The word I've heard is that they simply don't have enough free time (their satellite launch business is doing very well) to do it in 2014, so it's pretty likely to be next year.
if NASA had gone ahead with Orion
...they wouldn't have had any budget left to actually go anywhere. Or at least not anywhere Congress could agree to let them.
That is handled by default. It is a requirement for ISS to have enough seats docked for everyone on board to get down to earth. Of course that depends on the Soyuz going down with all seats occupied.
or require supplies.
Fortunately, that's under control with the commercial cargo launches, aside from ground problems delaying Dragon or Cygnus from getting up there. (The Air Force radar system that confirms launches are not off-track is currently broken, holding up the launches of both Dragon and a new spy satellite.)
At least this is a change from the usual politics that get in the way of space science. Usually it's Congress messing with the NASA budget to protect the pork of legacy "OldSpace" jobs that have been threatened since the end of the Shuttle. We've already had to extend buying rides from Russia for three more years because Congress keeps underfunding the Commercial Crew program. At least SpaceX shows every indication of plowing ahead with their own manned spaceflight projects in spite of all that bullshit.
So you're saying that the "consultant" should have free reign to troll the "contestants" and anyone else on the set as much and as hard as he wants just because he worked for the sponsor?
Coming soon, the Indie Wall Painter Jam Show, sponsored by Pepsi... because we know you want to watch the paint dry! In the first episode, we compare Eggshell Latex with Off-White Enamel! Stay tuned for the chaos when someone brings in a bucket of lead-based paint!
It means they covered their tools with small bird feathers, presumably to insulate the tools to keep them from getting too cold to use. Ever tried putting a hammer in the freezer for a while? Submitch gets cold.
I think one reason they don't is because it's not trivial to set up a dish properly, there is some math involved. The average/. reader could do it, but not the average Wal-Mart customer. Nothing like pissing off thousands of "free" customers because they can't their equipment to work and they want a refund for the stuff they bought used at a flea market somewhere. In fact, they don't even want you opening up a new account with used equipment, to discourage theft of equipment from actual paying customers.
I dunno, it sounds more like C-band to me. At one time the joke was that the C-band dish was the state flower of Oklahoma.
But from what I've been able to tell, what really killed off FTA satellite was that digital made it so easy to encrypt content. The size of C-band dishes at 2-3 meters didn't help much either, which is why pay satellite went with the Ku/Ka bands that only need a half-meter dish.
I know someone who is an optometrist who years ago wrote up some cool software to type in and print out exam prescriptions using Wordstar and Mailmerge. At least it's the x86 version (he got it with a Sanyo MBC-555 back in the day), but his main problem so far is finding printers that will work with it. At some point, being a.COM executable is going to be another problem. At least there's no problem with losing that version of Wordstar, because you can download it from Computer History Museum. (I even verified the CRCs.)
What in particular about web browsing in a VM requires Windows as the OS, as opposed to Linux? The only thing I can think of is Flash, if you happen to like advertisements that wave or scream at you, or take over the whole browser window. And maybe a few video players, except that YouTube can work with plain HTML5 now, right?
For what it's worth, there has been a move toward using the billing zip code like a PIN, especially with pay-at-the-pump gasoline. While this is something that would be known to someone who steals your wallet, most of the fraud is likely from magstripe skimming and card numbers sold on the internet.
Someone who skims your stripe isn't going to know your zip code, at least not at a restaurant or faceplated ATM where most of that happens. Also the CVV number is physically kept on the card, but not in a form where it can be automatically read by a skimmer. (At least not until the faceplaters start putting an optical scanner in there too!)
The zip code has the advantage of being something you will know without having to write it down, and the CVV is already written down for you on the card. So there's no worry about forgetting them like with a PIN, or with someone picking a PIN of 1234. And I know they do use them for card security, from the first time I encountered this and entered 55555 instead of my zip code, and got a concerned call from my credit card company.
Of course it helps a lot that in the US, zip codes are all numeric, unlike postal codes in Canada and the UK, so they're easy to enter on a keypad.
And what does it matter if you can find out how old your milk is from your cellphone when you're at work, if you're not there at the fridge door to get rid of it?
Your eyes and nose are a plenty good enough way to determine how bad the milk is. To have the fridge do it without sticking a freaking sensor into the milk itself, it would need to know when the milk was put in, and every time it was removed and replaced. Even then, the actual freshness depends on how fresh it was when it first came from the store. Sure, the date on the milk could be on an RFID chip, but if you forget and leave the milk out for a couple of hours, that's going to make the milk spoil a lot sooner than the date on the store, which is really a "sell by" date, anyhow.
Don't forget all his palling up to Obama after Sandy... which ended up not helping New Jersey at all. The feds still took their own damn time to clean things up. So he gets an image problem and nothing to show for it!
Being written in a small locked closet with no air-conditioning, over a period of a couple of days, as a demo program for a brand-new computer? I can't say I'm surprised.
I'm going to agree with the El Reg link. I learned 8080 assembly language "from Bill Gates" by disassembling TRS-80 Level II BASIC (which I think was roughly the same version as on the Altair) back in the day. (Note that it did not teach me Z80 assembly language due to the lack of using anything but relative jumps, and IX in I/O drivers. But I've seen some C-to-Z80 code that I found quite mind-bending.) I recall finding about 35 bytes that could be bummed out of that 12K ROM, which isn't bad. (In comparison, you can bum over 1K out of the 8K ROM in the ColecoVision, while still keeping all of the absolute entry points (ab)used by other crap programmers!)
Kent: My condolences on your meltdown, Knight.
Chris Knight: What meltdown, Kent?
Kent: I'm not saying you had one, because how would I know? But just in case you do.
Chris Knight: You slime!
Kent: It's your own fault, Knight. Didn't anyone ever tell you to make sure your optics are clean?
If they don't launch a FH by the end of this year, my understanding from what I've heard is it will simply be because they're already doing so much other stuff this year that they literally won't have time to get around to it.
Along with severe server instability and a world made up of maze-like maps,
That's one little problem I have with the later maps in FFXI. While the original areas had nice big areas, most of the later expansion areas were what I call "outdoor dungeons". Pits connected by trench hallways, with the areas in between being up on 10 foot high cliffs. There are even some areas you wouldn't realize are outside except when you look up and see a tree canopy.
Another problem XIV had was the degree to which sections of a map were copied and pasted. Sure, in FFXI you can see stuff like similar looking forks in the road, but in XIV, entire small hills were practically rubber-stamped all over a zone, without so much as even rotating them.
he also cited the game being stuck in past, trying to stick with a formula that worked with Square Enix's first MMO, Final Fantasy XI, without looking at newer MMOs to see what had worked there."
My own analogy of what happened is that they effectively had a list of "stuff that didn't work in FFXI and we need to fix when we don't have PS2 Limitations", and "stuff that works great in FFXI and we should keep". They used the first list, and threw out the second.
Another problem I think XIV had was that someone had A Great Idea, which is always trouble. "Hey, guys! What if we made your class depend on the weapon you were using?" Which sounds like it could possibly be a pretty good idea. Except they apparently never bothered to actually play test it to make sure it worked well enough, or even tune it. Instead, all the preview demos were all about the uber graphics resolution. Of course, this being in Japan, anyone who might have pointed out that it wasn't such a great idea would have instinctively held back so as not to embarrass his superiors.
Other radical ideas were thrown in, apparently from just trying to do something different without trying it, such as "People weren't 100% happy with the auction house in XI, so let's not have an auction house! We'll make people's characters stand around and bazaar their stuff even when they're not online!" Except that the number one problem with that is NO INDEXING. If you want, say, a cotton thread, you have to check every character's stuff individually, with no way to compare prices or even know who has what you want. Or at least that's what I understood the problem was from reading a bunch of forum posts from people in beta, because no way was I going to start another grindy MMO from the start, so I stayed with XI. (If I do go try other MMOs, I've sworn that it will be for exploration and seeing cool landscapes and maybe cool plot lines, not for grinding gear to help me grind more gear.)
There's less of an excuse now to not bring your own box, what with non-wimpy laptops being common, and with displays not being boat anchors like they were ten years ago. I'd also like to see some two-room team-vs-team LAN play, like the Artemis folks can do.
I guess kids these days are just too lazy to go outside with their computer and get on my lawn where I can shout at them to get off my lawn.
Your sig makes me wonder if possibly Homer Simpson was somehow involved in the Mt. Gox problems. Maybe it was on the sofa and Homer sat on it, causing it to be lost in the cushions. Have they done a parody episode for bitcoin yet?
Slashdot Mirror
SpaceX is not too far from manned launches.
The word I've heard is that they simply don't have enough free time (their satellite launch business is doing very well) to do it in 2014, so it's pretty likely to be next year.
if NASA had gone ahead with Orion
...they wouldn't have had any budget left to actually go anywhere. Or at least not anywhere Congress could agree to let them.
Seriously, go read this guy's stuff, he explains a lot about NASA's budget troubles: http://spaceksc.blogspot.com/
Wait until the astronauts need to return to Earth
That is handled by default. It is a requirement for ISS to have enough seats docked for everyone on board to get down to earth. Of course that depends on the Soyuz going down with all seats occupied.
or require supplies.
Fortunately, that's under control with the commercial cargo launches, aside from ground problems delaying Dragon or Cygnus from getting up there. (The Air Force radar system that confirms launches are not off-track is currently broken, holding up the launches of both Dragon and a new spy satellite.)
At least this is a change from the usual politics that get in the way of space science. Usually it's Congress messing with the NASA budget to protect the pork of legacy "OldSpace" jobs that have been threatened since the end of the Shuttle. We've already had to extend buying rides from Russia for three more years because Congress keeps underfunding the Commercial Crew program. At least SpaceX shows every indication of plowing ahead with their own manned spaceflight projects in spite of all that bullshit.
So you're saying that the "consultant" should have free reign to troll the "contestants" and anyone else on the set as much and as hard as he wants just because he worked for the sponsor?
After all, that's where the "u" in "colour" came from!
(I did not expect to find that so quickly.)
Coming soon, the Indie Wall Painter Jam Show, sponsored by Pepsi... because we know you want to watch the paint dry! In the first episode, we compare Eggshell Latex with Off-White Enamel! Stay tuned for the chaos when someone brings in a bucket of lead-based paint!
You can also down an enemy plane.
It means they covered their tools with small bird feathers, presumably to insulate the tools to keep them from getting too cold to use. Ever tried putting a hammer in the freezer for a while? Submitch gets cold.
because the immigration system for America is totally fucked up.
Would you mind elaborating in which ways you think it's fucked up? Seriously, you didn't make it clear and I would like to know your opinion on this.
I think one reason they don't is because it's not trivial to set up a dish properly, there is some math involved. The average /. reader could do it, but not the average Wal-Mart customer. Nothing like pissing off thousands of "free" customers because they can't their equipment to work and they want a refund for the stuff they bought used at a flea market somewhere. In fact, they don't even want you opening up a new account with used equipment, to discourage theft of equipment from actual paying customers.
I dunno, it sounds more like C-band to me. At one time the joke was that the C-band dish was the state flower of Oklahoma.
But from what I've been able to tell, what really killed off FTA satellite was that digital made it so easy to encrypt content. The size of C-band dishes at 2-3 meters didn't help much either, which is why pay satellite went with the Ku/Ka bands that only need a half-meter dish.
you have to put up with a motorized dish, or you need to fill your yard with several dishes
Look, ma, no motor!
Anyhow, ATSC OTA is plenty enough for me. Good thing I'm not a sports fan.
Motorized? Not really, look up toroidal antennas. You can hang up to 16 LNBs off of those babies to cover 40 degrees of sky.
I know someone who is an optometrist who years ago wrote up some cool software to type in and print out exam prescriptions using Wordstar and Mailmerge. At least it's the x86 version (he got it with a Sanyo MBC-555 back in the day), but his main problem so far is finding printers that will work with it. At some point, being a .COM executable is going to be another problem. At least there's no problem with losing that version of Wordstar, because you can download it from Computer History Museum. (I even verified the CRCs.)
What in particular about web browsing in a VM requires Windows as the OS, as opposed to Linux? The only thing I can think of is Flash, if you happen to like advertisements that wave or scream at you, or take over the whole browser window. And maybe a few video players, except that YouTube can work with plain HTML5 now, right?
For what it's worth, there has been a move toward using the billing zip code like a PIN, especially with pay-at-the-pump gasoline. While this is something that would be known to someone who steals your wallet, most of the fraud is likely from magstripe skimming and card numbers sold on the internet.
Someone who skims your stripe isn't going to know your zip code, at least not at a restaurant or faceplated ATM where most of that happens. Also the CVV number is physically kept on the card, but not in a form where it can be automatically read by a skimmer. (At least not until the faceplaters start putting an optical scanner in there too!)
The zip code has the advantage of being something you will know without having to write it down, and the CVV is already written down for you on the card. So there's no worry about forgetting them like with a PIN, or with someone picking a PIN of 1234. And I know they do use them for card security, from the first time I encountered this and entered 55555 instead of my zip code, and got a concerned call from my credit card company.
Of course it helps a lot that in the US, zip codes are all numeric, unlike postal codes in Canada and the UK, so they're easy to enter on a keypad.
And what does it matter if you can find out how old your milk is from your cellphone when you're at work, if you're not there at the fridge door to get rid of it?
Your eyes and nose are a plenty good enough way to determine how bad the milk is. To have the fridge do it without sticking a freaking sensor into the milk itself, it would need to know when the milk was put in, and every time it was removed and replaced. Even then, the actual freshness depends on how fresh it was when it first came from the store. Sure, the date on the milk could be on an RFID chip, but if you forget and leave the milk out for a couple of hours, that's going to make the milk spoil a lot sooner than the date on the store, which is really a "sell by" date, anyhow.
Don't forget all his palling up to Obama after Sandy... which ended up not helping New Jersey at all. The feds still took their own damn time to clean things up. So he gets an image problem and nothing to show for it!
Also, popping in a disc is inconvenient? [Kids today, get off my lawn, etc.]
Be kind! Rewind!
Being written in a small locked closet with no air-conditioning, over a period of a couple of days, as a demo program for a brand-new computer? I can't say I'm surprised.
I'm going to agree with the El Reg link. I learned 8080 assembly language "from Bill Gates" by disassembling TRS-80 Level II BASIC (which I think was roughly the same version as on the Altair) back in the day. (Note that it did not teach me Z80 assembly language due to the lack of using anything but relative jumps, and IX in I/O drivers. But I've seen some C-to-Z80 code that I found quite mind-bending.) I recall finding about 35 bytes that could be bummed out of that 12K ROM, which isn't bad. (In comparison, you can bum over 1K out of the 8K ROM in the ColecoVision, while still keeping all of the absolute entry points (ab)used by other crap programmers!)
Kent: My condolences on your meltdown, Knight.
Chris Knight: What meltdown, Kent?
Kent: I'm not saying you had one, because how would I know? But just in case you do.
Chris Knight: You slime!
Kent: It's your own fault, Knight. Didn't anyone ever tell you to make sure your optics are clean?
If they don't launch a FH by the end of this year, my understanding from what I've heard is it will simply be because they're already doing so much other stuff this year that they literally won't have time to get around to it.
Along with severe server instability and a world made up of maze-like maps,
That's one little problem I have with the later maps in FFXI. While the original areas had nice big areas, most of the later expansion areas were what I call "outdoor dungeons". Pits connected by trench hallways, with the areas in between being up on 10 foot high cliffs. There are even some areas you wouldn't realize are outside except when you look up and see a tree canopy.
Another problem XIV had was the degree to which sections of a map were copied and pasted. Sure, in FFXI you can see stuff like similar looking forks in the road, but in XIV, entire small hills were practically rubber-stamped all over a zone, without so much as even rotating them.
he also cited the game being stuck in past, trying to stick with a formula that worked with Square Enix's first MMO, Final Fantasy XI, without looking at newer MMOs to see what had worked there."
My own analogy of what happened is that they effectively had a list of "stuff that didn't work in FFXI and we need to fix when we don't have PS2 Limitations", and "stuff that works great in FFXI and we should keep". They used the first list, and threw out the second.
Another problem I think XIV had was that someone had A Great Idea, which is always trouble. "Hey, guys! What if we made your class depend on the weapon you were using?" Which sounds like it could possibly be a pretty good idea. Except they apparently never bothered to actually play test it to make sure it worked well enough, or even tune it. Instead, all the preview demos were all about the uber graphics resolution. Of course, this being in Japan, anyone who might have pointed out that it wasn't such a great idea would have instinctively held back so as not to embarrass his superiors.
Other radical ideas were thrown in, apparently from just trying to do something different without trying it, such as "People weren't 100% happy with the auction house in XI, so let's not have an auction house! We'll make people's characters stand around and bazaar their stuff even when they're not online!" Except that the number one problem with that is NO INDEXING. If you want, say, a cotton thread, you have to check every character's stuff individually, with no way to compare prices or even know who has what you want. Or at least that's what I understood the problem was from reading a bunch of forum posts from people in beta, because no way was I going to start another grindy MMO from the start, so I stayed with XI. (If I do go try other MMOs, I've sworn that it will be for exploration and seeing cool landscapes and maybe cool plot lines, not for grinding gear to help me grind more gear.)
There's less of an excuse now to not bring your own box, what with non-wimpy laptops being common, and with displays not being boat anchors like they were ten years ago. I'd also like to see some two-room team-vs-team LAN play, like the Artemis folks can do.
I guess kids these days are just too lazy to go outside with their computer and get on my lawn where I can shout at them to get off my lawn.
Your sig makes me wonder if possibly Homer Simpson was somehow involved in the Mt. Gox problems. Maybe it was on the sofa and Homer sat on it, causing it to be lost in the cushions. Have they done a parody episode for bitcoin yet?