No it wasn't, Buran (Buran is the name of one of the orbiters, not the class of spacecraft) flew in space successfully, and unmanned (US orbiters have never flown in space unmanned). It only flew once however simply because the money ran out.
There were at least 2 other space-capable orbiters in the mid to late stages of construction at the time the programme was shelved.
The russian orbiters were technically superior, although that said, still not a brilliant way of getting to space.
It's all moot now though as aside from some Energia engines that may still be made servicable (I believe they are mothballed somewhere), Buran itself is (I think still) buried under the Baikonur roof collapse, and the next most complete craft was stored outside and is in no way servicable any more if it hasn't already been broken down for scrap.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Energia was exactly dumb, big, yes. I'm sure that Energia was reusable, and throttleable (not light & pray). but I might be wrong, it's been a while since I've read about Energia and the soviet shuttle program.
Simple, he is not charging a "copy fee", he is charging a "usage fee". If this were a copy fee (for "distribution") then you would have to pay this wether you continue to use it or not, because iut gets distributed to you wether you use it or not.
But as it is, you can download it for free (ie it's distributed for free) and then 30 days later it will require you to pay a $20 fee to continue using it, it is restricting the usage. That is a very clear GPL violation.
Add to that the fact that the win32 binaries may not be reproducable from the source you can get (ie there are closed modifications to the GPL, notably the registration lockout code I imagine!), and that he has included, without permission, patches from 3rd parties which were contributed to a GPL project and thus are GPL. Really, he hasn't a leg to stand on.
I have no problems with him trying to make a buck, but not if it's off the hard work of others with no respect given.
Flying cars sound great until an unlicensed, uninsured drunk driver crashes into your childs school from an altitude of 2,000 feet.
But what is to stop people doing that *now* anyway? Any unlicensed drunk can go buy/steal an aircraft now, they'll probably kill themselves about 2 seconds after leaving the ground (pull back you go up, just keep pulling back to go back down;-)) but there is nothing to stop them doing that. Sure you have to have a licence to legally fly one, but there is nothing to stop you jumping in a plane and flying illegally.
It would be no easier if flying-cars were common place, aircraft are already common place, and infact, most now aircraft are pretty insecure, it wouldn't take a genious criminal to nick one. Cars by comparison are typically far more secure (car alarms for a start).
I'm not saying the flying cars are a brilliant idea for anything other than recreation, just that it's not valid to say things like "It'll be raining death if we let joe blow drive in 3 dimensions."
A great episode. You've indicated the one real flaw in Farscape that even die-hard fans have to acknowledge.
Umm, no, those of us with attention spans of more than an hour realise that Farscape is ultimatly one very long story; of John and his journey, the 'people' he meets along the way, and the experiences he goes through to get there.
People have become so accustomed to the 'Star Trek' universe where the entire universe is (almost) reset for the beginning of each episode simply don't seem to grasp the idea that Farscape is not like that.
In short, it's not a flaw, thats the way it's supposed to be. The Farscape story is too big to fit into 1 hour, so it's been broken over 4 seasons (+ miniseries) of them.
As you say, missing episodes will confuse (although there are a couple of throwaways each series which don't impact the scheme of things), but after you've got hooked in the story you don't *want* to miss them anyway, you'll look forward all week to finding out what happens in the Farscape universe next.
It will make you happy, and also bring tears of sadness, you will really feel for the characters as if they are life-long friends, you'll privatly mourn for the dead, and cheer for the living.
Ah man, we get enough of news already here on Earth, it's all the same wherever you go, it's about time Cassini discovered some Enternainment Moons, that's what I'm talkin' about.
And while I certainly would not want to type a comment like this with a one-handed keyboard
Not speaking from experience, but from what I have read, using a chording keybaord once you get accustomed isnt' really very much slower than using a regular keyboard. This is because of course your fingers are moving much shorter distances.
The silly thing is, that they would be seriously doing themselves, nay, everybody a favour if they did that.
I mean, realistically what do they have to *lose* for doing that?
Nothing I can think of.
What do they have to gain? Well, they save a whole bunch of money (development costs), they save a wholoe lot of time (again, development), they get a better browser which loses nothing to IE (except for those (rare in my experience) bad sites that break in anything other than IE), they gain some creedence with the more astute computer users (those who know what Mozilla is and why it's good), they get more security (more eyes if nothing else)......
The only things that would be a problem is the tight integration to the Windows system that IE has; but I bet they could write some sort of wrapper that could let the Mozilla API present itself as the IE API.
Maybe even keep the IE core in the OS and only use the Moz core if the specific application is 'IE7 Aware' (i.e, IE itself would be, but perhaps stuff embedding IE wouldn't unless it said so).
It just makes sense, but I'd take a wager that it will NEVER happen.
(I belive that's why "not just anyone" was supposed to open av TV 50 years ago..).
TV's (CRT at least, ignore LCD) still involve very high voltages.
Usually when something breaks I won't hesitate to break it open and see if I can fix it, but when it comes to CRT's and Microwaves - thats a job for people who know what they are doing.
Rutan has clearly decided to try and push the envelope to win the prize, like he did by doing his last test flight in high-wind conditions. Lets just hope that he doesn't kill someone in the process.
At the end of the day, it's the pilots (both of White Knight and SS1) who make the final go/no-go call, if after everything the pilot's feel it's unsafe then they don't go. No different than any other flight operation.
Debian has never really been hard to install (with the exception of hardware and there being no autodetection thereof) if you only install a base system, or use tasksel to select one or more specific tasks.
It's when you try and install a huge pile of packages (using dselect/aptitude) that things get dawnting; but it's just not sensible or necessary to do that. The reason is that you'll end up installing a pile of stuff that you'll never get around to using.
What I do when I install a deb box is to install the minimum possible stuff, just enough to get a usable (desktop perhaps) machine, then once it's installed (quickly, because there's not much going in) I start using it. When I come to something where I need some software I don't have, a quick "apt-get install" and it's there. That way I don' t install a lot of stuff I have no real need of but which "sounded interesting" when I was installing the base distro.
IMO, the deb installer team should make the installer like this..
Welcome to Debian..
Is this computer going to be a desktop machine?
Yes - I'm a new computer user, or more familiar with a Mac (GNOME)
Yes - I'm more familiar with Windows (KDE)
No - Just command line thanks
and that's it apart from localisation perhaps; on the default desktop there should be an icon - "Install a New Program" which opens a selector of top level stuff
Office
Word Processor
Spreadsheet
Email
Web
Tools
Calculator
etc.....
And another icon on the desktop
"Upgrade Installed Programs"
which does an apt-get update, apt-get upgrade with perhaps a bit better problem resolution (often times I'll update + (dist)upgrade only to find that something is conflicting somewhere and I have to go fix it).
Perhaps you'd even put some stub icons on the desktop for the most common things,
"Word Processing"
"Spreadsheet"
"Email"
which will bring up the installer at the correct location if you havn't already installed such software.
LSA, and LSA Pilots are very similar to what most other countries call thier 'ultralight' (or microlight) pilots now, and have done for many years.
Oh, I see, actually, you're in the UK. Do you even know what your own regs are?!?!?!
I suggest you read up on Microlights in your part of the world then you can come back and tell me about all the terrible things these "BMW Drivers" have done in your very own country!
fly something a bit bigger than an ultralight, but not much bigger,
For USians, this is a big deal, because the US regs are very limited in terms of what an ultralight is. LSA brings it much closer to most other countries where 1200lb 'ultralights' are the norm.
LSA opens up a wide range for you guys, from the 30 knot fair weather craft to 100 knot + plastic fantastics.
I hear a lot of people saying that these aircraft are somehow safer, or that training will be lesser but that's not the case. Training will be lesser only in so far as it wil focus on those areas that are important for this type of aircraft (no night, no instrument, no radio navigation unless you're aircraft is equipped (not likely) and you want to of course). And all aircraft can kill you in a jiffy, they are not safer, and not really cheaper any more.
Not necessarily, the classic wormhole + lightspeed travel + time way of making a time travel device would mean that the absolute limit of reverse travel is the point at which the wormhole is created.
So if that turns out to be feasible in the distant future you could only travel back to the distant future from the more distant future (and conversely from the distant future to the more distant future).
New Zealand is hydropowered for the most part, we do have a couple of coal fired stations but mostly as backup for when the lakes get a bit low and the power usage gets a bit high.
We also have a windfarm somewhere but that's of negligible contribution.
So our power generation capabilities are quite reliable for the forseeable future.
Anyway, I'd like to see any vessels nuclear power plant try to power an entire city let alone a country of 4 million people!
The NZ Nuclear Free stance is based on two directions
1. Nuclear Weapons are bad mm'kay.
2. Nuclear Power Generation (NPG) has a risk of contaminating our unique and isolated ecosystem.
I have no problem with NPG, but the risk to our ecosystem is too great, we have to find a better way to deal with the waste before NPG could be considered.
The Nuclear Weapons issue however is non-negotiable, and if the US won't confirm that conventionally powered vessels (are there any left anyway) do not carry nuclear weapons, then they are not permitted in NZ either.
Doesn't matter how close of an ally New Zealand is.
NZ isn't that close of an ally to the US actually, we (New Zealand) won't let the US bring nuclear powered or armed vessels into our waters, and the US doesn't much like us for that.
Every now and then they try and "convince" us otherwise, like waving FTA's (free trade agreements) under our nose or making thinly veiled threats to take something away or not play ball on something.
And every time we give them the finger and tell them to go take thier toys and play somewhere else.
Neither one of them worked well until I set up FF to allow popups and cookies for the school district website.
Oooh, man that's a bad move enabling those eviiiil cookies, we all know the really bad stuff cookies can do, wow, youre just opening up a whole big ass can of worms by allowing cookies. I strongly suggest you go put those custom made tinfoil PC covers you had made just-in-case a while back on immediatly, who knows what the evil dooers might be garnering from those cookies.
XML is a file format, it has nothing to do with objects, no more than HTML does, which is not at all.
However to counter your claim that XML is hard to represent in a relational database. Uhm. No, it's not.
XML consists (simplifying) of elements and attributes, elements may be nested.
A generic mapping to a relational database is that elements correspond to the entity tables, attributes correspond to columns in those tables, and the nesting of elements is modelled as a foreign key in the child entity records.
For example: Navigating within this browser window. Which is faster, scrolling from top to bottom with the mouse-wheel? Or grabbing the scroll bar, and dragging it up and down? That kind of quick, reflexive action is not possible in 3D with a mouse alone.
Mouse-wheel, at least since I trimmed the notch-inducing bit of plastic inside it so it will free-wheel. One quick flick to spin the wheel and the page rolls down to the bottom, flick it up and the page rolls to the top.
I dunno why mouse manufacturers remove the spin-ability of thier scroll wheels, forcing the user to manually scroll for each and every movement. It's much more useful having it freewheel with only slight resistance.
MySQL 3 is common on shared hosts because there are incompatabilities goign from 3 to 4 that a handfull of older web apps fall prey to.
Whats worse though is that some 'control panels' (eg Plesk, Ensim as well I think) don't run with 4, or at least come with 3 as the default 'supported' environment.
There are hosts out there though that are not stuck in the past and do run MySQL 4 now, personally, I wouldn't even give the time of day to a host who runs MySQL 3 and doesn't provide any MySQL 4 server at all.
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Their shuttle project was a failure
No it wasn't, Buran (Buran is the name of one of the orbiters, not the class of spacecraft) flew in space successfully, and unmanned (US orbiters have never flown in space unmanned). It only flew once however simply because the money ran out.
There were at least 2 other space-capable orbiters in the mid to late stages of construction at the time the programme was shelved.
The russian orbiters were technically superior, although that said, still not a brilliant way of getting to space.
It's all moot now though as aside from some Energia engines that may still be made servicable (I believe they are mothballed somewhere), Buran itself is (I think still) buried under the Baikonur roof collapse, and the next most complete craft was stored outside and is in no way servicable any more if it hasn't already been broken down for scrap.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Energia was exactly dumb, big, yes. I'm sure that Energia was reusable, and throttleable (not light & pray). but I might be wrong, it's been a while since I've read about Energia and the soviet shuttle program.
Simple, he is not charging a "copy fee", he is charging a "usage fee". If this were a copy fee (for "distribution") then you would have to pay this wether you continue to use it or not, because iut gets distributed to you wether you use it or not.
But as it is, you can download it for free (ie it's distributed for free) and then 30 days later it will require you to pay a $20 fee to continue using it, it is restricting the usage. That is a very clear GPL violation.
Add to that the fact that the win32 binaries may not be reproducable from the source you can get (ie there are closed modifications to the GPL, notably the registration lockout code I imagine!), and that he has included, without permission, patches from 3rd parties which were contributed to a GPL project and thus are GPL. Really, he hasn't a leg to stand on.
I have no problems with him trying to make a buck, but not if it's off the hard work of others with no respect given.
Flying cars sound great until an unlicensed, uninsured drunk driver crashes into your childs school from an altitude of 2,000 feet.
But what is to stop people doing that *now* anyway? Any unlicensed drunk can go buy/steal an aircraft now, they'll probably kill themselves about 2 seconds after leaving the ground (pull back you go up, just keep pulling back to go back down
It would be no easier if flying-cars were common place, aircraft are already common place, and infact, most now aircraft are pretty insecure, it wouldn't take a genious criminal to nick one. Cars by comparison are typically far more secure (car alarms for a start).
I'm not saying the flying cars are a brilliant idea for anything other than recreation, just that it's not valid to say things like "It'll be raining death if we let joe blow drive in 3 dimensions."
A great episode. You've indicated the one real flaw in Farscape that even die-hard fans have to acknowledge.
Umm, no, those of us with attention spans of more than an hour realise that Farscape is ultimatly one very long story; of John and his journey, the 'people' he meets along the way, and the experiences he goes through to get there.
People have become so accustomed to the 'Star Trek' universe where the entire universe is (almost) reset for the beginning of each episode simply don't seem to grasp the idea that Farscape is not like that.
In short, it's not a flaw, thats the way it's supposed to be. The Farscape story is too big to fit into 1 hour, so it's been broken over 4 seasons (+ miniseries) of them.
As you say, missing episodes will confuse (although there are a couple of throwaways each series which don't impact the scheme of things), but after you've got hooked in the story you don't *want* to miss them anyway, you'll look forward all week to finding out what happens in the Farscape universe next.
It will make you happy, and also bring tears of sadness, you will really feel for the characters as if they are life-long friends, you'll privatly mourn for the dead, and cheer for the living.
Cassini discovered two news moons on Saturn,
Ah man, we get enough of news already here on Earth, it's all the same wherever you go, it's about time Cassini discovered some Enternainment Moons, that's what I'm talkin' about.
Ah come on man, you can't do that! Say that something funny/cool/scary happen and then in the next breath "but I'm not going to tell you what".
And while I certainly would not want to type a comment like this with a one-handed keyboard
Not speaking from experience, but from what I have read, using a chording keybaord once you get accustomed isnt' really very much slower than using a regular keyboard. This is because of course your fingers are moving much shorter distances.
You forget about chording, unless this keyboard cannot chord at all? In which case I agree.
The silly thing is, that they would be seriously doing themselves, nay, everybody a favour if they did that.
I mean, realistically what do they have to *lose* for doing that?
Nothing I can think of.
What do they have to gain? Well, they save a whole bunch of money (development costs), they save a wholoe lot of time (again, development), they get a better browser which loses nothing to IE (except for those (rare in my experience) bad sites that break in anything other than IE), they gain some creedence with the more astute computer users (those who know what Mozilla is and why it's good), they get more security (more eyes if nothing else)......
The only things that would be a problem is the tight integration to the Windows system that IE has; but I bet they could write some sort of wrapper that could let the Mozilla API present itself as the IE API.
Maybe even keep the IE core in the OS and only use the Moz core if the specific application is 'IE7 Aware' (i.e, IE itself would be, but perhaps stuff embedding IE wouldn't unless it said so).
It just makes sense, but I'd take a wager that it will NEVER happen.
TV's (CRT at least, ignore LCD) still involve very high voltages.
Usually when something breaks I won't hesitate to break it open and see if I can fix it, but when it comes to CRT's and Microwaves - thats a job for people who know what they are doing.
Rutan has clearly decided to try and push the envelope to win the prize, like he did by doing his last test flight in high-wind conditions. Lets just hope that he doesn't kill someone in the process.
At the end of the day, it's the pilots (both of White Knight and SS1) who make the final go/no-go call, if after everything the pilot's feel it's unsafe then they don't go. No different than any other flight operation.
Debian has never really been hard to install (with the exception of hardware and there being no autodetection thereof) if you only install a base system, or use tasksel to select one or more specific tasks.
It's when you try and install a huge pile of packages (using dselect/aptitude) that things get dawnting; but it's just not sensible or necessary to do that. The reason is that you'll end up installing a pile of stuff that you'll never get around to using.
What I do when I install a deb box is to install the minimum possible stuff, just enough to get a usable (desktop perhaps) machine, then once it's installed (quickly, because there's not much going in) I start using it. When I come to something where I need some software I don't have, a quick "apt-get install" and it's there. That way I don' t install a lot of stuff I have no real need of but which "sounded interesting" when I was installing the base distro.
IMO, the deb installer team should make the installer like this..
Welcome to Debian..
Is this computer going to be a desktop machine?
Yes - I'm a new computer user, or more familiar with a Mac (GNOME)
Yes - I'm more familiar with Windows (KDE)
No - Just command line thanks
and that's it apart from localisation perhaps; on the default desktop there should be an icon - "Install a New Program" which opens a selector of top level stuff
Office
Word Processor
Spreadsheet
Email
Web
Tools
Calculator
etc.....
And another icon on the desktop
"Upgrade Installed Programs"
which does an apt-get update, apt-get upgrade with perhaps a bit better problem resolution (often times I'll update + (dist)upgrade only to find that something is conflicting somewhere and I have to go fix it).
Perhaps you'd even put some stub icons on the desktop for the most common things,
"Word Processing"
"Spreadsheet"
"Email"
which will bring up the installer at the correct location if you havn't already installed such software.
apt-get is what the advanced & server users use.
You are woefully ill-informed sir.
LSA, and LSA Pilots are very similar to what most other countries call thier 'ultralight' (or microlight) pilots now, and have done for many years.
Oh, I see, actually, you're in the UK. Do you even know what your own regs are?!?!?!
I suggest you read up on Microlights in your part of the world then you can come back and tell me about all the terrible things these "BMW Drivers" have done in your very own country!
fly something a bit bigger than an ultralight, but not much bigger,
For USians, this is a big deal, because the US regs are very limited in terms of what an ultralight is. LSA brings it much closer to most other countries where 1200lb 'ultralights' are the norm.
LSA opens up a wide range for you guys, from the 30 knot fair weather craft to 100 knot + plastic fantastics.
I hear a lot of people saying that these aircraft are somehow safer, or that training will be lesser but that's not the case. Training will be lesser only in so far as it wil focus on those areas that are important for this type of aircraft (no night, no instrument, no radio navigation unless you're aircraft is equipped (not likely) and you want to of course). And all aircraft can kill you in a jiffy, they are not safer, and not really cheaper any more.
Just, easier in different ways.
yoke
Pedantry, but most aircraft that will fit the LSA category are stick and rudder all the way baby.
Not necessarily, the classic wormhole + lightspeed travel + time way of making a time travel device would mean that the absolute limit of reverse travel is the point at which the wormhole is created.
So if that turns out to be feasible in the distant future you could only travel back to the distant future from the more distant future (and conversely from the distant future to the more distant future).
the author knew he didn't have a leg to stand on
No, the author is completely happy because this is what he intended in the first place, anybody can take the source and use it for anything they want.
New Zealand is hydropowered for the most part, we do have a couple of coal fired stations but mostly as backup for when the lakes get a bit low and the power usage gets a bit high.
We also have a windfarm somewhere but that's of negligible contribution.
So our power generation capabilities are quite reliable for the forseeable future.
Anyway, I'd like to see any vessels nuclear power plant try to power an entire city let alone a country of 4 million people!
The NZ Nuclear Free stance is based on two directions
1. Nuclear Weapons are bad mm'kay.
2. Nuclear Power Generation (NPG) has a risk of contaminating our unique and isolated ecosystem.
I have no problem with NPG, but the risk to our ecosystem is too great, we have to find a better way to deal with the waste before NPG could be considered.
The Nuclear Weapons issue however is non-negotiable, and if the US won't confirm that conventionally powered vessels (are there any left anyway) do not carry nuclear weapons, then they are not permitted in NZ either.
Doesn't matter how close of an ally New Zealand is.
NZ isn't that close of an ally to the US actually, we (New Zealand) won't let the US bring nuclear powered or armed vessels into our waters, and the US doesn't much like us for that.
Every now and then they try and "convince" us otherwise, like waving FTA's (free trade agreements) under our nose or making thinly veiled threats to take something away or not play ball on something.
And every time we give them the finger and tell them to go take thier toys and play somewhere else.
Neither one of them worked well until I set up FF to allow popups and cookies for the school district website.
Oooh, man that's a bad move enabling those eviiiil cookies, we all know the really bad stuff cookies can do, wow, youre just opening up a whole big ass can of worms by allowing cookies. I strongly suggest you go put those custom made tinfoil PC covers you had made just-in-case a while back on immediatly, who knows what the evil dooers might be garnering from those cookies.
No.
XML is a file format, it has nothing to do with objects, no more than HTML does, which is not at all.
However to counter your claim that XML is hard to represent in a relational database. Uhm. No, it's not.
XML consists (simplifying) of elements and attributes, elements may be nested.
A generic mapping to a relational database is that elements correspond to the entity tables, attributes correspond to columns in those tables, and the nesting of elements is modelled as a foreign key in the child entity records.
Whats so hard?
Mouse-wheel, at least since I trimmed the notch-inducing bit of plastic inside it so it will free-wheel. One quick flick to spin the wheel and the page rolls down to the bottom, flick it up and the page rolls to the top.
I dunno why mouse manufacturers remove the spin-ability of thier scroll wheels, forcing the user to manually scroll for each and every movement. It's much more useful having it freewheel with only slight resistance.
MySQL 3 is common on shared hosts because there are incompatabilities goign from 3 to 4 that a handfull of older web apps fall prey to.
Whats worse though is that some 'control panels' (eg Plesk, Ensim as well I think) don't run with 4, or at least come with 3 as the default 'supported' environment.
There are hosts out there though that are not stuck in the past and do run MySQL 4 now, personally, I wouldn't even give the time of day to a host who runs MySQL 3 and doesn't provide any MySQL 4 server at all.
Why? Do you want to see ads that are of little interest to you, or do you want to see ads that are targetted to you?
Ads are a fact of life, get over it. Besides, targetted ads are actually good enough to click sometimes.