Ummm... This doesn't sound like your system is too slow. It just sounds like a bug in the game. Make sure you have the latest drivers for everything, etc. Inform the developer of the problem you are having, put the game back in the box and wait for a patch/update/service pack.
Could you tell a little bit more about your setup? I want a media center system, but I don't want any live TV at all. I just want to have all my media stored on my Linux server, accessed over 802.11g, using a remote and a simple interface that even my room mate can use without any problems. I was hoping to use an X-Box, but I killed mine while trying to mod it, so now I'm looking at a PC/Linux solution...
I tried to add my joke to the queue, but do to a weak implimentation of object orientation and inconsistency, I was just left befuddled as to whether I needed to AddJokeToQueue, joke2queue, add_joke, etc. So, I gave up and just put my joke on rails.../me ducks...
Seriously, I love PHP, but I think that it is designed to require having the docs handy...:)
I would love to see a quad-Opteron mobo with four x16 PCIe slots but arranged in a way that traffic is spread across all HT links. So that I could use it to put 4 PCIe SATA cards, and have the highest possible read/write I/O throughput for a Linux software RAID array. Hardware RAID is out of the question, since no constructor offers a way to create arrays of disks across 3 or more cards. An Opteron has 3 HT links, 2 of them could be used as coherent links to other CPU's, and 1 of them could be used as a link to an external PCIe bridge chipset. The solution I would like to see implemented is one where 4 PCIe bridge chipsets would be connected to their own Opteron, via their own HT link. And each PCIe bridge chipset could provide at least one 16x slot.
Some numbers: each of the four x16 PCIe bus would allow for 2500 MT/s * 16 bits / 8 = 5000 MB/s of traffic in each direction. And each of the 4 HT links: 1600 MT/s * 16 bits / 8 = 3200 MB/s. The global amount of I/O would be 3200 MB/s * 4 = 12.8 GB/s in each direction ! (HT links are the bottleneck). To resolve this bottleneck AMD would either need to increase their width from 16x16 to 32x32 bits or need to increase the signal freq from 800 MHz to 1.25 GHz (current limit is 1 GHz for coherent links and 800 MHz for the ones facing outside worlds -- chipsets seem to lag a little bit regarding HT frequency).
Let's assume Ultra SCSI 320. That means it would take ten fully saturated SCSI busses to saturate each HT Link at 3200 MB/sec. The highest claimed sustained transfer rate I've seen for a single SCSI drive is about 90 MB/sec. So, that's four drives per SCSI controller, ten controllers per HT Link, four HT links. That's 160 drives! What the heck are you going to do with this? Seriously, just saturating one HT link is going to involve about 40 drives. I don't think anybody is going to make a motherboard with >10 slots for SCSI controllers, realistically. If you genuinely need that kind of configuration, you just shouldn't expect that you will find it in consumer level hardware!
Unfortunately, this would kill a lot of their developer base.
If almost all PC's have Windows, and almost all Macs run Windows apps, then you can just write a program for Windows, and there is no need to make a Mac specific port.
If there is no native Mac OS software, why get a Mac?
Sure, lots of developers would develop for the Mac out of love for the platform or whatever, but a lot of other devs would declare that just supporting Windows is sufficient for a very large percentage of their user base.
Indeed, many people have made similar technological things. I count myself among them. By 18, I was working at a small local phone company, running their website. A ton of money was probably made from the orders that went through the site. But, it wasn't especially glamorous. It was like any other "E-commerce" site at the time, really. And, the company wasn't about to advertise the fact that their tech staff was extremely inexperienced.
So, I won't bow down to this kid from a technological standpoint.
But, shit. He did his own thing, and he managed to get the word out about it. My hat is off to him as a self promoter. Nobody ever heard of me, so he pretty much has me beat from that angle... Even if his website is dead.
Lots of guys like me and the parent poster have a reasonable amount of skill with technology, and did so at a rather young age. We all had neat ideas. He made his idea. That deserves respect. My real time strategy game, for example, still only exists as notes on scrap paper, and the start of a header file for a prototype...
You know, I don't game much anymore, but I think I may go and buy this game just to make a point, too. I basically never buy any PC games any more for fear that they might have some junkware copy protection. Games are a diversion, not the reason I have a computer. So, if a game has any potential to interfere with my ability to burn CD's and DVD's, then I won't even think about bothering with it.
The companies pushing strict DRM need to remember that they are providing entertainment, not our only source of breathable oxygen.
Indeed. The problem isn't people who don't know computers. It's people who do know computers, and only know one sort. I replaced IE with Firefox on my dad's computer a while back. He has never had any more trouble with it than he did with IE. If anything, he's a bit more confident now. (I installed an extension to kill all javascript, and told him how to turn javascript on in case a site "looks funny," I then told him that his computer is invincible, and he doesn't need to worry about breaking it by visiting a web page...)
I'm about to try an interesting experiment. I'm moving into a new place, and my room mate doesn't have a computer of his own, so he is going to borrow one of mine. He has only ever used Windows XP, but isn't really a computer person. I don't have any spare PC's, so he's getting a beast of an old SGI running Irix. It'll have OpenOffice, and Firefox, so he can write papers and browse the web and check email. Probably also a remote desktop client so he can access the windows terminal server at work, if I can find it for Irix. It'll have mplayer and an MP3 player, so he can watch video clips, and play music while he works. That's all he needs. Really, I think he'll be just fine. I don't expect that he'll have any serious issues getting oriented, except that his mouse will have three buttons instead of a scroll wheel. That'll need to be briefly explained. Past that, because he doesn't have much in the way of preconceived notions about how it should look feel and act just like windows, it'll be perfect.
This smells of a MS astroturfing troll. Since whatever it is hasn't been released we can only waste time speculating. Maybe it's a desert topping or a floor wax. Maybe it's both. In any case, it's vapourware until it shows up. How about we all wait a week to see what is announced and then have a discussion about it?
Well, we can always try to whip ourselves into a frenzy so that we expect something fantastic, and then are horribly disappointed in what comes out.
BTW, my brother's uncle's cousin's friend's wife's brother's guy he once met said that it's going to be a portable supercomputer capable of 128 exaflops on each of 128 cores. It gets 3 years of battery life, comes with free wireless broadband anywhere in the world. It's motion sensitive, and have VR glasses that make you look cool. It has an AI OS that you can have conversations with.
Unfortunately, the wireless isn't standard, and it has less space than a nomad.
If Day=Friday AND time="5:30:00" then Deliver_Beer() Function Deliver_Beer() If Bank_Balance > $300.00 then Beer="Sam Adams Boston Lager" Else Beer = "Stroh's" Endif end Function
You have made a classic blunder. You don't want to check for exact equality with a continuous variable.
If Day=Friday AND ( abs (time - BEER_O_CLOCK) < epsilon) )...
This way, you don't risk missing beer time just because the function ran a fraction of a second too late. Actually, it'd probably be even better to set a flag.
if (!BEERFLAG)
if time > 5:30:00pm && time < CLOSING_TIME && !HAVE_BEER
BEERFLAG = ! BEERFLAG
if (BEERFLAG)
Deliver_Beer()
and modify Deliver_Beer to set HAVE_BEER when it arrives.
Bit Torrent still needs a server to host the.torrent files. The actual transfers can all be peer-to-peer, but a server is still involved. Gnutella is more like it. Or, maybe something run on top of Freenet...
W00t!! I, too, have a VAX in my collection. Almost nobody knows what it is anymore. A shame.
Anyhow...
One VAX Server 4000 One AlphaServer One SGI Octane, One SGI Indy. (MIPS) A bunch of SPARC and UltraSPARC boxes. Ultra1's, SS IPX, SS10, SS20... iBook G4, PowerMac G3 (PPC) Macintosh (The original 1984) (M68K) HP D-Class 9000 (HPPA) One AMD64 box, and a few IA32 boxes (including Xbox)
I'm sure I have a few other imortant CPU architectures in systems I'm forgetting. That's 10, so I feel I have a decent coverage.:)
I want to be able to control it via telnet from my laptop as an uber remote control.
You mean "ssh"; otherwise somebody will sniff your session and switch it to the Goatse Channel.
Well, sure. But, if it is a Linux box, that's no problem. Whether I use telnet or VNC, or SSH, or roll my own control interface, I know that I can get it to work, regardless of what OS is running on the machine I want to use as a controller.
I want it to run a bit torrent client so I don't need another machine on all the time.
And watch frame rate drop as the scheduler has trouble handling the demands of video playback and BitTorrent routing simultaneously.
The 360 has three cores, and bit torrent doesn't need that much CPU to keep up with my 1 Mb line. The files will all be on the 360, so there won't be a conflict of network bandwidth. The hard drive should be able to keep up with playing one compressed video while download a megabit simultaneously.
I also want to be able to run SNES games on it.
How do you plan on dumping your Super NES cartridges to make the ROM files that emulators need?
Look, I'm gonna have to admit that not everything downloaded via bit torrent is going to be something that I have a license for. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but as long as I'm a bad person who can watch current Doctor Who and play SNES games, I'll be a happy bad person. And, I'll be okay with that.
The moment that Linux becomes available for the XBox 360, I'm buying one even if it means that I can never boot a game on it without Microsoft patching and eliminating my Linux system. I don't care about Xbox 360 games and plan to never buy one; I just want a cheap, powerful, energy efficient Linux PC. Making MS subsidize my Linux box is only a cherry on top.
I am in the same boat, pretty much. I want a media center PC that I can use to play video on. I want to be able to control it via telnet from my laptop as an uber remote control. I want it to run a bit torrent client so I don't need another machine on all the time. I want it to be low power, and look decent in my living room in case I ever have a girl over. I don't want the hassle of building my own PC. I also want to be able to run SNES games on it.
Now, there are plenty of options for a real PC that fits those requirements, but for the most part, none are as cheap and fast as the 360 without making me build it myself.
The only real drawback is the fact that we are unlikely to ever see fully accelerated video for the 360 Linux. So, I won't be able to play 3D games on it, or show off 3D demos at parties. But, the CPU(s) have enough oomph that it should be able to play MPEG-4 and the like without too much trouble. Hopefully, mplayer will take advantage of the multiple cores by the time I get my 360!:)
I suppose if you disabled ActiveX, Java and Flash, you might only come across malware in the case of exploitation of some unpatched flaw in IE or in Windows... but we all know how on-the-ball Microsoft is for security, so that's not a problem, right? Right?
I'm not sure if you were serious about disabling ActiveX, Java, and Flash completely, but you forgot to mention JavaScript. IMHO, it's usually more annoying than Java, which at least runs in a sandbox.
I think that the big issue is that you will get more that two writes per day on certain sectors, even if you sync only once per day. The sectors that contain that FAT (or equivalent for HFS iPods...) will likely be updated for basically every song you transfer, and could potentially see hundreds of writes per day.
Theoretically, you could make the firmware automatically remap heavily used sectors after every erase. I have no idea if the iPod does this, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it is the case.
I'm all for genetically modifying humnity. The human race is so pathetic that we need to improve ourselves anyway we can.
That's exactly how I feel about GM corn. Fucking stupid corn.
Be careful with what you do to corn, man. One minute, you are munching on genetically modified taco shells, the next minute, Corn stole a starship, killed the staff of a research outpost, and is going to use the genesis device as a weapon. Remember, it all could have been avoided, as you shout into your communicator,
But, how will I install both the OpenGL Extractor and the DVD player with menu support on my Apple II?! It doesn't support mixed case files!!! Please help, sombody - it's quite irgent that I do this.
Yes, I can see your point. There are some cases where an image may be hard to see, and some degree of manipulation may make things much clearer. Personally, I'd have no problem with it if it was clearly labelled, and there was a URL to a website where I could directly get the straight raw images. I understand that in some cases it may be infeasible to print a full explanation with all source images in an article for print, but in this day and age there is no reason to not make all information readily available unless it's a scam.
For example, a researcher might take video of a still subject under low light conditions, and then average together multiple frames of video to reduce the noisiness. It would be impractical to print 120 frames, full of noise and basically identical in a few page article. It makes perfect sense to just print the composite image, and a link to the original video clip completely unprocessed.
Unfortunately, it seems that there is some strange interaction between the latest Java and current nvidia drivers on my dualhead system under XP. When I start a Java app, One monitor turns off if I am using Dual View mode. This makes it very inconvenient to use Azureus on that machine.:( Hopefully, the next Java update or nvidia drivers will sort it out, and I'll be able to go back to using Azureus as my main torrent client.
Huzzah! I am currently returning to school in pursuit of my bachelor's degree. Thankfully, I am in pretty breezy courses so far this semester. (I start psych 101 on Monday - keeping my fingers crossed!) But, last time I was in school, I remember being constantly bogged down with all sorts of inane crao work that didn't demonstrate knowledge of the subject, and wasn't a useful practice. Petty busy work was one of the key things that has prevented me from finishing school already. I mean, I'm not a guy who goes out and parties. My spare time is usually taken up with projects like teaching myself Japanese, attending lectures, or writing a better terrain engine in OpenGL. Unless I'm in school. Then, my spare time is busy work, and complaining about it because I'm all stressed out about how stupid it is.
Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go practice the Russian alphabet. Despite the fact that I already know it, and the exercise doesn't have anything to do with correlating the letters to the sounds, which is the only significant part of learning the alphabet! (And, like I said, this semester has much less busy work than I remember previously having!)
Nawwww, not too obscure. Good show. It's actually just what I was going to post about, myself. For those who haven't seen it, Planetes is a Japanese cartoon about space debris collectors in the near-ish future. IT's actually quite interesting, and has a pretty good story arc. It gets into exploitation of 3rd world nations, like Mananga, and El Tanika, human drive to explore, the importance of getting a proper visa if you intend to work, etc. The Debris collection section is funded by "The Union" (UN like world government) through environmental tax credits for all the debris they cleanup. This is fairly unprofitable, so the debris section is considered to be very unimportant in the hierarchy. But, they save the day on several occasions, expose trechery, and so forth. And, most important of all, they help crazy moon ninjas save people from a burning hotel on the moon. Crazy Space Ninjas who don't have proper work visas!
It's not quite "hard sci fi" but it's closer to it than almost any other cartoon you'll ever watch. Some of the visuals seem like they were probably inspired by 2001.
Re:For the rocket scientists out there....
on
Pluto Probe Delayed
·
· Score: 1
Aside from the other posts explaining the issues of needing ginormous rockets, we also don't know what we'd want to put on the orbiter/lander. Once we have a flyby, and we can get some detailed information about Pluto, we can go, "Well, this piece of data is really interesting - I want to know more about XYZ"
If we make an orbiter without knowing some of the basics, we may send a big honking magnetometer and a camera (for example.) If Pluto has no magnetic field, and doesn't visually change much over time, then the orbiter doesn't get us any more real information than the flyby.
Also, the flyby may be able to see some of the other stuff out there. We dont know what will be nearby yet, but we are currently scanning the heck out of that chunk of the sky. In ten years, we hope to know of several objects along the flight path that the probe can fly past after Pluto. This would be impossible with an orbiter.
No, seriously, you posted it on the same day as the MacBook announcement. Some of us were just getting started with complaining about Roland when everybody moved over to the MacBook thread. If you repost it, we can shout Dupe! and complain about Roland at the same time. It'll be great! I don't think anybody even read my post in the Roland thread, so I can repost it.
I was thinking about yelling about your "to/too" issues, but I just don't have it in me today.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm... This doesn't sound like your system is too slow. It just sounds like a bug in the game. Make sure you have the latest drivers for everything, etc. Inform the developer of the problem you are having, put the game back in the box and wait for a patch/update/service pack.
Could you tell a little bit more about your setup? I want a media center system, but I don't want any live TV at all. I just want to have all my media stored on my Linux server, accessed over 802.11g, using a remote and a simple interface that even my room mate can use without any problems. I was hoping to use an X-Box, but I killed mine while trying to mod it, so now I'm looking at a PC/Linux solution...
I tried to add my joke to the queue, but do to a weak implimentation of object orientation and inconsistency, I was just left befuddled as to whether I needed to AddJokeToQueue, joke2queue, add_joke, etc. So, I gave up and just put my joke on rails... /me ducks...
:)
Seriously, I love PHP, but I think that it is designed to require having the docs handy...
Let's assume Ultra SCSI 320. That means it would take ten fully saturated SCSI busses to saturate each HT Link at 3200 MB/sec. The highest claimed sustained transfer rate I've seen for a single SCSI drive is about 90 MB/sec. So, that's four drives per SCSI controller, ten controllers per HT Link, four HT links. That's 160 drives! What the heck are you going to do with this? Seriously, just saturating one HT link is going to involve about 40 drives. I don't think anybody is going to make a motherboard with >10 slots for SCSI controllers, realistically. If you genuinely need that kind of configuration, you just shouldn't expect that you will find it in consumer level hardware!
Unfortunately, this would kill a lot of their developer base.
If almost all PC's have Windows, and almost all Macs run Windows apps, then you can just write a program for Windows, and there is no need to make a Mac specific port.
If there is no native Mac OS software, why get a Mac?
Sure, lots of developers would develop for the Mac out of love for the platform or whatever, but a lot of other devs would declare that just supporting Windows is sufficient for a very large percentage of their user base.
Indeed, many people have made similar technological things. I count myself among them. By 18, I was working at a small local phone company, running their website. A ton of money was probably made from the orders that went through the site. But, it wasn't especially glamorous. It was like any other "E-commerce" site at the time, really. And, the company wasn't about to advertise the fact that their tech staff was extremely inexperienced.
So, I won't bow down to this kid from a technological standpoint.
But, shit. He did his own thing, and he managed to get the word out about it. My hat is off to him as a self promoter. Nobody ever heard of me, so he pretty much has me beat from that angle... Even if his website is dead.
Lots of guys like me and the parent poster have a reasonable amount of skill with technology, and did so at a rather young age. We all had neat ideas. He made his idea. That deserves respect. My real time strategy game, for example, still only exists as notes on scrap paper, and the start of a header file for a prototype...
You know, I don't game much anymore, but I think I may go and buy this game just to make a point, too. I basically never buy any PC games any more for fear that they might have some junkware copy protection. Games are a diversion, not the reason I have a computer. So, if a game has any potential to interfere with my ability to burn CD's and DVD's, then I won't even think about bothering with it.
The companies pushing strict DRM need to remember that they are providing entertainment, not our only source of breathable oxygen.
Indeed. The problem isn't people who don't know computers. It's people who do know computers, and only know one sort. I replaced IE with Firefox on my dad's computer a while back. He has never had any more trouble with it than he did with IE. If anything, he's a bit more confident now. (I installed an extension to kill all javascript, and told him how to turn javascript on in case a site "looks funny," I then told him that his computer is invincible, and he doesn't need to worry about breaking it by visiting a web page...)
I'm about to try an interesting experiment. I'm moving into a new place, and my room mate doesn't have a computer of his own, so he is going to borrow one of mine. He has only ever used Windows XP, but isn't really a computer person. I don't have any spare PC's, so he's getting a beast of an old SGI running Irix. It'll have OpenOffice, and Firefox, so he can write papers and browse the web and check email. Probably also a remote desktop client so he can access the windows terminal server at work, if I can find it for Irix. It'll have mplayer and an MP3 player, so he can watch video clips, and play music while he works. That's all he needs. Really, I think he'll be just fine. I don't expect that he'll have any serious issues getting oriented, except that his mouse will have three buttons instead of a scroll wheel. That'll need to be briefly explained. Past that, because he doesn't have much in the way of preconceived notions about how it should look feel and act just like windows, it'll be perfect.
Well, we can always try to whip ourselves into a frenzy so that we expect something fantastic, and then are horribly disappointed in what comes out.
BTW, my brother's uncle's cousin's friend's wife's brother's guy he once met said that it's going to be a portable supercomputer capable of 128 exaflops on each of 128 cores. It gets 3 years of battery life, comes with free wireless broadband anywhere in the world. It's motion sensitive, and have VR glasses that make you look cool. It has an AI OS that you can have conversations with.
Unfortunately, the wireless isn't standard, and it has less space than a nomad.
You have made a classic blunder. You don't want to check for exact equality with a continuous variable.
If Day=Friday AND ( abs (time - BEER_O_CLOCK) < epsilon) )
This way, you don't risk missing beer time just because the function ran a fraction of a second too late. Actually, it'd probably be even better to set a flag.
if (!BEERFLAG)
if time > 5:30:00pm && time < CLOSING_TIME && !HAVE_BEER
BEERFLAG = ! BEERFLAG
if (BEERFLAG)
Deliver_Beer()
and modify Deliver_Beer to set HAVE_BEER when it arrives.
Bit Torrent still needs a server to host the .torrent files. The actual transfers can all be peer-to-peer, but a server is still involved. Gnutella is more like it. Or, maybe something run on top of Freenet...
W00t!! I, too, have a VAX in my collection. Almost nobody knows what it is anymore. A shame.
:)
Anyhow...
One VAX Server 4000
One AlphaServer
One SGI Octane, One SGI Indy. (MIPS)
A bunch of SPARC and UltraSPARC boxes. Ultra1's, SS IPX, SS10, SS20...
iBook G4, PowerMac G3 (PPC)
Macintosh (The original 1984) (M68K)
HP D-Class 9000 (HPPA)
One AMD64 box, and a few IA32 boxes (including Xbox)
I'm sure I have a few other imortant CPU architectures in systems I'm forgetting. That's 10, so I feel I have a decent coverage.
Well, sure. But, if it is a Linux box, that's no problem. Whether I use telnet or VNC, or SSH, or roll my own control interface, I know that I can get it to work, regardless of what OS is running on the machine I want to use as a controller.
The 360 has three cores, and bit torrent doesn't need that much CPU to keep up with my 1 Mb line. The files will all be on the 360, so there won't be a conflict of network bandwidth. The hard drive should be able to keep up with playing one compressed video while download a megabit simultaneously.
Look, I'm gonna have to admit that not everything downloaded via bit torrent is going to be something that I have a license for. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but as long as I'm a bad person who can watch current Doctor Who and play SNES games, I'll be a happy bad person. And, I'll be okay with that.
I am in the same boat, pretty much. I want a media center PC that I can use to play video on. I want to be able to control it via telnet from my laptop as an uber remote control. I want it to run a bit torrent client so I don't need another machine on all the time. I want it to be low power, and look decent in my living room in case I ever have a girl over. I don't want the hassle of building my own PC. I also want to be able to run SNES games on it.
Now, there are plenty of options for a real PC that fits those requirements, but for the most part, none are as cheap and fast as the 360 without making me build it myself.
The only real drawback is the fact that we are unlikely to ever see fully accelerated video for the 360 Linux. So, I won't be able to play 3D games on it, or show off 3D demos at parties. But, the CPU(s) have enough oomph that it should be able to play MPEG-4 and the like without too much trouble. Hopefully, mplayer will take advantage of the multiple cores by the time I get my 360!
I'm not sure if you were serious about disabling ActiveX, Java, and Flash completely, but you forgot to mention JavaScript. IMHO, it's usually more annoying than Java, which at least runs in a sandbox.
I think that the big issue is that you will get more that two writes per day on certain sectors, even if you sync only once per day. The sectors that contain that FAT (or equivalent for HFS iPods...) will likely be updated for basically every song you transfer, and could potentially see hundreds of writes per day.
Theoretically, you could make the firmware automatically remap heavily used sectors after every erase. I have no idea if the iPod does this, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it is the case.
They are hoping for another nipple exposure.
Be careful with what you do to corn, man. One minute, you are munching on genetically modified taco shells, the next minute, Corn stole a starship, killed the staff of a research outpost, and is going to use the genesis device as a weapon. Remember, it all could have been avoided, as you shout into your communicator,
"COOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!
And, it's all echoey. And, Spork will die at the end of the movie.
Wait, I may be getting confused again. Anyhow, my point is, if you genetically modify corn, don't abandon it in a cornfield on Ceti Alpha 3.
But, how will I install both the OpenGL Extractor and the DVD player with menu support on my Apple II?! It doesn't support mixed case files!!! Please help, sombody - it's quite irgent that I do this.
Thank you.
Yes, I can see your point. There are some cases where an image may be hard to see, and some degree of manipulation may make things much clearer. Personally, I'd have no problem with it if it was clearly labelled, and there was a URL to a website where I could directly get the straight raw images. I understand that in some cases it may be infeasible to print a full explanation with all source images in an article for print, but in this day and age there is no reason to not make all information readily available unless it's a scam.
For example, a researcher might take video of a still subject under low light conditions, and then average together multiple frames of video to reduce the noisiness. It would be impractical to print 120 frames, full of noise and basically identical in a few page article. It makes perfect sense to just print the composite image, and a link to the original video clip completely unprocessed.
Unfortunately, it seems that there is some strange interaction between the latest Java and current nvidia drivers on my dualhead system under XP. When I start a Java app, One monitor turns off if I am using Dual View mode. This makes it very inconvenient to use Azureus on that machine. :( Hopefully, the next Java update or nvidia drivers will sort it out, and I'll be able to go back to using Azureus as my main torrent client.
Huzzah! I am currently returning to school in pursuit of my bachelor's degree. Thankfully, I am in pretty breezy courses so far this semester. (I start psych 101 on Monday - keeping my fingers crossed!) But, last time I was in school, I remember being constantly bogged down with all sorts of inane crao work that didn't demonstrate knowledge of the subject, and wasn't a useful practice. Petty busy work was one of the key things that has prevented me from finishing school already. I mean, I'm not a guy who goes out and parties. My spare time is usually taken up with projects like teaching myself Japanese, attending lectures, or writing a better terrain engine in OpenGL. Unless I'm in school. Then, my spare time is busy work, and complaining about it because I'm all stressed out about how stupid it is.
Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go practice the Russian alphabet. Despite the fact that I already know it, and the exercise doesn't have anything to do with correlating the letters to the sounds, which is the only significant part of learning the alphabet! (And, like I said, this semester has much less busy work than I remember previously having!)
Nawwww, not too obscure. Good show. It's actually just what I was going to post about, myself. For those who haven't seen it, Planetes is a Japanese cartoon about space debris collectors in the near-ish future. IT's actually quite interesting, and has a pretty good story arc. It gets into exploitation of 3rd world nations, like Mananga, and El Tanika, human drive to explore, the importance of getting a proper visa if you intend to work, etc. The Debris collection section is funded by "The Union" (UN like world government) through environmental tax credits for all the debris they cleanup. This is fairly unprofitable, so the debris section is considered to be very unimportant in the hierarchy. But, they save the day on several occasions, expose trechery, and so forth. And, most important of all, they help crazy moon ninjas save people from a burning hotel on the moon. Crazy Space Ninjas who don't have proper work visas!
It's not quite "hard sci fi" but it's closer to it than almost any other cartoon you'll ever watch. Some of the visuals seem like they were probably inspired by 2001.
Aside from the other posts explaining the issues of needing ginormous rockets, we also don't know what we'd want to put on the orbiter/lander. Once we have a flyby, and we can get some detailed information about Pluto, we can go, "Well, this piece of data is really interesting - I want to know more about XYZ"
If we make an orbiter without knowing some of the basics, we may send a big honking magnetometer and a camera (for example.) If Pluto has no magnetic field, and doesn't visually change much over time, then the orbiter doesn't get us any more real information than the flyby.
Also, the flyby may be able to see some of the other stuff out there. We dont know what will be nearby yet, but we are currently scanning the heck out of that chunk of the sky. In ten years, we hope to know of several objects along the flight path that the probe can fly past after Pluto. This would be impossible with an orbiter.
Just repost the last one again!
No, seriously, you posted it on the same day as the MacBook announcement. Some of us were just getting started with complaining about Roland when everybody moved over to the MacBook thread. If you repost it, we can shout Dupe! and complain about Roland at the same time. It'll be great! I don't think anybody even read my post in the Roland thread, so I can repost it.
I was thinking about yelling about your "to/too" issues, but I just don't have it in me today.