The reason command line tools are very useful is for cron jobs. I dont know how many times on a windows machine I wish that there was an command line tool to do something.
Here's a free clue, kid: just because you don't know how to do it, doesn't mean it can't be done. Like the other poster said, at/?. And if you're really into command lines, look up Windows Scripting Host on MSDN.
One of the more frightening 'hits' people take is through their good buddies, landlords. They move, believe they have closed their utility/phone/whatever, and the landlord doesn't forward the request for the last bill. The billing companies have no forwarding address...
I wonder how bad that is. A few years ago, after an argument with the landlord (it was a crap apartment and the restaurant next door had mice which were starting to get in) we just left. Didn't say anything to him, we just went. By the time he realized what had happened, I was actually living in a different country!
I did wonder if that would leave a black mark on my credit history, but it doesn't seem to have - I had zero trouble getting an Amex card, getting a mortgage etc. So I think most people's worries about their credit histories are blown way out of proportion.
No, it didn't make sense. Sure it may work as a deterent, but it didn't help anyone get out of debt. I believe that the poster was referring to this. In the debtors prison, there was no way to make any money.
Well, there was an institution for that, it was called the workhouse. If you owed money to people and couldn't repay them, the law (quite reasonably) required you to put your own plans on hold until you had fulfilled your obligations. So you would go to the workhouse (or poorhouse as they were also known) and do some stuff (not usually particularly unpleasant stuff, just sewing buttons or whatever) until you had paid it off.
The law these days allows people to avoid the consequences for their actions far too easily. And it's always the honest and hard-working who get screwed. For example, work hard all your life, pay taxes and save some money, but when you need a place in a nursing home, the government will insist that you pay for it yourself. But if you live your life on the dole, never contributing anything to society, then the government will pay for everything for you.
Some people do get into debt through genuine hardship, but I've no pity for people who go crazy with a credit card, buy loads of useless stuff, then can't pay for it. The credit card companies should have the right to have them arrested and put to work in a call centre or stuffing envelopes or something.
And yes; i think it's great that 15 nations can collaborate in this... even when the Arianne 5 10 tonnes explodes... i am proud of our industry of which i hope being and active part in the future (studying aeronautics at madrid)
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'd rather they collaborated well than not, but the point isn't collaborating for the sake of collaborating!
However, ESA's biggest achievement of all, explained Bonacina, lies not in any one particular space project. Rather, it's the fact that 15 European nations have successfully worked together, and in cooperation with other non-European space programs, to reach a common goal.
That is just politically correct rubbish. The taxpayers of those 15 countries don't care that all the ESA employees have a group hug every morning, we care about actual results and effective use of resources. It's like telling an athlete that "it's not the winning that counts". Hell, get any bunch of people together from 15 countries, give them a budget of billions and tell them to have a good time, and they'll "cooperate" just fine!
I mentioned this article to the recently-pregnant project manager who sits next to me and she said she could feel her baby hiccuping while it was still "in development" and that it is a very strange sensation.
I wouldn't put it past Carmack to construct a huge bomb.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that if you wanted to, you could buy a plot of land and explode stuff on it to your heart's content, so long as you weren't polluting rivers (that flow onto someone else's land) or anything. Land of the free, right?
The big problem with this lovely picture is that as soon as Armadillo announces its $1M-to-orbit vehicle, $BIG_CONTRACTOR realizes that even if they buy Armadillo outright, the $10B/year gravy train (20 comm/spy satellites at $500M each) is gonna come up $9.9B short (20 comm/spysats, plus 80 space probes and Space Hilton modules, at $1M per launch).
The problem there is that Carmack isn't in it for the money (at this stage at least) - he just likes rockets. The second problem is that once he proves it can be done, there's little to stop anyone recreating it. The third problem is that Carmack could run id software and launch rockets just as well from Switzerland - one of the least likely places to get assassinated by a foreign government.
Think about it... don't you suppose that the steam engine industry would have loved to have suppressed the diesel engine? But they couldn't.
In fact, if you read up on what killed the Kursk, they say it was indeed an innocuous little substance that looks like water- Peroxide.
They say what killed the Kursk was starting a torpedo motor in air. It was designed to run in water, so it quickly overheated in air, and that's what ruptured the tank. The peroxide hit the copper fittings in the torpedo room, underwent an oxidising reaction, and the pressure lew out the hull (subs are built to withstand external pressure, no-one was worried about internal pressure).
Actually, there were production aircraft powered by hydrogen peroxide rockets.
The Royal Navy experimented with peroxide fueled submarines for a while, but gave up when they realized that all things considered, peroxide was more expensive and far more dangerous than a nuclear reactor! It's incredibly difficult to store for long periods of time, even more so if you also want to transport it, and it's vicious if it gets out of storage. Plus, in a submarine, a nuclear reactor gives you nearly unlimited ranger and electrical power (obviously not infinite but far more than you will ever need) so that's why modern navies go straight from diesel power to nukes.
After all, PB's are all about form and function, and since Intel doesn't make a laptop, all the function in the world won't help if the form sucks.
Reminds me of one time at the last company I worked for (a consulting firm), Intel came to us and said, so, what should we do to make our products more attractive to people buying web servers? After careful consideration we said, umm, there's not much you can do directly. What you should do is send Compaq et al to speak to us, since they control your channel to market. No-one (in the server-buying market) says "I specifically want an Intel processor" they say "I want to use NT (or Linux), where can I get a good system for doing that?".
It's like Guinness. They control the product, but the channel is owned by and large by the major breweries. All their TV advertising won't help if the product isn't competently poured by barstaff who work for Guinness' rivals. An interesting if a little precarious position to be in.
Apart from for the fanboys, there's no real difference between AMD and Intel - all the differentiation comes from the OEM.
The real failing of NASA was when US (Congress mostly) stopped thinking big.
There was that, sure, but there was also the problem of having to finance the Vietnam War. That's what really killed the momentum. If it wasn't for that, an "onward to Mars!" mission could have come for the next decade.
NASA is a bottomless pit for money. Doubling their budget would only slow them down more, as it got soaked up in endless committees. NASA should be to the space industry as the FDA is to the pharmaceutical industry or the SEC is to the finance industry.
This would have the effect of eliminating the manned space program, which has a ridiculously low ratio of scientific results to funding. Unmanned probes are the real workhorses of space science and planetary exploration.
What is the point of planetary exploration if you don't intend to go there? Space science could be self-funding if space was industrially useful, i.e. mining, manufacturing, tourism, etc. If you can obtain your raw materials off-planet (Mars, the moon, the asteroid belt), carry out manufacturing off-planet too (Mars, moon or LEO) and dump the waste products into the Sun and send the goods back to Earth, then that's a win-win situation for the scientists, the explorers, the capitalists and the environmentalists.
The question occures whether there is anything we can do in space in the foreseeable future that cannot be done using robotic instruments.
You are assuming that the sole purpose of space is to act as a giant laboratory. The focus on space has to be industry and habitation - in other words, before space can become "mainstream" it's got to be able to pay for itself. That means mining, manufacturing and tourism. Once there's a commercial infrastructure in place, you can do some real science, move your whole lab and all its people to orbit or to Mars, for example. Remember Mars has a land area equal to Earth's (no seas) so if you want to do "big science" like a 1000-km diameter collider, you can.
A lot of people signed in the campaign, but the government, of course, did not change anything.
Perhaps the government realized that if it did cut back on defense then ETA blew up a load of civilians, those same people would be howling for its dismissal?
The problem with anti-war types is that they are generally perceived as being anti-war for the sake of being anti-war. The same cannot be said about the pro-war camp - after all, we are at peace most of the time!
With just one year of the DoD budget, famine could be erradicated forever in this planet, and you'd have enough spare change to build another shuttle and send a mission to Mars!
The food problem is nothing to do with food production, and it's nothing to do with money. The problem is political obstacles to distribution. Right now, for example, there is famine in Zimbabwe because their dictator Mugabe finds it easier to control the country if it's starving. The famines in Somalia and Ethiopia could be ended tomorrow if the local warlords could be persuaded to stop hijacking food shipments.
This situation is particularly interesting because it catches pacifists on the horns of a dilemma: allow the people to starve, or use military intervention to feed them?
Of course now the important thing is bombing Iraq because the stupid dictator there tried to kill someone's daddy *and* has huge amounts if oil...
You do know that the USA gets 7% of its oil from Iraq and 15% from Venezuela? If the war was about oil, it wouldn't be in Iraq!
Finding out if there was (or wasn't) life on Mars could tell us a lot about how likely there is life on other planets. Let's get some probes on there, and roam around a bit, dig up some stuff, and bring it back!
They did do that, I don't remember the name of the mission offhand (might have been Viking). The probe contained 4 experiments for detecting life in Martian soil. Something like 2 experiments said "maybe" and 2 said "probably not". Unfortunately, those were the only 4 experiments that the probe was capable of. Nothing beats having a competent human on the ground able to use intelligence and improvise.
That'd be great, if NASA actually listened to its experts.
You are so right. I'm currently reading The Case For Mars, written by an ex Martin Marietta engineer. They designed and priced a manned mission to Mars using technology available off-the-shelf in the 1990s - in fact, most of it was available in the 1960s. It would cost $20B to develop and $2B/mission, and made use of seemingly obvious common sense. For example, why cart all the fuel for the return trip with you, when you can send an automated device there years beforehand to manufacture rocket fuel (methane + oxygen) from the Martian atmosphere (carbon dioxide) using a process that's been around since the 1890s (not a typo)? And if you don't have to carry all that excess fuel, you don't need to assemble your craft in space, you don't need an orbiting shipyard, etc.
And there was the problem. NASA wanted $450B for a project that did involve orbiting shipyards and fueling stations, in-orbit assembly, a stop off on the moon en route, etc. His proposal faced enormous opposition from all the little cliques and empires within NASA who accused him of "de-justifying" their projects, and who sought in inflate mission requirements in such a way that only their fiefdom could meet.
Why? It all comes down to funding, which comes from the government.
Right now, NASA (in its present form at least) is an obstacle to space exploration. The problems aren't technological any more, they are organizational! But there is a better way. If the governments responsible for funding NASA and ESA were instead to fund a (say) $40B prize for the first organization - private or public, it doesn't matter - to land a team on Mars, carry out a list of experiments or explorations and return safely, then the game changes radically - and we could see humans on Mars this decade.
How dare they allude to this being the last episode of the next gen crew and have Data die.
Particularly since Berman/Paramount already made the final episode of the ST:TNG series in which we see that Data survives to a ripe old age and becomes a professor at Cambridge after retiring from Star Fleet. That's why the fans don't care: we're not invested at all in the fate of the characters, because we know that the producers will just change it afterwards anyway. And no amount of CGI can save you if the audience fundamentally don't care what happens next.
Maybe it tanked because Star Trek is dying out in mainstream culture.
I think it's the opposite - Star Trek is distancing itself from mainstream culture. Consider the original series. Kirk and his crew roamed the galaxy exploring the frontier, basically doing good, but they wouldn't back away from a fight and they weren't afraid to break the rules in the service of a greater good. That's not just entertaining TV, it resonates deeply with the way Americans see themselves.
Next Gen was California in the 1990s - the Captain took his therapist with him on board and no-one made a decision without getting a consensus from everyone that their feelings wouldn't be hurt. And Voyager - Janeway wasn't a captain, she was a self-loathing Democrat senator, never hesitating to put every other species' interests ahead of her crew's. Californians don't realize it, but they're held in contempt throughout the rest of the world - when some actress announces she's converted to Buddhism or taken to a macrobiotic diet or started wearing crystals, the rest of the world just rolls its eyes.
Essentially, Star Trek is dying because the people making it make it for people like themselves, not the fans and not the general public.
Today's corporate leaders are the "Robber Barons" of the late 19th century. Unfortunately (*in the USA*) the Government doesn't seem to watch/regulate corporations, nor do they seem to care.
Are you crazy? Enron broke the rules, it was destroyed. Andersen broke the rules, it was destroyed. Worldcom broke the rules, it was punished. Tyco broke the rules... and President Bush has just increased the SEC's budget and powers.
Yes, it sucked for the average Enron shareholder, but remember that shareholders own the company. That means taking the rough with the smooth.
Slashdot Mirror
and that many times he wishes there was a "command line" tool to do something
That's what WSH is for. Try it, you might like it.
The reason command line tools are very useful is for cron jobs. I dont know how many times on a windows machine I wish that there was an command line tool to do something.
/?. And if you're really into command lines, look up Windows Scripting Host on MSDN.
Here's a free clue, kid: just because you don't know how to do it, doesn't mean it can't be done. Like the other poster said, at
How's TIVO a threat to BBC anyway since there are no commercials to filter out?
There are commercials on the BBC, but they only advertise BBC products and services.
One of the more frightening 'hits' people take is through their good buddies, landlords. They move, believe they have closed their utility/phone/whatever, and the landlord doesn't forward the request for the last bill. The billing companies have no forwarding address ...
I wonder how bad that is. A few years ago, after an argument with the landlord (it was a crap apartment and the restaurant next door had mice which were starting to get in) we just left. Didn't say anything to him, we just went. By the time he realized what had happened, I was actually living in a different country!
I did wonder if that would leave a black mark on my credit history, but it doesn't seem to have - I had zero trouble getting an Amex card, getting a mortgage etc. So I think most people's worries about their credit histories are blown way out of proportion.
No, it didn't make sense. Sure it may work as a deterent, but it didn't help anyone get out of debt. I believe that the poster was referring to this. In the debtors prison, there was no way to make any money.
Well, there was an institution for that, it was called the workhouse. If you owed money to people and couldn't repay them, the law (quite reasonably) required you to put your own plans on hold until you had fulfilled your obligations. So you would go to the workhouse (or poorhouse as they were also known) and do some stuff (not usually particularly unpleasant stuff, just sewing buttons or whatever) until you had paid it off.
The law these days allows people to avoid the consequences for their actions far too easily. And it's always the honest and hard-working who get screwed. For example, work hard all your life, pay taxes and save some money, but when you need a place in a nursing home, the government will insist that you pay for it yourself. But if you live your life on the dole, never contributing anything to society, then the government will pay for everything for you.
Some people do get into debt through genuine hardship, but I've no pity for people who go crazy with a credit card, buy loads of useless stuff, then can't pay for it. The credit card companies should have the right to have them arrested and put to work in a call centre or stuffing envelopes or something.
And yes; i think it's great that 15 nations can collaborate in this... even when the Arianne 5 10 tonnes explodes... i am proud of our industry of which i hope being and active part in the future (studying aeronautics at madrid)
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'd rather they collaborated well than not, but the point isn't collaborating for the sake of collaborating!
. It turns out she had the machine in the oven for 20 minutes, baking at 400 degrees.
Did she say what she was trying to accomplish by doing this? I'm really curious.
However, ESA's biggest achievement of all, explained Bonacina, lies not in any one particular space project. Rather, it's the fact that 15 European nations have successfully worked together, and in cooperation with other non-European space programs, to reach a common goal.
That is just politically correct rubbish. The taxpayers of those 15 countries don't care that all the ESA employees have a group hug every morning, we care about actual results and effective use of resources. It's like telling an athlete that "it's not the winning that counts". Hell, get any bunch of people together from 15 countries, give them a budget of billions and tell them to have a good time, and they'll "cooperate" just fine!
Because basically, we are fish....
I mentioned this article to the recently-pregnant project manager who sits next to me and she said she could feel her baby hiccuping while it was still "in development" and that it is a very strange sensation.
I wouldn't put it past Carmack to construct a huge bomb.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that if you wanted to, you could buy a plot of land and explode stuff on it to your heart's content, so long as you weren't polluting rivers (that flow onto someone else's land) or anything. Land of the free, right?
The big problem with this lovely picture is that as soon as Armadillo announces its $1M-to-orbit vehicle, $BIG_CONTRACTOR realizes that even if they buy Armadillo outright, the $10B/year gravy train (20 comm/spy satellites at $500M each) is gonna come up $9.9B short (20 comm/spysats, plus 80 space probes and Space Hilton modules, at $1M per launch).
The problem there is that Carmack isn't in it for the money (at this stage at least) - he just likes rockets. The second problem is that once he proves it can be done, there's little to stop anyone recreating it. The third problem is that Carmack could run id software and launch rockets just as well from Switzerland - one of the least likely places to get assassinated by a foreign government.
Think about it... don't you suppose that the steam engine industry would have loved to have suppressed the diesel engine? But they couldn't.
In fact, if you read up on what killed the Kursk, they say it was indeed an innocuous little substance that looks like water- Peroxide.
They say what killed the Kursk was starting a torpedo motor in air. It was designed to run in water, so it quickly overheated in air, and that's what ruptured the tank. The peroxide hit the copper fittings in the torpedo room, underwent an oxidising reaction, and the pressure lew out the hull (subs are built to withstand external pressure, no-one was worried about internal pressure).
Actually, there were production aircraft powered by hydrogen peroxide rockets.
The Royal Navy experimented with peroxide fueled submarines for a while, but gave up when they realized that all things considered, peroxide was more expensive and far more dangerous than a nuclear reactor! It's incredibly difficult to store for long periods of time, even more so if you also want to transport it, and it's vicious if it gets out of storage. Plus, in a submarine, a nuclear reactor gives you nearly unlimited ranger and electrical power (obviously not infinite but far more than you will ever need) so that's why modern navies go straight from diesel power to nukes.
After all, PB's are all about form and function, and since Intel doesn't make a laptop, all the function in the world won't help if the form sucks.
Reminds me of one time at the last company I worked for (a consulting firm), Intel came to us and said, so, what should we do to make our products more attractive to people buying web servers? After careful consideration we said, umm, there's not much you can do directly. What you should do is send Compaq et al to speak to us, since they control your channel to market. No-one (in the server-buying market) says "I specifically want an Intel processor" they say "I want to use NT (or Linux), where can I get a good system for doing that?".
It's like Guinness. They control the product, but the channel is owned by and large by the major breweries. All their TV advertising won't help if the product isn't competently poured by barstaff who work for Guinness' rivals. An interesting if a little precarious position to be in.
Apart from for the fanboys, there's no real difference between AMD and Intel - all the differentiation comes from the OEM.
I do support the larger aim of manned space exploration. But I do not think we shall be ready for anything significant in a long long time!
But what if Columbus had waited for Spain to develop steel hulls before setting off across the Atlantic?
The real failing of NASA was when US (Congress mostly) stopped thinking big.
There was that, sure, but there was also the problem of having to finance the Vietnam War. That's what really killed the momentum. If it wasn't for that, an "onward to Mars!" mission could have come for the next decade.
the Point is that NASA needs funding.
NASA is a bottomless pit for money. Doubling their budget would only slow them down more, as it got soaked up in endless committees. NASA should be to the space industry as the FDA is to the pharmaceutical industry or the SEC is to the finance industry.
This would have the effect of eliminating the manned space program, which has a ridiculously low ratio of scientific results to funding. Unmanned probes are the real workhorses of space science and planetary exploration.
What is the point of planetary exploration if you don't intend to go there? Space science could be self-funding if space was industrially useful, i.e. mining, manufacturing, tourism, etc. If you can obtain your raw materials off-planet (Mars, the moon, the asteroid belt), carry out manufacturing off-planet too (Mars, moon or LEO) and dump the waste products into the Sun and send the goods back to Earth, then that's a win-win situation for the scientists, the explorers, the capitalists and the environmentalists.
The question occures whether there is anything we can do in space in the foreseeable future that cannot be done using robotic instruments.
You are assuming that the sole purpose of space is to act as a giant laboratory. The focus on space has to be industry and habitation - in other words, before space can become "mainstream" it's got to be able to pay for itself. That means mining, manufacturing and tourism. Once there's a commercial infrastructure in place, you can do some real science, move your whole lab and all its people to orbit or to Mars, for example. Remember Mars has a land area equal to Earth's (no seas) so if you want to do "big science" like a 1000-km diameter collider, you can.
A lot of people signed in the campaign, but the government, of course, did not change anything.
Perhaps the government realized that if it did cut back on defense then ETA blew up a load of civilians, those same people would be howling for its dismissal?
The problem with anti-war types is that they are generally perceived as being anti-war for the sake of being anti-war. The same cannot be said about the pro-war camp - after all, we are at peace most of the time!
With just one year of the DoD budget, famine could be erradicated forever in this planet, and you'd have enough spare change to build another shuttle and send a mission to Mars!
The food problem is nothing to do with food production, and it's nothing to do with money. The problem is political obstacles to distribution. Right now, for example, there is famine in Zimbabwe because their dictator Mugabe finds it easier to control the country if it's starving. The famines in Somalia and Ethiopia could be ended tomorrow if the local warlords could be persuaded to stop hijacking food shipments.
This situation is particularly interesting because it catches pacifists on the horns of a dilemma: allow the people to starve, or use military intervention to feed them?
Of course now the important thing is bombing Iraq because the stupid dictator there tried to kill someone's daddy *and* has huge amounts if oil...
You do know that the USA gets 7% of its oil from Iraq and 15% from Venezuela? If the war was about oil, it wouldn't be in Iraq!
Finding out if there was (or wasn't) life on Mars could tell us a lot about how likely there is life on other planets. Let's get some probes on there, and roam around a bit, dig up some stuff, and bring it back!
They did do that, I don't remember the name of the mission offhand (might have been Viking). The probe contained 4 experiments for detecting life in Martian soil. Something like 2 experiments said "maybe" and 2 said "probably not". Unfortunately, those were the only 4 experiments that the probe was capable of. Nothing beats having a competent human on the ground able to use intelligence and improvise.
That'd be great, if NASA actually listened to its experts.
You are so right. I'm currently reading The Case For Mars, written by an ex Martin Marietta engineer. They designed and priced a manned mission to Mars using technology available off-the-shelf in the 1990s - in fact, most of it was available in the 1960s. It would cost $20B to develop and $2B/mission, and made use of seemingly obvious common sense. For example, why cart all the fuel for the return trip with you, when you can send an automated device there years beforehand to manufacture rocket fuel (methane + oxygen) from the Martian atmosphere (carbon dioxide) using a process that's been around since the 1890s (not a typo)? And if you don't have to carry all that excess fuel, you don't need to assemble your craft in space, you don't need an orbiting shipyard, etc.
And there was the problem. NASA wanted $450B for a project that did involve orbiting shipyards and fueling stations, in-orbit assembly, a stop off on the moon en route, etc. His proposal faced enormous opposition from all the little cliques and empires within NASA who accused him of "de-justifying" their projects, and who sought in inflate mission requirements in such a way that only their fiefdom could meet.
Why? It all comes down to funding, which comes from the government.
Right now, NASA (in its present form at least) is an obstacle to space exploration. The problems aren't technological any more, they are organizational! But there is a better way. If the governments responsible for funding NASA and ESA were instead to fund a (say) $40B prize for the first organization - private or public, it doesn't matter - to land a team on Mars, carry out a list of experiments or explorations and return safely, then the game changes radically - and we could see humans on Mars this decade.
How dare they allude to this being the last episode of the next gen crew and have Data die.
Particularly since Berman/Paramount already made the final episode of the ST:TNG series in which we see that Data survives to a ripe old age and becomes a professor at Cambridge after retiring from Star Fleet. That's why the fans don't care: we're not invested at all in the fate of the characters, because we know that the producers will just change it afterwards anyway. And no amount of CGI can save you if the audience fundamentally don't care what happens next.
Maybe it tanked because Star Trek is dying out in mainstream culture.
I think it's the opposite - Star Trek is distancing itself from mainstream culture. Consider the original series. Kirk and his crew roamed the galaxy exploring the frontier, basically doing good, but they wouldn't back away from a fight and they weren't afraid to break the rules in the service of a greater good. That's not just entertaining TV, it resonates deeply with the way Americans see themselves.
Next Gen was California in the 1990s - the Captain took his therapist with him on board and no-one made a decision without getting a consensus from everyone that their feelings wouldn't be hurt. And Voyager - Janeway wasn't a captain, she was a self-loathing Democrat senator, never hesitating to put every other species' interests ahead of her crew's. Californians don't realize it, but they're held in contempt throughout the rest of the world - when some actress announces she's converted to Buddhism or taken to a macrobiotic diet or started wearing crystals, the rest of the world just rolls its eyes.
Essentially, Star Trek is dying because the people making it make it for people like themselves, not the fans and not the general public.
Today's corporate leaders are the "Robber Barons" of the late 19th century. Unfortunately (*in the USA*) the Government doesn't seem to watch/regulate corporations, nor do they seem to care.
Are you crazy? Enron broke the rules, it was destroyed. Andersen broke the rules, it was destroyed. Worldcom broke the rules, it was punished. Tyco broke the rules... and President Bush has just increased the SEC's budget and powers.
Yes, it sucked for the average Enron shareholder, but remember that shareholders own the company. That means taking the rough with the smooth.