Sorry to disturb the geekstravaganza over "Mining Asteroids" and "Space Living", but someone has to do it.
Problems:
1) If huge bales of pure gold metal were floating in orbit and all you had to do was open the shuttle doors and scoop it up with rakes, it would still come nowhere near offsetting the cost of a shuttle launch. Or the next generation of "cheap" vehicle launches. Moving mass off earth or back to Earth is INSANELY EXPENSIVE.
2) We have most of everything we want on earth. Noone needs helium 3 or dumb crap like that unless they're looking to offset the mass-expense of earth by making fuel/stuff on the fly. Some more platinum might be nice because there's not really enough to meet potential demand, but oh well.
3) Many/most asteroids are made of fluff, crap, and dust. They are not rocks. They are not mine-able, and they do not offer a place to land.
4) Where's the fuel going to come from to smelt these bad boys? Certainly we're not going to be hauling ore to and from earth?
5) Anyone who believes significant (100k+) populations will exist off-earth within the next century is delusional. Delusional squared if they think space colonization is a solution to population growth. Period.
6) Why bother? Earth is enormous. Space is difficult to make habitable.
7) There is far more interesting science that can be funded with the cash we blow on NASA Stupid Human Tricks.
8) Sending people to Mars is a pure unadulterated tremendous waste of money. Just like the Space Station under construction. Too bad Texan Congressmen and professional corporate cocksuckers don't agree.
The concept: build a hyper-reliable storage device or something, something that can last for millennia. Then ship it to the moon. Wah-lah! Permanent information deep-freeze.
Pitch Dark is supposed to be a tepid aliens ripoff. Beh...
Mission to mars is getting extremely good script reviews and the SFX look stellar. Not very sciency or whatall, but looks original at least. I will be in line.
U-571 is supposed to be very good to excellent. I will be in line too.
Use your favorite system-native toolkit. Ask it to draw a pushbutton three-hundred pixels wide, forty pixels tall, with a png image as the surface, with a 14-point font of arbitrary type colored blue that turns red on mouseover, and have it change the font black and spawn any number of system events on a clickevent. Now insert it and many others like it on a document. Now repeat for EVERY system-native toolkit you would like to support. Make sure they can report their status to whatever application would like to know about it. Make sure they can be changed on the fly. WHOOPS! Kind of a pain in the ass!
Native system widgets CANNOT BE USED FOR A WHOLE LOT OF LAYOUT due to W3C specifications. They are just NOT the right thing for the job. Deal.
Yes the interface on the mac is probably going to suck for a while. Perhaps forever.
**THE USER INTERFACE IS COMPLETELY MUTABLE BY YOU!**
Read the release notes before talking about replacing X11.
Yes it crashes. Yes it's slow. Yes it's NOT DONE YET.
No it doesn't need to be 'pared down like icab'. Icab is icab. Mozilla is mozilla. Learn why they made the technology decisions they did and starting THINKING about the problemspace these products are addressing.
Most previous versions of Netscape had email clients and news readers and stuff.
AOL is probably going to spend around $100,000,000 on mozilla development all said and done. Perhaps MUCH more. You have paid $0.00. Netscape 5 is their product. Mozilla is yours. Bitch accordingly.
Internet Explorer 5's implementations of HTML4, CSS1, XML, and the DOM are broken according to specifications. Mozilla's generally are not.
Mozilla NEVER PROMISED CSS2 and will probably not deliver on it.
Finally, for the severely clue impaired, MOZILLA CODE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH NETSCAPE CODE. AT ALL.
High-quality open source operating systems for your computer: Many.
High-quality open-source graphical toolkits for your favorite unix-style OS: GTK, QT, FLTK, Tk
Bindings for your favorite language to your favorite unix-style graphical toolkit: Complete and comprehensive across all toolkits
High-quality open-source Desktop Environments available for your favorite unix-style OS: KDE, Gnome
High-quality open-source Window Managers you may use with either Desktop Environment: At least sixty to choose from.
Cost of any of the prior products: Marginal amounts of time and effort.
Financial cost of any of the prior products: Nominal to none.
Number of developers on aforementioned products: Thousands.
Their sum and total total obligation to you: Jack Shit.
Reasons to complain non-constructively about ANYTHING: None.
Catches: You have to be mature enough to use and modify high-quality warranty-free cost-free open-source software constructively. Whining, baseless complaining, vague, criticism, and political pot-shots reflect poorly on you, your technical skill, and your penis size. (if applicable)
With places like server51, sourceforge, xnot, and all their ilk, any dork who can type gcc can enter the world of program creation... This is a good thing. It gets people comfortable with software creation and the tools used. Microsoft is one of the biggest software manufacturers there is. Their products cover EVERYTHING. Yet not much else than Visual Basic is readily accessible by the average computer enthusiast. Why would it not be in MS's best interest to flood the market with dirt cheap or free copies of VC++ and development kits for the younguns to play with? Or do they do this already? Just a thought.
I would posit that the great majority of mid/upper-class, first-world skript kids, college kids, scenewhores, old-school-unix-people, Anything-But-MS zealots, computer enthusiasts, autistics, CS majors, programmers, hackers, tech workers, corporate research departments, social marginals, hardcore gamers, prodigies, and curiosity seekers have now been exposed to Linux/BSD and have a pretty good idea of how it fits into the Grand Scheme of Personal Computing. Who else is left? MS zealots perhaps, but I would imagine that the potential market for a sophisticated open source Unix-style OS has been significantly tapped.
Of course, I'm just pulling that thought out of my ass, but I have personally brought linux to about 10 people, but I'm out of technically-competent people who are open-source virgins. They either love it, or use it, or don't understand it, or tolerate it, or hate it, but they've all been acquainted with Linux/BSD.
I think the Linux hype is over because there was never really anything to get insanely excited about. Linux is just better-distributed and packaged BSD, with a license that is trivially different from BSD style licensing. Wee. I think Linux still the greatest thing since sliced bread and oxygen, but it's not going to knock Win9x off the Common Desktop, it's NOT going to stop MS from owning the mid-small server market with their trillion dollar cap and Windows 2000 (which is a STUNNING improvement over NT4), it's not going to displace Commercial Unixes by virtue of technological superiority (or even parity for that matter), and it's NOT going to revolutionize life as we know it.
One thing that might be helpful is a sort of comparison between Win/Mac concepts and terminology to the Unix-style equivalents..
Et al, an explanation of the divisions between Kernel/Shell/X11/Window Manager/Desktop Environment and the Windows environment... Where to find how to change common system settings... What Linux/BSD is good at and what it is NOT good for.. [!]
The most killer thing for newbies seems to be understanding partitions, setting up X, setting up the mountpoints, 'startx', and understanding common commands like ls, rm, mv, cat, et al...
I dunno. All I do know is that a lot of computing enthusiasts hear all sorts of great things about Linux/BSD, hit a snag or ten, and dance right back into Windows, probably never to leave again. Perhaps a real-world document on how to get comfortable in a unix environment quickly would be helpful.
Upside: Snappy pacing, good cinematography, excellent makeup and acting job by JC, well written story, pleasant to watch, funny moments, not overly long...
Downside: WTF is Andy Kaufmann?, not a remarkably great movie you'll be dying to see again, no natalie portman, courtney love has nothing to do, movie doesn't get real deep inside what made AK tick...
So Alpha is fast and well designed and beats the shit out of x86 and IA64... What else is new? It's also irrelevant to a large majority of computing enthusiasts because the systems are really really expensive relative to the x86 boxes we can all go out and buy at Comp-U-Planet.
I know a lot of people who would absolutely adore having an Alpha box, but they're just so expensive... We have a variety of free high-quality OSes working on Alpha and we've got millions of people who are now re/entering the land of *nix. Put 1 and 1 together and you get a large potential market for low-end, moderate-cost alpha boxes... My question is, where can we find them and what's holding up the market from bringing them to us at a sane price? Are we not looking hard enough or are they not there?
(song tuneof="spam spam spam spam" title="Things Quake's/QW's networking implementation was designed to deal with, in descending order") Ping lag latency noise Dropped packets loss loss accuracy sampling rate issues Ping lag latency noise Fun lag latency noise dropped packets noise noise ping lag latency noise security buy a ferrari marry the receptionist (/song)
Moral: Quake is not a mission-critical-eCommerce -iEnabled-Me.Personal-Electronic-FinanceSecure.com kind of thing. It's a game. It's a game that has a player community that consists of 60% people who love the game, and 40% qu4k3 k1dz. They are irrelevant as their penises are tiny. (the k1dz penises, not the true players) This article is a rehash of plans and posts with a not-technically-sophisticated-enough explanation that doesn't fully describe the complexity of the situation and the target audience consists of people who are bored at work and will read any goddamn thing that floats across the web. I hereby piss on someone else's well-intentioned, well-written and well-executed effort to explain things to people.
I am now just mutilating whitespace. My job is so boring. I have seven win peecees at my disposal that break a lot. They can't be fixed. Noone wants to fix them. There is no money or interest in fixing them. Yet I am paid to watch them. Someone end my empty horribly empty life. I am a total twat with no life. Kill me. Moderate me. Please.
A nice work... I enjoyed it... But...
on
Gates of Fire
·
· Score: 0
Tim Sweeney, the main engineer of the Unreal Engine, which spawned a variety of shitty games, a fun pretty roleplayingish game, a mediocre but pretty game, and one of the best games of the year. Probably no single person before or since has done more to congest the net than TS, with the possible exception of that Carla Mack chick I keep reading about.
I guarantee on my small insignificant life that you will be delighted with the new functionality, stability, and efficiency in M12. It still eats RAM like a mother, isn't luxuriant-feeling like IE, and falls over every once in a while, but it's well behaved, significantly more responsive-feeling, and handles far more page/frame/ecmascript/java issues... As an added bonus, the Win32 version can find and use all your old plugins, like Flash!
For the uninitiated, let's run down a few facts.
*************************
Mozilla is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, which is certified Open Source.
Mozilla has nothing to do with Netscape whatsoever, except for a majority of the authors, the backwards-plugin functionality, and the fact that Mozilla will be incorporated into Netscape 5.
Mozilla is quite modular.
Mozilla is completely cross platform. If the OS exists, Mozilla will probably have no problems running on it.
Mozilla is a very insanely complex program, which is probably why it doesn't have a lot of outside hackers. It's not a weekend project, and the codebase is enormously sophisticated.
Mozilla will do to-the-standard CSS1, HTML4.0, DOM Level 1, XML, a great majority of CSS2 (although this is not promised), and the latest bastard variant of Javascript.
Mozilla will not have crypo. That's for binary-only vendors, or your own project.
The entire UI (ENTIRE) will be themeable. So if you don't care for the UI, don't bitch, because theme support is coming soon, and you will be able to write your own.
Mozilla is going to be large because that is how it is. Don't bitch about bloat, because none of the weekend-project HTML widgets your favorite toolkit sports are able to do everything Mozilla does yet.
Mozilla is not going to force any particular Java Virtual Machine, HTML editor, or mailer on you. Although the comes-with editor and mailer are extremely nice this time around.
Mozilla will be a compile-it-yourself type thing if you so desire.
Report any and all bugs to bugzilla.mozilla.com. Please follow the bug submission guidelines. A shitty bug report is worse than none at all, and wastes developer time.
If you wish, you can do hourly downloads of binaries, weekly downloads of tarballs, or up-to-the-minute CVS of mozilla.
You will be delighted with mozilla. If not, use something else.
People love to piss on the WinCE (excuse me, "Windows Powered") parade, but it really is new, efficient, largely cruft-free, and malleable, even if it isn't what Palm uses, or there aren't any Dreamcast games using it yet...
Just because it came out of MS doesn't mean it sucks. Look at the meeces, the keyboards, Excel 97, Hearts, VB, Age of Empires x, and Windows 2000. =P
I wonder if you could make a beowulf out of people-puters.... They're very modular, have a long MTBF, and, well, enjoy the fork()ing process. Of course, killing child processes might be a bit of a problem...
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to disturb the geekstravaganza over "Mining Asteroids" and "Space Living", but someone has to do it.
Problems:
1) If huge bales of pure gold metal were floating in orbit and all you had to do was open the shuttle doors and scoop it up with rakes, it would still come nowhere near offsetting the cost of a shuttle launch. Or the next generation of "cheap" vehicle launches. Moving mass off earth or back to Earth is INSANELY EXPENSIVE.
2) We have most of everything we want on earth. Noone needs helium 3 or dumb crap like that unless they're looking to offset the mass-expense of earth by making fuel/stuff on the fly. Some more platinum might be nice because there's not really enough to meet potential demand, but oh well.
3) Many/most asteroids are made of fluff, crap, and dust. They are not rocks. They are not mine-able, and they do not offer a place to land.
4) Where's the fuel going to come from to smelt these bad boys? Certainly we're not going to be hauling ore to and from earth?
5) Anyone who believes significant (100k+) populations will exist off-earth within the next century is delusional. Delusional squared if they think space colonization is a solution to population growth. Period.
6) Why bother? Earth is enormous. Space is difficult to make habitable.
7) There is far more interesting science that can be funded with the cash we blow on NASA Stupid Human Tricks.
8) Sending people to Mars is a pure unadulterated tremendous waste of money. Just like the Space Station under construction. Too bad Texan Congressmen and professional corporate cocksuckers don't agree.
9) Tang sucks. Even the new stuff.
10) I bent my wookie!
Toodles!
The concept: build a hyper-reliable storage device or something, something that can last for millennia. Then ship it to the moon. Wah-lah! Permanent information deep-freeze.
Pitch Dark is supposed to be a tepid aliens ripoff. Beh...
Mission to mars is getting extremely good script reviews and the SFX look stellar. Not very sciency or whatall, but looks original at least. I will be in line.
U-571 is supposed to be very good to excellent. I will be in line too.
>> Um, neither can HTML. *ahem*
Use your favorite system-native toolkit. Ask it to draw a pushbutton three-hundred pixels wide, forty pixels tall, with a png image as the surface, with a 14-point font of arbitrary type colored blue that turns red on mouseover, and have it change the font black and spawn any number of system events on a clickevent. Now insert it and many others like it on a document. Now repeat for EVERY system-native toolkit you would like to support. Make sure they can report their status to whatever application would like to know about it. Make sure they can be changed on the fly. WHOOPS! Kind of a pain in the ass!
gfx makes everything easier for everyone. =P
Thanks for the micro-troll though!
A few quick things despite this thread's age.
Native system widgets CANNOT BE USED FOR A WHOLE LOT OF LAYOUT due to W3C specifications. They are just NOT the right thing for the job. Deal.
Yes the interface on the mac is probably going to suck for a while. Perhaps forever.
**THE USER INTERFACE IS COMPLETELY MUTABLE BY YOU!**
Read the release notes before talking about replacing X11.
Yes it crashes. Yes it's slow. Yes it's NOT DONE YET.
No it doesn't need to be 'pared down like icab'. Icab is icab. Mozilla is mozilla. Learn why they made the technology decisions they did and starting THINKING about the problemspace these products are addressing.
Most previous versions of Netscape had email clients and news readers and stuff.
AOL is probably going to spend around $100,000,000 on mozilla development all said and done. Perhaps MUCH more. You have paid $0.00. Netscape 5 is their product. Mozilla is yours. Bitch accordingly.
Internet Explorer 5's implementations of HTML4, CSS1, XML, and the DOM are broken according to specifications. Mozilla's generally are not.
Mozilla NEVER PROMISED CSS2 and will probably not deliver on it.
Finally, for the severely clue impaired, MOZILLA CODE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH NETSCAPE CODE. AT ALL.
Toodles.
High-quality open source operating systems for your computer: Many.
High-quality open-source graphical toolkits for your favorite unix-style OS: GTK, QT, FLTK, Tk
Bindings for your favorite language to your favorite unix-style graphical toolkit: Complete and comprehensive across all toolkits
High-quality open-source Desktop Environments available for your favorite unix-style OS: KDE, Gnome
High-quality open-source Window Managers you may use with either Desktop Environment: At least sixty to choose from.
Cost of any of the prior products: Marginal amounts of time and effort.
Financial cost of any of the prior products: Nominal to none.
Number of developers on aforementioned products: Thousands.
Their sum and total total obligation to you: Jack Shit.
Reasons to complain non-constructively about ANYTHING: None.
Catches: You have to be mature enough to use and modify high-quality warranty-free cost-free open-source software constructively. Whining, baseless complaining, vague, criticism, and political pot-shots reflect poorly on you, your technical skill, and your penis size. (if applicable)
With places like server51, sourceforge, xnot, and all their ilk, any dork who can type gcc can enter the world of program creation... This is a good thing. It gets people comfortable with software creation and the tools used.
Microsoft is one of the biggest software manufacturers there is. Their products cover EVERYTHING. Yet not much else than Visual Basic is readily accessible by the average computer enthusiast. Why would it not be in MS's best interest to flood the market with dirt cheap or free copies of VC++ and development kits for the younguns to play with? Or do they do this already? Just a thought.
not to be a dick, but this one gets me... just like principle/principal...
pEnultimate means *second* best... the word i think they were looking for is ULTIMATE, which is in common usage...
penultimate (p-nlt-mt)
adj.
Next to last.
Linguistics. Of or relating to the penult of a word: penultimate stress.
n.
The next to the last.
I would posit that the great majority of mid/upper-class, first-world skript kids, college kids, scenewhores, old-school-unix-people, Anything-But-MS zealots, computer enthusiasts, autistics, CS majors, programmers, hackers, tech workers, corporate research departments, social marginals, hardcore gamers, prodigies, and curiosity seekers have now been exposed to Linux/BSD and have a pretty good idea of how it fits into the Grand Scheme of Personal Computing. Who else is left? MS zealots perhaps, but I would imagine that the potential market for a sophisticated open source Unix-style OS has been significantly tapped.
Of course, I'm just pulling that thought out of my ass, but I have personally brought linux to about 10 people, but I'm out of technically-competent people who are open-source virgins. They either love it, or use it, or don't understand it, or tolerate it, or hate it, but they've all been acquainted with Linux/BSD.
I think the Linux hype is over because there was never really anything to get insanely excited about. Linux is just better-distributed and packaged BSD, with a license that is trivially different from BSD style licensing. Wee. I think Linux still the greatest thing since sliced bread and oxygen, but it's not going to knock Win9x off the Common Desktop, it's NOT going to stop MS from owning the mid-small server market with their trillion dollar cap and Windows 2000 (which is a STUNNING improvement over NT4), it's not going to displace Commercial Unixes by virtue of technological superiority (or even parity for that matter), and it's NOT going to revolutionize life as we know it.
Bah humbug.
One thing that might be helpful is a sort of comparison between Win/Mac concepts and terminology to the Unix-style equivalents..
Et al, an explanation of the divisions between Kernel/Shell/X11/Window Manager/Desktop Environment and the Windows environment... Where to find how to change common system settings... What Linux/BSD is good at and what it is NOT good for.. [!]
The most killer thing for newbies seems to be understanding partitions, setting up X, setting up the mountpoints, 'startx', and understanding common commands like ls, rm, mv, cat, et al...
I dunno. All I do know is that a lot of computing enthusiasts hear all sorts of great things about Linux/BSD, hit a snag or ten, and dance right back into Windows, probably never to leave again. Perhaps a real-world document on how to get comfortable in a unix environment quickly would be helpful.
Upside: Snappy pacing, good cinematography, excellent makeup and acting job by JC, well written story, pleasant to watch, funny moments, not overly long...
Downside: WTF is Andy Kaufmann?, not a remarkably great movie you'll be dying to see again, no natalie portman, courtney love has nothing to do, movie doesn't get real deep inside what made AK tick...
So Alpha is fast and well designed and beats the shit out of x86 and IA64... What else is new? It's also irrelevant to a large majority of computing enthusiasts because the systems are really really expensive relative to the x86 boxes we can all go out and buy at Comp-U-Planet.
I know a lot of people who would absolutely adore having an Alpha box, but they're just so expensive... We have a variety of free high-quality OSes working on Alpha and we've got millions of people who are now re/entering the land of *nix. Put 1 and 1 together and you get a large potential market for low-end, moderate-cost alpha boxes... My question is, where can we find them and what's holding up the market from bringing them to us at a sane price? Are we not looking hard enough or are they not there?
(song tuneof="spam spam spam spam" title="Things Quake's/QW's networking implementation was designed to deal with, in descending order")
m kind of thing. It's a game. It's a game that has a player community that consists of 60% people who love the game, and 40% qu4k3 k1dz. They are irrelevant as their penises are tiny. (the k1dz penises, not the true players) This article is a rehash of plans and posts with a not-technically-sophisticated-enough explanation that doesn't fully describe the complexity of the situation and the target audience consists of people who are bored at work and will read any goddamn thing that floats across the web. I hereby piss on someone else's well-intentioned, well-written and well-executed effort to explain things to people.
Ping lag latency noise
Dropped packets loss loss accuracy sampling rate issues
Ping lag latency noise
Fun lag latency noise
dropped packets noise noise
ping lag latency noise
security
buy a ferrari
marry the receptionist
(/song)
Moral: Quake is not a mission-critical-eCommerce -iEnabled-Me.Personal-Electronic-FinanceSecure.co
I am now just mutilating whitespace. My job is so boring. I have seven win peecees at my disposal that break a lot. They can't be fixed. Noone wants to fix them. There is no money or interest in fixing them. Yet I am paid to watch them. Someone end my empty horribly empty life. I am a total twat with no life. Kill me. Moderate me. Please.
ASSES OF FIRE was much much better.
BLAME CANADA! BLAME CANADA!
Tim Sweeney, the main engineer of the Unreal Engine, which spawned a variety of shitty games, a fun pretty roleplayingish game, a mediocre but pretty game, and one of the best games of the year. Probably no single person before or since has done more to congest the net than TS, with the possible exception of that Carla Mack chick I keep reading about.
I guarantee on my small insignificant life that you will be delighted with the new functionality, stability, and efficiency in M12. It still eats RAM like a mother, isn't luxuriant-feeling like IE, and falls over every once in a while, but it's well behaved, significantly more responsive-feeling, and handles far more page/frame/ecmascript/java issues... As an added bonus, the Win32 version can find and use all your old plugins, like Flash!
For the uninitiated, let's run down a few facts.
*************************
Mozilla is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, which is certified Open Source.
Mozilla has nothing to do with Netscape whatsoever, except for a majority of the authors, the backwards-plugin functionality, and the fact that Mozilla will be incorporated into Netscape 5.
Mozilla is quite modular.
Mozilla is completely cross platform. If the OS exists, Mozilla will probably have no problems running on it.
Mozilla is a very insanely complex program, which is probably why it doesn't have a lot of outside hackers. It's not a weekend project, and the codebase is enormously sophisticated.
Mozilla will do to-the-standard CSS1, HTML4.0, DOM Level 1, XML, a great majority of CSS2 (although this is not promised), and the latest bastard variant of Javascript.
Mozilla will not have crypo. That's for binary-only vendors, or your own project.
The entire UI (ENTIRE) will be themeable. So if you don't care for the UI, don't bitch, because theme support is coming soon, and you will be able to write your own.
Mozilla is going to be large because that is how it is. Don't bitch about bloat, because none of the weekend-project HTML widgets your favorite toolkit sports are able to do everything Mozilla does yet.
Mozilla is not going to force any particular Java Virtual Machine, HTML editor, or mailer on you. Although the comes-with editor and mailer are extremely nice this time around.
Mozilla will be a compile-it-yourself type thing if you so desire.
Report any and all bugs to bugzilla.mozilla.com. Please follow the bug submission guidelines. A shitty bug report is worse than none at all, and wastes developer time.
If you wish, you can do hourly downloads of binaries, weekly downloads of tarballs, or up-to-the-minute CVS of mozilla.
You will be delighted with mozilla. If not, use something else.
Perhaps we should move #redhat to UnderNYSE... Their servers don't suck so f***ing much...
People love to piss on the WinCE (excuse me, "Windows Powered") parade, but it really is new, efficient, largely cruft-free, and malleable, even if it isn't what Palm uses, or there aren't any Dreamcast games using it yet...
Just because it came out of MS doesn't mean it sucks. Look at the meeces, the keyboards, Excel 97, Hearts, VB, Age of Empires x, and Windows 2000. =P
I wonder if you could make a beowulf out of people-puters.... They're very modular, have a long MTBF, and, well, enjoy the fork()ing process. Of course, killing child processes might be a bit of a problem...