However, I think the big problem for these is safety, particularly if you must share the road with cars, trucks and busses. Even for a very fit driver, 50 km/h seems to be a high speed, which is significantly lower than general road traffic in Australia. Combine that with the extremely low profile... let's just say that the odds of getting caught dead in one of these seem a little high for my comfort.
Now, in cities with excellent bike networks, that wouldn't be such an issue - IF the vehicle actually meets the legal requirements for use on bike paths. I'm not sure whether these would be allowed on the bike network in my city. If I had to guess, I'd say the purely muscle powered ones probably are, but I am honestly unsure about the electric/muscle hybrids.
I don't think I'd pay 8000 euros, but if there is one available for, say, 1000 euros, I think I would be interested. You'd want to have somewhere to keep it locked up and safe, though.
All Australian states have their own flags. China should just create provincial flags and stop worrying about it.:)
Of course, Australia is a federation, like the US... And China certainly doesn't want its provinces to start thinking secessionally. (Do Autonomous Regions get flags?)
If you're interested in my credentials, UFO: Enemy Unknown (I played a copy with the British branding:)) is probably my fondest memory of the 486 era of computing, along with Civ II.
I think Terror From The Deep was the first computer game I ever actually bought (went halves with a high school buddy), and I've finished both it and XCOM Apocalypse. Apocalypse was great in many ways (especially the interactions between the various organisation in the Megacity, and the fact that the starting equipment choices didn't become totally obsolete. Also, Sectoid hybrid soldiers rock.) but the pause-able realtime combat wasn't as good as the turn-based implementation in 1 or 2, and the turn based mode was compromised in order to support the realtime mode. Most importantly, the Apocalypse aliens just weren't very cool compared to UFO or TFTD.
TFTD was a total bitch of a game though. Alien artifact missions with fucking tentaculats in all the hidey holes... ship terror missions (with tiny corridors against lobster men and those little exploding drones...) And the tech tree bugs... I've played that game two or three times now and I've *never* succeeded at getting Molecular Control. That is a very, very mean game. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is certainly not as cruel.
I've tried to play Interceptor but I'm no good at killing those fast little UFOs.
I've never even bothered installing Enforcer, although I suspect I have a copy in my Steam account somewhere.
It's an amazing game and you should definitely get it.
They've changed the rules. It's a little more abstract and game-y compared to some of the more simulationist design in the original X-COM. And in my opinion, it's made it a better game.
Borderlands 2 on the other hand isn't very fun for me.
It's not exactly the same game as the original XCOM, in the same way that Civ IV and Civ V are significantly different games from Civ I and Civ II (Civ II isn't really very different from Civ I). But in my opinion, it is actually a better piece of game design, particularly in the tactical combat mode. I actually think it is the best all-round XCOM game yet.
The tactical combat mode is probably where most of the significant changes occur. I would say it now is somewhat more boardgamey than the original XCOM. I don't have a problem with that but I can see where some people would find it off-putting. Instead of time units, you get two actions per turn. You can use both to make a single long move from one position to another, or spend one action to move and then use the other action to do something else. The most common choices for "something else" are firing a weapon, using an item such as a grenade or medpack, going on overwatch, and re-loading. Doing anything other than moving will generally end your turn, even if you do it with your first action.
The inventory is very much "streamlined" over the original XCOM. Soldiers get a main weapon (largely determined by what type of soldier they are, combined with what research you've completed), a pistol, and one inventory slot for an item that grants passive bonuses or a limited-use special ability (eg throw grenade). All soldiers carry a "sufficient" (ie unlimited) number of reloads for their primary weapon, but reloading ends your turn, which denies you the opportunity to overwatch or attack - so ammo management is hugely important tactically. Ensuring that you don't exhaust your ammo for everyone in the team at once is much more important than in the original games.
If you've played a d20-based tabletop RPG sometime in the last 15 years, it's fairly similar in its general mechanics. Like a tabletop RPG, all these basic combat mechanics get elaborated on by a class-based advancement system for the soldiers. Instead of just getting bonus APs, stamina and accuracy, soldiers now get perks as they advance which modify the main tactical combat rules. For example, heavy weapons experts can easily get an ability that makes it so that firing their main weapon as the first action no longer ends the turn - so they can fire and then move, or fire twice, or fire and reload, or fire and overwatch. The close-in "Assault" class starts with an ability that allows them to move twice and then attack in the same turn.
Another limitation is that most soldiers can only attack enemies they can see themselves. (Snipers can optionally be given the ability to *either* move and fire, *or* attack enemies that other squad members can see but can't see themselves. This is a really hard choice to make.)
Cover is hugely, hugely important in the tactical play. It provides *large* penalties to the hit chance of attacks, but more importantly, attacks against someone who is *not* in cover are extremely likely to score a critical hit, which does a lot more damage. Since cover is relative to attacker & defender positioning, it's very important to cover your flanks and be aware of possible avenues for attack. This makes the move & attack abilities, or the later-game stealth abilities, very useful. It also enables some interesting tactics. For example, grenades don't do a terribly large amount of damage, and might seem very inefficient for actually killing enemies. But as well as being an area of effect attack, they also destroy cover. So if you can maneuver a soldier into grenade range of a bunch of aliens who are hiding behind good cover, you can destroy the cover with the grenade and then mow down the now-exposed aliens with your other soldiers. Unlike the original game, XCOM Enemy Unknown is actually very good at telling you what cover your soldiers will have if they move to various positions. But cover is positional and directional, so if an alien outflanks your soldiers' positions, the cover will be useless.
I was very pleased to find that in both Borderlands 2 and XCOM Enemy Unknown, the super-annoying splash screens can all be disabled with a little light editing of.ini files in your user profile.
I hate those things, especially when the game developer doesn't let you skip them. (Borderlands 1, I'm looking at you. Ugh.)
But once I've seen them once, I don't need to ever see them again... so commenting out the StartupMovies lines in the.ini files is a lovely feature.
With a price tag like that, I'm sure this thing could pack some decent quality hardware. But the actual value of a system like this is entirely dependent on the software it comes with, and I don't know how much I trust Motorola's ability to deliver on that aspect of it.
The huge advantage of a platform like Android, iOS, Windows etc is the enormous ecosystem of third party developers, who have relatively open access to fill in all the gaps in the software feature set that originally shipped with the hardware. (For example, would Microsoft have gotten anywhere without Lotus 1-2-3 to give their MS DOS machines actual business utility? Would the iPhone really have taken the mobile world by storm with just the iOS feature set and no apps?)
With a hardware system like this, targeted at "Enterprise" and military users at more than 4 grand a pop, it's pretty obvious that the install base is going to be very small. It seems unlikely that there will be a thriving third-party software development ecosystem. That makes me wonder if the hardware will really be leveraged sufficiently to deliver real, usable value. What's the point of amazing hardware if it doesn't really do anything very useful?
Anyway, it certainly looks the part for a cool cyberpunk character design in a movie.
But how about a software RAID "recovery mode", where it tries to recover the array... if it comes across any unrecoverable surprise bad sectors, it replaces the contents of those sectors with 0, and dumps a report to console saying exactly which sector(s) were unrecoverable. Basically, like a fsck report. For bonus points, if possible, the report should list which files are damaged. "I did my best, here's the mostly-rebuilt volume, here's a list of stuff that's borked. Hope it wasn't anything critical." This sort of situation is abnormal by definition; I don't think it would be helpful or necessary to try and persistently track/manage unrecovered sectors on an ongoing basis. If this were to ever happen to me, I know that I would need to manually analyse the importance of the lost data. If it's just NataliePortmanHotGrits.avi, then not a problem. If it's the source code repository for Stuxnet (or some other piece of precious proprietary data) then clearly you have a bigger issue. And hopefully backups:D
I guess what I'm saying is, when the RAID rebuild fails, it's better to recover as much as possible (with some warnings about the issues that were detected) rather than just throw your hands in the air and say "screw you, this array is entirely garbage now because there was one bad sector on one disk." I'd rather have most of volume's data (with some unrecoverable losses) than nothing at all.
I understand the advantages of RAID 6 in this situation, but I don't understand why the impact of one unrecoverable sector seems to be so excessively large. My understanding is that the situation you describe for RAID 5 (one previously unknown bad sector) can cause the array re-build to fail catastrophically - as you said your only option was to retry the bad media until you got lucky.
Why can't the RAID controller just mark that one sector as unrecoverable, and go on to the next set of stripes? I mean, each set of stripes has its own parity block, independent of the others, so the rest of the volume actually doesn't depend on that one bad stripe. There's a pretty good chance that the data stored in that one sector wasn't really all that critical, anyway. If you've got a giant photo collection, it probably doesn't matter that much if one.jpg can't be viewed any more. You certainly wouldn't throw away the rest of the files because one file is no longer readable.
I'm confused about what, exactly, is supposed to run on top of this new operating system.
Is it supposed to be a new OS for devices with physical-layer control capability like PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers), DCSs (Distributed Control Systems) and RTUs (Remote Terminal Units)?
If so, I don't see how it would help, since each of these devices has its own unique proprietary hardware architecture. It's highly unlikely Kaspersky could effectively support the hardware.
Or is it supposed to be for hosting central SCADA servers, and historian/MES server type applications? This is probably the easiest place to gain some traction, although most of the SCADA servers, historians and MESs I've ever worked with have been based to a lesser or greater extent on Microsoft technologies. For example, the OPC APIs are one of the most common ways of interconnecting server-side ICS software from different vendors, and that's based on COM/DCOM - so it's unlikely to be supported on non-Windows platforms. One way you can make it work is to have the SCADA server itself run on a non-Windows platform which then communicates using a proprietary protocol to a Windows data interchange "gateway" which runs an OPC interface. But if your data interface gateway gets pwned, you might not have gained much from having the main server process running on some kind of ultra-hard OS.
Or is it supposed to be for hosting client applications that humans interact with directly (HMI) for control, monitoring, data analysis, or engineering (configuration/programming/diagnostics/troubleshooting) purposes? At the moment, the actual operator interface for most SCADA systems are proprietary desktop apps, although there does seem to be a trend towards using HTML5 and other web technology for the operational HMI. That eliminates the need to deploy & manage client software and reduces the dependency on Windows. With appropriate access controls on the SCADA server (DON'T allow access from the internet!), that's not necessarily a problem. But right now, an operator generally interacts with their SCADA server by running a desktop (usually Windows) application which connects to the server. The desktop apps are maintained by the ICS software vendors and for reasons of cost and market penetration, almost all the "modern" ones target Windows primarily and other OSs secondarily if at all.
But aside from the fact that most of the client apps are Windows apps, the operator interfaces generally need to run on a general-purpose OS because analysts need to be able to collate & correlate data from ICS and non-ICS sources, and plant operators need to be able to access other business systems like maintenance planning & dispatch tools, weather data, security camera systems, work plans, enterprise reporting systems, etc. There's no point in collecting extensive data about your operations if you can't actually use it to improve your business's operations!
Basically, you need to be able to run Excel, a web browser, and (for the engineers) more proprietary tools from your hardware vendors for things like configuring/troubleshooting the SCADA hardware.
Web browsers are of course very cross-platform, and non-Excel spreadsheet software does exist (although Excel basically owns corporate data analysis at the low to middle end, at least in the West). But web browsers on all platforms are pretty flakey from a security perspective and almost all the configuration, programming and diagnostic software tools which come with industrial hardware are, again, based on the Win32 or.NET APIs because that's what corporate computers have. There is little likelihood that industrial hardware vendors will be enthusiastic about rewriting all these tools for an exotic new OS. And since the primary design objective of the exotic new OS is security, it presumably doesn't use existing complex and bug-riddled desktop environment software stacks.
Hmm. Well, you might have a point, but I'm not sure this would be in character for Google. So far Google has offered two types of software upgrades:
1) Web apps, where you get the upgrade whether you want it or not. You don't usually have to pay for the upgrade, and you don't have to do any management at the client end, but opt-out might not be available. And roll-back is almost never available at your discretion. And there's always the risk that Google gets tired of a niche offering which is unprofitable and/or unstrategic and drops it entirely.
2) Android, where many users can't get the upgrades even when they want them, due to foot-dragging and cheapness on the part of the device manufacturers and carriers.
I'm not sure that either option is unambiguously better than the MS treadmill (which applies to pretty much all proprietary packaged software, not just MS). Webapps have their advantages (especially from the developer's perspective), but at least with traditional packaged software, you can choose to stay put or even roll back to an earlier version if the new release doesn't meet your needs. And, since all the software runs on a standard PC hardware platform rather than the unique little snowflakes that ARM SoCs seem to be, your access to updates is less dependent on the willingness of your hardware vendor & ISP/telecoms carrier to spend money on software development & QA.
Gearbox is a game developer, and they made Borderlands 2 (and Borderlands, and also finally completed Duke Nukem Forever, and the expansion packs to the first Half Life game). Some hits, some misses.
Firaxis is a game developer, and they made the new X-COM, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Civilization IV, and Civilization V (some of the best strategy games ever for PC).
Both of these developers are published by 2k. I don't think you can draw any conclusions about X-COM based on Borderlands 2... except that Australians are gonna get overcharged on Steam for both games. (That's a publisher decision).
If you're trying to maximise the impact of your donation, you might be interested to know that a bunch of eggheads have already considered this exact point and written a report on their conclusions. It gets updated every few years.
On the upside, a fair bit of thought and research has gone into their publication. On the downside, most of the experts are economists, and I'm not actually sure if one should take an economist's word on whether the sky is blue.
They analyse charities for cost/benefit of their activities and what percentage of the charity's funding goes on ancillaries vs the charity's stated purpose.
Also, they look for evidence that the charity actually does what they say they do.
Another resource for evaluating charities is the BBB, apparently.
Ursula Vernon well deserves the recognition for Digger.
That reminds me that I should go and buy the print collections. I enjoyed it very much as a free webcomic, and she deserves some money for her efforts.
I find that the one thing the iPad (with retina display) is truly exceptional at is reading PDF documents (using the GoodReader app).
It offers a screen with plenty of pixels and a 4:3 portrait oriented aspect ratio. It could be a little bigger (11-12" would be lovely) and searching the documents could be faster, but it still compares _very_ favourably with trying to read long documents on a laptop or desktop screen.
I bought a similar model (Matrix Neo 2560x1440 IPS 27")
When the vendor says "not compatible with laptops", they're not kidding. I couldn't get it to work with my laptop with an nvidia Quattro 1000M card, even though the card supports the required resolution, even though I was using an ACTIVE DisplayPort to DUAL link DVI adapter. The computer just wouldn't detect the display. It worked fine with my personal laptop which has a real dual link DVI port, though.
In the end I just hooked the thing up to my secondary computer (a desktop with a real DVI port). It's a bloody good screen, but I wish I could use it with my preferred computer.
It's the only monitor I've used where I haven't wanted a second panel to accompany it. Maybe there is, eventually, such a thing as enough desktop space? I'm sure this is only a temporary state.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting article.
However, I think the big problem for these is safety, particularly if you must share the road with cars, trucks and busses. Even for a very fit driver, 50 km/h seems to be a high speed, which is significantly lower than general road traffic in Australia. Combine that with the extremely low profile... let's just say that the odds of getting caught dead in one of these seem a little high for my comfort.
Now, in cities with excellent bike networks, that wouldn't be such an issue - IF the vehicle actually meets the legal requirements for use on bike paths. I'm not sure whether these would be allowed on the bike network in my city. If I had to guess, I'd say the purely muscle powered ones probably are, but I am honestly unsure about the electric/muscle hybrids.
I don't think I'd pay 8000 euros, but if there is one available for, say, 1000 euros, I think I would be interested. You'd want to have somewhere to keep it locked up and safe, though.
All Australian states have their own flags. China should just create provincial flags and stop worrying about it. :)
Of course, Australia is a federation, like the US... And China certainly doesn't want its provinces to start thinking secessionally. (Do Autonomous Regions get flags?)
Haha, I was going to make a Power Grid joke. Beat me to it!
Haha, I'll have to give it another go. :)
One other thing:
If you're interested in my credentials, UFO: Enemy Unknown (I played a copy with the British branding :)) is probably my fondest memory of the 486 era of computing, along with Civ II.
I think Terror From The Deep was the first computer game I ever actually bought (went halves with a high school buddy), and I've finished both it and XCOM Apocalypse. Apocalypse was great in many ways (especially the interactions between the various organisation in the Megacity, and the fact that the starting equipment choices didn't become totally obsolete. Also, Sectoid hybrid soldiers rock.) but the pause-able realtime combat wasn't as good as the turn-based implementation in 1 or 2, and the turn based mode was compromised in order to support the realtime mode. Most importantly, the Apocalypse aliens just weren't very cool compared to UFO or TFTD.
TFTD was a total bitch of a game though. Alien artifact missions with fucking tentaculats in all the hidey holes... ship terror missions (with tiny corridors against lobster men and those little exploding drones...) And the tech tree bugs... I've played that game two or three times now and I've *never* succeeded at getting Molecular Control. That is a very, very mean game. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is certainly not as cruel.
I've tried to play Interceptor but I'm no good at killing those fast little UFOs.
I've never even bothered installing Enforcer, although I suspect I have a copy in my Steam account somewhere.
TL;DR
It's an amazing game and you should definitely get it.
They've changed the rules. It's a little more abstract and game-y compared to some of the more simulationist design in the original X-COM. And in my opinion, it's made it a better game.
Borderlands 2 on the other hand isn't very fun for me.
Well...
It's not exactly the same game as the original XCOM, in the same way that Civ IV and Civ V are significantly different games from Civ I and Civ II (Civ II isn't really very different from Civ I). But in my opinion, it is actually a better piece of game design, particularly in the tactical combat mode. I actually think it is the best all-round XCOM game yet.
The tactical combat mode is probably where most of the significant changes occur. I would say it now is somewhat more boardgamey than the original XCOM. I don't have a problem with that but I can see where some people would find it off-putting. Instead of time units, you get two actions per turn. You can use both to make a single long move from one position to another, or spend one action to move and then use the other action to do something else. The most common choices for "something else" are firing a weapon, using an item such as a grenade or medpack, going on overwatch, and re-loading. Doing anything other than moving will generally end your turn, even if you do it with your first action.
The inventory is very much "streamlined" over the original XCOM. Soldiers get a main weapon (largely determined by what type of soldier they are, combined with what research you've completed), a pistol, and one inventory slot for an item that grants passive bonuses or a limited-use special ability (eg throw grenade). All soldiers carry a "sufficient" (ie unlimited) number of reloads for their primary weapon, but reloading ends your turn, which denies you the opportunity to overwatch or attack - so ammo management is hugely important tactically. Ensuring that you don't exhaust your ammo for everyone in the team at once is much more important than in the original games.
If you've played a d20-based tabletop RPG sometime in the last 15 years, it's fairly similar in its general mechanics. Like a tabletop RPG, all these basic combat mechanics get elaborated on by a class-based advancement system for the soldiers. Instead of just getting bonus APs, stamina and accuracy, soldiers now get perks as they advance which modify the main tactical combat rules. For example, heavy weapons experts can easily get an ability that makes it so that firing their main weapon as the first action no longer ends the turn - so they can fire and then move, or fire twice, or fire and reload, or fire and overwatch. The close-in "Assault" class starts with an ability that allows them to move twice and then attack in the same turn.
Another limitation is that most soldiers can only attack enemies they can see themselves. (Snipers can optionally be given the ability to *either* move and fire, *or* attack enemies that other squad members can see but can't see themselves. This is a really hard choice to make.)
Cover is hugely, hugely important in the tactical play. It provides *large* penalties to the hit chance of attacks, but more importantly, attacks against someone who is *not* in cover are extremely likely to score a critical hit, which does a lot more damage. Since cover is relative to attacker & defender positioning, it's very important to cover your flanks and be aware of possible avenues for attack. This makes the move & attack abilities, or the later-game stealth abilities, very useful. It also enables some interesting tactics. For example, grenades don't do a terribly large amount of damage, and might seem very inefficient for actually killing enemies. But as well as being an area of effect attack, they also destroy cover. So if you can maneuver a soldier into grenade range of a bunch of aliens who are hiding behind good cover, you can destroy the cover with the grenade and then mow down the now-exposed aliens with your other soldiers. Unlike the original game, XCOM Enemy Unknown is actually very good at telling you what cover your soldiers will have if they move to various positions. But cover is positional and directional, so if an alien outflanks your soldiers' positions, the cover will be useless.
So the tactical combat is in many ways les
Thanks! I probably won't play BL1 much now that I've got the second, but I do appreciate the info.
I was very pleased to find that in both Borderlands 2 and XCOM Enemy Unknown, the super-annoying splash screens can all be disabled with a little light editing of .ini files in your user profile.
I hate those things, especially when the game developer doesn't let you skip them. (Borderlands 1, I'm looking at you. Ugh.)
But once I've seen them once, I don't need to ever see them again... so commenting out the StartupMovies lines in the .ini files is a lovely feature.
This post is a very eloquent argument for the dire need for electoral system reform in the United States.
With a price tag like that, I'm sure this thing could pack some decent quality hardware. But the actual value of a system like this is entirely dependent on the software it comes with, and I don't know how much I trust Motorola's ability to deliver on that aspect of it.
The huge advantage of a platform like Android, iOS, Windows etc is the enormous ecosystem of third party developers, who have relatively open access to fill in all the gaps in the software feature set that originally shipped with the hardware. (For example, would Microsoft have gotten anywhere without Lotus 1-2-3 to give their MS DOS machines actual business utility? Would the iPhone really have taken the mobile world by storm with just the iOS feature set and no apps?)
With a hardware system like this, targeted at "Enterprise" and military users at more than 4 grand a pop, it's pretty obvious that the install base is going to be very small. It seems unlikely that there will be a thriving third-party software development ecosystem. That makes me wonder if the hardware will really be leveraged sufficiently to deliver real, usable value. What's the point of amazing hardware if it doesn't really do anything very useful?
Anyway, it certainly looks the part for a cool cyberpunk character design in a movie.
Well, it's not like turning off the IDFA would disable web beacons, cookies etc.
If they labelled the setting as "disable", they would be over-selling the capability of that setting pretty badly.
Well, ok.
But how about a software RAID "recovery mode", where it tries to recover the array... if it comes across any unrecoverable surprise bad sectors, it replaces the contents of those sectors with 0, and dumps a report to console saying exactly which sector(s) were unrecoverable. Basically, like a fsck report. For bonus points, if possible, the report should list which files are damaged. "I did my best, here's the mostly-rebuilt volume, here's a list of stuff that's borked. Hope it wasn't anything critical." This sort of situation is abnormal by definition; I don't think it would be helpful or necessary to try and persistently track/manage unrecovered sectors on an ongoing basis. If this were to ever happen to me, I know that I would need to manually analyse the importance of the lost data. If it's just NataliePortmanHotGrits.avi, then not a problem. If it's the source code repository for Stuxnet (or some other piece of precious proprietary data) then clearly you have a bigger issue. And hopefully backups :D
I guess what I'm saying is, when the RAID rebuild fails, it's better to recover as much as possible (with some warnings about the issues that were detected) rather than just throw your hands in the air and say "screw you, this array is entirely garbage now because there was one bad sector on one disk." I'd rather have most of volume's data (with some unrecoverable losses) than nothing at all.
I understand the advantages of RAID 6 in this situation, but I don't understand why the impact of one unrecoverable sector seems to be so excessively large. My understanding is that the situation you describe for RAID 5 (one previously unknown bad sector) can cause the array re-build to fail catastrophically - as you said your only option was to retry the bad media until you got lucky.
Why can't the RAID controller just mark that one sector as unrecoverable, and go on to the next set of stripes? I mean, each set of stripes has its own parity block, independent of the others, so the rest of the volume actually doesn't depend on that one bad stripe. There's a pretty good chance that the data stored in that one sector wasn't really all that critical, anyway. If you've got a giant photo collection, it probably doesn't matter that much if one .jpg can't be viewed any more. You certainly wouldn't throw away the rest of the files because one file is no longer readable.
I'm confused about what, exactly, is supposed to run on top of this new operating system.
Is it supposed to be a new OS for devices with physical-layer control capability like PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers), DCSs (Distributed Control Systems) and RTUs (Remote Terminal Units)?
If so, I don't see how it would help, since each of these devices has its own unique proprietary hardware architecture. It's highly unlikely Kaspersky could effectively support the hardware.
Or is it supposed to be for hosting central SCADA servers, and historian/MES server type applications?
This is probably the easiest place to gain some traction, although most of the SCADA servers, historians and MESs I've ever worked with have been based to a lesser or greater extent on Microsoft technologies. For example, the OPC APIs are one of the most common ways of interconnecting server-side ICS software from different vendors, and that's based on COM/DCOM - so it's unlikely to be supported on non-Windows platforms. One way you can make it work is to have the SCADA server itself run on a non-Windows platform which then communicates using a proprietary protocol to a Windows data interchange "gateway" which runs an OPC interface. But if your data interface gateway gets pwned, you might not have gained much from having the main server process running on some kind of ultra-hard OS.
Or is it supposed to be for hosting client applications that humans interact with directly (HMI) for control, monitoring, data analysis, or engineering (configuration/programming/diagnostics/troubleshooting) purposes?
At the moment, the actual operator interface for most SCADA systems are proprietary desktop apps, although there does seem to be a trend towards using HTML5 and other web technology for the operational HMI. That eliminates the need to deploy & manage client software and reduces the dependency on Windows. With appropriate access controls on the SCADA server (DON'T allow access from the internet!), that's not necessarily a problem. But right now, an operator generally interacts with their SCADA server by running a desktop (usually Windows) application which connects to the server. The desktop apps are maintained by the ICS software vendors and for reasons of cost and market penetration, almost all the "modern" ones target Windows primarily and other OSs secondarily if at all.
But aside from the fact that most of the client apps are Windows apps, the operator interfaces generally need to run on a general-purpose OS because analysts need to be able to collate & correlate data from ICS and non-ICS sources, and plant operators need to be able to access other business systems like maintenance planning & dispatch tools, weather data, security camera systems, work plans, enterprise reporting systems, etc. There's no point in collecting extensive data about your operations if you can't actually use it to improve your business's operations!
Basically, you need to be able to run Excel, a web browser, and (for the engineers) more proprietary tools from your hardware vendors for things like configuring/troubleshooting the SCADA hardware.
Web browsers are of course very cross-platform, and non-Excel spreadsheet software does exist (although Excel basically owns corporate data analysis at the low to middle end, at least in the West). But web browsers on all platforms are pretty flakey from a security perspective and almost all the configuration, programming and diagnostic software tools which come with industrial hardware are, again, based on the Win32 or .NET APIs because that's what corporate computers have. There is little likelihood that industrial hardware vendors will be enthusiastic about rewriting all these tools for an exotic new OS. And since the primary design objective of the exotic new OS is security, it presumably doesn't use existing complex and bug-riddled desktop environment software stacks.
Is a WINE + Mono compatibility layer on
Hmm. Well, you might have a point, but I'm not sure this would be in character for Google. So far Google has offered two types of software upgrades:
I'm not sure that either option is unambiguously better than the MS treadmill (which applies to pretty much all proprietary packaged software, not just MS). Webapps have their advantages (especially from the developer's perspective), but at least with traditional packaged software, you can choose to stay put or even roll back to an earlier version if the new release doesn't meet your needs. And, since all the software runs on a standard PC hardware platform rather than the unique little snowflakes that ARM SoCs seem to be, your access to updates is less dependent on the willingness of your hardware vendor & ISP/telecoms carrier to spend money on software development & QA.
2k is a publisher.
Gearbox is a game developer, and they made Borderlands 2 (and Borderlands, and also finally completed Duke Nukem Forever, and the expansion packs to the first Half Life game). Some hits, some misses.
Firaxis is a game developer, and they made the new X-COM, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Civilization IV, and Civilization V (some of the best strategy games ever for PC).
Both of these developers are published by 2k. I don't think you can draw any conclusions about X-COM based on Borderlands 2... except that Australians are gonna get overcharged on Steam for both games. (That's a publisher decision).
If you're trying to maximise the impact of your donation, you might be interested to know that a bunch of eggheads have already considered this exact point and written a report on their conclusions. It gets updated every few years.
On the upside, a fair bit of thought and research has gone into their publication. On the downside, most of the experts are economists, and I'm not actually sure if one should take an economist's word on whether the sky is blue.
Here's the website, anyway: The Copenhagen Consensus.
There's a website that focuses on exactly this point:
Give Well
They analyse charities for cost/benefit of their activities and what percentage of the charity's funding goes on ancillaries vs the charity's stated purpose.
Also, they look for evidence that the charity actually does what they say they do.
Another resource for evaluating charities is the BBB, apparently.
+1 for being named LordSnooty. Perfect match of username to post.
What about the clockwork artist? That seems like a sf element, even if the story overall is mostly focussed on the human aspects.
Ursula Vernon well deserves the recognition for Digger.
That reminds me that I should go and buy the print collections. I enjoyed it very much as a free webcomic, and she deserves some money for her efforts.
I'm sure I will enjoy re-reading Digger...
I find that the one thing the iPad (with retina display) is truly exceptional at is reading PDF documents (using the GoodReader app).
It offers a screen with plenty of pixels and a 4:3 portrait oriented aspect ratio. It could be a little bigger (11-12" would be lovely) and searching the documents could be faster, but it still compares _very_ favourably with trying to read long documents on a laptop or desktop screen.
Why is vertical scrolling so much more technically straightforward than horizontal scrolling?
I bought a similar model (Matrix Neo 2560x1440 IPS 27")
When the vendor says "not compatible with laptops", they're not kidding. I couldn't get it to work with my laptop with an nvidia Quattro 1000M card, even though the card supports the required resolution, even though I was using an ACTIVE DisplayPort to DUAL link DVI adapter. The computer just wouldn't detect the display. It worked fine with my personal laptop which has a real dual link DVI port, though.
In the end I just hooked the thing up to my secondary computer (a desktop with a real DVI port). It's a bloody good screen, but I wish I could use it with my preferred computer.
It's the only monitor I've used where I haven't wanted a second panel to accompany it. Maybe there is, eventually, such a thing as enough desktop space? I'm sure this is only a temporary state. :)