Explorer extension fails to work with 64 bit Windows Explorer. Explorer is a 64 bit program, so it cannot load a 32 bit DLL. However, Windows XP x64 Edition also ships with the 32 bit explorer.exe, which can be used as the user's default shell with a registry change. 16 bit programs will not run, the AMD64/Intel64 architecture supports this (16-bit programs on 64-bit operating systems) but Microsoft couldn't fully support this. Unfortunately some 32 bit software have 16 bit installers, so special support for some specific installers was added (ACME Setup versions 2.6, 3.0, 3.01, and 3.1 and InstallShield versions 5.x). Command prompts will not load in full-screen. This is also true of Windows Vista in both 32 and 64 bit editions. Does not contain a Web Extender Client component for Web Folders (WebDAV). Some installers refuse to install to anything other than 32 bit XP, even though the product runs perfectly on x64.
As to compatibility problems, the internet is full of articles complaining about them: http://www.astahost.com/info.php/Windows-Xp-64-Compatibility-Problems_t13042.html http://desktop.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=25631 and on and on - just google it.
You'll probably blame the developers of the packages. I blame the entire way Microsoft approaches Windows evolution and setting clear standards, guidance and direction - at least as far as the desktop market is concerned. From the first day Windows was released until now, they have let chaos reign. Their few attempts at enforcing some order, e.g. signing and certification, were undermined because they approached more as a marketing strategy than an engineering one.
When Microsoft introduced DLL's why didn't it occur to them to require that each version be identified? Did they not know that software changes and new versions are released? Why can any installer overwrite the registry entries of other products? Why are products allowed to overwrite the operating system supplied DLLs? All of these issues and their solutions were well known in the industry save Microsoft.
At least they eventually figured out that their enterprise server operating systems should no longer be compromised by consumer based decisions like when they compromised NT 4.0 by this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc750820.aspx
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Re:IT is a customer service group
WHOA, Whoa, whoa... You have SMS and wake on lan enabled and working and you can't get a simple batch file to remotely shut down the computers? Something is wrong with that; shutting down the computer is the EASY part.
First google result: http://www.astahost.com/info.php/shut-down-restart-log-off-xp-using-batch-file_t3715.html -
Re:They found it
Or in a pinch the could use Governmentium which is so dense I doubt even the heat of Magma would be able to move it. And of course as a nice bonus if they blow all their money they can then use the Governmentium to bail themselves out. It's a win/win!
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Re:Le tranziggle
Doesnt sound so absurd if you playa thizzay Googles algorithm is based solely on stochastic measures, witout applyn too much linguistics n shit. Like, dictionizzles like old skoo` shiznit . One, two three and to tha four. They sure as hizzy hizzy one, but its probably only anotha weight in a complex system.
Unfortunatizzles thats tha only link I could find regardn thiznat 2005 contest which Google won . Yizouse a flea n Im tha big dogg. Theyre probably still tha best... http://www.astahost.com/googles-translatizzles [astahost.com]
Thizzles a problem wit tha linguistics in computatizzles linguistics:
"Every tizzle I fire a linguist, tha recognizzle rate goes up!" -- Jelinek, IBM 1988
Unfortunatizzles still true.
Of course, tha linguist wizzle tizzle you "theres a problem wit tha computatizzles in computatizzle linguistics". Nevermind thizzat linguist in tha hood . Keep'n it gangsta dogg. Hes probably wriznong :-P (beware of bizzle sarcasm) . Death row 187 4 life. -
Re:Le translation
Doesn't sound so absurd if you consider that Google's algorithm is based solely on stochastic measures, without applying too much linguistics. Like, dictionaries. They sure as hell have one, but it's probably only another weight in a complex system.
Unfortunately, that's the only link I could find regarding that 2005 contest which Google won. They're probably still the best... http://www.astahost.com/googles-translation-wins-hands-down-t11662.html
There's a problem with the linguistics in computational linguistics:
"Every time I fire a linguist, the recognition rate goes up!" -- Jelinek, IBM 1988
Unfortunately, still true.
Of course, the linguist will tell you "there's a problem with the computational in computational linguistics". Nevermind that linguist. He's probably wrong :-P (beware of biting sarcasm). -
Re:MythTV distros over-rated
Continuing my work...
I do see the myth libraries in the output of ldconfig -v, so that looks good.
I have to recreate the QTDIR and PATH changes in my console window tonight. If I'm successful with the build, I'll figure out how to make these changes permanent later - I'm sure there's some .conf file somewhere that defines these on startup.
syd@test:~/Desktop/mythsource/mythtv-0.20.2$ sudo make install
It worked! My problem last night? I just ran "make && make install". Make works fine with just that, because it's all in my home directory, but "make install" needs sudo because it's copying stuff into places I don't own. I think that's what I did wrong.
12. Because this machine had previously run MythTV from the Ubuntu distribution, I thought that MySQL was already set up correctly. I must be mistaken, because mythtv-setup dumps a bunch of errors to the console window, then the GUI that appears (yes, it appears!) says that MythTV can't connect to its database. Ok, I need to set that up too, apparently.
13. Hmm. I get Incorrect database name '/home/syd/Desktop/mythsource/mythtv-0.20.2/databa se/mc.sql'. I see that file at that location. I'm not sure what's incorrect about it. Ahh ok, from reading on the internet here:
http://www.astahost.com/cant-import-backup-sql-fil e-localhost-t15040.html
it seems that the mc.sql isn't the database. That's just a script that probably points to a different database, and that one has a problem with its name. Let's look inside mc.sql... Nothing looks too weird there. So the name of the database is mythconverg, it's supposed to create it if it's missing, and yet it complains that the name is wrong... Adding the -v verbose tag to the command doesn't help; nothing new is printed. Ok, from the mythtv.org howto, I try:
syd@test:~/Desktop/mythsource/mythtv-0.20.2/databa se$ mysql -u root -p mythconverg
This seems to work, giving me a mysql> prompt. I'll try manually executing all of the commands in the script and see what happens.
Ok I don't know. Every line executes on its own without problem, except the first one which I skipped because mysql seemed to indicate that the database did in fact exist. Is it done now?
It worked! mythtv-setup executes. Actually, there's nothing to set up; it still remembers all my setup and channels from when I had the package version installed.
14. /var/lib/mythtv/recordings/nfslockfile.lock: Permission denied
Unable to open lockfile!
Be sure that '/var/lib/mythtv/recordings' exists and that both
the directory and that file are writeable by this user.
Ok, fair enough. I'm in group mythtv, but the group has read-only access, not write access, to the two files already in that folder. Let me fix that... (I wish I could figure out how to sudo in the GUI to use the right-click "Properties" to fix this.) I think chmod is the file, but it's --help is less than useful. There are some options, then:
Each MODE is of the form `[ugoa]*([-+=]([rwxXst]*|[ugo]))+'.
Gee, that tells me nothing. Google search saves me.
syd@test:/var/lib/mythtv/recordings$ sudo chmod g+w *
That did it.
15. Well, we're almost there. I have video, but no sound. I had sound with the pre-built version, and I have sound on the system now, so it must be my mythtv configuration. Audio output device is set to ALSA: default. Aha! From the console output:
2007-08-29 19:32:10.156 Audio output device is set to an ALSA device but ALSA support is not compiled in!
2007-08-29 19:32:10.156 NVP: Disabling Audio, reason is: Unable to create AudioOutput.
It looks like my guide served me wrong with regard to what options to use. My only other options are dsp and dsp2. Let's see if they work.
dsp worked!
Ok, I'm already getting fewer prebuffering pauses than with the prebuilt setup, b -
Re:Your site is likely already compromised.
Maybe you shouldn't bother with the patches. If you're running any of the well-known PHP software, there's a good change your server has already been compromised by one or more such script kiddies.
I actually persuaded my business partner to authorise a 2-month long project to reimplement all the features we need from phpBB from scratch, rather than use original code, just for this reason. It didn't take much work to convince him that we didn't want the hassle of having to deal with regular 0-day exploit scripts in the wild.