As it turns out, any money you save on a generic PSU purchase will likely cost you more in the long run.
The money I saved buying a generic PSU, I spent buying a midrange UPS. Come on, any benefit that expensive PSU is supposed to bring you will likely be negated by bad power from the wall. Think of the PSU as a bullet-proof vest, and the UPS as an armored car. I would feel more secure inside an armored car without a bullet-proof vest, than wearing a bullet-proof vest outside an armored car.
For a distro that prides itself on proactive security, OpenBSD seems to lack one security feature most mainline Linux distributions have: some form of package signing. I know package signing doesn't make a system 100% percent secure from Trojan'ed applications. I'm not a security expert, but I think having signed packages helps reduce the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks, say, from malicious DNS redirection that points the user to a bogus mirror even if the "real" mirror (which presumably is running a secure BSD system) isn't compromised.
It seems to me the most secure OpenBSD system is one without anything besides the base system installed, good enough for a server, but unfortunately not for everyday Desktop use in Facebook era.
I've experienced serious regressions with Intrepid Ibex. Among them is bad audio due largely I suspect to the new False, I mean, Pulse Audio system. Wine games are largely unplayable unless I disable sound. Then there's the confirmed "won't fix" bug concerning Gnome session (https link to Ubuntu bug tracker here). Now every time I log out I have to manually restart all my applications. I'm not talking about the usual background system stuff but the important end-user programs like Pidgin, Firefox and Gnome Terminal. All in all, this is the most troubling Linux upgrade I've experienced since I switched to a Debian derivative. The last time something like this broke was when I couldn't play Crack Attack because of a Mesa incompatibility in Debian Unstable! And that was fixed within weeks.
The screen shot in the Sun blog shows Time Slider having 2.4 MB of snapshots available for possible recovery. I'm sure office workers writing memos and Slashdot posters whose posts regularly get eaten by the browser would love this feature. But what happens when the OS has to deal with the sort of big files churned out in a multimedia setting, say, a a multi-GB cache of digital video. Granted that someone dealing with such big files ought to make backups using other means, the question remains: does ZFS have the intelligence, for example, to preserve smaller files when one or two big files are threatening to exhaust filesystem's allotted snapshot space? Which file gets priority?
This is almost old hat for Russian and American astronauts (or cosmonauts or whatever). Any country could work with those two space programs and complete a space walk on their own. I wouldn't be surprised if the ESA has already done this as well and I just haven't heard of it. In other words, the third or fourth country doing this isn't a great step forward for all humankind, it's one more country catching up to where other countries were decades ago.
The early Renaissance was old hat to the ancient Romans. But the Europeans had to make that first step back to the level of technology and culture enjoyed by their ancestors, or they would have been stuck in the Dark Ages. Think of the Chinese space effort as a complement to the venture capital-funded new space economy of (mainly) the US. Most of the technology used by these small space companies are just mash-ups of old pre-Apollo technology. Yes, sometimes it's necessary to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes not just once, but many times over.
Spatial computing? What we need is aural computing, computing by voice commands. I blame Apple for popularizing the graphical user interface. Massive amounts of time and resources have been devoted by programmers and software designers to perfect the GUI, first windows now full-blown virtual presences (avatars or is it MS Bob 2010?). If the Unix command prompt triumphed (maybe even in its anemic DOS mutation), we will now have true artificial intelligence. Remember Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyessey? The vision of that sci-fi movie was for people to order computers around, not to massage them like teledildonic lovers. It wouldn't have been that much of a technological leap for "$ls Directory_Foo" to evolve to "Hal, please list the contents of Directory Foo".
Don't be complex! Google's plan for world domination seems pretty obvious. By persistently striving to create products with simple user interfaces, they reduce the hazards of patent law suits while at the same time fostering a computing environment where the user simply doesn't care about the product as a product (Brand X vs. Brand Z). It's a different strategy from Steve Jobs's iThings (which probably don't strive for world domination) where ease of use is sometimes subordinated to the idea of sci-fi elegance (the Star Trekkish iPhone, for example, lacks the tactile feedback of conventional cellphones).
For Google simplicity is sexy. A product is elegant the more it resembles the Google start page. Here then is a software battlefield where Microsoft's billions in development funds are less likely to make a difference than in the race for the coolest 3D, surround sound, biofeedback, jack-it-in, teledildonic Operating System.
Ren'Py is pretty basic (the "Py" is for python). I'd rate it as slightly better than clicking through an Impress presentation. But the documentation seems English enough to me, and there's even a simple and rather silly demo game for you to get a feel of the game engine features (or lack thereof). Official packages for Debian and Ubuntu are available for point-and-click installation via synaptic.
Slashdot Mirror
As it turns out, any money you save on a generic PSU purchase will likely cost you more in the long run.
The money I saved buying a generic PSU, I spent buying a midrange UPS. Come on, any benefit that expensive PSU is supposed to bring you will likely be negated by bad power from the wall. Think of the PSU as a bullet-proof vest, and the UPS as an armored car. I would feel more secure inside an armored car without a bullet-proof vest, than wearing a bullet-proof vest outside an armored car.
For a distro that prides itself on proactive security, OpenBSD seems to lack one security feature most mainline Linux distributions have: some form of package signing. I know package signing doesn't make a system 100% percent secure from Trojan'ed applications. I'm not a security expert, but I think having signed packages helps reduce the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks, say, from malicious DNS redirection that points the user to a bogus mirror even if the "real" mirror (which presumably is running a secure BSD system) isn't compromised. It seems to me the most secure OpenBSD system is one without anything besides the base system installed, good enough for a server, but unfortunately not for everyday Desktop use in Facebook era.
I've experienced serious regressions with Intrepid Ibex. Among them is bad audio due largely I suspect to the new False, I mean, Pulse Audio system. Wine games are largely unplayable unless I disable sound. Then there's the confirmed "won't fix" bug concerning Gnome session (https link to Ubuntu bug tracker here). Now every time I log out I have to manually restart all my applications. I'm not talking about the usual background system stuff but the important end-user programs like Pidgin, Firefox and Gnome Terminal. All in all, this is the most troubling Linux upgrade I've experienced since I switched to a Debian derivative. The last time something like this broke was when I couldn't play Crack Attack because of a Mesa incompatibility in Debian Unstable! And that was fixed within weeks.
If it were that warm, those bears would be doing something else.
The screen shot in the Sun blog shows Time Slider having 2.4 MB of snapshots available for possible recovery. I'm sure office workers writing memos and Slashdot posters whose posts regularly get eaten by the browser would love this feature. But what happens when the OS has to deal with the sort of big files churned out in a multimedia setting, say, a a multi-GB cache of digital video. Granted that someone dealing with such big files ought to make backups using other means, the question remains: does ZFS have the intelligence, for example, to preserve smaller files when one or two big files are threatening to exhaust filesystem's allotted snapshot space? Which file gets priority?
And there fake money comes into it - because something is being represented as having value that it is known not to have.
With fake money I can buy all the imaginary property I want!
The early Renaissance was old hat to the ancient Romans. But the Europeans had to make that first step back to the level of technology and culture enjoyed by their ancestors, or they would have been stuck in the Dark Ages. Think of the Chinese space effort as a complement to the venture capital-funded new space economy of (mainly) the US. Most of the technology used by these small space companies are just mash-ups of old pre-Apollo technology. Yes, sometimes it's necessary to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes not just once, but many times over.
Spatial computing? What we need is aural computing, computing by voice commands. I blame Apple for popularizing the graphical user interface. Massive amounts of time and resources have been devoted by programmers and software designers to perfect the GUI, first windows now full-blown virtual presences (avatars or is it MS Bob 2010?). If the Unix command prompt triumphed (maybe even in its anemic DOS mutation), we will now have true artificial intelligence. Remember Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyessey? The vision of that sci-fi movie was for people to order computers around, not to massage them like teledildonic lovers. It wouldn't have been that much of a technological leap for "$ls Directory_Foo" to evolve to "Hal, please list the contents of Directory Foo".
Don't be complex! Google's plan for world domination seems pretty obvious. By persistently striving to create products with simple user interfaces, they reduce the hazards of patent law suits while at the same time fostering a computing environment where the user simply doesn't care about the product as a product (Brand X vs. Brand Z). It's a different strategy from Steve Jobs's iThings (which probably don't strive for world domination) where ease of use is sometimes subordinated to the idea of sci-fi elegance (the Star Trekkish iPhone, for example, lacks the tactile feedback of conventional cellphones).
For Google simplicity is sexy. A product is elegant the more it resembles the Google start page. Here then is a software battlefield where Microsoft's billions in development funds are less likely to make a difference than in the race for the coolest 3D, surround sound, biofeedback, jack-it-in, teledildonic Operating System.
Ren'Py is pretty basic (the "Py" is for python). I'd rate it as slightly better than clicking through an Impress presentation. But the documentation seems English enough to me, and there's even a simple and rather silly demo game for you to get a feel of the game engine features (or lack thereof). Official packages for Debian and Ubuntu are available for point-and-click installation via synaptic.