You know what, you're right. A lot of people, including me, saw the same problem across 4 or 5 distros and assumed it was the kernel. However, it could be that they're using the same bootloader, which would also cause this problem. I'm not all that technical, so I don't know. I'm just going to stick with my 2.4 kernel (RH 8.0) until this problem is definitively solved.
where if=(input device), should point to your first drive, eg./dev/hda, and of=(output dir) should point to where you want to save the bootsector as a file. Restore the MBR by reversing the input and output.
Even if you do this to restore, your Windows partition may still be toast, depending on how much you messed with the partition table.
...but Liberated Games has a listing of games that have had their source code released free to the public.
I've compiled Alien vs. Predator 2 from source after playing around with the AI to make aliens smarter. The really cool part is while the human and Predator characters have an AI governed by a well-defined set of propositional logic statements, the Alien code is absolute spaghetti, all procedural logic. The only way I figured this could happen is if the humanoid characters were programmed, but the Alien was evolved. I think, at the least, that releasing the source for games that were formerly closed allows development of open-source addons.
However, I've played FreeCiv as an exploration of whether it could be used in an educational setting, and it just seemed too modular and stiff. Civilization's interface, though dated, is much more interactive and slick.
Re:Skills you learn could save your real relations
on
Virtual Girlfriend
·
· Score: 1
Why do you say that like it's a bad thing?
I didn't need to go that route, actually. Met her in the USA, she already is a citizen.
Re:Skills you learn could save your real relations
on
Virtual Girlfriend
·
· Score: 1
Not ALL American women are like that. It's just a stupid generalization. Besides, you only need to find one who isn't. My wife isn't (that's why she's my wife), though she does care about being remembered and not being taken for granted.
Realize that this woman got very angry at him for not remembering an anniversary. He then did damage control, spending a whole large chunk of money to appease Ms./Mrs. Cupcake. American women get angry if their "special days" are not remembered and celebrated. Real women are happy that you remembered, and don't become vengeful if you don't remember. This way, she knows that your getting her a present for a special occasion is because you love her, not because you're motivated by fear or obligation.
Re:Skills you learn could save your real relations
on
Virtual Girlfriend
·
· Score: 1
Who said I was staying in the USA? American culture is too toxic and turns women into shrews after a few years. I was planning on moving to either South America or Prague should we get married.
Re:Skills you learn could save your real relations
on
Virtual Girlfriend
·
· Score: 1
My point is that one can find internally ugly women everywhere, but American women are by and large the worst and most common. There are gems to be had in America too, but I'm too jaded to look.
I'm Polish but live in America.:)
Re:Skills you learn could save your real relations
on
Virtual Girlfriend
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You, my friend, are whipped. Verbatim quote from the girl I've been dating for years, after I mentioned the fact "hey, we met X years ago today."
"You know, don't bother remembering stupid things like that. Even though my girlfriends think I'm an idiot for saying this, I'm sticking by it. Make every day special for us, and I'll be yours forever. I will never ever get mad at you for not remembering these things."
Of course, it helps that she's Eastern European and doesn't grant importance to the Hallmark Holidays(tm). American women have bought into that bullshit wholesale, I'm done with them.
NetLibrary has a stupid interface - you log in from a member institution, then you can view books online. Good idea, right? Wrong. All of their content is crippled - you can't print it more than a page at a time, save it to a file, or even look at more than two pages consecutively without going through a screen that says "Please type the letters you see in the box. This is to protect against actions you have performed that appear to violate copyright." This is after simply viewing three pages in a row quickly, because I wanted to find a particular equation!
So what did I do?
Right.
I wrote a script that brought up each of 280+ pages sequentially and printed them to TIFF files, popping up a browser so I could perform their human-detection action when required. The I packed the whole thing into a PDF, and ran an OCR on the whole thing. Presto! The original book, in un-DRM'd form, happily readable and printable.
As I recall, the Mandrake 10.0 versions (both community and release) will try and "fix" the MBR and partition table if it sees a Windows XP install on the same drive as the Mandrake install. This results in a broken Windows install - this issue was minimized on the dev lists and wasn't fixed in the release version.
Blew away the MBR and almost had to reinstall until I found the "dd" trick that allows you to rewrite it.
In any case, I fixed it by partitioning manually and loading from the NTLDR in Windows.
See here for a description of the same problem with FC2, here for a description of how to make a dual-boot system with problem work. Lastly, see here for the skinny from Mandrake themselves.
Of course, one should always have backups of any and all valuable data, but it's still a pain to bring a system back from the undead.
Too bad there's been people doing research and creating devices using this principle for at least 15 years. Hell, I assisted my friend's senior project in creating a Bluetooth implementation of a sensor net that communicated through Bluetooth over the skin. We even did propagation studies by wiring ourselves to a network analyzer and running on a treadmill.
I would agree. Hire an admin assistant that is married, very attractive, and outgoing. Simply a smile from her in the morning makes the whole office more productive.
Aw, comeon. Everybody knows that a bomb detonator is a 555 chip with a really big timing capacitor.
Uhm, no. If you try to hook up a big cap to get ticks more than 300ms apart, you will blow the input regulator of the opamps, as well as overheat the transistor that pulls the discharge line to ground. I would definitely go with a clock-divided microcontroller. I was going to use a 555 to drive a data line at rrreeeaaallllllyyy slow rates, but the app notes discouraged this. YMMV.
I didn't see much that addressed this, so I'm going to bring it up... firmware debugging! I always design in a serial port I can use for printf(), but when the system doesn't have much overhead and using printf() delays execution of a critical loop or changes a value in memory, the whole thing can crash.
I ran into this when putting together a system with two micros, each of which had a 16MHz processor and 32K of onboard memory. I couldn't afford their damn emulator, so I had to think of other good ways to debug. They had to communicate regularly, and using printf() caused the program to delay at critical points, causing it to hang even though nothing else was done to the code. Even putting in a trap-check was still too big of a delay. I started using bitwise operators on 4 bits of memory. Each time I executed a bit of code that I thought would give problems, I inserted an assembly command into the C code that shifted in 4 bits with a code that corresponded to the location, and set the read line high. Then I put those 4 lines to a logic analyzer and triggered on the read line, reading the bits as the program ran. If (when) it hung, then I would know where. This had the advantage of being much faster to execute than a printf(), so I could put it in anywhere, even in the middle of getting a packet.
Debugging firmware is a whole new bag, to be sure.
Agreed. I find I get the most return on a technique if I keep uke close to my center and simply act as if my extremities are very heavy. I find I'm much less tired at the end of practice.
He demonstrated martial arts to Japanese Navy officers, acting as a consultant and demonstrator. It was then that he developed a dislike for the martial society of the time. You are correct in that "went to war" is an overstatment, but he was involved with the Japanese military until 1942.
Daito Ryu Jujitsu (alternatively Daito Ryu Aiki-Jujitsu) and Kashima Shinto Ryu were the two martial arts preceding Aikido.
Factually, he was *most definitely* a badass throughout his life, in the sense of being capable of great strength and speed. He accepted challenges from many martial arts practitioners throughout his life (including some demonstrations he arranged himself - of course these are apocryphal).
Lastly, I did not adequately explain the difference between aikido as Ueshiba envisioned it and the earlier war arts. Aikido techniques rotate much of the angular techniquess from earlier arts, making the techniques less injurious, as Aikido was fundamentally an art of love, influenced by some of the more radical Shinto teachings.
Please excuse my early morning pedantry, I was seeking to correct the lineage and got ahead of myself.
Aikido stems directly from Daito-Ryu Aikijujitsu, an fairly brutal art that has been around since 1341(?) and a technique in that art goes much like "enter, strike, lock, throw, break, pin, strike, kill". The founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, was in any sense of the word a badass. After going to war in WWII, he realized that much if not all of martial arts is useless in the age of the rifle. So he created Aikido, a way of - as I heard it put - "aggressively de-escalating confontations". Much of the techniques are adapted from killing techniques (some schools teach both). Also, aikido has an exclusive focus on multiple attackers which is unique and quite useful.
I agree with the characterization of Aikido as an art that can either be very hard or very soft. My old sensei used to have a continuum of techniques - on one end, there's "my brother's drunk and pushing me around, and I don't want to hurt him too much" and at the other is "you're trying to injure my family - how can I kill you as efficiently as possible?" Some of the more drastic techniques give me the willies.
I guess my advice is to pick a martial art that requires interaction with a partner as an integral part of the class - not just sparring. This helps them become comfortable with both their body and the bodies of others. It helps get around some sexual awkwardness too - you don't get all freaked out when you accidentally grab boobie when doing a lapel grab, because you don't have time to worry about it. And the girls have this happen to them all of the time, and they're quite gracious about it.
(No one's going to read this anyway at 1000+ comments, but I thought I'd throw in)
How funny we're talking about this... I just this minute fixed one in the firmware I'm working on. Increased the stack size and changed a function call:
where a is a horrendous function:
unsigned long z() {
unsigned long b;
b=a(1)+a(2)+a(3);
(...stuff...)
return(b); }
This returned different values depending on when you called z(). Figured out this had to do with how full the stack was.
Instead, I tried this:
unsigned long z() {
unsigned long a1, a2, a3, b;
a1=a(1);
a2=a(2);
a3=a(3);
b=a1+a2+a3;
(...stuff...)
return b; }
I'm a physicist, not a software engineer, so this is probably obvious to all of you - but I felt better.
It's good to see my old boss in the news. I worked for Mario in 1999-2000 as a snot-nosed intern, doing some work on their through-backplane transcievers and modulators. Because silicon is transparent at infrared wavelengths, you can see right though the chip if the base is thin enough. Add to that the idea that the electron density changes in the gate region of a FET as it switches, and, well, there you go.:) This technology has the potential to go MUCH MUCH faster than a measly 2GB/s.
Anyway, the group I was in consisted of ten PhD's and me, a sophomore. The level of output of that one group was amazing, and I'm pleased to see the technology they worked on for so long start to take off.
I was rebuilding a test system where one could put two devices in a master/slave configuration. Both of them used an RS232 interface, and to tell the two apart: one was labeled "master" and made of white plastic, and the other was labeled "slave", upside down, and made of black plastic. I blinked once, then dismissed myself as a reactionary idiot.
Actually, the flyash produced is pretty useful. Allow me to explain. The pollution produced by a typical power plant falls within three categories: SOx (sulfur oxides), NOx (nitrogen oxides), and inert particulates. These are filtered out by spraying a high pressure fan of limestone (CaCO3) through the flue gas, causing the formation of CCP (coal combustion products) in a system called a "scrubber" - known also by its tongue-in-cheek name, "SOx NOx rocks box". Some uses include road agglutinates, cast concrete products, and drywall. See this page for more information.
Back in the day, my friends had to do a senior project. The unimaginative picked GIS systems, low noise amplifiers, PDA sensors, etc. Ever the perpetual partiers, my boys hit on The Idea: an automated mixologist. Their advisor loved the idea! They started small, but the project just kept growing, ever the victim of feature creep. Their work was conducted in intense secrecy, and occasionally they would say something about "valve lag on keypad interrupt" or "fluid flow management".
Presentations came around, and upon being called, they went to the lab down the hall and wheeled out their creation. It was, to say the least, impressive. They had packed enough alcoholic capacity into a 6 foot tall steel frame to inebriate a small sorority. Mixers on the bottom, liquors on the top, and valves,hoses, power cables, and the ice maker cannibalized from a refrigerator took up the rest of the space. The PIC-driven UI was elegantly designed to be easily operated while drunk (they actually did usability tests - how drunk can I be and still read this text?)
They presented the first drink, a stiff whiskey sour, to the head of the department.
It is the only senior project ever to recieve a standing ovation.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what, you're right. A lot of people, including me, saw the same problem across 4 or 5 distros and assumed it was the kernel. However, it could be that they're using the same bootloader, which would also cause this problem. I'm not all that technical, so I don't know. I'm just going to stick with my 2.4 kernel (RH 8.0) until this problem is definitively solved.
This problem is common with the 2.6 kernel and has been verified in Mandrake 10.0 Community, Red Hat FC1, Red Hat FC2, and others.
/dev/hda, and of=(output dir) should point to where you want to save the bootsector as a file. Restore the MBR by reversing the input and output.
Read about it here.
Basically, if you touch the MBR with a 2.6 kernel bootloader, XP or Windows 2000 is gone, and can't be restored. So backup your MBR first by using
"dd if=(input device) of=/(output dir)/hda-img.mbr bs=512 count=1"
where if=(input device), should point to your first drive, eg.
Even if you do this to restore, your Windows partition may still be toast, depending on how much you messed with the partition table.
My computer is processing data with a base frequency of 1419MHz.
...but Liberated Games has a listing of games that have had their source code released free to the public.
I've compiled Alien vs. Predator 2 from source after playing around with the AI to make aliens smarter. The really cool part is while the human and Predator characters have an AI governed by a well-defined set of propositional logic statements, the Alien code is absolute spaghetti, all procedural logic. The only way I figured this could happen is if the humanoid characters were programmed, but the Alien was evolved. I think, at the least, that releasing the source for games that were formerly closed allows development of open-source addons.
However, I've played FreeCiv as an exploration of whether it could be used in an educational setting, and it just seemed too modular and stiff. Civilization's interface, though dated, is much more interactive and slick.
Why do you say that like it's a bad thing?
I didn't need to go that route, actually. Met her in the USA, she already is a citizen.
Not ALL American women are like that. It's just a stupid generalization. Besides, you only need to find one who isn't. My wife isn't (that's why she's my wife), though she does care about being remembered and not being taken for granted.
Realize that this woman got very angry at him for not remembering an anniversary. He then did damage control, spending a whole large chunk of money to appease Ms./Mrs. Cupcake. American women get angry if their "special days" are not remembered and celebrated. Real women are happy that you remembered, and don't become vengeful if you don't remember. This way, she knows that your getting her a present for a special occasion is because you love her, not because you're motivated by fear or obligation.
Who said I was staying in the USA? American culture is too toxic and turns women into shrews after a few years. I was planning on moving to either South America or Prague should we get married.
My point is that one can find internally ugly women everywhere, but American women are by and large the worst and most common. There are gems to be had in America too, but I'm too jaded to look.
:)
I'm Polish but live in America.
You, my friend, are whipped. Verbatim quote from the girl I've been dating for years, after I mentioned the fact "hey, we met X years ago today."
"You know, don't bother remembering stupid things like that. Even though my girlfriends think I'm an idiot for saying this, I'm sticking by it. Make every day special for us, and I'll be yours forever. I will never ever get mad at you for not remembering these things."
Of course, it helps that she's Eastern European and doesn't grant importance to the Hallmark Holidays(tm). American women have bought into that bullshit wholesale, I'm done with them.
NetLibrary has a stupid interface - you log in from a member institution, then you can view books online. Good idea, right? Wrong. All of their content is crippled - you can't print it more than a page at a time, save it to a file, or even look at more than two pages consecutively without going through a screen that says "Please type the letters you see in the box. This is to protect against actions you have performed that appear to violate copyright." This is after simply viewing three pages in a row quickly, because I wanted to find a particular equation!
So what did I do?
Right.
I wrote a script that brought up each of 280+ pages sequentially and printed them to TIFF files, popping up a browser so I could perform their human-detection action when required. The I packed the whole thing into a PDF, and ran an OCR on the whole thing. Presto! The original book, in un-DRM'd form, happily readable and printable.
As I recall, the Mandrake 10.0 versions (both community and release) will try and "fix" the MBR and partition table if it sees a Windows XP install on the same drive as the Mandrake install. This results in a broken Windows install - this issue was minimized on the dev lists and wasn't fixed in the release version.
Blew away the MBR and almost had to reinstall until I found the "dd" trick that allows you to rewrite it.
In any case, I fixed it by partitioning manually and loading from the NTLDR in Windows.
See here for a description of the same problem with FC2, here for a description of how to make a dual-boot system with problem work. Lastly, see here for the skinny from Mandrake themselves.
Of course, one should always have backups of any and all valuable data, but it's still a pain to bring a system back from the undead.
Too bad there's been people doing research and creating devices using this principle for at least 15 years. Hell, I assisted my friend's senior project in creating a Bluetooth implementation of a sensor net that communicated through Bluetooth over the skin. We even did propagation studies by wiring ourselves to a network analyzer and running on a treadmill.
Patently stupid, if you ask me.
I would agree. Hire an admin assistant that is married, very attractive, and outgoing. Simply a smile from her in the morning makes the whole office more productive.
Aw, comeon. Everybody knows that a bomb detonator is a 555 chip with a really big timing capacitor.
Uhm, no. If you try to hook up a big cap to get ticks more than 300ms apart, you will blow the input regulator of the opamps, as well as overheat the transistor that pulls the discharge line to ground. I would definitely go with a clock-divided microcontroller. I was going to use a 555 to drive a data line at rrreeeaaallllllyyy slow rates, but the app notes discouraged this. YMMV.
I didn't see much that addressed this, so I'm going to bring it up... firmware debugging! I always design in a serial port I can use for printf(), but when the system doesn't have much overhead and using printf() delays execution of a critical loop or changes a value in memory, the whole thing can crash.
I ran into this when putting together a system with two micros, each of which had a 16MHz processor and 32K of onboard memory. I couldn't afford their damn emulator, so I had to think of other good ways to debug. They had to communicate regularly, and using printf() caused the program to delay at critical points, causing it to hang even though nothing else was done to the code. Even putting in a trap-check was still too big of a delay. I started using bitwise operators on 4 bits of memory. Each time I executed a bit of code that I thought would give problems, I inserted an assembly command into the C code that shifted in 4 bits with a code that corresponded to the location, and set the read line high. Then I put those 4 lines to a logic analyzer and triggered on the read line, reading the bits as the program ran. If (when) it hung, then I would know where. This had the advantage of being much faster to execute than a printf(), so I could put it in anywhere, even in the middle of getting a packet.
Debugging firmware is a whole new bag, to be sure.
When I shop at a supermarket that wants some information before they give me a card, I use the name and address of their CEO's. For example:
Safeway CEO
Steve Burd
2130 Las Trampas Rd
Alamo, CA
94507-1862
King Soopers/Kroger/City Market CEO
David Dillon
65 Tejon St.
Denver, CO
80203
More information about loyalty cards and privacy issues can be found here.
Also, these cards may not save you any money at all.
Agreed. I find I get the most return on a technique if I keep uke close to my center and simply act as if my extremities are very heavy. I find I'm much less tired at the end of practice.
From a biography, Abundant Peace:
He demonstrated martial arts to Japanese Navy officers, acting as a consultant and demonstrator. It was then that he developed a dislike for the martial society of the time. You are correct in that "went to war" is an overstatment, but he was involved with the Japanese military until 1942.
Daito Ryu Jujitsu (alternatively Daito Ryu Aiki-Jujitsu) and Kashima Shinto Ryu were the two martial arts preceding Aikido.
Factually, he was *most definitely* a badass throughout his life, in the sense of being capable of great strength and speed. He accepted challenges from many martial arts practitioners throughout his life (including some demonstrations he arranged himself - of course these are apocryphal).
Lastly, I did not adequately explain the difference between aikido as Ueshiba envisioned it and the earlier war arts. Aikido techniques rotate much of the angular techniquess from earlier arts, making the techniques less injurious, as Aikido was fundamentally an art of love, influenced by some of the more radical Shinto teachings.
Please excuse my early morning pedantry, I was seeking to correct the lineage and got ahead of myself.
Small correction:
Aikido stems directly from Daito-Ryu Aikijujitsu, an fairly brutal art that has been around since 1341(?) and a technique in that art goes much like "enter, strike, lock, throw, break, pin, strike, kill". The founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, was in any sense of the word a badass. After going to war in WWII, he realized that much if not all of martial arts is useless in the age of the rifle. So he created Aikido, a way of - as I heard it put - "aggressively de-escalating confontations". Much of the techniques are adapted from killing techniques (some schools teach both). Also, aikido has an exclusive focus on multiple attackers which is unique and quite useful.
I agree with the characterization of Aikido as an art that can either be very hard or very soft. My old sensei used to have a continuum of techniques - on one end, there's "my brother's drunk and pushing me around, and I don't want to hurt him too much" and at the other is "you're trying to injure my family - how can I kill you as efficiently as possible?" Some of the more drastic techniques give me the willies.
I guess my advice is to pick a martial art that requires interaction with a partner as an integral part of the class - not just sparring. This helps them become comfortable with both their body and the bodies of others. It helps get around some sexual awkwardness too - you don't get all freaked out when you accidentally grab boobie when doing a lapel grab, because you don't have time to worry about it. And the girls have this happen to them all of the time, and they're quite gracious about it.
(No one's going to read this anyway at 1000+ comments, but I thought I'd throw in)
How funny we're talking about this... I just this minute fixed one in the firmware I'm working on. Increased the stack size and changed a function call:
where a is a horrendous function:
unsigned long z()
{
unsigned long b;
b=a(1)+a(2)+a(3);
(...stuff...)
return(b);
}
This returned different values depending on when you called z(). Figured out this had to do with how full the stack was.
Instead, I tried this:
unsigned long z()
{
unsigned long a1, a2, a3, b;
a1=a(1);
a2=a(2);
a3=a(3);
b=a1+a2+a3;
(...stuff...)
return b;
}
I'm a physicist, not a software engineer, so this is probably obvious to all of you - but I felt better.
It's good to see my old boss in the news. I worked for Mario in 1999-2000 as a snot-nosed intern, doing some work on their through-backplane transcievers and modulators. Because silicon is transparent at infrared wavelengths, you can see right though the chip if the base is thin enough. Add to that the idea that the electron density changes in the gate region of a FET as it switches, and, well, there you go. :) This technology has the potential to go MUCH MUCH faster than a measly 2GB/s.
Anyway, the group I was in consisted of ten PhD's and me, a sophomore. The level of output of that one group was amazing, and I'm pleased to see the technology they worked on for so long start to take off.
I was rebuilding a test system where one could put two devices in a master/slave configuration. Both of them used an RS232 interface, and to tell the two apart: one was labeled "master" and made of white plastic, and the other was labeled "slave", upside down, and made of black plastic. I blinked once, then dismissed myself as a reactionary idiot.
Actually, the flyash produced is pretty useful. Allow me to explain. The pollution produced by a typical power plant falls within three categories: SOx (sulfur oxides), NOx (nitrogen oxides), and inert particulates. These are filtered out by spraying a high pressure fan of limestone (CaCO3) through the flue gas, causing the formation of CCP (coal combustion products) in a system called a "scrubber" - known also by its tongue-in-cheek name, "SOx NOx rocks box". Some uses include road agglutinates, cast concrete products, and drywall. See this page for more information.
Back in the day, my friends had to do a senior project. The unimaginative picked GIS systems, low noise amplifiers, PDA sensors, etc. Ever the perpetual partiers, my boys hit on The Idea: an automated mixologist. Their advisor loved the idea! They started small, but the project just kept growing, ever the victim of feature creep. Their work was conducted in intense secrecy, and occasionally they would say something about "valve lag on keypad interrupt" or "fluid flow management".
Presentations came around, and upon being called, they went to the lab down the hall and wheeled out their creation. It was, to say the least, impressive. They had packed enough alcoholic capacity into a 6 foot tall steel frame to inebriate a small sorority. Mixers on the bottom, liquors on the top, and valves,hoses, power cables, and the ice maker cannibalized from a refrigerator took up the rest of the space. The PIC-driven UI was elegantly designed to be easily operated while drunk (they actually did usability tests - how drunk can I be and still read this text?)
They presented the first drink, a stiff whiskey sour, to the head of the department.
It is the only senior project ever to recieve a standing ovation.