Perhaps this seems a bit extreme, but exactly WHY are these military computers even connected to the Internet? If it's really secret information, shouldn't they have their own network or just not put these things online?
Yes but a "cat brain" that operates at a thousand times the speed of a common house cat's will likely be able to learn how to out think us in shot order, mostly because it can use 100% of that 'brain" that it has, 24/7.
I completely agree. I think it would be easy for the BIOS to be cached someplace and in a state of being ready to go. Once you get the hardware set up, you put it into a locked mode where it assumes no hardware or major software changes. This would be especially useful on a laptop.
I bet this could lower POST times to 1-2 seconds. Even with a standard XP install, my boot process is 2/3 getting the hardware up and running and 1/3 booting windows(does this in about 30 seconds or so). ASUS board. Completely unreasonable.
If I had mod points right now, I'd give you them all.:) I've been looking for a proper version of the I-Ram like this for a year. It looks to be ideal for my needs.
$250 or so for the lower end model would be ideal. The other use for it would be to put the swap file on. A swap file like this would net a vast increase in speed and effectively be a cheap way to get around the 4GB limit with 32 bit OSes. This would be especially useful for a program like Photoshop - just toss the swap files on it and no more endless HD thrashing.
Just get an I-Ram and there you go. True, you'll only have a 4GB partition for your boot drive, but it's the real deal if you have to boot in 4 seconds. Yes, it's closer to 10-12 given the typical POST process, but since that varies from board to board, it is about 4 seconds total from the time Windows itself starts until it gets to the desktop.
When the 2.0 version someday comes out, it'll do 16GB, DDR2, and Sata 3.0. And I'll certainly buy one at that time.
By hard drive, obviously you mean "put data on hard drive - stick it in a closet.":)
Sometimes it's not obvious to people that we're talking about physically storing the actual drive in a powered-off state. Short of a house fire, the data will be there 20 years later, guaranteed. Note - your machine may have a hard time interfacing with it(try mounting a MFM drive), which is why a laptop drive in a USB case is a good idea, IMO.
Sadly to say, the 100 years nonsense is for pressed CDs like you get music and programs on. Burnable ones last maybe 5-10 years, tops. When you add in literal bit-rot due to fungi and so on that exist and love to eat worm-trails in the media surface itself... I've had CDs go bad in as little as a year or two. I constantly have to re-burn my media every couple of years. Thankfully the media density gets better, so I can toss an entire collection of CD-Rs onto 2-3 Blu-Rays and be done with it.
If you want it to be secure, the only viable solutions seem to be flash media or an old-school hard drive in storage. Thankfully the prices of both are affordable for your critical data. All of my critical data and installers and so on fits in a single 512MB flash drive. Toss that in a safe deposit box and forget about it.
But there is a problem with this idea. Turbo-diesels require highly refined and filtered fuel to run properly and not clog the injectors and filters. You would have to restrict it to non-turbocharged and non-injected engines to be able to use most of the homemade stuff. Thankfully there are a lot of them still around. Mercedes says that nearly 80% of all of the vehicles it's ever made are still on the road. You can't hardly go a mile in most towns without running across an old Mercedes diesel.
could you get in real life trouble for planning a nasty Ponzi/pyramid scheme within the game? (which does not violate the EULA in any way, I might add)?
Nope. As long as you are doing it with your own account and character, theft, bribery, stealing, or whatever else is okay as long as it's in-game. Obviously stealing someone's account or password, or taking this into the real world is a huge violation of the rules(and laws in most countries). But yes, you can scam and do pyramid schemes to your heart's content.
It weighs 1200KG(~2650lbs), so getting it trucked to remote places as an emergency shelter(they do this a lot in Canada and Alaska) or for workers. If you've seen that show Ice Road Truckers, you know what a major pain trucking shelters up to the middle of nowhere is. At just over a ton each, plus the fact that they are essentially self-leveling, these have many uses.
Oh - and for that application, a computer to run the "walking" could just be replaced with manual controls to get it level and then lock it in pace. Probably save 5-10K off of the cost as well.
Sixty replies, and still no wonder has speculated on the possibility of a Beowulf cluster? Changed days...
Seriously - is this a slow news day or what? It's a blade server-in-a-box. BT,DT, nothing new(and actually quite overpriced for what it is). The OP obviously didn't understand what they were looking at, and neither did the person who okayed this as being newsworthy.
Wow. We're so clever that we couldn't learn anything from aliens?
(looks around) Given the general lack of intelligence that Humanity seems to be demonstrating, I seriously don't think anything that they would teach us would sink in.
Wow. I've read hundreds of doomsday and off the wall ideas over the years, but this one is by far one of the most entertaining conspiracy theories that I've heard. Truly tinfoil-hat time.
That said, it's pretty clear that there are some incidents that look to be legitimate mixed in with all of the various piles of other junk. What they are, though... that's a whole other discussion. It's far more likely that they are actually the results of various secret programs. Doubly so since most "sightings" take place near military bases.
And even *if* they were aliens and they did exist, it's still not going to fix our economy, make gas cost $2 a gallon, or even take out the trash. Life goes on, and there's a zillion things to deal with and fix that are more important.
Obviously such a test is only valid if it includes other competitors as well. Most notably, Chrome/Iron (de-Googled/de-crufted Chrome). I've found that this is much faster than either Firefox or IE. It's a bit minimalistic in its approach, but that's good in a way, since it feels more like a typical *IX based app than a bunch of eye candy and bloat.
$200 a song can easily be arbitrated down to half or 1/4 of that amount that they would actually pay. Yes, it's excessive, but this alone sets a ceiling for such claims in the future. And every time that they accept less, they set that bar lower. I suspect that it'll end up being closer to $50 a song by the time this all blows over a few years from now. Yes, that is punitive, and hugely so, but it's never going to go down to the actual cost.
And, technically they DO have you dead to rights if you are file sharing music, as it is re-distributing music and the single purpose of the copyright is to give them the only legal right to distribute the music. But only for the files that you share. That's the tricky part, since their monitoring system doesn't seem to do a very good job of figuring that out.
MPG unfortunately only tells you how much fuel you use to go that distance, but it's a little trickier since the transmission has gears.
ie - imagine lumbering along at 1500rpm in 2nd. In theory, you'll get better mpg than 2000rpm in 5th gear. But you can't actually drive 30mph on the highway, and the ratios change so that 5th gear may actually be a true overdrive ratio. So each gear has its own best fuel economy. Obviously less time spent getting from point A to B is also important. You can't drive 30mph on the freeway, nor would you want to take hours to get anywhere.
Instant MPG calculations(most new cars have these things in the dash) get a bit odd when you're trying to hypermill your vehicle as well, since the fuel consumption is more closely related to a diesel. It uses a certain amount of fuel per hour, minimum, just to keep running. So time matters quite a lot. But few vehicles also give you a rating of how much fuel it uses per hour when idling.
Oh - my previous post - the confusing part was that I put mpg in instead of mph. It should have read:
60 mph for 60 minutes is 2 gallons used. 75mph for 48 minutes is 1.9 gallons.
This of course assumes that the gearing is affecting the mpg in a linear fashion, plus the MAF and TPS aren't above the RPM limits where they go from running lean to full rich. Wide open throttle or about 3000rpm on most 4 cylinder cars, as a rule - always stay below this if you can, as mpg will drop quickly.
This is why I also said to accelerate "smartly" with a manual - keep it in the 2500-3000rpm range if possible(but under WOT or where it goes full rich) and get to speed efficiently, then idle along. A lot of people waste fuel in manual cars by lugging the engine through gears, since there's a big difference between 30 seconds at 10mpg to get to 60mph versus 15 seconds by skipping gears at 8mpg.
Your engine is seriously unlikely to be so much more efficient at 2500rpm, compared to 1800 that it MORE than compensates for the extra drag at 85, rather than 60mph. ****
Not necessarily. You have to factor in how long the engine is running.
That is, say, 30mpg for 1 hour or 25 mpg for 48 minutes. There is a sweet spot where the factors of time and fuel used get their best values in relation to each other. 30 mpg for 60 minutes (60mph) is a 2 gallons used. 25mpg for 48 minutes (75mph) is 1.9 gallons.
This is why you get your best NET economy in top gear, because you're covering more distance per minute with about the same fuel economy. If your car has a tach, you can see where this breakpoint is. Watch the speed in top gear. At 50mph, then go to 55mph. It should be a fixed rpm change.(usually 200-300rpm) Go to 60 and watch the change. You'll see where it starts to diverge from this linear progression due to wind, tire friction, and other factors. Just before this is where you're covering the most ground per minute while using the same fuel per mile as at the lower speeds(relative to each other).
First off, the guy's site only lists data for one car - a Volvo sedan. Secondly, he doesn't mention whether it's an automatic or manual, though I suppose it's an automatic. That makes a huge difference, because what's happening at 35mph or so is that the torque converter is locking up and he's in fourth gear/overdrive. We're talking gearing so tall that 3500rpm or so, where it makes it maximum HP, it would be going somewhere well over 100mph. So 35 vs 55mph hardly makes a difference due to the mile high overdrive gear.
There are different ways to get maximum mpg: 1 - if you have an automatic, it's the exact speed where the torque converter locks up. This usually is in the 1300-1500rpm range for most cars. You want to accelerate as slowly as humanly possible and nudge it up to where the torque converter locks once it hits top gear.(usually about 35mph) Basically lug the engine like crazy and eek along. Time isn't a huge factor since the converter lets you lug the engine like a diesel.
2 - if you have a manual, it's top gear at lowest practical rpms while not lugging the engine or making the clutch slip. This means skipping gears when accelerating most of the time as well. You want to get up to that speed as quickly as possible without making the RPMS go over about 3000(throttle position sensor and egr goes into bypass mode and it just starts dumping more gas since air is already maxxed out) or hitting full throttle.
So you want to accelerate smartly in 2nd and 3rd, then go straight to top gear and back off. You want to go as fast as you can while keeping the fuel to mpg ratio the same while getting there as quickly as possible(since there's no torque converter and you can't lug the engine, there's a spot in top gear where you do a mile the quickest with the least fuel spent.
And it's different for every car. I had a Buick(automatic) that got maximum MPG at exactly 51mph. My 4Runner gets maximum mpg at exactly 67mph(manual transmission).
Beer or any carbonated beverage has a potential problem of the vibration causing a nearly instant release of all of the CO2 at once if the vibration is at the right frequency and/or is too long. It's actually a very ugly hazard, so it of course worries me.
But for mixing a suspension finely, settling precipitates out, or letting wine breathe more rapidly(which I suspect it is actually doing instead of "aging" it)...
Sure, anyone can train a smaller ship and be the low man on the totem pole. You can mine or be support or whatever, but to actually survive combat, you need a minimum of 6-9 months to get into the game. After that, there's not much difference between a 6-9 month character and a 4-5 year old one.
But the problem is that most players don't last 6 months worth of training and grinding before they move on. EVE has a shockingly high turnover rate due to the initial time-sink and how the 6-9 month+ players utterly punk the new guys in the 0-6 month range. Every time.
Shoot, to learn just your initial learning skills to GET it down to that 6 month pvp time instead of 10-12 months, you have to basically do nothing but train your status up. For a solid month.
It's quite honestly the slowest skill progression in any game that I've ever played. Even Astronest and other 4X type games where there's an enormous skill tree didn't take half a year to actually begin to be decent at the game. It's also one of the most brutal initial learning curves of any game as well and frankly, it scares off new players. There's no guide for it at Gamestop, there's no in-game explanations for half of it, character generation is a joke in how it tells you almost nothing about what skills are important, and the sheer number of choices are mind-boggling.
As for shards, well, the reality is that it works exactly like a zoned game, because every time you ove between systems, it might as well BE moving to another one. The game is good, but it's also hugely slow and laggy. It clearly wasn't designed for more than about 10K players at a time.
agree that a PvP spec character requires 6-9 months. But from there its only another 3 months to be fully specced on any one class of ship (T2 cruisers for a race). Once you get up and going with PvP, you're most of the way there. ****
Absolute rubbish.
Sure, you can physically fly the ship, but you need shields, armor, guns and ammo, targeting, repairers, warp scramblers, energy and CPU efficiency skills to FIT them - stock can't fit half of them... there are literally 20+ skills that you need to even fly it.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps this seems a bit extreme, but exactly WHY are these military computers even connected to the Internet? If it's really secret information, shouldn't they have their own network or just not put these things online?
Yes but a "cat brain" that operates at a thousand times the speed of a common house cat's will likely be able to learn how to out think us in shot order, mostly because it can use 100% of that 'brain" that it has, 24/7.
"Do nothing"
After applying CIS and corporate-speak filters:
"Aw man, do I have to get up and actually program some code?"
I completely agree. I think it would be easy for the BIOS to be cached someplace and in a state of being ready to go. Once you get the hardware set up, you put it into a locked mode where it assumes no hardware or major software changes. This would be especially useful on a laptop.
I bet this could lower POST times to 1-2 seconds. Even with a standard XP install, my boot process is 2/3 getting the hardware up and running and 1/3 booting windows(does this in about 30 seconds or so). ASUS board. Completely unreasonable.
If I had mod points right now, I'd give you them all. :) I've been looking for a proper version of the I-Ram like this for a year. It looks to be ideal for my needs.
$250 or so for the lower end model would be ideal. The other use for it would be to put the swap file on. A swap file like this would net a vast increase in speed and effectively be a cheap way to get around the 4GB limit with 32 bit OSes. This would be especially useful for a program like Photoshop - just toss the swap files on it and no more endless HD thrashing.
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Storage/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2678&ProductName=i-RAM%20BOX
Just get an I-Ram and there you go. True, you'll only have a 4GB partition for your boot drive, but it's the real deal if you have to boot in 4 seconds. Yes, it's closer to 10-12 given the typical POST process, but since that varies from board to board, it is about 4 seconds total from the time Windows itself starts until it gets to the desktop.
When the 2.0 version someday comes out, it'll do 16GB, DDR2, and Sata 3.0. And I'll certainly buy one at that time.
By hard drive, obviously you mean "put data on hard drive - stick it in a closet." :)
Sometimes it's not obvious to people that we're talking about physically storing the actual drive in a powered-off state. Short of a house fire, the data will be there 20 years later, guaranteed. Note - your machine may have a hard time interfacing with it(try mounting a MFM drive), which is why a laptop drive in a USB case is a good idea, IMO.
Sadly to say, the 100 years nonsense is for pressed CDs like you get music and programs on. Burnable ones last maybe 5-10 years, tops. When you add in literal bit-rot due to fungi and so on that exist and love to eat worm-trails in the media surface itself... I've had CDs go bad in as little as a year or two. I constantly have to re-burn my media every couple of years. Thankfully the media density gets better, so I can toss an entire collection of CD-Rs onto 2-3 Blu-Rays and be done with it.
If you want it to be secure, the only viable solutions seem to be flash media or an old-school hard drive in storage. Thankfully the prices of both are affordable for your critical data. All of my critical data and installers and so on fits in a single 512MB flash drive. Toss that in a safe deposit box and forget about it.
But there is a problem with this idea. Turbo-diesels require highly refined and filtered fuel to run properly and not clog the injectors and filters. You would have to restrict it to non-turbocharged and non-injected engines to be able to use most of the homemade stuff. Thankfully there are a lot of them still around. Mercedes says that nearly 80% of all of the vehicles it's ever made are still on the road. You can't hardly go a mile in most towns without running across an old Mercedes diesel.
I can't imagine customers putting up with this sort of thing for very long, especially in a business environment.
Oops - you didn't pay... your entire business goes dead.
Open source never looked so good.
(and apparently the new Linux version just out shows how the gap is rapidly shrinking)
could you get in real life trouble for planning a nasty Ponzi/pyramid scheme within the game? (which does not violate the EULA in any way, I might add)?
Nope. As long as you are doing it with your own account and character, theft, bribery, stealing, or whatever else is okay as long as it's in-game. Obviously stealing someone's account or password, or taking this into the real world is a huge violation of the rules(and laws in most countries). But yes, you can scam and do pyramid schemes to your heart's content.
Though, most people are wise to it by now...
As usual, the original posting doesn't link to the actual site.
http://www.n55.dk/
There is a lot of good information about the group of designers and more about the structure itself.
http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/WALKINGHOUSE/walkinghouse.html
Several pages plus more pictures of it.
It weighs 1200KG(~2650lbs), so getting it trucked to remote places as an emergency shelter(they do this a lot in Canada and Alaska) or for workers. If you've seen that show Ice Road Truckers, you know what a major pain trucking shelters up to the middle of nowhere is. At just over a ton each, plus the fact that they are essentially self-leveling, these have many uses.
Oh - and for that application, a computer to run the "walking" could just be replaced with manual controls to get it level and then lock it in pace. Probably save 5-10K off of the cost as well.
Sixty replies, and still no wonder has speculated on the possibility of a Beowulf cluster? Changed days...
Seriously - is this a slow news day or what? It's a blade server-in-a-box. BT,DT, nothing new(and actually quite overpriced for what it is). The OP obviously didn't understand what they were looking at, and neither did the person who okayed this as being newsworthy.
Wow. We're so clever that we couldn't learn anything from aliens?
(looks around) Given the general lack of intelligence that Humanity seems to be demonstrating, I seriously don't think anything that they would teach us would sink in.
My take is that any planet with sufficiently advanced and varied life on it is going to have something bipedal.
Technically, it would tend to be symmetrical along at least one axis. Not necessarily bipedal.
Wow. I've read hundreds of doomsday and off the wall ideas over the years, but this one is by far one of the most entertaining conspiracy theories that I've heard. Truly tinfoil-hat time.
That said, it's pretty clear that there are some incidents that look to be legitimate mixed in with all of the various piles of other junk. What they are, though... that's a whole other discussion. It's far more likely that they are actually the results of various secret programs. Doubly so since most "sightings" take place near military bases.
And even *if* they were aliens and they did exist, it's still not going to fix our economy, make gas cost $2 a gallon, or even take out the trash. Life goes on, and there's a zillion things to deal with and fix that are more important.
You beat me to it. :)
Obviously such a test is only valid if it includes other competitors as well. Most notably, Chrome/Iron (de-Googled/de-crufted Chrome). I've found that this is much faster than either Firefox or IE. It's a bit minimalistic in its approach, but that's good in a way, since it feels more like a typical *IX based app than a bunch of eye candy and bloat.
$200 a song can easily be arbitrated down to half or 1/4 of that amount that they would actually pay. Yes, it's excessive, but this alone sets a ceiling for such claims in the future. And every time that they accept less, they set that bar lower. I suspect that it'll end up being closer to $50 a song by the time this all blows over a few years from now. Yes, that is punitive, and hugely so, but it's never going to go down to the actual cost.
And, technically they DO have you dead to rights if you are file sharing music, as it is re-distributing music and the single purpose of the copyright is to give them the only legal right to distribute the music. But only for the files that you share. That's the tricky part, since their monitoring system doesn't seem to do a very good job of figuring that out.
MPG unfortunately only tells you how much fuel you use to go that distance, but it's a little trickier since the transmission has gears.
ie - imagine lumbering along at 1500rpm in 2nd. In theory, you'll get better mpg than 2000rpm in 5th gear. But you can't actually drive 30mph on the highway, and the ratios change so that 5th gear may actually be a true overdrive ratio. So each gear has its own best fuel economy. Obviously less time spent getting from point A to B is also important. You can't drive 30mph on the freeway, nor would you want to take hours to get anywhere.
Instant MPG calculations(most new cars have these things in the dash) get a bit odd when you're trying to hypermill your vehicle as well, since the fuel consumption is more closely related to a diesel. It uses a certain amount of fuel per hour, minimum, just to keep running. So time matters quite a lot. But few vehicles also give you a rating of how much fuel it uses per hour when idling.
Oh - my previous post - the confusing part was that I put mpg in instead of mph. It should have read:
60 mph for 60 minutes is 2 gallons used. 75mph for 48 minutes is 1.9 gallons.
This of course assumes that the gearing is affecting the mpg in a linear fashion, plus the MAF and TPS aren't above the RPM limits where they go from running lean to full rich. Wide open throttle or about 3000rpm on most 4 cylinder cars, as a rule - always stay below this if you can, as mpg will drop quickly.
This is why I also said to accelerate "smartly" with a manual - keep it in the 2500-3000rpm range if possible(but under WOT or where it goes full rich) and get to speed efficiently, then idle along. A lot of people waste fuel in manual cars by lugging the engine through gears, since there's a big difference between 30 seconds at 10mpg to get to 60mph versus 15 seconds by skipping gears at 8mpg.
There is a group in Europe that is distributing Chrome minus all of the ills and Google junk. It's vastly better.
http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php
Chrome Vs Iron
http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php
Clear win, IMO. Open source made this possible - and in only a couple of months.
Your engine is seriously unlikely to be so much more efficient at 2500rpm, compared to 1800 that it MORE than compensates for the extra drag at 85, rather than 60mph.
****
Not necessarily. You have to factor in how long the engine is running.
That is, say, 30mpg for 1 hour or 25 mpg for 48 minutes. There is a sweet spot where the factors of time and fuel used get their best values in relation to each other. 30 mpg for 60 minutes (60mph) is a 2 gallons used. 25mpg for 48 minutes (75mph) is 1.9 gallons.
This is why you get your best NET economy in top gear, because you're covering more distance per minute with about the same fuel economy. If your car has a tach, you can see where this breakpoint is. Watch the speed in top gear. At 50mph, then go to 55mph. It should be a fixed rpm change.(usually 200-300rpm) Go to 60 and watch the change. You'll see where it starts to diverge from this linear progression due to wind, tire friction, and other factors. Just before this is where you're covering the most ground per minute while using the same fuel per mile as at the lower speeds(relative to each other).
First off, the guy's site only lists data for one car - a Volvo sedan. Secondly, he doesn't mention whether it's an automatic or manual, though I suppose it's an automatic. That makes a huge difference, because what's happening at 35mph or so is that the torque converter is locking up and he's in fourth gear/overdrive. We're talking gearing so tall that 3500rpm or so, where it makes it maximum HP, it would be going somewhere well over 100mph. So 35 vs 55mph hardly makes a difference due to the mile high overdrive gear.
There are different ways to get maximum mpg:
1 - if you have an automatic, it's the exact speed where the torque converter locks up. This usually is in the 1300-1500rpm range for most cars. You want to accelerate as slowly as humanly possible and nudge it up to where the torque converter locks once it hits top gear.(usually about 35mph) Basically lug the engine like crazy and eek along. Time isn't a huge factor since the converter lets you lug the engine like a diesel.
2 - if you have a manual, it's top gear at lowest practical rpms while not lugging the engine or making the clutch slip. This means skipping gears when accelerating most of the time as well. You want to get up to that speed as quickly as possible without making the RPMS go over about 3000(throttle position sensor and egr goes into bypass mode and it just starts dumping more gas since air is already maxxed out) or hitting full throttle.
So you want to accelerate smartly in 2nd and 3rd, then go straight to top gear and back off. You want to go as fast as you can while keeping the fuel to mpg ratio the same while getting there as quickly as possible(since there's no torque converter and you can't lug the engine, there's a spot in top gear where you do a mile the quickest with the least fuel spent.
And it's different for every car. I had a Buick(automatic) that got maximum MPG at exactly 51mph. My 4Runner gets maximum mpg at exactly 67mph(manual transmission).
Beer or any carbonated beverage has a potential problem of the vibration causing a nearly instant release of all of the CO2 at once if the vibration is at the right frequency and/or is too long. It's actually a very ugly hazard, so it of course worries me.
But for mixing a suspension finely, settling precipitates out, or letting wine breathe more rapidly(which I suspect it is actually doing instead of "aging" it)...
Sure, anyone can train a smaller ship and be the low man on the totem pole. You can mine or be support or whatever, but to actually survive combat, you need a minimum of 6-9 months to get into the game. After that, there's not much difference between a 6-9 month character and a 4-5 year old one.
But the problem is that most players don't last 6 months worth of training and grinding before they move on. EVE has a shockingly high turnover rate due to the initial time-sink and how the 6-9 month+ players utterly punk the new guys in the 0-6 month range. Every time.
Shoot, to learn just your initial learning skills to GET it down to that 6 month pvp time instead of 10-12 months, you have to basically do nothing but train your status up. For a solid month.
It's quite honestly the slowest skill progression in any game that I've ever played. Even Astronest and other 4X type games where there's an enormous skill tree didn't take half a year to actually begin to be decent at the game. It's also one of the most brutal initial learning curves of any game as well and frankly, it scares off new players. There's no guide for it at Gamestop, there's no in-game explanations for half of it, character generation is a joke in how it tells you almost nothing about what skills are important, and the sheer number of choices are mind-boggling.
As for shards, well, the reality is that it works exactly like a zoned game, because every time you ove between systems, it might as well BE moving to another one. The game is good, but it's also hugely slow and laggy. It clearly wasn't designed for more than about 10K players at a time.
agree that a PvP spec character requires 6-9 months. But from there its only another 3 months to be fully specced on any one class of ship (T2 cruisers for a race). Once you get up and going with PvP, you're most of the way there.
****
Absolute rubbish.
Sure, you can physically fly the ship, but you need shields, armor, guns and ammo, targeting, repairers, warp scramblers, energy and CPU efficiency skills to FIT them - stock can't fit half of them... there are literally 20+ skills that you need to even fly it.
Otherwise, it's a fancy flying tin can. Joy.