I really want to make a dual Athlon system, but I am waiting for the 0.13 micron process Athlons. I'd like to have a system that doesn't need roaring loud fans, and two CPU chips that dissipate about 60 Watts each is a bit much heat!
I was wavering, almost considering breaking my "no Intel CPUs" rule, because the 0.13 micron version of the Pentium III is sweet. But Intel reminded me why I have that rule -- the 0.13 micron Pentium III was deliberately made incompatible with Socket 370 motherboards. I hate it when companies play those sort of stupid games.
When the 0.13 micron chips come out, they will crush the Pentium 4. Right now the best Athlon is neck and neck with the best Pentium 4, and the Pentium 4 has the benefit of a 0.13 micron process (i.e. a much higher clock rate).
0) I'm using an analog LCD monitor right now, and I'm content with the quality. It's a ViewSonic ViewPanel VG150, and you ought to be able to get one for under $400.
1) If you really want DVI, use the PCI slot in the SV24 for a PCI video card. I'd go with the PCI Radeon, personally.
How about using the USB ports for audio? You probably don't want a cheap pair of USB speakers, but perhaps just a box you can hook up from USB to your amplifier. A quick web search found one but of course I have no idea if it meets your quality needs. If this works, you could use any laptop with decent USB.
Perhaps you could get a small computer that has a PCI slot, such as a Shuttle SV24. Get a flat-screen display and a small keyboard and mouse, and then stick in your choice of high-quality PCI-based sound card. This plus a couple of carrying cases would be about as functional as a lunchbox portable, and a heck of a lot cheaper.
In short, you'd have to dust off the Saturn-V diagrams.
I like reading the sci.space.* newsgroups on USENET. Henry Spencer has discussed the idea of building more Saturn V rockets.
The problem is that blueprints only take you so far; there is a lot of know-how that was distributed among the various contractors who built the various pieces. All that know-how is irretrieveably lost. No one ever wrote down the special heat-treating process that made this part here strong enough, no one ever wrote down the custom jig used to machine that part there, etc.
So you really cannot build a Saturn V now. You would be starting all over from a design. And, says Henry Spencer, there is no reason to start all over from the Saturn V design; you would do just as well, or better, to start with a fresh design that made modern assumptions (like modern computers).
By the way, for similar reasons, you really cannot build a Space Shuttle orbiter now either. We already have as many orbiters as we will ever have; let's just hope no more of them explode.
If we ever do want to build a heavy-lift launcher, the correct way to do it is to announce that the US government will pay $X dollars per each heavy payload launched into space, and will commit to launching Y payloads. Then stand back and let the market work. NASA, as presently constructed, cannot pull off projects like building a new heavy-lift vehicle, at least not without spending an insane amount of money and running far over schedule.
The author Ann Rule does not have the domain annrule.com because someone registered it way back in 1996. The person who got it tried to shake her down for some bucks; she instead registered annrules.com. annrule.com goes to some sort of celebrity portal.
There was also the odd case of peta.org. Some guy registered peta.org, and set up a web site: People Eating Tasty Animals. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the somewhat more famous group with the initials PETA, objected to this. They contested the domain name and Network Solutions yanked the domain and handed it over to PETA.
Then there was my own sad story. I looked into who owns the domain name qv.org, and found that a web hosting company is sitting on it; they offered me a chance to take it over for a mere $1000. "It's one of the rare remaining 2-letter domain names," I was told. I suspect it will be a long time before anyone pays them $1000 for a.org name, 2-letter or no.
has anyone tried to make human-powered aircraft that uses multiple "human engines"?
No. Here is the problem: the airplane needs to hold itself together, hold itself in the sky, and hold its pilot in the sky. Two pilots mean more weight must be held in the sky. That means the plane must be stronger, which means it must be heavier. And, check out the wing span of the Raven: 115 feet wide! Add another pilot and you need more lift, i.e. even bigger wings! Finally, there are drive train issues: transferring power from both pilots into the propeller means more mechanical gears and stuff, which is bad; you want that stuff simple, and thus light.
On a bicycle, you do get economies of scale when you add extra people. The main thing that slows a bicycle down is air resistance, and two people on one bicycle are aerodynamically very efficient. Also, a quality two-person bike weighs a little less than two quality one-person bikes, which is another economy of scale.
Maybe they could upgrade to a Pentium and convinced Lance Armstrong to give it a try...
I know this is a joke, but just for your information, their pilot Mike Eddy is an excellent choice. He is shorter than average, and built of muscle, and a world-class cyclist. I don't think Lance Armstrong is shorter than average, so I don't think he would work as well as Mike Eddy!
The installation went ok, even if it was a bit confusing, until we got to XF86Config.
Ye flipping gods, what a nightmare that was.
[...]
Someone please do tell me if this is now easier with debian.
Yes and no. Debian still has the same installer it always had, and many folks feel this installer is not newbie-friendly. I know two people who tried it and hate it, but I do okay with it.
But the major part of your nightmare was getting XFree86 to work, and that has indeed gotten better. XFree86 version 4.x has much improved config files and much improved detection of hardware, and the Debian install takes advantage of this.
I would still say that most newbies should have a guru do the initial Debian install for them. Once it is installed, Debian is a joy to use and administer, especially with a high-speed connection to the Internet.
I do agree that the installer for Progeny is better, but that is only if it works. I had a friend run the Progeny installer, and when it tried to auto-detect his GeForce2 video card, it exploded, leaving Progeny half-installed. I should have scrubbed everything and just run the plain Debian installer from the beginning, but instead I installed aptitude and then went over all the packages by hand, fixing the configs or installing missing stuff, and it took forever. (When I was done he had a Woody system, not a Progeny system, because I changed his sources.list to point to a Debian mirror instead of to Progeny.)
Corel Linux, based on Debian but with a cool newbie-friendly graphical installer, also has a problem with GeForce video cards. Maybe 2.x fixed it, but with 1.x the graphical install would just hang, and there was no non-graphical installer! The official recommended workaround was to install some other video card Corel's installer could deal with, do the install, then swap in the GeForce and manually configure XFree86.
The plain-text Debian install starts to look better after the friendly ones bite you a few times. But the Mandrake installer starts to look even more better, because in my experience, it just works. If only we could get the Mandrake guys to port their installer to Debian!
Go back, read the articles linked above. No one noticed until very recently. The documentation had been in violation of the Debian guidelines for a long time, and no one noticed. Now someone noticed and said something. This gave Debian two choices: 0) knowingly violate their own guidelines; 1) decline to knowingly violate their own guidelines, even though this would make extra work for everyone. They chose not to violate their own guidelines.
The timing is unfortunate. It wasn't planned.
You know what's cool about Debian? The main core, the part they call "Free", is all free stuff. I can give copies to all my friends. I can run a business on it. I can change it. I can do anything I want with it (except distribute a changed version while not distributing the source). And you know what? I really like that. And it's because they have these guidelines, and they follow them, that they have a completely useful system that's completely free.
Do you already have all this equipment, or are you planning to kit out the room after you move in?
If you plan ahead, you ought to be able to set up with all the gear you need, without using too much power/making too much heat.
Start with one big Linux server. Equip it with a ridiculous amount of RAID storage: how about 3 or 4 80 GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration; that's 160 GB or 240 GB right there. Use a 2-processor SMP Socket A motherboard, and a couple of Athlon MP chips. (When the.13 micron version of the Athlon MP comes out, you can get a speed boost and a heat reduction in one go, so I'd get the cheapest Athlon MP chips available.) With that amount of CPU horsepower you can do Linux software RAID for free (just make sure each IDE drive has its own controller, i.e. only one drive per cable) and still have lots of power left over for running server software.
Now I assume you want some number of other computers for various purposes. At a minimum you want one firewall. If you want a server exposed to the net you really want two firewalls, with the net server behind one and your really big Linux server behind both firewalls (and the second one should be really locked down!). For these extra computers, you ought to look at using the Shuttle SV24, with a VIA C3 chip. The SV24 has little expansion capability, so it only has a little power supply, so it only makes a little heat. The C3 dissipates about as much power as a night light ( 7 Watts) typical and 11 Watts max according to the Via web site. You don't even need a fan on the heatsink: a simple passive heatsink is enough for a C3! For firewall use, put an extra net card in the single PCI slot on the SV24.
Because Linux can boot off a floppy (try that with Windows XP Professional Server sometime) you can set up the SV24 boxes with just a floppy and a whole lot of memory. If you can get a net boot working with the built-in 100 Mbps Ethernet, you don't even need the floppy.
Of course your personal workstation/gaming boxes can run hot with fast CPUs and fast 3D graphics cards and such, but those probably won't be in the server room!
Unless you are planning to invest in a render farm or Beowulf cluster, you should be able to get everything you need running, and it shouldn't get too hot.
How can you seriously expect someone to help you, while you are asking other people to mod him/her down?
He doesn't seriously expect help from KidSock. KidSock clearly didn't study the design for Abiword; he clearly didn't know what he was talking about; yet he felt qualified to say what the AbiWord developers should and should not be doing. Guess what, they are already doing those things, and didn't need KidSock to tell them to do it.
Don't letyour ego get in the way of your goals, and you'll accomplish much more, and will be more respected.
They have already accomplished so much with AbiWord. They already have my respect.
I don't get the joke. I'm a Debian user, and I have a computer with a Radeon DDR 32MB board. It's running Debian (the "unstable" branch). It has a recent 2.4.x kernel, the latest stuff from Xfree86, and 3D just works. The performance definitely isn't as good as the Windows drivers (no hardware T&L under Xfree86 yet) but everything just works, and it's pure Debian.
Well, maybe I do get the joke: the Debian "stable" branch is legendary for being behind the times. But most of the people running Debian on a desktop are using "unstable" or "testing", not "stable"; stable more often found on servers. And Debian stable is also legendary for being, well, stable.
By the way, the current version of KDE in unstable is 2.2.2. The next stable version of Debian will therefore have at least that recent a version of KDE.
Debian has a sort of split personality: the stable branch has aging packages, with bug fixes and security patches lovingly applied (and back-ported from newer software versions if necessary). Meanwhile, the unstable branch is always right up on the bleeding edge, with the latest packages arriving within a day or two of the upstream release.
It makes sense for Microsoft to do this. Other companies do similar things. It isn't free for Microsoft to keep supporting old software.
Microsoft has big labs full of computers, and testers who work in these labs. If they support DirectX on Win95, that means they need to run tests on Win95, which means they need computers set up and running Win95, and they need to pay the testers who will run all the tests on Win95. When the testers find bugs, the DirectX developers need to fix the bugs, too. None of this is free.
It's not that Microsoft will be going out of their way to make sure things break on Win95; they just won't pay any attention to Win95 anymore. Stuff might even work, especially since MS will still be testing against Win98, which is similar to Win95.
One of the things I like about HP: they have an official policy that they support their products for five years after they stop selling them. Microsoft seems to have chosen a similar guideline of about five years after they stopped selling stuff. That's not bad.
It's true that when everything older than WinXP is dropped, that you won't be able to buy any non-activated MS software new. By then I expect to be running 100% Linux, including games, so I'm not worried about it, but even if I were there is a huge pool of Windows software out there at swap meets, on eBay, etc. It will still work as well as it ever did.
MS isn't doing anything evil or unexpected here. Support can't last forever.
steveha
Re:How Would the Telcos Pervert This One?
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Why ADCo?
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without regulation we'd all still be paying AT&T two bucks a month to lease our phones.
I don't agree; without regulation, AT&T wouldn't have been a monopoly in the first place, and if they weren't a monopoly, we wouldn't have had to pay two bucks a month for phones.
Everyone thought phones needed to become a monopoly, but I'm not so sure. The successful phone companies would be the ones that had good connections to other phone companies. Without a monopoly guaranteed by law, the phone companies would have no way to lock in customers.
given regulations designed to allow ADCos to exist, how would the Baby Bells pervert such regulations to maintain their stranglehold on the phone lines in their areas?
You are right, they would try to do that. I don't have an answer either, other than "deregulate everything and let the market sort it all out."
I have never quite understood why FTL is supposed to be impossible. I'd like a physicist to explain.
First of all, I do understand this: take a tin can, and accelerate it to.9999 C. Now accelerate it more. And more. No matter how much you accelerate it, it will never reach 1.0 C, let alone a speed faster than light. (As I understand it, relativistic effects make the apparent mass of the tin can increase, making it harder to accelerate, and as it gets more massive it takes more energy to accelerate it, such that it would take infinite energy to push it to C, and it would have infinite mass, clearly impossible. You can get arbitrarily close to the speed of light if you can pour enough energy in, but never reach it.)
So far I'm happy. But now let's imagine a magic closet door, and its twin orbiting Alpha Centauri, about 4 light years away. You toss the can through the magic door on Earth and it pops out of its twin; never mind how this works. My understanding is that physics says it must take 4 years for the can to get there, that it is fundamentally impossible for it to get there sooner. This is the part I don't get. Why is this?
It has something to do with causality and the speed of light: I've been told that if the can is able to get there faster than the speed of light, the can has essentially travelled back in time, and this is forbidden because we like to believe in cause and effect. But I still don't get it.
P.S. If your answer to this question is "RTFM", please tell me which FM. I have already tried to figure this out by looking at physics books, and I'm clearly looking at the wrong ones.
20 years ago, Spy Hunter was a sprite-based top-down scrolling shooter. Your little car sprite would shoot the other little car sprites, or drop oil slicks in front of them. Sometimes you would drive a little boat sprite. You drove on an endless scrolling road (or sometimes river). (With Shockwave, you can play a version of the original Spy Hunter here.)
Now, on the PlayStation 2, Spy Hunter is a 3D game. The camera is just above and behind your car. There are 14 levels to play, with multiple objectives per level. It plays a lot like Hydro Thunder, but with weapons.
Drive into water, and the car morphs to a boat. Drive the boat up onto land it and morphs back to car. When the car takes too much damage, lots of parts explode off it and what's left morphs to an armored motorcycle! Even cooler, drive the motorcycle into the water and it morphs into an armored jet-ski! When you are driving the car/jetski, you don't have the full special abilities of the car, and you have reduced firepower, but you can play the level anyway; it's just tougher. Dock with the weapons van (or weapons boat) for a full repair of all damage and full ammo load.
If you like Hydro Thunder you should like this too. I haven't had it long, but I don't think I will get tired of it, just as I'm not tired of Hydro Thunder. The gameplay is somewhat repetitive: you drive around shooting bad guys, you try to find the ramps that let you make the jumps, etc. But the level design is fun, and I don't seem to get tired of locking guided missiles on enemies and blowing them away.
I have only two complaints about the game. 0) Most of the cinematic cutscenes are pretty boring (just a shot of your car making the getaway after finishing the level). 1) If you are a good player, it will probably take you 20 hours or less to finish all the levels. But as I said there is a lot of replay value even just playing the same levels over and over, plus it will take you many plays to find all the secrets and accomplish all the objectives. Once you have found all secrets and accomplished all objectives, that level unlocks for 2-player mode; in 2-player mode you both play, split-screen, at the same time. I haven't tried 2-player yet but it looks like a blast.
The music is great. The rocking "Spy Hunter" soundtrack the "Peter Gunn Theme" by Henry Mancini, but remixed and with variations. I like the soundtrack so much that if they sell a CD of just the music, I'll probably buy it.
GameSpot has a review. They like it but not quite as much as I like it.
Recommended.
steveha
Re:Begging Questions and Urban Planning
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This is IT?
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How many people live close enough to work that they can afford the time to communte on a device that moves at walking speed?
The article in Time suggested that in the future, you may find a car-free urban core full of IT scooters, with links to mass transit on the ouside of the core. It makes some sense this way:
Mass transit is great for getting you from point B to point C. The problem is you live at point A, and you work at point D. You need to get from A to B, then you ride mass transit, and then you need to get from C to D. So now the problem is not living within scooter range of work, it's living withing scooter range of a mass transit station, and working within scooter range of a mass transit station.
Then you either need a scooter on each end, or the mass transit needs to move scooters and people together. This sort of thing is probably what Steve Jobs had in mind when he said people would redesign cities around these things.
I don't know if it will happen, but it's not as dumb as you implied.
steveha
Re:Why can't anyone see the implications of this?
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This is IT?
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It probably goes much slower than an electric bike (~20 mph)
That's a feature. It's easy to crash a bike, and difficult to crash one of these.
Mail-order companies (like, say, amazon.com) have huge warehouses; they have guys running around the warehouses, collecting things for an order, and bringing all the things to a box for shipping. I can picture these Ginger things zipping safely around a warehouse! Yeah, there is at least a niche commercial market.
It will be stolen within a weeks time if you leave it anywhere
Eh, it depends. $3000 gives them room for some fancy security features. It would be cool if you could wear some kind of token and just hop on it and go, but for everyone else without the token, it won't work and in fact will scream (by siren and cell phone) if you start trying to drag it away.
When I was in college, I read the book Software Tools in Pascal by Kernighan and Plauger. The most valuable thing I learned in college was the system of design set forth in that book, which the authors called "left-corner design".
The idea is simple: when creating a program, start with the most important thing the program needs to do. Once you have that working, add more features. Ideally, as you go, you should be releasing working versions to whoever will be using your program.
This is so right in so many ways. For one thing, if you run out of time during a project, at least you have something you can release, and it may very well do much of what the users need. (There is a line in the book to the effect of "80% of the problem solved now is better than 100% solved later.") Also, early feedback from the users can show you what's wrong with your design, before you write a whole bunch of code that you would later have had to rip out. (I seem to recall an example in the book where a large system spec turned out to be totally wrong; the users didn't know what they wanted until they had something to play with.)
I never before noticed that the standard open-source development techniques match up with the left-corner methodology. Open-source projects such as Linux are all about "release early and often".
When I read Linus's comments, I was nodding my head all over the place. You create some code that solves some problem, possibly not very well. You release it. Feedback and patches start to arrive, and the code grows, possibly in directions you never foresaw. The more popular the code gets, the more robust it gets, as people patch it to work in a wide variety of situations and on a wide variety of hardware. This is why Linux has come so far, so fast.
i was deadly serious. if the current situation continues then linux will never become a viable gaming platform for several reasons
It's true that gaming is not Linux's strongest area. But for those of us who like to use Linux, the WineX technology is very interesting.
If Wine can play Counter-Strike (and it does) that's over 50% of all my gaming right there, with no need to reboot the computer out of Linux! I'd be willing to pay some money just for the convenience. I have other reasons than gaming to use Linux, but if I can do all my gaming there too that would be nice.
If all you want to do is play games that were released when Win98 was out, then all you need is a computer running Win98, and I'm glad you are happy with yours. That is no reason to tell me that I know I want to dump Linux.
it does amuse me to see you all kludging around just to get games working on the architecture they were originally designed for
Heh. But that's not completely fair; I'd say Win32 and DirectX are part of the total system architecture that the games were designed for.
c'mon, leave this open source bullshit behind you and get an operating system that proper games will work on. you know you want to.
I should have known better than to try to make a reasonable response to an article containing that. I suppose it's possible you intended it as a joke, but it wasn't very funny.
I won't waste any more of either of our time. Have a nice life.
And 99% doesn't do, it must be 100.000%. If there are even small incompatibilities, you have to use genuine MS Word -> MS Windows.
But luckily it's not 100% of all Word features, it's just 100% of the features the customers actually use. And even there 99% might be enough if the last 1% degrades gracefully.
P.S. The current economic climate is actually helping the competition to Word. When companies feel rich, they just throw money at Microsoft until they have enough copies of Word for all their employees; right now, a few companies are giving Star Office to people with minimal Word needs, and only giving Word to the people who need the full feature set. Belt-tightening in IT means the IT guys are more willing to settle for less than 100.00% Word compatibility.
useful product? it lets you play a handful of aging games
Yep, useful product. It lets you play Windows games on Linux, thus providing more games on Linux. More is usually better than less.
Aging or not, some of the games it enables are great games. I play Counter-Strike more often than any other game.
Yes, WineX will be more useful when it can run more and newer games; that doesn't make it useless now.
playing games should be fun
I agree. This has nothing to do with whether WineX is useful or not. When WineX works perfectly, all you have to do is run the game's installer under WineX, then run the game. Very simple, no source required. Early, bleeding-edge adopters may suffer more and work harder. This merely means that WineX isn't fully done yet. So, you don't want to mess with it until it's fully done? Fine with me.
to the best of my knowledge there has never been a 100% accurate emulation of a non-trivial system ever
First of all, you don't need 100%; you need "enough". There are plenty examples of non-trivial systems being emulated accurately enough. How about, for example, Windows XP? It has huge amounts of code to emulate Windows 98's guts, so games written for 98 will run on XP. And the whole NT family has always had a Win16 subsystem that usefully runs old Win16 apps. Plenty of code from UNIX gets ported to Linux because the compatability is good enough. I could go on.
Second of all, it's already good enough to play Counter-Strike, Starcraft, and a bunch of other games! So WineX itself refutes your argument.
c'mon, leave this open source bullshit behind you and get an operating system that proper games will work on. you know you want to.
Oh, I see: you are a troll, deliberately wasting my time. Silly me.
Slashdot Mirror
I really want to make a dual Athlon system, but I am waiting for the 0.13 micron process Athlons. I'd like to have a system that doesn't need roaring loud fans, and two CPU chips that dissipate about 60 Watts each is a bit much heat!
I was wavering, almost considering breaking my "no Intel CPUs" rule, because the 0.13 micron version of the Pentium III is sweet. But Intel reminded me why I have that rule -- the 0.13 micron Pentium III was deliberately made incompatible with Socket 370 motherboards. I hate it when companies play those sort of stupid games.
When the 0.13 micron chips come out, they will crush the Pentium 4. Right now the best Athlon is neck and neck with the best Pentium 4, and the Pentium 4 has the benefit of a 0.13 micron process (i.e. a much higher clock rate).
steveha
On Windows, I use an old copy of EasyCD for burning disks. Works fine and has all features I need.
But I do most of my burning under Linux these days, using Gnome Toaster. Gnome Toaster rocks; it burns data or audio with equal ease.
http://gnometoaster.rulez.org/
steveha
0) I'm using an analog LCD monitor right now, and I'm content with the quality. It's a ViewSonic ViewPanel VG150, and you ought to be able to get one for under $400.
1) If you really want DVI, use the PCI slot in the SV24 for a PCI video card. I'd go with the PCI Radeon, personally.
steveha
How about using the USB ports for audio? You probably don't want a cheap pair of USB speakers, but perhaps just a box you can hook up from USB to your amplifier. A quick web search found one but of course I have no idea if it meets your quality needs. If this works, you could use any laptop with decent USB.
Perhaps you could get a small computer that has a PCI slot, such as a Shuttle SV24. Get a flat-screen display and a small keyboard and mouse, and then stick in your choice of high-quality PCI-based sound card. This plus a couple of carrying cases would be about as functional as a lunchbox portable, and a heck of a lot cheaper.
Good luck.
steveha
In short, you'd have to dust off the Saturn-V diagrams.
I like reading the sci.space.* newsgroups on USENET. Henry Spencer has discussed the idea of building more Saturn V rockets.
The problem is that blueprints only take you so far; there is a lot of know-how that was distributed among the various contractors who built the various pieces. All that know-how is irretrieveably lost. No one ever wrote down the special heat-treating process that made this part here strong enough, no one ever wrote down the custom jig used to machine that part there, etc.
So you really cannot build a Saturn V now. You would be starting all over from a design. And, says Henry Spencer, there is no reason to start all over from the Saturn V design; you would do just as well, or better, to start with a fresh design that made modern assumptions (like modern computers).
By the way, for similar reasons, you really cannot build a Space Shuttle orbiter now either. We already have as many orbiters as we will ever have; let's just hope no more of them explode.
If we ever do want to build a heavy-lift launcher, the correct way to do it is to announce that the US government will pay $X dollars per each heavy payload launched into space, and will commit to launching Y payloads. Then stand back and let the market work. NASA, as presently constructed, cannot pull off projects like building a new heavy-lift vehicle, at least not without spending an insane amount of money and running far over schedule.
steveha
The author Ann Rule does not have the domain annrule.com because someone registered it way back in 1996. The person who got it tried to shake her down for some bucks; she instead registered annrules.com. annrule.com goes to some sort of celebrity portal.
.org name, 2-letter or no.
There was also the odd case of peta.org. Some guy registered peta.org, and set up a web site: People Eating Tasty Animals. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the somewhat more famous group with the initials PETA, objected to this. They contested the domain name and Network Solutions yanked the domain and handed it over to PETA.
Then there was my own sad story. I looked into who owns the domain name qv.org, and found that a web hosting company is sitting on it; they offered me a chance to take it over for a mere $1000. "It's one of the rare remaining 2-letter domain names," I was told. I suspect it will be a long time before anyone pays them $1000 for a
steveha
has anyone tried to make human-powered aircraft that uses multiple "human engines"?
No. Here is the problem: the airplane needs to hold itself together, hold itself in the sky, and hold its pilot in the sky. Two pilots mean more weight must be held in the sky. That means the plane must be stronger, which means it must be heavier. And, check out the wing span of the Raven: 115 feet wide! Add another pilot and you need more lift, i.e. even bigger wings! Finally, there are drive train issues: transferring power from both pilots into the propeller means more mechanical gears and stuff, which is bad; you want that stuff simple, and thus light.
On a bicycle, you do get economies of scale when you add extra people. The main thing that slows a bicycle down is air resistance, and two people on one bicycle are aerodynamically very efficient. Also, a quality two-person bike weighs a little less than two quality one-person bikes, which is another economy of scale.
steveha
Maybe they could upgrade to a Pentium and convinced Lance Armstrong to give it a try...
I know this is a joke, but just for your information, their pilot Mike Eddy is an excellent choice. He is shorter than average, and built of muscle, and a world-class cyclist. I don't think Lance Armstrong is shorter than average, so I don't think he would work as well as Mike Eddy!
steveha
The installation went ok, even if it was a bit confusing, until we got to XF86Config.
Ye flipping gods, what a nightmare that was.
[...]
Someone please do tell me if this is now easier with debian.
Yes and no. Debian still has the same installer it always had, and many folks feel this installer is not newbie-friendly. I know two people who tried it and hate it, but I do okay with it.
But the major part of your nightmare was getting XFree86 to work, and that has indeed gotten better. XFree86 version 4.x has much improved config files and much improved detection of hardware, and the Debian install takes advantage of this.
I would still say that most newbies should have a guru do the initial Debian install for them. Once it is installed, Debian is a joy to use and administer, especially with a high-speed connection to the Internet.
I do agree that the installer for Progeny is better, but that is only if it works. I had a friend run the Progeny installer, and when it tried to auto-detect his GeForce2 video card, it exploded, leaving Progeny half-installed. I should have scrubbed everything and just run the plain Debian installer from the beginning, but instead I installed aptitude and then went over all the packages by hand, fixing the configs or installing missing stuff, and it took forever. (When I was done he had a Woody system, not a Progeny system, because I changed his sources.list to point to a Debian mirror instead of to Progeny.)
Corel Linux, based on Debian but with a cool newbie-friendly graphical installer, also has a problem with GeForce video cards. Maybe 2.x fixed it, but with 1.x the graphical install would just hang, and there was no non-graphical installer! The official recommended workaround was to install some other video card Corel's installer could deal with, do the install, then swap in the GeForce and manually configure XFree86.
The plain-text Debian install starts to look better after the friendly ones bite you a few times. But the Mandrake installer starts to look even more better, because in my experience, it just works. If only we could get the Mandrake guys to port their installer to Debian!
steveha
I think it translates to "Klaatu says not"
It's been years since I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still, but if memory serves, this line meant "Klaatu commands obedience."
yeah, that's the same line whatsisface has to use in "Army of Darkness", and it was the only part of that lame movie I can remember laughing at.
Oh man, either you saw a different movie than I did or else your sense of humor is way different from mine. Oh well, to each his own, I guess.
"Klaatu barada... necktie!"
steveha
Go back, read the articles linked above. No one noticed until very recently. The documentation had been in violation of the Debian guidelines for a long time, and no one noticed. Now someone noticed and said something. This gave Debian two choices: 0) knowingly violate their own guidelines; 1) decline to knowingly violate their own guidelines, even though this would make extra work for everyone. They chose not to violate their own guidelines.
The timing is unfortunate. It wasn't planned.
You know what's cool about Debian? The main core, the part they call "Free", is all free stuff. I can give copies to all my friends. I can run a business on it. I can change it. I can do anything I want with it (except distribute a changed version while not distributing the source). And you know what? I really like that. And it's because they have these guidelines, and they follow them, that they have a completely useful system that's completely free.
steveha
Do you already have all this equipment, or are you planning to kit out the room after you move in?
.13 micron version of the Athlon MP comes out, you can get a speed boost and a heat reduction in one go, so I'd get the cheapest Athlon MP chips available.) With that amount of CPU horsepower you can do Linux software RAID for free (just make sure each IDE drive has its own controller, i.e. only one drive per cable) and still have lots of power left over for running server software.
If you plan ahead, you ought to be able to set up with all the gear you need, without using too much power/making too much heat.
Start with one big Linux server. Equip it with a ridiculous amount of RAID storage: how about 3 or 4 80 GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration; that's 160 GB or 240 GB right there. Use a 2-processor SMP Socket A motherboard, and a couple of Athlon MP chips. (When the
Now I assume you want some number of other computers for various purposes. At a minimum you want one firewall. If you want a server exposed to the net you really want two firewalls, with the net server behind one and your really big Linux server behind both firewalls (and the second one should be really locked down!). For these extra computers, you ought to look at using the Shuttle SV24, with a VIA C3 chip. The SV24 has little expansion capability, so it only has a little power supply, so it only makes a little heat. The C3 dissipates about as much power as a night light ( 7 Watts) typical and 11 Watts max according to the Via web site. You don't even need a fan on the heatsink: a simple passive heatsink is enough for a C3! For firewall use, put an extra net card in the single PCI slot on the SV24.
Because Linux can boot off a floppy (try that with Windows XP Professional Server sometime) you can set up the SV24 boxes with just a floppy and a whole lot of memory. If you can get a net boot working with the built-in 100 Mbps Ethernet, you don't even need the floppy.
Of course your personal workstation/gaming boxes can run hot with fast CPUs and fast 3D graphics cards and such, but those probably won't be in the server room!
Unless you are planning to invest in a render farm or Beowulf cluster, you should be able to get everything you need running, and it shouldn't get too hot.
steveha
How can you seriously expect someone to help you, while you are asking other people to mod him/her down?
He doesn't seriously expect help from KidSock. KidSock clearly didn't study the design for Abiword; he clearly didn't know what he was talking about; yet he felt qualified to say what the AbiWord developers should and should not be doing. Guess what, they are already doing those things, and didn't need KidSock to tell them to do it.
Don't letyour ego get in the way of your goals, and you'll accomplish much more, and will be more respected.
They have already accomplished so much with AbiWord. They already have my respect.
steveha
I don't get the joke. I'm a Debian user, and I have a computer with a Radeon DDR 32MB board. It's running Debian (the "unstable" branch). It has a recent 2.4.x kernel, the latest stuff from Xfree86, and 3D just works. The performance definitely isn't as good as the Windows drivers (no hardware T&L under Xfree86 yet) but everything just works, and it's pure Debian.
Well, maybe I do get the joke: the Debian "stable" branch is legendary for being behind the times. But most of the people running Debian on a desktop are using "unstable" or "testing", not "stable"; stable more often found on servers. And Debian stable is also legendary for being, well, stable.
By the way, the current version of KDE in unstable is 2.2.2. The next stable version of Debian will therefore have at least that recent a version of KDE.
Debian has a sort of split personality: the stable branch has aging packages, with bug fixes and security patches lovingly applied (and back-ported from newer software versions if necessary). Meanwhile, the unstable branch is always right up on the bleeding edge, with the latest packages arriving within a day or two of the upstream release.
steveha
It makes sense for Microsoft to do this. Other companies do similar things. It isn't free for Microsoft to keep supporting old software.
Microsoft has big labs full of computers, and testers who work in these labs. If they support DirectX on Win95, that means they need to run tests on Win95, which means they need computers set up and running Win95, and they need to pay the testers who will run all the tests on Win95. When the testers find bugs, the DirectX developers need to fix the bugs, too. None of this is free.
It's not that Microsoft will be going out of their way to make sure things break on Win95; they just won't pay any attention to Win95 anymore. Stuff might even work, especially since MS will still be testing against Win98, which is similar to Win95.
One of the things I like about HP: they have an official policy that they support their products for five years after they stop selling them. Microsoft seems to have chosen a similar guideline of about five years after they stopped selling stuff. That's not bad.
It's true that when everything older than WinXP is dropped, that you won't be able to buy any non-activated MS software new. By then I expect to be running 100% Linux, including games, so I'm not worried about it, but even if I were there is a huge pool of Windows software out there at swap meets, on eBay, etc. It will still work as well as it ever did.
MS isn't doing anything evil or unexpected here. Support can't last forever.
steveha
without regulation we'd all still be paying AT&T two bucks a month to lease our phones.
I don't agree; without regulation, AT&T wouldn't have been a monopoly in the first place, and if they weren't a monopoly, we wouldn't have had to pay two bucks a month for phones.
Everyone thought phones needed to become a monopoly, but I'm not so sure. The successful phone companies would be the ones that had good connections to other phone companies. Without a monopoly guaranteed by law, the phone companies would have no way to lock in customers.
given regulations designed to allow ADCos to exist, how would the Baby Bells pervert such regulations to maintain their stranglehold on the phone lines in their areas?
You are right, they would try to do that. I don't have an answer either, other than "deregulate everything and let the market sort it all out."
steveha
I have never quite understood why FTL is supposed to be impossible. I'd like a physicist to explain.
.9999 C. Now accelerate it more. And more. No matter how much you accelerate it, it will never reach 1.0 C, let alone a speed faster than light. (As I understand it, relativistic effects make the apparent mass of the tin can increase, making it harder to accelerate, and as it gets more massive it takes more energy to accelerate it, such that it would take infinite energy to push it to C, and it would have infinite mass, clearly impossible. You can get arbitrarily close to the speed of light if you can pour enough energy in, but never reach it.)
First of all, I do understand this: take a tin can, and accelerate it to
So far I'm happy. But now let's imagine a magic closet door, and its twin orbiting Alpha Centauri, about 4 light years away. You toss the can through the magic door on Earth and it pops out of its twin; never mind how this works. My understanding is that physics says it must take 4 years for the can to get there, that it is fundamentally impossible for it to get there sooner. This is the part I don't get. Why is this?
It has something to do with causality and the speed of light: I've been told that if the can is able to get there faster than the speed of light, the can has essentially travelled back in time, and this is forbidden because we like to believe in cause and effect. But I still don't get it.
P.S. If your answer to this question is "RTFM", please tell me which FM. I have already tried to figure this out by looking at physics books, and I'm clearly looking at the wrong ones.
Thanks.
steveha
I just got Spy Hunter and it's a blast.
20 years ago, Spy Hunter was a sprite-based top-down scrolling shooter. Your little car sprite would shoot the other little car sprites, or drop oil slicks in front of them. Sometimes you would drive a little boat sprite. You drove on an endless scrolling road (or sometimes river). (With Shockwave, you can play a version of the original Spy Hunter here.)
Now, on the PlayStation 2, Spy Hunter is a 3D game. The camera is just above and behind your car. There are 14 levels to play, with multiple objectives per level. It plays a lot like Hydro Thunder, but with weapons.
Drive into water, and the car morphs to a boat. Drive the boat up onto land it and morphs back to car. When the car takes too much damage, lots of parts explode off it and what's left morphs to an armored motorcycle! Even cooler, drive the motorcycle into the water and it morphs into an armored jet-ski! When you are driving the car/jetski, you don't have the full special abilities of the car, and you have reduced firepower, but you can play the level anyway; it's just tougher. Dock with the weapons van (or weapons boat) for a full repair of all damage and full ammo load.
If you like Hydro Thunder you should like this too. I haven't had it long, but I don't think I will get tired of it, just as I'm not tired of Hydro Thunder. The gameplay is somewhat repetitive: you drive around shooting bad guys, you try to find the ramps that let you make the jumps, etc. But the level design is fun, and I don't seem to get tired of locking guided missiles on enemies and blowing them away.
I have only two complaints about the game. 0) Most of the cinematic cutscenes are pretty boring (just a shot of your car making the getaway after finishing the level). 1) If you are a good player, it will probably take you 20 hours or less to finish all the levels. But as I said there is a lot of replay value even just playing the same levels over and over, plus it will take you many plays to find all the secrets and accomplish all the objectives. Once you have found all secrets and accomplished all objectives, that level unlocks for 2-player mode; in 2-player mode you both play, split-screen, at the same time. I haven't tried 2-player yet but it looks like a blast.
The music is great. The rocking "Spy Hunter" soundtrack the "Peter Gunn Theme" by Henry Mancini, but remixed and with variations. I like the soundtrack so much that if they sell a CD of just the music, I'll probably buy it.
GameSpot has a review. They like it but not quite as much as I like it.
Recommended.
steveha
How many people live close enough to work that they can afford the time to communte on a device that moves at walking speed?
The article in Time suggested that in the future, you may find a car-free urban core full of IT scooters, with links to mass transit on the ouside of the core. It makes some sense this way:
Mass transit is great for getting you from point B to point C. The problem is you live at point A, and you work at point D. You need to get from A to B, then you ride mass transit, and then you need to get from C to D. So now the problem is not living within scooter range of work, it's living withing scooter range of a mass transit station, and working within scooter range of a mass transit station.
Then you either need a scooter on each end, or the mass transit needs to move scooters and people together. This sort of thing is probably what Steve Jobs had in mind when he said people would redesign cities around these things.
I don't know if it will happen, but it's not as dumb as you implied.
steveha
It probably goes much slower than an electric bike (~20 mph)
That's a feature. It's easy to crash a bike, and difficult to crash one of these.
Mail-order companies (like, say, amazon.com) have huge warehouses; they have guys running around the warehouses, collecting things for an order, and bringing all the things to a box for shipping. I can picture these Ginger things zipping safely around a warehouse! Yeah, there is at least a niche commercial market.
It will be stolen within a weeks time if you leave it anywhere
Eh, it depends. $3000 gives them room for some fancy security features. It would be cool if you could wear some kind of token and just hop on it and go, but for everyone else without the token, it won't work and in fact will scream (by siren and cell phone) if you start trying to drag it away.
steveha
When I was in college, I read the book Software Tools in Pascal by Kernighan and Plauger. The most valuable thing I learned in college was the system of design set forth in that book, which the authors called "left-corner design".
The idea is simple: when creating a program, start with the most important thing the program needs to do. Once you have that working, add more features. Ideally, as you go, you should be releasing working versions to whoever will be using your program.
This is so right in so many ways. For one thing, if you run out of time during a project, at least you have something you can release, and it may very well do much of what the users need. (There is a line in the book to the effect of "80% of the problem solved now is better than 100% solved later.") Also, early feedback from the users can show you what's wrong with your design, before you write a whole bunch of code that you would later have had to rip out. (I seem to recall an example in the book where a large system spec turned out to be totally wrong; the users didn't know what they wanted until they had something to play with.)
I never before noticed that the standard open-source development techniques match up with the left-corner methodology. Open-source projects such as Linux are all about "release early and often".
When I read Linus's comments, I was nodding my head all over the place. You create some code that solves some problem, possibly not very well. You release it. Feedback and patches start to arrive, and the code grows, possibly in directions you never foresaw. The more popular the code gets, the more robust it gets, as people patch it to work in a wide variety of situations and on a wide variety of hardware. This is why Linux has come so far, so fast.
steveha
Okay, what the heck.
i was deadly serious. if the current situation continues then linux will never become a viable gaming platform for several reasons
It's true that gaming is not Linux's strongest area. But for those of us who like to use Linux, the WineX technology is very interesting.
If Wine can play Counter-Strike (and it does) that's over 50% of all my gaming right there, with no need to reboot the computer out of Linux! I'd be willing to pay some money just for the convenience. I have other reasons than gaming to use Linux, but if I can do all my gaming there too that would be nice.
If all you want to do is play games that were released when Win98 was out, then all you need is a computer running Win98, and I'm glad you are happy with yours. That is no reason to tell me that I know I want to dump Linux.
it does amuse me to see you all kludging around just to get games working on the architecture they were originally designed for
Heh. But that's not completely fair; I'd say Win32 and DirectX are part of the total system architecture that the games were designed for.
steveha
To quote you:
I should have known better than to try to make a reasonable response to an article containing that. I suppose it's possible you intended it as a joke, but it wasn't very funny.
I won't waste any more of either of our time. Have a nice life.
steveha
And 99% doesn't do, it must be 100.000%. If there are even small incompatibilities, you have to use genuine MS Word -> MS Windows.
But luckily it's not 100% of all Word features, it's just 100% of the features the customers actually use. And even there 99% might be enough if the last 1% degrades gracefully.
P.S. The current economic climate is actually helping the competition to Word. When companies feel rich, they just throw money at Microsoft until they have enough copies of Word for all their employees; right now, a few companies are giving Star Office to people with minimal Word needs, and only giving Word to the people who need the full feature set. Belt-tightening in IT means the IT guys are more willing to settle for less than 100.00% Word compatibility.
steveha
useful product? it lets you play a handful of aging games
Yep, useful product. It lets you play Windows games on Linux, thus providing more games on Linux. More is usually better than less.
Aging or not, some of the games it enables are great games. I play Counter-Strike more often than any other game.
Yes, WineX will be more useful when it can run more and newer games; that doesn't make it useless now.
playing games should be fun
I agree. This has nothing to do with whether WineX is useful or not. When WineX works perfectly, all you have to do is run the game's installer under WineX, then run the game. Very simple, no source required. Early, bleeding-edge adopters may suffer more and work harder. This merely means that WineX isn't fully done yet. So, you don't want to mess with it until it's fully done? Fine with me.
to the best of my knowledge there has never been a 100% accurate emulation of a non-trivial system ever
First of all, you don't need 100%; you need "enough". There are plenty examples of non-trivial systems being emulated accurately enough. How about, for example, Windows XP? It has huge amounts of code to emulate Windows 98's guts, so games written for 98 will run on XP. And the whole NT family has always had a Win16 subsystem that usefully runs old Win16 apps. Plenty of code from UNIX gets ported to Linux because the compatability is good enough. I could go on.
Second of all, it's already good enough to play Counter-Strike, Starcraft, and a bunch of other games! So WineX itself refutes your argument.
c'mon, leave this open source bullshit behind you and get an operating system that proper games will work on. you know you want to.
Oh, I see: you are a troll, deliberately wasting my time. Silly me.
steveha