but almost every developer I know is not installing Linux over Windows, rather they're dual-booting their systems to run both Linux and Windows.
I've noticed the same thing. Often developers have to keep a copy of Windows around for the very few times when nothing else will do (like debugging a Windows-specific problem). I have a laptop with Redhat 8.0/Windows 2000 and a desktop with Mandrake 8.2/WindowsNT at work. A lot of my fellow developers have similar setups (although a number now have 'pure' Linux boxes.
The interesting thing to note is the frequency of use of each OS on these boxes. The desktop hasn't run WinNT for about 1.5 years and has an average uptime of around 100 days (times between scheduled power down periods). The laptop occassionally gets booted into Win2000 to update the virus definitions. All the serious development work gets done on linux.
Could it handle the destructible and climbable walls, though? Also, I'm not sure it'd scale to quite that many troops. The Total War [totalwar.com] series also has an engine with most of the right components to do a Helm's Deep simulation, but as far as I know, it still would be unable to handle troops on the walls, or ladders for climbing the walls.
There are plenty of Myth II levels where you need the mortar-wielding dwarves to blow holes in wall to proceed through the level. So that part is going to be fine.
As to siege ladders, I don't think I've seen that happen. But then again, it's definitely time to dust off the Total Codex and go Mything in Action.
Even if being in far earth orbit were sufficient distance away (and it's not) to reduce the signal strength of terrestrial transmitters on the surface of the earth broadcasting at astronomically useful frequencies (say 1.5GHz) you would still be faced with the problem of building those telescopes up there. Thats actually an interesting problem for high resolution radio astronomy, as you can combine the data from a collection of dishes separated by enormous distances and treat the result as though you actually had a dish as large as the largest separation and currently the highest resolution radio images have come from the Merlin project where the diameter of the earth is the effective limit. Terrestrial radio telescopes are heavy constructions and it's not entirely easy to build suitable space telescopes that are light enough to lift into orbit...
And it wouldn't be particularly amusing if a fleet of aliens swooped out of space and gave us a major fine for littering the astronomically important parts of the radio spectrum:-)
Radio Astronomers have a hard enough time keeping the important wavebands free of interference without the radio spectrum being unregulated. Lots of useful, hard science is being done by the radio telescopes around the world observing the machinations of galaxies out in the distant universe. One of the key problems is that these signals are amazingly faint. The standard unit used in radio measurements is the Jansky - thats 10^(-26) Joules per second per square metre - which should give you some indication as to how faint. Lift that coke can off the floor onto the table and you've just used up more energy than has been received from distant galaxies by ALL the radio telescopes on the surface of the planet.
Terestrial radio transmitters are so many orders of magnitude stronger than these signals that any sideband transmissions even 90db below peak transmission still totally swamps the surrounding spectrum. And very few transmitters are truely 'perfect'. It's not as though a transmitter broadcasting at frequency X with HWHM waveband Y can't be detected at X +/- 8 Y. Yes - better quality receivers allow you to separate out signals at close frequencies, but a very strong signal next to a very weak signal will drown out it's neighbours.
as of 1.3b Mozilla xslt support is majorly broken, to the point that is not usable.
I am told there are several fixes in CVS but I like dealing with a semmi stable platform.
but that is precisely why vendors building on Mozilla won't be targetting a beta release. In fact, they are likely to target Mozilla 1.0.x as a stable API, stable platform. If it works on later releases, excellent. But that is a bonus - not the raison d'etre.
The "extended" edition isn't for the average person, it's for the/. uber-geek audience, or people who can recite the books word-for-word, and have arguments about whether Tom Bombadil could kick Saruman's ass.
Hell, we'd never even consider arguing over this one. Tom Bombadil would kick Saruman's ass all over the Old Forest and down the Barrow...
Err...
Maybe it's better if I just shut up before I get labelled:-)
Safari/KHTML vs. Gecko/Mozilla is just like KDE vs. GNOME. It's a matter of personal preference based on what is important to the end user.
Safari vs Mozilla is not a simple comparison. Safari is an extremely competent web browser, with a few shortcomings in the XML department which will no doubt be tackled and fixed as developers get to it. Mozilla is really the first viable web platform to appear that has the capabilities necessary to deliver a fully integrated web UI, using all the power of XML wrapped up in the XBL integration with XSLT, XUL, SVG and other XML-based markup and integration utilities. With Mozilla, you really can build a fully operational crossplatform application to do considerably more than trivialities.
While the previous platform sounds like the worst marketing blurb, it also happens to be a crucial point for the next generation of the web. The "Web As A Platform" is where Microsoft really wants to be - to fully integrate everything you see and do through one web delivery system is an extremely attractive proposition for a number of software vendors. Being certain that the platform will remain around even if the parent company moves on to other things or goes into the financial abyss is also extremely important if vendors are going to leverage Mozilla as the next big thing.
Of course, given that all the XBL/XUL/XSLT/etc. are published specs, there is no reason why Safari won't get them in time. Vive la difference.
Eg; I work for a company that writes and sells computer dispatching and records systems to cops and firemen. I see no CAD systems on sourceforge. They simply dont exist, and wont because much of the code req
Guess you haven't tried QCAD then. Or maybe it doesn't exist:-)
Cats are pretty creative. Not only can they persuade you to part with a significant portion of the food on your plate, they insinuate themselves to the point of displacing you from your favourite chair. And then, just to rub salt in the wounds a little more, they also paint and dance.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. I have no connection to these books/websites but I did fall off my chair laughing the first time I saw the website:-)
Ford's service is making cars. Are you saying that Ford has a moral obligation to give me one, even though I haven't paid for it?
No - get the analogies right. If I, as a car servicing firm, knew of a part in a Ford car that could fail and cause the car to go off the road at random and I only let my best customers know, I would be sued for screwing around with peoples lives.
Not that I have any sympathy for either MS or Sympantec - Symantec gets to make money off the loopholes in MS's operating system in a strange almost parasitic relationship. The only thing that isn't clear to me is which company is the host...
I concur (using a shell rather than a manager), though pretty/ugly are matters of preference. from what I've heard KDE's is 'better' functionally. This might be a perception holdover of when Nautilus was slow.
I still remember the first time I loaded up Nautilus at it's first major release and watched in amazement as CPU usage went through the roof, the drive thrashed and a window outline slowly filled in on the screen. Things improved quite a bit during the Gnome 1.x lifetime but moving to Gnome 2 and the new Nautilus is a day and night change. Nautilus on Gnome 2.x is fast, has some really sweet integration features which are only just being exploited now (fontilus springs immediately to mind) and there are bound to be more coming as people get to grips with it.
I still generally use the command line and a few perl scripts for most file manipulation. But just once or twice recently, I've been reaching for that Nautilus window to track stuff down, examine fonts and look for music.
Technically the main tank is never reused. It burns up after it is detached. So while it was the old style it was a "new" tank. The solid rocket boosters are recovered and reused.
Oops - I should have said use of a tank using old design. Apparently there is still (at least?) one more left - I wonder if it will ever be used.
Ron Dittemore made it clear in the Saturday press conference that there is no way to do an EVA in order to inspect the wing or tiles. The EVAs that are done are done in the cargo bay area. The arm that is used to go further out wasn't aboard this flight.
Must have missed that part of the call. I do find it intruiging that EVAs are normally restricted to the inside of the cargo bay. Does anyone have any more details on what other parameters restrict EVAs? Reading through the EVA details for the ISS missions doesn't have a nice short summary of such limitations.
Also, there is no way they could have gone to the space station. The Columbia is the heaviest of the shuttles and they used the old style heavy main tank for liftoff. They can't get to the station's orbit with that configuration.
I do wonder whether the re-use of this tank will be seen as one of the more controversial parts of this whole operation in retrospect. There were public notices that these tanks had been retired from use, with the newer design being used in preference.
I firmly believe NASA knew that the insulation hitting the wing doomed the shuttle.
BOL^H^H^HI respectfully disagree...
While it may not seem much, the shuttle was travelling as awesome speed already as the insulation fell. It would have hit the wing at some shocking speed. This had sealed the fate.
Yes - the space shuttle was travelling fast. But the insulation fell OFF THE SHUTTLE. This means that the relative speed of the insulation hitting the shuttle was just the deceleration felt by the insulation in the time between coming loose and striking the front wing edge. The insulation is almost certainly inside the bow shock caused by the nose of the fuel tank itself so the insulation was probably tumbling inside the turbulent flow inside the bow shock and not exposed to the still air ahead of the shuttle.
Look - the astronauts were up there for 16 days in orbit. I don't know if there were any scheduled EVAs during that period but I suspect that the first thing any EVAs might have looked at would be a visible inspection of the wing edge.
I also firmly believe that had NASA felt that the dangers of re-entry would have a modest chance of causing a severe structural failure, they would have ditched the shuttle in orbit and looked for other ways to get the astronauts back down. There is always some sort of plan B - in this case the most obvious one is dock with the ISS and look to the other shuttles or the Russians for extraction. You don't play games with peoples lives, especially under such scrutiny and at a time when NASA funding isn't so good. When a shuttle explodes, it's inevitably a major public event.
Can anyone remind me why Sun chose GNOME over KDE or any other desktop environment? Was it because RedHat has adopted GNOME as their default desktop, or they liked the look of Ximian GNOME? Because I can't really believe that they chose GNOME purely on technical reasons.
There were probably a raft of reasons rather just one. GTK is written in C, so it's an easier task to tie GTK to anything already existing than QT would be. Sun needed to find an architecture with strong accessibility features and they may have felt that GNOME would be easier to get those accessibility features in...
Probably the clincher though is the licensing of GTK. It's LGPL, rather than GPL. So Sun can take their proprietary stuff and dynamically link it to the GTK libraries and keep their proprietary stuff proprietary and closed. With QT, they would either have had to completely open their sources up under the GPL or they would have to have licensed the QT libraries from Trolltech. Like it or not, if you are developing proprietary Linux/Windows apps and you want a toolkit, GTK2 looks pretty good, doesn't force you to reveal your stuff and is a capable, accessible toolkit.
However, the next version of "Windows for Servers" keeps getting pushed back, and many corporates are only now upgrading their servers from NT4 to W2K - not to take advantage of new features, but because support is being withdrawn.
That is absolutely spot on. As applications and the OS become close to 100% feature complete for what the customer wants (as opposed to what the software manufacturer wants them to want), revenue will dry up unless you can keep your foot in the door. MS is trying to keep that foot there by
ensuring that Windows Next Gen is installed on as close to 100% of the new machines out there, and
forcing customers to buy new versions by terminating support for older versions.
Possibly the latter is the one most likely to upset the customer - buying a new machine with Windows (and Office) pre-installed is probably seen as a good deal by most buyers (except people like me...). But finding out that some critical security flaw in, say, Office 2000 is not going to be fixed and that an upgrade to Office XXP is required at the cost of a freshly remorgaged Granny and one arm is likely to annoy Joe & Jo Sixpack.
As the number of computers sold starts to tail off, money from new OS's will continue to decline for MS and shortening the TTL for the product lines is probably the most obvious business action - witness MS licensing 6.0. But that could just prove to be another thin end of the wedge for MS's desktop monopoly.
I don't see that it makes much sense. after all 16x16 or 32x33 icons have been around fr a long time. they're even-byte things and easy to handle. and they're quick
And so are SVG icons - a lot of the current SVG icons are quick to load (requiring considerably less memory to describe the icon than PNG) and quick to draw with this fast renderer. But that is ignoring the most useful part of describing your screen using vectors, splines, etc. - rescalability. We're all used to being able to switch monitors with different DPI and still have the same physical size font on the screen (so that 10 pt is 10/72 inch high regardless of screen dpi) and it's useful to be able to have icons which behave in the same way.
isn''t a desktop all about making a useful user experience? if I wanted gigantic icons I'd have gigantic icons, and I don't. It seems like extra complexity just for a coding exercise.
For people with normal eyesight, standard 16x16 or 32x32 icons are going to be fine. If you suffer from poor eyesight, being able to have fonts and icons at say 4x magnification is extremely useful. And a big part of the GNOME2 architecture is strongly accessibility orientated so this is a useful part of the puzzle.
Hate to break it to you, but Mozilla does do automated installs from web pages. Just head on over to MozDev [mozdev.org] and see for yourself. Many projects, such as OptiMoz and Spellchecker, have automated install links right on the page.
Which only work if a) you actually have software installation enabled in your preferences, b) have write access to the location where mozilla is installed and c) will prompt you BEFORE it installs the software, giving the web server and the package being installed.
Automated installs are extremely useful - it's all a question of finding that balance between ease of use and ease of abuse.
Linux's clustering capabilities are indeed better than those of Windows, but only in the engineering and scientific calculation space.
I'd say you'd been reading the wrong stats, but please continue...
You seem to be overlooking the enterprise database [tpc.org] space, where Microsoft has thoroughly smacked-down the competition, both in overall performance and price-performance.
MS only has decent benchmark results with SQL Server 2000 for small databases. These days, holding small (300MB and 1GB) database benchmarks is small cheer for the most part - the interesting stuff is how far you can scale. MS has set out and acheived good results on the small end because that is the only playground that it can be competitive in. If you think that Linux can't play in this playground too, I think you are sadly mistaken. Wait for equivalent benchmarks from Oracle and IBM (DB2 UDB) and then you can compare performance.
Can someone please explain why we need free access to Mickey Mouse, etc.? In my mind, Mickey Mouse is an asset owned by Disney, so why should it expire? Imagine the damage people could do to Disney if Mickey was used inappropriately by competitors. Not trolling, I just don't get why we need free access to this stuff.
First, Mickey Mouse(TM) is a Disney Trademark. Nobody is able to go around using Mickey Mouse(TM) to promote their products/services/whatever without an agreement from Disney. However, the original Mickey Mouse cartoons were distributed under copyright, giving Disney an absolute monopoly on the copying and distribution of those cartoons for a limited time. At least, it was limited when the cartoons were made. Beyond that limited time, all copyrighted works become public domain, adding to the huge amount of material that is available for further creative use. For example, the works of Mozart are all public domain. Think about that.
However, because of the continuing extension of those corporate copyrights, the corporations have been able to avoid the moment of truth when they lose that state-sponsored monopoly on their original works.
...Linux desktops are only going to appeal to consumers to the low end. Since if you're paying $500 for a computer it's no big deal to tack on an extra $50 dollars for a Windows license. But at $200 that extra $50 seems like a lot, especally with the lower profit on cheap hardware, the vender won't want to eat the cost of the OS himself.
That is so much BULL*&^%!
Hell, if I buy a system, it has to be close to/ on the cutting edge. When I bought my current desktop box, the Athlons had only been out for a couple of weeks and I bought the fastest stepping (650Mhz) I could lay my hands on. My laptop sports a 2GHz P4m. My next machine will be faster and feature a GeForce 4. And guess what the OS on all these machines is? Linux. Yes - Linux. And I play games on these machines as well as develop on them. Don't assume that everyone who uses Linux does so because it is cheap/free. I use linux because I can configure every last damn byte in the box and the OS and surrounding products generally do what I want rather than having to fight with strange UI decisions that can't be sidestepped.
Oh yes - number of Linux software packages BOUGHT: about 20. Total purchase outlay - $500+. Amount of pirated software on any of my machines: 0.
To all of those who think that dual booting really holds the secret to playing games when most of your work is done in Linux - forget it. This machine here I'm on has Windows 98 and an up to date Linux distro. I bought Black & White almost on the day of release, thinking that I would boot into Windows just to play it. Its a great game, particularly if you liked Populous. But after a week, it has barely seen the light of day. Rebooting back and forth is too much of a pain. When I want to play, it's normally for 30-40 minutes. If I reboot back and forth, it had better be really worth it. I got hold of GTA3 and it's the same story. I got off the first island and it hasn't been played since.
Now I have a healthy collection of Linux games on my box, including a fair number of Loki ports, some of the source code released games (Abuse, Freespace 1 & 2, Aliens vs Predator), and a bunch of improving open source projects, from Vegastrike to Foobillard. And Black & White and the other Windows only games don't provide sufficient allure to make me reach for the reboot.
LGP seems to have the right idea. The games they are porting are good games in their categories and they aren't costing a fortune for the porting rights. They are also managing to get games in more genres than just first person shooters. I hope that LGP hangs around long enough to break even or preferably show a profit. I hope that the Linux desktop market is starting to expand at a sufficient rate that the future for Linux gaming actually exists and that LGP is in a good position to reap the rewards.
Since this new chip is able to gather more light than traditional CCD chips, I would imagine that there will be some interesting uses for it in astrophotography. Instead of having to use a CCD imager with a 30 minute exposure to get an image, wouldn't you technically be able to get a higher resolution pic with this a lot quicker?
All the serious astrophotography I've done has been carried out with single waveband CCDs and filters, rather than colour CCDs so you would get an equivalent depth of image with the old style CCDs to the new X3 sensor for the same exposure time. However, the X3 sensor provides the advantage of doing three bands simultaneously but I would want to see the data sheets for the wavebands for each layer to see whether it could be used for colour measurements. I suspect that if you want more than just a good colour piccy, you are stuck with the R, G, Gb, B, V, etc. filters.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. in case you wondered which telescope I used for my astrophotography take a look:-)
It sees a real "color" instead of on red/green/blue (dispersed in fine pixels of course). It may not be able to see red quite as well as other colors, but it only means that the sensitivity at the red level is the limitation you have for the picture as whole.
I don't think I agree - it still looks like a standard red/green/blue pickup (and that is exactly like the human eye - we don't have different cones for, say, lime green and grass green). There is possible mileage in having more layers picking up wavebands spanning a smaller range of wavelengths (and there are humans with 4 types of cone rather than 3 - tetrachromatic vision) but it's not going to matter too much for our normal vision. Useful for simple spectroscopy (colour profiles etc.) though.
What you don't get is Moire patterns - at all!! That is what you probably hate when you say you hate "pixel noise" because it's totally obvious (due to the color changes), very distracting, and annoying to clean up after
It's pixelated still so you will still get Moire patterns as soon as the smallest details are finer than the resolving power of the X3 bins (think Nyquists theorem). However, the bizarre colours you get from a fine-grained black and white grid shouldn't be present to the same extent as all the measurements of colour intensity are done at the same point in the X3 layer, as opposed to the different spatial positions of the red green and blue bins in a colour CCD.
Slashdot Mirror
but almost every developer I know is not installing Linux over Windows, rather they're dual-booting their systems to run both Linux and Windows.
I've noticed the same thing. Often developers have to keep a copy of Windows around for the very few times when nothing else will do (like debugging a Windows-specific problem). I have a laptop with Redhat 8.0/Windows 2000 and a desktop with Mandrake 8.2/WindowsNT at work. A lot of my fellow developers have similar setups (although a number now have 'pure' Linux boxes.
The interesting thing to note is the frequency of use of each OS on these boxes. The desktop hasn't run WinNT for about 1.5 years and has an average uptime of around 100 days (times between scheduled power down periods). The laptop occassionally gets booted into Win2000 to update the virus definitions. All the serious development work gets done on linux.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
There are plenty of Myth II levels where you need the mortar-wielding dwarves to blow holes in wall to proceed through the level. So that part is going to be fine.
As to siege ladders, I don't think I've seen that happen. But then again, it's definitely time to dust off the Total Codex and go Mything in Action.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
And it wouldn't be particularly amusing if a fleet of aliens swooped out of space and gave us a major fine for littering the astronomically important parts of the radio spectrum :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Radio Astronomers have a hard enough time keeping the important wavebands free of interference without the radio spectrum being unregulated. Lots of useful, hard science is being done by the radio telescopes around the world observing the machinations of galaxies out in the distant universe. One of the key problems is that these signals are amazingly faint. The standard unit used in radio measurements is the Jansky - thats 10^(-26) Joules per second per square metre - which should give you some indication as to how faint. Lift that coke can off the floor onto the table and you've just used up more energy than has been received from distant galaxies by ALL the radio telescopes on the surface of the planet.
Terestrial radio transmitters are so many orders of magnitude stronger than these signals that any sideband transmissions even 90db below peak transmission still totally swamps the surrounding spectrum. And very few transmitters are truely 'perfect'. It's not as though a transmitter broadcasting at frequency X with HWHM waveband Y can't be detected at X +/- 8 Y. Yes - better quality receivers allow you to separate out signals at close frequencies, but a very strong signal next to a very weak signal will drown out it's neighbours.
Cheers,
Toby haynes
as of 1.3b Mozilla xslt support is majorly broken, to the point that is not usable. I am told there are several fixes in CVS but I like dealing with a semmi stable platform.
but that is precisely why vendors building on Mozilla won't be targetting a beta release. In fact, they are likely to target Mozilla 1.0.x as a stable API, stable platform. If it works on later releases, excellent. But that is a bonus - not the raison d'etre.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The "extended" edition isn't for the average person, it's for the /. uber-geek audience, or people who can recite the books word-for-word, and have arguments about whether Tom Bombadil could kick Saruman's ass.
Hell, we'd never even consider arguing over this one. Tom Bombadil would kick Saruman's ass all over the Old Forest and down the Barrow ...
Err...
Maybe it's better if I just shut up before I get labelled :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Safari/KHTML vs. Gecko/Mozilla is just like KDE vs. GNOME. It's a matter of personal preference based on what is important to the end user.
Safari vs Mozilla is not a simple comparison. Safari is an extremely competent web browser, with a few shortcomings in the XML department which will no doubt be tackled and fixed as developers get to it. Mozilla is really the first viable web platform to appear that has the capabilities necessary to deliver a fully integrated web UI, using all the power of XML wrapped up in the XBL integration with XSLT, XUL, SVG and other XML-based markup and integration utilities. With Mozilla, you really can build a fully operational crossplatform application to do considerably more than trivialities.
While the previous platform sounds like the worst marketing blurb, it also happens to be a crucial point for the next generation of the web. The "Web As A Platform" is where Microsoft really wants to be - to fully integrate everything you see and do through one web delivery system is an extremely attractive proposition for a number of software vendors. Being certain that the platform will remain around even if the parent company moves on to other things or goes into the financial abyss is also extremely important if vendors are going to leverage Mozilla as the next big thing.
Of course, given that all the XBL/XUL/XSLT/etc. are published specs, there is no reason why Safari won't get them in time. Vive la difference.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Eg; I work for a company that writes and sells computer dispatching and records systems to cops and firemen. I see no CAD systems on sourceforge. They simply dont exist, and wont because much of the code req
Guess you haven't tried QCAD then. Or maybe it doesn't exist :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Cats are pretty creative. Not only can they persuade you to part with a significant portion of the food on your plate, they insinuate themselves to the point of displacing you from your favourite chair. And then, just to rub salt in the wounds a little more, they also paint and dance.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. I have no connection to these books/websites but I did fall off my chair laughing the first time I saw the website :-)
Ford's service is making cars. Are you saying that Ford has a moral obligation to give me one, even though I haven't paid for it?
No - get the analogies right. If I, as a car servicing firm, knew of a part in a Ford car that could fail and cause the car to go off the road at random and I only let my best customers know, I would be sued for screwing around with peoples lives.
Not that I have any sympathy for either MS or Sympantec - Symantec gets to make money off the loopholes in MS's operating system in a strange almost parasitic relationship. The only thing that isn't clear to me is which company is the host...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
A web de-singer character.
Someone who is going out of their way to remove singing from the web. Does he work for RIAA? :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I concur (using a shell rather than a manager), though pretty/ugly are matters of preference. from what I've heard KDE's is 'better' functionally. This might be a perception holdover of when Nautilus was slow.
I still remember the first time I loaded up Nautilus at it's first major release and watched in amazement as CPU usage went through the roof, the drive thrashed and a window outline slowly filled in on the screen. Things improved quite a bit during the Gnome 1.x lifetime but moving to Gnome 2 and the new Nautilus is a day and night change. Nautilus on Gnome 2.x is fast, has some really sweet integration features which are only just being exploited now (fontilus springs immediately to mind) and there are bound to be more coming as people get to grips with it.
I still generally use the command line and a few perl scripts for most file manipulation. But just once or twice recently, I've been reaching for that Nautilus window to track stuff down, examine fonts and look for music.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Technically the main tank is never reused. It burns up after it is detached. So while it was the old style it was a "new" tank. The solid rocket boosters are recovered and reused.
Oops - I should have said use of a tank using old design. Apparently there is still (at least?) one more left - I wonder if it will ever be used.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Ron Dittemore made it clear in the Saturday press conference that there is no way to do an EVA in order to inspect the wing or tiles. The EVAs that are done are done in the cargo bay area. The arm that is used to go further out wasn't aboard this flight.
Must have missed that part of the call. I do find it intruiging that EVAs are normally restricted to the inside of the cargo bay. Does anyone have any more details on what other parameters restrict EVAs? Reading through the EVA details for the ISS missions doesn't have a nice short summary of such limitations.
Also, there is no way they could have gone to the space station. The Columbia is the heaviest of the shuttles and they used the old style heavy main tank for liftoff. They can't get to the station's orbit with that configuration.
I do wonder whether the re-use of this tank will be seen as one of the more controversial parts of this whole operation in retrospect. There were public notices that these tanks had been retired from use, with the newer design being used in preference.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Whenever there is
I firmly believe NASA knew that the insulation hitting the wing doomed the shuttle.
BOL^H^H^HI respectfully disagree...
While it may not seem much, the shuttle was travelling as awesome speed already as the insulation fell. It would have hit the wing at some shocking speed. This had sealed the fate.
Yes - the space shuttle was travelling fast. But the insulation fell OFF THE SHUTTLE. This means that the relative speed of the insulation hitting the shuttle was just the deceleration felt by the insulation in the time between coming loose and striking the front wing edge. The insulation is almost certainly inside the bow shock caused by the nose of the fuel tank itself so the insulation was probably tumbling inside the turbulent flow inside the bow shock and not exposed to the still air ahead of the shuttle.
Look - the astronauts were up there for 16 days in orbit. I don't know if there were any scheduled EVAs during that period but I suspect that the first thing any EVAs might have looked at would be a visible inspection of the wing edge.
I also firmly believe that had NASA felt that the dangers of re-entry would have a modest chance of causing a severe structural failure, they would have ditched the shuttle in orbit and looked for other ways to get the astronauts back down. There is always some sort of plan B - in this case the most obvious one is dock with the ISS and look to the other shuttles or the Russians for extraction. You don't play games with peoples lives, especially under such scrutiny and at a time when NASA funding isn't so good. When a shuttle explodes, it's inevitably a major public event.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Can anyone remind me why Sun chose GNOME over KDE or any other desktop environment? Was it because RedHat has adopted GNOME as their default desktop, or they liked the look of Ximian GNOME? Because I can't really believe that they chose GNOME purely on technical reasons.
There were probably a raft of reasons rather just one. GTK is written in C, so it's an easier task to tie GTK to anything already existing than QT would be. Sun needed to find an architecture with strong accessibility features and they may have felt that GNOME would be easier to get those accessibility features in ...
Probably the clincher though is the licensing of GTK. It's LGPL, rather than GPL. So Sun can take their proprietary stuff and dynamically link it to the GTK libraries and keep their proprietary stuff proprietary and closed. With QT, they would either have had to completely open their sources up under the GPL or they would have to have licensed the QT libraries from Trolltech. Like it or not, if you are developing proprietary Linux/Windows apps and you want a toolkit, GTK2 looks pretty good, doesn't force you to reveal your stuff and is a capable, accessible toolkit.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
However, the next version of "Windows for Servers" keeps getting pushed back, and many corporates are only now upgrading their servers from NT4 to W2K - not to take advantage of new features, but because support is being withdrawn.
That is absolutely spot on. As applications and the OS become close to 100% feature complete for what the customer wants (as opposed to what the software manufacturer wants them to want), revenue will dry up unless you can keep your foot in the door. MS is trying to keep that foot there by
Possibly the latter is the one most likely to upset the customer - buying a new machine with Windows (and Office) pre-installed is probably seen as a good deal by most buyers (except people like me...). But finding out that some critical security flaw in, say, Office 2000 is not going to be fixed and that an upgrade to Office XXP is required at the cost of a freshly remorgaged Granny and one arm is likely to annoy Joe & Jo Sixpack.
As the number of computers sold starts to tail off, money from new OS's will continue to decline for MS and shortening the TTL for the product lines is probably the most obvious business action - witness MS licensing 6.0. But that could just prove to be another thin end of the wedge for MS's desktop monopoly.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I don't see that it makes much sense. after all 16x16 or 32x33 icons have been around fr a long time. they're even-byte things and easy to handle. and they're quick
And so are SVG icons - a lot of the current SVG icons are quick to load (requiring considerably less memory to describe the icon than PNG) and quick to draw with this fast renderer. But that is ignoring the most useful part of describing your screen using vectors, splines, etc. - rescalability. We're all used to being able to switch monitors with different DPI and still have the same physical size font on the screen (so that 10 pt is 10/72 inch high regardless of screen dpi) and it's useful to be able to have icons which behave in the same way.
isn''t a desktop all about making a useful user experience? if I wanted gigantic icons I'd have gigantic icons, and I don't. It seems like extra complexity just for a coding exercise.
For people with normal eyesight, standard 16x16 or 32x32 icons are going to be fine. If you suffer from poor eyesight, being able to have fonts and icons at say 4x magnification is extremely useful. And a big part of the GNOME2 architecture is strongly accessibility orientated so this is a useful part of the puzzle.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Hate to break it to you, but Mozilla does do automated installs from web pages. Just head on over to MozDev [mozdev.org] and see for yourself. Many projects, such as OptiMoz and Spellchecker, have automated install links right on the page.
Which only work if a) you actually have software installation enabled in your preferences, b) have write access to the location where mozilla is installed and c) will prompt you BEFORE it installs the software, giving the web server and the package being installed.
Automated installs are extremely useful - it's all a question of finding that balance between ease of use and ease of abuse.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Linux's clustering capabilities are indeed better than those of Windows, but only in the engineering and scientific calculation space.
I'd say you'd been reading the wrong stats, but please continue...
You seem to be overlooking the enterprise database [tpc.org] space, where Microsoft has thoroughly smacked-down the competition, both in overall performance and price-performance.
MS only has decent benchmark results with SQL Server 2000 for small databases. These days, holding small (300MB and 1GB) database benchmarks is small cheer for the most part - the interesting stuff is how far you can scale. MS has set out and acheived good results on the small end because that is the only playground that it can be competitive in. If you think that Linux can't play in this playground too, I think you are sadly mistaken. Wait for equivalent benchmarks from Oracle and IBM (DB2 UDB) and then you can compare performance.
cheers,
Toby Haynes
Can someone please explain why we need free access to Mickey Mouse, etc.? In my mind, Mickey Mouse is an asset owned by Disney, so why should it expire? Imagine the damage people could do to Disney if Mickey was used inappropriately by competitors. Not trolling, I just don't get why we need free access to this stuff.
First, Mickey Mouse(TM) is a Disney Trademark. Nobody is able to go around using Mickey Mouse(TM) to promote their products/services/whatever without an agreement from Disney. However, the original Mickey Mouse cartoons were distributed under copyright, giving Disney an absolute monopoly on the copying and distribution of those cartoons for a limited time. At least, it was limited when the cartoons were made. Beyond that limited time, all copyrighted works become public domain, adding to the huge amount of material that is available for further creative use. For example, the works of Mozart are all public domain. Think about that.
However, because of the continuing extension of those corporate copyrights, the corporations have been able to avoid the moment of truth when they lose that state-sponsored monopoly on their original works.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
That is so much BULL*&^%!
Hell, if I buy a system, it has to be close to/ on the cutting edge. When I bought my current desktop box, the Athlons had only been out for a couple of weeks and I bought the fastest stepping (650Mhz) I could lay my hands on. My laptop sports a 2GHz P4m. My next machine will be faster and feature a GeForce 4. And guess what the OS on all these machines is? Linux. Yes - Linux. And I play games on these machines as well as develop on them. Don't assume that everyone who uses Linux does so because it is cheap/free. I use linux because I can configure every last damn byte in the box and the OS and surrounding products generally do what I want rather than having to fight with strange UI decisions that can't be sidestepped.
Oh yes - number of Linux software packages BOUGHT: about 20. Total purchase outlay - $500+. Amount of pirated software on any of my machines: 0.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Now I have a healthy collection of Linux games on my box, including a fair number of Loki ports, some of the source code released games (Abuse, Freespace 1 & 2, Aliens vs Predator), and a bunch of improving open source projects, from Vegastrike to Foobillard. And Black & White and the other Windows only games don't provide sufficient allure to make me reach for the reboot.
LGP seems to have the right idea. The games they are porting are good games in their categories and they aren't costing a fortune for the porting rights. They are also managing to get games in more genres than just first person shooters. I hope that LGP hangs around long enough to break even or preferably show a profit. I hope that the Linux desktop market is starting to expand at a sufficient rate that the future for Linux gaming actually exists and that LGP is in a good position to reap the rewards.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Since this new chip is able to gather more light than traditional CCD chips, I would imagine that there will be some interesting uses for it in astrophotography. Instead of having to use a CCD imager with a 30 minute exposure to get an image, wouldn't you technically be able to get a higher resolution pic with this a lot quicker?
All the serious astrophotography I've done has been carried out with single waveband CCDs and filters, rather than colour CCDs so you would get an equivalent depth of image with the old style CCDs to the new X3 sensor for the same exposure time. However, the X3 sensor provides the advantage of doing three bands simultaneously but I would want to see the data sheets for the wavebands for each layer to see whether it could be used for colour measurements. I suspect that if you want more than just a good colour piccy, you are stuck with the R, G, Gb, B, V, etc. filters.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. in case you wondered which telescope I used for my astrophotography take a look :-)
It sees a real "color" instead of on red/green/blue (dispersed in fine pixels of course). It may not be able to see red quite as well as other colors, but it only means that the sensitivity at the red level is the limitation you have for the picture as whole.
I don't think I agree - it still looks like a standard red/green/blue pickup (and that is exactly like the human eye - we don't have different cones for, say, lime green and grass green). There is possible mileage in having more layers picking up wavebands spanning a smaller range of wavelengths (and there are humans with 4 types of cone rather than 3 - tetrachromatic vision) but it's not going to matter too much for our normal vision. Useful for simple spectroscopy (colour profiles etc.) though.
What you don't get is Moire patterns - at all!! That is what you probably hate when you say you hate "pixel noise" because it's totally obvious (due to the color changes), very distracting, and annoying to clean up after
It's pixelated still so you will still get Moire patterns as soon as the smallest details are finer than the resolving power of the X3 bins (think Nyquists theorem). However, the bizarre colours you get from a fine-grained black and white grid shouldn't be present to the same extent as all the measurements of colour intensity are done at the same point in the X3 layer, as opposed to the different spatial positions of the red green and blue bins in a colour CCD.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes