I realise that there are lots of NT boxes still out there in production environments (we still have a few at uni, although everything is migrating to 2K/XP). However, I think that it is a little mis-leading to mention the problems with many generation old systems which are no longer supported. We should be picking on all of the problems with the new Microsoft products - there's plenty of them to go around;)
Incidentally, I would assume that you won't have these problems on Linux if you are using a wrapper around the Win32 drivers? Last time I checked Linux wasn't running its graphics drivers inside ring 0.
A major problem I see with using Win32 drivers on Linux is this - who is going to ask the major hardware vendors to write drivers for other operating systems when you can just use the ones for Windows? Who is going to bother reverse engineering a piece of hardware and write their own drivers (and release the source) when they can simply download a wrapper?
Don't get me wrong, I think that this is a great technical achievement, but I think that it should be a last resort solution - if you can't get it to work any other way, use the wrapper. We don't want the Linux OS or apps (or BSD etc) to emulate Microsoft products - we want them to surpass them.
We've been sitting here for quite a while now saying how SCO's plan is to drive up their stock price and then dump their shares once it hits a predetermined value.
So they're spouting FUD and being a royal pain in the ass, but what has their stock been doing for the last few months?
If I didn't have any morals or concerns about what they're doing to the industry, buying some of their stock to sell when it goes up again might sound pretty attractive.
I remember learning Java in my first year at uni. We were the first class to learn Java instead of C, and we were told how everyone would be using Java in the future, and how we would all be using the same code seamlessly across platforms, and how Java was going to revolutionise the internet.
A few years on, and I notice that we are still using whatever language is most suitable (a lot of the time not Java), the internet still runs on html (or the IE equivalent) and it is still a pain in the ass to take code from one platform to another.
I mention this because I don't think that Sun can sustain itself by relying on Java. Java came and found its niche, not conquered. The same is happening to XML. It'll probably happen to the next great thing to come along. Sun should maybe read some of the higher modded posts above and crank out the PR for some of its cool research toys and market them - maybe even come out with the greatest thing again. If it manages to get into IBMs good books again and the two team up in a significant way, *that* would probably be a good way to promote Linux, Java and open source.
I could be slightly incorrect on some of the facts here, but bear with me...
Wasn't the intention of the 2nd ammendment of the US constitution that the US didn't need a standing army? The populace has guns if it needs to defend itself, but no organised armed force to go attacking other countries.
Fast forward to WWII...
The Allies are in a world of hurt, and the US gets hit at Pearl Harbour (okay, so there are US armed forces by this stage). The US is sitting there, minding its own business, and gets thumped. All of a sudden, Uncle Sam realises that maybe it better do something, and ramps up production of war materiel, and goes and wins WWII.
Of course, after that, there is a bit of violent history.
I guess my point was, the idealistic way was tried and failed for whatever reason. I don't see a problem preparing defenses as long as there is a diplomat at the helm. Compare and contrast to having defenses and a standing army and having Bush as CIC...
Actually, I'm surprised that no one has really looked into this before. Most of the MMORPGs that are out these days are some sort of fantasy (Everquest, Ultima, Asheron's Call etc), or Star Wars.
What we need is for someone to develop a MMORPG with an espionage theme, or like GTA3 or something similiar. I'm sure that fantasy appeals to a lot of people, but what markets are lying out there untapped?
(eg how well do fantasy RPGs normally sell compared to the GTA games? who remembers Syndicate? who wouldn't kill to play that online?)
In the CS course at my uni, most units have one or two major assignments and the exam. The assignments are usually "design an app to do blah, document, discuss design decisions etc". The exam then has a number of questions based upon the assignments.
If you get less than half of the marks for those questions, you get zero for them. Seeing as they usually make up half of the exam (25% of the exam on each assignment), if you don't get 100% for everything else, you fail. This seems to have worked somewhat in stopping people from copying assignments from each other without understanding what's going on (this doesn't necessarily stop the smart lazy students from copying).
Of course, we also have a pretty draconian cheating policy. Any student caught cheating gets a zero and has to resubmit (for a completion mark, the zero stands). Repeat offenders automatically fail the unit.
I suppose the difference between us and other universities is that these policies are enforced (my last semester of undergrad, 8 first year students were failed and the entire student body was informed).
What it's supposed to do is limit casual piracy. Make it tougher for the average slob to make a copy with the EZ-CD Copier that shipped with his Dell and give it to his buddies. That's it. Most folks would just give up if it didnt work the first time they tried, they aren't going to jump through any hoops, scribble on it with a sharpie, open up a hex editor, solder a mod-chip into their player, run a distributed cracking engine to decode it, whatever.
Um, I think that the average slob might be willing to learn how to hold down the shift key...
I'm waiting for all CDs to start using this *uncrackable* copy protection, and all of the average slobs to start using shift.
I would have thought that anyone using Linux for their day-to-day computer needs would either learn reasonably fast or switch back to Windows. Linux doesn't always make common operations as easy to perform as Windows (this is normally a good thing), and some degree of knowledge is needed.
Also, how many people's mothers would switch to Linux just because? Either they would be introduced by a Linux-savvy relative (who would make the effort to educate them), or if they decided to switch by themselves they are more likely to take the time to learn how to use Linux properly.
It might be interesting to see if in the future Google offers a history function (your previous searches were a, b and c...). It could be fun (or incriminating!) to see what you've searched for in the past.
In other news, I am among the 99% of users who don't have a Google counter:(
While I can type faster than I can write, I've always found that sitting in front of a computer screen seems to stifle my creativity somewhat. I normally write things out by hand and then type up a copy if I need one. This also gives me another chance to proof read and improve my text as I type it in (in addition to a final proof read when its done).
Actually, since I've been writing this way, my uni marks have improved significantly:)
This may be slightly OT, but a fellow student in my university research group is looking at indium. She is looking at femtogram amounts (mass spectrometry), but apparently if you have a bar of indium and bend it, it squeaks or squeels.
Maybe vary the length of the bars and you could play them like wine glasses?
With any luck the movie will inspire people to find the original radio plays and read the book. After I watched Starship Troopers, I heard a lot about how the movie butchered certain themes in the book, and so I went and read it. And I was glad that I did. Maybe people will do the same with this movie - although let's hope that they don't butcher it too much.
In any case, a little word of mouth about how good the original was wouldn't hurt;)
There is a reason for the shuttle using *outdated* technology. It is because of the need for rigorous testing of the systems intended for use in manned vehicles.
The shuttles use 486DX66 processors in their flight control systems. Actually, they use 4 processors which each perform the same calculations and then submit the results to a fifth processor. This processor then takes the (hopefully identical) results and control the shuttle in whatever it is doing. The reason for this is that any potential damage caused by radiation in space can cause anomalous results to be produced. If only three of the processors agree, then the extra result is discarded.
The other issue I mentioned earlier is testing. The 486 processor has been around for so long that its behaviour is extremely well known and it has had no flaws found in it (would you want to man rate a new processor every 6 months, with a real time OS which needs to react in sub-millisecond time frames, and verify that all of your code executes exactly the same)? Since essentially the same operations are performed today in getting the shuttle to orbit as were performed 20 years ago, the processing speed is still more than adequate.
Not everything in the shuttles is outdated though. Discovery (and maybe the other shuttles) had their cockpits upgraded in the early 90s to allow the pilots to interpret more information at once, and in a more intuitive fashion.
Of course, any new space vehicle development (eg OSP) will likely incorporate new computer hardware and software components.
I bought two 40GB USB2.0 (high speed) hard drives a while ago. They cost a bit more than the same size IDE drives, but the reason I wanted them was for the portability and compatability.
At my uni the computing labs don't have CD/DVD burners, zip disks etc, and we only get 20MB of space each (mainly just for email). As an honours student, I don't yet have my own computer on campus (higher degrees only), yet I quite often find myself dealing with amounts of information larger than 20MB. Rather than dealing with floppies (why are we still using these?), my USB HDs allow me to plug in wherever I want (most PCs are Win2000/XP) and have an easy way to save or access large amounts of data. Students aren't allowed to install software (for obvious reasons), but 2000 and XP already have the drivers installed, so I don't have any problems. The fact that my supervisor and my girlfriend both have iBooks running OSX which instantly recognise the drives is another huge plus. And as Angram mentioned, on a USB2.0 port, you can barely tell the difference between the USB disk and the IDE drive.
I still use CDs to backup my data occasionally (haven't bought a DVD burner yet), but I'm very happy with my purchase. Even if DVD burners do come down in price, I'm not worrying about my hard drives failing in 6 months if I leave them in the sun. I'd definitely recommend these to anyone who asked.
NASA are great at somethings, but genuine cheap space transport needs to come from a competitive commercial environment.
Actually, I've always thought that the whole problem was about the economics. I think that history has proven that if you are willing to throw enough time and money at something, you can generally get it done. The thing is, who outside of the government (pick one) is willing to spend that much money and not get some sort of guaranteed return? At least initially, my bet is on the rich geeks (eg Carmack), although Scaled Composites seems to be the most technically qualified and they seem to have solid backing. I can't really see enough people being able to raise the capital (and develop the technology) to develop profitable businesses in this industry in the short term. Let alone create a competitive commercial environment (note that I'm talking manned flight here, not just satellites or the like).
As other posters have mentioned, prize money motivated the early aviation industry, and I think that the X-Prize will manage to do the same for sub-orbital flight. Sure, skipping around the globe is fun, but what (monetary) incentives do we have to develop real space travel? Unless someone offers an X-Prize for LEO and above, I'm afraid that we still won't be getting off the planet in the near future. Maybe someone could sign up some rich space tourists in advance?
On a related note, what are all wealthy people in the world doing with their money besides making more money? Even just a few million tossed in the direction of some qualified and enthusiastic engineers could probably yield some interesting results. The same probably goes for quite a few other fields (medicine, science research etc).
After reading the article, it seems rather lacking in explanation. Okay, so Larson says that there are three main models for word recognition and presented evidence for and against each one; parallel letter recognition being the one supported by his evidence. The article then goes on to present none of the evidence, which is a shame as it could have been enlightening for us masses.
So, we have our counter-example here but what about the rest of the rules to flesh this out? What rules do we need to follow to still allow comprehension of otherwise obfuscated text, and what rules produce unintelligible rubbish?
Incidentally, could this be used as our next method for determining a human user versus a program, rather than using images? How well could this survive being decrypted by a well crafted perl script? Maybe some research is in order...
Just downloaded this and been trying it out for a while. My impressions so far:
The installer is nice and clean, the readme covers everything and there were no problems. Character creation is ala BG2 - this is both good and bad. Kits are available, but be careful with weapon proficiencies - no stores have been changed (e.g. no katanas or other BG2 weapons). Rules for proficiencies are broken - a fighter can put all of their points into one weapon (wasn't a problem in BG2 due to the starting at level 7 or above). Mages should grab Find Familiar in their spells as the extra HP is nice, and you can't buy it.
In game, the graphics look sweet at a higher res. Spell effects, armor, avatars etc all use BG2 models. Use of the BG2 engine fixes any DirectX problems (playing BG1 under DX9 was prone to crashing - it was written for DX6). The 1.5x walk speed is in. So is the enemy ability to follow you between areas - old tactics don't always work anymore:/ I am unsure about in game movies - I was able to skip the Friendly Arm Inn movie, but not the Beregost one, weird. Having NPCs with kits is cool (provided you choose what you want upon installation).
After a few hours of playing, I have come to the conclusion that this is a good thing for BG1. It breathes some life back into an RPG classic. If you enjoyed playing BG1, enjoy it again.
Slashdot Mirror
I realise that there are lots of NT boxes still out there in production environments (we still have a few at uni, although everything is migrating to 2K/XP). However, I think that it is a little mis-leading to mention the problems with many generation old systems which are no longer supported. We should be picking on all of the problems with the new Microsoft products - there's plenty of them to go around ;)
Incidentally, I would assume that you won't have these problems on Linux if you are using a wrapper around the Win32 drivers? Last time I checked Linux wasn't running its graphics drivers inside ring 0.
A major problem I see with using Win32 drivers on Linux is this - who is going to ask the major hardware vendors to write drivers for other operating systems when you can just use the ones for Windows? Who is going to bother reverse engineering a piece of hardware and write their own drivers (and release the source) when they can simply download a wrapper?
Don't get me wrong, I think that this is a great technical achievement, but I think that it should be a last resort solution - if you can't get it to work any other way, use the wrapper. We don't want the Linux OS or apps (or BSD etc) to emulate Microsoft products - we want them to surpass them.
Someone out to make some money?
We've been sitting here for quite a while now saying how SCO's plan is to drive up their stock price and then dump their shares once it hits a predetermined value.
So they're spouting FUD and being a royal pain in the ass, but what has their stock been doing for the last few months?
If I didn't have any morals or concerns about what they're doing to the industry, buying some of their stock to sell when it goes up again might sound pretty attractive.
I remember learning Java in my first year at uni. We were the first class to learn Java instead of C, and we were told how everyone would be using Java in the future, and how we would all be using the same code seamlessly across platforms, and how Java was going to revolutionise the internet.
A few years on, and I notice that we are still using whatever language is most suitable (a lot of the time not Java), the internet still runs on html (or the IE equivalent) and it is still a pain in the ass to take code from one platform to another.
I mention this because I don't think that Sun can sustain itself by relying on Java. Java came and found its niche, not conquered. The same is happening to XML. It'll probably happen to the next great thing to come along. Sun should maybe read some of the higher modded posts above and crank out the PR for some of its cool research toys and market them - maybe even come out with the greatest thing again. If it manages to get into IBMs good books again and the two team up in a significant way, *that* would probably be a good way to promote Linux, Java and open source.
I could be slightly incorrect on some of the facts here, but bear with me...
Wasn't the intention of the 2nd ammendment of the US constitution that the US didn't need a standing army? The populace has guns if it needs to defend itself, but no organised armed force to go attacking other countries.
Fast forward to WWII...
The Allies are in a world of hurt, and the US gets hit at Pearl Harbour (okay, so there are US armed forces by this stage). The US is sitting there, minding its own business, and gets thumped. All of a sudden, Uncle Sam realises that maybe it better do something, and ramps up production of war materiel, and goes and wins WWII.
Of course, after that, there is a bit of violent history.
I guess my point was, the idealistic way was tried and failed for whatever reason. I don't see a problem preparing defenses as long as there is a diplomat at the helm. Compare and contrast to having defenses and a standing army and having Bush as CIC...
Actually, I'm surprised that no one has really looked into this before. Most of the MMORPGs that are out these days are some sort of fantasy (Everquest, Ultima, Asheron's Call etc), or Star Wars.
What we need is for someone to develop a MMORPG with an espionage theme, or like GTA3 or something similiar. I'm sure that fantasy appeals to a lot of people, but what markets are lying out there untapped?
(eg how well do fantasy RPGs normally sell compared to the GTA games? who remembers Syndicate? who wouldn't kill to play that online?)
In the CS course at my uni, most units have one or two major assignments and the exam. The assignments are usually "design an app to do blah, document, discuss design decisions etc". The exam then has a number of questions based upon the assignments.
If you get less than half of the marks for those questions, you get zero for them. Seeing as they usually make up half of the exam (25% of the exam on each assignment), if you don't get 100% for everything else, you fail. This seems to have worked somewhat in stopping people from copying assignments from each other without understanding what's going on (this doesn't necessarily stop the smart lazy students from copying).
Of course, we also have a pretty draconian cheating policy. Any student caught cheating gets a zero and has to resubmit (for a completion mark, the zero stands). Repeat offenders automatically fail the unit.
I suppose the difference between us and other universities is that these policies are enforced (my last semester of undergrad, 8 first year students were failed and the entire student body was informed).
What it's supposed to do is limit casual piracy. Make it tougher for the average slob to make a copy with the EZ-CD Copier that shipped with his Dell and give it to his buddies. That's it. Most folks would just give up if it didnt work the first time they tried, they aren't going to jump through any hoops, scribble on it with a sharpie, open up a hex editor, solder a mod-chip into their player, run a distributed cracking engine to decode it, whatever.
Um, I think that the average slob might be willing to learn how to hold down the shift key...
I'm waiting for all CDs to start using this *uncrackable* copy protection, and all of the average slobs to start using shift.
I would have thought that anyone using Linux for their day-to-day computer needs would either learn reasonably fast or switch back to Windows. Linux doesn't always make common operations as easy to perform as Windows (this is normally a good thing), and some degree of knowledge is needed.
Also, how many people's mothers would switch to Linux just because? Either they would be introduced by a Linux-savvy relative (who would make the effort to educate them), or if they decided to switch by themselves they are more likely to take the time to learn how to use Linux properly.
That being said, some people can't be taught...
because my hat isn't thick enough
unlike me, who hasn't worked out how to use preview yet ;)
Everytime I see a post like this I wonder why people have so much tinfoil in their hats.
Then I start to see the wisdom in what they are saying.
Then I realise that I may need to buy some more tinfoil because my hat isn't think enough.
It might be interesting to see if in the future Google offers a history function (your previous searches were a, b and c...). It could be fun (or incriminating!) to see what you've searched for in the past.
:(
In other news, I am among the 99% of users who don't have a Google counter
While I can type faster than I can write, I've always found that sitting in front of a computer screen seems to stifle my creativity somewhat. I normally write things out by hand and then type up a copy if I need one. This also gives me another chance to proof read and improve my text as I type it in (in addition to a final proof read when its done).
:)
Actually, since I've been writing this way, my uni marks have improved significantly
This may be slightly OT, but a fellow student in my university research group is looking at indium. She is looking at femtogram amounts (mass spectrometry), but apparently if you have a bar of indium and bend it, it squeaks or squeels.
Maybe vary the length of the bars and you could play them like wine glasses?
Sorry, you are correct. Thanks for pointing that out.
t er s/Ch4-2.html
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/compu
Don't know where I got that information (OTOH).
Everything else I said appears to be correct though.
With any luck the movie will inspire people to find the original radio plays and read the book. After I watched Starship Troopers, I heard a lot about how the movie butchered certain themes in the book, and so I went and read it. And I was glad that I did. Maybe people will do the same with this movie - although let's hope that they don't butcher it too much.
;)
In any case, a little word of mouth about how good the original was wouldn't hurt
There is a reason for the shuttle using *outdated* technology. It is because of the need for rigorous testing of the systems intended for use in manned vehicles.
The shuttles use 486DX66 processors in their flight control systems. Actually, they use 4 processors which each perform the same calculations and then submit the results to a fifth processor. This processor then takes the (hopefully identical) results and control the shuttle in whatever it is doing. The reason for this is that any potential damage caused by radiation in space can cause anomalous results to be produced. If only three of the processors agree, then the extra result is discarded.
The other issue I mentioned earlier is testing. The 486 processor has been around for so long that its behaviour is extremely well known and it has had no flaws found in it (would you want to man rate a new processor every 6 months, with a real time OS which needs to react in sub-millisecond time frames, and verify that all of your code executes exactly the same)? Since essentially the same operations are performed today in getting the shuttle to orbit as were performed 20 years ago, the processing speed is still more than adequate.
Not everything in the shuttles is outdated though. Discovery (and maybe the other shuttles) had their cockpits upgraded in the early 90s to allow the pilots to interpret more information at once, and in a more intuitive fashion.
Of course, any new space vehicle development (eg OSP) will likely incorporate new computer hardware and software components.
I bought two 40GB USB2.0 (high speed) hard drives a while ago. They cost a bit more than the same size IDE drives, but the reason I wanted them was for the portability and compatability.
At my uni the computing labs don't have CD/DVD burners, zip disks etc, and we only get 20MB of space each (mainly just for email). As an honours student, I don't yet have my own computer on campus (higher degrees only), yet I quite often find myself dealing with amounts of information larger than 20MB. Rather than dealing with floppies (why are we still using these?), my USB HDs allow me to plug in wherever I want (most PCs are Win2000/XP) and have an easy way to save or access large amounts of data. Students aren't allowed to install software (for obvious reasons), but 2000 and XP already have the drivers installed, so I don't have any problems. The fact that my supervisor and my girlfriend both have iBooks running OSX which instantly recognise the drives is another huge plus. And as Angram mentioned, on a USB2.0 port, you can barely tell the difference between the USB disk and the IDE drive.
I still use CDs to backup my data occasionally (haven't bought a DVD burner yet), but I'm very happy with my purchase. Even if DVD burners do come down in price, I'm not worrying about my hard drives failing in 6 months if I leave them in the sun. I'd definitely recommend these to anyone who asked.
NASA are great at somethings, but genuine cheap space transport needs to come from a competitive commercial environment.
Actually, I've always thought that the whole problem was about the economics. I think that history has proven that if you are willing to throw enough time and money at something, you can generally get it done. The thing is, who outside of the government (pick one) is willing to spend that much money and not get some sort of guaranteed return? At least initially, my bet is on the rich geeks (eg Carmack), although Scaled Composites seems to be the most technically qualified and they seem to have solid backing. I can't really see enough people being able to raise the capital (and develop the technology) to develop profitable businesses in this industry in the short term. Let alone create a competitive commercial environment (note that I'm talking manned flight here, not just satellites or the like).
As other posters have mentioned, prize money motivated the early aviation industry, and I think that the X-Prize will manage to do the same for sub-orbital flight. Sure, skipping around the globe is fun, but what (monetary) incentives do we have to develop real space travel? Unless someone offers an X-Prize for LEO and above, I'm afraid that we still won't be getting off the planet in the near future. Maybe someone could sign up some rich space tourists in advance?
On a related note, what are all wealthy people in the world doing with their money besides making more money? Even just a few million tossed in the direction of some qualified and enthusiastic engineers could probably yield some interesting results. The same probably goes for quite a few other fields (medicine, science research etc).
After reading the article, it seems rather lacking in explanation. Okay, so Larson says that there are three main models for word recognition and presented evidence for and against each one; parallel letter recognition being the one supported by his evidence. The article then goes on to present none of the evidence, which is a shame as it could have been enlightening for us masses.
So, we have our counter-example here but what about the rest of the rules to flesh this out? What rules do we need to follow to still allow comprehension of otherwise obfuscated text, and what rules produce unintelligible rubbish?
Incidentally, could this be used as our next method for determining a human user versus a program, rather than using images? How well could this survive being decrypted by a well crafted perl script? Maybe some research is in order...
Just downloaded this and been trying it out for a while. My impressions so far:
:/ I am unsure about in game movies - I was able to skip the Friendly Arm Inn movie, but not the Beregost one, weird. Having NPCs with kits is cool (provided you choose what you want upon installation).
The installer is nice and clean, the readme covers everything and there were no problems. Character creation is ala BG2 - this is both good and bad. Kits are available, but be careful with weapon proficiencies - no stores have been changed (e.g. no katanas or other BG2 weapons). Rules for proficiencies are broken - a fighter can put all of their points into one weapon (wasn't a problem in BG2 due to the starting at level 7 or above). Mages should grab Find Familiar in their spells as the extra HP is nice, and you can't buy it.
In game, the graphics look sweet at a higher res. Spell effects, armor, avatars etc all use BG2 models. Use of the BG2 engine fixes any DirectX problems (playing BG1 under DX9 was prone to crashing - it was written for DX6). The 1.5x walk speed is in. So is the enemy ability to follow you between areas - old tactics don't always work anymore
After a few hours of playing, I have come to the conclusion that this is a good thing for BG1. It breathes some life back into an RPG classic. If you enjoyed playing BG1, enjoy it again.